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Lala was SO sweet to me last night. I was in a terrible mood, grumpy and on the edge of tears all evening. All she did all night was try to make me feel better. She offered to drive in the rain and dark to a friend fifteen miles away to borrow a couple of pills for me (I’ve run out of my SSRIs due to a shipping snafu – hopefully I’ll get them in the mail today – if not, I’ll go wait in line at Kaiser). She offered to go get ice cream. Wait, a minute, maybe she was just trying to get away. I wouldn’t blame her. I wanted to get away from me, too.

And it makes me realize (again), how debilitating depression is. I had this moment with Mom when she was sick. She had severe dementia for about three days as the calcium flooded her blood, and I wondered how can people watch their loved ones go through Alzheimer’s. It was unbearable.

In the same way, me with my low–grade, treatable depression – I realize when I’m low that being clinically depressed or having major depression is like nothing I can even imagine. I’m not trying to compare anything here – emotions and brain chemistry are exactly individual. But I feel deep, desperate empathy for those suffering interminably. My depression is and always has been driven directly by hormones. My hormones are out of whack, and the SSRI helps with the lifting up of serotonin or whatever it is that makes me feel better. I tried diet, exercise, and meditation when it landed on me five years ago after my hysterectomy, and the only thing that helped was the anti-depressant – it made me feel normal. (That and it helps hot flashes, which is great, as I grew back an ovary after full hysto and am now going through SECOND menopause at 45 – allergic to estrogen and phytoestrogens. Right now, 3 days off my medicine, and the hot flashes are fifteen minutes apart. I’m about to give birth to the sun.)

But I have that option for my depression. One little pill can make me feel normal. Not happy or sedated or perked up. Just normal. I hate that everyone doesn’t have that option.

Again, I’m stuck staring into the fact that I’m so incredibly privileged, in every way, and instead of dodging guilt about it, I’m just going to allow myself to feel gratitude for it.

I’m grateful that I have health–care. That there is a rug beneath my feet that I can sink my toes into. That my dogs are cute. That I have a passion for my work. I’m so grateful for Lala.

And for coffee. Always, for the coffee. (I’m back on it. One cup (sometimes two) a day. It’s amazing. I’ll probably give it up again at some point for health reasons, but right now, the coffee is in my life and DAMN, is it delicious.)

Earthquake last night, a 4.7, a nice long jolt–roll. Lala and I went from sleep to a very animalian huddle. I don’t know how long it took me to realize that it was an earthquake, but it wasn’t more than a second or two, because I had time to enjoy it a little. There’s still fear, but there’s also a strange frisson of “what’s going to happen next?” I’ve always assumed, and I could be wrong, that the Big One will start so violently that I’ll be in no doubt about what’s going on. So if I wake and feel an earthquake and understand what it is, I’m allowed to just kind of enjoy it.

I did like the way we clutched at each other. Felt like we were in a cave and there was an animal outside. Very prehistoric. We didn’t have to think, “find my partner and hold on,” we just did. I was wearing my earplugs as usual, so Lala got up to see the damage since she’d heard something falling. It was her TRS-80, still fine of course. For some reason, I find this HILARIOUS.

Then I rolled over and prided myself on being such a staunch Californian that I could go right back to sleep, and of course, I didn’t. Up for another hour, trying not to imagine carnage. It was so roll–jolty (that’s the technical term) that it felt local, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was Baja or Oregon, having an eight? I was a five–hour drive from the Loma Prieta and it felt like riding a wave of land that made me panicked and dizzy at the same time. So I had to check Twitter, which roundly woke me up. Then I dreamed of natural disaster for the rest of the night, which is completely normal for me, and something I still sometimes wonder if I can’t get fixed. I love that I dream a lot, but I hate that I have nightmares every night. Gory, bloody, violent, grief–filled ones. I’ve had them since I was a child. Someone told me I can get hypnosis to help, and I’m almost at that point. Speaking of that, I heard yesterday about someone who got hypnosis for sugar cravings. Sign me up. I wonder if I can get a two–fer?

I spent New Year’s Eve and Day in bed with a wicked cold (caught from the germ-tastic aquarium, no doubt) and I’m a little wobbly today, but I’m up. Not quite up to leaving the house yet, but at least I’m (literally) standing at my standing desk as I type this.

And I’m thinking about my word of the year. Lots of people do it–I certainly didn’t come up with it–but this tool has been helpful to me in years past.

This year it’s easy: REPLENISH

It’s easy because that’s what my new collection of essays is about. Each month, I’m trying a new creative endeavor in the hopes of replenishing my spirit, body, mind, and soul, and at the end of the month, I write about how it went. Without spoiling the last essay which I sent out on the last day of the year, the Reading Month went way better than I’d expected it to.

This month, January, is about Home, making and shaping it into the best place it can be. It’s funny, yesterday was the first day of the new year, and my reading challenge was officially over as the home challenge geared up, but because I was sick, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I just wanted to read, because the refound habit of reading deeply really sunk in over December.

