I love you, Grandma.

Most of my friends know that my Grandma passed away last month, on October 8th.   My father had gone into the the hospital for lung cancer surgery the day before, with my grandma passing away overnight.  In the morning, my mother and I had to explain to my hospital-bed-ridden, epidural-ed father that his mother was dead.  It was definitely the worst day of my life so far.  I felt like I was losing my mind.  Everyone was being super nice, doing favors for me, asking things like, “how ya hanging in there?”  Inside, my brain was raging and my heart was hurting, and I just didn’t know how to answer the question.  So I wouldn’t.  I’d say, “I don’t know how I’m feeling”, and it would be true.  In fact, I started feeling guilty when people checked in on my well-being.  Suddenly, everyone was super helpful and concerned, seemingly at the price of my grandma dying.  I didn’t want my family’s great loss justifying the nice and thoughtful actions of other.  It was a weird amalgamation of confused, furious, guilty, and very, very sad.

Now, my good friend is dealing with a similar situation: the passing of his brother.  I hurt for him now, too.  When I was young, I never really had much of a concept of death or illness or grief.  I thought I knew grief even up through my 20′s, but I didn’t actually have a clue.  Now I know, and I see others go through it, and I get it.

My dad showed his grief in a very visible, emotional, teary way.  He was pretty doped up on pain meds, and didn’t hold back his emotion.  I blocked a lot of it out for a while, made myself super busy, took on extra work, and tried to help everyone else in my family.  This culminated in a super-huge breakdown where I essentially unleashed the fury, so to speak.  I suddenly felt like my entire body was one giant, exposed nerve ending.  Everything made me cry, scream, and panic.  I still feel bad for my poor husband, who had to endure it. I have since calmed considerably, so have no fear.

The wake was really special.  People I hadn’t seen in a decade showed up.  It wasn’t at a funeral parlor or cemetery. Grandma was cremated, and we held a party in her honor at a local country club.  There was a DVD photo slide show of her life that I put together, and my uncle had a wonderful speech.  Mostly, it was just good to be around family.  My grandma always said family was most important.

Ceremony Video!

Thanks, Chuck, for being our videographer.

Weddings, honeymoons, and our triumphant return

Joe and I have just returned from our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta after what, by all accounts, was an amazing re-wedding.

Wedding

The ceremony was officiated by the lovely Susie, with a boxing fight-card theme. Joe’s processional was I’m Shipping up to Boston by the Dropkick Murphys. Mine was The Seeker by The Who. Our recessional was Where is my Mind by the Pixies.

Our cake was not cake, but a three-tiered magical confection created out of baby-back ribs, with a whiskey fountain underneath. This was created by the insanely talented Marianne, who also hand made my dress. She is THAT amazing.

We had karaoke, courtesy of our good friend Pat.

We had old friends, new friends, family, and even a few of my students in attendance.

We even had old-timey mustaches on sticks, and a commemorative stuffed dinosaur, courtesy of the crafty Aidra F.

Honeymoon
We spent the following week in the magical Garza Blanca Resort and Preserve in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Now, we need to pack for our *BIG* move into the two-bedroom unit next door, and I need to gear up for work, which starts next Monday. What a month! And we could have done none of it without the support of our friends and family. <3

Internal Manners, or How to Be Polite to Yourself

I have a tendency to push my brain and body to unreasonable limits in times of stress.  I start eating irregularly and strangely – like some days I may only eat blueberries and cheese, and then steak and popsicles the next.  I grind my teeth at night to the extent that I finally had to go buy one of the sexy mouth-guards to wear to bed.  I smoke more, which is obviously unhealthy and not just sitcom-quirky.  Lastly, I stop doing nice things for myself.  This last part I explain away with things like lack of time and lack of energy.  Really, though, I think it has more to do with depriving myself of rewards until I have dealt with the stressors in my life, and accomplished the tasks at hand.

I don’t have time to buy a replacement tank top. The ones I have, while holey, still cover most of my body.

