Stateside Sisyphus

Who am I kidding? It's tough living here in the US of A.

Everything I wrote in my earlier posts is still true. Our surroundings are still way prettier than we can believe. Our neighbours are still incredibly nice, and strangers are still unaccountably friendly. We've had spells of miserable cold rain, but we've also had plenty of glorious sunshine on endlessly long summer days.

So what's the problem? Life, I guess, and what it takes to live it.

After the office-work and house-work have been seen to, there is little time and less energy left over for anything else at the end of a day. My long silences on this blog are eloquently mute testimony to that. I knew that living here would take some work, but so far it has been just a little bit more than I was prepared for.

I feel oppressed by the feeling that the my day is merely assembled from a sequence of tasks that need to be completed. Every morning I wake up feeling that I have a fraction less energy than I did the morning before. I'm tempted to make a to-do list to help me get things under control again. And I'm not making that list because I'm afraid that once it starts, it will keep getting longer. I'm scared I'll keep adding things to that list faster than I can check them off.

I've found it impossible to fully relax. I seem to have a constant semi-conscious scan running on my memory banks, trying to recall what 'useful things' I should be doing. As a result I have not truly goofed off in weeks. That does not mean I have been in constant motion; on the contrary it means I have often been paralyzed into inactivity, intimidated by all the things that I'm supposed to do that still stand undone.

Yes this is a whinge. I usually find a way to end these whinges with an upbeat memo to myself. This time I don't have the heart for it.