And I wanted to read, specifically, a memoir about building home (DO leave me a comment if you know a great one). I loved Dee Williams’s Big Tiny, and I wanted something like that. I found Hammer Head by Nina MacLaughlin, a book about a journalist who becomes a carpenter when writing clickbait got too much. It’s exactly what I wanted. It wasn’t until I’d click Buy that I realized I was feeding the January challenge–I’d completely forgotten.

I loved realizing that the reading challenge will follow me into each of the next eleven challenges. This should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, and it was delightful to discover. (For people new to the challenge, I’m replenishing my creative spirit by doing things I want to do in my downtime instead of reading social media or frittering away time watching TV or other mindless activities. One reader thought I was doing this as my job, which I wish I was wealthy enough to do. Nope, still working 40+ hours a week writing. But I can’t complain about that because I love love love love it.)

So. What’s YOUR word for 2018? Leave a comment – I’d love to know.

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

I stood alone on the upper level, facing the kelp forest, watching the silver sardines swim in their schools. They were a murmuration, the swarm of them moving together over the course of split seconds, their scales flashing gold and red sometimes. Turns out you can’t call it a murmuration when it’s fish – it’s called simply shoaling or schooling, but schooling is too simple a word for that gorgeousness of flight I watched. I could have stared at it for hours. They moved like conversation, to and fro, parts splitting off to make new sentences, flying back into each other to complete paragraphs and whole pages. It looked like song, visualized.

Other creatures in the tank were mesmerizing, too, of course. I love the leopard sharks and the kelp bass the size of my car that stays near the front round window as if he knows he’s the star of the show. But the flight-song of those sardines is my favorite aquarium magic. Yes, I love the cuttlefish, with their chromatophore skin (I feel them – with my hot flashes and tendency to blush, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t choose to be so showy and placed in an aquarium for it, but that’s my anthropomorphism showing). The octopuses this time finally seemed kind of amazing instead of gross (Lala is wearing off on me). We watched a day octopus sleeping, and we watched it dream. Scientists struggle to agree on whether they dream or not, but this layperson can tell you with assuredness that they do. He was tucked against his rock, all creamy and pendulous, his one visible eye tightly shut. He puffed out his siphon. He wriggled. He twitched, his arms uncoiling and then coiling back up again. His skin mottled quickly, brown spots, and then flashed back to cream. He twitched again, his eye shutting more tightly closed and then relaxing. His siphon panted. He was obviously chasing cars.

But still, those sardines were more magnificent. I’d always thought they swam together for safety in numbers – some might be picked off but not all. But in fact, they actually look like one big fish making the other actually huge, predatory fish believe they’re tiny and weak in comparison. There’s a lovely metaphor there – stronger together, etc – but what I really love is watching that shared brain in action. Like watching wind, if wind was silver and had intention. And there, in the middle of a Christmas holiday week, surrounded by approximately 400,000,000 children, I was alone with the magnificent, awed and hushed.

(Not the kelp forest exhibit, but from the Open Ocean exhibit.)

Five days from Christmas! How I would have been freaking out as a kid. Christmas was everything. It was the lottery. Anything could happen, and though each year, every year, I felt the small taste of disappointment in my mouth when I didn’t get everything I’d asked for, I still hoped that this would be the year, this would be the one.

I thought of it, quite literally, as wishing season. I could sit around and wish and wish and wish and tell my parents my wishes, and maybe they’d all come true. It was astonishing, really, how many times they were able to come through.

I remember the morning I came down to find that bicycle. I think the reason I go back to this memory over and over again is that I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I’d wished for this perfect bike with the banana seat and plastic streamers at the handle’s ends, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t get it. My folks didn’t have the money. And somehow Mom had convinced me that Santa couldn’t meet all children’s requests, either, that he just didn’t have enough money. This I understood. It made sense that Santa couldn’t afford to give gifts to the whole WORLD without scrimping a little.

So it didn’t bother me in the slightest that it was a used bike under the tree – I completely understood why the rims were scratched and why the banana seat (o blessed banana seat) had a tiny tear along the saddle stitching. Santa had done his best and his best was perfection. It was all my dreams come true in one swoop, and I believed that Christmas was the most magical and selfish of all days, and sometime’s a girl’s dreams really could come true. I flew down the driveway on the bike, still in my nightgown. I pedaled hard up the gravel to ride back into the courtyard. I was a princess; I was a knight; I was a soldier. My bicycle meant freedom, and I wanted to ride that freedom all the way to the village to buy candy. But honestly, that was a long and scary ride, so instead, I did another loop to the bottom of the drive and back up, dodging the Corvair and beat–up VW bug parked next to the falling–down barn. I could still feel that freedom while reading my new books and eating gilt chocolate while glancing outside at my new steed every few seconds.

Magical, selfish lottery. I don’t regret a single wish. I still don’t.