In The Air Tonight
2006-03-21, 15:51

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord

When I get home from work, hopefully I'll be seeing a business truck there, with a guy waiting to show me how to use my forthcoming CPAP machine. I cannot express how happy I am that I am getting this thing. I've been feeling especially crappy today, and it's been an effort to make myself at least seem alert. I haven't gotten nearly as much as I'd like today, not that my docket was packed. It's just been hard to focus. As the afternoon approaches, I'm doing a little better. I think the short nap I took during lunch helped.

I'm really considering turning in early tonight - early being before 11pm, which is usually when we wend our way to our room and veg to the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report if we make it that long. I know that there's going to be some tweaking and adjusting to be done with the machine even after I get my walkthrough from the guy bringing it. And I'm starting to get worried that maybe the effectiveness of the thing was a fluke, and that I won't wake up tomorrow feeling electrified with energy like I was the first time. What if I picked the wrong mask? What if the strap keeps slipping? What if the machine explodes, taking out half the block?

Maybe I should stuff my worries in a hole and see what happens. Conversely, I have all these semi-formed plans in my head for what to do with all this energy that I'm going to have once I've been on it for a while. Finish the bedroom! Clean out the basement! Lose weight! Get healthy! Stop being a surly bastard! Cure cancer! Raise the dead! Like Brussels sprouts! I'll leave it to you to decide where I should have stopped that list.

Over the weekend my brother invited the family to their place to have a little St Pat's Day-oriented food fest, with corned beef, cabbage, taters, etc. I'd forgotten that I liked corned beef; I can't remember that last time I had it. My brother, as usual, made a fine meal. Our family certainly does enjoy both eating and making good cooking (well, I should admit that cooking actually stresses me out, because I get flustered trying to focus on seven things at once and am constantly worried that no one will like what I made, but on day I'm sure I'll thoroughly enjoy it, I promise).

The main thing is, though, that I'm starting to feel like I have a family again. I think the shards of my nuclear family really severed most of what I was connected to in my extended family as well. I've never known my great aunts and uncles that well, I haven't seen any of my cousins in years, and my dad's and my mom's brothers/sisters are all off leading their own lives with little insistence that we all reunite in one place. And I'm only on the fringes of H's family, which is huge by comparison. We see her dad and sister all the time.

But now that my brother and his wife back in town after being in Columbus for four years, things are changing. They've taken it upon themselves to be the drawing point to try and knit what's left of our family back together. And that's awesome; I certainly wasn't going to be the one to do it, as I've got enough of my own issues - not to mention being the only one with underage children to keep functioning and happy. My brother and sister-in-law, however, are just the two of them, and they have the will and finances to be the draw. Does this make me feel like the 'bad' son? Not at all. It's a relief to have the pressure taken off (that I mainly put on myself) to bring and keep family together.

So now every now and again the lot of us meet up at my brother's place for dinner or just because, and it makes me feel like I'm getting some semblance of family again, like I haven't had in a very long time, though now minus the lingering fear and anxiety that often accompanied such events due to my dad's past volatility. Now he's become an old dog that, while he still tries once and a while to bark like the old days, just doesn't have it in him anymore. Which is fine by me. Keep on truckin', happy pills.

Okay, enough of this - I'm leaving work soon to go home and get my most excellent happy wonder machine. Wish me luck, and sweet dreams.

-- End Transmission --