Half-mast

My eyes aren’t quite open yet. I was up till a little after 11:00 last night, watching the marathon movie otherwise known as Sybil—3 hours and 6 minutes of child abuse and the resulting multiple personalities. Sally Fields does a phenomenal job, and while I loved the movie (as much as you can love something that disturbing), I spent a good portion of it with a dishtowel over my head and—at one loooong point—with my fingers in my ears.

So then, of course, I couldn’t sleep till about midnight because I was thinking of all my schizophrenic behaviors and what would it be like to give the Church Me one name, the Furious At My Kids Me another, the Happy In My Kitchen Me yet another, and so on. It was both an enchanting and disturbing thought.

And then when I finally did doze off, I was almost immediately awakened by our outside black cat meowing at the top of his lungs in our bedroom doorway. (If any of you have seen the movie, you’ll recall the loud meowing cat scenes and headless cat drawings, yikes.) A screen had fallen out of a downstairs window earlier that day and I had forgotten to close the window.

Then I couldn’t fall back asleep for another hour because of the blasted heat…

So that’s why my eyes are at half-mast this morning.

This same time, years previous: a free-wheeling education