So I Had a Bad Day

(copied from dland)

I woke up this morning and could not hear at all, which means most likely an inner ear infection. That one cannot be ignored, and requires prednisone. So I called in sick (so to speak, we now log in absences via computer) and have been trying to get an appointment with the doctor. I'm having trouble with their phone people/voice mail. Last time, I called at 9 and left a message, and heard back from them in ten minutes and got a 9.45 appointment. Today, I can't connect with the right people. It's 9.30. I'll try again in five minutes, and report my progress here as things go on.

I could not read Timequake. Allegedly a novel, it has no story that I could detect, just ramblings about what Vonnegut would have written if he had decided to write this book. Okay, that's not so unusual for him, but he usually keeps that stuff in the preface. This was the whole book, so I gave up around chapter 7. If I can't find that queens book downstairs, I'm going to re-read The Order of the Phoenix and the The Half-Blood Prince.

12.15

I never did get a call back from the regular doctor's office -- not a good sign -- but I'm going to see the ear-nose-throat guy at 1.45. I'm just going to see my regular sinus guy who will hopefully give me prednisone for a week so that I can continue to hear. Although my hearing is a bit better now. But my head was ringing like a bell for hours last night, and again this morning when I woke up and couldn't hear.

I still feel pretty crappy in general, but I'm going to try to get some things done as long as I'm out, like get to the bank and drop something off at my sister's house (she's not home, just leaving it in her mailbox.) I have to pick up a few groceries and when I get home, attempt yet again to pay K's summer tuition. They are really not making it easy.

Later.

4.20

Have you seen a doctor, or spoken to a doctor? Because I haven't.

Long story short, I got to my 1.45 appointment at 1.30, and at 3.00, somehow found myself still sitting in the waiting room and crying. Why? No clue, except that the burning feeling in my face for the last few days (due to the congestion, I assume) feels the way you do before you're about to cry, so I guess the dam just burst. I did not want to sit there on display, crying, so I got up and left. By the time I got home, there was a message wondering where I was, and apologizing for the delay, etc. We played a little phone tag, but allegedly, the doctor is going to call me any minute here. Yeah, I'm holding my breath.

There was also a message from the regular doctor's office that hadn't called back this morning, so I called them and left a rather detailed account of my symptoms on their voice mail -- they asked for it -- and a lot of snuffles and sobs. Because I am still crying, off and on. I don't want to say for no reason. The reason came to me on the drive home. Here ya go.

You know, I make a whole lot of jokes about being a hypochondriac and/or having all these varied ailments, but the reality of it just kind of hit me, right there in the doctor's office, I guess. I have finally accepted that I am not a hypochondriac. The only truth left is that there is a lot of shit wrong with me. If I were a car, I'd be a lemon.

The first wave of this, in the doctor's office, was that now I can't go to this doctor anymore, and that made me very, very sad, because I've been going to him for a long time and he pretty much keeps me breathing. But I'm better on that score now, because it was his office that made the call to apologize to me, so I don't have feel that since I walked out, they're mad at me or won't want me back. That part of it is resolved, anyway.

But I think the rest of it has kicked off a depression, which, you know, you usually don't realize in the first hour, but I was in the car and I was driving, and I had that one thought that has always been there when I'm depressed: Wouldn't it be easier if I just drove into a brick wall and it was all over? I could avoid all the drama.

Now, I am not suicidal, not at all, but that one image has been in my mind for 30 years whenever I'm actually depressed. So it's like a benchmark, and now I know I'm depressed. Timing sure sucks, with R's play next week and a million plans going along with it. But I'll be okay. If I could do something for the health concerns of the moment, I could pull out of it, and I guess I will.

As for the full depth of the thoughts of depression, you don't want to know. Maybe I can share them more objectively tomorrow, and maybe if I do, it'll bum you out, too.

I'm going to blow my nose now, and then go to the bathroom, and then sit here with my thumb up my ass waiting for two different doctors' offices to call. Sounds like a good time for Harry Potter.


watching Ellen :: entry #1450

Eh.

I actually left school a little early this afternoon, and came home and took a nap. Okay, two naps, since the first nap ended with a quick trip to the bathroom and a snack, and then I went back to sleep. I've been feeling somewhat better since then, so let's hope it's a trend. I felt miserable most of the day at school, but I had things I needed to do, so I went.

I picked up the new hearing aids this afternoon. Once again, they need some adjustment. I'm having a little trouble understanding speech, which, you know, would be something I'd probably need to do on a regular basis, and I think these are turning themselves off, too. Really. All I want to do is buy absurdly expensive hearing aids and have them work. Why is this hard?

And in the Amazing Stories department, K went food shopping this afternoon while I was sleeping. That's not something you'll see me write often. But it was very nice of her.

We just watched last night's Idol, in preparation for tonight's results show. I'm guessing that Chris and Phil are going, although I thought Phil wasn't bad last night. I really liked Blake; he's a cutie and he's interestingly talented.

Okay, I'm going to see if I can read a little Timequake before all the TV starts for the night. I'm better off reading, since I tend not to want to eat while I read, so we'll see how that goes. I think when I finish this Vonnegut I need to go for a little non-fiction, something historical, I think. K had a book on the female descendents of Queen Victoria who became queens themselves -- there were five, I think, in that generation of her daughters or granddaughters -- but it was in the basement and I know I moved it when I cleaning up, so I don't know if I'll be able to find it or not.


watching Raymond :: entry #1449

So It Goes

Some days are hard to follow with just regular days, but as the great man said, so it goes. Thank you all so much for your kind words and sympathy.

(I'm thinking, btw, that my reward tattoo when I've lost the rest of the weight is going to be So it goes. According to Kurt Vonnegut, it's what they say on the planet Tralfalmadore when somebody dies. It's what he's most often quoted for. I bet I won't even be the first person to get that tattooed, either.)

So, the next day. K is having a very hard time with it. R has a lot going on, and that distracts her, and I am just older, I guess. Of course it's sad; we are all sad. K, I think, is depressed. She needs something to distract her, too. Well, tomorrow we are finally having that lunch with the Sibs and her kids, Monday is K's last day of classes for the semester, and this week will be her last at the Giant Jeans Conglomerate. Hopefully, she'll also sub a few days this week.

In the meantime, my allergies have kicked in big time, and I woke up this morning (after a terrible night's sleep) with a sore throat, achy ears, and the whole stuffy/runny nose experience. I've been pretty miserable all day. My stomach does seem to be settling down, though. And we were distracted for part of the day.

R's roommate is moving out, not because of any falling out between them, but that was leaving R with a three bedroom apartment she couldn't handle on her own, and trouble finding a new roommate. Even though she was happy where she was, she realized that it would be best to start looking for her own place, alone. She had appointments to see two today, so K and I went with her.

One was a studio in a fairly large apartment building in Jersey City. Ten years ago, you would not have wanted to move to Jersey City, and ten years from now, everyone will be dying to move there. 2007 ... not so sure yet. Anyway, it's too far and the apartment, a studio, wasn't great. Then we went to see a one-bedroom in the city she's living in now, just a few blocks away from where she's already living.

It was just adorable. It looks like a very old building, older than the 1917 the owners think it is, and full of charming details. A small apartment building with six or seven apartments in it. I think it must have been a large single family house once, but was cut up into units long ago. There are three floors; the place was saw was on the third floor, up a winding staircase. (Love those.)

Anyway, it's two nice size rooms and a bathroom. The first room has the kitchen in it, but there's also room to make it a living room/dining room. And there's actually a back porch, of all charming little details. After much discussion, and R saying she would call the owners on Monday morning, she called them this afternoon, so the place is hers. I think she'll be very happy there. And it met one of her most important criteria:

She can have a cat there.

Which makes me feel worse for K, since now R has the chance to get her very own kitten, while K mourns for little Q. (We still have BooBoo, of course, who actually pooped in the litter box today, first time in years. Interesting.)

Okay, time to collapse somewhere.


watching -- :: entry #1445

Better Now

An update, but first, the last Yiddish word I used in the last entry was faigeleh. Literally, a faigeleh is a little bird, and is often a term of endearment for small children, especially girls. My grandmother almost always called me faigeleh, as in "Faigeleh, can you hand me ... " whatever it was, as you might call someone "Sweetie." However, in more contemporary slang (which goes back a good 50 years or more) faigeleh is also used to indicate a homosexual man, or a man with effeminate tendencies. It is not always derogatory, althougth it can be. It can be merely descriptive, as gay now is, or it can be hurled as an insult. But it's not the origin of the English insult fag, which is actually English, as in British, in origin, and comes from faggot, which means a burning bundle of sticks or wood used to start a bigger fire.

Okay, class dismissed.

The rug in the basement is gone, and was not that hard to get rid of. It was a little challenging to get the stuff moved off it, and some things had to be repacked, but the rug cut up into strips very easily, and when the Hubs got home, he carried the pieces outside. I had also left a narrow strip since the stuff on top of it was too heavy; I planned to get shelves and put them up on Monday and then the rug would be gettable, but the Hubs somehow managed to get that out, too. So there are no wet boxes sitting down there, nothing in imminent danger, and I think, nothing prone to smelling. I still have work to do, as in the shelves and re-arranging everything for future safety, but it's all much more managable now. And it turns out that the shelves I need are on sale at Target this week for half of what I paid for the ones I already have, and got a few years ago elsewhere. Score. I may be dropping by Target every day this week until I have enough to cover every basement wall.

