doctors and inadequacy

My hands have been going numb. At night, my fingers and legs won't bend. I can't lift my arms because the joints freeze up, so I tuck my elbows to my body and turn my forearms out when I need to reach things. I look like a broken action figure. Better than an upended tick, anyway. The vog rolled in and settled in everyone's lungs, so I've been driving back and forth to the doctor, unable to feel my fingers on the steering wheel and too sorry for myself to change the radio when it starts playing shitty music.

I made thumbnails out of the illustrations and sent them to my editor. They don't look right to me. The style is wrong. The colors are bad. The computer just sits there, hedged off by small people. There is a box from the state library on my dresser, containing a panel for the centennial mural I'm supposed to paint by next month. I knew it was laughable to think of these months as time to work on my illustration career, but it doesn't make me laugh now.

 very cute time/life force absorber

This is the part of baby-having you brace yourself for; the tired, sore, fat, impoverished, cluttered-home phase that stretches out on both sides of you like it will never end.

BUT - have new crackpot life-plan: to become an FBI-trained forensic sketch artist. Art! Crime-solving! Intrigue! 

Or, you know, I will send Leif off to kindergarten and get back to library work.