miscellaneous, part 87,332,904

My dad gave me a gift during his short visit last weekend: a kashmir scarf (really a sort of wrap, like the pashminas they sell on the streets of London for ten quid) he brought back from Afghanistan. NW had apparently told him that she thought I liked earth tones, and it’s a sort of browny-beigy pattern. It’s soft, and quite pretty, but I have no idea where either of them got the idea that I like earth tones. I like cool colors and also fiery reds, and while I think brown has its place it’s far from the first thing I’d choose.

Yet last week, I wore a ninja-esque black outfit to work that wasn’t quite warm enough for the weather, and I put the scarf on around my neck like a bohemian. And all day I felt better with it around my neck than not. It felt comforting, soothing. I didn’t want to take it off. I wore it today around the house with the same results. I can’t explain this, since the source of the gift is hardly a source of soothing happiness. I wonder if perhaps the woman who wove it was very, very happy.

My car recently hit 100,000 miles, and it has never yet had a tune-up. Since I am well and fully aware that routine maintenance is what will keep my car running without more than the usual issues for another 100,000 miles, I felt that it was time to give it a major service. Which I did, and I dropped just over $400 on it. This is not small potatoes for me. But I swear I’ve never felt so good spending so much money in my life, because I knew my car needed the work, and I knew I was doing something positive for the future of my finances and my mobility. It’s actually given me something of a lift to think about it.

On Saturday morning I felt restless. For the first time…ever, I think, I felt like the weekend was almost too long, and how would I fill all that time? I had chores to do, and I had homework to do, and I had plenty of things to watch, cross-stitch, and read, but I didn’t really want to do any of that. I’m not really sure what would have made me happy. I felt the urge to go into the garage and start going through more of my stuff to see what I could get rid of, or try the same thing with what covers the surfaces in the rest of our house (I had watched Clean House in the morning, pretty much the only reality-ish shows that I enjoy, and it made me want to get all Mary Poppins on my own house), but I already have boxes of stuff to give to charity and don’t have room to do more cleaning-out until those boxes are gone. And we really don’t have that much clutter to speak of. Just a lot of books. It was a weird feeling to be restless on the weekend instead of feeling panicky about the lack of time to relax and enjoy myself.

I had gotten up so early on Saturday to take my car in to the mechanic that by 11:00 I really just wanted to go back to bed. I had been dizzy most of the morning – a sign I haven’t slept enough – and this made me cranky and tired. In the late afternoon I gave in to this feeling, put on a really funny MST (The Deadly Bees) and dozed off. BF went into the bedroom and slept too, and we didn’t wake up for two hours. It felt great to sleep but no fun to get up; the longer the nap is past about 40 minutes, the less fun it is to revive oneself, I find.

Something else we did on Saturday was roll pennies. I haven’t rolled money for years, and it was actually one of my favorite activities when I was a child. Stacking the coins in neat piles and stuffing them into their rolls, and then lining up the rolls and knowing they could be exchanged for real, paper money…oh, I loved it. My parents used to let me keep the nickels and pennies that I rolled (they kept the dimes and the quarters), which was just icing on the cake. Today we ended up with $2.98 in pennies. I’ll have to exchange one of our nickels to make it $3 even (plus $0.03).

I tend to plan things down to the last detail. I failed to do this well when considering the homework assignment that’s due on Tuesday, and I was worried for a short time this weekend that I would have to miss work to complete the assignment. Luckily I found a trapdoor that will help me do the assignment tomorrow, but that and the complicated budget planning I’ve had to do to pay for the car service plus all these stupid copays for my appointments lately has made me realize that the planning I do is an amazingly strong part of my personality. Planning things in pieces, slotting them in where they belong like the wedges in a Trivial Pursuit pie, is how I live my life, in the big picture and the small. I admit this is part of the reason my social life is so unsuccessful – I tend not to be able to do things spontaneously without calculating exactly how much time it’s going to take and realizing I won’t have time to do the other things I’d planned. It’s a meticulous lifestyle. Why is this so necessary for me? Why can’t I let go of the spreadsheet-tidy structure of my brain and live a bit more unstructuredly? It’s too vague a problem (with too few negative consequences) for me to worry about it more than vaguely, but it’s still something I think about.

Asana column tomorrow. See you then.