I cleaned up my desk. I cleaned up the coffee table. I finished Jailbird. I finished Dead-Eye Dick. So I'm on the move. Next: Galapagos. And getting those bills paid. And I gathered up all the shoes and put them in a laundry basket. Yes, things are looking up. I don't feel so ... okay, whatever the word was that I couldn't find, I don't need it anymore. I'm okay.

Oy. Gotta put the last wash in.


watching Today in New York :: entry #1439

Report From the Trenches

I believe that "trench" would be the most descriptive word for my basement, because the edges of full of yucky water and it smells more or less like a sewer. I keep holding onto the memory that after the hurricane in '99, when we had way more water than we had this time, it all dried up and did not smell. Let's keep the good thought. I think it's the big carpet remnant that smells, anyway, and that's going over the weekend.

The plumber was here and said that the leak (from the kitchen sink into the basement) isn't that bad and can wait until next week when they're not busy (and when I'm on what is now laughingly called "my vacation"). He also said that I could safely use the washer and dryer, and I got right on that, because I'm thinking the less-than-lovely smell is also the result of -- TMI coming -- cat-towels that have accumulated Boo residue over the last couple of days and which I could not wash. Eeuuw, indeed. But they're clean now, and K and I are going to hit the IHOP and then I'll put them in the dryer when I get back. I know that lots of people never run the dryer if they're not home, but I always do. I figure, if the house is going to blow up, I'd really rather not be here. But this time I have to wait for it to get going and make sure I don't smell gas. (The plumber assures me that dryers have safeguards so that if the pilot is out, the gas doesn't keep on coming, which really, who knew? I've always suspected death-by-clothes-dryer is a real possibility. Just another one of those things I irrationally fear.)

(Which leads to this particularly long "I digress". Before we moved to the house 20 years ago, we lived in a two-family house, the upstairs apartment, and I always suspected that one day, the house would do us in. So, one morning, I woke up early, about six, to get little baby R her bottle, and on my way from the kitchen to her room, the whole house shook. I a) was scared shitless, and b) could feel the floor shaking and moving under my feet, and c) fell and/or fainted. Either way, the Hubs, who was asleep, heard me hit the floor and leaped out of bed. Once he saw I was speaking to him, he helped me back into bed, where I lay in a quivering heap of cold sweat, and went to take the bottle to the baby. While he was in her room, I heard on the radio that there had been an earthquake in north Jersey a few minutes earlier! When he came back, he asked tenderly if I was okay, and I said, not moving, "There was an earthquake." He did his best to comfort me, and said "No, you fainted." "There was an earthquake," I said again, and a few times, until finally he heard it on the radio too, and then believed me. The furnace had not blown up. There had been a goddam earthquake. In New Jersey.)

(The house shook another time, too, when one of those big round oil thingies in Linden, on the New Jersey Turnpike maybe 15 - 20 miles from us, blew up, but we also heard that and found out about it right away.)

.
.
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So we are back from the IHOP, headache much better after eating, and I only ate what I planned to and that's fine. I'm finishing the entry before I approach the dryer, since I ought to finish one thing before I start another one, and K is having a cigarette down in the basement, and you know, why tempt fate. She was telling me more over dinner about yesterday's subbing experience, and she was making me happy. She's got the teacher instinct, all right. Not that I wouldn't have expected her to, she's got it in the blood from both sides, but it's nice to know for sure.

Hey, I read a book last night! I've been thinking more about why I don't read books often anymore, and I usually say it's because I have a short attention span, but I don't think that's it, actually. I think it's that I know I will get lost in a book, and I don't want to start one unless I have the time and focus to give myself to it completely. Okay, that sounds weird. But I actually went in to work later than usual this morning -- I skipped my walk -- so I could finish it. The funny thing is, it turned out that this was a book I'd read before! It was Vonnegut's Slapstick, and although I realized right away that I'd already read it, I kept on. Next is Jailbird, which I didn't buy but had in the library. I may not start it until tomorrow night, though, since I'm devoting my after school time tomorrow to that nasty rug downstairs.


watching Reba :: entry #1435

Where's That Baby Book?

You know how you record the milestones of your child's life in her baby book?

Today was K's first day in front of a classroom. They called her late last night to sub at the high school today, and she went. I swear I wanted to take a picture of her "first day of teaching" outfit. (She looked adorable, I might say, and not 17, which is the goal when you're a first-day substitute who's 5'2" and slight.)

I did see her a few times during the day, and all seemed to be going well. The amazing thing is that when she left the high school at 2.45, she had to zip over to her job in the Giant Jeans Conglomerate, where she's working today from 3 to 8. So, a 12 hour day for her.

Both my children have a very good work ethic. Jack would be incredibly proud.

