Here it is St. Patrick’s Day and for the second year in a row, there’s no Guinness in the house. No Jameson, either. Not every holiday comes with drink requirements, but this one does and it feels wrong to not be able to partake. Not even a shot. This is just another one of the things that goes with being on chemo. I’ve mentioned it before, I know. If we were having corned beef for lunch today, that might help, but we’re not. Corned beef costs far too much for our budget, especially when considering how much of it we have to cook to keep the kids pleased. Five pounds is barely enough for the kids.
When cancer treatment starts, it’s easy to think, “I got this. We’ll make it through. No problem.” The longer treatment continues, though, and the side effects get worse, not better, and you miss being around your friends, and you begin to feel the weight of the treatment as an emotional burden, the more difficult it is to hold onto any kind of hope. I keep telling myself, “Maybe next year.” Maybe. Who knows what might happen over the next 365 days? There are no promises that the backside of treatment won’t leave me with lingering side effects. There are no promises that as one treatment ends another becomes necessary.
This is where the depression kicks in. Every day, there is something that you’re missing, something you want to do and can’t. Dance a jig? I never have been a dancer, but trying such a thing now would land me on my butt. Go to a burlesque show? Sorry, I can’t stay out that late. Bingo night with the other old folks? I don’t dare. They might be contagious.
At least I have coffee. The day they take that away from me, I’ll have no choice but to die.
The problem of archived digital photographs is coming to bear in a painful way. The above photo was taken with a five-megapixel Canon 5D. In 2005, it was the best in its class for digital SLRs. One of the promises of digital photography was supposed to be that we could return to them at any time and re-process them without damaging the negative. That’s proving not necessarily to be the case.
JPEG artifacts are the problem. Or maybe it is software that doesn’t accommodate how formats were written to disc 20 years ago. Whatever the issue may be, I’m finding that trying to fix the color in old images, which is a frequent necessity, is difficult. This morning, it’s the red channel that won’t cooperate. There are places where original settings can’t be changed or improved. The data can’t be overwritten.
Part of the problem may be that I no longer have the original RAW file. In theory, I shouldn’t have as many color issues working from the original. However, this photo was processed from an uncompressed TIFF file which should contain all the same digital information as the RAW file. This has me concerned that our digital files may not have the archival longevity that we had hoped.
I need some things from the store but no one currently in the house can drive, there’s not a car available if they could, and delivery isn’t an option. Maybe this time next year.
Morning Update: 05/04/24
Try sleeping late on a Saturday morning when all the animals in the house are accustomed to the 6:00 AM weekday schedule. The dogs aren’t really that much of a problem. I took them outside late enough that they were comfortable waiting on me to move first. The cats, on the other hand, are less patient. They began invading the Recovery Room when I hadn’t fed them by 7:30. They climbed on top of me, nudged me, licked me, and mewed in my face to let me know that they were going to starve to death if I didn’t get up right now. Fortunately, Kat was already awake so the impact was minimal. Still, there are days when the cats’ alarms need to turn off.
The first message I saw this morning was from a college friend, one of the smoothest tenor voices I’ve ever heard, letting me know that he, too, has now been diagnosed with cancer. I guess we’re all at that age where our bodies turn against us. Whether it is a familial inclination that plagued the generations before us or the aggregate compound effect of life’s choices, we see more of our friends fighting health battles that keep them from engaging in the things they love. We work all our lives, practice, study, and perhaps even experiment with our craft, trying to become the best we are capable of being, wanting to be one of the wise elders who is respected as we pass information down to subsequent generations. Yet, when we’re at that point in life when we should be enjoying the fruits of our labor, we get hit with some disease that strips away all that glory and leaves us with a shell that struggles to survive. We may still live but not at the timbre we did before.
I made the mistake of watching Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You” last night. It was a mistake not because of the quality of the movie; as rom-coms go, it was rather decent. But it highlights the challenges of not only finding love as we get older (in this case, “older” being a whopping 40 years old) but also what happens when you find it in someone significantly younger. For the movie’s characters, the solution was simply to wait five years when the social effects were less severe. Whether it’s inadvertent or not, the movie also demonstrates the degree to which finances play a role in finding these exceptional forms of love. Had the younger male character not been swimming in cash, had the female not been independently financially stable, the romance would never have happened in the first place. Money put them where they were.
There are always people in our lives who will say, “I love you.” How they mean that changes over the years. Much of the time, the definition is along the lines of, “I appreciate your place in my life and value your presence.” That’s nice, and it keeps us from being able to complain that no one loves us. What we lose, though, are those people who would define their love as a soul-level experience, a desire to be an intimate and constant part of who we are, what we’re doing, and wanting to join their lives to ours for everyone’s pleasure. That love? Yeah, you can kiss that goodbye as you get older. Companions become tolerated because, if not them, who? Even then, for how long? The deep connections we have with people erode with time. We’re no longer exciting to be with. There’s nothing new in our relationships as we become set in our ways and, we like being set in our ways.
At the end of the movie, she’s 45 with a daughter happily in college. He’s 30 with a new solo album. As the movie ends, the producers would have you believe that their relationship picks right back up with the same level of passion as before. You and I both know that’s not the way it works, though. Things happened over those five years. Everyone changes. Five years, especially when you’re twenty-five, is a long time and our emotions change dramatically. We might remember former loves tenderly, even longingly, but the day-to-day is going to have less passion, less heat, and more illness and doctor’s visits and disparities between our desires. Maybe he wants a family. She already has one. He wants to keep that jet-set life. She’s anchored to the business she owns. As the movie fades to black, the relationship inevitably falls apart.
Maybe what’s disturbing is that ending: all our lives slowly fade to black. We still want that high, the fiery love that we knew when we were young and healthy but it’s no longer something we can maintain. Not only is the other person letting go, but we let go of ourselves because who we are now is not the person we thought we’d be.
Or maybe I’m just an old man babbling in a pool of loneliness. I really shouldn’t watch rom-coms.
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