My Friday night wasn’t so bad. As soon as I told red-haired guy we needed to be friends, my anxiety stopped and it’s not come back. Not sure what this means or if what I said to him had anything to do with it, but at least my anxiety is gone for now.

On Saturday, I went to pick my cousin and her six-year-old daughter up at the airport. It was a rainy day in San Francisco and it was kind of depressing. They were hungry so went to Stonestown, a local mall on the way home, to eat and shop. My cousin said her daughter didn’t have any black clothes, so we went shopping for kids clothes.

My six-year-old niece is very talkative, very spoiled, and striking self-possessed for her age. We went into this shop called ‘The Children’s Place’, and I pulled out what I thought looked like a nice black stretch velvet dress. My niece took one look at the dress and said, ‘That’s not my style. The clothes here are all ugly too.’ I took one look at my cousin, and she said her daughter was very picky about clothes. So I said fine, let’s go to Nordstrom to see what we can find.

We headed up to the Nordstrom Children’s department. My niece saw a mannequin wearing a long black stretch velvet skirt, a glittery black tee-shirt and a black sweater with a fake black fur collar, and said ‘I like this outfit, it’s my style.’ I looked at the price of the outfit and it was about $100. I mean she was right, there weren’t other decent outfits in black in the whole place, but to hear that coming from a six-year-old was a little odd.

The same thing happened when we tried to get shoes. My niece was so picky about her shoes, that my cousin told the salesperson to just bring every black shoe out in my niece’s size. My niece looked at every shoe carefully before picking out a pair of black patent mary jane flats, pairing them with white sox with a glittery fringe. My cousin added a headband and forked out $150 for her six-year-old’s daughter’s outfit.

Kid’s clothes are so expensive. All the grown up shoe brands had miniature versions of their shoes in the children’s shoe section. I saw a couple buying a pair of Nikes for their baby in diapers. Manufacturers are smart. They start out brand loyalty on the very young.

My life these last few days have a tangle of emotions. I took Friday October 22 off because I kind of just felt like staying home and dealing with the news of my uncle’s death. I had scheduled to take two days off for his wedding in November, so I told my boss I was going to take the time off now. She was very nice, and said take as much time as I needed.

I had a major, major anxiety attack on Friday morning, so major that my hand was shaking like I had Parkinson’s or something, and I was afraid to leave the house. I talked to a friend of mine, and she wanted me to call my primary care physician and get a prescription for an anti-depressant. In between all of this, my family kept calling telling me of their plans to fly into San Francisco and could I pick them up. Then my aunt and uncle who were already visiting from Florida were asking me if I was going to hang out with them that day.

I also spoke that morning to my dearly departed uncle’s wife and I asked her if she had called my uncle’s estranged children to let them know he was dead. She was understandably scattered, and told me "I’m sure somebody is calling them." I was concerned about my cousin, my uncle’s daughter who lives out in Texas, so I emailed her.

Next thing I know, my cousin calls me back and just starts wailing on the phone for five minutes. Poor thing. Nobody told her. I felt so bad for so I suggested that she could stay at my house, then I felt guilty because I knew if she took me up on the offer I was going to have to figure out how to get my aunt and cousin from the airport on Saturday night. My cousin said she’d let me know later that night if she was coming and all the details.

Then I got more freaked out and called my brother because I figured nobody told him either. My brother was his usual calm self, and did his best to ease my fears. He’s a good brother for that kind of thing. Then afterwards I called red-haired guy and told him we should be friends because life is short, and it hurt too much to not be friends at him. I was like "this close" to being okay with never having contact with him again for the rest of my life, and now I was like in tears on the phone telling the guy we needed to be friends.

And this was just my Friday day. More later.

So I decided to join the National Novel Writing Month group again, and I'm about to write a novel in November. I wasn't going to do it, but I think the exercise of writing every day will keep my mind off my roller coaster ride of a life. My life is one big trauma right now, and I need to do some serious writing to keep me from getting too depressed.

I got into this habit where I'm writing constant letters to my future self 20 years into the future, to ask advice about what I'm going through. It's really trippy because my future self writes back about a future I'm supposed to have which seems so impossible. My future self says she went through the same things I have, but she never wrote letters to her future self the way I'm doing right now. She keeps saying some things in a person's timeline can't be changed. Anyway it's kind of like having an running argument with myself, and it kind of keeps me amused and thinking about things.

But my future self letters have me really interested in writing a story about a character trying to change her future. So I titled my new novel "Changing Timelines", and it will be about a character who discovers a way to remote view into the future and who of course (like her creator) so does not like the future she sees that she tries desperately to change the timeline.

My future self keeps writing to me that while I do have free choice and free will in my life, some timelines cannot be changed. And when my future self says timelines, she means that a certain person will always be in my life no matter what I do. She says it doesn't matter what I do or don't do, if the other person does choose to take a different path, then the person remains in my timeline.

I hate her vision of the how the future works, because it makes me across like a passive victim and I don't believe I'm that. But my future self insists that there are other forces, divine forces at work, that brought us together and which I cannot tear apart. And I hate this interpretation! So I spend many letters arguing about free will, free choice, divine intervention, god's will, god's plan, and on an on with my future self. I am definitely at war with myself right now, and I guess it helps psychologically to argue with myself on paper.

Anyway, all this traumarama makes for an interesting novel about what a person would be willing to do to change a future they don't want. Like how far would my character be willing to go to change her future? Would she be willing to commit crimes, maybe even murder to change her future? I couldn't do that myself, so maybe I need to write about a character who does just to see how far I would really go in a fictional world.

I could explore the ethics lesson I had in grade school. Does the ends equal the means or the means equal the end? In other words, would I be willing to kill if it meant I would be preventing something equally horrible happening. And in grade school I told my teacher I don't know, it depends on the situation. And she just looked at me and said I was "situationalist" and that I saw the world in shades of grey and not in black and white. Looks like I was a post modernist thinker even in my youth. You can thank my hippie grade school teachers for it. They started us on the post modernist track very young.

It's definitely a sign of something that the Boston Redsox beat the evil NY Yankees empire. Yes, there are miracles sometimes in life, if only for a little while.

Pray for my repose of my uncle's soul who was sick back on memorial day. He passed this afternoon. My aunt said he knew it too, and even though he was serene and peaceful at the end, tears rolled out of his right eye. My aunt said it was sad, very sad. He was young too, only 61 years old and about to retire. He and my aunt were looking forward to spending their golden years together.

You just never know when you're going to go.