As IF!!!

I asked if I could go get Moonbeam back. I left her with my exboyfriend who didn't make payments on the jeep I signed for (yeah, dumb, dumb...I DID say it was my Year of Bad Decisions didn't I?)....well I went and repo'd my own jeep which meant Mike certainly was going to feel wronged. Which meant no chance of seeing Moonie again. This is moonie:


What is it with people? That the things that they don't like are somehow morally wrong, and the things that make them feel good are somehow morally right? What's up with that nonlogic? Or is that just White Trash Nation speaking?

So anyway I write this carefully crafted email to Mike's daughter Amy. She responds by saying I left my CAT with a man so that I could somehow reestablish contact with him -- much in the way a woman might leave something behind after a night of pleasure in hopes of more -- hence the title of this blog.

Uh..no.

I really didn't want to leave him alone. I really didn't want to traumatize my Moonkitten by moving her again. She's a run-and-hide kitty, and it always took her months to get over any kind of major change. I didn't want to do it again to her but I'm not sure she's safe or happy or loved where she is.

Please God let them let me come and get my Moonie back

Can I colonize a new planet or something?

My weekends suck right now.

see, I said "right now" like I still have some hope. I desperately need to let go of hope because it keeps me afloat and all around me is this endless waste. I need to just be able to give it up and sink.

I'm sick of being ugly. I'm sick of having short gray hair and being overweight and having pseudo boobs slowly being inflated. I had my nails done, at least they look nice. I want to go out and be beautiful and dance and flirt and maybe even go home with someone. I want to turn heads again. This was me before my Year of Bad Decision Making:



and you see me over there, now -------------------------->

I went to the gym today.

this blog has nothing to do with what I really want to say.

What I really want to say is I am never going to be able to go back to the way I was. I don't know how to interface with this world inside of me. It's not pretty. People are awful, most of them. They don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. I always thought people were better than that. Even those that seem caring and nice, when you push them to the wall it disappears. I don't want to be a human being any more.

Nothing helps. I even broke down and bought a pack of cigarettes but I didn't want them. I kind of forced myself to smoke a few. Nope.

I hope there is a heaven.

click here

Life is Good. Whew that was close. I thought I was reaally going to lose it.

knock me down with a feather

i am this close. i can't win. nothing is right. work was the one safe place. but apparently being out on disability or all the medical claims from cancer or something has them looking for reasons to nitpick me to death. i want to go live under a bridge where i don't have to answer to anyone. except it's cold. and i'd miss the cats. i cried at my boss today. i mean, i fucking passed the foreign service exam and left everyone else still writing in the room. i know what my iq is. so what is wrong? are they sifting through everything i am doing to find something to fail me on? what? well what they might not know is that i rarely quit work. they have to fire me. and they're going to have to pay me.

Time for some of that Joy

Spring is almost here, the air is very cold but you can feel it.

I have moonflowers, morning glories, cosmos, zinnias and black-eyed susan seeds to plant. Just looking at the seed packets makes my heart jump. The days are getting longer.

My reinflation process is hitting the big time (o pun intended). The doctor is rather conservative and keeps asking me how big I want my boobs to be. I try not to answer but I am looking forward to wearing some of those little summer dresses.

We went to the health club today, my friend and I, and the good news is I can't possibly get any weaker!!!

I struggle with living here. I want to live anywhere but here. I don't know if I will have the heart to leave when the time comes. I have that little dream of a house in the woods, on a cul-de-sac or lightly travelled road. A place where I can let the cats out to play and be cats instead of bored adored prisoners.

I can't even get sparrows to come to my bird feeder here. It's too polluted on this corner. With spring comes hope. I'm squirrelling money away like mad. My job is my lifeline to my dream.

The horse ain't dead yet

While I have started to feel better physically after surgery I have kinda gone over the edge mentally. I couldn't figure out whether or not I was suicidal or grieving the losses or angry at all that had happened or a combination of all of it. I have written hate mail to the government and the oil companies, sent money to some pretty radical groups and argued with everyone, including my supervisor at work (who is a remarkable man. He used the word "odious" in a sentence. I never heard anyone do that before). I have stopped eating animal products.

This is a good way to lose weight, especially if you dislike green food.

I have road rage, shopping cart rage, and have thought about buying a gun and going into business as a hit woman (my eyesight sucks).

I want to put a bumpersticker on my car that says "fuck you" to all the tailgaters. I am sorely tempted to quarterpanel the next car that cuts in front of me, just for fun. And to see if I can do it right.

