My list of appointments

Yesterday one of my contact lenses ripped while I was taking it out. I was pissed ‘cause it was my last left contact and I had procrastinated making an appointment at the eye doctor. Now I’m going to have to go without my contacts for at least a month.

I went into the kitchen and wrote on the dry-erase board on my refrigerator “eye-doctor appointment.” I thought about other stuff I needed to get done, then wrote “dentist appointment,” “hair appointment,” and finally, “head appointment.”

I saw a grief counselor for several months last fall and it didn’t really work. The guy was a weirdo and I wasn’t into it. I felt weird going into his unwelcoming office at the hospital, and having to talk to a total stranger about my family and my Mom and everything else that’s plaguing me.

But the stress of dealing with myself is building up (I’m having stomach problems, and the doctor looked at me point blank and said they’re caused by “stress, anxiety and depression”), and I’ve realized that with work and everything else, it’s simply not sustainable.

It’s going to shorten my lifespan if it keeps up much longer.

I like to blame most of my problems on work, although I’m sure there are some deep, dark issues about my sister’s death too. My friend Sarah put it best when she was talking about a stressful job (she started working at Fallon Ad Agency in Minneapolis last summer):

“I don’t like starting at the bottom. It’s stressful trying to work your way up, and it’s a lot of work. I spend all my day working my way up from the bottom, then when I get home at night I realize that my fingers are all bloody from trying to claw my way up.”

It was a very fitting metaphor, and one that resonated with me.

But the point of this post is not that I’m going crazy. I was listening to a program on Public Radio with a psychologist a few weeks ago. She said that people with emotional issues, or people who have experienced grief, need a long time to get over it and often times a week-long vacation doesn’t do it.

Well, I took the week vacation a few weeks ago, and it helped temporarily. The vacation was sweet, but now that I am looking at months without another vacation, I’m starting to get stressed out again.

About the vacation:

It was awesome. Tom and I spent the week relaxing in the Boundary Waters. For the uninitiated, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is a place near the Canadian Border with more than 1,000 lakes right next to each other. There are no motorized boats permitted, so you canoe everywhere and carry the canoe and your stuff between lakes.

Because I’m lacking a better definition, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a 1.09 million acre (4400 km©˜) wilderness area within the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota. The BWCAW is renowned as a destination for both canoeing and fishing on its many lakes, and is the most visited wilderness in the United States.”

We drove to Duluth on Friday night (June 16), and I ran Grandma’s half marathon on Saturday morning. Sunday, we had a Father’s Day breakfast for my Dad, then drove to Grand Marais.

We spent Sunday through Friday in the BWCA, dodging billions of mosquitoes, hauling our canoe everywhere and trying to make gourmet meals. We even carried in a box of wine (bottles aren’t allowed), but the four-bottles worth of wine was gone in two days.

On the third day, we liked our campsite so much we chose to stay there for the entire day. All we did was swim, read, fish, and eat.

On one windy day, we arrived at Lake Little Saginagaw, only to find that the waves were a lot better than we had expected. We’re not canoeing experts, so when we tried to paddle across the lake to our campsite the wind grabbed us and sent us into a bay of rocks. We sat on one rock for four hours while the wind died.

When we left on Friday we were tired, sick of mosquitoes, smelly, and wanted to go back to my parents’ house in Duluth to relax for the rest of vacation. That included visits to the Fitger’s Brewhouse and the Lake Avenue Café.

Relaxing on the hammock