Lion and Magic Boy

I’m living smack in the middle of the Middle Ages.  Everyone knows that scarlet fever went out of fashion hundreds of years ago.

Except I must have superpowers of bringing back dead diseases.  Things were too boring around here anyway.  Plague, anyone?

My tattooed torso is covered with sunburny redness. Also my neck and earlobes. Arms. Okay, my entire skin hurts and feels two sizes too small. All because Typhoid Eric is a veritable petri dish and likes to get close and breathe streptocacaprophylactic on everyone.

Let me tell you about scarlet fever.  The number one thing to know about it is that it’s highly contagious.  I could breathe near you right now and you would be swallowing shards of glass within 3 days and wondering why your skin hurts within 5.  Guaranteed.  Also.  You need drugs for this.  The kind that kills off those little warring feudal sonsabitches in your throat before they start invading other places like your kidneys.  Scarlet fever is related to strep throat, the thing that the pediatrician sticks a long long q-tip down your kid’s throat for (I seriously want a pack of those q-tips; they look useful).

[was trying to insert a joke having to do with Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter but I couldn't quite put it together, so pretend that I did and you got the joke and now you're laughing companionably, pleased with yourself because of your fondness for jokes made from obscure literary references]

Two comments:

1. Since losing custody of health insurance I have been to the doctor 34 times as frequently as when I actually had health insurance.

2. Ow. Hurty throat hurt. Can’t talk.

I used to get strep on two major holidays a year and while growing up could be counted on to make Easter and Thanksgiving extra special. It became no particular big deal to anyone after awhile (except me) and after doing that for a few years and especially after being confined to the couch for an entire mono-ridden month of my 4th grade year, having nothing to entertain me but Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith and a box of Red Vines (plus the whole colored fairy tale book series by Andrew Lang), I suddenly stopped being sick anymore.

So this thing of fever and throat issues and especially antibiotics is a little foreign to me. I wonder if they bled me enough? I was serious about the leeches; it’s hard to get really good quality leeches these days.

My eyelids itch now.

Oh, and I breathed all over my laptop so don’t get too close to your screen there. Sorry!

Want to know what I did yesterday?  Of course you do.  You got up this morning thinking, “What did Karen do yesterday?”  All right then!  Stop twisting my arm!  Ow!

This is what I did:

1.  Spent $100 at vet for thick white fluid in small bottles meant to be handily squirted into cat’s mouth twice a day, and also for an entire case of prescription canned cat food that of course looks and smells identical to regular cat food but costs four times as much.

2.  Chased Blood-Dripping Peeing Razor Blades in Inappropriate Places Cat around the house in a vain attempt to deter said cat from leaving bright red spots on the rented carpet whenever he headed purposefully for a corner.

3.  Told landlord, “Sure, bring someone over tomorrow to have a look at buying the place!  What do I care!”

4.  Ran around insanely throwing things into drawers and closets.  Looked at said rented carpet with loathing.  If I issue them green glasses at the door, the green will cancel out any red they see, right?

5.  Met with patchouli-scented petsitter who will happily inject said cat’s mouth with said white cat-fluid twice a day (for a fee) while I am away later this week and next, since I know damn well that 12-year-old boys will not.  At least not the one I know.

6.  Taxes!  Something about taxes!

7.  Regretted not having sent in those estimated self-employment tax payments all last year.

8.  Work.  Because “working from home” means, uh, working.  From home.  However to the unaided eye, “work” can look an awful lot like “doing something on a computer.”  So I’ll clear that up and just say I spent 3 hours at work.

9.  Painfully swallowed more than 4,600,000 times.  Because someone came in the night and filled my throat  full of shards of glass and strep-laden steel wool.

1. I am seeing how dirty I can let the bathroom get before I break down and clean it. Though the concept of “dirty” is relative. (And I will most certainly clean it before Wednesday.)

