Every time we drive the car on our free day, the temperature gauge moves slowly to the 'H' as we drive. The other day, we had been driving for twenty minutes, and I hadn't thought to check the gauge, and then I did, and it was way past the 'H.' But it's not like the car sounds bad or acts up or smells funny, and Catherine and I are the only people here that seem to notice this problem, and we've already sent the car to the shop to have this fixed, and, as was the case last Friday, we need to use the car and not take it into the shop again. Over winter break, two people used this car to go to New Hampshire and back, which is like 20 hours of driving round-trip, and they didn't complain about any problems. So on Friday, I adjusted the steering wheel so that the steering wheel blocked my view of the temperature gauge, and we drove around to do our errands with what was maybe an overheating car. This made me very anxious.
I ordered nine cds from borders.com for myself for Christmas using a gift card that I got for Christmas. I thought the confirmation email said that the box of cds would get here to Soltane no later than the 12th of January, and so, on the 11th, I volunteered to go get the mail at lunch time, but I didn't get any packages. I came back and Catherine said that packages don't come until like 2:30. So later in the afternoon, I walked back and checked, and the box wasn't there
still, so I thought, okay, it must be coming tomorrow. But then, the exact same thing happened as on the 11th. I checked the mail room like three times on the 12th, and there was nothing. So I thought that maybe the borders people just miscalculated, and the box would come on the 13th, one day later than they said would be the latest. So I checked the mail room twice on Saturday, and there was nothing. I got very anxious about this, and decided to try and check the status of the order on the internet, and pulled up the confirmation email that said how to check the status of the order, and saw that the email said the package would come as late as the 18th of January, not the 12th. I felt confused about why I thought it said the 12th, and now I have to wait for so long until the 18th.
For the past week or so, I have been checking the forecast in the Daily Local paper. It's a five day forecast, and since Tuesday or so, it has said that on the fifth day of the forecast, it would snow. That means that when I checked the forecast on Tuesday, it said there would be snow on Saturday. When I checked the forecast on Wednesday, it said there would be snow on Sunday. I checked the forecast on Friday, and it said we'd have snow on Tuesday. This made me anxious because I really like the snow and I really want it to snow here, and the forecast tells me that what I want is going to happen, but then keeps pushing it away. It's like someone who has some candy that I want and keeps putting it on the table between us saying that I can have it, and then when I reach for it, they snatch it away before I can get it. So now, the paper says that Tuesday really is the day, and that it will be really cold that day and the next day, but at the library yesterday, I looked in the Philadelphia paper, and it said that there's only a chance for snow, and a small chance at that, and that it's not even going to be very cold. The Daily Local has been screwing with its readers, and that makes me anxious and mad too.
For years now, my hair has been falling out of my head in disconcerting amounts, but because my mom's hair does the same thing and she still has such and abundance of hair, I've never worried about it. But every once in a while, I decide to pull my hair back to see just how far back my forehead goes, and I am pretty convinced that I see more and more forehead each time I check. I also have these hairs that are growing just a few millimeters down from the hair line, like some remnant of a once numerous a prosperous population. The percentage of white hairs to dark is also increasing by the day, and the whites are visible in my hair, even when I stand like five or six feet away from the mirror. So now I am anxious because I think that by the time I am thirty, my knobby, irregular head will be shining out from a ring of radiant white hairs, kinking uncontrollably into the air, and if this part of my body is so quickly retreating to deterioration, than what of the unseen parts of body. I bet my insides are rotting away as I write, the cartilage of my joints is weakening, and I think I can feel a pain developing in my hip. I will be an eighty year old man in less than ten years. Maybe I can pretend that our coming child is really my grandchild. That may make me feel a little more comfortable with the rate of my body's decay.
And Catherine is pregnant. I am anxious because she is pregnant and this is my first time thinking about there being a person in the world that I helped make. We heard its heart beat at the baby doctor on Friday, and I still don't really know how to respond to all this. The whole thing has made me pensive and less social lately and unwilling to engage people. This is what it was like with me and a student at the library yesterday:
