June 2007 Archives

I’ve been putting off writing this post for days now, as if writing the words that I’ve already had to say over and over to people will somehow make them more final, more concrete. Nora died on Friday afternoon. As deaths go, I think it was a pretty gentle one. She lost consciousness around 3 pm, and was gone just before 4 o’clock. Unfortunately, it happened so quickly that neither John nor I were there, but his sister and his aunt were, so she wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t unexpected, of course, although we all thought she had more time left. On Wednesday night she said that she was ready to go, that this process of dying was tiresome and taking such a long time. But she said it with so much vigor, I really thought she’d live another couple of weeks.

So we are sad – John naturally much more sad than I am – but doing ok. We had time to prepare for this, I guess. And there are so many details to focus on right now instead of grieving. Planning the service and what should go in the programs. Picking up relatives from the airport. Wondering about ordering deli trays. Still, the realization that Nora is gone comes out of nowhere sometimes, just sneaks up and whacks me on the back of the head, leaving me teary. She’s gone and I miss her already. That’s pretty much all I have to say right now.

John comes from a very international family. His mom is British, his dad is German, and he has a whole host of cousins all over the world. They are all very nice, although occasionally we run into cross-cultural divides. I was inadvertently snotty to John’s Auntie Bea when she was here a few weeks ago, answering the question I thought she’d asked, when in fact she wanted to know something different. And I do get the impression sometimes that they are amused by my American enthusiasm and brashness. That’s ok though, because I am amused by their dependence on tea, their overuse of the term brilliant, and their pronunciation of the words aluminum (aluminium), lieutenant (leftenant) and schedule (schedule).

Right now, Auntie Jimmie is visiting from Australia to spend some time with Nora.
Last night, while hanging out with them, we were discussing my exercise schedule, and I mentioned that on Thursday nights, I had spinning class.

Auntie Jimmie was quite enthusiastic about spinning, and said she had a friend in Brisbane who did spinning. I found this a bit surprising, since Auntie Jimmie is probably around 70 years old. However, all of my husband’s relatives have a wide range of friends and acquaintances, so it seemed possible she knew someone who enjoys spinning class.

But then she went on to the me the story of her friend in Ireland’s mother, who would go around picking up bits of wool left behind by sheep on fences in the countryside, which she would then wash and card and spin it in to yarn. Obviously, by this point in the story, I had figured out that we were talking about two completely different activities, so I broke in to gently describe the sort of spinning that I do. I had to act quickly before anyone started thinking I could produce a ball of yarn or something. I’m a slow enough knitter as it is. Can you imagine if I had to create my own yarn, too?

I’ve been extra cranky this week, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. Sure, I’m running at a higher level of stress than usual, but that’s really become the norm over the last two months. Yes, I’ve got a dying mother-in-law, a crazy sister-in-law, a crown that fell off (yay, more expensive dental work!) and I felt lousy on Sunday and Monday, and I’m down a team member at work. Oh, and all of our infertility plans are on hold, which sort of ebbs and flows as a situation that’s irritating me. However, even accounting for all of that, I’ve just been downright out of sorts. I haven’t even been able to get excited about possibly buying a new car. Normally, I’d be obsessively researching car prices and options and loans on the Internet, but instead, it has just felt like one more hassle.

Well, the light bulb finally went off for me this morning. This is the week we were supposed to head to Europe. Given our tentative itinerary, by rights at this point I would have art-geeked my way through Amsterdam and should be sitting in a café in Montmartre, sipping wine giggling over a snotty Parisian waiter and plotting to drag John to look yet another architectural gem that he could really live without seeing.

Instead, I went to work, did work stuff all day, visited my mother-in-law and then went to the Safeway of the damned to purchase ginger ale and ramen for John, who is a bit under the weather. Somehow, it’s not quite the same, and I guess I’ve been subconsciously resenting it.

I Dysoned the whole house for the first time yesterday. That vacuum cleaner continues to amaze me with its powers of awesomeness. Given the amount of hair and dirt it pulled out of our carpets, I’m also amazed that a) John, Seamus and I aren’t completely bald and b) that we don’t go around perpetually enveloped in a Pigpen-esque cloud of dust. Apparently we’ve been unknowingly living in an appalling amount of filth. But now my carpets are safe for humanity once again.

Not so safe? All of my bathrooms. But I’ll get them next weekend. I can only handle so many hours of cleaning in one weekend, and after the all vacuuming (I even moved furniture!), cleaning the kitchen, and tackling the massive pile of papers that had built up on my desk, I hit the wall and put down the sponge.

In other news, John and I are considering purchasing a second car. He’s been using his mom’s car to get back and forth to see her, but that may not work as an option for us much longer. We’d already started talking about buying a second car, so we might just do it a little earlier than we had planned. We’ve talked for years about getting a hybrid, so we’re looking at the Honda Civic Hybrid, the Prius, and the new Toyota Camry hybrid as possibilities. John’s main concern is that we get a car with a sunroof. My main concern is that we get a car that I like. I don’t know. Given how much time I usually put in to obsessing over decisions like these, it will probably take us a while to make up our minds. Got any cars you would recommend? Or perhaps cars that you’ve owned and hated that you’d like to warn us about?

There’s a lot that goes on in my life that I don’t write about here. Given the rate at which I’ve been posting lately, there’d have to be, wouldn’t there, or I’d be the most boring person on the planet.

Anyway, lately I’ve been not blogging about a situation that is just driving me nuts. A person in my life is going through something really awful, and has decided that rather than facing up to the fact that she ended up where she is because of the choices she made, it is much easier to blame me and John.

It’s very odd to feel so much compassion for someone and the truly sad situation they are going through – I can’t imagine how she is feeling, and I hope I never have to deal with something like what she’s facing – and be so incredibly angry at them at the same time. Last night I spent the whole time I was walking Seamus telling her off in my head. Tonight at spinning class I tried to just get in to the groove of the bike and let all of my resentment and hurt feelings go, but I can’t quite seem to shake it. She’s just so damn wrong, we’re being so unjustly blamed, and there’s nothing I can do about it. She’s never going to admit that she’s wrong. Intellectually, I can understand why this is happening. I can even say, rationally, if blaming us is what she needs to do to get through her extremely lousy days right now, then let her do it. But I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. I know she's wrong, and I want her to know how wrong she is.

This is not healthy, and I know it. I’ve got to find a way to grow up, get past this and move on. One of us has to, right?

In my teenage years and perhaps a bit beyond, I desperately wanted to be different from the sort of bland middle class girl I seemed destined to be. My parents thought that was all I should ever want. My teachers (mostly) didn’t understand why I wasn’t content, although since I did my work and didn’t cause trouble, they pretty much left me alone. And oh, how I longed to be different or special in some way. I was smart, but I wasn’t one of those kids who wrote a publishable novel at 12 or who got a 1600 on their SATs. I was a pretty good dancer, but I was never even going to come close to being a professional ballerina. People liked me, and I was lucky enough to have some truly great friends, but I was shy, and reserved and lacked that sparkle that so many of the people I admired had. At the time, I tried to be different by dressing in black, piercing my ears a couple of extra times, dyeing my hair frequently and skulking about with it hanging in my face, listening to the Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees and Depeche Mode and Ministry and the Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus. I was “artistic”. I smoked way too much. I read Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and graphic novels and watched movies like Repo Man and La Femme Nikita and the Hunger. My friends and I would hang around Dupont Circle and Georgetown, wandering through Commander Salamander and Smash and then we’d con our way in to clubs on alternative music nights, trying to look disaffected and cool. Of course, none of that actually made me different. It made me a teenager who was trying to be different. Perhaps I was a teenager with a slightly wider range of experience than some of my peers, but I don’t think I was ever really the rebel I thought I was.

Now, many years later, when all I really care about is being me rather than making any effort to be different, I find that I am. (Of course I still want to be special. Who doesn’t want to be special? But that’s another story.) Diabetes makes me different. I have to exercise five or six days per week, every week, for the rest of my life. It will always be easier for me to gain weight than it is for other people, and it will always be harder for me to lose weight than it is for other people. I will have to work harder than they do just to get to the same place. I can’t go to Starbucks and get a Venti Latte every day like my friends can. Not that I would, since I don’t like coffee, but I do have to justify having half a tall non-fat chai once per week. I will always have to pay attention to portion size. I will always have to count carbs. I will always have to think harder about the food choices I make than other people do. Never again will I unthinkingly scarf down cookies or donuts or soda. I will probably always have to take medication and check my blood sugar.

My ancestry is mostly Irish and Scottish, with a little German and Dutch thrown in for good measure. In addition to ensuring that I have a practically vampire-like pallor, that apparently also means I am built rather solidly and will do well in situations where food is scarce and hard labor is necessary. I suppose you could look at me and say “Now, there’s a lassie who’ll survive a potato famine.” However, since I live a nice cushy, modern, first world existence, chances are that won’t come up. I certainly hope not, although there is always the remote potential for a zombie invasion (have we learned nothing from World War Z?) Seriously though, I realized this weekend that I have to stop pretending to myself that I’m like everyone else when I’m not. Having diabetes makes me different, and it’s time I faced up to that fact and accepted it.

