annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary
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Day 96
I'm still moving between being so tired I can hardly move and feeling better so doing too much. It's rubbish, I know, but I can't seem to stop. Yesterday, Sunday, I didn't get dressed till about 5.30 when suddenly I'd had enough of being at home, and met Daughter on the beach for a swim, first swim of the year
I seem to have a permanently grumpy face these days - it always surprises me when I see the photo when I thought I was doing at least a half smile. Ah well. The sea was still quite chilly, but so good to swim, to have my weight borne by the water, floating in the sunshine, being lifted and let down by the gentle waves. Then we noticed the jellyfish and got out, double quick. They were only small but there were fucking masses of them - neither of us had seen anything like it before, in all our years of swimming here. We don't know anything about them either and there was no one else to ask, no wifi, so we just got out of the water. We had a laugh together. When I'm feeling sorry for myself I need to remember how lucky I am to have her in my life - she's funny and clever and we see things very much the same way, but not so much that we can't have intense discussions about stuff.
Today Bloke was out from morning till late afternoon - fucking bliss it was. Enough that it made me get back to that co-dependency book and work a few more pages, on my way to having some kind of resolution of this dreadful impasse. One of the end of chapter questions you're asked to write about is 'Do you think you can change?' and when I answered, I could feel a tight knot of resistance forming and hardening in my belly. I don't want to have to do the work, the painful work. It's bound to be painful, isn't it? I want it all to be his fault and for something magical to happen so that I'm happy in my home. Or happy enough. But that's not how it goes, so I'll have to do the fucking work. I cannot bear being a person who lives in a bad situation for the rest of my life, moaning. Non.
Keyboard lesson - first for a couple of weeks as I was too tired to even think about it last week, and before that it had been a bank holiday. I can never see any progress as I do my daily practice but she was well impressed with my two handed Morning Has Broken - still slow but with no mistakes. And I realise I can read music now, which is a real achievement since the start of lockdown. I don't know all the fancy squiggles and notations, but I have the basics and some of the fancy stuff. This two hand business is a struggle though. If I just play the tune with my right hand, I can read the notes off the page and play them, even on a new piece of music. As soon as I try to add one note per bar with my left hand, written in the usual alphabet above, my brain forgets how to read the music. That note on the middle line - I have to think, to start from D below the bottom line and count up, when I know it's a B, for fuck's sake. I find it interesting - more brain weirdness. The teacher says to just keep going, as slowly as I need, and that it will come. I saw someone on TV playing piano with both hands, both of them moving up and down, hitting loads of notes - it looked amazing to me.
This afternoon I did a "Paint like Frida Kahlo" live online workshop, which was very intense - I had to concentrate like fuck, and I still got the eyes too far over to one side. It's meant to be a self-portrait but I lost my nerve when it came to painting my glasses on, after the trouble I had with the black lines on Picasso's Rooster. But I'm quite pleased
Very hard, but exhilarating. Now I'm off to bed - it's my birthday tomorrow - I'm going to be 66 - how did that happen? I haven't even decided what I want to be when I grow up yet.
11:59 p.m. - 15.06.20
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