I don’t need to go to bed yet, as I don’t have to be up for another 6 hours and I still have to finish filling out progress charts. That’s what coffee is for.

I don’t need to buy a new bar of soap.  I can just smoosh the remnants of these other three bars together to make a new one.  Who cares if I smell like lavender/clove/tea tree?

I think in a lot of ways, withholding rewards until you’ve met preset work objectives and goals makes a lot of sense.  That is, until you realize that your life for the last few month has been a non-stop gauntlet of working and more working and helping and supporting, missing out on the things you love to do, and missing the people with whom you’d rather be spending your time.  That’s why, this weekend, I didn’t do any work.  I spent time watching TV.  I visited my friend Marianne.  I hung out with my grandma.  I built blanket forts with my nephew, and talked politics with my mom.  I bought not just soap, but bubble bath and a face mask.  I replaced my tank tops. I still need to go grocery shopping – I am out of blueberries and steak.

I still have a lot of work that needs doing: writing progress notes, finishing wedding crap, packing for the move, tutoring.  But now, I can do all of those things while smelling relatively normal, and without feeling thankless.

Thank you, self.

It’s the Final Countdown

In honor of the last few days of summer school, I present the Final Teen Spirit Mashup, my introduction to which I credit Geeks Who Drink Pub Quiz.

I am really enjoying this pub quiz, even though it’s apparently a corporate deal.  Our team, Hipster Ariel says: “I Wanna Be Where the PBR” has placed first consistently over six weeks, with the exception of one 2nd place win.  I think other teams are starting to resent us.

While I love all my kids, I definitely need some time off.  There is a lot of last-minute wedding planning to complete, and a rapidly diminishing number of minutes in which to achieve said planning.   I am not going to bore you with the details, but let’s just say my head is EXPLODING. I am experiencing stress-related physical symptoms that caused me to need to leave work yesterday.  I slept from 11am to 2pm, and then again from 9pm to 6am.  I feel a lot better now, but dammit, I need my body to consistently perform right now.  Wish me luck.

Why do I argue on Facebook?

I wanted to share a copy of a conversation I had on Facebook today to see where you guys weigh in on the issue.

***
The discussion actually continued after the above exchange:

Pete:

Quitting may be more complex than that, but starting isn’t. Starting down the road to substance abuse is ALL about foolish choices and personal responsibility. That includes people who learn poor coping habits and self-medicate as a response to depression and/or stress. This isn’t about feeling superior, it’s about the lack of sympathy I feel for someone who doesn’t have strength of character sufficient to deal properly with their problems and instead decides to start a lifelong habit they KNOW is destructive. It’s not like the jury’s out… It’s pretty much universally known that drugs and alcohol are addictive and can easily kill you. Add to this the fact that addicts commonly turn away from those who try to help them (another personal choice) and it becomes pretty clear that moral responsibility is a central theme here.

Me:

As someone who has been there, I can definitely say my starting drinking did not stem from a lack of character. It started because I was miserable, and everyone around me drank, and something as ubiquitous as drinking didn’t seem to be a life-threatening choice. It seemed like a normal thing to do. Turns out, I am not exactly normal. Addicts start out just doing it once and a while, and suddenly they’re doing it every day and wondering how it got so bad. It feels like you need it. An addicted brain can tell itself all sorts of things to convince the user to keep using. It tells you to stay away from people who want you to stop, and surround yourself with people who want you to keep going.

I think you may be oversimplifying the issue of addiction. Are you implying that the choice to start a drug or to start drinking is solely impacted by the user? That there are no other mitigating factors? “Moral responsibility” indicates the action of a moral agent resulting in either a socially positive or negative outcome, but it’s causal oversimplification to think that the choice of the moral agent is untainted by circumstances and context. A kid who takes his first hit of a crack pipe doesn’t think, “gee, how can I stick it to the man today?”

Agnosticism and Death

I have religious friends, spiritual friends, and atheist friends.  I have always found that I fall somewhere in between – I don’t really THINK there are gods or demons, or bigger-than-us, sentient forces battling for our souls, but I don’t know these things DON”T exist.  I don’t believe in Thetons or Flying Spaghetti monsters either, but I can’t prove they don’t exist.

Basically, I steadfastly refuse to join one side of the argument or the other.

I see the benefits of religion and bad events related to it.  I hear the derision from the other side, mocking religion, and I can’t help to see the bad in that as well.  The truth, the REAL truth, is that I have no idea what is going on in the universe past what I can learn with science, and so far science hasn’t been able to explain EVERYTHING.  So I am not going to claim to know everything.

This creates a dilemma for me as I am now faced with the imminent death of my grandmother from cancer.  I love my grandma, I have seen her at least once a month since I was born – she and I are very close.  Now that she is on the way out, I don’t know what to think.  I want to think that some part of her might carry on in some way, whether it’s memories of her living on in me, or some sort of miniature afterlife produced by the final firing of her neurons.  I don’t like to think that her last years are just suffering and painful death.

But I don’t know.  How can I?  After she dies, friends of mine might argue that I should come to peace with the fact that she’s gone forever, dead, and cherish what life she did have.  Other friends might tell me she IS in a better place, and that I shouldn’t be sad, because she’s calm and peaceful.  Some asshole might tell me she’s in Hell because she wasn’t religious either, and voted pro-choice.

How does the grieving process work with agnosticism?  How does one reach acceptance when the term has such variable meaning?

Intervention Intervention

Joe likes to make fun of me because ever since he got us Netflix streaming, I’ve been watching at least three episodes of Intervention a week. For those of you out there unfamiliar with the show, it features the most out of control addicts you’ve ever seen being filmed documentary style. Their families suddenly confront them and demand that they go into a treatment program.

You may have heard of Allison, from season five, who suffered from an addiction to CANNED AIR. Like, the stuff used to dust computers:

Linda, from season eight, was addicted to fentanyl lollypops – they basically made her go completely insane. She thought auras from electronics caused her joints to spontaneously dislocate:

Why to I subject myself to this form of “entertainment”? What about it is appealing? As a person who used to be classified as a certifiable train wreck, I find some catharsis in watching others completely self-destruct. I watch and think that, while I’ve done some crazy things in the past, at least I never throw up into heavy-duty, 2-quart zippy bags and hide them in my closet. I have also never passed out drunk on a train track, only to have a train take off my leg.

Do I have a problem? For a lot of recovering addicts, I have heard that seeing people using can trigger relapses. For me, seeing people using makes me feel relieved. It makes me appreciate being able to sleep regularly, hold down a job, and form coherent sentences. I also love having teeth and being able to afford shoes. I like having friends who like me because I am awesome, and not because I have awesome smack.

The Ups and Downs of Vacation

Being a teacher, I get the small luxury of regular vacation time – it sort of makes up for the 60 hour work weeks for ridiculously little pay.  I manage to keep myself busy with regular tutoring jobs, and playing catch-up on all of the errands and chores I have no time for otherwise.  This whole plan comes crashing down, however, when I catch a nasty cold.  Of course I get sick as soon as the weather is nice and I don’t have to go to work.  Why wouldn’t I?

As an update to my last blog post, I have cut down on my smoking substantially.  I haven’t quit altogether, but my blood pressure is back down in the normal range, and I’ve dropped ten pounds.  All good things.

New Goals

I have gone back to the gym after a month or so hiatus.  I got out of the habit and forgot how good it felt to get regular exercise.  Now I’m chronically sore, but I sleep better and am less moody.

Due to a less than stellar blood pressure reading at my last doctor’s appointment, I have also decided to cut down on my smoking.  I am currently down to four cigarettes a day, which is really hard.  It’s insane how often my mind wanders and I just think about how badly I want to smoke.  I am all about personal freedom, but sometimes it just boggles my mind how something so bad for you and so addictive can still be legal.

Joe and I have been married 6 months this month.  A few days ago, Joe misplaced his wedding ring.  We tore the apartment apart looking for it – it has vanished.  I am a little sad, but Joe is devastated.  Poor guy – he really digs on symbolism.