Something Evil This Way Comes

In anticipation of Valentine’s Day

Feb 132008

I’m not really sure I can nail down a starting point for this post. But I just received an e-mail, reminding me that a year ago one of my OVCA buddies died. She was one of those online support comrades, another one I never met in real life and another one who died too soon. This online support thing is a bit strange to me, because the wellbeing of a bunch of people I have never met means so much to me. It’s a good thing, it just continues to surprise me with its intensity.

There has been a lot of death and grief in my life over the last couple of years and there is not much I can do about those circumstances except try to maintain some sort of point of view that allows me to squeeze out some smidgen of something positive. Often, I fail miserably at this goal. But one thing that is important to me is that we remember the people we have lost.
So, today, I thought I should do something to remember Heather MacAllister. This is a snippet from what I wrote a year ago.

“Heather was a Fat/Social Justice Activist and the founder of the Fat Bottom Revue, a burlesque troupe full of really hot fat grrrls.

The thing Heather wanted to say, that message she wanted to leave us with, is that we should love our bodies, just like they are and appreciate all they do for us, and that we should love each other.”

How about we all try that? How about that for a post-Valentine’s Day idea?

So, in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, how about we all do like she says and try to, you know, love one another or at least be more kind to each other. What could it hurt?

What to say…

Cancer News 5 Responses »

Feb 062008

It certainly has been a wild ride these last few years and I find myself becoming reluctant to talk about any of the details of my ever so melodramatic life because it all seems so very over the top. It’s been hard. I guess I am just paying in advance for the salad days that are just over my horizon. When my address changes to “General Delivery, Easy Street, Vangroover, BC Canada”
I’d like to believe that.

Anyway, not to come out and sucker punch folks now that I have you thinking about other stuff but my dad died last week.
I haven’t really been talking about it because I can’t really think of anything to say about it. It’s all sort of surreal, and then that sounds like a stupid thing to think since the man has been dreadfully ill for the last couple of years. I sort of think that since my mom died, he didn’t think there was so much left to fight for. I dunno. I do tend to believe that he finally gave himself permission to let go, but I wasn’t there and I don’t really know what happened inside his head.

Anyway, he’s gone.
And she’s gone.
I confess, I don’t harbour images of a verdant and pastoral place where they are goofing around now, but I’d like to. If he threw in the towel because the woman he loved his whole life was gone, then I hope that somehow, they get to be 18 and together again.

Rodger Dodger
over and out.

Short People

Cancer News 2 Responses »

Jan 282008

Since I am going on and on and on about my mom these days….

My mom was under 5 feet tall.
My mom never weighed more than 100 pounds in her life. Like, really. Even if she was on anabolic steroids, she wouldn’t have touched 100 pounds. (Though I shudder to think of her with a neck as big as my thigh.)

When I was a teenager, Randy Newman had an actual hit on the AM airwaves with his song “Short People”.
My mom thought that was one of the most brilliant pieces of satire, a well aimed poke at our inclination to persecute the “other”, all packaged up in hatred towards short people.
It baffled me at the time that she wasn’t offended, she thought it was a great social critique.

My mom rocked.

“They got little baby legs that stand so low
You got to pick them up just to say hello
Well I don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
round here.”

It’s just on my mind tonight.

Birthday

Cancer News 1 Response »

Jan 262008

Yesterday was, or depending on your perspective, would have been my mom’s birthday. One of the strange things that comes up around my mom’s death is which tense to use in which situation. Like, was yesterday her birthday? Do dead people have birthdays? I really don’t know.

It’s also strange because my parents’ house is being put on the market. Now, I stumble when I say “my parents’ house” because it seems to me I really should have erased my mother from that equation and updated it to “my father’s house”. Except the ironic part is, my father hasn’t even been in that house since my mom died. And on that technicality, I feel I am allowed to continue referring to it as my parents’ house.

It’s also strange because my mother spent a lot of time telling us, her three kids, which bits of Harris treasure we would get or inherit when the time came. Well, the time has come. What is it they say about the best laid plans?