2. Yesterday my mom used her normal tactic of getting off the phone, which is a “Well, I’m sure you have to cook dinner now….” trailing off uncertainly and with plenty of martyrdom.

My response: “I don’t cook anymore. The kids know where the kitchen is.”

Silence. Looooong silence.

“Are you serious?”

(I was, but only sort of and only once in awhile.)

“Yes.”

More silence.

“Okaaaay. Well, I’m sure you have to go now anyway.”

That’ll keep her guessing for awhile.

3. Last night Serena and Eric were running around the house, making a circuit through the livingroom and kitchen. I felt like running so I got up and joined them (Eric is a definite obstacle to making any sort of speed through the circuit).

Serena: “I’ve never see you run in the house before!”

(She doesn’t remember the last house where I played soccer with Nathaniel in the kitchen, which was quite large.)

~~~

It’s not easy to move out of the box created by others’ expectations of you, but it’s fun.

My life has reached a crisis state. I’ve been trying to hide it but there’s no use any more; things have simply escalated to a point I can no longer deal with. Even if that means ending a sentence with a preposition.

I need a new blogentity.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when I looked at one of my stupid Pages over there in the sidebar and said, “Fuck! Who was that bitter angry woman who wrote all that shit anyway?” and I stomped around angry for an entire day wondering who it was that broke into my blog and wrote all that stuff. Then I realized that person had been me, and I was no longer that person.

Fine. Change the stupid Pages then.

Right. Not. Because my stupid fucking blog is BROKEN and I can’t FIX IT. Yes, I have Googled “wordpress can’t edit pages delete posts” and I’ve come up with some threads where people tentatively say stuff like “you have to query your wp_options table”, a phrase which causes my brain to instantly snap shut as it requires digging into my database, and I don’t think my blog and I know each other well enough yet for that kind of unalterable intimacy.

I have upgraded to WP 2.5 and that did no good. Right now the message (in red, no less) “YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO DO THAT” is staring at me unblinkingly, taunting me. I never even asked WP 2.5 for anything! We only just met! And already it is telling me NONONO to questions I have not yet asked.

Also I want a new theme. Fine. Because I found my blog twin, and I am still stumbling about stuttering a little at seeing my very unique (but free! downloadable by anyone!) theme I never bothered to customize in use by someone else. Someone else quite like me in many ways, which is totally cool. But still. A little weird.

So I’m getting out. Making changes. This is no longer the ALL of me I want to present.

But the stupid fucking Pages. Will follow me.

So I need help.

Help? Anyone?

Oh, hi. You like my new dropdown sidebar widgets? They only took me seven tries and 3.4 hours to install. And they still have issues, but unless they agree to pay half the counseling fees to get through those issues they may just have to deal with them for awhile. Hopefully it won’t affect their quality of life too much.

The sun is out, mocking me. It asks why don’t I get off my butt and go outside and run a few 10K or so. I have no answer, so I close the blinds more tightly and pretend it’s winter still.

Here’s my running log for the past week:

Day 1: Sunny. A good day to think about running.

Day 2: Raining. My first run since October shouldn’t be in the rain. I’ll wait.

Day 3: Cloudy. Does that look like rain? I would hate my first run since October to be in the rain. I might run wrong or something. I’ll wait.

Day 4: Sunny. (What? I didn’t hear you.)

Day 5: Cloudy and kind of cold. Brr. Better wait until it’s sunny.

Day 6: Where are my running shoes?

Day 7: Eric found my running shoes where someone must have stashed them in the very far back of the closet. Huh. Is that a cloud there? It might get cloudier. Better wait.

So yes, the running thing is going well, quite well, thank you. I hardly have any sore muscles at all.

[insert masterful segue here]

Oh! Serena made banana muffins yesterday. Almost practically by herself. I was only there barking out orders about how to properly scoop flour without packing it down too much and how to melt the butter without it exploding all over the inside of the microwave. Tonight she makes paella, Peking duck, and crepes suzette, and maybe steak au poivre for dessert. These kids have to pull their own weight around here.

