Life is Just a Bowel of Cherries

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2010-11-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

We went to Nebraska last week for my Aunt Maggi's 90th birthday party. All my cousins came in from Illinois and my sisters were both there from out of state. It was good to see everybody.

On the way up, I listened to a lot of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth and was feeling all Zenned up by the time I got to Lincoln.

It took about 2 hours to be catapulted back into age 10. The older the both of us get, the more capable my mother is of making me feel inappropriate. Maybe I am gaining some enlightenment by virtue of the fact that I can see what's going on, for a change. I dunno but I handed my personal remote control to each of the family members, respectively, to allow them to push however many buttons they desired. And I reacted. Only, not really. I restrained myself.

At one point, I looked across the room and Freddy was staring back at me, wide-eyed like he was fixing to see a shanking when my mother hissed an admonishment regarding her "good china". I had simply pointed out that she had, mistakenly I assumed, placed the "good dishes" under the plants she'd brought in off the porch and which now sat on the livingroom floor. Each with a good plate underneath the pot.

"Those aren't 'good dishes'," she spat. "I'm putting them through the dishwasher as often as I can to get the gold to come off them so I can use them in the microwave." And then, in case I didn't get the point, "I was mad at your Dad when he brought them home in the first place."

And you have to know me to understand the effect these words had on me. I adore old things. I can't afford good antiques but I frequent "junk" stores whenever possible. Last year after the tornado hit our town (and our house) I made a trip to Nebraska early that summer, stopping at jillions of antique stores. I know now that I was in a grief reaction, reacting to the loss of so many old houses and huge trees in our town, but I loaded my car with antiques that trip. It started when I went to local junk stores in search of a stained glass window to replace the one destroyed in our bathroom. I discovered I felt safe surrounded by all that old stuff that'd survived for so many years and felt that maybe everything wasn't gone, after all.

Interestingly, that summer in Nebraska, I didn't buy just old things but old kitchen things, things that looked like the ones we'd had when I was a kid. The meaning of that isn't lost on me. A tin flour scoop like my Grandma used when baking. A set of brushed aluminum canisters. A pair of heavy kitchen shears like my Grandma's. A pink, metal cake carrier that I took an ass chewing from my mother about even then. The stuff made me feel safe. And like I had some control over my life. Which of course I wasn't and didn't. But it was worth a hundred bucks or so to get some relief for a short time.

So to disrespect family glassware to me is to spit in my face. And crazy or not on my part, my mom knows that when she does it. And that's why she does it. And that breaks my heart. I know she's old and I'm lucky to have her around to irritate me but it still hurts.

So lots of stuff like that on this trip, old family dysfunction, and I feel a little beat up right now. And not anxious to go back anytime soon. And I think I'm gonna quit inviting my mom to come live with us. I may have to face the fact that she and I are not compatible and leave her to my sister or brother to take care of her. As much as I'd like to be the kind of selfless person who takes care of their aging parents, I may have to throw the flag on having her under my roof.

Still, it's nice to be back in the midwest where church people go to eat at the taverns in little towns after church on Sundays.

Otter Memories

2010-11-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

My experience with drumming started in 1997 when I attended a retreat at the home of a friend's. She asked myself and another woman to come and do a segment talking about our experience in 12-step groups. I wasn't into what I then referred to as the New Age bullshit my friend was all about but we went and spoke. After we spoke, another woman did a segment on Native American spirituality. She did a guided meditation that she called a "journey" in which we traveled to the top of a mountain and met an animal who brought us a lesson. She told us stories and

I can't remember what we did first but at one point we "drummed". They had several handheld drums there for those without a drum of their own. And in the dimly lit livingroom of that big, rough-cut lumber house in the woods in Arkansas, that group of women drummed together. It was just a simple rhythm but all in unison and as I drummed along with them something profound happened to me. I still don't really know what it was. The power of being in rhythm with all of those other women. The same heartbeat, as I later learned the drum beat signifies. I don't know what it was but I was totally hooked. In a time, that woman, Lyn, and a couple other women and myself began to meet once a month at Lyn's house in the woods nearby. But first I gotta tell you about Lyn.

Lyn is larger than life. A female John Wayne. She is tall but it's not that that makes her stand out. She has long, thick, beautiful, now gray hair worn in the traditional butt cut so favored by us older gals. Her eyes are a peircing gray-blue color. I'm not sure of her heritage. She claims Irish and Native American though she looks as Irish as Mickey Rooney (he is Irish, right?). But she has a presence. Just something that takes your breath away when you see her. Her spirit, I guess it is.

She lived, as I said, in the woods in a log house her husband and she built themselves as in, cut the trees down and skidded them out of the woods and skinned the logs, etc. They take off work every year for the entire month of November to hunt and it is during this time that they stock up all the meat they'll use the coming year. On their property, they had a combination art studio and woodworking shop out of which came the most beautiful creations. They could do anything. There wasn't a thing those two couldn't do. One time at another get together, one of the gals in the drumming group asked if anybody had heard from Lyn. Another gal spoke up, "Yeah, I called her today. She was skinning a bear."

She was my hero. And I wasn't alone. The group slowly grew. Women were drawn from all different directions and stations in life. And everyone who was suppose to be there, was there. I never missed it except once in October when the moon was full and the sky was incredible and I was on frigging vacation somewhere. I swore I'd never again miss one. Just to know people like that existed was a privelege. I adored them. We'd have a huge potluck before the drummings and she'd always cook something scrumptuous like beans only they weren't like any beans you ever ate before. Or elk or deer or black-eyed pea cornbread that made you wanna slap your mama. We'd all cut up and laugh and tell smart-ass jokes and then we went to the livingroom in front of the fireplace or, and this was my absolute favorite, outside to the fire pit.

Someone would smudge us, usually the one who cried so much. "Woman Who Cries", we called her for fun. She would light a bundle of ceremonial white sage and then blow it out, keeping it smoldering and, one by one using a fan of turkey feathers, she fanned the smoke over our bodies from head to toe, back to front to cleanse us and prepare us for communion with God which we called "Grandfather". And once the smudging began, no more fooling around. We fell silent because it was sacred time. Sometimes Lyn would lightly beat a rhythm on her large, Buffalo drum while we waited for the rest to prepare themselves.

Then, all smudged and sitting around a circle one by one we voiced our prayers and whose ever turn it was, would begin the drumming. We all used the same rhythm except once in a while a new person would come and do something different. But whatever the rhythm, the rest would join in and drum along with them, carrying our prayers to heaven on the sage smoke. We moved around the circle, continuing until everybody had said all the prayers they had and then we quit. Most times, and again this was my absolutely favorite thing in the world, at some point in the night Lyn would say, "Okay ladies, get comfortable" and that meant to grab a pillow or something to use to lie on the floor with your eyes closed because she was getting ready to do a lesson. It was always an Indian story about the roots of a pine tree versus an oak tree or about the directions or some woodland animal and they all carried lesson. I found out later, despite the fact that the lessons were structured and organized, she rarely knew what she was going to say until the words came out of her mouth.

Of course, Lyn had made her own drum beater. The stick was wrapped in leather that was cut into long fringes. At the ends of each fringe she'd attached little hollow metal balls and when she referred to the rain or a storm in a story, she'd rattle those fringes over the drum and it sounded like rain hitting something. It was absolutely magical.

Sometimes I'd bring my guitar and sing songs that seemed to me to fall far short of the mark but that everyone at least pretended to enjoy. Woman Who Cries started leaving early when I got my guitar out and I developed a little paranoia about that and quit bringing it but it was nice for me when I did.

The evolving group had many different souls and belief systems and all were welcomed. Each month someone could, if they wished, do a presentation to teach about their spiritual beliefs. One gal did a lesson on Buddism explaining what it was and how she applied it to her life, etc. Another did Judism. I shared about AA.

Sometimes Lyn had communion. Most nights, we'd ask if anyone wanted to "sit in the middle" which meant to sit in a chair in the middle of the circle and have us pray over them. In my head I called it "laying on of hands" because some of us touched the subject as they sat in the chair. Some nights we'd do two or three women. It was a beautiful time.

Every square inch of her home was decorated with something beautifully Lyn. The whole place reeked of she and her husband's talent and respect for the land and for God. Just being on the place felt like going back in time. I honestly felt like I had a glimpse into another place and time. When they killed a deer, she took tobacco out of a leather pouch she carried around her neck and did a blessing and thanked Grandfather and the spirit of the deer, for the sacrifice made for them.

Lyn's belief in God was palpable. She was one of those people who don't ever seem to have any doubts. She just lived and breathed belief. And so did I, back then. It was so easy to believe when you looked into those big, blue eyes. The earnestness. The integrity. And somehow, she gave me and all of us hope. Somehow. That's why we all love her so damn much.

We patterned ourselves after a group of Native American women Lyn told us about who lived around the turn of the century called The Otter Society. They gathered together to pray for each other and the country and leaders and, like us, anything and everything. And they did healings. So we called ourselves The Otter Sisters.

Occasionally, we'd meet somewhere else. Once we met at a nearby falls in a recreation area and drummed. We often met for a sunrise "service" on Easter morning or the day before, and we'd drum in the sunrise together up on some mountain in the cold mist, usually.

I don't know what happened. Things changed. The group got really big for a short time and there were lots of new people. Some of them, I didn't like and I don't think I was alone. But when a group gets big like that, it can't be all things to all people.

All I can say is that we all went in a little different directions. Or maybe it was just me. And I wish it was different. I miss those times so much.

Sometimes in the middle of a drumming, Lyn would walk by and throw a big handful of white sage into the campfire and I can't begin to tell you what that smell does to you. It just shoots you off on a rocket to the 1800s, or something. I still carry a little smudge stick of white sage in my vehicle and often light it while driving in the woods. The smell takes me back to that log house in the woods and that campfire and those women beating those drums under the moon and more stars than you've ever seen in your life.

Sucks to Be Me

2010-10-16T14:33:00.001-07:00

I'm sort of ambling around, aimlessly today. Yesterday was my last day of work at my job. I was surprised how hard it was to leave. The people I worked with in our local office, as well as our regional supervisor, are phenomenal. I don't think I've ever worked with a better bunch of gals. And nobody irritated me, not one of them.

Four weeks of notice is too long. I can change my mind 90 times in four weeks. When I got up yesterday I wasn't sure I wouldn't call my supervisor sometime during the day and tell her I'd changed my mind and wanted to stay. And even now, I get a funny, panicky feeling when I realize I no longer have a key to the office and can't drop in up there to make a copy or fax something anytime I want to. Weird.

There seems to be a thing in my brain that makes me focus, not on what is possible in the current situation, but whatever is no longer possible. A glass half empty sort of glitch in my psychic wiring. I've always been like this. So instead of the euphoria I'd anticipated at the ending of the commitment to a full-time job that felt tremendously meaningless while performing it, I now wander around the house wondering what to do with myself.

I didn't sleep well last night. I recall waking up once with the image of one of my co-workers in my head, followed by an overwhelming sense of loss at the realization that I won't be working with her, any longer. I won't be walking over to that desk to visit with her on Monday. I wish I was different, I really do. And yet, maybe this is a normal grief reaction. I'm not confused about missing the work I did. Or of being a part of the organization I worked for. But there's a kind of Steel Magnolias-type of commaraderie inherent with a group of women in an office. And I miss that when it's not a part of my life.

So, as usual, I have no idea who, what or where I actually want to be in this life. Back in July when planning all of this, I vowed to be ready when October rolled around. I would have a solid business plan backed financially by a sizable savings account. And oddly enough, it's not the money I'm worried about. I'll easily make a living and I do have a little savings. But it's a Catch-22. When I'm in a full-time position, I want to be dead. I honestly start thinking about how nice it might be to be struck down in the street by a FedEx truck (they're bound to have good insurance) rendered disabled and forced to stay home and blog all day. And I know my true path lies in some such vocation. But the second I'm released from this commitment of mainstream employment and free to pursue my "dream life", I turn into a tearful, needy, lost soul, longing for socialization. I didn't expect this, I don't know, depression? I expected euphoria.

I've probably picked the wrong day to quit eating sugar.

Countdown

2010-09-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

I made it through my last supervisor's meeting and board of director's meeting. It's all down hill from here. I have tomorrow and 3 more weeks after that until the divorce is final on me and full-time employment. Tomorrow is casual Friday and I'm off on Monday. I'm gonna rock this.

Argh

2010-09-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

God, I'm tired. I'm so tired, I dreaded taking a shower and washing my hair tonight. I had 5 hours of sleep last night and the boss was in the office all day long, today. I do like her, though. She's like me, only smarter. I took 3 Valerian and a Melatonin before my shower and now I need to go to bed. The supervisor's meeting is tomorrow. Just shoot me, fuck it.

Is Anybody Out There?

2010-09-22T02:59:00.001-07:00

I don't believe in God the way I used to. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just sort of evolved. I used to be very sure what I thought in that area and now I'm not sure, anymore. More on that in a later post but for now, just know that He (She? The Universe?) came through for me, yesterday.

As I said before, I quit my job Monday. I put in my 2 weeks notice and then found out I had to give 4 weeks because I'm such a big deal in the office, so that's what I did. I love to quit jobs. It's my favorite thing about work. But I still second guess myself a little, no matter how bad I hate the job I happen to be quitting at the time.

So yesterday I'm driving to work and I start praying. I say, "God, please show me if I'm doing the right thing". It's a weird thing about sort of brushing the edge of agnosticism, in my case anyway. I just decide that I can allow myself to consider the fact that I might not believe in God anymore because I have so many doubts and see so many conflicts in that whole arena, and the next thing I know, I'm praying. It should also be mentioned that it's then, that moment I allow myself to consider not believing anymore, that I feel a warm Presence right next to me. I mean really feel it. Not on my skin but a strong sense of it's presence. Like maybe my own having to understand it all is distancing me from Him. So I still pray and I did so yesterday on the way to work.

About 10 minutes before noon, my boss calls me and says she's headed down (our corporate office is 85 miles away) and to have Nurse X in the office when she gets there. Nurse X is a model employee. She's been there for 20 years full-time, longer if you count her part-time years. Never a hint of a problem out of her. Builds up huge banks of paid time off and loses it every year rather than take it and go on a vacation. Does anything you ask her to do. Never a write up in 20+ years. Always hands in her paperwork on time without being asked. I couldn't figure out what was going on, and neither could anyone else.

My boss arrived at 1pm accompanied by the HR person. They called Nurse X into my office and fired her. They had a "disciplinary action" form with some off-the-wall, straw grabbing bullshit cited on it, made her sign it and walked her out to her desk to pack her belongings. No warning.

I have my theories what it was about and none of them have anything to do with her. Corporate bullshit's what it boils down to. Economics. My boss and HR knew it, too. They looked like they were about to throw up. I sat there and cried while they did it. The whole thing took about 30 minutes. When I walked her out to her vehicle I told her to get a lawyer. She asked me what can a lawyer could do. I said, "Just get one. He'll tell you."

You can imagine what the office was like the rest of the day. After my boss left, we all sat around in a daze and tried to figure out what to do with it in our heads. Tried to figure out who's going to do her work. Wondering what has happened to fairness and just-ness.

Guess that answered that question.

Cephalalgia Sentiments

2010-09-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

I'm having headaches almost every day. It's gone on for about 2 1/2 months and I'm beginning to decompensate. I've quit taking my hormones in case they were contributing. Then I quit my St. John's Wort. Then the suicidal ideation began. Just a little, I mean. Is it wrong to hope it's a brain tumor?

I went to a headache clinic last week. It was sort of my worst nightmare in terms of western medicine in that the doctor was clearly not an advocate of alternative medicine nor a student of nutrition. We're gonna do these tests and give you this medication and you may forget what to call a ballpoint pen but you'll still know what it is, so don't worry.

Um, no thanks.

I'm gonna quit my job tomorrow, instead. I've been thinking about it for a long time. I had a concrete plan and then tried to talk myself out of it. All these jobs are like my ex-husband. If he had been all bad, it would've been so easy. Same thing here. I'm hoping the headaches will quit when I do.