I’ve been feeling a bit surrounded by babies lately. My boss’s boss’s wife just had a baby girl on Thursday. My friends Dave and Valerie had a baby boy on Friday. I attended a baby shower for a co-worker on Friday. Even though I was happy for her, I did just about burst in to tears at one point when they were holding up the incredibly cute little girl outfits. Then when I left the shower, there was a guy standing at the elevator telling someone how he and his wife just found out they are having a girl. And my sister-in-law will be having her baby soon.

So, babies, babies everywhere. And I’m happy for all of them, really, even the random stranger by the elevator. Until today, when I saw two stories that just put me right over the edge. First, Sasha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher are having a baby. Why do I care? I have no idea. Obviously, I don’t know them. He’s pretty funny (although I have not seen Borat) and she seems like a decent actress. I’ve never really thought about either one of them all that much, but for some reason, the fact that they are having a baby got under my skin. And then, well then I saw this story about the rumor that Nicole Richie is pregnant.

Seriously, universe, if that is true and Nicole fucking Richie gets to be pregnant and I don’t, we are going to throw down. How can someone that thin even ovulate? And yes, I know no one ever promised me life would be fair, blah blah blah, but damn.

I got my first clock radio at the start of the school year, I think in seventh grade. I’m such a light sleeper that I never did well with alarms. My parents are both heavy sleepers who had to keep their alarm clocks across the room in order to be sure they woke up. I, on the other hand, would fly out of bed and across the room, frantically pushing buttons in order to make the noise stop. It was like waking up having a heart attach every morning. There were even times that I stomped down the hall to my parents room, threw open the door and pounded on their alarm to get it to turn off, grumpily shouting “Your alarm is going off!” at them.

So the switch to waking up to the gentle sounds of the radio came as a very welcome change for me. I’ve stuck with it ever since and it has worked very well. Well, once there was the time that it accidentally got set an hour ahead somehow. I didn’t realize the time was wrong until I got in the car to drive to work and thought, wow, it is awfully dark outside. I was seriously pissed off that morning. I don’t like mornings to begin with, and to realize I had gotten up at 5 am unnecessarily really, really bothered me. And then there was last night, when I apparently lost the knowledge I’ve had since I was 13 and set the alarm for 6:30 pm instead of 6:30 am. Thank goodness I have a little dog with a keen sense of time to wake me up in the morning. That didn't help me feel any less stupid, but it did help me get to work on time.

Then…
Roll in from a night out on the town as the sun came up at 5:30 am, reeking of cigarette smoke and 3 am pizza and booze.

Now…
Go to bed at 11 so we can all get up at 5:30 am to go run a 5k together. According to Julie’s watch timer, we ran it in 35:11. Our official time was 36 something because we started 40 seconds after the people in the very front, and then had to moo our way through a cattle-pen-like traffic jam at the finish line. Still, I’d like to say, Go us! We rock!

Then…
Sleep until 12:50, then run down to the dining hall to get brunch before they closed the doors at 1.

Now…
Eat lunch at 12:50, having run 3.1 miles, eaten free breakfast, hung out downtown, made our way back to the hotel and had time for all three of us to shower and change and walk 27 gazillion blocks to a restaurant.

Then…
Lie around, smoke more cigarettes, chatter at each other and possibly take an afternoon nap.

Now…
Shop, yak at each other, then take an afternoon nap.

Then…
Subsist on Twix bars and Ruffles Sour Cream and Cheddar potato chips and Coca Cola.

Now…
Snack on Fiji water, lattes, chai and other goodies from Starbucks.

Then…
Play games like Otello and Egyptian Rat Screw in the common room until 1 am.

Now…
Play Totally ‘80’s Trivial Pursuit until dinner time. Start giving each other outrageous hints so we can end the game before it gets too late.

Then…
A fancy dinner out meant Pizzeria Uno or Friday’s, followed by a visit to a bar or a party or something, which then lead (again) to rolling in at dawn. Or sleeping on someone’s couch/bed/floor so we didn’t have to drive back to school, followed by the early morning stumble out to wherever we had left the car, hoping it would still be there.

Now…
Pick out a decidedly non-chain tapas restaurant in Old Town, devour tapas like wolverines, knock back a couple of margaritas each, enjoy the live Spanish music, and then take a leisurely walk back to the hotel. Off to bed by midnight.

Then…
Hour upon hour of laughter and discussion and analysis and argument and fun and some of the best times in my life with the greatest friends in the world.

Now…
Ditto. A lot has changed since we all met back in 1989 (which Jules just loves to point out was almost 20 years ago) but the important pieces have all stayed the same.

Here are the "Babes for Boobs" after their triumphant finish (me, Julie, Jules, Sarah and Jules's son Malcolm.)Yes, my face is glowing bright red, and yes, I really am that short:

And out at dinner: