I had a feeling this was going to be a bad one. I just got the dreaded call from the mechanic: It’s the catalytic converter, and it’s going to cost $586. (That’s almost an entire month’s rent.)
A couple of you have already donated, and I’m grateful. If there’s anyone else who can spare a few bucks, please donate. I’d really, really appreciate any help at all.
I was out shoveling snow this morning. I don’t know why I did that; it’s supposed to snow all day and it’s predicted that we’ll get nine inches.
But it was so wet and gloppy, I figured I’d just do the pathway – for the mailman, I told myself.
And this is the thing about middle age: You keep forgetting you’re old now. You remember other mornings, cheerily shoveling snow, and it seems like a nice, brisk start to the day.
It isn’t. Not unless it’s that nice, light, fluffy snow. Not like this.
So I’ve pulled out my entire right side and everything hurts. All this, for the illusion that I’m young again. Oy.
I hit a pothole. Suddenly, my exhaust system is very, very loud and very underpowered. Exhaust repairs, as you know, are very expensive. (My mechanic can’t look at it until Monday, or I’d know for sure.)
So if you can afford to donate a few bucks, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
I was at the chiro yesterday, who’s trying to help me with my chronic neck and shoulder problems. He asked me if he could use this new tool, some kind of neuromuscular stimulation something or other (really, it’s like a small jackhammer). It didn’t hurt when he was doing it, but damn, everything was sore last night!
He used it on my spine and neck and when he was done, he showed me the medical journal describing how it’s supposed to work. I said, “Hmm. I wonder if that would help my ankle.”
“Do you want me to try?”
I told him I was fine with being a guinea pig, and he used it on the bottom of my foot. It felt extremely… peculiar — and really painful, to boot. But my foot feels good, so what the hell.
http://youtu.be/b_a-eXIoyYA
I couldn’t stay. Her family wanted me to stay and make a speech, but I couldn’t. Her rotten ex was there, and as I walked past and heard him explaining — no, lecturing someone on how “disturbed” Lyn was, it was all I could do not to haul off and hit him. (I am not a violent person.) As it turns out, I wasn’t the only person who felt that way. But her family did not want a scene, so my friend and I left and went to a bar, where we drank to her memory.
Well done, Lynnie. Look at all those people who loved you!
I just don’t know if this headache is from my sinuses, or the TMJ. I just know that waking up with one is a really lousy start to the day. I’m now contemplating getting a giant Pepsi caffeine infusion at the Wawa to see if it helps. Trying to write with a bag of frozen string beans on my head is a drag.
I found out my friend had pawned all her jewelry and died with a purse full of pills. Sigh. From the things her family told me, she was planning this for a while and I don’t think anyone could have changed her mind.
That’s one of the things when someone kills themselves like this: There are no answers. You’re just left with your own ideas about it, none of them necessarily true.
http://youtu.be/nZlCTcqdaug
My friend Lyn (aka commenter Shadgirl) killed herself Saturday night, an hour or two after she left my house. I just found out when I tried to call her and her sister-in-law answered her phone. She took all the pills she had and climbed into the bathtub, where the guy she was breaking up with found her.
I’d spent the day with her, helping her work out a budget and prepare to have a cleaning lady work on her house this week. You know how it is when you’re depressed — you can’t seem to get started on anything, and I was trying to help. Turns out she was about $500 in the hole every month and didn’t know what she could do about it. She was making plans to get a new roommate after her ex left, but nothing was final yet.
She was on Zoloft. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.
We’d known each other since high school. I can’t say I’m completely surprised, but I can’t quite believe she’s gone.
Is there anything quite like the kick in the teeth of being dumped by someone you once loved madly, of having to start over when you thought you’d never have to date again? Or the terrifying moment of being naked again in front of a stranger? It’s all there, right in Jill Clayburgh’s face. I haven’t seen this movie in thirty years or so, and as I watched it last night, I thought about something a friend’s daughter once said when she overheard us talking. “The only thing that’s getting me through high school is thinking that once I’m grown up, there won’t be all this obsessing over boys,” she said. “But from listening to you, it sounds like it never stops.” You could hear the teen angst in her voice.
We burst out laughing. “No, honey. It never, ever ends,” her mother said. “Ask your grandmother.”
My mother used to say, “Girlfriends will see you through times of no men better than men will see you through times of no girlfriends.” She was 86 but still chatted on the phone every day with her friends or with her last sister. It was reassuring, not scary the way the thought of being alone used to be.
That whole thing of being all raw nerves: Will he call? Won’t he? Is he telling the truth? Am I telling the truth? This is why living alone is not so bad. Not having my head space filled with someone else’s expectations is good, not having to give a shit over whether I’ve annoyed someone is liberating. More room to create.
I like to create.
The birds are twittering. A picturesque snow flurry is falling. And as I sit here, I have excruciating pain on the right side of my head that starts at the top and runs all the way down behind my ear. That is why I am drinking a Diet Pepsi and wearing a Velcroed ice pack around my head.
I’m beginning to think this has more to do with the chronic TMJ problem than my sinuses. (I have an appointment with the chiro this afternoon.)
I have such chronic tension in my neck and shoulders, you could bounce a brick off me. I’m running the other site, where it gets so busy, I sometimes forget to come back here and post. (Sorry!) I’m always feeding that goddamned media beast. So between that and the mechanical problems that come with being deskbound all day, I am fucked up. I am an assembly-line worker.
It’s my life has been wasted/And I who’ve been a fool/To let this manufacturer use my body for a tool.
Writers are no longer paid to write, they’re “content providers.” And the machine grinds on.
