Golden Nugget

My grandpa died last week.  He was 94 years old.  He had been married to my grandma for over 70 years.  He started two small businesses and they both still exist.  He loved motorcycles and fishing and golfing.  He served in WWII and received a Bronze Star.  He saw every continent except Antarctica.  He loved polka music and doing things himself and collecting things.

The wake was last Sunday and the funeral was on Monday.  With the exception of my terrible aunt who I had not seen in 15 years being there, it was really nice.  My grandma did awesome.  She was exhausted and sad, but not overcome.  That was a big relief.  The service was good.  My brother and I did the eulogy together.  It was really hard and I was glad we were together.

I sat with my grandma during the wake.  She and my uncle made a bet over whether there'd be more people at the wake or the funeral, so she wanted me to count everyone who came in.  140 people came to the wake.  It was interesting to hear the variety of things that people said.  A few people said he was gone too soon.  Which yeah, it sucks when a good person dies because you miss them, but too soon?  He was six weeks away from his 95th birthday.  That is a really long life.  And he didn't feel well and was unhappy at the end.  It was not too soon.

After the funeral, I got sick with a terrible stomach virus.  My dad, brother, and three of my cousins also got sick.  It was pretty intense.  On day three I finally went to the doctor and got an anti-nausea shot (in my right butt cheek), which helped immensely.

Two days before the wake, my very dearest friend moved out of state.  She herself has been going through a rough time and had been spending a lot of time with me and NB.  She'd been spending the night at our apartment a lot.  It's weird that she's gone.

The last two weeks have been strange.  I feel weird and moody and out of control.  When I laugh it is too hard and I almost start crying.  I feel like I'm failing.  Last night I dreamed that I went into a shop and got kicked out for laughing too hard and being hysterical.  I flung myself out of the shop and stumbled across the road, unable to stop.  I fell into a ditch.  It was snowing.  I knew I'd probably die of hypothermia, but I couldn't stop laughing and coordinate my muscles to stand.

I feel overly-tender and I'm fucking over it.

Soft Snug Sleep

I could comment about how long it has been since I have posted, but that would probably be tiresome.  I’m also fairly certain that no one reads this because it is very unimportant and infrequently updated.  But, I realized it makes me feel better to write, so I am going to make it more of a habit.

I am so tired.  Something about the combination of food and sleep that I am putting into my body is not working and I just want to lay my head down on my desk, even though I got a solid eight hours last night.

Perhaps it is related to my two week long  crazy dream problem.  Every night for the last two weeks I’ve had either flat out nightmares (murder, ghosts, hallucinations), or dreams where annoying things happen (NB hides my toothbrush, someone is mean to me at a party), or really long and complicated dreams there are not nightmarish or annoying but just really incredibly lengthy and detailed and leave me feeling tired instead of rested.

In the past, these kind of dreams have been linked to a general feeling of sadness, and this time seems to be no exception.  I don’t want to go to work or class.  I don’t want to volunteer or see my friends.  I just want to hang out in my bed and watch movies or listen to podcasts and occasionally hang out with NB and/or the cat.  On Friday night I went to sleep at 8pm, blew off class on Saturday morning and friends on Saturday night, and stayed in the same pajamas until Monday morning.

Despite this general lameness, I have managed to apply for a couple of jobs in the last two weeks.  I usually like my job and I really like the people I work with.  But, I have been getting pretty bored/annoyed at work lately plus I am fairly underpaid and in August my office is relocating to a neighborhood I can’t easily access as a no-car-having person.  

One job that I applied for is at a place that does really good work and is only about seven blocks away from my apartment.  I applied Saturday and I’m guessing they had off Monday for Presidents’ Day.  Despite that, I still keep checking my email and phone for a message from them.  It sounds like a pretty good gig and I’d be really excited to interview.

