Overwrought

I apologise up front for what I'm sure will be a very rambling and somewhat incoherent post.

I am not a crier. I never have been. If something upsetting happens I usually completely bypass "sad" and go straight to "depressed" or "pissed off". I take things hard, it's true, but I rarely cry about them. The last few weeks I have felt like crying on a fairly regular basis: sometimes for big things but sometimes for downright silly things.

The whole mess with Pop is undoubtedly at the root of all this emotional upheaval. It's so hard to see him so ... unlike himself. He barely talks anymore (because of the pneumonia); he just grunts or whispers. It's so sad. Even when he laughs I feel sad. It reminds me of what I miss the most.

The recent bushfires have had us on edge for the last fortnight, especially with the 45 degree heat we had this afternoon. Just the oppressive heat has upset me (when usually I would get over it fairly quickly). It's so much effort fireproofing a property, especially for a fortnight.

I feel like shit, physically speaking. My legs are aching, my head is pounding, I'm not sleeping, I'm exhausted constantly. On the one hand I should be used to this because this is a fairly common occurrence for me, after seven years of illness, but I feel so useless lately.

Then I finished Holding the Man and finally let loose. I finally cried. At 3,30am. It was cathartic, yes, but didn't seem to be enough.

The other night Dad got home from the hospital and told me that Pop was asleep the whole time he was there and didn't really know anyone was with him, but he kept saying "bugger!" as he slept. I pissed myself laughing and suddenly was filled with a deep sadness and the urge to cry, but no tears came.

I was talking on the phone to Lala the other day and she said her father had called her asking about the fucking secret santa shamozzle. It appears everyone has been bitching about me behind my back. Mum was furious. The irony is they are so family-centric it's often quite smothering, yet they can do this.

Shopping for the Christmas tree the other day was not as difficult as I supposed it would be because I had Liz and James with me, but even so I had the thought at the back of my head "You have to get this tree ASAP because he may not make it to the 24th".

I was chatting with a friend from high school yesterday. He's a journo for a fairly big christian newspaper/magazine/website thingy. I went to the site and tried to find something he'd written but had no luck so I thought I'd search for something and see if he'd written any of the articles in the results. For want of a better search-term, I typed in "gay". The first one was written by him. The article was about how churches in the UK would shut down youth clubs, parish halls, even adoption agencies, in protest to new anti-discrimination laws about to be enacted which did not include an exemption clause for churches. They would rather shut down adoption agencies than give a baby to a gay couple, rather shut down youth hostels than cater to gay teens, rather shut down parish halls than rent them out to gay functions. Usually I would be mad on reading this, but again a deep sadness fell over me. Even sadder was that I realised that in Australia all this is moot, since discrimination against homosexual Australians is built into the law, so companies and church groups don't have to make any effort to discriminate. Worse still, this guy who wrote the piece was saying how many church leaders in Australia agree with what the twats in the UK are doing, which leads me to believe he concurs also.

And finally, for something totally silly and totally unlike me: today I watched the year's finale of Home and Away. It was really funny actually, they did a ripper Christmas pageant which was quite amusing. In the last scene, Sally was stabbed and left for dead. It was fairly upsetting. I was doing fine until they did one of those montages that seem to be in lately to the song Light Surrounding You by Evermore. That nearly set me off but still no tears.

So what the fuck is going on with me?