I cried about losing my cat Moonie, cried over the lost friendship with Alecia, the lost hopes of marriage and relationship, the loss of my independence, the loss of money, the fact that I am living in Derby, cried because people are mean, you name it; I was in tears about it.

I have decided that most people are beasts and I will never trust anyone again and that I don't belong to the species "Human". And wow, I haven't picked up a cigarette (not to mention a drink either)!

Nothing helps I suppose I gotta grieve and be angry and tend to my emotions which have been stuffed into "coping" mode for so long. It's gotta boil over sometime. I am glad I am in a safe place with a very forgiving person so I can go insane without consequences.

Paradoxically, the joy and energy I am starting to feel is tremendous. Work is a safe place.

I take a raft of vitamins now, my cancer was not hormone receptor positive so I take a menopause combo pill, pycnogenol, co-q10, c and e in the morning and the same at night, along with 5-htp, valerian, and occasionally melatonin to zonk me out. Every week I take a b complex. When my stomach will allow me to, I take a multi.

Hot flashes suck, they are the basis for spontaneous human combustion *pow* now I'm just an ashy little grease spot on my chair....

The house where I grew up

I drove by the house where I grew up yesterday.

It’s in what is now a very pricey neighborhood. I noted with some satisfaction that it looked much like it did when I lived there…the yard is unkempt, the product of ambitious landscaping plans and no follow-through. Shaggy trees, lawn, nothing special about the exterior of the house except its location near the beach. Someone had actually fixed the shutters though.

The satisfaction sprang from the feeling that no one should be allowed to clean up and make presentable a place which, for so very long, had harbored the desperation of a family afflicted with alcoholism and generations of despicable behavior. No one should tidy up the remains of my childhood. The world should see this.

I can hear the shouting the crying, the police at the front of the house. I broke the rule of silence. I didn’t care what our neighborhood thought. Wrong should out. You adults behave like criminals you get the treatment.

The same hardworking, low-brow, barely literate family resides next door, forced to look at my back yard the way it always was. They’re there because Department of Defense contracts, under Ronald Reagan, allowed Mr. Neighbor to earn a ridiculously high union wage, allowing him to pursue the horrifying hobbies of hunting and taxidermy, to buy a boat and two purebred hunting dogs who received little, if any, love. I bet they hoped the new people would have some self respect hahaha.

Understand I am still a little insane from the past year. I’ll calm down hopefully.

My dad used to start building projects and then never finish them, leaving the pile of materials in the back yard. Mrs. Neighbor was certain there were rats in that pile. She would call the department of health on us. I wonder if she calls on the new owner? I feel like sending them a congratulatory letter for carrying on the tradition.

I walked on the beach for an hour as I had time to kill. I was looking for beach glass. My cd player’s batteries had died and I was grateful for I had not listened to the sound of waves in a long while. Hypnotic. The sun was brilliant and the wind burned my cheeks.

Everywhere I looked I saw the present juxtaposed atop the past. There used to be a nickel payphone in Penfield II, and we would buy French fries there, feet burning on the painted wooden deck. I sunburned badly here the summer I was 12, looking for hermit crabs and seashells. There was Nancy’s wedding on the deck, 15 years ago. So different. Am I that old?

Ghosts of all those caved-in and weathered cottages in the 60s beamed from within the elaborate, proud three-story beach homes that only the rich can afford. A host of bad storms, my mother said, had ruined all the little beach bungalows and no one had rebuilt them. How we forget.

After being treated to the CNN spectacle of Katrina gutting a quarter of the US Coastline this summer, I became inordinately grateful for a dry bed, air conditioning and a roof. I shook my head in wonder at the risk these beach people are taking. Connecticut gets zonked with a winner every 30 or 40 years, and we’re overdue. I know that the high water mark is not what it appears to be in the sand. It’s actually a few hundred feet down the road. I know that all the basements flood. This was Wolf Swamp in the 18th century.

It’s hard, knowing every crack in the pavement but not recognizing the houses. This place is my place, it’s in my bones. Every memory, happy or sad, this place built me as much as the people in my life. I know where every tree stood and still stands. I get angry at pseudo cool Audi drivers tailgating me down MY street. They don’t belong here.