The other day at work I thought about getting my purse and keys and leaving and driving to Walmart and buying a bunch of real basic clothes, jeans, t-shirts, cotton underwear, socks and boots, some drinking water and food and driving out to our cabin, throwing my cell phone(s) out the window on the way and just staying forever. I figured Freddy would eventually find me and when he did I'd tell him I'm staying there and whatever he wanted to do would be fine. Stay, go, sell the house and cars, declare bankruptcy, I don't care, but I wasn't leaving. I have a wringer washer and tubs out there. Mental note: add clothesline to the Walmart list.

I get a little excited sometimes when I hear about someone committing suicide because I think, if they had stopped just short of kicking the stool out from under their feet or pulling the trigger or swallowing the pills and had, instead, taken that desperation and applied it to something else, what might have happened? How magical could their lives have turned out? I think we paint ourselves into a corner, thinking we have to be a certain way and when we aren't, we refuse to consider alternatives because they don't fit our idea of what life was suppose to be like. So we redouble our efforts and fight against our inner voice and sometimes, we kill ourselves. Or we drink. Or take Vicodin enemas. Or we have migraine headaches. It's not that I don't know what's going on here.

So what is my alternative on the way to climbing up onto the stool with the cord around my neck? What do I do, instead? I guess I quit the best job I've ever had because even it doesn't please me. I'm telling you the truth, if I lived in a big city where nobody knew me, I'd apply for a job as a dishwasher and when I got sick of it I'd go get another one. Or I'd clean houses for a living. I used to do that and I miss it a lot. I was really good at it, like massage therapy. So far, those seem to be my gifts. And what if they are? What if that's it? Would pissing away my nursing license in favor of cleaning houses and doing massages for the rest of my life really be that much worse than working in a good paying, respectable job wondering how much longer I was gonna be able to fight the urge to cut my throat?

In 2002 I was working two ER nursing jobs and drowning in credit card debt. I felt like I was running as fast as I could and could still feel myself losing ground. I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up the pace and I didn't know how I was going to pay off my debts without losing my house as a result. I started waking up in the middle of the night scared to death thinking about it. In the Spring, I got bronchitis and had to be off work for a week. I was very ill sleeping 20 hours a day. It was during that week, finally getting some rest and being able to think for a change, that I figured out what to do: quit my full-time, lowest paying job of the two and increase my hours at the part-time, higher paying one. It was simple but I couldn't figure it out until I was forced out of the game for a week. They call pneumonia the old man's friend. Bronchitis is sorta like that for me.

It's a frightening prospect, following your heart. It's not like there's any evidence it's gonna turn out okay. It's more like stepping out of a 6th story window and trusting you'll figure something out on the way down.

Milky Way

2010-05-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

I spent the entire day yesterday and a lot of Saturday writing in my journal. It's how I process life and when I can't do that, I don't cope so well.

I wrote and wrote and wrote just stuff in my head. Stuff I'm thinking about and haven't had the time to assimilate. And I brainstormed on scratch paper various scenerios; jobs, budgets, lifestyles, plans, cabins, gardens. I got it all out. All the stuff that's been building up. I'm like Hazel's rooster.

When I first moved to Arkansas and met my friend, Hazel, and once I got a telephone, Hazel and I use to talk on the phone for hours at a time while we crocheted or embroidered or lapquilted together in our respective homes. We'd often talk 4 hours at a time covering all the bases in the process. One such night she told me this story.

She had a rooster who stood, she said, by the door to the henhouse at night and as the hens were going in to roost and he'd "screw every one of them" as they passed through the door. She confided, "If I thought I had that shit to look forward to every night I'd kill myself". Clearly not a student of anatomy and physiology, she claimed that before she got the hens, the rooster was so full of "come" that it backed up and turned his eyes all milky-looking. Hazel's from Texas, if that helps at all.

Anyhow, my eyes get all metaphorically milky when I can't journal and I cleared that up, to a degree, this weekend. Wrote it all out, cleared the air, wiped the slate clean, purged myself. A mental colon cleanse, if you will. Today, driving to a meeting 80 miles away, I realized what I do, a lot.

I know what I want to do. I know the life I want. I don't need to brainstorm or journal or undergo hypnosis to find out what it is. I've known since I was 10. I want to write. It's what I do. It's what I'll do for the rest of my life, whether I ever earn any money at it, or not. I write. But I don't believe down deep that it's possible to make a living doing what I want to do so I figure out other things that seem more possible and I agree to "settle" for those things. Massage school was one of those things. And, like all the other things, massage is a noble pursuit. But it's not my passion. It's something I like a whole lot and enjoyed doing when I did it and still do, sometimes. But it's a job. Like the job I have now. And like organic farming or goat milking or soapmaking would all turn into, eventually.

My job pays really well. I get to wear nice clothes and don't have to deal with drug addicts or drunk people or really very many assholes at all. But it's not my passion and I know it and I know what is. And I know I'm not living up to my potential until I follow my heart. I know I'm not gonna be satisfied no matter what until I follow my heart and do what I'm suppose to be doing.

There's a back road on the way to the town where the meeting was held today and I frequently take it in favor of the main highway. Today as I drove that road with the bright blue wild flowers in the ditches that I don't remember ever seeing before and all the swallow-tails and blue birds and old barns and cows in the pastures, I thought about what a fucking shame it is that so many people feel like they're in prison because of their jobs. I had the sensation of looking at it all from a place of confinement. Through bars. I was right there but not really. Not able to experience it because I was going from meaningless task to meaningless task in my job today. And my job's not bad, I keep saying that and it's true. It's a damn good job, the best job I ever had, but it's not me. It's not the real me and the older a woman gets, the less willing she is to spend her time in pursuits that are meaningless to her. We don't have the hormones for it.

It occurrd to me that I have to let go of all the other bullshit. I have to let go of all the other ideas and cling only to my passion if I'm ever going to do it. If I continue to vacillate between 5 or 6 different directions, directions that are merely substitutions for what I really want, I'll never go anywhere but this same spot. And as I said, it's not a bad spot. It's just not where I belong.

Zzzzzzzzzz

2010-05-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

I couldn't sleep last night, to save my ass. I tried everything. Hot bath, Valerian, Melatonin, milk. Nothing worked. All that crap at work was swarming around in my head. You know when something gets just stuck in your brain, like right behind your forehead in your frontal lobes and you can't pry it out of there for anything? The only thing that stops it is either sleep, like that's gonna happen, or a shock of some kind or resolution. So, that's pretty much what got rid of it for me today. Resolution. So I'm still in the home health game for another day, at least, and I didn't call in sick, which is a miracle considering I had about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. I'm going to take a bath and go my ass to bed.

Same Circus, Different Clowns

2010-05-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

Ya know, I've put off posting because even I get tired of listening to my bullshit. But the blog muse continued to torment me until I'm back here, signed in, and once more bearing my flawed soul before all of humanity.

I think I'll just assign this as my signature: I hate my job at _______ and I wish I could quit and be a writer or an artist or an organic farmer. If it weren't for my nursing job, I'd be so much happier. If I had balls I'd quit this fucking job, etc.

So, here's the condensed version. I quit my job in the ER in February, took another job at a home health agency. Desk job. Almost no patient contact, which is best for everybody involved. Big problems in the office but I'm trying to wade through it and most days I don't hate it.

Then yesterday, the new secretary we hired a month ago came in and quit. Just when we got her trained and she had started to do some stuff, now she's quit. And I should mention that she is a nurse who took a secretarial position with us precisely for the same reasons I hate nursing. So she took this job in the office and stayed approximately 4 weeks and quit. To go back to nursing. Fucking nurses, I swear to God.

Somehow, that made me start thinking (pretending here that I don't think about it every, single day) about following my bliss and how if I had the balls... (see above). And I don't hate this job, most days. This week, yeah, but usually I sorta like it. But it still feels like a fucking cop out. Like I'm taking the coward's way out, and I am. Good money. Damn good money. Way more than I was making before. And it takes about 5 minutes of making more money to have to have that much from now on. And I knew that would happen. I had the big talk with myself when they told me how much they were gonna pay me, about how I wasn't gonna let myself think I had any extra money and how I was gonna pay stuff off with it and get ahead so when I started hating the job I'd be in a better position to quit. Only, you can't pay much off in 3 months, it turns out. Especially when you go to Best Buy and buy a new, digital video camera.

And there's another story. Late one brain-dead night, I happened upon this hysterical video on You Tube and it changed my life, ya'll. I mean it. I got all empowered over it because it's like watching a movie of me and my ex-husband and somehow it made me feel all validated, or something and it just lived on in my head. And somehow I got that all mixed up with the idea that if I bought a video camera, me and my BFF Bobbi could make some kinda movies and put them on You Tube or somewhere online and express my creativity and maybe be able to quit my job and live on adsense, or something. No, really. You know, it's just something I do in my head. So anyhow, I charged the camera. Put it on my credit card so now I get to pay that off instead of making an extra house payment.

I quit my massage business in October. I've been doing a few, tenacious souls in the meantime but mostly not doing massage, to speak of. Last month, I canceled my website. And today I called the 800 number to try to get my web address back.

I had this same thing happen when I was married, once. I thought he was the One. And so did everybody else. They all thought I'd finally found a nice guy. Well, he wasn't. I now refer to him as, "The Nazi". Terrible person, really, but at first he seemed so great and we got married after a short time that I'd prefer not to put a number to in an attempt to preserve a shred of my dignity. But we shouldn't have. Gotten married, I mean. I told myself I wasn't going to get another divorce, no matter what, and that I'd need to figure out a way to make it work and so I tried. That was the year I had my first migraine. There was never a better year to start having migraines than that year, I promise. But I wouldn't let myself admit it wasn't working. The thing is, my mind couldn't be completely repressed and one day I found myself packing my stuff in my car without ever having made a decision to leave. I packed the whole car full and I could pack a car, let me tell you. I could pack a horse trailer full of stuff in a car back then, I'd had so much experience. I packed the car and then I unpacked it because I didn't think I was really leaving. Until I did.

It's the same thing, here. I'm trying to tell myself I'm okay. It's not my choice, exactly, but it's a good paying job and it's not in the ER and I can do it and the next thing I know, I'm calling Homestead and asking for my domain name back.

Anyway, my husband is going to blow a rag if I tell him, "Oh, you know all that money I made for three months that I was gonna be helping you pay stuff with? Well, that's not working out so well, after all." So I'm not gonna admit it to myself right now. Right now, I'm gonna go take a nice, hot bath and go to bed and hope tomorrow is better. And actually, it probably will be. But if I just had those balls...how much better it could be.

Pinball Wizard

2010-02-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

Remember pinball machines? Glass-lidded wooden boxes in which a silver ball bounces maniacally from side to side before eventually making its way to the hole in the front, dropping forever out of sight? I am that ball. And nursing is my glass-lidded box. And the hole, I suppose then, is death or retirement. Or as I'd like to think, being finally able to quit nursing to pursue a career in writing.

I don't relish my role as the silver ball and wouldn't outwardly admit it to people who know me, personally, not wanting anyone to recognize it for what it is, "it" being my behavior. But I know it's the truth.

I'm what I refer to as "rapid cycling" right now. There are nurses who stay in the same job for 35 years and then there are those of us who feel the need to move from job to job, "cycling" if you will, in an attempt to avoid inevitable and rapidly-approaching burnout. Fortunately, this particular profession accommodates this method of self-preservation, by virtue of the ever-present nursing shortage, ensuring there will always be another nursing position to which to run. As burnout increases in a nurse not unlike myself, she tends to make the rounds of available nursing positions in ever increasingly rapid succession. Hence the term "rapid cycling". The fact that the term is also used in the categorization of bipolar disorder is not lost on me, I might add.

I applied for a job today. It's kind of a biggie. Probably the biggest I ever had, making the most money and with the most responsibility. But it's management, not field nursing or acute care. It's home health. There are no emergencies in home health. None. If there is an emergency, it gets diverted to the Emergency room at the hospital. Where I will no longer be working. That is, if they hire me.

A job interview is decidedly different when you're applying for a management position, I noticed.

Can you tell us about a time when you had a bad run in with a supervisor and how you resolved it?

There was this one time, in that exact office (I worked there in the past, a long time ago) when I was pretty angry and tossed around a lot of the "F"-word when addressing my supervisor on particularly hot summer day when I was getting a divorce and some major appliances went out and then I had a flat tire on the way back to the office that I wasn't sure wasn't somehow done intentionally by my soon-to-be-ex-husband. When I got to the office I got some bad news about not being able to do some work I'd been counting on for extra money (now to use to buy tires) and I lost my shit. So today I told the interviewer...

I've never really had a bad run in with a supervisor.

And all of this being said, I really would do a hell of a job in that position, I think. I think I could retire from that job. As I said, I worked there before and it was the best job I ever had in my whole career. I quit after 5 1/2 years to go back to the ER because I was dating an emotionally unavailable predator I met on the internet and it took 10 hours driving time to see him in Texas and I thought that would be easier to do if I worked 3 days a week and not 5. In six months, the bloom now off the rose, I tried to come back and by that time, they were downsizing and, eventually, everybody there got fired or quit. The office is a fraction of the size it was then. And the benefits are not nearly as good, as in most places right now. But it's still good money and it's a desk job and, damn me, I think I'm ready.

I don't have to tell you that I came out the hero in every one of those scenarios the interviewer asked me to place myself in and then tell him and the other supervisor about. I can be very creative when when the need arises. And I do have some really good points that are gonna make me a damn good supervisor if they offer me the job but I didn't get the opportunity to tell them about them because I was too busy making up stories to go with the questions they asked me. They were all based in non-fiction but had to be embellished upon in order to make me look competent and effective.

I may not get the offer but I think I've made my mind up that I'm going to make a change. Again. I'll probably wait for an opening in the other home health (the one that's putting my old one out of business). I just have such a need to root for the underdog. Give me a good old bleeding lost cause, any old day. I'll go down with the ship. By then I'm sure I'll be ready for another job change, anyway, and that'll keep me from looking so much like that silver ball.

I really can't wait to fall through that hole in the front.

Shades of Garbo

2010-02-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

Freddy says he's going to the store in a little while. I've been waiting with bated breath since then for the few minutes he's gone.

When I get off my three 12-hour weekend shifts, I got nothing left for the world. I need to be quiet and self-absorbed for at least the next day, or so. I already prostituted myself out by agreeing to do two massages tonight, which I knew was a bad idea when I did it. I knew I'd regret it, wishing instead to just be able to veg out on the bed with my laptop. But okay, just two hours and I get paid for it, they're not gift certificates, so I'll make a little extra money. And not till late in the afternoon. So then my daughter calls this morning and her babysitter is MIA and she needs us to watch the kids tonight. I love my grandsons but those little boys kick my ass. But I said, okay. That's not till 3.

So he finally comes and kisses me good-bye, Freddy does, and leaves. I swear to God, it's not 5 minutes later and even though I know it's impossible, I distinctly hear footsteps in the livingroom headed toward the bedroom where I sit, blogging, on the bed with my laptop.

Who could that be? I ask myself, incredulously. He just left and I didn't hear the door reopen. When in walks my 25-year-old daughter.

"In a week I'm gonna be ghetto rich!" she says.

"What? Where did you come from?"

"I've been here, you psycho. I'm getting $3400 back on my income tax,"

"What?"

"I'm getting....."

"No. How'd you get in here? I didn't hear the door."

"I've been here. I've been in the computer room doing my tax return. I got here about an hour and a half ago."

Jesus H. Christ.

Is it just me? Out of an entire day, I have maybe 20 minutes of time to be alone without anybody asking me questions or turning on a television or walking through the bedroom to take a pee in the toilet directly in front of me when there's a perfectly good one down the hall, out of my earshot, and my adult daughter shows up, seemingly out of the frigging air doing her tax return. Fuck.

And while we're on the subject, does anybody else pretend to be asleep when their spouse is in the room in an attempt to discourage interaction? I mean, just keep their eyes shut, like I do, for just a little longer after they wake up, just until he goes out of the room and shuts the door and then breathe a sigh of relief because they don't have to answer any questions or express any affection?

I just want to be alone, sometimes. I don't wanna talk for a few hours after I get up. Is that too much to ask? And maybe 20 minutes alone while my husband goes to the store? I mean, I love the guy, I'm nuts about him and he's older than me and I know he's gonna die before I do and I'm gonna wish to hell he was here up my ass as usual but right now I just wish I could have about 48 hours alone.

short-timer?

2010-01-17T23:47:00.000-08:00

Who here has ever rushed to the Emergency Room after throwing up one time? If I live to be 100 I will never get this. And I swear on my mother's grave (wherever that ends up being cause she's alive and well, so far) a woman came in today who had pelvic cramps and low back pain. Her period had started. Today. And she came to the ER without even having taken a Motrin. And, not unlike this video I happened across today, she had the same problem in the past. About a month ago.

How can this be happening? And yet, it's every single day I work. Every single one. I keep thinking I missed something, like something happened since I was a kid and people had common sense. And every, single day I have more and more trouble not responding in a manner that would lead to my termination.

Like today. A young couple brought their 6-month-old baby in. He'd apparently fallen off the couch and hit his head on the floor. It was carpeted and the baby wasn't hurt. But judging by the degree of marijuana smoke on the parent's clothing, I wasn't surprised he rolled off. And when I came to the part of the nurse's note asking about 2nd hand smoke, I almost said, "It's obvious the baby is exposed to 2nd hand smoke because you two smell like a flash fire at an Amsterdam cannabis cafe " And would that have been so bad? Really? I mean, what kind of retaliation could I have possibly expected? Are they going to go to the CEO's office on Monday and tell him the nurse was rude by commenting on the pot smell on their clothing?

I'm thinking a lot about taking an ER position in a large teaching hospital ER 130 miles from here. In a big town. You know, where everybody isn't related to everybody else and not so many people wear camoflauge. I put in an online application tonight. It's funny because when I updated my application I discovered I'd applied at that facility at exactly the same time of year in 2008.

My boss got fired, that time. I was heartbroken. And really, really mad. But in the end I didn't feel good about bailing out because I was angry. Not a good ending. So I stayed. Another 9 months.

The trouble is, I no longer want to be a nurse most of the time.

And all of that being said, there I've gone again and focused on precisely what I don't want to attract in my life, thereby ensuring I'll get more of the very same. I so suck at the Law of Attraction for which I hold such high hope.

Tomorrow we go away. Back to the cabin in the state park. And first, to a larger town to go shopping for groceries at a particularly gourmet grocery store in that vicinity that one of the ER docs told me about. We'll check into the cabin and unpack and then we'll go on north to the big city and the gourmet food and then, afterward, we'll come back and start a fire and spend the next 4 days reading and hiking and sleeping and soaking in the tub and doing some art, I hope.

Oh, and the jigsaw puzzle.

play day

2010-01-16T20:38:00.000-08:00

I almost bought a new camera, today. I mean very nearly, as in ordered one and applied for the interest-free credit and got approved and clicked on SUBMIT ORDER. And then I chickened out and canceled it. I hope. Instead of charging $1300 on a new credit card, I downloaded the owner's manual for the camera I got for my birthday 2 1/2 years ago and printed it out. Then I went home and played.

This is Calpurnia.
Although the next two photos are very poor quality, I like them because it makes Maggi appear ghostly.

Sometimes I really love my life.

Lain Kali Tengok Nila

2010-01-14T08:08:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm randomly going through blogs again this morning to check out what's out there like I said in the previous post and I find this fucking thing. This is some funny shit. What is it about people who speak foreign languages cursing in English that is so damn funny? Started my day off just right. Protein shake, Tylenol, St John's Wort, Claritin, little Asian girl posting some really awkward swear words. Makes life worth living. Next is coffee. Then a real, live hair appointment and it's on to Hot Springs (me and Bobbi). Just hope we don't run across any barbaric fucktards out there (waves of laughter resuming). "But hey, the honk was a looooooooongg one"! Oh my God, I'm never gonna get out of my seat.

Herpatology and the Domestic Arts

2010-01-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

Another day pissed away in hedonistic pursuits. Slept till 9:30, which I know isn't late for me but you don't. Got a massage. Ate 4 cupcakes. You know, the usual. Oh, and surfed the net looking for websites I like and might someday wish to emulate.

I've been thinking a lot lately about an alternate career. Something involving more sitting on my couch and not so much of this healing the infirm. At this point, it's strickly a fantasy but it will eventually become a necessity.

I fantasize about a bed and breakfast. I really love entertaining. The whole thing; cooking, dressing up, decorating. I love it. That's why I usually need to be institutionalized right after Christmas. I overdo it. Too many late nights baking cookies. While we're on the subject, there is little I enjoy more than being up in the kitchen really late at night, everybody else in bed, in preparation for a holiday dinner. I am in heaven those nights. I put Martha Stewart on tv (if she's not on satelite, I plug in my old, homemade VHS tapes from the old Martha Stewart Living show) or just some old movie on TCM, and I cook. With the dinner not until the next day, or maybe the day after that, there's no pressure. Nobody is going to ring the doorbell in a minute wanting to be fed. I still have a good night's (or half a night's) sleep before all of that.

But back to the B&B fantasy, there is no real attraction at my house with which to lure the public. Nor is our small town much of an attraction, particularly since the tornado turned the woods across the street, as well as a good part of the whole town, into what looks a lot like Hiroshima. We do have a little-used cabin on 20 acres with which we could do something along those lines. Not a B&B exactly 'cause, don't you have to live there? But some kind of retreat place and I could cook and bring it out there and do massage and spa treatments on the premises. Something like that. And it's pretty
out there and, so far, no tornado damage.

There's probably a way to make money out there renting it out on weekends (while I work) if nothing else. It's a cool place, built of strawbales. That's an attention grabber. But then, there is that huge, black snake who sheds his/her skin in the loft. Any snake extermination suggestions? Then again, I did see an article in National Geographic about a high end spa in the west that offered snake massages. Hmmmm.....(tapping chin with forefinger)...

Is This Heaven or Just Alabama?

2010-01-12T00:09:00.000-08:00

I'm doing what I've sworn off and here it is after 2am, again. The thing is, it's the only uninterrupted time of the day. The only time nobody is calling or stopping by or when I'm suppose to be doing something else, aside from sleeping. So it's natural that I gravitate toward middle of the night hours. I always have.

I watched To Kill a Mockingbird again tonight. I will never tire of it. What an incredible film. And book. My absolute favorite. I've watched it so many times, over so many years that I've become confused about my relationship with Gregory Peck. Is he a family member of mine or simply somebody I've seen on tv? Like Andy Griffith and Aunt Bea, his voice sounds as familiar as my own Father's. And as comforting.

In fact, there is something about old movies in general that I adore. Despite the ability to differentiate fact from fiction, I feel as though I'm glimpsing another time, when watching them. Only really seeing into the past and not a movie set, either, but back to a real moment in time, long since lost. As if the children's bedroom in the Finch house, where Jem lie on the bed following his Bob Ewell debacle, were the one in my Grandmother's house on 27th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska when I was a little girl. But it feels that way. It was just off her livingroom. And it's the same with the porch, the big, old trees on the street, the wallpaper behind the panel door where Boo Radley hid in that bedroom. And my hair was cut exactly like Jean Marie Finch (Scout) who I've always had mixed up with my niece, Angie. They are one and the same, Angie and Scout and me, I guess, by virtue of my haircut the first 10 years of my life.

If there is a heaven and if by some mix up I get to attend, I will have a seat in that porch swing beside Boo on the front porch of the Finch house on that October night, Bob Ewell lying in the woods across town, a butter knife stuck up under his ribs. Or even Grandma Fricke's house, Lawrence Welk playing in the livingroom and me trying on plastic wigs. I'll take either one.

Janus: God of the Doorway (and possibly closets)

2010-01-07T19:34:00.000-08:00

January is the most curious of months. I want to sleep and soak in the tub and sip broth from rustic, hand-thrown pottery bowls. And is it just me or does everybody open their refrigerator and, although it looks like this, not be able to find anything to eat?
All that damn food and nothing to eat (except for Cinnamon Roll-flavored Yoplait Light that I just retrieved and am eating after spotting it in the above photo).

Freddy likes to leave the Christmas decorations up through January 6th, the second Christmas. Before he came along, decorations were cleaned up, the floor vacuumed and everything put away by 10am on Christmas morning. But I respect his wishes and now I leave them up. The only time it bothers me is when I'm in the living room and then the urge to take things down is almost more than I can stand. The Monday after Christmas I just took a couple Christmas pot holders and a Christmas hand towel into the laundry room and threw them in with another load of clothes. That's all. When we do take the decorations down, which I wasn't doing until the 6th, there's always something that needs to be washed and air dried and that takes time so I thought I'd get that little bit of it out of the way. On Tuesday, the same thing, only this time it was a few of the Santas I had in the cabinet in the livingroom. I just put a few of the Santas in the spare room. And then I put them into a bin. Wednesday, the placemats and a couple of candles. New Year's Eve I went ahead and took the garland off the fence and porch railing, just in the back of the house and only after dark. Well, and in the front, too, eventually. But that was all.

Monday, January 4th, I took three ornaments off the tree. Just three. A glittery reindeer and two red balls. That's all. Tuesday the 5th, I gathered every candy cane off the tree and put them in a bowl. But something about removing those candy canes opened a door that I could no longer close and in the course of an hour, every ornament, every icicle, every string of red beads was off that tree and in the bins with the lids clicked into place and stacked in the metal shed in the yard. But I didn't take the tree down and I didn't remove the lights. I made it through the 6th! I kept my resolve to respect my husband's wishes! I mean, right? Didn't I? (Why do I feel like the Grinch?)

I should say here that my life occurrs in increments of 4 days, Monday through Thursday, as I work 12-hour shifts Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the hospital and have no energy to do anything but take baths and put on makeup and pack my lunch those days. So the 6th was yesterday, Wednesday, making today Thursday, the last day of my life this week. And I went out of town yesterday (another blog) so I didn't take down the tree. The danger with that is that I have an internal switch. A toggle with two settings: On and Off. That's it. Nothing else. No other options. On or Off. So, by taking the day off from un-decorating yesterday, I inadvertantly flipped my switch to the Off position. And the tree still stands. Just the tree and the lights.
Only God knows how long it will stand there. Last year it was February.

And then there's the organizing obsession. I'm not that kind of person any other time but in January, something about putting away Christmas decorations makes me suddenly want to organize the years and years worth of clutter in my house. This year, we had a guy build shelves in the closet. I had Freddy buy lumber in June for me to build those shelves and finally this week we had Chad, a nice guy who helps us (a non-procrastinator), built those shelves. This is what the closet looks like, now.
And...are you ready?.....the floor looks like this!
You'd really have to have seen it before. The closet floor has never looked like this (except briefly, immediately after the tornado when it was covered with about 2 inches of water and there were no walls or ceiling and once when the room was first added to the house). My children will think I photoshopped these images but I swear they're authentic. My closet is organized. Every Mother Earth News, every Martha Stewart Living, every National Geographic, every Country Living magazine is stacked in order of months (okay, just the Country Livings are in monthly order, but still!). The shoes are lined up on a shelf. And the shelves are all painted. Believe me, I'm as shocked as anyone.

And the weirdness continues. Earlier this week, I went to Walmart and bought two bookshelves. Those bookshelves were very nearly my undoing, as it turned out. The first casualty was when I loaded them into the cart. Note to self: Always put the lightbulbs into the cart after loading the heavy items. But besides the broken glass (and they were those $8.39 halogen bulbs, too, damnit), I may have bulged a disc lifting the boxes into the cart. When did those things get so heavy? I gotta start doing Pilates, or something. Then I brought them into the house by myself (a nice young man loaded them into the back of my vehicle for me at the store but he wouldn't come home with me). But the kicker was when I was sitting on the floor with the contents of the boxes scattered all around me on the floor and some of the long boards standing up, leaning on the foot stool. As I looked at something to my right, the tallest of the boards to my left fell over, striking me in the left side of my face, right above my eye. I'm pretty tough, though, so once I quit crying I finished putting the shelves together and now we have these (note the empty shelves on the bottom right).

Every single book we own has a home. No more sideways stuffed books and double stacked books that have to be moved to gain access to those in the back. One book at a time so all the titles are clearly visible at all times. They're not organized by subject, yet, but that's another week.

Tomorrow it's back to the ER. My work here is done.

Tale of Two Cities

2009-10-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm reclining on the queen-size bed in the back of this RV in Long Island. It use to be our's, the RV, and now it belongs to Freddy's son and his wife and sits in their yard in East Northport, New York (the above picture is from a previous trip...a gas station in the Pocanos). They took over the payments. We asked to stay in it during this trip...the youngest son, Brooke's wedding is this weekend...and they said we could. So we arrived here, yesterday. Went to their restaurant and had lobster.

I'm not gonna do that, again. It was my first actual whole lobster experience and not one bit like what I got in a platter of lobster (something and pasta) at Di Nico's in Little Italy last trip.

Those were just unidentifiable peices, some even shelled and mixed with scallops and shrimp and things in cream sauce over angel hair. Only the claws were whole but that doesn't seem like an animal, somehow, nor do tails that aren't connected to bodies with eyes. This last night was different.

There's not a live lobster back there that they're going to have to kill for this, is there?

No. No

I'm sure he was lying.

When it came out, I had no idea how to eat it. Freddy turned it over and handed me a little fork and nutcracker and nods at me as if to say, There, go ahead, assuming I had the slightest idea how to proceed.

I sat looking down at the spiny underside, little curled-up legs undoubtedly drawn in an attempt to protect the crustacean's beneath parts from the onslaught of boiling water and probably just a few minutes ago, too. I looked away and began applying large quantities of butter and sour cream to my baked potato, a more familiar fare not associated with a violent death. Freddy, whose job it is to make my life perfect, plucked the red shelled monster from my plate and went to work on it.

I did eat it and it was good, I suppose. But I won't do it again. I'll have crab cakes or carbonara next time. And I don't want to think about an entire lobster's life sacrificed for a scant few mouths full of meat, again. Shame on me. Damn my very soul to firey hell.

I got my hair fixed before I left Arkansas. I never do that. Resistent to change, I. And I never spend money on my hair which would set you into a fit of hysteria to hear me say if you knew what my hair usually looks like.

The very thought that I'd have to tell you I don't spend money on my hair. Except once a year, or so, when I get a perm. And then it's a spiral, despite concerned glances from my hairdresser. Just do it and I'll pay you, so she does, but it's not in my best interest. She knows it and I sense it.

So I made an appointment and she cut it and colored and highlighted it and then showed me how to blow dry it straight. It was flattering.

I looked like Jessica Rabbit and I received lots of complements on it...until it had to be washed again. I simply can't reproduce it. I try but I just can't.

It's okay though because Saturday before the wedding, we're all going to a salon and get our hair done. "We", being my husband's ex-wife, his two daughter's-in-law and their two daughters, my granddaughters I should get used to saying.

And tomorrow is nails. I've never done that, either. I've gone to the beauty college for pedicures a couple of times but never an out and out manicure at a regular salon and certainly never, ever in New York. Apparently, I don't have to remove the nail polish before we go. They'll take it off at the salon, according to one of the Carols (approximately 48% of our female friends and relatives are named Carol, for some reason, including Freddy's ex-wife). So I'm going to walk into the hotsy-totsy New York salon with my cheap ass Walmart nail polish, what's left of it, clinging to my raggedy nails and I'm going to have them...well...whatever they do to them, filed I suppose and painted, right?

