another 18 years of this, you say?
What did Britain decide to do about Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration (of Catholics and Protestants), and why did it decide to do it?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I had a bad night last night. I couldn't fall asleep because I was uncomfortable in any position I lay in, so I went upstairs to read. In the middle of reading I burst into tears. Mind you, I was pretty upset before I went upstairs, but once I started crying I couldn't stop. You know that kind of hysteria -- oh, what a time to be using that term -- where letting the tears out doesn't help, it just builds and makes things worse.
I cried uncontrollably for about an hour. I wrote a really depressed entry and it didn't help. Everything seemed wrong: my body hurt, all the things that need doing around the house aren't getting done, and the idea of having this stranger to care for the rest of my life crashed in on me in a way it hadn't before. The more I thought about what was bothering me, the more out-of-control I felt.
Eventually I said, I've got to talk to someone, and I couldn't imagine who I'd rather talk to other than Darin. I went downstairs at 2am and woke him up. I wonder if he could actually understand a word I was saying, since I could barely talk for crying.
He talked to me until I calmed down and felt a lot better. He wiped off my face and caressed me. He assured me that what was happening was that one bad thing was going on (my abdomen hurts a lot when I lay down, and turning is a difficult operation) was influencing everything else. Nothing was that bad, everything was going to be okay.
He kept talking and soothing me until I fell asleep.
Of course, I found out this morning my fear about waking him up had come to pass: he couldn't fall back asleep -- he went upstairs to watch some TV for a few hours. Oops. I know I'm going to remember this if I ever work myself up into that state again -- "Don't wake Darin up, he needs his sleep for work!" Mind you, Darin wouldn't say that, he wants me to wake him up; I just feel too guilty.
On Tuesday, when the AAA guys took my car, there was a little accident involving the driver's door, which hit a tree as they were towing the car out of my driveway. (The door was open as the guy behind the wheel was looking back to steer my car on to the flatbed.) I thought everything was fine, but I noticed today -- I'm not the swiftest cookie on the planet these days -- that there is something wrong: it doesn't close well and there's a whistling air sound, as though the window were down a bit (but it's not). So now I have to have that taken care of.
Add this item to the to-do list; make me a little more tense.
I am a little worried about my Swift Cookie Quotient these days. Honestly. Have you seen this advertising campaign by Earthlink, which has billboards that read (for example):
serf@aol.com
surf@earthlink.net
I needed to have this explained to me, if you can believe that. Evidently everyone else I know who's seen it understood it. Sigh.
Tell me which movies I should go see. I have to make the most of my time. Or the most of my late nights avec baby.
The answer to yesterday's question: The hijacking ended...and the requests for political asylum began. Evidently 74 of the passengers -- about half of the people on board -- do not want to return home to Afghanistan, which has led to speculation that the hijacking was in fact an elaborate scheme by a large group of people to get out of Afghanistan and request political asylum.
Britain now gets to decide what to do about these requests, which isn't going to be easy -- they'd hardly want to encourage this sort of immigration. The Taliban leaders in Afghanistan have said the hijackers will be put on trial when they return home and do not face certain death, but the hijackers know for sure there's no death penalty in Britain.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com