Yes, I am a victim. Although I often decry the victim mentality that’s so prevalent these days, I am one myself now.

Because the “high-speed internet” promised on the website of the hotel we stayed at this past weekend? Was possibly the Slowest Internet Ever, worse even than the 14.4 kbps dialup we all used to have. (Remember those days? And it all seemed so new?)

So I am catching up on 5 days of Unintentionally-Inflicted Internet Abuse.  Not to mention all the other abuses heaped upon us from our 4-night stay there, like the breakfast-that-wasn’t, the not-so-free-parking, or the fact that every other room in the hotel was occupied by college students convening in the hallways and in the room next door to ours.

Oh! My workshop in Tucson went wonderfully. The people there were all warm and lovely, and I couldn’t have had a nicer venue in which to teach people all about finding their personal power animals or connecting with their spiritual guides. And the best part was that I ate Mexican food every day. Every day! There was a little place down the street from the hotel where you could get two breakfast burritos, humongous things the size of a horse’s penis (thankfully I didn’t make this connection until just now while searching for an appropriate analagy; noticing that over the weekend would have made consuming one a very different experience) filled with scrambled eggs and ham and cheese and stuff and doused with two kinds of salsa, for $5. Five! Dollars!

And there were mountains all around, reddish rocky ones, and there was a hot tub under the stars. And channeling for all those wonderful warm people was like touching their souls, truly an honor.

So if you live in the southwest, I’ll be back there in Tucson doing this again. Soon. You can subscribe to my announcements!

The sad part: Matthew took a plane this past Monday that was pointed in one direction, and my plane was pointed in another. So I am fighting having to get used to the Matthew-shaped energetic hole left here. And everything else that goes along with that.

Uh, I’m not sure I actually believe the rest of that phrase, actually: la plus c’est la meme chose. To me, things are always changing and never staying the same.

I alluded a while ago about issues with my mom. Essentially (and there is much more to say than this), I am tired of the old family regime of never talking about anything other than the most shallow of topics. With my mom the topics are my kids, my court issues/divorce (aka The Neverending Story), my cat(s), her cats. Safe topics. Venture outside that framework and someone (not me) changes the subject. Yesterday I spoke to her for the first time in weeks. It was shallow. I worked on tweaking the header on my site update while we talked (always my way of not noticing the avoidance of anything real has been to engage myself in something else while we talked). Then I told her something about another member of the family, something I think so far only I (of the family) knew about.

“You mean ____ doesn’t know?” she asked.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Well, ____ should know,” she said.

“I know, but it’s not my decision,” I replied, thinking all the while then why did you tell Mom, you idiot?

She wanted to contact the other member of the family and relay the information. For the first time ever, I told her that under no condition was she to do that, that the information belonged to the first person and that I regretted telling her, and that we aren’t even a family “like that” anymore, not since my parents’ divorce, hello, close to thirty years ago, and that it was none of her business at this point. And to stay out of it. And that I would be very, very angry with her if she told anyone.

I’ve never talked to either parent like that before. It felt totally weird but kind of good.

It was like I came out of the I’m-the-kid-and-you’re-the-parent dynamic and became Just Me. I’m 44 fucking years old and it’s about time.

Why, hello! I am reminded I have a blog. So hello, blog! Nice to see you again. Have I been avoiding you? No not at all why yes, actually. But it’s not you, it’s me. I mean it baby! You have many fine qualities. I am sure you will find another blogger soon. Very soon. One with motivation. One who loves you enough to post every day, just like in the old days. One who updates your links and looks at your stats. One who loves you enough to tell you when you’re getting fat and then updates your theme.

