Old Decathlon Olympics Journal

May 19 on May 19- If I don't do it now, then when

It is 8:23 am Central time. I spent most of yesterday feeling totally alone and unappreciated. I did not get even one email message on Writing.Com from one blessed soul. I was definitely feeling left out.

This morning I wake up, turned on the computer, and poured myself a cup of coffee while I waited for this blasted machine to put itself through the start up paces. As soon as I was able, I logged into my Writing.Com account where I see that I have eight new messages. I am thinking to myself that it must be newletter time again, and at least the newsletters will provide me some entertaining reading. To my surprize there was not one newsletter in my inbox. All the messages were either return comments on the reading that I responded to yesterday, or comments concerning my Writer's Cramp entry that I posted yesterday. What a wonderful feeling of being connected.

Today I have to go get a new driver's license, I am suppose to drop off a letter to the bank, and teach a life skills class. Actually all I really want to do is sit here and read and write. My house is so quite and empty, but I am actually enjoying it. My house is also a total disaster, but I am so able to ignore all of my chores. I think I have actually elevated my ability to ignore my household duties to a fine art - unsurpassed in any field of study regarding duties and responsibilities. God knows that I cannot die today, because I don't have time and my house is such a mess.

I can remember a time when I kept a fine house. I routinely use to rotate the furniture in every room, change curtains, rearrange the nik-naks, pictures and art on my walls every 3 or 4 months like clock work. It was a certainity, but even that was short lived if measured by my time on this earth. Sadly my children were too young to remember - now all they see is an old woman who wants to spend her days and nights on a computer neglecting her household chores. What a shame.

I have four children who know less about me than they do each other, and I was here first. They don't realize that I was a whole and interesting individual in my own right before I ever gave birth to any of them. They see me as boring, and I know this because I have been told by each one of them more times than I can count, "I am boring." I don't tell my children how immature I think they are, or how foolish in most of their pursuits, and I certainly don't try to discourage them from attempting new things - so for the life of me I don't understand why I am so easily dismissed as a superficial, uninteresting person. I have actually reached a point more recently where I have discovered that I don't care what they think and don't think that they actually think at all. I know that they are capable of thinking, I just don't believe that they do. I don't remember being so selfish, and totally self absorbed when I was their age. The fact is I do love my children, it is just at this moment in time I don't like any of them very much. I wonder if adults in my youth felt that way about me? I wonder?

Again the haunting feeling of the Patches In Time theme is rearing it's ugly head in this journal. I know people who have pictures of themselves since birth displayed throughout their house. As for me the only picture I every have is the one on my current driver's license. I have never been a big picture person, and I don't know why that is either. Maybe because I spent the majority of my youth in an orphanage where I had no walls on which to display personal mementos. I don't even remember having momentos, or even wanting them. I slept in a huge dorm with a bunch of other girls that I barely knew. I remember the ceiling fans with their big wooden blades that seemed to turn to slow. I remember the big floor to ceiling windows, and the old creeky wooden floors that kept the nuns from sneaking up on us when we were talking instead of sleeping. I remember lights out, and I certainly remember the annoying school bell that Sister Mary Richards and all her sucessors would ring bright and early every single blasted day of the week. I remember wanting to find a way to get my hands on that bell and destory it. I know that the dorm had no air-conditioning, but I honestly don't remember feeling extremely hot, ever. I remember the cold - but not the heat. I wonder why that is, unless it just didn't get that hot that many years ago. Strange.