So, minutes after I finished my list last night, Boo began to poop here, there, and everywhere. The perfect end to the perfect day. And I cannot use my washer and dryer until the plumber tells me it's okay, since they were sitting in an inch or so of water. That would be the plumber who was supposed to come today at 3 but didn't because other people have no heat or hot water and all we have is a leaky sink. They swear they're coming tomorrow. Please.

I did use the pump I got yesterday to get rid of as much water as I could from the laundry area, so I guess it's going to dry. Even so, I have all kinds of stuff on the machines that I saved from sitting in puddles, so it'll be a logistical puzzle whenever it happens, unless the floor is completely dry and I can put that stuff back down on it again.

Here's what I really want: a team of strong men to take everything out of my basement, clean it all up, and then put stuff back neatly, on shelves, with nothing at all resting on the floor except the rubber-coated bottoms of the shelf uprights. Perhaps that's too specific. Honestly, I would call someone from the local paper, but I wouldn't even know what to look for or whom to call. And there are plenty of people in town way worse off than we are, so whoever it is that does this is going to be booked up with more important problems.

I actually did one little something for myself before. After I'd re-scheduled the plumber and then taken Q to get her claws clipped -- she was walking on tippy-toe -- I went to Barnes and Noble and got two Kurt Vonnegut novels that I've never read: Slapstick and Galapagos. Slapstick was his first one I didn't read, if that makes sense, and I know that Galapagos is one of R's favorites. I may start after dinner, which is happening in five minutes, if I'm not distracted by some shiny object.


watching Still Standing :: entry #1434

So It Goes

[copied from dland]

I'm not sure how I let this slip by for the last couple of days, but I suppose it's not really important if time is moving haphazardly, back and forth, or in a linear fashion. It all comes out the same in the end.

Billy Pilgrim has become stuck in time. Or, to be more precise, Kurt Vonnegut has died.

My high school boyfriend, Bob, had a way of imposing his will on me people. This was not always to my detriment (although my parents weren't too sure.) He practically forced me to read his all time favorite book, Catch-22, which I've never regretted. And he was pretty adamant about Cat's Cradle, too. And I was hooked.

Have you ever seen Field of Dreams, how Ray (the builder of the baseball diamond) seeks out the novelist Terry Mann because he was the influential philosopher of his youth? I never stalked Vonnegut, but there was certainly a time when I knew where he lived (Martha's Vineyard) and the names of his children (I've forgotten that.) Kurt Vonnegut spoke to me in a way that I think no other writer ever has, even -- yes, I dare to speak this aloud -- Shakespeare. What Vonnegut wrote reached into every little corner of me; what I have become is in many ways shaped by the words Kurt Vonnegut wrote that I read in my late teens and early twenties. And if you read the article I linked to above, you'll see that I was far from the only one. Aw, you're probably one of us, too. A generation whose ideals were not shaped so much by Dr. Benjamin Spock, as the media once accused, but by Kurt Vonnegut.

He was quirky: no one else got away with writing like that, real novels masquerading as science fiction. (Or maybe they really were science fiction.) He took topics that were nothing more than ethical questions to us and embroidered them into their weirdest possible outcomes, as in the excellent short stories "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House." He took the most ordinary people or experiences and shared them with us, as in the stories "Who Am I This Time?" or "The Long Walk to Forever." Hell, the preface of each of books was pure gold.

I read all his early works, although not all of the recent stuff. I did read and listen to his last book, A Man Without a Country. I remember being totally blown away by Breakfast of Champions; it has in it one of my truly favorite scenes in all fiction: one of the characters has already told us that he calls mirrors "leaks" because he thinks they are portals to other dimensions, a leaking-through of one dimension to another. And then there is a scene in a bar where a great many of the characters from many of Vonnegut's novels are gathered. (I loved the way his characters kept turning up in more than one book.) And then we learn that the man sitting in the corner, watching the scene through mirrored sunglasses, is the well-known writer Kurt Vonnegut, who happens to be passing through town that day.

Blew me away. Still does.

Anyway, I've mentioned before that I have one bookshelf here, a little to my left, on which I have copies of the books that changed my life, or, at the very least, had major influence on my life. Occasionally, I'll refer to a title or two. Only one author is represented more than twice, and he's there four -- really, five -- times.



He's flanked by Catch-22 on the left and Inherit the Wind on the right. I have new copies of four of his titles: Slaughterhouse-Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle. Lying across the top of them is my original copy of The Sirens of Titan, a mess, but R wouldn't let me throw it out. I bought the new copies and re-read all of them four years ago, right after I turned 50. It seemed like the thing to do. The re-discovery was a wonderful process.

So, I just thought I'd say something. And there it was.

"Poo-tee-weet?"

watching Will & Grace :: entry #1430