I miss this RV, especially right now still on the bed in the back, listening to the rain hit the metal roof and drinking coffee from a 7-Eleven cup. The payments are $500 a month. Add to that, insurance and taxes and we're looking at around $700 a month BEFORE you buy gas and take off work to go anywhere. That's why it's up in New York in the yard of our son who owns a thriving seafood restaurant instead of in our RV barn being eaten up by the pack rat who destroyed the vacuum lines and something else three times for about $300 per incident. Not practical but I've never been accused of being practical. What I have been accused of is spending more money than I make so the RV stays here unless I get a lucky LOTTO ticket which I'm thinking might be worth doing. Buying a ticket, I mean. Who knows? I could win and if I do, we're going to pay off the RV and buy a trailer for my Mercury and drive this big bitch on back to Arkansas. Word.

Reflections on Intercourse

2009-10-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

We spent the night in Lancaster County Pennsylvania night before last. First we ate at an old farmhouse, turned restaurant (and obligatory gift shop, of course) where they seated several couples or families at large, farm tables together. This was clearly my husband's idea. I lack the people-person gene but I went along. Probably a result of all that submissive female Amish air up there.

The food came out in courses and was served family-style in bowls which were passed around amongst the diners. As it turns out, eating with strangers can be added to the list of things my husband knows best about and it was a delightful experience. With lots of food (there are no delightful experiences that don't include lots of food, you know). Meatloaf, fried chicken, ham, mashed potatoes touted as "real", green beans that looked like they just came in from a farm next door, gravy, stuffing (made with white bread and not so great as it turns out), corn with brown butter (?), coleslaw, cottage cheese, chow chow, homemade bread cut in thick slices served with butter and apple butter. There was more but I can't remember it all. And the whole orgy culminated with 5 desserts: Shoo Fly Pie, red jello cut in large cubes which were made by substituting applesauce for water in the recipe, coconut cream pudding, homemade chocolate or vanilla ice cream and orange sherbert. Is there suppose to be an "r" in that word? I mean, I always pronounce it "sherbert" but should I? I'm thinking probably not. But we ate it like hungry, little pigs and then set out into the night for this motel.

We stayed here once before when we passed through Intercourse, Pennsylvania and had what I remember to be a restful and rejuvenating stay which included pumpernickle dinner rolls at a nearby German restaurant.

In the morning, we headed out and saw this...

and this...

and this punkin' field...

and this farm complete with horse dookie in the lane...

It's always refreshing to visit that area. A part of me, and that of a throng of embroidered sweatshirt-wearing old women, rejoices in the knowledge that people actually live like the Amish. No electricity, growing their own food, helping each other in activities of daily living, dressing plain...it's reassuring, somehow. And we think we'd like to do it, but I'm a little too stressed right now to make any life changes because my laptop screen is cracked and I need to wait till it comes back from Dell. But maybe after that.

Visiting Virginia

2009-10-13T18:15:00.000-07:00

I've done something for most of my adult life. Whenever I visit somewhere cool, I start planning to move there. And every time I come through Virginia or West Virginia, the area where my father was born, I start making plans. Today I even convinced my husband...almost.

We stopped off at Staunton, Virginia for breakfast on our way to New York for my step-son's wedding. My Dad was born about 40 miles from Staunton in the tiny hamlet of Blue Grass. Every summer of my childhood, we visited this area for a two-week vacation. His family still lives here, though those I knew are mostly all dead.

So, it was innocent enough. I just said, "Let's stop in Staunton real quick for breakfast" and he took the exit. Soon enough he found the Beverly Restaurant in the historic downtown district and we went in and had a nice breakfast. We'd been there before on a previous trip.

The cook was a black man, quite funny, who sang and the waitress began dancing which sent the cook into a fit of laughter that he had to go outside to stop. We watched him through the tall front windows.

I started noticing some very interesting, characters: People walking down the street who were just obviously open-minded, you know? You can tell. A tall guy with a faded, blue do-rag on his head. Two 30-ish business men who smiled at me through the window as they passed because I happened to be smiling at something Freddy had just said. A mother with three kids dressed in a style I admire (I even took their picture).

You have to understand something, first. I'm stifled. I live in a small-minded little town in Arkansas where everybody loves guns and drives 4-wheelers and hates Obama. And, though I dearly love some of them, and I mean really and truly love them as much as I love my family, I feel like I'm drowning in...conservatism (is that a word? Somehow it looks really weird, right now.)

So we leave the restaurant and walk down the street and we see art galleries and a vintage clothing store and Fair Trade Coffee shops and places like this...

...and this:

And I stop in a health food store to look for one of those free papers that list the local happenings and which give you a feel for the grassroots of a place and I start talking to the owner, a friendly, red-headed guy with a baby on his shoulder. And then a trio of young people follow me out to the street to tell me where the Shakespeare Center is and other attractions. One girl, rather butchy, had a myriad of tattoos and one huge, quite exquisite one of Jesus on the left side of her neck. You don't see people like that where I live. And you don't see any black people, or not many. And I'm getting older and I'm tired and I've been through a tornado now and I just want to get on with my life. I did this and I'm ready to do some new stuff. Only, that's probably not gonna happen because my husband only stayed convinced to move to Staunton for about 45 minutes, and then he began to crawdad on me.

He did say he could live in Eureka Springs, though........

Tomato Preserves or What To Do on a Cloudy Day in September

2009-09-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

I grew up in the midwest, Nebraska. I didn't realize until later, having moved to the south, that the whole world didn't know about tomato preserves. Most people I know, now, never heard of them. Back in Nebraska, we learned how to make them in home ec just in case our mothers didn't teach us how to make them, which mine probably didn't but I saw the process numerous times in the kitchen of our farmhouse. My parents and my grandmother, who lived with us, raised a large garden and what they didn't raise, my father brought home in bushel baskets from outside the home because, as my mother said, he believed "a busy wife is a happy wife". It wasn't until years later, living in Arkansas, that I remembered tomato preserves even existed and realized that I had no idea how to reproduce them, having forgotten my home ec lesson and the home demonstrations. So I called my Mom and asked her for the recipe. This is how that went:

"How do you make tomato preserves?"
"Oh...well...cut up a bunch of tomatoes and add a bunch of sugar and cook it for a long time"
"How much sugar and how many tomatoes?"
"A whole bunch."
"A whole bunch of what?"
"A whole bunch of both."
"How much is that?"
"Oh, quite a bit."
"Is that all you do?"
"Yeah"
"Aren't there lemon slices in it?"
"Oh yeah. And some lemon."
"How much?"
"Oh, just some. However much you want."
"And then what do I do?"
"You cook it for a long time."
"How long?"
"Til it's gooey."
"Til it's gooey?"
"Yeah."
"How long does that take?"
"Hours."
"Is that all there is to it? Just mix up a bunch of tomatoes and sugar and some lemon slices and cook it?"
"Yeah."

So, I finally got up my nerve and tried it last year. And then again today. Here's how you do it:

Dig some of these out of your garage or out from under the bed in your spare room and wash them.

And find some of these. Note the word "find" not "grow". I haven't grown a decent tomato in 5 years. Go to the Farmer's Market or buy them from the guy who parks on the corner across from James' Food Mart. Do whatever you have to do but get some, and as many as you can get your hands on.

Buy some of these:

And do this to them, take out the seeds and put the seeds into the compost:

Blanche the tomatoes and then put them in ice water to loosen the skins.

Remove the skins and core them and cut them up like this:

Put them together with the lemon slices and start looking for a heavy pot...

Put them all in a pot and add a bunch of this:

Cook it all together...

...til it looks like this:

This is gonna take hours on low heat and in the meantime you're probably gonna want to go play with this guy, or somebody like him. He's trying out his Halloween costume, here:

Later on, after the lion goes home, you'll wanna do this with the preserves and clean up the mess in the kitchen and go somewhere and sit down and watch Wife Swap or Split Ends or post something on Facebook.

In the morning, you can turn the jars right side up and they should be sealed. Use the one that's only half full first. It's the one you didn't have enough to fill all the way up. It never works out that you fill them all up. You're gonna wanna try some on homemade bread, toasted, and buttered with real, salted butter. Forget about your cholesterol. This isn't the time. Maybe you're gonna want to add some peanut butter.

And one more thing; don't share these with anybody else or you'll be hassled for the rest of your life by people wanting more. Keep them all for yourself. Don't even share them with your mother.

She's too old to want to mess with making them herself and she's gonna put a guilt trip on you to share them if she knows you've got them. Take my advise, put them on the back shelf and keep your mouth shut. Remember, she didn't give you one ounce of help in terms of a recipe so don't weaken. The only exception to this rule is if she gave you some of her homegrown tomatoes. If so, maybe you can work out a deal.

Of Roaches and Bad Acting

2009-09-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Just before I got off work tonight the triage bell went off. That's a doorbell the admission clerks ring that sounds in the main ER alerting us to a patient in the waiting area. I've heard that same bell in other places out in public and it elicits in me a Pavlovian sense of impending doom.

It is September 11th, 2009, a Friday night and it was 11:45pm, exactly fifteen minutes before my shift ended. This late in one's shift it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the sound of the triage bell, electing instead to stare blankly at the computer screen at a game of Spider Solitaire, letting the other nurses do the work. You're as good as gone, anyway, and nobody really cares. But, because I'm trying really hard to get my full 12 hours in every day I work spurred on by having balanced my checkbook yesterday, I elected to stay long enough to triage the, for me, last patient of the night. I'm kinda glad I didn't miss this one.

I called the patient's name after opening the triage door, prompting a trio of neurologically challenged backwoodsians to stand and begin their painfully slow approach to the triage area among them, an older woman, and a man and younger woman who looked exactly alike. They were like one of those child's games where you take a face and add different hairstyles and glasses, hats, etc to change its appearance but the face never changes. The man carried a metal box which I correctly assumed held the patient's medications. With his other arm, he guided the patient, the younger woman, toward the triage area as if she would collapse and her hand on his arm would somehow prevent that.

ER patients think that their level of perceived acuity is directly related to how slow they walk and talk. It's not unusual to have a patient speak in broken sentances which they mistakenly believe convinces medical personnel of the validity of their ailments. These poor actors, when questioned about their conditions, respond with a breathy, "...can't eat....I'm.....weak...." reminding me of the cartoon series I use to watch on tv when I was a kid. Space Ghost, when stripped of the garments from which he gleaned his superhuman powers would gasp, "....can't.....reach....my....power.....bands....."

The three eventually made it into the triage room and the patient and her mother were seated in the only two seats and I began a brief triage assessment. When I first speak to a patient who presents as this woman did tonight, it's not uncommon for the patient to look at one of the family members, cueing them to begin answering questions for them further illustrating the degree of debilitation they've experienced as a result of their devastating illness. I've even had women tell me a number when I ask their husbands to rate their pain on a scale of 0 to 10. Tonight I dared that family to start answering questions for this woman and, as if they sensed it, they didn't. When I asked her, the patient told me she'd been sick for two weeks.

ER nurses pose seemingly innocent questions to patients which are designed to teach them lessons. My next was one of those questions.

"What happened tonight to bring you to the emergency room?" translates to: "Are you out of your fucking mind? This is an EMERGENCY room. It's called that because you're only suppose to be here if you have an EMERGENCY. Being sick for two weeks does not fall into that catagory. What in the name of all things holy was going through your mind to get your family out at nearly midnight and crawl to town in the middle of the night? What about this date made you decide that today was the day you were finally going to seek medical treatment for something you've been experiencing for two weeks? Is it something about the twin towers? What?"

Turns out, they'd taken the girl to several different clinics and ERs over the two week course of her illness and "nobody would help her". That was my cue to say something like, "Gee, I wonder why everybody is so mean? It's clear to see you've been terribly mistreated. Here honey, you come in our ER. We can see you're sick. You're sick as hell and we're gonna rush you in here and pamper you for as long as you want us to. And if somebody comes in having a heart attack, well, fuck 'em. They can wait while we fluff your pillow." That's what they expect us to say. Really.

I continued my assessment and then did vital signs and documented them and then I looked in the med box. As I was taking one bottle of medication at a time out of the box and writing it on the medication sheet in the chart, I looked down and saw it. A shiny, brown roach crawling amongst the clutter in the bottom of the box. It was about the same time that I decided I had compiled a sufficient list of medications and shut the lid, handing the box back to the male family member, whatever he was; Dad, husband or both.

I then left the room and while the doctor was looking over the chart, I formed a plan. I would tell the man to take the medications out and put them in the car, thereby preventing the escape of the roach into the general population of the ER. When I went back in, I handed the chart to the woman and turned to the man who was, once more, holding the box in one hand and had begun to guide the woman back out into the waiting area with the other.

"If I were you," I said, looking as somber as I could in an attempt to convey some hidden threat of theives, etc, "I'd take those medications out and lock them up in the car."

He remained silent for a second and then said as he turned out the door toward the admissions desk, "I'll just hold onto them. They won't get them away from me."

I clocked out and left before they checked in and came back to a treatment room.

Life is Sweet

2009-09-09T22:50:00.000-07:00

Why do I feel so lazy? How is it possible to feel worked to death one minute and like a lazy piece of shit, the next? I did pretty much nothing, today. I didn't call people back who left messages to book massages. I just ignored the whole thing. I don't want to deal with them. Or it ("it" being the business"). This is typical for me, being completely done with a thing once I decide to ease out of it. Just completely lose interest.

I was suppose to go to the doctor in Little Rock today but I canceled my appointment. I just couldn't imagine leaving my house. I'm very tempted to do the same with my annual checkup tomorrow with my local physician but they called to confirm today and I said I'd be there. I probably need to be going to somebody I don't know for this. Pap smear. I need to not go to a doctor I work with in the hospital but I'm too fucking lazy to find somebody out of town. So I'll go tomorrow and then look at the floor whenever I meet him in the hallway at work.

I wish I could just allow myself to be lazy when I feel lazy. It's not enough I'll have done five 12-hour shifts in the ER this week? Today and tomorrow off (is it really a day off if you do an hour massage in the afternoon?) and that's it. Every other day I'll work 12 hours. So the one day I sit on my ass I feel guilty. Haven't I been through enough therapy to be over that by now? Feeling guilty, I mean? That's part of the big fascination with going back to a full-time position. Being "on" for three days a week and "off" the other 4. That's why I'm getting out of massage, for the most part. So I don't have to feel so fucking guilty every single day for not being willing to drop whatever I'm doing to go rub somebody else's body.

I've been thinking a lot about death, lately. I suppose I'm working through some developmental task that 50-year-old women go through facing their own mortality. I have the sensation of people around me dropping like flies. And I think having lived through a tornado ripping your town a new ass probably has a part in it. The realization that life is fragile and bad things really do happen. And along with all of that, a very clear sense that the label "bad things" may not be so accurate as we think. Maybe the tornado wasn't really bad. Maybe it brought us what we needed on some level. All of us. And maybe death isn't so bad, is what I'm thinking. I don't necessarily want to do it right now but if I do, I figure it won't be so bad. For me, anyway. My kids and family would be devastated and I would regret that, if I was even aware of it from my position in paradise. I suppose the more real life you encounter, the more "paradise" has the potential to offer you. It is attractive.

And my life is good. Even I think so. I'm enjoying it, though I suppose I'm really tired. But I've pretty much got the bull by the proverbial dick at this point in my life. Nothing fancy but lots of nice little luxuries and beauty and companionship. Lot's of great people in my life, right now, as it's pretty much always been for me. I've been lucky but that doesn't mean being dead doesn't have it's allure. My daughter recently expressed her feelings on the subject. I suspect her's may be from that deeper sense of disillusionment that naturally follows in one's 30's. That, coupled with some pretty shitty losses she's had to endure. Stuff nobody should have to go through. Doesn't take too many of those to make you maybe a little more willing to cross over than is healthy for you. I haven't commented on it because I suspect I'll sound like my mother did to me once, about 10 years ago.

