What a shitty day…

So, I’m in Boston now. Well, Westborough technically.

I knew I was going to have to be here Mon-Th this week, and I decided to drive down this time. My theory was that while I want to minimize time away from Sarah (which would suggest that I should fly) that I would instead elect to drive home on Friday, taking most of the extra time out of the week I would have had to work if I had flown in. This way I could theoretically get the psychological (and karmic) benefits of a road trip, without losing too much extra Sarah time–really just the five hours today.

This made sense under the theory that I love to drive, that I find the Blue Sky Mind you get into on a good road trip kind of cleansing, etc. Also, there is one other small reason which I may talk about later.

However, here’s how the day actually went:

I spent all day Saturday obsessing over missing Sarah–now that she is so interactive, and starting to talk, I hate to miss even a minute. This morning, that was amplified and I really hated to leave–especially when she wanted to come with me, and was sitting down in the hall trying to put on her boots so she could come along.

Also this morning, I woke up with my right eye crusted shut. Sarah had picked up a mild case of conjunctivitis (a.k.a. “pink eye”) from the day care, which we had treated, and which I thought was pretty well done. Apparently she managed to infect me, though.

While I did manage to get some of the relevant eye drops on the road, what this meant was that I basically drove all day with a stream of yellow pus running down the right side of my face, from the infected eye. Also, the eye itself was very irritated, which did not contribute to a relaxing drive–indeed, I felt like a Teargarden album.

Additionally, it rained for almost the entire drive, which in combination with the fact that the Focus fishtails like a bastard at the slightest of poor road conditions, meant that the drive was both much slower (and hence much longer) and much more stressful than was ideal.

Also, just as I was heading out the door this morning, my mom called to tell me that a very good friend of the family had died. This was the worst part of it, obviously. I should be headed back to North Bay for a memorial service on Tuesday–besides being the oldest friend of the family, this guy is the father of someone who’s basically my second brother. Instead I’m in Boston, and I don’t know what to do. Every instinct I have is telling me to blow off this week in Boston and drive up to North Bay tomorrow, in order to be there for my “brother” and his mom… I’ll have to see what the lay of the land is at work tomorrow. (My brother is also in Boston, and also should go to the service, so we will probably either go together, or both not go.)

I spent a lot of the drive trying to figure out how I could get to the memorial service, and thinking about good memories about Gerry. I may write something about it later.

So, all in all, it was a very unsatisfactory drive, through which the only things keeping me sane were frequent phone calls home and the combination of P. G. Wodehouse and Johnathan Cecil.

I wish I felt like I could just go to North Bay now, and damn work.