Since we’re talking about work, I will tell you a work story from last week.  Last Thursday afternoon our CEO asked our IT Manager to fix something for her and on Friday morning he foisted it on me.  It is a relatively small problem that will not come into play again for a whole month.  It could have been left for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks with no ill consequences, but everyone was scrambling and insisting it be done NOW because it was for our CEO.  So I figured out three possible solutions, tested all three, and provided samples of all three, so she could decide which option she prefered.  This took about an hour and a half.  Shortly after that I saw her in the hall.  I said hello and in response she sighed heavily.  That’s it, no actual words.  Why, you’re quite welcome boss-lady!  I was very happy to urgently do a non-urgent task that is not even my job so that you could ignore my greeting and instead sigh at me.  

Oh my mouth.  I am having mouth pain thanks to my decision to ingest these foods in this order: two mouth-cutting tootsie pops, homemade tomato-carrot soup, V8.  Tomato-y pain all up in my tongue and the roof of my mouth.

Alright, it’s time to go home.  Time to hang up the phone on my company’s website provider’s hold music (90 minutes on hold).  Time to go volunteer and then go home and get into bed early.  Yes, yes, yes.

Sha na na na na na

Oh hi, it would seem that I have been gone a very long time.  What happens though, is that I write these words in a Google doc during my lunch break at work, intending to post them to my blog when I get home, but then when I get home the idea of continuing to sit and look at a computer sounds so dreadful, and then whatever I wrote becomes outdated and pointless to post whenever I actually get around to it.

November, December, and thus far January have been very busy, with both the good (holiday celebrations! family vacation! enjoyable work projects! karaoke!) and the bad (family illness and subsequent hospital visits/worrying/sadness, personal illness (food poisoning), work stress/boredom, financial stress) plus of course horrible things that have happened and keep happening in the world that are are mind-boggling and sadness/paralysis-inducing.  My mind lately seems to vacillate between overactive thinking, thinking, thinking and sludgy, lazy oatmeal brain.

In November, the day after Thanksgiving, my grandpa fell and broke his hip.  He is 94 and the doctors weren’t sure if he would make it through the necessary surgery, but he did and he is recovering in a nursing home now.  Unfortunately, his recovery is not going well and we’re not sure if he’ll get well enough to come home even with a live-in nurse.  I’ve gotten to visit him pretty frequently, and he gets multiple visitors everyday, which of course makes the whole thing slightly less awful, but it is hard.  It is hard to see him in pain, to see him not remember his visitors (he also has dementia), to see him struggle to eat (no appetite), and to see him get frustrated at his loss of mobility.  It is hard to see the affects on my grandma and my mom.  

In my memory of him, my grandpa has always been an old man.  He went from slow walking, to slower walking, to not walking.  Also, in my earlier memories of him, when he was more vital, I was a little kid.  So though he had great health for his age, he still seemed so old to me in my little-kid understanding.  I am very close to him, and this change has been painful, but it has not been such a huge adjustment, as it has been for my mom.  I try to imagine what it must be like.  One day I will probably go through the same thing - I will probably see my parents, my partner, myself, go from our most vital, able, mentally clear and present states, to slowly but surely diminishing states of physical, and possibly mental, abilities.

On to a less serious/sad/important topic...tonight I am getting a haircut!  I am dreaming of this haircut because my hair is growing down onto my neck and it is the worst.  I’m sure all you short-hair-wearers know what I’m talking about.  This haircut was actually scheduled for last week, but too many students called in sick after New Year’s Eve.  This is my first non-great experience with the hair school, so I still fully recommend cheap haircuts at the Aveda school on Clark.

I feel like I am a fancy lady who gets beauty treatments done a lot, because in addition to tonight’s haircut, last night I got a massage.  I had never had a professional massage before and for Christmas I received one of those daily deal site coupons to get a massage.  It was amazing.  I was touching the tops of my shoulders afterwards and I couldn’t believe there were areas that felt so soft - my shoulders usually feel like a hard, wooden mass.  It was super relaxing and I was definitely in awe of the skill-level of the massage therapist.  Obviously I knew that massage takes skill, but I hadn’t really considered the amount of knowledge a good therapist has until I had one rearranging my limbs and pressing on different body parts in ways that seemed to make no sense but that made me feel so good.