I was in the absolute throes of depression. Situational as hell, though I didn't realize it at the time. I thought it was entirely chemical imbalance. I needed therapy, which I got and it's better now. But I was fucking miserable back then as I was a lot of my adult life. It was Easter time and my Mom and brother came to visit. I remember being so depressed, I couldn't wait for a respectable length of time after eating lunch to ask if they minded me taking a nap. The truth was, I simply couldn't wait another second to curl up in the fetal position and sob. I could pull that off alone, in the bedroom, my sobs muffled by my pillow.

My brother had brought his Harley down on a trailer and we rode. My brother offered me a helmet but I grinned and declined. Later, driving up on the mountain in his Suburban, my mother and kids in the back seat, I confided in him that I didn't take the helmet because I'd thought to myself, "I wouldn't kill myself, I'm not going to do that but if I have a wreck and have a chance to have my brain scattered over the pavement and be out of this hell I'm in, I'm not gonna do anything to prevent that." As soon as I said it I mentally chastised myself for sharing such a macabre thought in front of my poor mother who would, of course, be devastated to even imagine me thinking such a thing. We got out of the car at our destination about the same time and my Mom came up to me, smiling.

"I know just how you feel," she said, grinning as if we shared a delicious secret. I was sort of surprised but the older I get, the more I understand.

The Next Chapter

2009-09-08T21:40:00.000-07:00

I'm loving my job, these days. As soon as I started back in the ER I decided to let (most of) my massage business go the way of the wind.

I'm tired. Of a lot of things. I'm tired of the sense of impending financial doom I've felt for some time. I'm tired of feeling pressured to be...personable, likable, unobjectionable...in an attempt to stay in a favorable position with the public who I hoped would, in turn, provide me a proper living by booking massages on a regular basis. I'm tired of the crackhead neighbors who live in the "units" surrounding my office space on main street. I'm tired of the fucking twisted metal roofing still hung in the tree in front of my office despite numerous pleading calls to the overworked and underpaid landlord to remove it. I heart you, Orvin, but I'm tired.

I'm tired of feeling like I'm not doing enough. Always letting people down. Letting the people at the hospital down by not working many hours. Letting my massage clients down by not being available to them 7 days a week. For going to Nebraska and Little Rock and Hot Springs on a regular basis and not being in the office when they want to book a massage. Letting my husband down by sticking him with the brunt of financial responsibility for our family. Letting my grandchildren down by not having energy for them after nursing and doing massage. Letting myself down by not having time to write or read or vacuum the dead flies off the windowsill. I'm tired.

So I let go.

I have people calling now for massages and I have to turn them down, or worse. I turn them over to another therapist. And that's really hard. There's another therapist working in my space with me. Or instead of me. She shares the rent. And that's really hard. Not a team player, I. Not a partner.

My new "studio" is going up next to my house. I look for completion by November. And I may fold up shop October 1st, leaving a message on my office phone that I'll reopen on a much smaller scale in a new location later in the year and to leave a number if you have a gift certificate. Hell, I'll pay Trisha to do them, if I have to, but I'll honor them.

And I'll let go.

And while it's hard, it's not really sad. For once, a "letting go" that's not sad to me. Instead, it's a new chapter. It's the "other stuff" I've wanted to do.

As soon as I decided to let go of the business, the morning I called and asked Trisha to share my office space, the very next second, I decided to write a book about the tornado. It's a format I've wanted to use for years and as soon as I made space in my life, I knew it was the perfect time to do it. I immediately began making appointments for interviews which I plan to transcribe essentially verbatum into a volume I intend to self-publish and sell, locally, in time for the first anniversary of the tornado. I began interviews a couple weeks ago and after this week I'll go at it full throttle, having my five 12-hour shifts out of the way.

There's a lot to the concept of "intention" and attraction but there's also a lot to be said for letting go and allowing the right way to unfold, naturally and as it wishes in its own time.

I'm turning over my work in the clinic to Trisha, for the most part and I go now to begin the next chapter.

Visions and The Law of Attraction

2009-07-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm just putting this out there. Not sure what to make of it, myself, but it's something to think about.

In my last post, I alluded to having read the Law of Attraction and using the tool of visualization for some time, now. And I've grown to believe in this. I've seen stuff materialize too many times not to.

For instance. I have always wanted a two-story house. Over the years, I've contemplated moving into a huge, two-story house like the ones so plentiful back home in Nebraska. Not so much here in Arkansas. Those mammoth, white monstrosities are few and far between here and almost never found in the country, which is where I'd want to move if I moved again. Unless it were to Eureka Springs and then I'd live on the Historic Loop, but I digress.

We've had so much work done to our current home, getting it just exactly like we wanted it (sans a 2nd story) I now realize we'll never move from here while my husband is alive. His heels are permanently dug into the rocky soil of our 3 1/2 acres here in our rural, southern town and there's nothing to be done about it. So for a while I've been fantasizing about having a second story added to our house. And it's possible to do but would require, in the case of this particular house, a new foundation. Foundations sound like big money, especially on houses that are already standing. And even that's not the end of the world or necessarily of the vision, but it suddenly occurred to me that in the event of storms, my house's integrity may be compromised by the addition of a 2nd story. As it was explained to me by the contractor who added on our back bedroom and built the new roof over the new and part of the existing house in 1996, the lumber that is produced (grown) nowdays is inferior to the lumber in the past, another contribution by corporate America. The trees now grown for lumber are faster growing pines as opposed to those, slower growing varieties from years gone by, such as the lumber from which the original part of my house was built. That coupled with the ever-growing intensity and frequency of storms in the past 10 years made me second-guess my desire for another floor added to our house.

So I'd been leaning toward the idea of tearing down the building that existed next to our house, the only original old outbuilding left on our property, and building in it's place a nice 22ftx24ft massage studio/art studio/ guest house/ exercise room/ writer's studio (and added to that now a summer kitchen). I toyed with both ideas and visualized them both at different times in my imagery exercises. The only problem with having either one of those options was, as usual, finding the money to build them with, the building being the lesser expense and probably the safest of the two.

In addition, I visualized myself spending my days working outside, doing physical labor and getting suntanned as well as building muscle and cardiovascular strength. I longed to cook and work around my place all day long, daylight to dusk as it had been when I first moved to Arkansas in 1979 and built a house along with my first husband and then, baby, Amanda.

Okay, back to now or a just little before now. In April of this year, a tornado hit our house, along with 600 others in our community. The back half of our house was blown away. The roof and a couple of walls, that is. My massage clinic, itself, was not harmed but the surrounding area looked like a bomb had been dropped. And the main breaker out at the meter kept tripping. Something was wrong. And I lacked the emotional energy to deal with it. So I stayed home and cooked meals for the volunteers and other workers involved with the cleaning up and rebuilding of our house and surrounding area. Days and days were spent packing up our belongings and moving them to storage. I worked outside searching for and retrieving our belongings in peices and sometimes intact from brush piles and from the woods across the street. I rummaged through piles of lumber in an attempt to salvage usable peices for small building projects.

And my beloved old shed had to be torn down, what remained of it. Monetarily, it was no great loss. Before the tornado, the building had slipped slowly off it's so-called foundation consisting of a pile of rocks which had, miraculously worked for many years. It began to lean and I knew it would require extensive work to save it, at the same time, laboring over the idea of allowing it to be torn down to make way for the new building to house my business and other pursuits. But I couldn't make the decision, not then any better than during the years the remodling was going on and the contractor wanted so badly to tear it down that his mouth watered. Still it stood until April 9th, 2009. And even then, it only moved a half a foot from where it'd stood only this time it sported a huge, gaping abyss where it's side had once been. This time it had to go and we all knew it.

The day they tore down my shed was one of the saddest days for me surrounding the tornado. My smashed McCoy Pot Belly Stove Cookie jar didn't faze me. Likewise, picking up peices of my jewlery out of the dirt and mud in what used to be our yard. But I grieved the passing of that old shed, and still do. And it was that grief that insisted on keeping the back, lean-to portion of the shed to be moved to the back pasture and used as a future goat shed (though we own no goats at present).

The first few weeks after the tornado I spent in filth, freezing, wet from rain one minute and sweat the next, cut hands and feet and arms, constantly burned from cooking in an unfamiliar environment with a hodgepodge of cooking implements. We were heating our house with only the fireplace for at first we had no electricity and even when the meter was restored, we had no venting for the furnace so it had to be left off. Both our vehicles had the glass blown out of them and my husband's, having had full-coverage insurance, was in the shop to be repaired....for 9 weeks (long story). Mine, on the other hand, resembled something I'd seen on Mad Max, an apocalyptic improvisation providing a semblance of mobility in unconventional circumstances. The back hatch glass of my Explorer, long broken, now sported just the coils of wire once connected to the defroster. They blew, bouncing in the breeze as I drove down the littered streets which, when catching my eye in my rearview mirror (yes, that survived), stuck me as extremely amusing for some reason. I must have been some sight as I sped around the countryside, dirty hair blowing through jagged-edged open holes where windows once lived, laughing hysterically at those wires.

It was during this time, sitting around the livingroom one afternoon talking with my husband and my friend Bobbi that I realized I was doing exactly what I'd envisioned. Did I cause this? Was this a type of witchcraft in which I conjured this calamity upon my neighbors and my family? We laughed about it but I wondered and I still do.

I recall, during that time, in spite of the chaos and loss and relief, an overwhelming sense of a sort of humming of the spheres, if you will. Like everything was as it was meant to be, even, no, especially then. I felt a sense of possibly having recieved the exact, mathematically calculated amount of catastrophe to move things along as they were designed. Words fail me as I attempt an explanation of this. I've made a mental note to explore the existance of similar experiences among other people involved in disasters. Or not. I've actually felt the same thing when in a particularly accepting period in my life. Like when I first got sober, etc. And while I cannot speak for the man who lost his wife, nor the family whose father was crushed beneath their pre-civil war home or the family of the elderly piano player, I view the tornado, on my good days, as more under the umbrella of blessing rather than curse.

Materially, we lost very little that hasn't been replaced. Our house is almost completed, the blow away parts replaced by better built parts. We got to change a few things we'd regretted during the first and second remodelings. And after everything is paid for, it looks like we'll have enough money to build the building next to the house that I'd envisioned and all paid for by the insurance money we have leftover. All that and the possibility that we may actually be able to pay off my husband's pickup.

And yet, that's not all. We got a spiritual shock treatment. We'd become skeptical, cynical and judgmental in our views of the human race (all of that probably expediated by working in ERs for many years) but I wasn't entirely comfortable with the degree of cynacism I possessed, either. The tornado changed some of that at the root level. People I had previously loved to hate, turned into our biggest heroes during that time. Church people, for one. Once believing them all a bunch of pompous, judgemental asses without an inkling of the definition of charity, we were, after the tornado, bombarded with offers for food and drinks and tarps and anything else we could possibly need. And it was that way with a whole array of people and of institutions we had previously long since written off as the spawns of Satan. It was a wake up call to the human condition in which we are all partners. Parts of the Whole I claim to believe in so strongly. I needed it and so did Freddy. We stand humbly corrected.

And so, if I did "conjure up" such a disaster as our tornado, perhaps it is as it should be, at least for us. And as I won't deliberately do it again, I'll probably continue to visualize, my intent being for the good of all involved and leaving it as always, open-ended. Do no harm, and all of that.

ER, Again?

2009-07-21T07:23:00.001-07:00

I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm seriously considering taking another full-time job in the ER. I've been doing prn since quitting my previous full-time ER day job last September, opting instead to put my energy into my massage business. Only to discover I have very little energy for much of anything, at this point in my life. When left to my own devices, I tend to do gravitate to sitting on my ass, writing and surfing the internet. So shoot me.

I really thought I was through with nursing in general and ER in particular. I dreamed of the day I could tell HR to remove my name from the calling list and bid her have a nice life. I've thought and journaled and lamented about nothing else for years, at least 5. My family and friends are sick of hearing about it, already. And yet, while basking in the serenity of my new life I found my creativity stunted. Rather than blossoming out into the creative rebirth I anticipated, my 10 month semi-sabbatical from the ER has proven to be more of just a convalescence. A "resting up" period during which I reorganized my priorities and recuperated from the soul-deprecating effects of 20 years of nursing.

I thought I would write volumes, but volumes never materialized. I found in their stead, an empty, albeit calm and comfortable, center where I reposed for weeks on end never inspired to write more than a sentance or two. A chilling thought now shadows over me. Could it be that I somehow need the harried life of the ER not only as a source of writing fodder, but for a well-rounded life of any kind? Could it be that, perverted by nursing school, my life has deteriorated to the point of needing the ER like a junkie needs heroin?

This is not what I had envisioned. I planned to build my massage business, branching out into other holistic modalities, until I was able to one day ease out of the arena of nursing, entirely. I would then, as my mind movie progressed, begin to write in my spare time until the day I would become a financially independent writer of books and essays. My life would then consist of days spent in the following manner:

I would get up at my leisure. Pad up the carpeted stairs to my office (we live in a single-story dwelling) where I would drink coffee in a soft, overstuffed chair upholstered in light, floral patterned fabric. The 2 or 3 windows in my office would be covered with white Venetian blinds, you know, the ones with wide slats. On the back wall would be a huge, built-in book shelves where I would keep the majority of my myriad books. ("Mine" in the sense that I own them not necessarily that I wrote them after all, even I recognize my limits even in the realm of creative imagery).

It would be there that I spend the first hour of so of my day, followed by a healthy lunch, an hour on my EFX machine which would be located in the exercise room to the left of the now nonexistant staircase. Mid afternoon would find me soaking in my jacuzzi tub followed by a nap. This on the day I don't have an appointment at Turtle Cove Spa on Lake Ouachita for my weekly mud wrap and 90 minute massage. Upon awakening, I would prepare a healthy, gourmet meal for my husband and myself before returning to the office to write until late in the night.

Cold winter nights would be spent before the fireplace downstairs, dressed in leggings, an oversized organic cotton knitted sweater and thick, white, cotton socks, my dogs at my feet as I sipped herbal tea into which I'd squeezed a couple of tablespoons of Agave Nectar. I would, as a matter of course be writing in a notebook while listening to the wind howl beyond the orangey light of our livingroom lamps. Apparently my husband will have decided he no longer wishes to watch television with the volume at his current, deafening level of preference as this would never be possible otherwise.

When involved in a big book deal, we would take to the road in our new RV that I would buy for us with my first (in a series of many) book deals. He would drive while I slept or ate and at night, he'd read or watch tv wearing a good set of headphones while I reclined in the back bed and wrote. Our RV would be equipt with fax, copier and WiFi, of course, allowing me the necessary constant communication with my editor. We would travel to New York in the RV as we use to do before the rat ate the lines under the hood of our old one, only this time we'd frequent the publishing house working book deals and negotiating advances and film rights.

On our trips home, hefty checks in our bank bag made out to me, we'd amble around the countryside, West Virginia where my father's family still lives, Tennessee, Georgia to visit my sister, buying antiques which we'd have shipped back home and eating gourmet meals. We'd eventually come home and start the whole grueling process over again.

That's what I had envisioned. And I'm serious about the word vision. I read The Law of Attraction and I know how to do it (more on that, later). I've been working on this one for years. So what's with this pull to return to the ER? Well, maybe the road to my dream life isn't via living the slow-paced ethereal life of a holistic nurse/massage therapist like I thought. Maybe I need to work like a dog and be abused by ridiculas patients, doctors and family members 3 days a week as a type of catalyst to my creative process. What's more, earning my living in 3 days in the ER as opposed to the basically 7 days a week required by my current combination of massage and prn ICU nursing, will allow me sufficient "moodling" time, as Brenda Euland calls it. Maybe I can write better during my recovery period of 4 days off each week. I don't know. All I know is, damn me, I don't seem to be able to quit ER nursing.

Life As We Knew It

2009-06-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted about the tornado, yet. One night I sat down with my laptop in the dark, spare room where my husband and I now sleep, and wrote for 3 hours and only got the first 10% of the story told. I realized nobody would read that much in a blog. My usual flaw, too wordy. And now it's almost 2 months since the night of the tornado and I don't know where to start, again. So I'll just let the pictures speak for me.
This is my life before and after April 9, 2009.

Catholic Guilt

2009-03-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

It's obvious I need to blog more frequently. It's been over a month since I blogged here. Part of that is because I gave up the internet, save 30 minutes a day, for Lent. One has to have at least 30 minutes to check email, order books, etc. What I found out was:

I got a lot more real, read "creative", writing done
I tend to engage in more impulse buying at amazon.com when I only have 30 minutes to shop
As a Catholic candidate, I suck.

I did really well for the first 3 weeks. Got a lot of writing done. Well, not done but I wrote a lot and not just journaling but beginnings of stories that I've thought about writing for a long time. I was way more creative. But then, I don't know what happened, I just stayed online longer. I started bargaining. Like I'd look stuff up for other people but sneak some of my own "surfing" in there. Now I'm back to being a blatant internet junkie and Lent abuser. I really do suck.

I suddenly feel very guilty so I'm going to log off and go do my chi machine.

Carefree Highway

2009-02-20T18:59:00.000-08:00

I went back to Nebraska this week for my grandson's 5th birthday. I have a love/hate relationship with Nebraska. I'm from there, grew up there so, naturally, there is a lot of pain involved with it for me. And I don't mean I had a bad childhood, just that most days I'm just busy being me and that's a full-time job, as my brother used to say about his ex-wife. I'll just say that I'm sensitive and come from a family where emotions, unless they're these particular ones: Happy, enthusiastic, cheerful, etc. were sort of frowned upon. The frowners would debate this but I'm telling you they're full of shit. They aways looked down upon people who were....sentimental, we'll say. For instance, people who express distress about other family members who have, let's say, metastatic cancer, for instance, are criticized for being "dramatic" And here I always thought cancer was dramatic. Who knew?

So it's that kind of thing that I gnash my teeth over while I'm there. That, and other stuff. Stuff like the message that everybody's feelings and perceptions are more valid than any of our's, including street people who come to my mother's home on a regular basis for her to give them, what my sister, Janet calls their "allowance". It's a long story that I'm not sure I know all of. Nor do I particularly care to know any more.

And then there are the trashcans. My mother doesn't believe in trash bags. God love her, her heart is in the right place. She says she doesn't use trash bags because they stay in the landfill too long. But apparently she also doesn't believe in lining the trash cans with newspaper (the newspaper that's piled high in her office) to keep the stuff, you know what kind of stuff I mean, off the sides of the inside of the trash can. That stuff on the sides, she says, is a result of improper catagorizing of the trash by her grandchildren (of which my daughter and her two kids were....three). She says, they shouldn't be putting "wet" things in the trash but into the compost and it is, that wet stuff that causes the mess on the inside of the can. Mother of God. I can scarcely stand it.

So just when I think my head is going to start rotating on my shoulders I go for a ride somewhere. This time it was the second day I was there and I went to look for a piece of exercise equipment that I've been wanting. And I found it. And bought it. And then I went to see my cousin and her husband who are both bus drivers. My cousin is the union shop steward at the bus station in that town and I'm proud of her. It's so nice to be around Democrats. Then I went to Open Harvest which is a great health food store where my sister-in-law works. That was balm to my wounds. Smelling the spices and herbs and seeing the people in there. All but one woman who liked to draw attention to herself by doing things like touching people from behind as she came upon them and saying, "I'm sorry, I need to get by you". Typical pain in the ass and just when I was thinking how nice it would be to work somewhere like that. But anyway, they have this perfume I absolutely love. It's called Sacred Fire and had I not just spent $900 on a Precor EFX 544 Elliptical trainer I would have that bottle, now. That wasn't the first time I've carried that bottle around the store and then talked myself out of it. But I need that shit and I'm going to go back and buy it the next time I'm up there.

After that, and drinking a really big caffeinated latte with sugar-free chocolate macadameia nut syrup, I sat in the parking lot and wrote in my journal. I drew a quick sketch of a girl in a short coat with tights and boots putting her groceries in her trunk. She was so damn cute. I need to get some different clothes. The last time I tried to buy funky little (if you can call size 14 little) clothes in a university town I ended up buying too much tie dye that just won't work here very easily. I'd feel too out of place to wear that stuff, for the most part, I'm afraid. But some natural fibers, knitted caps, cool boots, some of that stuff I saw in that parking lot, well. I need it.

And that little outing saved my mind. For a little while, anyway. When I got home, I backed the truck into my mother's driveway so my daughter could load her belongings into it for us to bring back to Arkansas with us on the trip back home the next day. I used my daughter's car to take my mother to a small town south of Lincoln named "Firth" where my cousin, Elaine, is in a nursing home. She had a stroke during aneurysm surgery close to 30 years ago. But you'd have to know my daughter's car for this to make sense.

She has cleaned it twice in the 6 years she's owned it. The windshield is a roadmap of cracks, including some forming perfect circles which I fear will pop out driving down the road, some day. Of course there was no gas in the car and I told Mom I might as well fill it up as I'd be doing so all the way to Arkansas, the next day, anyway. (Which, by the way wasn't true, after all).

The car is so filthy one cannot allow oneself to think about it focusing instead on the road before them, if that is even possible while being repeatedly stabbed in the forehead by the broken sun visor hanging down to about my hairline. How do you break a sun visor? Has anybody ever actually done that before?

She had the windows tinted and the ever present dirt on them caused great scratches down both front seat windows which make seeing out of them a challenge. All of that coupled with the fact that we were about 25 miles out of town, it was evening and getting colder, the wind was blowing, as usual, and it was already like 22 degrees. Oh, and there was no cell phone service. How does that work on the plains? I mean, what is there to interfere with the signal? I can see in the mountains like here, but...

So we come to an intersection and being the anally fixated individual I am, I sort of wanted to see if there were any cars coming before I turned onto the road. So I rolled both windows down. After I pulled out, I rolled the windows back up only my window didn't go up. I thought maybe only one switch works at a time so I tried mine again after putting up my mother's side but it didn't work and then I remembered. The driver's side window won't go back up if you put it down. How could I have forgotten? Oh damn me, damn me right to hell. I had done that same thing once before. Oddly, it was also at my grandson's birthday party in the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese's during a dark, rainy and cold as hell night in Arkansas, that time. About 2 years ago and it stayed down until May. She drove with two kids in the car and that window down all the rest of that winter.

I seemed to recall that someone, a man, of course, got the window to go up once by playing with the switch until it finally caught somehow and rolled the window up. I immediately started doing that. I saw my mother out of the corner of my eye buttoning up her coat and pulling her collar closer around her face which made me feel more incompetent and guilty now for freezing my poor 82-year-old mother as a result of my stupidity. Seeing my mother bundle up only further strengthened my resolve to manipulate that switch into submission and it was with great relief that I heard a new, dinging sort of noise which I interpreted as an encouraging sign that I was making some sort of progress until I realized that the dinging was not related to the window switch at all but was, instead, the low fuel alert noise. I'd forgotten to stop and buy gas and now there we were with no town in sight and we didn't know for sure if there were any gas stations in this small town to which we were headed. And if there were any, were they open after 5pm which was almost upon us, we wondered? I began to look around the car for a sedative, at that point.

In a time we did find the town of Firth and there was a gas station on a corner. I got out and began to try to pump gas but nothing happened and I feared they were closed but the meter on the pump began to register and the gas began to fill the tank, at last. I went in to buy some hot coffee and inquired about a mechanic but the young girl said they were all gone at five (it was now about 10 after). I was just so happy to have gas and now coffee that I didn't care and praddled on giddily while the little girl counted out my change. After fueling, I saw a place with something about "auto body repair" on the sign and drove over there to catch the man behind the counter finishing business with another customer. I told him what happened and that we had to leave for Arkansas in the morning and that my 82-year-old mother was freezing out there and that we were 25 miles from her house. He explained that the door panel would have to be taken off (didn't sound too hard for an auto body place). I asked him if he could do it but he said, "Not right now" as in "I'm going home now and don't give two shits about you or your 82-year-old mother".

So we went on to see my cousin and drove home in the cold, stopping for more coffee before going to my brother's for him to only hit the door with his fist and roll the window up in about 15 seconds. Thank God for men, is all I can say. Sometimes things just have to have a man touch them, as our friend Marty says. And I believe it's true.

I have more to say but it'll have to wait. It's complicated and probably won't make much sense, anyway.

Devil's Den Week

2009-01-27T18:09:00.001-08:00

Every January, Freddy & I go to Devil's Den State Park in the Ozarks south of Fayetteville. It's a special place to us ever since our first visit during my family reunion in July, 2002 when Freddy & I had just started seeing each other. We made a reservation that time for the following January. When we checked out that time, we made another reservation for the following year, etc. This was our 8th visit. In between times, we carry Devil's Den around with us in our pockets like a delicious secret. During the rest of the year, we smile wryly as we drive past the exit sign on our way to Springdale or Nebraska, counting the months until we'll be checking in there, again.

There are rules for our stay in the cabin. These are them:

No tv
No phones
No computers
Fire in the fireplace, constantly
Be as close to nature as possible which involves the windows and doors being open whenever possible. (this one is my rule)

As for the tv, they didn't use to have tvs in the cabins but about 2 years ago, they got them. It's not a thing for me because I just don't turn it on but it's quite a temptation for Freddy who drapes his jacket over the tv to keep it from speaking to him.

Usually, the cell phones don't come in up there but this time, they did. A little. I could stand out by the truck in the driveway to the cabin and get a few bars. I'd check the answering machine at the clinic, primarily because I'm waiting on pins and needles for a go-ahead on a new massage gig with a pretty good potential. I'm about to run out of money to tide me over and keep me out of a full-time job back in the ER (which is the only place I'd work, although I'd bitch about it, unceasingly). This year they have phones installed in the cabins but our's didn't ring and we didn't use it. Simple.

Same with computers. We didn't bring one.

The fire rule is the way we are able to abide by the doors and windows open rule. They go together. Here's what we do. The first night, we check in, unpack, bring in arm loads of firewood. Then we go to Fayetteville and eat. Sometimes we eat in really nice places. This time we ate at Formosa Garden which was pretty darn good oriental food (I don't know the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai but I think it was Chinese). Then we go buy groceries. Well, because one of us stayed up way too late on the internet the night before we left home and only getting 4 hours of sleep, we (I) was too tired to shop after we ate so we just picked up a few things and went home. Then Freddy builds a fire, takes his place at the table and reads for 4 days. I open the window in the living room, fold the futon into a bed, pile onto it my books, magazines and art supplies, get two pillows off the bed for my back and one for my lap and wrap up in a blanket and start reading, writing or painting/drawing in front of the fire. And that's how we spend our week at Devil's Den every January. Oh, and the puzzle. I almost forgot the puzzle. That's the best part. The first January visit to the cabins I brought a jigsaw puzzle. How often do you have the time to do a puzzle, for Christ's sake? Well, I did one and I was hooked. I've brought a puzzle every year, since. For some reason last year I didn't work on the one I brought but I was back at my game this time. God, what a luxury to put together a jigsaw puzzle. I can't get over how much I love that. Try it. It's better than Zoloft.
I sit on the log chair outside on the rocky area beside the cabin. I wrap up in a blanket, take a mug of coffee with me and write, read or just watch birds. I stay until it gets dark and I stay latest on the last night because I don't want it to be over.
You can see the top of the cabin my mother and sister, Janet, stayed in during our family reunion. Seven years later, I still expect to see them in there when we drive past. It makes me miss them all.

I've been in this weird faerie-drawing mood, lately, that I'm not sure what's about. So while hiking on one of the Devil's Den trails, I took 191 pictures of cool places that looked like good backgrounds for faerie paintings or drawings. Little rocky out-croppings and mossy covered rocks with holes in them and hollow logs. What inspiration there. I hiked every day we were there.

I attempted a watercolor of the above photo. Wow. It's not as easy as you'd think. I did some art, what little I did, because Bobbi said, "Do some art while you're there," when we left and she's been especially sad lately and I wanted to please her. This painting won't, though.

These are some of my favorite pictures of the trail. There was a waterfall and ice all around that, on the trail making for some monumental puckering but breathtaking scenery. Freddy went with me the first day and after that I was on my own. One day as I was walking to the trail from the cabin, I came across an armadillo bumbling around in the leaves. I was able to get up close to him and every once in a while he'd look around and get startled when he saw me. He'd take about 3 fast steps and go back to rooting around in the leaves. Crazy thing. As if he'd outrun me in 3 crummy armadillo strides.

A park employee stopped when she saw me taking like 9 pictures of this armadillo and must've felt sorry for me. So she told me about this guy on the right. She said he'd be down by the lake between 8:30 and 9am. So the next morning I got up and went down to see and there he was. What a sight. I couldn't get very close and this picture is horribly zoomed and blurry but what an incredible sight. When I tried to get closer, he flew away and I wanted to flog myself. Next morning he was back, as was I and minding my manners better that day. I watched him as long as I could, there in the bitter cold and then I left him for somebody else to look at and I went back to the cabin to pack.

On the way home (not exactly. We live south of the park and Amanda lives north, but, anyway) we stopped to see the boys, oh yeah and Amanda. They're short-timers now and I'm gonna miss them a lot when they move to Nebraska. (Waaaaa!)

An old friend, Elizabeth, was visiting while we were there. It's easy to see that married life agrees with her! She looks wonderful. Doesn't she know you're suppose to gain weight when you get married? It only took the boys 2 hours to completely knock out any existing energy we had and we went home pretty early.

It was a wonderful trip, as usual. Is it not January 2010, yet?

Maybe It's 'Cause of January

2009-01-16T21:46:00.000-08:00

My bedroom is my favorite place in the world. We laughingly call it my home office because I spend almost all the time I'm home in there. I read there, do everthing I do online there. I even have a printer on Freddy's side on his bedside table with the printer cord snaked around behind the headboard.

This is my bedside table. On it are the things I love. The things that make life worth living.
A water bottle.

A cordless phone. Cordless so I can carry it to the kitchen to get coffee while I talk, as well as to the bathroom.

Clock radio with sound machine and a thing on the top that does this.

My new drug of choice "Head On". It's a topical anesthetic, homeopathic, that you smear on your head wherever it hurts which in my case is always over my left maxillary sinus and sometimes my whole face.

Vicks (in the drawer). Same application, usually. If I'm really sick I put it everywhere like when I was a kid. But I have to be sick enough to not care if my hair gets greasy. I have two jars in that drawer and more on the dresser. I love Vicks. I once heard a comedian say that he thought the government should issue Vicks to the general population because it's so wonderful.

Remotes. Four of them. One for the TV. One for the VCR. One for the DVD player. And one for the Direct TV receiver. That's why I can't get a home theater (which would go in the bedroom, by the way), because I don't have room in the nightstand drawer for another remote. As it is, when I put something on the table, something else falls off.

A cup of expresso made in my new, stove top expresso maker that I bought at Tuesday Morning in a fabulous, hinged and lidded box with four expresso cups and these sexy square saucers. (I can't figure out how to turn this picture 90 degrees to the right like it's suppose to be).

Drawing pencils. I started drawing faeries last night and worked on them a little bit again tonight. It's fun though I'm not particularly good at it.

A spa textbook from which I glean ideas I use to turn my clients into great drooling, euphoric idiots.

One of the three new books I bought Wednesday in Hot Springs. A Jack Canfield book about the Law of Attraction which, by the way, I know really works. We'll talk more about that, later. I also bought, "You Staying Young" (hardcover on the bargain table for $9.97 at Books-a-Million) and "The Real Age Workout" for $6.97.

My new Hancock's of Paducah catalog. Hancock's of Paducah has the most exquisite fabric. It makes you want to make somebody a quilt just so you can buy some of that fabric. That is if you'd ever finished the baby quilt you started for your (almost) 5-year-old grandson while he was still in the womb.

Toilet paper. Because there is no room on the bedside table for a Kleenex box.