Maybe someday I can move back here. Maybe I can sell my soul to the company I work for and they’ll pay me enough to pay an obscene amount of money so I can go back home again. Maybe I’ll even buy the old house. I’ll bring along a truckload of construction debris for the back yard J

Losing our focus? January 2005

After the chemo I had surgery and after the surgery I finally treated myself to an eye exam for a new pair of glasses. “A funny thing happens to us as we get to our age” said the ophthalmologist. “We lose our focus.” He was born in 1960, the same year I was born.

He’s so right, on so many levels.

Good lord, I’ve lost the tenacity of my younger days. Feisty didn’t begin to describe it. Picking my battles wasn’t necessary. I had enough piss and vinegar for all of them, great or small. I tore through life, one of those tiny women who terrorize.

Sometimes losing one’s focus can be a good thing for society.

I know something about these golden year things. Mine started when I was 25 . One by one all my joints have given out on me. My hair turned prematurely gray. Oh yes, that’s what we all say, isn’t it? I was put together with used parts, I would joke.

The diagnosis of cancer and subsequent chemotherapy, double mastectomy and oophorectomy (wherein the ovaries are removed -- an “oofie” the nurses call it) have left my animal brain indignant, outraged and frustrated.

My human brain can do all sorts of interesting things with this; I can look at it through the lens of spiritual challenge. I can look at it as a call to evaluate my life and the time I have left. I can, as Viktor Frankl put it, ask what Life wants of me, not the other way around. But my animal brain is having none of it. It’s still pissed off.

I thought old Viktor could teach me something new but I see that I have learned his lessons treading my own path. I’m 45. I didn’t go to a death camp but I did get my face slammed up against that glass wall for a good look. Couple of times now.

I’m still waiting for a renewal of some sort. Springtime maybe.

Please – I am not complaining. Much. Just ruminating and sharing. The last time I wrote something like this I got letters trying to console me and convert me to Christianity. Sigh. I don’t need consolation. I choose to live. It’s normal, I am beginning to see, to suffer.

Shunryu Suzuki said “suffering is how we extend ourselves, it is how we live our lives.” And that we see all beauty against an ever-changing backdrop of chaos. In his words I found tremendous solace and meaning.

Breast Cancer

October was breast cancer month. Month? Well for me it's been the BC year. The year my life unraveled. Lots and lots of chaos. I lost a relationship, a home, had to move several times, my finances are a shambles. And none of it really matters much. I can get it all back. It's just stuff. You can always get more stuff. It's been the worst thing that's happened to me and the best at the same time.

I have just hit a wall all us cancer patients seem to hit after chemotherapy, kinda depressed. Six months of it. I never thought I'd get through. So much anger! I am like a child who wants to tell a Big Person how much it hurt and where they stuck the needles and how sick I felt and that some of my friends ran away and didn't come back. That hurt more than anything. I can only hope there is a God out there holding me, and telling me all will be well.

We keep ourselves all hyped and girded up, stiff-upper-lip you know, for chemo, and just get through each day as best as we can -- and then whoosh! it's over. And and I look around and I say, That's it? Who do I get mad at? Who do I hit? I got mugged and poisoned and I stuck it out and didn't cry (much). I did it. I even quit smoking in the middle of it. I feel like someone's gotten away with doing something horrible to me. They need to pay.
Most days, I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.
With cancer, I am a colorless citizen of the universe. People look at me as though I have some kind of special answer they lack. As though the thick and seemingly insurmountable hills and layers of status and stuff and race and appearance have been strip-mined and there we are: naked to eachother, mortal defenseless human beings, temporary travellers. I can look anyone in the eye and find them in there, behind all the temporal stuff. I got a secret. We all die. You're eligible too.
Now I am going to have surgery. I am the poster child for Not Tolerating Chemotherapy Well. Not this gal. I am in such rough shape they want to do a full cardiac workup first. As the anaesthesiologist put it "I don't want to put a tube in someone and not be able to take it out." Finally a take-charge, bossy, brilliant doctor. He's perfect for his job. I can finally go limp and let him do his work. I so need to stop carrying all this. I can let go and drop down to the bottom of my internal ocean where it is dark and silent and sleep.
I am not thinking about waking up, not yet. There will be another hard chapter when that happens. Missing body parts and all. I can only do this journey one step at a time. Right now my task is to breathe in and out, keep my feet elevated and wait for this darkness to pass and the color to come back into the world. Hug the cats. Fill the birdfeeders. Talk to the other women and men who are travelling this road with me, or have gone before so I know I am not alone.
If I can find a good enough movie, maybe I can even cry.