We ain’t no kin to the Rockefellers but when my parents bought something, which wasn’t that often, they bought good stuff. We had a very nice dining room suite that was promised to my brother. As a kid, it always annoyed me that he got the most cherished chunk of the inheritance pool. Now it’s time to move all that stuff from my parents’ home, and my brother has no room for that dining room suite. In a different life, I would love to have it, but simply don’t have the space and I shudder to think what my cats would do to it. My sister also is suffering from space restrictions.

It’s just a very strange feeling to have been told for your whole life that one day you will own this thing. And the thing has been assigned value by the very act of someone wanting to pass it along; of making a point of passing it along, because it mattered to them. And now there is nowhere for it to go, except maybe to an auction house. It’s caused me to look around my place and imagine what bits of stuff that I have that might get passed on to someone else, and what parts will end up in the landfill cuz most of us have very little room for more stuff.

So, my parents’ home has to be emptied out so someone else can move into it. And while I have never lived in that house, I still feel a strange loss. It’s not the loss of “my home”, per se. Only twice in my life have I felt like the house I lived in was “my home” and this house doesn’t qualify. But there is the loss of some sort of safety net. I suppose it’s another step in finalizing the growing up thing. There is absolutely no safety net anymore. That’s okay, it’s just a new feeling.
I try to imagine what it will be like, in the future, to drive along that highway and *not* take the exit that leads to my parents’ home, to just keep on driving till I land in a motel room further on up the road.

It also means facing the fact that lots of things that were important to my mom have no place to go and so they will probably go to the Goodwill or to the dump. That process, the throwing away of something she valued and in many cases made by hand, that’s the part that almost kills me.

Sometime in the next month or so, between work and school, I will go and help my siblings empty out my parents’ home. And I feel an astounding level of dread whenever I think about that, for quite a few reasons. A big one is that emptying out the house, the house I don’t care about, will bring a whole new level of finality to the situation. It feels a bit like closing a door on my parents.

I’m still working through it all.

Dang! I forgot to update my blog again.

Regular Life 1 Response »

Jan 122008

It’s been a typically long while since I last posted. Someone left me a little nudge in my comments section and the light went on. The magic one that appears above my head in my more animated moments.

See, it’s a weird thing with we cancer bloggers that if you don’t post for some chunk of time, people begin to worry. It’s a strange kinship. But it’s also a very good thing. It’s an experience unlike any other that I have had. I have become part of a secret club that nobody would ever wish to join, but now that we are here so we do our best to help each other and keep an eye on each other and share information about treatment and surviving in general. And in many cases we could pass on the street and not know each other. But, I am deeply affected by the good things and the bad things that happen in the lives of these folks and I suspect others have the same experience.
It’s strange, but a very good sort of strange and I am awfully glad that folks are out there, doing those things.
I’m also glad for my local face to face comrades. We all share something and, not to be all Sesame Street about it, but the sharing is good.

So, how’ve I been?
You know, I really couldn’t say. Which isn’t a very helpful response because you’d think me, of all people, ought to be able to at least fudge an answer.
But I think my mom’s death sort of hip checked me into some new and different frame of mind. It’s difficult to describe and mostly I am still trying to figure it out.
Some wee snippets of it are things like…. at Christmas this year, I had this small but constant sadness that I would never get a Christmas present from my mom ever again. Now, the reality is, my mom hasn’t been able to participate in Christmas for about 5 years. And I was not someone who believed she would ever have a miracle recovery from Alzheimers and we would all slide back to happier times. But it was the absolute finality of it that kept nipping at me.
And it wasn’t about needing or wanting some more stuff. It was a sense of missing how my mom used to put a lot of care and attention into the presents, and the wrapping itself was a work of art.

When my dad had to step up and take over that detail there was a marked change in the whole deal.
My dad, who has non Alzheimer’s related memory problems in that he just plain spaces things out, would send us each a smoke detector, some wrenches and a few screwdrivers all with their Canadian Tire price tag still on it. Often there would also be a one pound can of beer. Like I said, memory problems.
And I don’t mean to take away from the things my dad did. Because they are sweet in the way he tried so hard to do this thing, a thing he had never done before and here he was, an all grown up man, having to learn how to do the Christmas shopping for his grown kids. And are there any people more difficult to shop for than your adult relatives?
But I digress.