The electric blanket control. How can an electric blanket bring so much pleasure to a life?

Yummy, soft, blue earplugs (in a condiment dish under the electric blanket control). They're called "Hear-Os" and they are the only thing keeping me from beating my husband's head in with a jar of Vicks for snoring so loud.

My eye mask. I started using it when I worked nights at the VA. I can't sleep without one, now. I have two. One here and one in my makeup bag for when I'm out of town. I also have more Hear-Os in there.

Really thick Lavender-scented cream that my friend, Dottie, gave me and which I slather onto my feet when I get out of the bathtub, sometimes, and which makes my feet feel totally yummy.

My cell phone. It's usually plugged in on the kitchen counter beside the refrigerator but I'm too lazy to take it in there tonight. Besides, the battery should be okay since it's been on silent all day and I missed all my calls.

My laptop. Not right now, of course. Right now it's on my....well...lap. But it lives on the bedside table drawer which is always pulled halfway out.

And the best for last.....Q-tips. I'm about Q-tips like my daughter is about the Ped-Egg. I bore my ears out, and anyone else's I can gain access to, every chance I get. My doctor said I have scars in my ears. I didn't tell him why. My perfect job would be cleaning out people's ears and popping their pimples and blackheads. I'm completely compulsive about those things. I sometimes think about deliberately feeding Freddy an abundance of fatty foods so he'd develop a bunch of really nice zits that I could then squeeze. I've considered going back to school to become an aesthetician so I could do "extractions", legally. Sometimes when I'm doing massage I feel a blackhead on a client's back and I have to really fight to not work on it. When I'm working in the ER and I know we've got a patient with an abscess, I start watching the doctor really closely to see when it looks like he's getting ready to go in and drain it so I don't miss it. Don't hate. I've seen other nurses like that. It's not that weird. We're abscess junkies. What of it?

So, I guess, that's pretty much it. My bedside table is like my whole life, right now. No direction. No organization. Messy. Lot's of potential but nothing really happening. I kinda like it but it's a little unnerving, too. My life, I mean. Right now, I mean.

Shredding Reflections

2008-12-03T20:19:00.000-08:00

I'm going to bed in a minute, as in, putting my head on the pillow and putting the ear plugs in my ears and the mask over my eyes. Not just sitting on the bed with the comforter over my legs, pillows to my back, my laptop on my heavily pillowed...well...lap as I spend most of the time I'm home if I'm not cooking or doing laundry or soaking in the tub. Those are my favorite things to do, those four.

My bed is my home office, really. Oh, we have a "computer room" with a desk and, now, an art table and a daybed. Our desktop computer is in there and Freddy uses it to read the New York Times and New York Post, but that's about it. I prefer my bed and the printer that sits on top of Freddy's nightstand, it's cable snaked around the headboard to my side where I connect it, periodically when I need to print out a flyer, or something. So I don't use the desktop in the computer room, much. I quickly check my email in there, sometimes, while shredding the cereal boxes that the recycling Nazi won't accept, but that's about it.

Freddy takes the recycling stuff to the recycling place, which is a developmental center for mentally challenged people. I didn't think about that when I got the resentment.

It all goes back to when I was working full-time in the ER and trying to run a business on my "days off" and Freddy ate frozen dinners all the time. I mean all. the. time. (I especially like this putting a period after each, separate word to accentuate the statement-thing). So we had mountains of frozen dinner cardboard containers and lots of cereal boxes which I flattened like a good, green witch and stuffed into the box with the cardboard for the recycling center. That went alright for a while and then one day Freddy came home and said:

"You can't put the cardboard tv dinner boxes into the recycling, anymore."

"Why?"

"They won't take it."

"Why the hell not?" I asked.

"Because it's not considered cardboard".

"What? Since when?"

"I don't know. He just said, 'Tell your wife this is trash,' kinda grouchy."

"Well, what the fuck is cardboard, then?"

"I guess the corrugated stuff like big boxes are made out of."

"Bullshit."

Freddy didn't mention "developmentally delayed" man, he just said, "man" so I was just thinking "What an asshole," and immediately went about devising a plan to scam the recycling...person. Then it dawned on me. The shredder! I'd shred all that, what I know damn well is, cardboard and send it to the recycling center in the black, plastic bags along with the other shredded paper I always sent and the "tell your wife this is trash" horse's ass would be none the wiser. And that's what I've been doing for about 9 months. Every time I take a carton into the computer room and shred it I mentally thumb my nose at the "tell your wife this is trash" man. About 5 months ago it finally dawned on me.

"Hey, you know that guy at the recycling center?" I asked Freddy one day.

Blank stare. "What guy?" He always waits a while before admitting he doesn't know what I'm talking about out of fear of a scolding.

"The guy who told you the cardboard was trash and they wouldn't take it."

"Yeah?". He clearly didn't remember.

"Was he retarded?"

"Oh, that guy. Yeah, he was."

Shit. There went all the fun, almost. I found a way around it, though, by deciding to forget about it, pretending he was a supervisor of normal intelligence. Blocking the clarifying conversation with Freddy out of my mind and sharpening the mental image I have of the recycling Nazi and delighting in outsmarting him.

And I shred. Some of us especially need victories like this.

Sleepless in Lincoln

2008-11-26T01:03:00.000-08:00

I feel like Holly Hunter in the movie, Home for the Holidays.

It started with spaghetti sauce. All our lives, our mother has made this wonderful spaghetti and meatballs. She gave me the recipe and I started making it myself when I first got married, the first time, back in 1975. It's delicious.

Mom is 82 and I don't know if her cooking was really good when we were growing up or if we just thought so because we didn't know the difference. But she's gotten, well, as older people do she's gotten lax, I guess you'd say. She cuts corners. Consequently, there aren't a lot of things she cooks the way she used to and we generally prefer eating out when we come up here to visit. But she asked me last weekend if I wanted anything special to eat while we were here, aside from the huge Thanksgiving meal we're cooking. I did still love her spaghetti sauce the last time I had it so I requested that, knowing it would make her feel good to treat us to something tasty and it not being especially difficult to prepare and we might save ourselves from at least one lecture on wasting money on fast food. It hasn't been spaghetti and meatballs for some years because, she says, the meatballs always break all up, anyway, so now she just uses hamburger in the sauce which didn't appear to make a big difference. Still, I wondered how the meatballs managed to stay together for 40 years, for the most part. But, as I said, last time it was okay so I figured it would be safe. I'm sad to report the spaghetti sauce has gone the way of all the other things she used to cook that were so good and that we looked so forward to.

She is, now, not only skimpy with her own cooking but while I read aloud a recipe I found on the internet today, having no intention of actually making it only delighting in reading about it, she interrupted with a dissertation on, "Why would you want something else to eat when we already have all this food?"etc. That's the whole point of going home. And the longer I'm here, the more I need to eat in order to tolerate the dysfunction. My mother is dwindling away, disintegrating into her sauce like her meatballs as we watch, helplessly.

There's that. And then there's my brother. And my daughter. And the cold. And the darkness. And now I can't sleep. We went to see Twilight tonight and I drank a huge Diet Pepsi which I almost never do since my banding. It was enough caffeine to keep me awake until, so far, 3:34am. And I seem to be having an exacerbation of the hot flashes that were subsiding since I started my Estridiol. If I were home I'd get in the tub and soak and watch an old movie on Turner Classic Movies (yes, there is a tv in the bathroom) but here, not only is there no tv in the bathroom but no bathtub. Only a shower, not that I'd actually get in a tub here. Not the cleanest environment, anymore. I'm pretty much miserable and I know that the grandsons will be trotting in here around 9 to wake me up. And by the time I wake their mother up I'll be wide awake, albeit tired and surly and then I have to bake pies and put together casseroles and do dishes and instruct the other members of the family on how to manage their lives. It's all quite exhausting. I can't wait to go home.

Isn't it strange how we all get in our own little worlds apart from our families? The older we get, the deeper into our own worlds we get. More comfortable and less tolerant of discomfort. Less anxious to subject ourselves to the insanity that is our family. God knows I have a good family. One of the best I know. But it's so damn noisy here and so many people and I've eaten all this sugar. I need medication this week, I really do. This would be a good time to start abusing Xanax.

I'll be glad to get home to my little self-absorbed life on Saturday and I probably won't be back for another holiday anytime soon. I'll have to forget some of this, first.

Oh, Happy Thanksgiving.

Of Fires, Hot Flashes & Bear Dookie

2008-11-15T21:03:00.000-08:00

I woke up today feeling really good. No obligations, which is all I've ever asked from life, by the way, but it rarely works out. I called Freddy to have him pick up some Celestial Seasonings Candy Cane Lane tea on his way home and then I sat up in bed and wrote in my journal. I planned to go out in the barn and built the first fire in that woodstove and build a soap mold today. It was cold and I've been day dreaming about that for some time. But Freddy showed up before he went shopping and I decided to go with him, needing to pick up my hormones and thinking I needed to give them my new insurance information. Wrong. Insurance doesn't cover compounded medications and I'm beginning to think I may know why. I go between freezing and sweating about 115 times in a 24 hour period since I started my new, compounded, bioidentical hormones for which I held such high hope. .

So we went shopping and I got the idea, as we were pushing the shopping cart to the truck, that a big bowl of tortilla soup would be nice. So we went to the Mexican restaurant and ate, me bitching the whole time about ignorant hillbillies and nonprofessional behavior (more hormone-related thought processes).

And here it comes again. A wave of heat traveling instantly from my knees to the top of my head in a mighty whoosh culminating with me feeling as though I could breath fire if I exhaled with my mouth open. Note to self: buy some dong quai and black cohash tomorrow after work.

After we ate, we decided to go out to our cabin, for the first time in a couple of months, just to make sure everything was okay. As soon as we got out there I had to start a fire in the pot belly stove. It was freezing and the wind was blowing and I couldn't resist. The cabin is strawbale construction, like our barn, and it heats up nicely and stays that way for a while without much of a fire. And that potbelly stove is a dandy. I keep a small basket full of try kindling, just leaves and handfuls of sticks, in there at all times. That way, even if it's raining or there's a foot of snow on the ground, I can still start a fire at the spur of the moment. And I always go gather up more before I leave, even if it's, as I said, wet or whatever because it'll dry long before I get back out there and need it, again. Freddy made a pot of decaf while I hauled 3 or 4 armloads of wood from the wood pile to the livingroom. We had it toasty warm in minutes and spent the next hour, or so, doing what we always do out there. Nothing. Sitting holding our mugs of coffee, staring at nothing like dope fiends in an opium den. About every 3 minutes, Freddy says, "God, I love this place," then falls silent again for a little while.

About the time we were thinking about leaving, I went up in the loft to see how warm it was up there and pretty soon had dug an old quilt out of the plastic bin we keep linens in up there to keep them safe from the mice, and spread it out on the bed and decided to take a nap. Freddy joined me and we dozed for a while. I got up toward the end and grabbed the old, afghan (my friend Carol's mom calls them, "Africans" as in "No wonder you're not cold, lying on the couch wrapped up in two Africans") off the railing and covered up as the fire was beginning to die down.

When we left for home, we saw a big pile of bear scat just down from the cabin in front of the pump house. It would've made a great picture, full of persimmon seeds but I was ill-prepared and didn't have my camera. I thought, after all, that we were only going to Walmart when I left home this morning.

I made 4 dozen, or so, peanut butter cookies when we got home and froze most of them for our Christmas party a month away. It's suppose to get down to 20-something tonight so I covered my lettuce with an old, blue tarp and then shut the flaps on the chicken house windows and rigged up a light in there to help keep the chickens (and doves and turkey) warm and encourage them to start laying, again. It's been a good day. We don't spend enough of them together. And tomorrow's ICU for 12 hours.

On My Way Back

2008-11-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

I've been doing pretty well with the time change and subsequent impending exacerbation of SAD that I get every year until yesterday. And that's how it happens. I'm going along without any problem and BOOM! I get an unnerving sort of coldness in my stomach and I know it's time for my full spectrum light. I use it when I first start feeling the coldness. Once I start, I try to use it every day. If I go out of town, I bring the light. It's not negotiable. It makes a tremendous difference.

And in the meantime, I cook. Oh, and eat. Monday I did one massage and was home by 2. I cooked until 10pm. It was wonderful. I've been busy or out of town or working for several weeks, now. I'd gotten used to being home and was settling into this delicious slower pace before we went away for a week. When we got home there were three weeks of working basically a full-time schedule in ER. And then a lot of massages to do in the meantime. All that to say that I didn't have time to cook and I hated it, having had a really good taste of what it's like to be a real person who cooks in her own kitchen and does her own laundry and vacuums. So I made up for it yesterday.

I cooked stuffed grape leaves, homemade pita bread, hummus, kale with sausage and potatoes, bread pudding with lemon sauce and jalepeno jelly. Then last night I made miso soup. Oh God. Is that good. I never made/ate it before. And so easy. I got the miso this weekend when I was out of town.

This weekend was nice. I had no massages scheduled Friday so about 11:30 while talking on the phone to my friend, Bobbi, we decided it might be nice to drive up to Winslow, Arkansas on old Highway 71 and go to the Ozark Folkways. We packed an overnight bag in case we decided to stay at my daughter's in Springdale. I toasted homemade bread and scrambled eggs with Pecorino Romano cheese for our breakfast sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper and we headed out. It was a beautiful day. We stopped to take pictures and gather leaves and pods for Bobbi to use in her artwork. The trees were magical. Brilliant. The sky, that deep blue you only see in Autumn. Breathtaking.

We spent about an hour at Ozark Folkways, before they closed, looking at art, Bobbi explaining how each thing was made and how we can do the same thing. She's such a delightful friend. So fun to spend time with.

We bought some stuff. Me, a couple of hand made pottery bowls and a bar of lye soap and she, a hand painted, lidded porcelain dish for my Christmas gift. So I came out like a bandit.

We went on to Springdale and spent the night with Amanda and family. Aidan graciously lent us his bed. I couldn't get over the feeling that I'd come to visit my daughter with my lesbian lover. Even better is the fact that the kids had little sores on their mouths and we were both kissing them. I told her we'd probably both come home with sores on our mouths after spending a weekend away together and everybody will think we caught them from each other. So far, so good, though.

We had a great visit with the kids. Matt made loaded baked potato pizza for supper. And appetizers while we waited: shrimp and cocktail sauce and 3 cheese garlic bread with marinara sauce. Man, was that good! Good food. Good company. Next morning Sis made apple cinnamon pancakes. Wow! Did we ever pick the right place to crash.

First stop Saturday morning was Hobby Lobby. Stayed there a long time. Then on to Ozark Natural Foods. We spent hours there poring through the bulk herbs and spice. It was a heavenly olfactory orgy. We bought lemongrass, dried elderberries, cumin, turmeric, curry, whole nutmeg, some other kind of orange Indian spice that I can't remember the name of. I bought miso and tahini and organic peanut butter and grape leaves and Sumatra coffee beans and I can't remember what all. Freddy's truck smelled like New Delhi on the way home. Sunday when I worked in ICU I brought along a newspaper I'd gotten on the trip and it smelled like spices. Yum!

We ate lunch at La Huerto on College. I had cheese enchiladas. After that we stopped at an intriguing line of shops on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. New Treasures where we bought bumper stickers that said things like, "Treehugger" and "Jesus was a Liberal". I bought some very ethnic-looking clothing and a long, tie-dyed jersey jumper. Next door was a bakery with chalk board menus and 24 inch breadsticks and huge slices of chocolate raspberry cake with 3/4 inch frosting. We had coffee and...well...chocolate cake.

Then the bead store. It made me want to learn to make jewelry. I bought two little silver hands with swirls in the palms and earring hooks to put them on. After that, on to the second hand retro clothing and costume shop where we bought nothing but a lady came up to Bobbi and complemented her on her lovely cheekbones.

On the way out of Fayetteville, we stopped at a purple building that looked like a castle where they do tattoos and piercings to ask about piercing my nose. I sort of chickened out but used the price for an excuse. I really should have done it, though. It woulda been great to cook using all those Indian spices with an earring in my nose and wearing my ethnic clothing. I'll have to make that a thing to do.

We stopped at Micheal's on Rogers on the way through Fort Smith and shopped for art supplies, some more. Nice stuff in there, though the lighting sucks. Bought a Fillet O' Fish sandwich that I ate on the way out of Fort Smith, sans the top of the bun.

So that's it, then. Wonderful 2 days. Made me want to live in Northwest Arkansas all over again having just gotten over that from our last trip to Eureka Springs. But I live here, I suppose, and I'll make the best of it. Not a bad thing, living here. Just not much here for open minds, I'm afraid.
Tonight I picked salad greens from the Mesclin Mix I
planted in October, though, and made this, which I ate for supper with some leftover grape leaves.

Before that, I walked around the pasture, twice, with Maggi. Then we fed the fish and sat at the end of the dock and thought, both of us, about how nice it's going to be with grandsons visiting, again. When the babies are here, I'm totally present in the moment. Completely at peace, albeit chaotic peace, but you know what I mean. The sun was setting and just lit up the tops of a tree near the neighbor's property line. It reminded me of a dream I had ten years ago about a lilac bush. It was comforting. I can feel myself slowing down, again. It feels good to be cooking.

My Book...At Last!

2008-10-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna title it, Life is Just a Bowel Full of Cherries. Right. Just like this blog. I've always known what the book was going to be called, just not exactly what it was going to be about. I knew it would be about nursing and patients but no particulars, until now. Today at work it dawned on me. Twenty years in nursing, ten in the ER and I've picked up on some things the general public needs in terms of education. So, I'm going to write a common sense-type of medical manual for the general public who are, I'm beginning to realize, completely insane.

The book will be a sort of filling-in of the average Joe on the street regarding little medical things that I thought pretty much everybody knew all their lives, like I did. For instance, there will be a chapter titled, "When To, and When Not to Call 911". Under When Not to will be a paragraph explaining that when you have a bowel movement that, how do I put it, let's say "stalls", you have a few options, none of which involve activating the emergency medical alert system. One option is to end the attempt by employment of the anal sphincter thereby "pinching off" the sluggish substance. Another option involves straining to expedite things. There is always the sit-and-wait option to see if anything changes. And until this week it never occurred to me to tell another human being that getting "stuck" halfway into a bowel movement was no reason to call 911 but I have since been enlightened.

In the same chapter I will explain that if you are in your 50's, in good enough shape to ride a motorcycle to the state park on the mountain and camp, there is no reason for you to call an ambulance because you haven't had a bowel movement for 3 days.. Moreover, if you do call an ambulance and you have a bowel movement just prior to the arrival of the ambulance, you certainly don't need to come on into the ER, anyway, despite the fact that you "don't want to get in that shape, again!". Eat some Raisen Bran, drink some coffee and take responsibility for you own GI tract.

The chapter on "Proper Medical Terminology for Novices" will include, You have blood clots. There is no such thing as blood "clods" or "clogs." And, you have fibroids in your uterus, not "fire balls in your euchrist".

Just because you have a boil on your filthy body doesn't mean you were bitten by a poisonous spider. You probably have an abscess and might want to think about bathing once in a while. In the event you were, indeed, bitten by a spider, it probably was a brown recluse, not a "brown glucose" spider.

When you came to the emergency room once in the past because you couldn't pass urine, you were catheterized, not castrated (at least, I don't think so. However, if it turns out that you were, I'd like the name of that hospital so I can go there and apply for a job).

Under miscellaneous, I'll explain that when you "feel hot one minute and freezing the next" and you're not menopausal, it's no big mystery. You have a fever. Who has not known this since age 5? They actually sell devices that enable you to make your own fever diagnosis at home. They're sold at Walmart and they're called "thermometers". What's more, you can actually take Tylenol or Motrin for a fever and determine the correct dosage yourself by reading the label. Again, having a fever for one hour is no reason to rush to the ER.

Same thing with throwing up. If you threw up an hour ago, you don't have an emergency and you can stay at home. If you do end up in the hospital, throwing up isn't going to kill you and you don't need to send a family member darting into the hall to summon a nurse to the room. A nurse is not going to keep you from throwing up, (which is, by the way pronounced "vomit", not "vomick"). Just throw up and wipe your mouth and lie back down on your stretcher. When the nurse or doctor do come into the room, turn your head when you breath or cough. Your breath smells like vomit. Nobody wants to smell it, not even public servants. And while on the subject, if you come to the ER vomiting, don't get mad when they won't give you a big glass of ice water to drink. I promise you, if you drink a glass of water, you're going to throw up again. It happens every time. Another point, it doesn't matter what you saw in your vomit. Just because you saw, say, carrots doesn't mean you got food poisoning from your mother-in-law's glazed carrots last Sunday. You threw up what was in your stomach. Your stomach does not isolate the one offending substance and throw up only that. It doesn't work that way. Furthermore, you needn't describe it to us as in, my personal favorite, "It was green and slimy". Of course it was. It came out of your stomach. It was vomit. There's bile in it. Bile is green. It's no mystery. And there are no scientists in the lab waiting to analyze your vomit so don't bring it to the hospital with you in a peanut butter jar.

Now for the chapter on Medical History. You may be allergic to sulfa, not "sulpher". It is called emphysema, not "the zee-mee". And it's a hiatal hernia, not a "high up hernie".

Leukemia is considered to be a health problem so if you have Leukemia and the triage nurse asks you if you have any health problems, you should probably mention it.
If you are missing a kidney, we need to know if it was surgically removed or you were born without it, or what. It's not helpful when you tell the nurse, "Honey, I don't have any idea what happened to it". We expect you to research this before you come to the hospital.

If you cut your hand opening a package of bologna with your pocket knife, don't expect general anesthesia during your suturing. You're going to get a local anesthetic and stay awake. Nobody's going to recover you for an hour while you come out from under. We need our lunch breaks, too, you know. You might want to explore why it is you want so badly to be put to sleep.

When you come to the ER, bring a list of your medicines with you. Despite what you think, the nurses don't have copies of your med list folded up in lockets around their necks. If you can't even keep up with your medications while taking them every day of your lives, how do you expect us to?

If a nurse or a lab tech has a needle in their hand getting ready to start an IV or draw blood, the chances of them being successful are much better if you don't first say to them, "You have one chance! If you blow that, I want somebody who knows what they're doing." The employees at the hospital have licenses. They went to school. Despite what you might think, they really do know more about medicine than you do. That's why you're there. If you don't believe that, why didn't you stay home? Next time, you might want to think about doing that. Just stay home and use your Waffle House waitress experience to figure out the correct way to treat your heart attack and I promise you, nobody from the hospital is going to come to your house and drag you out and poke needles in you. They'll leave that to the funeral director and it will be a lot easier on them to just read about you in the obituaries next Thursday.

Anyway, you get the idea. And there's more. God knows, there's so much more.

Madness?

2008-10-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who is a known, sort of conspiracy theorist, suggested I go to a site she found on the internet. She was told about it by a woman she met at the farm supply store buying big, plastic tubs for water storage. The internet site is for women who are, well, I'm not sure exactly. They're survivalists, to a degree. There's a lot of talk about the end of the world and preparedness (how does having a cellar full of canned goods keep you safe from the Apocalypse?) and God and war, etc. I knew better than to go to that site but I did it, anyway. I went to it because my friend told me to look at it and I knew she'd ask me later if I did. But also, because there is a lot of information about making soap and gardening and canning and a lot of things I'm particularly fond of.

My mistake tonight was in reading a thread on the website about "something bad coming in the Fall". Several of the posters shared similar "inner urgings" to prepare (how?) for some unidentified disaster that is suppose to occur this Fall, as in now. Well, economically I think there's some validity to that. And who am I to determine the validity of another's "inner urgings"? Nobody. I have to honor that because I have the same things. And maybe that's what bothers me so much, this similarity in their's and my own strong feelings this summer; their's regarding getting prepared by buying food and storing water, I guess and mine about getting back to basics, quitting my job and trying to get some semblance of sanity back (did I ever have it?) in my life. It was a little weird reading that other people experienced such a close premonition to mine. A feeling that wouldn't let them alone, a sense of urgency to make the changes in question, just a strong sense of being "led" to something (or away from something).

I considered, this in 2001, trying my hand at something of a political thriller-type of fiction writing in which some kind of disaster would happen and my whole family, sisters, brother, my grown kids and, now, grandchildren, my Mom would all come and live, with us, on our 20 acres and we'd have an intentional community, of sorts, out of necessity rather than a higher consciousness. We'd have to build houses for all of the various nuclear families (total of 5, if Freddy and I stayed in the cabin that's there, which we wouldn't because he would cause me to have to beat his head in with that tv blaring and no where to go to get away from it). But it's sort of a dream of mine, that I hope never comes true, to have all my chicks in one nest under my wing. That's why I wanted to write it. Because I'd love to be close to all of them, albeit not that close.

Back to the website for militant housewives. It occurred to me after I got scared like I always do when I read bilge like that, that those people on that website all think the same thing, in terms of disaster for what's the fun of preparing without a disaster? So they all think the same things and they all post on that forum and they all read all those posts and that's what they think about day and night. Dream about it. Disaster and being prepared. So, it follows that it's going to get bigger and bigger and realer and realer for all of them because of the time and energy they're giving it. And I've always known this. Or at least since we moved to the south in 1979 and began being bombarded by these Apolalyptic predictions. And maybe they're right. I have enough sense to know I may be wrong but what if I am? Oh, I'll starve to death sooner than the women on that forum because I only have a pantry and medium-sized freezer full of food but we're all gonna die anyway, aren't we? If it's the end of the world? Unless they're counting on the rapture and then they don't need all that damned food, anyway, do they? More for the rest of us, I say. And besides, these are the same people who were too smart to get caught with their pants down at midnight on January 1, 2000 when....whatever it was that was suppose to happen, happened. They were so superiorly obedient to their premonitions from God that they took their 401ks and bought 5 gallon buckets of wheat and big generators and guns because God knows, they couldn't let their neighbors eat any of their food, right?

Is it me or is everybody crazy? Let me get this right. The Republicans are Christians. Christians=Good Guys. These "Good Guys" are opposed to government policies that lend assistance to poor people. Republicans love guns. Republicans believe in capital punishment. Republicans believe the government should not regulate the people which allows the rich people to continue, more effectively to fuck the poor people. But, again, the Republicans are all about God.

The Democrats, conversely, are heathens because they don't want to persecute gay people and because they believe women should have a right to choose to have an abortion (which I'm not saying I do or don't subscribe to. I'm staying out of that shit.)

I honestly don't get it. I think the entire world has gone completely mad and I want to go hide, now. Yes, and suck my thumb.

The Haunting

2008-08-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

I have a ghost. The haunting has gone on for as long as I can remember it and it's getting worse, lately. Sometimes I try to write about it in an attempt to make sense of it but it's difficult. I almost never talk about it because it's very hard to put into words. I'll try here.

There is something very deep inside me, in my soul, I suppose. It's so deep I've never seen it fully, just feel it's presence. All of the time. It's always here, sometimes more evident than other times but always it's with me. Always. It feels sort of like a river that runs under the ground, it's current swift and sure and deep. Very deep. And it's old. Much older than I.

I'm not sure what it is, I only know how it feels and some of the things that make me feel it more strongly. I feel it in museums. Inside the two earth lodges I've been in up in Nebraska. It's in old houses and in the old houses I dream about so often. It was in my Mom's bed the last visit I made to see her when I laid down for a nap one afternoon and smelled her on the pillow and saw my grandmother's lamp on her nightstand. It made me cry.

It's in the long, waving prairie grass and in the log cabins at Silver Dollar City. It's in the sound of Irish music and the smell of a campfire and that of the coffee I boil in the blue enamel fleck coffee pot my friend, Mr. Toon gave me.

The smell of tomato vines and the dry air in my workshop loft and the full moon. And I know I'm suppose to write about it or what it tells me to write but I just can't quite hear what it's saying to me. I can't quite understand the message. I can tell that sometimes I'm very "warm" but just can't quite comprehend. It doesn't leave me alone, no matter what. It's as if I'm meant to do something, write something or paint something and it gets more urgent the longer I wait. The urgency is almost deafening now. It's not going to be ignored. It haunts me continuously.

My therapist (you knew there was a therapist somewhere in this story, didn't you?) said a door is open to me and that doors don't stay open forever. That I must act or the door will eventually close. I know he's right about the door being open. But I don't know if its ever going to close. I hope it waits for me to figure it out. To understand what the ghost is trying to tell me.

As I go through the days I recognize things that are connected to it. An ER patient we got one day who was struck by a train. His face looked like chopped beef, his toenails were long and twisted and on his scrawny chest was an unfinished tattoo that said, "Prope of Estelle (somebody)". He was connected. I don't know how, I just know he was. The smell of lavender. Moonlight. Lying on my belly at the end of our dock watching the fish and turtles and the reflection of the fat clouds in the glass-like, still surface of the water. That's all connected. The way I could see the grief hanging in the trees outside our RV parked in my daughter and son-in-law's driveway the 6 weeks following the death of my granddaughter, Anna in 2006. I could still see it even at night from my bed inside. It hung in the trees near my daughter and her husband's bedroom on the second floor.

I'm suppose to do something with all of that and millions of other things that nudge me when I see them or think about them. I just can't figure out what. What do I say about them? How do I express it all?

I'm a bit disappointed in myself for not following my heart. And I think the ghost is disappointed, as well. I feel its disappointment and its refusal to accept my procrastination to do what I know I'm suppose to be doing. And I feel a strong sense of urgency. Time is running out, it seems to be saying. There's only so much time. Hurry up and figure it out.

I fear I'll die before I understand what it's telling me to do. Death is a big part of what it's telling me about. People aren't here forever. I'm not going to be here forever. I see it every day in the ER. People in their 40s and 50s dropping dead. A guy tonight. 44. Dead. I've got to hear what it's saying to me.

I dream at night about big, old, empty houses. Huge houses. And sometimes there are sounds coming from the basements. Or there's a feeling in the house and it paralyzes me and I can't scream and I can't run. I'm paralyzed. I'm not doing what I'm suppose to be doing.

Other people just get up in the morning and go to work and do what they're suppose to with a smile on their face and come home and mow the lawn and eat supper and watch something on mainstream television and go to bed and never think about it. Just live their lives without asking questions. Without a ghost. I've never been like that. I've always had this ghost trying to tell me to do something but not quite talking loud enough for me to hear it.

Pray that that someday I can hear.

Me & Mother Abigail

2008-08-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

I have a new fantasy. When I need to go to sleep I put on the thunder on my sound machine and I imagine I'm sitting on the porch of an old, dilapidated farmhouse in front of acres and acres of grass that's waving in the wind in Nebraska and there's a thunderstorm coming. I pretend I live there and write stories for a living and never go to work at a hospital. I love that fantasy. It makes me feel like Mother Abigail in The Stand. I'm absolutely haunted by the idea.

I've never been much for reality. Never. Why is that? And more importantly, why can't I find a way to live a different reality that I'm comfortable with? One thing is this: I buy stuff because I'm trying to fill the void I have from not doing what my heart tells me to do. Then I have to do more of what my heart doesn't tell me to do in order to pay for all that stuff. And then I get even further away from my heart.

I asked my husband the other day if we could take enough money out of retirement to pay off enough bills so that I could stay home with him. He said we just can't and I understand that but I also know that the chances are that by the time I can afford to stay home with him, he'll be dead. I know it as well as I'm sitting here in the dark typing on my laptop at 12:48am listening to him snore beside me. And I told him that but he doesn't think it's a good idea. So we'll spend our years together like this. Me working and being so incredibly emotionally spent by the fucking insanity of a hospital emergency room that I have absolutely nothing left for anybody on my days off, including....no...especially him. And I'll order another movie or another book or some colonics equipment to fill the void inside me.