Great job to all skilled massage therapists.  I’m sure your own bodies are sore from the nature of your work and sometimes people are mean to you and maybe sometimes you have clients with really bad body odor or something.  But, you deal with it and you’re great.

Titles are tedious

I had a work meeting in Rogers Park this afternoon, and rather than taking public transit for 45 minutes back to my office, I'm working from a coffee shop.  And by working I mean screwing around on the internet while occasionally refreshing my slow, poorly functioning web access Outlook email.

Does anyone else get bathroom anxiety at the coffee shop?  I don't want to pack up all my stuff or bring my drink into the bathroom with me, but I also don't really like leaving my stuff unattended either.  I would like to add remote urination to the list of super powers I hope to gain.  Remote urination - the ability to make your piss go into the toilet from another room (I am thinking this is like radio waves - invisible to the eye - not like a pee water cannon that can launch my urine across the room).

Other super powers and fantastical bodily features I would like to have are flight (duh), invisibility (duh), big ass wings that I could retract to be invisible or pop out all massive (this is separate from flight - the point of these wings is to be big and scary), retractable Wolverine-type claws, prehensile tail, lion-like roar.

This chair is soft and the music is all down tempo, instrumental jazz and the sky is getting dark - I can feel myself getting all squishy and squashy and snuggly.

Tutoring session I am overhearing right now: "quotation marks aren't just for direct quotes, but can also be used to add emphasis..."  Sir, no.

"Thanks" for reading my "blog"!

November was

November was my big month for working lots and lots, but it is all over now and I have the day off today because I worked on Sunday!  Ack, if my memory is right I have not gone out with friends since November 2.  Unacceptable!  Luckily my parents did come visit last Saturday and took me and NB barhopping for about six hours.  I tried this beer for the first time and it was a delight.

The other night I was on my way home from work, waiting for the bus at Lawrence and Broadway.  There is a nook in the wall there, inside of which is a back door to a restaurant.  Suddenly an old man came out of the door, kicking a styrofoam cup into the gutter.  I felt immediately annoyed because littering is not cool and also I am 99% sure that guys owns the restaurant, so take some fucking care of your neighborhood/corner of the street.  So I told the guy that I couldn't believe he would just throw trash on the ground and the conversation ended with him saying, "why don't you shut your mouth, you stupid bitch?"  I felt sort of bad for hassling an old man, plus there was already trash in the gutter and who hasn't felt like "what difference does one more piece of trash make?" Also, I knew that I only said something because I was tired and cranky.  But also, he called me a stupid bitch because I told him not to throw trash on the ground, so fuck him.  Plus it was funny.

When you were taught to type, were you taught that one or two spaces should follow sentences?  I was taught two spaces, but I think that is more old-fashioned perhaps, and now one space is more commonly used?  It seems like most things I've used can adjust to either one or two spaces following a sentence, but Blogger does not seem to do that, so when the line break comes at the end of a sentence, the next sentence has a tiny indent.  Oh well.

Well this entry is pretty lame, but I am tired and want to go cook and clean and be all domestic, so I'm going to go.  Happy Thanksgiving - I hope you get to eat loads of delicious foods and have some good things to be thankful for.  I'm thankful for ending sentences with prepositions.

Hi everyone

Hi everyone, Happy Halloween!  Are you celebrating or are you recovering from the damage of a super-storm?  All my New York and New Jersey friends whom I’ve been able to contact seem to be doing alright. If you are from a heavily affected area and you are reading this, hopefully that means you have power!  I hope you are doing well and have food and a way to get to work or wherever you need to go. The size and reach of Sandy has blown my mind.  Even out here in Chicago the beaches and lakeshore paths are shut down because the wind is making Lake Michigan go crazy.  Having lived in the Midwest all but six months of my life, I have dealt with tornadoes and snowstorms, but have never been anywhere near a hurricane.  The prospect of it is completely terrifying to me.  