I tried pretty hard to do the ‘it’s just another day’ version of Christmas this year. But on the inside, it was a pretty introspective time. Which is okay. There are far worse ways of spending Christmas than being introspective, and I am guessing at least a few people reading this had them. It’s a tough time for lots of people. This year was tough, but not as tough as I had expected.

Okay, so Christmas is over.

It seems the current plan in family-land is to sell my parents’ home, though I guess I should say ‘my dad’s home’, but right now, I don’t feel like it.
And that creates another strange set of emotions. My dad is now enjoying all the mod-cons of a care facility and no longer needs a house. It all makes sense. So the siblings, and myself if I can squeeze in the time between work and school, will go to that wretched town and empty out my parents’ home and then it will be sold.
Now bearing in mind that this house is not one I have ever lived in myself. And that I hate hate hate the town my dad lives in. I still have this eerie feeling that there will no longer be that home base, that spot you can always sneak back to if the spit hits the spam in your life. The old safety net.
Given that I have never really used it as a safety net, it’s not so much of a loss in real terms. It was some strange under-utilized form of stability so, I suppose I should go create its replacement, though I don’t have a clue what that will mean or what it will look like.

That’s about it for now. Things are different. Still strange, still difficult more often that I would wish for (but who can’t say that?) but in a calm sort of way.

And to leave this on a trashy pop culture up-beat note, I am currently smitten, in a movie-star smitten sort of way, with Helena Bonham Carter. I watched the 5th Harry Potter movie one day last week and saw Sweeney Todd the next. Helena Bonham Carter does evil so good.

R.I.P… my mom

Regular Life 12 Responses »

Nov 092007

Last Saturday night, I had intended to be hanging out at an apres Hallowe’en “Day of the Dead” party but about the time the doors were opening for that event, my mom took one final lung full of breath and then cashed in her chips.
I’ve spent the last week in a town that I hate, burying a woman that I love and hanging on to a very delicate thread that ties me to sanity and the big picture. Okay, it slipped away more than once.

I expect I will feel a lot of things about my mom’s death over the next little while. There hasn’t been much time to just sit and let the reality wash over me. I’m sure that will come, and at all the least convenient times.

Here’s the thing.
I am a mix of good things and bad things. Somedays I am hard pressed to know what the good things might be, especially lately.
Whatever good there is in me got planted there by my mom.
When I was a kid, my mom wouldn’t let me watch Hogan’s Heroes. She said Nazi concentration camps/POW camps weren’t funny.
When I came home at age five and said someone had ‘jew’ed’ me out of something, she sat me on a stool and told me why I shouldn’t talk use expressions that justified treating other people atrociously.
When I came home at age six and said someone ‘gyp’ed’ me out of something, I got the same conversation, this time about the persecution of the gypsies rather than the Jews.
When I have acted like a dope, my mom could tell me to grow up and get over it and…. I would. More often than not.
I have always held my mom, and her opinion of me, in very high regard.

My mom died of Alzheimers, but more to the point, she died from isolation. When she was in her fifties, she and my dad moved to a town where she had to start all over again. And that was just too hard. It was too hard for her to find a job at that age and her social circle was vaporized, so that her only friends were the wives of my dad’s friends. And that didn’t actually click.
I feel bad about the loneliness my mother lived with for the last chunk of her life and I find myself wondering if there was anything I could have done better to support her.

My mom was smart and funny and ethical. She tried very hard to be fair, and I try to do the same.

It’s been a long time since my mom and I could have a conversation. She stopped knowing who her kids were about 3 years ago. And yet, she knew we were all there sitting with her right before she died. Something was different, her eyelids would flutter when one of us would talk. I dunno, but I know she knew we were there and I know that it mattered for her. And then she died.
If you knew how completely unlikely it is for me and my siblings to all be in the same room at the same time, you, like me, might think that she had actually died of shock.

So… my mom is dead.
Because it’s been so long since she participated in her life, I convinced myself it was just sort of a technicality. But I sat in the car and wept when we drove to the hospital to tell my dad that the woman he married 57 years ago had died.

The funny, not ha-ha funny but kick you in the ass funny, part is that everyone in my family has been having kittens about my dad and his crap-tastic health and his not-long-for-this-astral-plane future, and then my mom goes and sucker punches all of us and I think, “Good for you, mom. Good for finally getting some tiny shred of the attention you deserved.”

If there is one decent thing about my mom and Alzheimers, it’s that she was completely unaware of my whole cancer process, chemo and all its vile side effects. I am glad she never had to watch me go through that.

So, R.I.P. Mom.
Thanks for doing all you could to make me a decent person and the world a decent place.

R.I.P. Marianna

Cancer News 9 Responses »

Sep 082007

So, a friend of mine died of ovarian cancer on Friday morning. Unlike other folks who I sorta know who have died of OVCA in the last couple of years, she is someone I knew in the flesh and knew before her diagnosis.

Marianna got diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer about a year ago. I remember pretty clearly because I was having a crap-tastic weekend. I had just been told my dad has lung cancer, and I had a major appointment of my own at the High Risk Clinic, and in the midst of all that, a couple of friends took me out for dinner, to offer some morbid support. While we were having burritos, one of my friends’ cell phone rang, saying that Marianna was in the emergency department, with her girlfriend. On the way back from dinner, we stopped in to check on Marianna.

She said that the surgeons had drained a litre and a half of fluid from her lungs. She said they were talking about the possibility that it was cancer but, as she said, she wasn’t willing to believe that right off the bat.
I remember thinking, “You hold on to that thought as long as you can, sister.”

Marianna did chemo right up till about three weeks ago.
Along the way, people I know would say that she was dying.
I, as a cancer survivor, have a particular issue with regular folks deciding how much time a cancer patient has left on the clock. But suffice to say that Marianna has been proving folks wrong for at least the last six months.

And on Friday, she died.

I saw her on Monday night. She had been unconscious and, out of the blue, came to on Monday and spent the day on her porch, enjoying herself. By the time I got there, she had slipped back into sleep. But I sat there with her. It was nice. The house was warm like an orchid hothouse, but her bedroom window was open and it was a summer rain happening outside and a nice breeze and the sound of rain falling, and I was happy for her that she got to be in her home.

I had planned to go back on Thursday, but I got the mother of all colds and couldn’t go with all my germs.
And I knew that might mean I just wouldn’t see her again before she died. But then again, I thought, people have been burying Marianna for the last 6 months.

On Friday morning, a friend called to tell me she had died earlier that morning. I hope it was as peaceful as can be.

And now, my head is a jumble of emotions, few of which make sense in any linear fashion.

And tomorrow, I will go to a fund raising walk for Ovarian Cancer Canada.
Last year, after the walk, everyone on the team went to visit Marianna at the Cancer Agency, because she was still in the hospital.
Her fight was intense, and, while it seems to have been so much longer, began and ended in a year.

So, R.I.P., Marianna.

You were so much tougher than me.

Winners Walk of Hope

Cancer News 1 Response »

Sep 082007

It’s the last chance Texaco here, people. Tomorrow me and my peeps will be spending the morning in the sun, walking in the park and doing our bit to fundraise for Ovarian Cancer Canada. The timing is especially significant because we lost our friend, Marianna, yesterday morning, to ovarian cancer. She got diagnosed a year ago and she fought and fought and fought. I am in awe of what she went through. And so, tomorrow, we will go do our part.

If you’d like to help, you could sponsor me or anyone on the team.

Here’s the link for that gesture of random kindness:

That’s all for now. My head is a bit scrambly, and I’ll post something more sometime soon.

That which doesn’t kill us…

Cancer News 5 Responses »

Aug 152007

So, it’s been a very carcinogenic time lately.

How to explain.

My dad was re-admitted to the hospital for lung cancer/COPD/pneumonia.
That situation remains up in the air.

A friend, who was diagnosed with OVCA last summer, has been given a bed at the local cancer agency while she argues with them about whether or not she is palliative. It is her ferocious intent that she will go home and visit with her cats and work on her garden.
It strikes me that there are people who have, understandably I guess, taken that diagnosis and decided she is checking out, in spite of her kicking and refusal to just go along. I think that’s what people who aren’t sick need to do for themselves; start shifting their connections and, in some ways, pulling up their drawbridges.
I understand, and still, as someone who had plenty of people interact with me in a way that implied I had one foot in the grave, I will always back the long shot, cuz my friends, I am the long shot my own self.

So, that’s happening.
It’s weird on so many levels.
It’s a bit like staring at a fork in the road and seeing how someone else got the much rockier ride.
And do I feel any guilt about that?
More than you will ever know.

And then, last week, as all these things were shaking down, I made the ridiculous mistake of going through my “Copies to Self” file in my e-mail. I confess, I hadn’t gone through that file in several years. And in it, I found so many e-mails I had sent to women who have since died of ovarian cancer.
I’m counting four just off the top of my pointed little head.
Which leads me to wonder why I got to dodge that bullet and these other marvelous women took the hit.

And that’s not to say that OVCA didn’t completely destroy my former life.
It destroyed the most important relationship I have ever been in.
It messed with my work and my career aspirations.
It did strange things to my relationships with my friends.
And still, amid the fucking rubble that is my current life, I am the lucky one. Or one of them.

I’ve been really angry for the last few years about that which I have lost because of cancer. And unless you are a cancer survivor of some stripe, save yourself the keystrokes before you tell me something all sage-like, cuz you don’t understand cuz you can’t understand until you’ve done it.
Don’t mean to offend, just stating some facts.

Anyway… I have been angry. Cuz I was terrified.

And here is an enormous confession.

I remain terrified. Hence the crankiness.
Cuz whether you get it or not and whether you have already exhaled or not, for me… they still send me to a place at the cancer agency called the High Risk Clinic.
The folks at the cancer agency are only willing to say, “you are in the group of people which we view most optimistically”, and that’s when I live in a statistic of having a 20 – 30% chance of being around in 2011.
So, hey… I am one of the lucky ones.
And inside of all that, how weird is it to say that. But in spite of all the losses, I still get to wake up too early and go to work and curse that, and have my heart go in all its crazy directions, and if there are folks crying for me, it’s for things much less severe than because I left this mortal plain too soon.

So, I guess this makes me stronger.

It sure as hell has made me crazier.
And it has made me angrier. But I feel that I am turning a corner.
If I am gonna be here, then it’s time to get going and indulging, and letting go of that which torments me, to whatever extent that is possible.
But I feel so much less interested in being tormented by imbeciles and their presence in my peripheral vision.

Wish me luck.

And wish whatever you wish/hope for for the women still duking it out with this damned disease.

Rodger Dodger
over and out

Harry Potter and the weekend in paradise

Regular Life 5 Responses »

Aug 012007

I just spent 4 glorious days in this groovy cabin. I actually spent 2 months in this very cabin last winter. Back then, it didn’t look quite as splendid. That was because there was snow all over the ground as well as fallen trees and crap. Much chain saw action was necessary back then.This weekend was completely glorious. I drove off the ferry and I felt my shoulders start to drop.

The cabin is kind of bare bones. And there is a different cabin that I sleep in when I am there.
But here is the pretty cool part of the story.

I ordered my copy of the last Harry Potter book from that evil bookslinger that sells things basically at cost. Being a cheap bastard, I opted for the free shipping feature.
Now, I work 12 hour shifts and, from what the folks at Amazon were telling me, the book was due to arrive on one of my work days. So I arranged with my landlordy that she would take delivery for me and I would give her a container of yummy corn chowder. She did her part by being home and available. But the Mensa dudes at Canada Post apparently couldn’t read the sign I left on the door of the building, saying to buzz the landlordy. So, in spite of the sign, they buzzed my place, I wasn’t home, and they sent my book to a local post office, where it is still waiting to be picked up.