…What? Well, yeah, maybe I can still be your blogger. I mean, we do have a history, don’t we? Two years of posting regularly, and four years before that of holding onto a blog name with a couple of really old and lame posts. Something about a trip to a dentist. I mean, what was that?? We’ve come a long way together, you and me. I can’t exactly forget all we have been to one another now, can I?

So okay. I’ll give us another shot.

Yeah. Well.

See, early last week I was told Strollerderby no longer had need of my services. They were going in another direction, and it didn’t include me (what? bitter? me? noooo…)  So, having spent approximately 3,209,577 hours in the past year trolling the internets for stories for Strollerderby, thinking about stories to write for Strollerderby and my angle on them, writing said stories for Strollerderby, queueing them up (for Strollerderby) checking stats later and counting posts, plus the all-important back-chat with my fellow Strollerderby bloggers, I sorta associate my laptop and indeed ALL computers with Strollerderby now. And nobody likes getting fired. It sorta hurts. So I have been discovering a world outside those 3,209,577 hours: hey! there are other things you can do with the internets! Like…buy things! (oh. sorry. nope, can’t do THAT without a JOB). And…look stuff up! Interesting stuff! (If you know of any let me know) And….oh look, I am making a new website! (coming soon)

So yeah. Associating writing with Strollerderby with the burning pain of being fired (better check out those burning-type pains, just in case…antibiotics maybe?), I have not exactly wanted to write much lately. It’s MUCH easier to simply ignore said pains and pretend they aren’t there.

So here is what else I am doing:

• Getting ready to give a metaphysical workshop in Tucson AZ in 2 weeks. Wanna go?
• Getting rid of lots of STUFF. It is time, for a variety of reasons. I am starting with Waldorf-craft and knitting books, since there is little likelihood I will be needing them any time soon.
• Lots of channeling. My work is taking me in new directions, a life of its own, blah blah blah. Sometimes you just have to go where life takes you.

And this is what I am NOT doing:

• Cooking. Why do people need to eat every day anyway? Several times a day, even? What’s up with that?
• Eating. See above. Seriously, what’s the point?
• Cleaning. See above. You just have to do it again the next time. I mean, what’s UP with that? The short people here can do some of it anyway.

So anyway, that’s me. What have YOU been up to? Spill it! I want to know!

Woo!

There. I got that out of my system.

Wait a minute, no I didn’t after all. Hang on. Woo!

Okay, there. I think I can talk now.

It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I mean, it’s been A WEEK! Not only has it been a week since I wrote last, about the lovely Valentine’s poem (has it only been a week since then???!), but lots has happened. Not so much on an external level, but internally, boy, things are MOVING!

First. I saw an actual doctor! For an actual physical-malady-thing! I won’t bore you with the details, but it involves peeing and razor blades and drugs, all things I highly recommend you avoid. Except maybe the peeing; that’s hard to avoid. But I’m good now, or on the way to good. So, One Down, and it didn’t feel so terrible to be one of the millions who fall through the health-insurance-free cracks. (Yay for being self-employed!)

Second. Matthew is still here! Imagine my surprise (and his, probably) to find him still here on a two-week visit that began two months ago. And, well, there is transformation with that. Like with everything. Not that I would jinx anything by talking about it, but maybe! And I am still feeling privateish about this relationship, like maybe it’s a gossamer-thin bubble, so delicate that breathing on it even gently will cause it to disappear. Like one day I will wake up and open my eyes and find I have dreamed all this. So I will remain in dreamland just for now, that delicious feeling when you are still warm in bed and half-awake and you know you don’t have to get up yet or even quite awaken from that dream.

Third. I read this post the other day and was amazed at the words exchanged between mother and daughter, the openness about past hurts and present pain, even the blaming. It seemed wrong to me at first, and then it began to seem very right. It got me to thinking. Remember when I wrote this? Since then I have avoided contact with my mother, mostly because It’s Our Way, the Avoidance of Talking About Anything Emotional. But I am getting ready to have some confrontation. I’m completely frightened of it, yet I feel drawn to it at the same time. There are things I really, really need to say, things I don’t even quite yet know what they are but will figure out in the process. So much has been buried for so long, and I don’t want to hold onto it anymore.

