Riding the wave of near-normalcy

Thank goodness for modern medicine.

For want of a blog, a shoe was lost

After tense negotiations with my friend L., I am reviving the blog so that she will do her damn exercises. Take that, L.'s medical problem!

I can't find the cache of items that I wrote for the blog without posting them, so I'm going to wing it. Look out below!

Life is strange lately. My neurochemicals have been out of whack. They are re-entering Whack, thanks to the free passport that comes as a bonus in each and every prescription vial of Nutty NeuroTransmitterz.

As someone who generally lives in her own head, I have found that contact with a few loving friends for one morning each week has been of great help. So has taking care of my new pooch, whom I shall refer to as Alter. Were he a cocker spaniel, he would, of course, be Alter Cocker. (I think Google now translates Yiddish, if that's any help.)

The first offspring is doing very well in her last year of her baccalaureate program. The second is doing well at his college so far, far away after a period of adjustment. I wish that I had gone to college farther from my parents, so that I would have had to rely on, and develop, my own resources, and learn to ask for help from people outside my family. That was not to be, however. That's just one of the disadvantages of having been a fearful young squirt when I started higher ed.

My dear husband, the pseudonymous Mr. Martin, is doing well, though wishing he could retire soon. I sympathize. I wish I could retire soon. As an alternative, I will work toward getting a better job that uses my strengths.

Go ahead and do your prescribed exercises, L. They'll help if you do them regularly.

Your pal,

Dr. Beads

Winter Arrives a Month Late

Today was the first snowcone morning of the season.

The season itself (called "Winter," I think -- it's been so long) started about a month later than usual.

We are doomed.

Stop Talking Now

My best friend made the mistake of saying something complimentary to her passive-aggressive coworker. The coworker immediately questioned the compliment.

Later the same morning, my friend told the p/a coworker that her son had been scheduled for a class taught by his father.

Coworker's response: "Is that legal?" (Notice: not "Is that a good idea?" or "How does he feel about that?" but a suggestion of a possible crime in progress)

Must remind best friend not to say anything to p/a coworker unless absolutely necessary.

Paging Dr. Beads

Note to self:

Please stop waking me up by tapping me on the shoulder.
It's creeping me the fuck out.

That's My Boy

As part of the new Age of Insomnia and Nightmares, too-ra-loo too-ra-lay, I've been returning to my old, bad habit of having an unhealthy late-night snack.

As I made myself a quesadilla, my son asked, "Are you hungry, or just bored?" I replied, "Mostly bored."

My son's advice: "Hard liquor and a good book will take care of that."

Should I have asked him whether the word "man" could be substituted for one of the other nouns there?

Land of a Thousand Nightmares

The nightmares are back, and this time it's personal.

These are the nightmares I remember from the past 3 nights. (I'm sure that I don't remember most of my dreams. If this is just a sample of what I go through at night, no wonder I'm a twitching bag of nerves).

Saturday's recipe for disaster mixed together:

- the earliest episodes of "Dexter" (I've read the books, but wasn't prepared for the explicitness of the cable series)
- too many hours playing an addicting match-3 game, "Cradle of Rome"
- too much beer

Resulting dough was baked in the subconscious, and voila! Hypercolorful scenes of an after-hours bar, a growing sense of menace, and dreadful suspense as a group of innocents was simultaneously directed to an office downtown *and* stalked by a mob family down mean streets laid out on a near-grid.

Sunday night, I think my subconscious refused to let anything trickle up to my conscious mind so that I wouldn't go stark raving mad. Maybe that effort is why I barely slept.

Monday night, I dreamed about an urban legend that I think I made up for the purpose of dreaming about it.

You may have heard of some cockamamie date that is designated as the day you start working for yourself instead of the government. (Never mind that taxes primarily pay for services for us. I like having public education, clean streets, a civil service with fairly low corruption [if we ignore the higher levels of the Bush Administration], a concerned police presence, and NOAA.) My brain came up with a day that marked when you stop paying for the financial damages awarded victims (and families of victims) of a lawsuit against the government, stemming from a horrific air travel disaster.

I had to listen to a Robert Stack/Stacy Keach-ish voiceover that began, "There was no Charlie Baumer on the passenger list of Flight 103." I thought it was going to be a "ghost on the flight of DOOM" story, but it turned out that Charlie was an alias of a known passenger who spent hours (hours!) calming the fears of his increasingly worried fellow-passengers until the inevitable crash.

Now, I don't really operate in 3D, but I know that you don't fly a crippled airplane for hours, or fly in dangerous weather for hours, unless there is NOWHERE TO FUCKING LAND. It's not like the situation in a boat ship, in which you may try to make it back to land even if the engine is tottering on the brink. In a plane, you try to reach the ground in a controlled manner ASAP, otherwise you may reach the ground in an uncontrolled manner at a high rate of speed. (It's not the fall that kills, it's the sudden stop at the end.)

Woke up from that one in a total body clench.

Achieved only half-sleep from that moment on, punctuated by a dream about work, of course. I transferred between departments to a situation where I knew some of the people slightly, and they didn't realize that I needed orientation and training. I was immediately given assignments above my head and couldn't even get the necessary supplies. I was scheduled to give a presentation with just a few minutes' notice and told that I had to distribute tiny pens with the project or department logo on them. (Gods forbid that the attendees should have to use their own pens, or be given normal-sized pens that wouldn't cause hand cramp.) No one could give me any of the pens or tell me how to find any. I stumbled on a lobby display by a support department and found a partially filled package of the tiny pens. The pens disappeared (of course) and I asked desperately if I could get more. I was told that the next batch still had to be autoclaved.

What the fuck is my brain doing to me? Am I in Hell?

Glad It's Not My Family

My best friend told me of a convo with her son as they were out on an errand.

Son: What's BDSM?

Friend: stupefied silence

My friend finally found her voice and asked, "Where did you hear about that?"

Son's reply? "Watching TV with Mawmaw."

I'm so glad that's not my family.