That was a speed bump interfering with my plan for a perfect weekend, but that was okay because I had a big armful of books with me for my little vacation.

So, I was on Galiano, having an amazing dinner of halibut grilled on the barbeque and we started chatting pop culture. I mentioned being vexed by Amazon. My friends mentioned that they had a copy and, since they had already read it, it was available for reading.
Well, really, it was all I could do to stay and finish dinner.

And that’s how I spent my time away. Laying in a chair, in the sun, on the deck of a wonderful cabin, reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Gallows. It was marvelous.

The other wonderful thing about being at the cabin is… there are bees. Lots and lots of bees. They swarm around the fuscia plants at the cabin. You can stand right in the middle of them, and they just keep buzzing around, doing their bee thing, completely uninterested in hurting you, and rubbing their little bee feet together and making with the honey.
I liked that a whole lot.
And the eagles.
And the dragonflies.
And some brilliant yellow little birds that maybe were some sort of finch, I dunno. I just really liked them.
And the strange thing that kept making splashing sounds in the pond, but I never did figure out what it was.

And then one morning, I woke up and saw that a rat had chewed through the screen on my cabin window and had helped himself to a goodly chunk of my peach.
Well, what the hell.
I thought it was funny.
The owner of the property felt considerably less jolly about the whole affair. What with the rat-liness of the whole thing. Me, I thought it was an ambitious mouse but the owner of the property says rat, rat, rat.

And now I am back in the city. Did my week’s worth of work and now I am on holidays till August 13th.
It’s Gay Pride in my town, so that will take a big chunk of the first half of that time.
And then, after that, I may just toss some food in my cooler and head off camping by myself.

And then… if everything works out, which really remains to be seen, a week long kayaking trip later in the month.
Come September I know I will have to buckle down with work and school and having no life and so I plan on running a bit wild this summer and leaving the cats in foster care a bit too often.
I’m sure they’ll deal.

Happy Pride, folks.

Gimme all your money.

Cancer News 6 Responses »

Jul 082007

Well, not *me*, exactly. More like the Ovarian Cancer Canada folks.

See, me and some friends will go walk around the park and people will give us some money for that, because that’s how this works. And then the OCC folks will take that money and do researchy things and that will be good and, one hopes, someday soon, we can put all this nastiness behind us. And somewhere along the line, if you give some, unknown to me, amount of money, you get to tell the government to take it a bit easier on your income tax.
Sweet deal, no?

Spike
queering up cancer since 2004

Living with the beast in your belly

Cancer News 1 Response »

Jul 062007

I have been thinking about what my friend wrote here and one of the details that struck me was her experience of knowing she had cancer and having to wait for several weeks for her surgery.
And I realized that this was so completely different than my experience.

In retrospect, maybe everyone around me who was associated with the medical world was patting me on the head and playing alcoholic family, but even as they had me count backwards from 100, I never believed I had cancer.

Here’s what I did know.

I knew I had something weird and palpable right beside my right hip bone and I knew it was becoming a hindrance to my sex life, hence my eventual willingness to have it checked out. (This mass, gentle reader, would turn out to be a benign tumour, living in the middle of a wasteland of ovarian cancer. Can you say “Irony saved my life”? I know I can.)

I know I went for an ultrasound and the technician actually couldn’t capture an image of my ovaries, because of the moss-like spread of the OVCA, but I didn’t completely grok what the problem was at that point, thinking instead that it was my great benign tumour of hair and teeth and other disgusting anatomical strays.

I recall being somewhat taken aback when, after meeting with my surgeon prior to my surgery, he sent me for bloodwork across the street at the cancer agency. That was the first time I ever walked in the building and I was ready to have a full on melt down and explain to anyone and everyone why I really didn’t belong in that building. I consoled myself with the (idiotic) belief that this was the closest lab to the hospital and that’s why he sent me there (conveniently overlooking the full scale lab right across the street).

I recall my then gf telling me she was worried and me telling her that it would all be okay, and honestly believing that, explaining that “things like that don’t happen to me.”

