Dust and Free Floating Anxiety

I've been up since 4:30 this morning...unable to get back to sleep, twisting and turning with worries racing through my head. Some are real, some aren't, but they all leave me feeling restless and tired. I finally got up, hoping I could escape the low hanging cloud of free floating anxiety. It hasn't worked terribly well.

I've been working on our taxes. I don't have all the forms yet but I want to have an idea of how much we'll get back..not as much this year unfortunately which added to my general haze of unease. I almost spit at the computer I got so frustrated with Turbo Tax. I finally harumphed over to H & R Block and tried their program but oddly it gave me a bit less money and irritated me too so I guess I'm stuck with Turbo Tax despite it refusing to import last year's information and glitching out on me periodically.

After I finished the tax stuff I still couldn't relax so I dragged Ernie upstairs to work on the Fourth Room. We were supposed to focus on it all weekend but eh....  I sorted books, saving some, putting others in a donate box. After books were stacks of prints and posters and frames. Some have to be saved (my two Vertebrats posters...how I regret getting rid of the others...sigh), others I put in the donate pile. My father's Boston College diploma, with its broken glass, I reluctantly pitched. I just can't keep everything I keep tellling myself.

I feel myself getting so frustrated by all of the THINGS and the responsibility of having all these THINGS. Far too many things piled up in our house, and yet I am someone who gets attached to things....who imbues them with feelings and meanings that they surely don't really have. Why else do I love antiques so...but for all the history and stories they bring with them? I'm hopeless.

Ernie brought a box over and in it were four paintings that my grandmother had done of flowers. When I was a kid I just thought it was so incredibly magic and exotic that my grandmother could paint like that. I pulled them out of the box and looked at them and I just felt frantic at having nowhere for them. My mother had given those to Judi a long time ago and I was furious because I had wanted them too. I had asked Judi if I could have one of them and she refused. I was SO angry at her....angry for a long time. And now she is gone and I have them with nowhere to put them. It fucking breaks my heart and makes me so angry, far angrier than I ever was at my sister.

So I cried.

Between that and all the dust I have a headache. I hate days like this.