It feels lately like the number of things I can safely talk about here is becoming smaller and smaller, and I don’t like that feeling. People read this blog who read it simply to report back to others about what I said or did not say about them. That’s wrong. But it’s the way it is.

Still, my thoughts and feelings about things, especially about myself and how I interact with people, continues to change. One thing is certain about life, and that is that it will aways change. Circumstances, perceptions, whatever. Nothing remains static and you can be sure about that. Like where you are right now? Feel comfortable there? Don’t worry, the rug will come out from under you eventually. Not that it’s a bad thing, being flung toward the floor, and if you have great balance it’s no big deal at all! But it will happen. We thrive on change, as much as we resist it.

Oh. So what was I talking about? Oh yes, my mom.

I phone my mom every week. Back some years ago, we didn’t speak as frequently. I was uncomfortable with her, mainly because she was uncomfortable with me. Fine, whatever. But we came to some unspoken understanding and found a place where we could at least interact. Sort of. I mean, if you like shallow water and all. But if anything ever got deeper than that, even a little bit, she’d retreat. I figured I’d just deal with that (after all, it was “good enough”) indefinitely.

Sorry. I have changed my mind. Not gonna do it.

True. I thought I was “over” my issues with my mom, but guess what? I’m not.

So the past few weeks we’ve (or rather, she’s) been talking about a situation at her work. New Manager Guy annoys her. New Manager Guy talks too loud. New Manager Guy asks for too much. New Manager Guy wants her to change the way she’s been doing her job for, like, 20 years. She hates New Manager Guy. So, Karen, what should I do? Please tell me what to dooooo!!

Understand, my mom is 72, almost 73. I’m not sure she needs to work financially, but I have no idea what her financial situation is because she changes the subject if I ask questions like that. It’s fine for me to talk about my kids or the cats or even the herd of cats she feels obligated to feed and care for and can’t spend the night at my brother’s house on Christmas because of because the Cats Might Miss Her and because She Won’t be There to Feed Them (these are OUTDOOR cats. Who live OUTSIDE), but if it gets more personal on either end then things get mighty uncomfortable.

So I ask questions. She vents. I give some advice. Bottom line? I think she’s the victim of age discrimination. I am not litigious by nature, in fact I am the polar opposite of litigious especially after all this fucking time spent in custody/support/divorce court, but I advise her to see someone, to find out what her options are.

After all, she’s on a mandatory suspension from her job right now. (Which is why I can write this, because I am taking the chance she will never read it since she only reads my blog from work…am I playing with fire here?)

So she has some time on her hands.

She only had to say “okay, that’s a good idea, I will think about that.”

That’s all I wanted. I have been in middle management. I know what goes on when a company decides to squeeze someone out. I also know what an employee’s rights are.

But no. “Don’t worry about me, Karen. I can handle it.” Um, yeah. Like you’ve been handling it. Would it be a crime to let someone HELP you?? Hey mom, I KNOW that this makes you uncomfortable, makes you want to run for the hills and then stick your head in the sand when you get there, but there are times when you need to STAND UP FOR YOURSELF DAMMIT!!

Oops, I may be speaking to myself there. My bad.

But hey. She’s getting screwed, I care, and all she had to do was at least acknowledge, or just PRETEND to acknowledge, that maybe Karen had a good idea. Maybe Karen could be right about something. Maybe Karen is trying to help. And maybe I can let someone in, just a little.

Maybe not.

I’m all for the idea of choices, believe me. My entire understanding of the universe is built on the concept of Choice, so hey, I GET IT when I see my mom making a choice that I think sucks and will hurt her. I get it. I do. But it hurts me to be so fucking invisible.

Hello?

Anybody there?

Enough. Not invisible any more.

Watch out, people.