So, by the time anyone told me I had cancer, the bulk of it had already been cut out of me and was on its way to a tumour bank where it will live with other tumours and scientists will take it off the shelf and figure out a solution for all this anguish.

People with cancer often speak of feeling like their body betrayed them and there were people who asked me if that was my experience. In fact, I felt like I had betrayed my body; like I hadn’t done enough to look after my body in a toxic fast-food world. I have never felt like my body let me down.

In the long run, I made my body sit there and absorb terrible poisons so we could just hope to carry on. And my body, against all odds, did what I hoped it would do.

That’s just a strange detail that has been on my mind these last few days.

I went to visit my pal at the hospital. It was handy because I had an appointment with my oncologist, as weird and ironic luck would have it. I had lots of old ghosts walking with me between the hospital and the cancer agency. And it is completely overwhelming how many things have happened in my life since the first time I wandered from the hospital to the cancer agency for bloodwork. One really significant detail was seeing my reflection in a window and noticing that I was walking alone.
It’s not my ideal, but it’s the best case scenario these days.

And, for those who follow these details at home, things are cool in cancer land for now.

Gack!

Cancer News 3 Responses »

Jul 032007

I woke up this morning to an e-mail from a friend who is having a double mastectomy because she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She is having her surgery today.
It just sucks.

If you’d like to read about what’s up with Mary, you can go:

here

More later.

management woes

Cancer News No Responses »

Jun 132007

You know, I really like my bosses and my non-bosses who exist in a parallel universe where they have to (apparent) authority over me, but tonight, I could take every one of them over my knee and spank them till my hand was raw.

I’m just sayin’.

And… that’s *all* I’m sayin’.

Re-connected

Regular Life No Responses »

Jun 102007

Last week, while screwing around on my PC, I suffered an all too familiar screen freeze. I quickly wrapped my hand around the CPU to flip the ‘any key’ and that was all fine. It was just that the re-flipping produced absolutely no results. Just a big black screen on my monitor staring back at me uselessly. I was at first optimistic that there may be a miraculous and spontaneous re-birth, but no.

It’s times like this when it sucks to work 12 hour shifts because I had to wait till Thursday to even get a chance to take my computer in to the shop. And I must say, it was freaky to spend some time sans computer and realize my huge reliance on the beastly machine.
For example, I had a request to make some soup for a friend who is sick, and I originally thought, “sure, there is that yummy black bean soup I have been living off lately”. But then I realized that the recipe was online (at epicurious.com, in case you are looking for a great website for recipes) so instead I had to guttle around in the freezer and find a couple of tupperware containers of Sportswoman soup, which is a recipe known only to me, and while I am sure it did the trick for my friend, it was amazing to keep slamming into my assumption that anything that needed to be done could be done online.

I don’t know about you, but I am fairly internet dependent and I would say that I get an urge to do something, whether that is write an e-mail or look something up, at least twenty times a day.
In a big picture sort of way, I am glad that I went without, if only to demonstrate where I am at with all that.
And I am also happy because I spent way more time just laying on my couch reading books, rather than reading, well, who knows what sort of mindless shite on the computer.

Summer is making itself known here in my city, if only in a tentative way, and I have started exploring some vacation options for myself. Stay tuned on that score.
A vacation seems sorely needed.
Work has been especially gruelling lately, dealing with a lot of death in the work community. And it was made even more freaky when one of my co-workers was assaulted by one of the folks we work with. The colleague received 30 stitches to his face, many of which were around and inside his eye.
It’s crap like that that makes a person jump back a bit and say, “whoa… that could have been me. and why am I doing this, exactly?”
Of course, we do it for more complicated reasons than I can explain right here, but still, I think everyone I work with was horrified that someone who is known to us could do such an awful thing to a co-worker, and a totally nice man.

So, that’s me, in a nutshell. As always, it’s a mix of good and sort of complicated.

Okay, amigos. It’s a work night and there are dishes to do and counters to wipe before I lay my scruffy head down for the night.

Later…

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