I was pretty excited to dress up for Halloween this year - normally it’s a favorite holiday, but the last two years sad things have been happening on/around Halloween.  I did not end up dressing as Picasso’s Blue Period or a Zombie Vulva.  I went to a party on Saturday dressed as Zombie Abraham Lincoln, which meant lots of fake blood and a tall hat.  Before the party I was walking to the liquor store in the dark and a lady jumped and said “aye, Dios!” when she saw me, so that was pretty great.  Today I am just wearing my normal all-black getup, but with the addition of my “witch’s shawl” and black and white striped tights instead of black leggings.

At work we found a gift certificate to a salon that didn’t get purchased at our fundraising event last year, and I ended up getting it.  For over three years all my haircuts had been at hair schools and I had always colored my hair myself, so I was pretty stoked to get a certificate to a fancy-pants Lincoln Park salon.  I went and got my hair done last night and it was so nice - super-massagey shampoo session and cool asymmetrical cut.  

While I was at the salon I leafed through Marie Claire and while I was certainly expecting it to be all fluffy-puffy fashion, body image blah-di-blah I was still surprised and dismayed by some things.  For one, there was a large piece about getting ahead at work.  It was eight page longs, with two of the pages completely devoted to how women should look at work, and large sections of the same on the other six pages.  The piece also included brief snippets of interviews with powerful women and a section about race and ethnicity in the workplace.  Because female leaders, workplace discrimination, and fancy high heels are all worthy (and should be worthy) of the same amount of attention when trying to establish a successful career.  Right.

The other awful thing was a first-person article about how wearing towering high heels is what Grown Up Women do and even though these shoes are painful you will look terribly frumpy and un-adult if you don’t wear them.  The solution: every nine months get incredibly painful (by the author’s description) foot injections that leave you hobbled for a week; your stilettos will still be uncomfortable, but you’ll at least be able to stand them for longer periods of time.  And that is worth the cost, time off of work, and pain from the injections (plus the completely unmentioned harm caused to the rest of the body by wearing tall heels everyday).  I’m six feet tall and I like to rock a heel from time-to-time when I’m feeling fancy or outrageous, but to state that the only appropriate adult woman footwear is something that causes one to adopt an unnatural and unhealthy posture is just rage-inducing.

Today is the third year anniversary of when NB and I got drunk and made out for the first time.  And even though (because?) I was covered in fake blood, it was still great.  By this time next year, we’ll be married.  I don’t generally think that things are “meant to be” but this definitely feels that way.

Who wants to

Who wants to come give me a massage?  I will take it!  As long as you are non-creepy and know what you’re doing and won’t charge me.  Doesn’t that sound like a good deal for you?  I need a free massage because I hurt my back doing my super-mini morning workout, which is only light calisthenics and a lot of stretching and doesn’t seem very dangerous or likely to cause strain, but somehow it did.

Today I am all about health.  I ate a pretty healthy breakfast and lunch, got a flu shot and TDaP vaccine, and made an appointment to go to the doctor for the all-over mystery pain that I’ve had for several years (until recently I thought everyone felt like this but just didn’t complain about it because it’s just a part of life, but I’m finding out that is actually not the case).

Tonight I was going to be all about debauchery - my dear friend, DZ, and I had planned a vodka infusion night, but she has bronchitis, which is such a big bummer, especially because she is uninsured.  I know there are lots of opinions and findings and arguments about how we should get everyone insured.  I am not going to go into that here because this isn't that kind of blog, but damn, can we just make this happen?

I am still reading Bonk and yesterday I read a section talking about the cremaster muscle, which is a word I knew at one point, but had completely forgotten.  All day yesterday I kept saying cremaster in my mind.  And then I watched one of those forensics shows last night and the murderer’s last name rhymed with cremaster.  Coincidence?  I think not.