After consulting with her doctors and being told that they've done all they could do, my mother and my father have come to the mutual decision that it's time to go back home to Nevada. On their last visit, the doctors told my father that my mother had 1-2 months left to live, and my Mother wants that time to be in her own home, looking out at the snow-covered Virgin Mountains and nearby buttes.
I found out about all this when I called my Dad to ask if he'd been watching the news. Apparently, Las Vegas and the surrounding areas got smacked with a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm.... a whopping 4" of snow. My parents and I both got a chuckle out of how much of a non-story story this was, with us having lived part of our lives in Western PA, where a 4" snowstorm would be no big deal at all. It probably wouldn't even have caused a school delay. You don't want to know how bad it had to get to get school cancelled where I grew up. It had to resemble one of the icy disaster scenes out of the movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" before the superintendant of the Ligonier Valley Schools would even consider picking up the phone and cancelling school.
My Dad calmly explained to me what the doctors had said, then followed up by saying that they wanted to go back home and spend that time with each other; that they'd gotten all their crying done the night before after they'd gotten the news, and now they had a plan to move forward.
I was glad to hear that they'd gotten all their crying done. I wish I could say the same, but I'd be lying. I guess, as I sit here and type, I can't help but think and feel angry and sad that God has really let us all down here, that he's really dropped the ball on this one. I'm angry and sad that my mom never really got to enjoy her retirement, as she worked right up until she got sick; that my Dad is about to lose the love of his life, his wife of over 40 years; that my sisters and I are all going to lose our mother; and that my nieces and nephews are going to lose out on knowing their grandmother as they grow up.
I'm so sad and angry and let down right now that I am almost at a complete loss for words. I am glad, at times like these, that there are people smarter than me who have already written words (in Latin, no less) that so perfectly suit the way I feel at this moment, that all I need do is "copy and paste" them here:
(sarcastically) gratias tibi ago, domine.
haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito?
cruciatus in crucem!
cruciatus in crucem!
(dismissive hand gesture) eas in crucem!
For the sake of my Dad's sanity, I'll not bother to translate that text to English. I'm pretty sure his head would just explode if he read this in English.
So... 1-2 months they say. Well, who knows. There's a great line from the movie, "The Godfather, Part II", delivered by Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). While sitting and having a "business meeting" in his house in Reno, Michael's brother Tommy, the family consigliere, brings up that Michael's enemy, Hyman Roth is returning to the country after being denied access "to live out the twilight of his life" in his native land (Israel). Michael slyly quips, "Hyman Roth's been dying of the same heart attack for the past 20 years." Maybe 1-2 months for my mom might be longer than they think. Doctors have been known to be wrong before, and my mother enjoys nothing more than confounding doctors and proving them wrong.
With flying back to Nevada is out of the question (altitude changes causing pressure on the brain would be BAD), my sister has been attempting the colossal undertaking of putting together an Alexandria, VA to NV Amtrack train trip for my parents and for her and her husband. Since Amtrack doesn't stop in Las Vegas, the closest she can get is somewhere in Arizona, and then they'll have to take a bus to the Las Vegas airport and rent a car to get back home. While this is all happening, my parent's car will be transported from Alexandria to NV by a coast-to-coast car transport company, that is, if my sister can find one that's going that way during the holidays.
After hearing her recount her adventure in travel agent-hell, I can now understand why the nation's Governors want the Obama administration to invest some of the bailout money he'll be chucking around into fixing the infrastructure of the US. I am a huge proponent of mag-lev and other types of high-speed rail, and believe that our country would be far more efficient today if we had been keeping pace with other foreign countries and upgrading our rail system as they have been. I believe if we could easily link state-to-state, intra-state and city rail/metro systems together so that they are easy-to-use, efficient,and relatively inexpensive, a lot of our traffic and car congestion issues could be resolved. Imagine being able to go from Asheville, NC to the NC shore in a few hours by hi-speed rail. Or having a 40 minute commute from Charlotte to Chapel Hill or Durham via high-speed rail and then being able to take a metro-like rail system to get around the RDU area. That would be the shit! And imagine all the jobs that would attract!
But I digress. With all of that planning being set into motion, my sister told me that the earliest they could do this would be just after Christmas, on the 30th of December. So I am going to try to make it up to visit my Mom and Dad around Christmas before they head back out West. I will, of course, be ready to go out to Nevada at the drop of a hat if her condition takes a turn for the worse, but I do hope that my Mom disproves her doctor's predictions and that the hat doesn't drop for some time to come.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
A Come To Hospice (and Jesus) meeting....
The bad news came the other night. My mother's treatment is not working, and there was swelling on the front right side of her brain that was beginning to impair her cerebral and cerebellar functions.
This was discovered when my mother was eating dinner and realized that her left hand had taken up temporary residence in her mashed potatoes only after she had lifted the aforementioned hand up and rubbed her head. In doing so, she smeared the potatoes across her brow and head. While the picture that may paint in your mind may cause you to chuckle, my sisters, who had been staying with my mom and dad, immediately freaked out thinking that my mom had suffered a stroke, and rushed her off to the Stroke Center in DC for immediate evaluations.
As it turned out, she didn't have a stroke, but the symptoms were similar enough in nature that it was a good precaution. The doctors immediately started my mom on medication to reduce her brain swelling, but postulated that the swelling was caused by the expansion of her existing tumors. The prognosis for this is grim, and though we all still hope for a miracle, the reality of the situation is that my parents and sisters and I all agree that my mom and dad need the help of a hospice to adequately deal with this situation however it plays out.
I was the latecomer to this clan meeting. I got word of this on Wednesday night, after I spent the latter part of the day at the doctor's office, trying to figure out whether the trouble I was having breathing was caused by pleuracy, a non-diagnosed hiatal hernia, or some other unforeseen ailment. The doctor I was seeing that day, because my doctor was booked full and unable to see me, immediately jumped to the "you're fat and having a heart attack" conclusion. This only succeeded in pissing me off. I explained that I didn't think that was it, and that the pain I was experiencing was only on deep inhalation, and when I breath when laying prone, and also when I cough. Undeterred, she ordered up a EKG to make sure my heart wasn't about to explode out of my chest and muck up her tidy office. When the test came back with a perfect heart rhythm reading, I think I limited my "I told you so's" to a bare minimum, perhaps 8 or 9 at best.
The next step for her was palpation of my back and chest. Unknown to me however, was that this doctor was either a bonafide member of the undead or that she was just off in the other room with her hands in two buckets of ice. When she put her ice cold "Dukes" on my back, I nearly shot off the exam table into John's arms halfway across the room. She laughed and rubbed them together, bringing them from a frosty 20 degrees to a much balmier 22 or 23 degrees. I've heard of having ice in your veins, but she put new meaning to those words, as she kept me jumping and wriggling all over the place as she poked and prodded me with her icy digits.
I was then informed that the x-ray tech had left for the day and that I would need to come back the next day for an x-ray to check to see what might be going on in my chest. Figuring that the worst was over, I took my chart and paperwork and headed over to the labs area so that they could do some blood letting... er... blood drawing on me to see if they could find anything there. As I got there, the doctor strode up to me and added one more thing to the list, a fecal sample card pack, and I realized that I had cursed myself by thinking the worst was past and that the day could indeed get a whole lot worse.
If you've never had the pleasure of doing one of these, a fecal card pack is a multi-day test wherein you have to collect specimens of your own poop and put them on a card and send the whole lot of cards back in an envelope so they can be tested for blood or whatever else it is you can look to find in poop these days. The lab tech handed me the pack and I looked at it, mouth completely agape. I quickly asked if I could just grind one out right there for them and not have to do the collecting, spreading, letting dry, folding and mailing off business. I admit it, I'm a wuss. The idea of making teeny-tiny poop picassos on the inside of what looks like a bunch of matchbook covers just has no appeal to me whatsoever.
First off, I've not had a regular bowel movement since Bill Clinton was in office and I had my gall bladder out. I actually worry when I DO have a normal bowel movement as that's usually a sign that I'm sick or about to be sick.
Second, what does come out of there usually looks and smells like it went through New Jersey on its way out. I mean, some people say that they think their shit doesn't stink. I assure you, mine certainly does. My shit REALLY REALLY does stink! My foolishly curious dogs will push the door of the bathroom open and waltz on in when I'm trying to do my business, then get one whiff of the wolfbane I'm dropping and quickly back the hell out of the bathroom. That's gotta be a sign! I mean, if a dog thinks your shit smells so awful that they have to leave the room, well... there ya go!
Third, the idea of using a piece of a stick that's smaller and thinner than a tongue depresser to fish through the liquid loveliness that is my fecal matter holds absolutely no draw for me at all! I don't understand scat play, I never have and I can honestly say that I never will.
Lastly, I know what comes out of my butt is gross, nasty, and probably toxic on many, many levels. I know this because I've had to clean my toilet, and the chemicals I have to use to remove the lingering remains of my time spent on the porcelain throne are so powerful, bleaching and caustic that the poison warning on the label is practically as big as the product logo itself. And that's just not a good sign at all when the makers and marketers of a product feel that the poison warnings for their product should have as much real estate on the label as the name of the product itself. So my last protest against the at-home scatology painting and self-mailing lab kit was that the mailing pouch didn't look nearly sturdy enough to mail my poop anywhere safely. Come ON...it was PAPER! You definitely want a little more between my shit and the outside world than some flimsy papery envelope.
I mentioned this, apparently not too quietly to the lab tech and due to the close proximity of the office layout, most of the entire office as well. All of them, including the patients who were also within earshot, began to giggle in a rather school-girlish fashion. Great! Just great!
So yeah, I'd have definitely taken any bets at that moment that I'd hit rock bottom there, and that the day couldn't really slide/freefall any further down the abyss. Fecal collection... I mean... how much shittier can it get, right? Well.. I definitely wouldn't have beat the spread (fecal collection pun intended) on those bets, as my sister called just as I got back in the car and began driving off to get something to eat before I headed home. She called to let me know about Mom's possible stroke and to let me know that they were testing her now and they'd know more later on that evening. It was then that I knew, without a doubt, that I'd hit the bottom of the laurentian abyss that had been my day.
When I called my friends on Wednesday and Thursday to tell them what was going on with my Mom (there's a group of my friends that ask me for constant updates oon my mom), every one of them asked me if I'm alright. I've found that I have two base instinctive reactions that can happen when disasters happen, and I think this may be a "guy thing" too. I can either throw my hands up in the air, scream, yell, wail and cry, or I can "fuck shit up", which is wherein I take something/anything and just slam it against a wall, a tree, the side of the house, etc., til it's just splinters. Though both of these usually makes me feel better, the first really doesn't do much of anything positive except burn calories, and the second makes me wish I had better property insurance after I calm down and realize that the "insert destroyed object" cost "$xxx.xx" dollars and destroying it was just stupid. It's definitely a guy thing!
I got my chest x-ray the next day (Thursday) and then, that evening, got the news from my sister that what my mom had wasn't a stroke, but brain swelling that was causing my mom's symptoms. John and I discussed my options and I decided that, sick or not, I was going to go up to visit. I called my coworker and told her what was happening and she told me not to worry about whatever I was working on, that it would get done and that I was to go be with my mom. My boss, whom I called as I drove up today, said much the same thing, adding that everyone in my workgroup thoughts were with my mom and me and my family.
When I got to my parents sublet in Alexandria, I got to see a familiar sight, my parents forcing food on my siblings, and then onto me even before I was able to set down my bags and greet everyone. This ritual is one my partner never fails to make light of. This stems from the time we'd taken a trip to PA to visit my folks when they lived in Latrobe. We'd driven up there one night after work and had arrived there around 5 am, and, despite the hour and the fact that we'd been driving for 10-12 hours, my parents got up to greet us at the door and to tell us that they'd made some chili for us, and to ask would we like some? John just looked at my parents as if they'd just done something really, really disturbing and then, shaking his head in disbelief, toddled off to bed. I, of course, had some chili, and then went off to bed. Having been raised by them, I'm nothing if not well-trained when it comes to that kinda stuff.
So, as the early evening wore on, all of my sisters showed up, and, like kids waiting for Santa Claus, we began to wait for the "Hospice Lady" to make her appearance. While we waited, we threw in a copy of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" and my parents watched incredulously as my sisters and I recited the entire show, verbatim... in chorus; pointing out our favorite parts of the show as they passed. I remarked on the eerie similarity in looks between John and the Grinch in several places during the show. most notably when he was grousing about the Whoos to his dog Max, and again when he began to smile "a smile most unpleasant" as he watched the Whoo children asleep with their candy canes (right before he stole them.) My sisters goggled at me for a second and then began to laugh and point at the screen and say, "oh my God, he really DOES look like John!" There's more than one reason we named our dog Max.
The Hospice Lady showed up and went through the whole spiel on what all was entailed with the hospice and hospice-care and then got the paperwork going for my mom's enrollment. My mother's doctor, Dr. Kressel called the Hospice Lady to confirm all the facts with her and in doing so, inadvertently upset both my mom and my dad when she relayed out-loud his rather grim prognosis for my mom, which is necessary to get the hospice care going. After my sister walked the Hospeice Lady back to her car, thanking her for the housecall, she and my other sisters began to explain to my parents that it wasn't a death sentence, but only his estimation, and that it might be completely off the mark.
My Dad, God love him, refuses to believe anything but the best will happen, and predicts my Mom will still beat this back. I quietly asked my sisters if they thought he could see the pyramids and Sphynx from his vantage point in de Nile (sic).
The rest of our evening was spent having a really, really fascinating conversation about the state of our family; how the way our family works positively impacts the new family members (i.e. spouses, daughters, sons, cousins, aunts, uncles, mother and fathers-in-law, etc., and how proud we all are of the way our family has stayed so tightly together through the years in contrast to other branches of our family who have splintered off.
I have to admit that I know where my Dad's coming from with his unflappable optimism (aka Denial), as part of me is seeing the pyramids just as clearly. There's that part of me that believes it could happen, too. I mean, I keep thinking to myself that, in a world where the son of a lowly carpenter can become the King of the Jews, anything is possible.
This was discovered when my mother was eating dinner and realized that her left hand had taken up temporary residence in her mashed potatoes only after she had lifted the aforementioned hand up and rubbed her head. In doing so, she smeared the potatoes across her brow and head. While the picture that may paint in your mind may cause you to chuckle, my sisters, who had been staying with my mom and dad, immediately freaked out thinking that my mom had suffered a stroke, and rushed her off to the Stroke Center in DC for immediate evaluations.
As it turned out, she didn't have a stroke, but the symptoms were similar enough in nature that it was a good precaution. The doctors immediately started my mom on medication to reduce her brain swelling, but postulated that the swelling was caused by the expansion of her existing tumors. The prognosis for this is grim, and though we all still hope for a miracle, the reality of the situation is that my parents and sisters and I all agree that my mom and dad need the help of a hospice to adequately deal with this situation however it plays out.
I was the latecomer to this clan meeting. I got word of this on Wednesday night, after I spent the latter part of the day at the doctor's office, trying to figure out whether the trouble I was having breathing was caused by pleuracy, a non-diagnosed hiatal hernia, or some other unforeseen ailment. The doctor I was seeing that day, because my doctor was booked full and unable to see me, immediately jumped to the "you're fat and having a heart attack" conclusion. This only succeeded in pissing me off. I explained that I didn't think that was it, and that the pain I was experiencing was only on deep inhalation, and when I breath when laying prone, and also when I cough. Undeterred, she ordered up a EKG to make sure my heart wasn't about to explode out of my chest and muck up her tidy office. When the test came back with a perfect heart rhythm reading, I think I limited my "I told you so's" to a bare minimum, perhaps 8 or 9 at best.
The next step for her was palpation of my back and chest. Unknown to me however, was that this doctor was either a bonafide member of the undead or that she was just off in the other room with her hands in two buckets of ice. When she put her ice cold "Dukes" on my back, I nearly shot off the exam table into John's arms halfway across the room. She laughed and rubbed them together, bringing them from a frosty 20 degrees to a much balmier 22 or 23 degrees. I've heard of having ice in your veins, but she put new meaning to those words, as she kept me jumping and wriggling all over the place as she poked and prodded me with her icy digits.
I was then informed that the x-ray tech had left for the day and that I would need to come back the next day for an x-ray to check to see what might be going on in my chest. Figuring that the worst was over, I took my chart and paperwork and headed over to the labs area so that they could do some blood letting... er... blood drawing on me to see if they could find anything there. As I got there, the doctor strode up to me and added one more thing to the list, a fecal sample card pack, and I realized that I had cursed myself by thinking the worst was past and that the day could indeed get a whole lot worse.
If you've never had the pleasure of doing one of these, a fecal card pack is a multi-day test wherein you have to collect specimens of your own poop and put them on a card and send the whole lot of cards back in an envelope so they can be tested for blood or whatever else it is you can look to find in poop these days. The lab tech handed me the pack and I looked at it, mouth completely agape. I quickly asked if I could just grind one out right there for them and not have to do the collecting, spreading, letting dry, folding and mailing off business. I admit it, I'm a wuss. The idea of making teeny-tiny poop picassos on the inside of what looks like a bunch of matchbook covers just has no appeal to me whatsoever.
First off, I've not had a regular bowel movement since Bill Clinton was in office and I had my gall bladder out. I actually worry when I DO have a normal bowel movement as that's usually a sign that I'm sick or about to be sick.
Second, what does come out of there usually looks and smells like it went through New Jersey on its way out. I mean, some people say that they think their shit doesn't stink. I assure you, mine certainly does. My shit REALLY REALLY does stink! My foolishly curious dogs will push the door of the bathroom open and waltz on in when I'm trying to do my business, then get one whiff of the wolfbane I'm dropping and quickly back the hell out of the bathroom. That's gotta be a sign! I mean, if a dog thinks your shit smells so awful that they have to leave the room, well... there ya go!
Third, the idea of using a piece of a stick that's smaller and thinner than a tongue depresser to fish through the liquid loveliness that is my fecal matter holds absolutely no draw for me at all! I don't understand scat play, I never have and I can honestly say that I never will.
Lastly, I know what comes out of my butt is gross, nasty, and probably toxic on many, many levels. I know this because I've had to clean my toilet, and the chemicals I have to use to remove the lingering remains of my time spent on the porcelain throne are so powerful, bleaching and caustic that the poison warning on the label is practically as big as the product logo itself. And that's just not a good sign at all when the makers and marketers of a product feel that the poison warnings for their product should have as much real estate on the label as the name of the product itself. So my last protest against the at-home scatology painting and self-mailing lab kit was that the mailing pouch didn't look nearly sturdy enough to mail my poop anywhere safely. Come ON...it was PAPER! You definitely want a little more between my shit and the outside world than some flimsy papery envelope.
I mentioned this, apparently not too quietly to the lab tech and due to the close proximity of the office layout, most of the entire office as well. All of them, including the patients who were also within earshot, began to giggle in a rather school-girlish fashion. Great! Just great!
So yeah, I'd have definitely taken any bets at that moment that I'd hit rock bottom there, and that the day couldn't really slide/freefall any further down the abyss. Fecal collection... I mean... how much shittier can it get, right? Well.. I definitely wouldn't have beat the spread (fecal collection pun intended) on those bets, as my sister called just as I got back in the car and began driving off to get something to eat before I headed home. She called to let me know about Mom's possible stroke and to let me know that they were testing her now and they'd know more later on that evening. It was then that I knew, without a doubt, that I'd hit the bottom of the laurentian abyss that had been my day.
When I called my friends on Wednesday and Thursday to tell them what was going on with my Mom (there's a group of my friends that ask me for constant updates oon my mom), every one of them asked me if I'm alright. I've found that I have two base instinctive reactions that can happen when disasters happen, and I think this may be a "guy thing" too. I can either throw my hands up in the air, scream, yell, wail and cry, or I can "fuck shit up", which is wherein I take something/anything and just slam it against a wall, a tree, the side of the house, etc., til it's just splinters. Though both of these usually makes me feel better, the first really doesn't do much of anything positive except burn calories, and the second makes me wish I had better property insurance after I calm down and realize that the "insert destroyed object" cost "$xxx.xx" dollars and destroying it was just stupid. It's definitely a guy thing!
I got my chest x-ray the next day (Thursday) and then, that evening, got the news from my sister that what my mom had wasn't a stroke, but brain swelling that was causing my mom's symptoms. John and I discussed my options and I decided that, sick or not, I was going to go up to visit. I called my coworker and told her what was happening and she told me not to worry about whatever I was working on, that it would get done and that I was to go be with my mom. My boss, whom I called as I drove up today, said much the same thing, adding that everyone in my workgroup thoughts were with my mom and me and my family.
When I got to my parents sublet in Alexandria, I got to see a familiar sight, my parents forcing food on my siblings, and then onto me even before I was able to set down my bags and greet everyone. This ritual is one my partner never fails to make light of. This stems from the time we'd taken a trip to PA to visit my folks when they lived in Latrobe. We'd driven up there one night after work and had arrived there around 5 am, and, despite the hour and the fact that we'd been driving for 10-12 hours, my parents got up to greet us at the door and to tell us that they'd made some chili for us, and to ask would we like some? John just looked at my parents as if they'd just done something really, really disturbing and then, shaking his head in disbelief, toddled off to bed. I, of course, had some chili, and then went off to bed. Having been raised by them, I'm nothing if not well-trained when it comes to that kinda stuff.
So, as the early evening wore on, all of my sisters showed up, and, like kids waiting for Santa Claus, we began to wait for the "Hospice Lady" to make her appearance. While we waited, we threw in a copy of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" and my parents watched incredulously as my sisters and I recited the entire show, verbatim... in chorus; pointing out our favorite parts of the show as they passed. I remarked on the eerie similarity in looks between John and the Grinch in several places during the show. most notably when he was grousing about the Whoos to his dog Max, and again when he began to smile "a smile most unpleasant" as he watched the Whoo children asleep with their candy canes (right before he stole them.) My sisters goggled at me for a second and then began to laugh and point at the screen and say, "oh my God, he really DOES look like John!" There's more than one reason we named our dog Max.
The Hospice Lady showed up and went through the whole spiel on what all was entailed with the hospice and hospice-care and then got the paperwork going for my mom's enrollment. My mother's doctor, Dr. Kressel called the Hospice Lady to confirm all the facts with her and in doing so, inadvertently upset both my mom and my dad when she relayed out-loud his rather grim prognosis for my mom, which is necessary to get the hospice care going. After my sister walked the Hospeice Lady back to her car, thanking her for the housecall, she and my other sisters began to explain to my parents that it wasn't a death sentence, but only his estimation, and that it might be completely off the mark.
My Dad, God love him, refuses to believe anything but the best will happen, and predicts my Mom will still beat this back. I quietly asked my sisters if they thought he could see the pyramids and Sphynx from his vantage point in de Nile (sic).
The rest of our evening was spent having a really, really fascinating conversation about the state of our family; how the way our family works positively impacts the new family members (i.e. spouses, daughters, sons, cousins, aunts, uncles, mother and fathers-in-law, etc., and how proud we all are of the way our family has stayed so tightly together through the years in contrast to other branches of our family who have splintered off.
I have to admit that I know where my Dad's coming from with his unflappable optimism (aka Denial), as part of me is seeing the pyramids just as clearly. There's that part of me that believes it could happen, too. I mean, I keep thinking to myself that, in a world where the son of a lowly carpenter can become the King of the Jews, anything is possible.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Longing For Christmas Past (Reprint)
I wrote this a few years back for my family, and, in a nice surprise, had a few newspapers contact me about printing this at Christmastime. My folks asked me to put it somewhere on the web where they could send people to read it.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Longing For Christmas Past
I remember when I was ten years old. Christmas seemed so much more intimate, so steeped in tradition and family. There were the many activities and events that led up to the Christmas Holiday, like going to church during advent, and watching as one by one, the four advent candles were lit. I remember going to sit on Santa’s lap at the volunteer fire hall just down the road from our house in Wilpen, P.A., and then, days later, writing that last minute letter to Santa Claus to ask for any important gifts I’d forgotten to ask for when I sat on his knee. Back in those days, I gave the letter to my mom and dad who promised to check it for spelling errors, (wow… was I ever gullible!), then they’d take me into town to drop off the letter in the huge “letters for Santa” mailbox in front of the town hall on the Ligonier Diamond.
I also vividly remember all pre-holiday baking that got done a day or two before Christmas Eve. I remember watching as Grandma would mix together rice and beef, boil cabbage heads to loosen and separate the leaves, then roll out casserole after casserole full of halupki. She would then mix together batch after batch of yeasty dough to roll out on the counter into long sheets which she would then fill and roll into kolacky rolls. I remember her whole house would smell of the heady aroma of bakery goods for hours, almost days after she baked.
Those are just a few of the many memorable little details that made the time leading up to the big two day Christmas holiday magical all unto itself. Why do I call it a two-day holiday? Well, because I'm Slovak-American and Christmas Eve is just as much a holiday to us Slovak-Americans as is Christmas Day.
Christmas Eve started early for me back then, and by early, I mean it started off really, really early! At some point just as the barest hint of dawn began to lighten the dark winter sky in the east, Dad would wake me up and help my clumsy, still half-asleep little body get dressed in all my heavy winter clothes. He would then push me out the back door of the house so that I could start the day off by fulfilling an old Slovak Christmas Eve tradition. Let me explain the concept behind the tradition here so that you can gain a better understanding about why anyone would wake a young kid up, throw some clothes on him and toss him out of the house into the pre-dawn chill of Christmas Eve morning.
The old Slovak tradition of “vins” dictates that a young man or shepherd would call from house-to-house making his Christmas wish or "vins" to all in the household:
On this glorious feast of the birthday of Christ our Lord,
I wish you from God, good health, happiness and abundant blessings.
May it be yours to enjoy comfort from your children,
salvation for your soul, the kingdom of heaven after death,
and for the family's welfare, may you have whatever you ask of God.
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok -- Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Now the tradition that my family and most of my neighborhood prescribed to, however, had changed slightly, altering through either some odd Americanization of the original Slovak tradition or just from the lunacy of the old Slovak ladies in my neighborhood. The newly modified, updated tradition of my neighborhood stood thusly, "Young Slovak-American males are to be awoken in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning, dressed warmly and tossed outside into the biting cold of the Western Pennsylvania wintertime where they are expected to take on the role of the “shepherd” traversing the neighborhood knocking on the doors of their Slovak-American neighbors (read as the aforementioned loony old Slovak ladies) and wishing them a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Did you happen to note the "Slovak males" part of the tradition? It's there for a reason, let me assure you. It is considered the height of bad luck for a woman to be the first person to come to your house on Christmas Eve. (I mean it's that kind of terrible “breaking a mirror while holding an umbrella open inside the house while walking under a ladder all at the same time” kind of bad luck!)
Sounds kind of sexist, doesn’t it? Well yeah. It is sexist, but hey, it's tradition! My grandmother is famed to have screamed at my mother through her kitchen window one Christmas Eve morning that she wouldn't let her into the house until a man could come to do the Christmas Eve blessing.
Of course, it’s not as not as if there isn’t any benefit in this for the young Slovak-American males as they fend of a sure bout of hypothermia schlepping all over the hell’s half-acre upholding this tradition. The old ladies in the neighborhood really took this blessing stuff seriously, and were more than happy to make with the cash handouts. A speedy route of a neighborhood like mine could net about $20 or $30, which, back in those days, to a ten year old, was a pretty good haul.
After that, the day went on fairly uneventfully. Christmas Eve is a day of fasting for Slovaks, so after I finished my freezing pre-dawn tour of the neighborhood, I’d head home and then hang around with my family as we would continue our fasting and preparing for the traditional Christmas Eve supper that was held at my Grandma's house. Around about 4 or 5 PM, we'd all walk up to her house and start getting ready for the "meatless dinner" that was traditional for a Slovak Christmas Eve celebration. The meal would consist of fish, usually highly breaded baked crispy fish sticks that bore absolutely no resemblance to fish. Getting my sisters and I to willingly eat fish when we were kids was only slightly easier than teaching a herd of elephants how to pirouette gracefully. Also on the evening’s menu were pierogies, peas, beets, stewed prunes, mashed potatoes, and brown sauerkraut gravy. There would also be kolacky, the Slovak pastry rolls my grandma usually made a day or two before, with different fillings such as ground walnuts, apricot, poppyseed, prune butter or pineapple.
At the start of the meal, each family member would be given a piece of Oplatki. Oplatki is a thin rectangle of unleavened bread that can come either in white or in various pastel colors. It usually is pressed into a mold when it’s made so that the side is embossed with a intricate and beautiful Christmas scene. The Oplatki is served with honey at the beginning of the meal along with a blessing. My grandmother would always do this blessing and I think that this, above all, was the main reason that she was so beloved by all the dogs that we had owned during my childhood. She would take some of the food, usually a spoonful of peas and throw them over her shoulder as the blessing or offering for "the birds and the animals of the forest." Apparently, our two dogs, Porky and Ebony qualified as the aforementioned “birds and animals of the forest" and they usually waited behind her like black and tan shadows, sucking up the fallen food like little 4-legged vacuum cleaners.
After dinner, we would go into Grandma's living room and open our Christmas presents. Now, there are Christmas purists that say you should wait until Christmas Day to open presents, but our family usually got "church clothes" for Christmas and opening them early on Christmas Eve ensured that we'd be wearing them later on for Midnight mass. After presents were opened at Grandma's house, we'd head back down the hill to our house (we lived next door to Grandma in those days) and go to bed to get in a nap so that we would be awake and alert at midnight mass.
Around about 10 o'clock in the evening, Dad would go off and start getting ready for midnight mass. Mom would hustle us into our rooms and get my sisters and I started on getting into our clothes for church. About 11 o'clock, Dad would tell me to go and get my Grandma and I would go up to her house and walk her down the path to our house. We lived in Western PA and it was usually either icy or snowy at Christmastime, usually both. I escorted Grandma down the walk between our two houses under the glass half full pretense that, had she slipped, her holding on to me would stop her from falling. But let's face facts, I was a small kid at ten years old, and, had she fallen down, that old woman would certainly have taken me right down with her. Dad would go outside and brush the snow and ice off of the car, then heat it up and we'd be heading off to St. Anne's Church in Wilpen, PA, a little over a mile or so from our house.
St. Anne's is a beautiful little Catholic church way out in the country. It is built at the base of a very, very steep hill. I honestly never realized how steep it was until I was one of four pallbearers at my Grandma's funeral just a few years ago. I thought briefly I might be joining her in the grave after nearly having a heart attack getting her casket up to the the cemetery at the top of that steep hill. Aside from the hill, there's a nice graded cement sidewalk with three small flights of steps that runs from the gravel parking lot up to the back of the church, where the doors to enter are located. During the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve, when we arrived thirty minutes before mass, before anyone could come and salt this sidewalk down, this trek was always particularly treacherous. I can remember many times that I wound up slipping and falling on my butt on this slick stretch of concrete sidewalk.
We would aim to arrive at church by 11:30 PM, easily a half-hour or more early, so that Grandma could say her rosary. Not that you would ever want to, but if ever you wanted to get Grandma really good and angry with you, try getting her to church without her allotted thirty minute rosary and prayer time. She was definitely a woman who took her pre-mass prayer seriously.
Inside, the church had 2 sets of about 20 rows of pews separated by the wide aisle that ran down the middle of the church. Women and young children sat on the left, and men on the right. I am unsure if this really was tradition, or just Grandpa's clever way of getting away from Grandma for an hour or so. Since nearly all the old men and women sat on separate sides, I always just assumed it was yet another one of those Slovak/Catholic traditions. I remember the many times I’d sit next to my Grandma and listen to her and Mary Miney, one of her many church bingo buddies, say their rosaries. Those two old women were “power prayers”. They could zoom through a rosary so fast that all you'd hear were hisses from rapidly whispered S's in the “Hail Mary’s and “Our Father’s.”
One Christmas Eve mass that I remember very well, my mother had decided to come along with us to midnight Mass. Mom was Methodist and didn't usually come to our church so this made it an unusual Christmas Eve indeed. The mass started out in the usual way with the priest entering from the back of the church and swinging ‘round the frankincense censor with such vigor that, if had he’d misjudged the chain length even a little, he’d have taken out the people standing in their pews who were next to the center aisle. Once to the altar, the priest passed the still-smoking censor off to the nearest altar boy, turned and welcomed us all to the church, wished us a Merry Christmas and began the liturgical part of the mass. Mass went on fairly routinely until communion, and then it went South in a hurry. As the people began to line up down the aisle and the priest began to dole out the hosts to them, the choir decided that it would be a good time to have a violin and vocal rendition of Ave Maria. Unfortunately, due to either poor planning or utter tone deafness, no one had thought to tune the violin beforehand, and so it was completely off pitch. In addition to this, the violinist was apparently a novice or really out of practice and would squeak the bow across the strings every few notes or so.
As the squeaky off-key intro to the song played out, the ridiculousness of the entire situation overwhelmed me and I began to giggle uncontrollably. Usually in church, a swift elbow to the side from my Grandma would have stopped any errant giggling, as the Catholic mass back those days was certainly no place for irreverent amusement. However, on that unusual Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sitting next to Grandma, I was sitting next to Mom and she too was also trying hard to hold back her own giggles brought about by the awful, squeaky off-key playing.
As the intro ended, the choir leader Anna Thomas, an older lady who possessed an amazingly powerful and penetrating voice, began to sing… very loudly and, unfortunately, very off-key. Now whether she sang off-key by accident or on purpose so that she would be in tune with the off-key violin accompaniment I’ll probably never know, but it was at that point that my mother, my three sisters and I all dissolved into semi-silent laughter, pushing into each other; hissing and shaking with barely controlled mirth. My Grandmother was livid, glaring over at us from the other end of the pew as if silently hoping and praying that the God that killed Cain and squashed Sampson would get back to work on us for our making merry in His church on Christmas Eve. Mass ended shortly afterwards and, on the walk back to the car and during the entire car ride back to the house, we got long and rather stern lectured from Grandma about not being "simple" in the house of God.
Come to think of it, I was always really good at being “simple.” I am (or was) apparently naturally talented in that particular area. I'm pretty sure that, unless my younger cousin Matthew beat me out, my Grandma probably told me I was being “simple” more often than anyone else in my entire family.
When we got home, we would all get out of our church clothes, wash up and head off to bed. Christmas Day would see us getting up and having the big Christmas dinner at our house around two in the afternoon. After dinner, we'd all laze around and watch television, nap or play with our Christmas presents.
As I write this account and think back on all those happy memories, I find myself feeling somewhat sadly nostalgic for those long ago days. I can't help but mourn the loss of those long-held traditions that my family and indeed, our whole neighborhood, celebrated back in those days. I feel terribly sad for the next generation of my family, and of Slovak-Americans in general who will never experience that facet of their heritage because of our current generation's loss of the knowledge about, or downright indifference towards, all the old Slovak traditions we celebrated when we were growing up.
As odd as it may seem, I know that if I were offered the choice of a million dollars cash or the chance to go back in time, to be that ten-year old kid again and be able to re-live that one Christmas, I would choose the latter without even a second's hesitation.
To be able to once more experience Christmas with my family; to once more be awakened by my dad before the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve and get tossed outside into the cold to walk the neighborhood and bring good luck to the loony old Slovak ladies by bestowing holiday vins…
To once more be able to be in my grandmother’s house to smell the delicious odors of her baking all the old Slovak food, and then sit with my family at Grandma's table for Christmas Eve dinner and watch her throw the peas over her shoulder…
Or to once more take that hazardous trek to Midnight Mass at St. Anne's Church and listen to those old women speed through their rosaries and then laugh with my mom and my sisters at the squeaky violin playing and off-key singing during communion.
Yeah, that’d be worth a million bucks. Heck, I think it’d be worth that and a whole lot more!
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok!
(Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!)
I also vividly remember all pre-holiday baking that got done a day or two before Christmas Eve. I remember watching as Grandma would mix together rice and beef, boil cabbage heads to loosen and separate the leaves, then roll out casserole after casserole full of halupki. She would then mix together batch after batch of yeasty dough to roll out on the counter into long sheets which she would then fill and roll into kolacky rolls. I remember her whole house would smell of the heady aroma of bakery goods for hours, almost days after she baked.
Those are just a few of the many memorable little details that made the time leading up to the big two day Christmas holiday magical all unto itself. Why do I call it a two-day holiday? Well, because I'm Slovak-American and Christmas Eve is just as much a holiday to us Slovak-Americans as is Christmas Day.
Christmas Eve started early for me back then, and by early, I mean it started off really, really early! At some point just as the barest hint of dawn began to lighten the dark winter sky in the east, Dad would wake me up and help my clumsy, still half-asleep little body get dressed in all my heavy winter clothes. He would then push me out the back door of the house so that I could start the day off by fulfilling an old Slovak Christmas Eve tradition. Let me explain the concept behind the tradition here so that you can gain a better understanding about why anyone would wake a young kid up, throw some clothes on him and toss him out of the house into the pre-dawn chill of Christmas Eve morning.
The old Slovak tradition of “vins” dictates that a young man or shepherd would call from house-to-house making his Christmas wish or "vins" to all in the household:
On this glorious feast of the birthday of Christ our Lord,
I wish you from God, good health, happiness and abundant blessings.
May it be yours to enjoy comfort from your children,
salvation for your soul, the kingdom of heaven after death,
and for the family's welfare, may you have whatever you ask of God.
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok -- Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Now the tradition that my family and most of my neighborhood prescribed to, however, had changed slightly, altering through either some odd Americanization of the original Slovak tradition or just from the lunacy of the old Slovak ladies in my neighborhood. The newly modified, updated tradition of my neighborhood stood thusly, "Young Slovak-American males are to be awoken in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning, dressed warmly and tossed outside into the biting cold of the Western Pennsylvania wintertime where they are expected to take on the role of the “shepherd” traversing the neighborhood knocking on the doors of their Slovak-American neighbors (read as the aforementioned loony old Slovak ladies) and wishing them a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Did you happen to note the "Slovak males" part of the tradition? It's there for a reason, let me assure you. It is considered the height of bad luck for a woman to be the first person to come to your house on Christmas Eve. (I mean it's that kind of terrible “breaking a mirror while holding an umbrella open inside the house while walking under a ladder all at the same time” kind of bad luck!)
Sounds kind of sexist, doesn’t it? Well yeah. It is sexist, but hey, it's tradition! My grandmother is famed to have screamed at my mother through her kitchen window one Christmas Eve morning that she wouldn't let her into the house until a man could come to do the Christmas Eve blessing.
Of course, it’s not as not as if there isn’t any benefit in this for the young Slovak-American males as they fend of a sure bout of hypothermia schlepping all over the hell’s half-acre upholding this tradition. The old ladies in the neighborhood really took this blessing stuff seriously, and were more than happy to make with the cash handouts. A speedy route of a neighborhood like mine could net about $20 or $30, which, back in those days, to a ten year old, was a pretty good haul.
After that, the day went on fairly uneventfully. Christmas Eve is a day of fasting for Slovaks, so after I finished my freezing pre-dawn tour of the neighborhood, I’d head home and then hang around with my family as we would continue our fasting and preparing for the traditional Christmas Eve supper that was held at my Grandma's house. Around about 4 or 5 PM, we'd all walk up to her house and start getting ready for the "meatless dinner" that was traditional for a Slovak Christmas Eve celebration. The meal would consist of fish, usually highly breaded baked crispy fish sticks that bore absolutely no resemblance to fish. Getting my sisters and I to willingly eat fish when we were kids was only slightly easier than teaching a herd of elephants how to pirouette gracefully. Also on the evening’s menu were pierogies, peas, beets, stewed prunes, mashed potatoes, and brown sauerkraut gravy. There would also be kolacky, the Slovak pastry rolls my grandma usually made a day or two before, with different fillings such as ground walnuts, apricot, poppyseed, prune butter or pineapple.
At the start of the meal, each family member would be given a piece of Oplatki. Oplatki is a thin rectangle of unleavened bread that can come either in white or in various pastel colors. It usually is pressed into a mold when it’s made so that the side is embossed with a intricate and beautiful Christmas scene. The Oplatki is served with honey at the beginning of the meal along with a blessing. My grandmother would always do this blessing and I think that this, above all, was the main reason that she was so beloved by all the dogs that we had owned during my childhood. She would take some of the food, usually a spoonful of peas and throw them over her shoulder as the blessing or offering for "the birds and the animals of the forest." Apparently, our two dogs, Porky and Ebony qualified as the aforementioned “birds and animals of the forest" and they usually waited behind her like black and tan shadows, sucking up the fallen food like little 4-legged vacuum cleaners.
After dinner, we would go into Grandma's living room and open our Christmas presents. Now, there are Christmas purists that say you should wait until Christmas Day to open presents, but our family usually got "church clothes" for Christmas and opening them early on Christmas Eve ensured that we'd be wearing them later on for Midnight mass. After presents were opened at Grandma's house, we'd head back down the hill to our house (we lived next door to Grandma in those days) and go to bed to get in a nap so that we would be awake and alert at midnight mass.
Around about 10 o'clock in the evening, Dad would go off and start getting ready for midnight mass. Mom would hustle us into our rooms and get my sisters and I started on getting into our clothes for church. About 11 o'clock, Dad would tell me to go and get my Grandma and I would go up to her house and walk her down the path to our house. We lived in Western PA and it was usually either icy or snowy at Christmastime, usually both. I escorted Grandma down the walk between our two houses under the glass half full pretense that, had she slipped, her holding on to me would stop her from falling. But let's face facts, I was a small kid at ten years old, and, had she fallen down, that old woman would certainly have taken me right down with her. Dad would go outside and brush the snow and ice off of the car, then heat it up and we'd be heading off to St. Anne's Church in Wilpen, PA, a little over a mile or so from our house.
St. Anne's is a beautiful little Catholic church way out in the country. It is built at the base of a very, very steep hill. I honestly never realized how steep it was until I was one of four pallbearers at my Grandma's funeral just a few years ago. I thought briefly I might be joining her in the grave after nearly having a heart attack getting her casket up to the the cemetery at the top of that steep hill. Aside from the hill, there's a nice graded cement sidewalk with three small flights of steps that runs from the gravel parking lot up to the back of the church, where the doors to enter are located. During the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve, when we arrived thirty minutes before mass, before anyone could come and salt this sidewalk down, this trek was always particularly treacherous. I can remember many times that I wound up slipping and falling on my butt on this slick stretch of concrete sidewalk.
We would aim to arrive at church by 11:30 PM, easily a half-hour or more early, so that Grandma could say her rosary. Not that you would ever want to, but if ever you wanted to get Grandma really good and angry with you, try getting her to church without her allotted thirty minute rosary and prayer time. She was definitely a woman who took her pre-mass prayer seriously.
Inside, the church had 2 sets of about 20 rows of pews separated by the wide aisle that ran down the middle of the church. Women and young children sat on the left, and men on the right. I am unsure if this really was tradition, or just Grandpa's clever way of getting away from Grandma for an hour or so. Since nearly all the old men and women sat on separate sides, I always just assumed it was yet another one of those Slovak/Catholic traditions. I remember the many times I’d sit next to my Grandma and listen to her and Mary Miney, one of her many church bingo buddies, say their rosaries. Those two old women were “power prayers”. They could zoom through a rosary so fast that all you'd hear were hisses from rapidly whispered S's in the “Hail Mary’s and “Our Father’s.”
One Christmas Eve mass that I remember very well, my mother had decided to come along with us to midnight Mass. Mom was Methodist and didn't usually come to our church so this made it an unusual Christmas Eve indeed. The mass started out in the usual way with the priest entering from the back of the church and swinging ‘round the frankincense censor with such vigor that, if had he’d misjudged the chain length even a little, he’d have taken out the people standing in their pews who were next to the center aisle. Once to the altar, the priest passed the still-smoking censor off to the nearest altar boy, turned and welcomed us all to the church, wished us a Merry Christmas and began the liturgical part of the mass. Mass went on fairly routinely until communion, and then it went South in a hurry. As the people began to line up down the aisle and the priest began to dole out the hosts to them, the choir decided that it would be a good time to have a violin and vocal rendition of Ave Maria. Unfortunately, due to either poor planning or utter tone deafness, no one had thought to tune the violin beforehand, and so it was completely off pitch. In addition to this, the violinist was apparently a novice or really out of practice and would squeak the bow across the strings every few notes or so.
As the squeaky off-key intro to the song played out, the ridiculousness of the entire situation overwhelmed me and I began to giggle uncontrollably. Usually in church, a swift elbow to the side from my Grandma would have stopped any errant giggling, as the Catholic mass back those days was certainly no place for irreverent amusement. However, on that unusual Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sitting next to Grandma, I was sitting next to Mom and she too was also trying hard to hold back her own giggles brought about by the awful, squeaky off-key playing.
As the intro ended, the choir leader Anna Thomas, an older lady who possessed an amazingly powerful and penetrating voice, began to sing… very loudly and, unfortunately, very off-key. Now whether she sang off-key by accident or on purpose so that she would be in tune with the off-key violin accompaniment I’ll probably never know, but it was at that point that my mother, my three sisters and I all dissolved into semi-silent laughter, pushing into each other; hissing and shaking with barely controlled mirth. My Grandmother was livid, glaring over at us from the other end of the pew as if silently hoping and praying that the God that killed Cain and squashed Sampson would get back to work on us for our making merry in His church on Christmas Eve. Mass ended shortly afterwards and, on the walk back to the car and during the entire car ride back to the house, we got long and rather stern lectured from Grandma about not being "simple" in the house of God.
Come to think of it, I was always really good at being “simple.” I am (or was) apparently naturally talented in that particular area. I'm pretty sure that, unless my younger cousin Matthew beat me out, my Grandma probably told me I was being “simple” more often than anyone else in my entire family.
When we got home, we would all get out of our church clothes, wash up and head off to bed. Christmas Day would see us getting up and having the big Christmas dinner at our house around two in the afternoon. After dinner, we'd all laze around and watch television, nap or play with our Christmas presents.
As I write this account and think back on all those happy memories, I find myself feeling somewhat sadly nostalgic for those long ago days. I can't help but mourn the loss of those long-held traditions that my family and indeed, our whole neighborhood, celebrated back in those days. I feel terribly sad for the next generation of my family, and of Slovak-Americans in general who will never experience that facet of their heritage because of our current generation's loss of the knowledge about, or downright indifference towards, all the old Slovak traditions we celebrated when we were growing up.
As odd as it may seem, I know that if I were offered the choice of a million dollars cash or the chance to go back in time, to be that ten-year old kid again and be able to re-live that one Christmas, I would choose the latter without even a second's hesitation.
To be able to once more experience Christmas with my family; to once more be awakened by my dad before the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve and get tossed outside into the cold to walk the neighborhood and bring good luck to the loony old Slovak ladies by bestowing holiday vins…
To once more be able to be in my grandmother’s house to smell the delicious odors of her baking all the old Slovak food, and then sit with my family at Grandma's table for Christmas Eve dinner and watch her throw the peas over her shoulder…
Or to once more take that hazardous trek to Midnight Mass at St. Anne's Church and listen to those old women speed through their rosaries and then laugh with my mom and my sisters at the squeaky violin playing and off-key singing during communion.
Yeah, that’d be worth a million bucks. Heck, I think it’d be worth that and a whole lot more!
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok!
(Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!)
Friday, November 21, 2008
Giving Thanks...
As Thanksgiving quickly approaches and John and I make plans to head to the DC area to celebrate Thanksgiving with pretty much all of my extended family, a friend of mine said something to me that gave me pause. He said, "It's kind of hard to give thanks for a year as totally screwed as this one's been, eh?"
At first, I had to agree with him. Yeah. This has been not one of the better years I've lived through, if you look at from the point of view of the problems that have, well... caused it to be totally screwed. Initially, that was the way I looked at it. Then, just last week as I drove home from work, I was thumbing absently at my iPod as it played through my newly added playlist of Christmas songs, when a song from Josh Groban's Christmas album from 2007/08 started. It's a song called "Thankful" and it made me think of my friend's statement and look at my year in a new perspective.
Yeah, I could look at over the last year and spend a lot of time and energy listing off all the really crappy things that have happened, or, I could look at it like this:
At first, I had to agree with him. Yeah. This has been not one of the better years I've lived through, if you look at from the point of view of the problems that have, well... caused it to be totally screwed. Initially, that was the way I looked at it. Then, just last week as I drove home from work, I was thumbing absently at my iPod as it played through my newly added playlist of Christmas songs, when a song from Josh Groban's Christmas album from 2007/08 started. It's a song called "Thankful" and it made me think of my friend's statement and look at my year in a new perspective.
Yeah, I could look at over the last year and spend a lot of time and energy listing off all the really crappy things that have happened, or, I could look at it like this:
In 2008, my mom was lucky enough to cough up blood in May, which got her to go to the doctor and find out that she had lung, rib, neck and brain cancer. She then traveled across the country to the DC area to begin effective treatment that is slowly beating back the cancer in her body. If she hadn't coughed up the blood, she wouldn't have known what was growing inside her at all and might not be here now to celebrate this thanksgiving with myself and my family.
In 2008, my dad was having some edema and breathing issues while staying in Alexandria with my mom for her chemo treatments. My sister was luckily on hand and so she hooked him up with a cardiologist friend of hers who identified his issues as being rather serious congestive heart issues, and now he has a pacemaker/defibrillator helping to regulate his heart. Again, if he had been stubborn and not told anyone, he might not be alive now to celebrate this holiday.
In 2008, my partner John was lucky enough to get moved laterally away from the internet team over to the Prospecting team at work, downgrading his stress level by getting moved away from a manager that was an utterly useless waste of DNA and who was out for blood, to one more like most other micro-managers out there -- one who simply tries his patience on a daily basis. If he hadn't moved, his former manager had already made plans to fire him, simply because he had cancer and she wanted a woman to have his job. On the upside, she up and quit a few months ago just as whispers of her impending termination began to circulate. It's hard to say that she'll be missed, especially with so many employees hoping that they'll still run into her "outside of the building." Usually the employees that say they hope to "run into her" are the ones revving the engines on their cars/SUVs. I guess I should give thanks that she left the company, though it did dash my hopes for a holy smiting. (But if God is reading my blog, just feel free to smite her anyways, cuz you know what I say, why waste a good smiting, right? It's not like her leaving of her own volition left her any less deserving of a holy smackdown, so go right ahead and smite away! Give me yet another reason to give thanks!)
In 2008, over 30% of our retirement money evaporated, our monthly house payments went from $1300 to $1800 so that we could get away from a soon to re-adjust ARM mortgage. However, in losing that money, as well as the country losing nearly half a trillion dollars in the Wall Street meltdown, everybody finally woke up enough to realize that you don't elect a president primarily because you think he's a good christian or that he's someone you'd want to hang out with and have a beer. You elect the guy who is going to do the best job looking out for the welfare of everyone in the country, not just to throw buttloads of money to his rich crony friends. The country realized that the current administration's policies only benefit GWMs (Guys With Money), so they elected a Democratic President that will begin to pull the country back from the financial suckhole into which the Republicans have driven it and back to the prosperity that the Democrats left it in back in 2000.
In 2008, I got to go see a Durham Bulls ballgame with my next door neighbor Jean Spencer, complete with 4th of July fireworks (which had been rain delayed from the actual 4th of July game night), and we had an absolute blast! We drove over to the stadium in the Volvo convertible and she said being out with the top down and all, that she felt like a young girl again. It is that memory that I hold onto now when I think of Jean; not the one of going to her funeral a little less than a month later after she died suddenly of a heart attack.
In 2008, my friend Daniel was lucky enough to break off his relationship and break away from his ex and move in with a nice guy named Don and they've been fused at the hip ever since.
In 2008, my friend Susan lost her child support and full custody of her kids, and had to move to a different part of Chapel Hill to a smaller apartment that was affordable for her. In doing so, however, she was able to continue to stand and prosper on her own without child support while at the same time showing her husband that taking care of two kids isn't nearly the picnic he had apparently envisioned it to be. I am glad that, though she is no longer living two doors down, we have been able to maintain and grow our friendship, as well as still be a part of her boys' lives.
In 2008, my friend Josh seemingly spent more time in the hospital than he did out of it. However, he was able to get batteries of tests done to help him understand his health issues better, and is hopefully (knock on wood... lots and lots of wood.... knock hard!) on the way back to good health.
In 2008, I got my blood pressure under control and lost 25 lbs.
In 2008, my friend Paul and his partner from Nevada went and tied the knot in a beautiful California wedding. What should be left unsaid is that the people of California took it upon themselves to make Paul and his partner and John and myself and all other gay and lesbian people second class citizens by voting in Proposition 8, a despicable anti-gay amendment to California's constitution. John and I emailed Paul the other day to tell him that we were thinking of him and his partner and that, whatever California decides, their marriage is more real and more of a reality than any ink on a marriage license could ever make it.
I guess another way of looking at it would be to be give thanks that I had another year to be with the people I really love and care about. I had another year with John, another year with my folks and family, another year to share good times with my friends, and even had another year of loving companionship with my wonderful old dogs, two of whom are getting so advanced in years that they may not have many more holidays left.
Yeah... I think those are reasons enough to give thanks, don't you?
Yeah... I think those are reasons enough to give thanks, don't you?
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
One Small Request...
I was in the middle of mixing up a meatloaf last week when my sister Kathy called from the Union Street Pub in Old Town, Alexandria. She called to see how I was doing and to catch me up on all the things going on with my Mother's cancer treatment. I learned that my mother's initial chemotherapy didn't work. The radiation part of it seemed to work fine, but the actual chemotherapy itself, the chemical part of it, after much deliberation by many doctors far more knowledgeable in that area than myself, turned out to have had nearly no effect on her cancer. What's worse, in doing nothing, it allowed 5 more growths to form in her brain and a golf ball sized lump to grow on her lower neck, right where the neck and the shoulder meet.
Seeing this lack of response from the initial chemo, the doctors on my mother's cancer team huddled together and decided that they needed to change the gameplan and put together another cocktail of toxic goo to see if it would work better. So they started her on this new drug cocktail on September 29th.
Whereas with the old chemo cocktail, the effects were not as pronounced; sure my mom lost most of her hair and got kinda tired, but for the most part she soldiered on through it without displaying a lot of the common negative side effects that you envision someone having after mainlining a couple of bags of highly toxic chemicals.
The new stuff, however, wasn't as easily brushed off; my mother got sick not 20 minutes after they finished her first session, and remained so for the next 6 or so days. My birthday was on Sunday of that week, October the 5th, and she sounded kinda rough when she wished me a happy birthday.
In addition to that, my mother's rib began to really cause her quite a lot of pain. So much so, that her doctors decided to use radiation on the rib to see if they could alleviate the pain there. Unfortunately, the position she had to remain in during the radiation treatment only seemed to aggravate the pain, and in the end, my sisters had to urge her doctors to prescribe some pretty powerful narcotic pain medicines to bring it down to a manageable level.
On top of all that, my mother had a rather bad fall outside of the Marshall's department store in Potomac Mills Mall. She and my sister were shopping for warmer clothes for the winter and as they left, my mother got tripped up either by her own feet or by some unevenness of the hardwood floor and went down like a sack of bricks. The impact caused her glasses to cut into her left cheek and blackened her eye, and she also ended up having to get stitches just above her eyebrow where her head hit the hardwood floor and then bled all over it. My mother, in discussing this event, admits that those were some really seriously hard hardwood floors!
When my partner John went through chemotherapy, the idea of him not living through it never entered my mind. Sure, he thought about it and mentioned it a few times, but I brushed aside that kind of stuff and assured him he'd get through it and be fine. The idea of him dying from it was just inconceivable to me; and so I just did all I could do to keep him eating as much as I could to keep his weight up, and keep him well-rested and as happy as I could make him. It seemed to be easy to be strong enough for both of us.
Last weekend, I was finally able to wrangle a kind of free weekend so I drove up to Alexandria to stay with my folks and spend some time with my Mom and Dad. When I saw my mom, who had always seemed to loom so much larger than life, from back when I was just a kid, to even after I'd grown up and made my own life, laying ever so still on her bed as she rested, all wrapped up in the small prayer blanket John had given her when she was diagnosed with cancer. I couldn't help but think that she looked so small, so frail and so very, very sick laying there, and it just hurt my heart to see her like that. I stood there silently watching her rest and really wondered why I didn't feel the same undefinable assuredness that I'd felt with John -- that blind faith that made me so sure that he'd pull through everything. I mean, I really wanted to feel it. I want more than anything to see my mom beat this cancer, get better and live for the next however the hell many years she lives. But as I stood there, all I felt was upset, helpless and scared. (and if you know me, those are three emotions that I simply cannot abide.)
One of the things my sisters and I agree on is that this whole thing with my mom is totally unexpected. She's been healthy as a horse for most of her life. I feel bad saying it, but we all expected to go through this with my Dad, but never with Mom. My Dad's health has been up and down since he was in his early 40s, and he's now pulled ahead in his private competition with Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, for total replacement operations.
I know that, with my parents a state or so away, and with John's iffy, ever changing, roller-coaster-like medical condition, I've not been able to be Johnny-on-the-spot for my Mom like I was for John during his treatment. My sister Kathy has been the one captaining that particular chemo cruise ship, along with my cancer cruise director sister Dee, who seems almost Italian-esque in her determination to see how fast she can drive from Columbus, Ohio to Alexandria, Va on her days off to stay with my folks and help out. Avanti! Dee! Avanti! They've been able to spend a lot more time with Mom during her treatment, which is probably for the best as I've had my hands full with John, the dogs, and work. I would not be nearly the patient-advocate that either of my elder two sisters are, and would probably do my mother no favors by using my own style of painfully direct communications interspersed heavily with sarcasm and invective to try and motivate her medical personnel.
But sometimes I can't help but feel like "the bad son." I can barely make enough money to pay my half of the mortgage, my car note and my other bills, let alone send extra money up to my sister to help her pay for my parents temporary apartment in Bellevue or to help with their medical bills like my other two sisters are doing. I know that this whole thing is really sucking Kathy and my other two sisters financially dry, and it seems like there's nothing I can do to help... and it makes me feel like a total schmuck. It's a guy thing, I'm sure, but it is what it is and I can't help but feel what I feel.
Anywho... back to my sister Kathy and the meatloaf interruptus phone call. So, as she talked to me, she got really sad, as people in bars sometimes do when emotionally charged up and half-crocked, telling me through tears that she wanted me to make up a Flash movie of still photos of us and mom and put it to a nice "mom positive" song, as I'd done for a Mother's Day present a few years back when I used a bunch of photos of us from when we were growing up. I put that movie to the Backstreet Boys song, "The Perfect Fan" and, after some large display of emotion, my mother said it was the nicest Mother's Day present she'd ever been given. So as soon as I get some photos from all my sisters and other relatives, I'll go ahead and do that. I just need to find a good song to put it to and it'll practically create itself. It seems the least I can do, I guess.
As she talked, Kathy mentioned that she was worried that we'll drift apart if we lose our parental anchors, but I don't believe that'll be the case. There's an saying in Latin, "Prosapia quid cohaerere pervadere maximus difficultatises fiet evalescere.", which when translated roughly means, "The family that holds together through the greatest difficulties will be made to increase in strength." If that's the case, with all we've been through so far in our lives, not even counting mom's current condition, we already should be nearly unbreakable.
As someone who likes to have all his bases covered, however, I did something the other night that I very rarely do. I went with John to the Candlelight Compline Service at his church, the Chapel of The Cross in Chapel Hill, NC and sitting in the dark, surrounded by students, frankincense smoke and singing, I asked God to give my Mom a break. Between staying married to my father, raising the 4 of us, and putting in 60+ hour work weeks well into her mid-60s just to make ends meet, she should be getting put on the short-list for sainthood, not sitting around in some hospital or temporary apartment wasting away from cancer.
It's funny, when people find out that John's an ordained minister, they tend to be shocked, so I jokingly tell them that I'm looking after this life for us, while John looks after the next one. The current policies of the Catholic Church towards gays and lesbians have left me a disastrously lapsed Catholic, though I've never doubted that God is looking down and keeping watch on me, though I'm sure he's occasionally scratching his head in bewilderment and saying to his chorus of angels, "What in the name of Me is he playing at down there?!?"
I've come to believe that God made me the way I am, and that because of that, me being gay doesn't make me a sinner as God wouldn't have made me gay if that really was the case. After all, He's a deity, not a reality TV show producer. I have resigned myself to believing that some of his proxies here on earth have "dropped the ball" on the whole gay issue, and are just pushing their own prejudices off as gospel.
I don't often ask God for things. I figure, with all the Christians in the world constantly asking for this, that or the other, he's really got enough people barking up his tree, and that it's probably in my own best interests to be a little more self-dependant in working out my own problems and issues instead of praying and hoping for some divine intervention. I am also hoping that, since God usually doesn't hear all that much outta me, He might be more inclined to listen as this particular situation with my Mom is not within my ability to set right and maybe then he'll do me a solid and make with the divine intervention.
Seeing this lack of response from the initial chemo, the doctors on my mother's cancer team huddled together and decided that they needed to change the gameplan and put together another cocktail of toxic goo to see if it would work better. So they started her on this new drug cocktail on September 29th.
Whereas with the old chemo cocktail, the effects were not as pronounced; sure my mom lost most of her hair and got kinda tired, but for the most part she soldiered on through it without displaying a lot of the common negative side effects that you envision someone having after mainlining a couple of bags of highly toxic chemicals.
The new stuff, however, wasn't as easily brushed off; my mother got sick not 20 minutes after they finished her first session, and remained so for the next 6 or so days. My birthday was on Sunday of that week, October the 5th, and she sounded kinda rough when she wished me a happy birthday.
In addition to that, my mother's rib began to really cause her quite a lot of pain. So much so, that her doctors decided to use radiation on the rib to see if they could alleviate the pain there. Unfortunately, the position she had to remain in during the radiation treatment only seemed to aggravate the pain, and in the end, my sisters had to urge her doctors to prescribe some pretty powerful narcotic pain medicines to bring it down to a manageable level.
On top of all that, my mother had a rather bad fall outside of the Marshall's department store in Potomac Mills Mall. She and my sister were shopping for warmer clothes for the winter and as they left, my mother got tripped up either by her own feet or by some unevenness of the hardwood floor and went down like a sack of bricks. The impact caused her glasses to cut into her left cheek and blackened her eye, and she also ended up having to get stitches just above her eyebrow where her head hit the hardwood floor and then bled all over it. My mother, in discussing this event, admits that those were some really seriously hard hardwood floors!
When my partner John went through chemotherapy, the idea of him not living through it never entered my mind. Sure, he thought about it and mentioned it a few times, but I brushed aside that kind of stuff and assured him he'd get through it and be fine. The idea of him dying from it was just inconceivable to me; and so I just did all I could do to keep him eating as much as I could to keep his weight up, and keep him well-rested and as happy as I could make him. It seemed to be easy to be strong enough for both of us.
Last weekend, I was finally able to wrangle a kind of free weekend so I drove up to Alexandria to stay with my folks and spend some time with my Mom and Dad. When I saw my mom, who had always seemed to loom so much larger than life, from back when I was just a kid, to even after I'd grown up and made my own life, laying ever so still on her bed as she rested, all wrapped up in the small prayer blanket John had given her when she was diagnosed with cancer. I couldn't help but think that she looked so small, so frail and so very, very sick laying there, and it just hurt my heart to see her like that. I stood there silently watching her rest and really wondered why I didn't feel the same undefinable assuredness that I'd felt with John -- that blind faith that made me so sure that he'd pull through everything. I mean, I really wanted to feel it. I want more than anything to see my mom beat this cancer, get better and live for the next however the hell many years she lives. But as I stood there, all I felt was upset, helpless and scared. (and if you know me, those are three emotions that I simply cannot abide.)
One of the things my sisters and I agree on is that this whole thing with my mom is totally unexpected. She's been healthy as a horse for most of her life. I feel bad saying it, but we all expected to go through this with my Dad, but never with Mom. My Dad's health has been up and down since he was in his early 40s, and he's now pulled ahead in his private competition with Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, for total replacement operations.
I know that, with my parents a state or so away, and with John's iffy, ever changing, roller-coaster-like medical condition, I've not been able to be Johnny-on-the-spot for my Mom like I was for John during his treatment. My sister Kathy has been the one captaining that particular chemo cruise ship, along with my cancer cruise director sister Dee, who seems almost Italian-esque in her determination to see how fast she can drive from Columbus, Ohio to Alexandria, Va on her days off to stay with my folks and help out. Avanti! Dee! Avanti! They've been able to spend a lot more time with Mom during her treatment, which is probably for the best as I've had my hands full with John, the dogs, and work. I would not be nearly the patient-advocate that either of my elder two sisters are, and would probably do my mother no favors by using my own style of painfully direct communications interspersed heavily with sarcasm and invective to try and motivate her medical personnel.
But sometimes I can't help but feel like "the bad son." I can barely make enough money to pay my half of the mortgage, my car note and my other bills, let alone send extra money up to my sister to help her pay for my parents temporary apartment in Bellevue or to help with their medical bills like my other two sisters are doing. I know that this whole thing is really sucking Kathy and my other two sisters financially dry, and it seems like there's nothing I can do to help... and it makes me feel like a total schmuck. It's a guy thing, I'm sure, but it is what it is and I can't help but feel what I feel.
Anywho... back to my sister Kathy and the meatloaf interruptus phone call. So, as she talked to me, she got really sad, as people in bars sometimes do when emotionally charged up and half-crocked, telling me through tears that she wanted me to make up a Flash movie of still photos of us and mom and put it to a nice "mom positive" song, as I'd done for a Mother's Day present a few years back when I used a bunch of photos of us from when we were growing up. I put that movie to the Backstreet Boys song, "The Perfect Fan" and, after some large display of emotion, my mother said it was the nicest Mother's Day present she'd ever been given. So as soon as I get some photos from all my sisters and other relatives, I'll go ahead and do that. I just need to find a good song to put it to and it'll practically create itself. It seems the least I can do, I guess.
As she talked, Kathy mentioned that she was worried that we'll drift apart if we lose our parental anchors, but I don't believe that'll be the case. There's an saying in Latin, "Prosapia quid cohaerere pervadere maximus difficultatises fiet evalescere.", which when translated roughly means, "The family that holds together through the greatest difficulties will be made to increase in strength." If that's the case, with all we've been through so far in our lives, not even counting mom's current condition, we already should be nearly unbreakable.
As someone who likes to have all his bases covered, however, I did something the other night that I very rarely do. I went with John to the Candlelight Compline Service at his church, the Chapel of The Cross in Chapel Hill, NC and sitting in the dark, surrounded by students, frankincense smoke and singing, I asked God to give my Mom a break. Between staying married to my father, raising the 4 of us, and putting in 60+ hour work weeks well into her mid-60s just to make ends meet, she should be getting put on the short-list for sainthood, not sitting around in some hospital or temporary apartment wasting away from cancer.
It's funny, when people find out that John's an ordained minister, they tend to be shocked, so I jokingly tell them that I'm looking after this life for us, while John looks after the next one. The current policies of the Catholic Church towards gays and lesbians have left me a disastrously lapsed Catholic, though I've never doubted that God is looking down and keeping watch on me, though I'm sure he's occasionally scratching his head in bewilderment and saying to his chorus of angels, "What in the name of Me is he playing at down there?!?"
I've come to believe that God made me the way I am, and that because of that, me being gay doesn't make me a sinner as God wouldn't have made me gay if that really was the case. After all, He's a deity, not a reality TV show producer. I have resigned myself to believing that some of his proxies here on earth have "dropped the ball" on the whole gay issue, and are just pushing their own prejudices off as gospel.
I don't often ask God for things. I figure, with all the Christians in the world constantly asking for this, that or the other, he's really got enough people barking up his tree, and that it's probably in my own best interests to be a little more self-dependant in working out my own problems and issues instead of praying and hoping for some divine intervention. I am also hoping that, since God usually doesn't hear all that much outta me, He might be more inclined to listen as this particular situation with my Mom is not within my ability to set right and maybe then he'll do me a solid and make with the divine intervention.
Monday, September 8, 2008
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished...
An Update On My Mom...
I was reminded by several people emailing me the other day that I'd not published an update post on my mom's fight with cancer, so here goes:
My mom's cancer turned out to be in her lungs, rib and brain. The doctors went after the lung and brain first, with radiotherapy (a mix of "lite" chemo and radiation) and with the "gamma knife" for the tumor in her brain. (kinda like what Ted Kennedy had done at Duke for his cancer.) She's currently undergoing the "hard" chemo sessions at Sibley Hospital in DC and seems to be doing well. In fact, she's doing so well that her doctors can't hardly believe it. Aside from some thinning hair from the chemotherapy, she seems to be living up to her reputation for being a certifiable force of nature. She walks a few miles every day to keep from getting bored and to walk off extra energy (she's gotta be the only chemo patient I've ever heard of that has "extra energy"). I am constantly amazed at her strength through all this. My dad also ran into some medical issues once he and my mom got over here to this side of the country. He ended up having some congestive issues with his heart and now has a nifty pacemaker/difibrillator combo to keep his heart beating on track. The downside is that it looks like he's got an alien coming out of his chest right above his left pectoral.
So... I'll give more information out as it happens. So far, everything is going well, and I hope it continues to keep going that way.
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Of late, I've come to realize that there is some truth to the saying that "No good deed goes unpunished." Just this week, I've had multiple reminders of this very phenomenon.
One of my friends, who was molested as a child, was heading home from his work and saw an elderly gentleman struggling to walk through a local strip mall in town. He stopped and asked the guy if he was OK and if he needed any assistance. The guy then proceeded to try to touch and grope my friend and made lewd suggestions as he did so. Because of his past history with this sort of thing, my friend went home, so stressed and freaked out that he was physically sick for the night and has been mentally out of whack since.
Another reminder comes from my partner, who is having a hard time recovering from cancer. Although he's been on "chemo maintenance" for a year now, he's been plagued with a variety of odd infections and sicknesses that have kept him in and out of the hospital now for the last 9 months. His boss dropped a bomb on his desk on Friday in the form of a very negative performance review letter. Usually in the review process, the boss and the employee sit down, chat and go over issues and then they go over a plan for goals for the next year and then, after all that, the boss writes up a performance review letter that details all that they discussed and gives it to the employee. The exact opposite happened this time. There was no meeting, no discussion or goals planning, just a nasty letter filled with snarky, unproven criticisms that (when one reads through the lines) is his way of saying, "You're sick too much, but I can't legally say that or you could sue the company, so I'll just throw in a lot of "out of left field" criticisms that start with the words, "Some people feel..." or "There are those that work here that feel...""
Grow some fuckin' balls! I mean... really! How chickenshit is that?!?!? Some people.... Jesus H. Christ!
Since he can't legally fire him for being sick, he's determined to write him up nebulous bad reviews and try to get him out that way. It's a sad, pathetic way to get rid of someone who's been a wonderful employee for over a decade, just to save on payroll and healthcare costs. But, you know, I'm not all that surprised. Remember... No good deed goes unpunished!
When I think of people like my partner's boss or the creepy guy that my friend tried to be a good samaritan for, I am put to mind of another saying, "Some people are like slinkies, not really good for anything, but you just can't help but smile when someone pushes one down the stairs."
Where my partner, who is an ordained minister, nightly prays to God and holds hope that all will work out for the best, I (being a catastrophically lapsed Catholic) will begin to nightly pray to the God that killed Caine and squashed Sampson that he come out of retirement and get back to work on this pair of bozos."
I was reminded by several people emailing me the other day that I'd not published an update post on my mom's fight with cancer, so here goes:
My mom's cancer turned out to be in her lungs, rib and brain. The doctors went after the lung and brain first, with radiotherapy (a mix of "lite" chemo and radiation) and with the "gamma knife" for the tumor in her brain. (kinda like what Ted Kennedy had done at Duke for his cancer.) She's currently undergoing the "hard" chemo sessions at Sibley Hospital in DC and seems to be doing well. In fact, she's doing so well that her doctors can't hardly believe it. Aside from some thinning hair from the chemotherapy, she seems to be living up to her reputation for being a certifiable force of nature. She walks a few miles every day to keep from getting bored and to walk off extra energy (she's gotta be the only chemo patient I've ever heard of that has "extra energy"). I am constantly amazed at her strength through all this. My dad also ran into some medical issues once he and my mom got over here to this side of the country. He ended up having some congestive issues with his heart and now has a nifty pacemaker/difibrillator combo to keep his heart beating on track. The downside is that it looks like he's got an alien coming out of his chest right above his left pectoral.
So... I'll give more information out as it happens. So far, everything is going well, and I hope it continues to keep going that way.
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Of late, I've come to realize that there is some truth to the saying that "No good deed goes unpunished." Just this week, I've had multiple reminders of this very phenomenon.
One of my friends, who was molested as a child, was heading home from his work and saw an elderly gentleman struggling to walk through a local strip mall in town. He stopped and asked the guy if he was OK and if he needed any assistance. The guy then proceeded to try to touch and grope my friend and made lewd suggestions as he did so. Because of his past history with this sort of thing, my friend went home, so stressed and freaked out that he was physically sick for the night and has been mentally out of whack since.
Another reminder comes from my partner, who is having a hard time recovering from cancer. Although he's been on "chemo maintenance" for a year now, he's been plagued with a variety of odd infections and sicknesses that have kept him in and out of the hospital now for the last 9 months. His boss dropped a bomb on his desk on Friday in the form of a very negative performance review letter. Usually in the review process, the boss and the employee sit down, chat and go over issues and then they go over a plan for goals for the next year and then, after all that, the boss writes up a performance review letter that details all that they discussed and gives it to the employee. The exact opposite happened this time. There was no meeting, no discussion or goals planning, just a nasty letter filled with snarky, unproven criticisms that (when one reads through the lines) is his way of saying, "You're sick too much, but I can't legally say that or you could sue the company, so I'll just throw in a lot of "out of left field" criticisms that start with the words, "Some people feel..." or "There are those that work here that feel...""
Grow some fuckin' balls! I mean... really! How chickenshit is that?!?!? Some people.... Jesus H. Christ!
Since he can't legally fire him for being sick, he's determined to write him up nebulous bad reviews and try to get him out that way. It's a sad, pathetic way to get rid of someone who's been a wonderful employee for over a decade, just to save on payroll and healthcare costs. But, you know, I'm not all that surprised. Remember... No good deed goes unpunished!
When I think of people like my partner's boss or the creepy guy that my friend tried to be a good samaritan for, I am put to mind of another saying, "Some people are like slinkies, not really good for anything, but you just can't help but smile when someone pushes one down the stairs."
Where my partner, who is an ordained minister, nightly prays to God and holds hope that all will work out for the best, I (being a catastrophically lapsed Catholic) will begin to nightly pray to the God that killed Caine and squashed Sampson that he come out of retirement and get back to work on this pair of bozos."
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Surviving the Worst Days Of Your Life...
Some people think that the worst day of their lives will be the one wherein they die. I tend to disagree with that notion, since, for most people, shuffling off this mortal coil will be the easier than falling out of a boat and hitting water. This, of course, discounts those people who fall out of the boat BEFORE they get it into the water, or indeed off the highway. In nearly all of those cases, however, the people are idiots and probably deserve their impromptu meeting with the Grim Reaper.
No, the worst days of your life are the ones that you receive bad news of catastrophic illness, impending death or actual death of the people you love and hold most dear. Those are the days where the world gets pulled out from under you and you're left to twirl.
I had one of the worst days of my life today when I found out that my Mom, the rock of my family, was rushed to the hospital coughing up blood and was diagnosed with a large cancerous mass in her lung.
I got this horrible, awful news as I took the first bite of the weekly lunch special at Bandidos in Hillsborough, NC. It's amazing how "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" can just turn to dust in one's mouth when paired up with news that bad. I had noted as I sat down that all three of my sisters and my mom and dad had called my cell phone multiple times before noon. The first thought to come to mind was, 'Crap! that can't be good. Something's gotta be wrong.'
I tried my eldest sister Dee with no luck, and then my middle sister Kathy, also with no luck, but then was able to get my youngest sister Shelly on her cellphone. She immediately asked me how I was doing and holding up.... and I probably ruined her day when I asked her what in the hell had happened. Shelly was audibly upset to be the one to have to tell me, as she figured that Dad or my other two sisters would have gotten hold of me already.
So, Shelly spilled the beans (honest, no mexican food pun intended!) just as the waitress plunked down my food and I began to absently cut and chew on my "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" and become completely unraveled.
John, of course, quickly realized that it wasn't the food that was causing my eyes to stream and me to blubber and he began to ask what was wrong and beckon frantically for the phone to talk to my sister himself. I waved him off and finished my conversation quickly and then told him what had happened. Being a recent cancer survivor, he immediately went into "Circle the Wagons" mode, and began making plans... none of which I really heard at all because I was so "in my head" at that point that I didn't hear much of anything. I was just in total shock.
I just couldn't believe that the woman who rarely got anything worse than a cold... Janey the Mule... my mom... the woman from whom I had inherited my ever-so appealing, "You got 32 teeth, buddy.... you wanna try for 16?" temperment... the woman who once had picked a man up by his neck and held him there suspended for some long time as she explained the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace after he had smacked her on the ass....This virtual Superman of women, had been laid low by this malignant kryptonite-like growth in her lung.
I got up from the table and calmly walked to the wrong bathroom, then turned around and found the men's room and had a complete and totally silent freak-out for about two minutes. Thankfully through the years I've learned to control my freak-outs, as I'm sure if I'd put voice to my internal scream-fest in the bathroom as I used to when I was younger, the cops would have been called, along with an exorcist and probably some mental health people with a oversize straightjacket.
I got back from lunch and, after informing my coworkers of this news, tried to work through the day. As you might surmise... I didn't get shit done the rest of the day.
I called my Dad and we talked for a while, and he got pretty emotional when he confided in me that the ER doctor at Mesa View Hospital had practically pronounced my mother dead, telling him (my father, Mr. Bill 'Nuclear-sized Overreaction' Kinnik) that my mother didn't have much time left and that because of the kind of disease it was it wouldn't be all that painful. I often am thankful that no instantaneous means of travel has ever been invented because Mesa View would have been accepting applications for a new ER doctor by about 2 pm EST/ 11 am PST after I dropped his ass off one of the high desert buttes in Mesquite, NV.
What in the name of Gay Hell was he thinking?!?!?
What on Earth would possess him, an ER doctor of a diddley-shit 25-bed hospital in a teeny-tiny (albeit beautiful) town with 3 stoplights MAX... to absent-mindedly toss out a judgement call like that about the wife of a 70-plus year old man who has a heart condition and has just come through cancer treatment himself?!??!?!?!? Yeah... he really needs stress like that!
Did this doctor graduate from the Himmler School of Doctor/Patient Relations?!?
So I spent some time telling my father that the doctor was so full of shit that his eyes were brown, and that we didn't know anything til we went to see a pulmonologist and oncologist about this stuff. As I spoke these words of reassurance to my father, I surfed over to the Mesa View Hospital website and found that the president of Mesa View Hospital actually has her home and her office telephone number listed for complaints. Be sure I will avail myself of those tomorrow. Woe betide her and the ER doc after I'm done, is all I can say. It's outrageous!
My sister Kathy called after I got off the phone with my Dad and I proceeded to tell her what Dad and said to me about the doctor, and then she and I discussed Mom's condition like sane adults after we discussed disembowling techniques for stupid, mouthy ER doctors with absolutely no bedside manner.
It was at during this phone call that I realized that Battlestar Galactica is a brilliantly written show. I realize that is sort of random, but as I heard my sister's voice break and fill with emotion and I remembered how my upset my Dad sounded on the phone just moments before, I felt my own emotions begin to run high again and three words from a Battlestar Galactica episode from a few weeks ago popped into my mind completely from out of the blue:
"Sine Qua Non"
"Sine Qua Non", from the Latin, it translates to "without which not" or, as Mr. Romo Lampkin the Galactica lawyer so astutely says, "those things we deem essential, without which we cannot bear living, without which life loses its specific value, and becomes abstract." I realized then that my mother is one of those things for me, for my sisters and for my Dad, "Sine Qua Non."
After I realized that, I began to mentally make a list of the other people and things that qualify as "Sine Qua Non" at this moment in my life, and quickly realized that this makes for a completely depressing exercise that is, like a broken pencil, utterly pointless. It's also an exercise that I don't hesistate not to recommend.
I pushed out of my mind all of that maudlin crap just in time to hear my sister give her own doom and gloom prediction for our Mom's health and came to the conclusion, as I had done before when John was diagnosed with lymphoma, that all the medical statistics and studies on life expectancy in the world mean exactly jack shit to me, and though it's important to know the odds, it's just as important to know that those figures are just "odds" and that they can be beaten.
I realized that it's game-on time, and my family needs to shelve our doubts and concerns right next to the odds and the doctor's statistics and come and rally behind Mom and become her own personal cheering and motivation group. Mom needs to go into this with her head held high and her family at her back because whether she knows it or not, she's just sat down at the biggest poker game ever! And it's no time to leave her poker face at home... It's no time to play to break-even... It's time to go all-in and play to win!
Since moving to NV a few year back, my Mom has shown herself to be quite the winner when it comes to gambling and regularly cleans-up at the local casinos. Though this game isn't her usual nickel slots and has much higher stakes, I'd like to think her luck's gonna hold and that she's gonna beat the odds.
So yeah, it was one of the worst days of my life... but you know what? It's now past 12:00 am, and that day is now officially over. It's past and I think it's time to make this day a really good day... for my Mom, for my sisters, for John, and for everyone else that I deem "Sine Qua Non".
Cheers!
No, the worst days of your life are the ones that you receive bad news of catastrophic illness, impending death or actual death of the people you love and hold most dear. Those are the days where the world gets pulled out from under you and you're left to twirl.
I had one of the worst days of my life today when I found out that my Mom, the rock of my family, was rushed to the hospital coughing up blood and was diagnosed with a large cancerous mass in her lung.
I got this horrible, awful news as I took the first bite of the weekly lunch special at Bandidos in Hillsborough, NC. It's amazing how "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" can just turn to dust in one's mouth when paired up with news that bad. I had noted as I sat down that all three of my sisters and my mom and dad had called my cell phone multiple times before noon. The first thought to come to mind was, 'Crap! that can't be good. Something's gotta be wrong.'
I tried my eldest sister Dee with no luck, and then my middle sister Kathy, also with no luck, but then was able to get my youngest sister Shelly on her cellphone. She immediately asked me how I was doing and holding up.... and I probably ruined her day when I asked her what in the hell had happened. Shelly was audibly upset to be the one to have to tell me, as she figured that Dad or my other two sisters would have gotten hold of me already.
So, Shelly spilled the beans (honest, no mexican food pun intended!) just as the waitress plunked down my food and I began to absently cut and chew on my "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" and become completely unraveled.
John, of course, quickly realized that it wasn't the food that was causing my eyes to stream and me to blubber and he began to ask what was wrong and beckon frantically for the phone to talk to my sister himself. I waved him off and finished my conversation quickly and then told him what had happened. Being a recent cancer survivor, he immediately went into "Circle the Wagons" mode, and began making plans... none of which I really heard at all because I was so "in my head" at that point that I didn't hear much of anything. I was just in total shock.
I just couldn't believe that the woman who rarely got anything worse than a cold... Janey the Mule... my mom... the woman from whom I had inherited my ever-so appealing, "You got 32 teeth, buddy.... you wanna try for 16?" temperment... the woman who once had picked a man up by his neck and held him there suspended for some long time as she explained the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace after he had smacked her on the ass....This virtual Superman of women, had been laid low by this malignant kryptonite-like growth in her lung.
I got up from the table and calmly walked to the wrong bathroom, then turned around and found the men's room and had a complete and totally silent freak-out for about two minutes. Thankfully through the years I've learned to control my freak-outs, as I'm sure if I'd put voice to my internal scream-fest in the bathroom as I used to when I was younger, the cops would have been called, along with an exorcist and probably some mental health people with a oversize straightjacket.
I got back from lunch and, after informing my coworkers of this news, tried to work through the day. As you might surmise... I didn't get shit done the rest of the day.
I called my Dad and we talked for a while, and he got pretty emotional when he confided in me that the ER doctor at Mesa View Hospital had practically pronounced my mother dead, telling him (my father, Mr. Bill 'Nuclear-sized Overreaction' Kinnik) that my mother didn't have much time left and that because of the kind of disease it was it wouldn't be all that painful. I often am thankful that no instantaneous means of travel has ever been invented because Mesa View would have been accepting applications for a new ER doctor by about 2 pm EST/ 11 am PST after I dropped his ass off one of the high desert buttes in Mesquite, NV.
What in the name of Gay Hell was he thinking?!?!?
What on Earth would possess him, an ER doctor of a diddley-shit 25-bed hospital in a teeny-tiny (albeit beautiful) town with 3 stoplights MAX... to absent-mindedly toss out a judgement call like that about the wife of a 70-plus year old man who has a heart condition and has just come through cancer treatment himself?!??!?!?!? Yeah... he really needs stress like that!
Did this doctor graduate from the Himmler School of Doctor/Patient Relations?!?
So I spent some time telling my father that the doctor was so full of shit that his eyes were brown, and that we didn't know anything til we went to see a pulmonologist and oncologist about this stuff. As I spoke these words of reassurance to my father, I surfed over to the Mesa View Hospital website and found that the president of Mesa View Hospital actually has her home and her office telephone number listed for complaints. Be sure I will avail myself of those tomorrow. Woe betide her and the ER doc after I'm done, is all I can say. It's outrageous!
My sister Kathy called after I got off the phone with my Dad and I proceeded to tell her what Dad and said to me about the doctor, and then she and I discussed Mom's condition like sane adults after we discussed disembowling techniques for stupid, mouthy ER doctors with absolutely no bedside manner.
It was at during this phone call that I realized that Battlestar Galactica is a brilliantly written show. I realize that is sort of random, but as I heard my sister's voice break and fill with emotion and I remembered how my upset my Dad sounded on the phone just moments before, I felt my own emotions begin to run high again and three words from a Battlestar Galactica episode from a few weeks ago popped into my mind completely from out of the blue:
"Sine Qua Non"
"Sine Qua Non", from the Latin, it translates to "without which not" or, as Mr. Romo Lampkin the Galactica lawyer so astutely says, "those things we deem essential, without which we cannot bear living, without which life loses its specific value, and becomes abstract." I realized then that my mother is one of those things for me, for my sisters and for my Dad, "Sine Qua Non."
After I realized that, I began to mentally make a list of the other people and things that qualify as "Sine Qua Non" at this moment in my life, and quickly realized that this makes for a completely depressing exercise that is, like a broken pencil, utterly pointless. It's also an exercise that I don't hesistate not to recommend.
I pushed out of my mind all of that maudlin crap just in time to hear my sister give her own doom and gloom prediction for our Mom's health and came to the conclusion, as I had done before when John was diagnosed with lymphoma, that all the medical statistics and studies on life expectancy in the world mean exactly jack shit to me, and though it's important to know the odds, it's just as important to know that those figures are just "odds" and that they can be beaten.
I realized that it's game-on time, and my family needs to shelve our doubts and concerns right next to the odds and the doctor's statistics and come and rally behind Mom and become her own personal cheering and motivation group. Mom needs to go into this with her head held high and her family at her back because whether she knows it or not, she's just sat down at the biggest poker game ever! And it's no time to leave her poker face at home... It's no time to play to break-even... It's time to go all-in and play to win!
Since moving to NV a few year back, my Mom has shown herself to be quite the winner when it comes to gambling and regularly cleans-up at the local casinos. Though this game isn't her usual nickel slots and has much higher stakes, I'd like to think her luck's gonna hold and that she's gonna beat the odds.
So yeah, it was one of the worst days of my life... but you know what? It's now past 12:00 am, and that day is now officially over. It's past and I think it's time to make this day a really good day... for my Mom, for my sisters, for John, and for everyone else that I deem "Sine Qua Non".
Cheers!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The First 20 Pounds...
When I was a kid, my parents and I used to go to the flea market that was held in the Latrobe Drive-In theatre. I used to go there and spend my allowance (or more) on such wonderful used treasures as old MAD, CRACKED or CRAZY magazines. On one such occasion I came across an "ancient" MAD from the 60s (yeah, that was ancient to me back then.) Inside was a poem about dieting that I can still recall perfectly, even today, some 25 plus years later. It was split into two paragraphs, both had a different shape. The first paragraph was shaped almost like an oval, and the second one was a tall, thin justified box shape, and the poem went like this:
When I started
my diet I had me a
plan, to cut down my weight
and to get me a man. So I ignored
all my cravings for ice cream and cake
and dogged through the days
when my belly would ache.
Now my
flabby
old fat
is the
thing that
I miss...
...cause I
ended up
looking
exactly
like this.
my diet I had me a
plan, to cut down my weight
and to get me a man. So I ignored
all my cravings for ice cream and cake
and dogged through the days
when my belly would ache.
Now my
flabby
old fat
is the
thing that
I miss...
...cause I
ended up
looking
exactly
like this.
During my life, I've never not been overweight, and so reading this poem always made me laugh out loud, as the ridiculousness of someone being angry about being skinny was just too much for me, as fat kid, not to find terribly amusing. I've come to realize, especially after coming to grips with my sexuality, that being overweight sucks, it's not healthy; it can cause all sorts of other sucky things, like sleep apnea, high blood pressure, etc. And being gay and overweight, well that's almost a mortal sin in the eyes of the gay community.
Now, I'm not saying that all gay men are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, because that would be a rude generalization of my queer peers. It's more like 97.5% of them are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, in my opinion. The rest are either chubby chasers who are into chubby guys or are fat like me and so they're about as screwed as I am in these days of the Aberzombie and Felch crowd.
Since I was very young, I've always wanted to have a nice thin body. I've always wanted to be able to look down and see a flat plane from my chest to my ankles (with of course, *ahem* one somewhat large protrusion *ahem* about mid-way down.)
This dream of slimness however, was not to be. Though I spent hours of my summers swimming, playing running, jumping, climbing, and everything else that I could do in Western PA, I was always kinda chubby and the weight never came off.
When I was a senior in High School, I joined Nutri-System and lost about 65 lbs, which, although was a goodly amount of weight, was about half of what I needed to lose at the time. (and I suspect that most of the weight that I lost at that time was a combination of fat and muscle.)
After I stopped eating the food, however, the weight came back, mostly during my freshman year at college. I discovered that the "Freshman 15" was a bit of a myth, as I packed on some 30-40 lbs during my first year in college. Fifteen would have been a blessing compared to that.
During the fall of my sophmore year, my folks and I talked and we decided that perhaps I should try Jenny Craig, so for the next year, I religiously followed the Jenny Craig foodplan... and it worked well. I went from 270 lbs to 205 lbs. (I remember that I never was able to break below 200 lbs, no matter how much I tried.)
As if a life-changing diet isn't enough for a 19 year old guy, I was in the midst of discovering my sexuality, which was a bit of a trial for me, especially when my freshman year roommates decided to put a bug in my sophmore year roommate's ear that they believed I was gay. My sophomore year roommate, a redneck from Maine, who is now a redneck lawyer from Maine, processed this rather poisonous news and proceeded to make my sophmore year a living hell for me, culminating in me moving out over Christmas break. It was a sucky time for me, but, on the bright side, that kind of severe depression can sometimes lead to some RIGHTEOUS weight-loss!
After I went on maintenance with Jenny, the weight stayed off for some time, but slowly came back during my junior and senior years. After I graduated and got a job, I found that one's first job can be somewhat dietetic, as employers hire cheap and you sometimes go hungry if you want to make ends meet. I was also biking from my lovely group house on S Street to Georgetown each day to go to and from work, so I had calves like iron and was able to keep my weight down pretty well.
That all ended when my then-newish boyfriend John got a call from his previous employers asking him to come to North Carolina and work for them again. We moved down here together, him to his new job, and me to a computer services and custom printing coordinator position similar to what I left in DC with Kinko's. I tried to bike once after we moved here, biking to Franklin Street from Southern Village, and found that if the Everest-like hill between Southern Village and Franklin Street wasn't enough to kill me, the psychotic drivers that had a penchant for "nudging" unsuspecting bikers off the road as they flew by at 50 mph would certainly be happy to finish the job.
So, as my iron-like calves began to rust, and my waist size began to increase in direct proportion to my salary and love for North Carolina barbecue, John and I decided to join the local gym (which was a much nicer hell-hole than it is today, now that it's been sold twice over and has yet to be remodeled or fixed up.)
However, when my weight began to touch 300 lbs in 2000, I decided to try something else. My work was offering discounted "Weight Watchers" classes, and both my partner and I decided to put our chins (several of them) to the grindstone and start losing weight... and we did. I got back down to a 38 waist, and my partner lost so much weight that he had to jump around in the shower to get wet.
Again, this success was fleeting. By 2004, my weight had shot up to over 340 lbs, and this time, because I was no longer a spring chicken, it had brought up my blood pressure with it. They call high blood pressure the silent killer, well, it's true. I never knew my blood pressure was excessively high until I went in for a doctor's visit in 2004 and, after the nurse had to go forage for an extra large "thigh cuff" to fit around my rather huge arm, she pointed out that my blood pressure, at 160/120 was not so good. Having gotten a degree in exercise and sport science, I tried not to say, "Uhhh... DUHHHHH!", but it was something that scared me. My doctor started me on some meds to bring it down and insisted it was weight and some "white coat hypertension", meaning I am a bit anxious around doctors, so my blood pressure tends to skyrocket around them.
In 2007, I had nearly the same blood pressure and had decided that, maybe 3 years into the same meds, that he needed to try something else. Having spent some time reading up on blood pressure issues for this very reason, I suggested he try me on some ace inhibitors, as he'd only been trying beta blockers on me until that point. He was hesistant at first, but then prescribed both a cheap generic ace-inhibitor and a water pill to see what it would do for me.
I think that was the start of something. Since then, my blood pressure has been 128/84 (give or take a point or two, but not much more) and I've been feeling remarkably better. My partner and I have also decided to go back on the wagon. This time, we were lured back to NutriSystem for two good reasons... (1) It's cheaper for us to buy NS food than it is to cook or go out, and (2) We're kinda lazy, and having pre-proportioned foodstuffs in the house is really awesome!
Since joining a month ago, I've lost 24 lbs. I didn't notice that I'd lost it, actually, because let's face it, I was 365lbs when I started and 24 lbs doesn't even begin to put a dent in that amount of fat (or so I thought.)
Although NutriSystem food is pretty good, we cheat every now and again, and go off the diet and have dinner out at a restaurant. Usually it's for something we've been craving, and usually it's not anything that's really dietetically terrible for us.
Last week we had dinner out at Mami Nori's Peruvian Chicken in Durham with our former neighbor Susan. Susan is an amazing woman who unfortunately got the cold damp, fuzzy end of the lollipop in her divorce and child custody battle last year with her... uhh...ex-(I don't want upset her if she were to read this blog post by trashing that heartless, cheating *insert multiple descriptive epithets here*, who is unfortunately also the XY chromosome provider for her two absolutely wonderful boys, they got all the good genes from her, of course.) In a sad turn of events early this year, she had to move away from our neighborhood to cheaper diggs on the other side of town.
Well, Susan showed up at the restaurant and grinned at me and the first thing she said, "Wow... do you look amazing! You've lost so much weight."
*pause* *SMILE*
Yeah... Weight loss is hard and it really sucks, like the first part of that MAD poem says, but Susan's words at that restaurant made it all totally worth it!
And you know what, this is only the first 20 or so pounds so I'm just gettin' started! I am going to keep with it and see if I can get under 200 lbs this time, and you know what, if I get close, I'm going to get some nip/tucking done because I can afford it and then I won't look like someone let the air out of me like a balloon, or like Peter Griffin from that episode of Family Guy where he wishes all his bones away and becomes an amorphous blob.
This time, I'm gonna make more of an effort to keep it off because (tho I don't like to admit it) I'm not gettin' any younger and I don't want to have to go through the whole "heart attack/bypass" thing my dad went through when he was in his 40s.
But let me tell you something, if I ever get so thin that I look like that second part of the poem, I can GUARANTEE that you won't hear me bitchin' about it!
Now, I'm not saying that all gay men are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, because that would be a rude generalization of my queer peers. It's more like 97.5% of them are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, in my opinion. The rest are either chubby chasers who are into chubby guys or are fat like me and so they're about as screwed as I am in these days of the Aberzombie and Felch crowd.
Since I was very young, I've always wanted to have a nice thin body. I've always wanted to be able to look down and see a flat plane from my chest to my ankles (with of course, *ahem* one somewhat large protrusion *ahem* about mid-way down.)
This dream of slimness however, was not to be. Though I spent hours of my summers swimming, playing running, jumping, climbing, and everything else that I could do in Western PA, I was always kinda chubby and the weight never came off.
When I was a senior in High School, I joined Nutri-System and lost about 65 lbs, which, although was a goodly amount of weight, was about half of what I needed to lose at the time. (and I suspect that most of the weight that I lost at that time was a combination of fat and muscle.)
After I stopped eating the food, however, the weight came back, mostly during my freshman year at college. I discovered that the "Freshman 15" was a bit of a myth, as I packed on some 30-40 lbs during my first year in college. Fifteen would have been a blessing compared to that.
During the fall of my sophmore year, my folks and I talked and we decided that perhaps I should try Jenny Craig, so for the next year, I religiously followed the Jenny Craig foodplan... and it worked well. I went from 270 lbs to 205 lbs. (I remember that I never was able to break below 200 lbs, no matter how much I tried.)
As if a life-changing diet isn't enough for a 19 year old guy, I was in the midst of discovering my sexuality, which was a bit of a trial for me, especially when my freshman year roommates decided to put a bug in my sophmore year roommate's ear that they believed I was gay. My sophomore year roommate, a redneck from Maine, who is now a redneck lawyer from Maine, processed this rather poisonous news and proceeded to make my sophmore year a living hell for me, culminating in me moving out over Christmas break. It was a sucky time for me, but, on the bright side, that kind of severe depression can sometimes lead to some RIGHTEOUS weight-loss!
After I went on maintenance with Jenny, the weight stayed off for some time, but slowly came back during my junior and senior years. After I graduated and got a job, I found that one's first job can be somewhat dietetic, as employers hire cheap and you sometimes go hungry if you want to make ends meet. I was also biking from my lovely group house on S Street to Georgetown each day to go to and from work, so I had calves like iron and was able to keep my weight down pretty well.
That all ended when my then-newish boyfriend John got a call from his previous employers asking him to come to North Carolina and work for them again. We moved down here together, him to his new job, and me to a computer services and custom printing coordinator position similar to what I left in DC with Kinko's. I tried to bike once after we moved here, biking to Franklin Street from Southern Village, and found that if the Everest-like hill between Southern Village and Franklin Street wasn't enough to kill me, the psychotic drivers that had a penchant for "nudging" unsuspecting bikers off the road as they flew by at 50 mph would certainly be happy to finish the job.
So, as my iron-like calves began to rust, and my waist size began to increase in direct proportion to my salary and love for North Carolina barbecue, John and I decided to join the local gym (which was a much nicer hell-hole than it is today, now that it's been sold twice over and has yet to be remodeled or fixed up.)
However, when my weight began to touch 300 lbs in 2000, I decided to try something else. My work was offering discounted "Weight Watchers" classes, and both my partner and I decided to put our chins (several of them) to the grindstone and start losing weight... and we did. I got back down to a 38 waist, and my partner lost so much weight that he had to jump around in the shower to get wet.
Again, this success was fleeting. By 2004, my weight had shot up to over 340 lbs, and this time, because I was no longer a spring chicken, it had brought up my blood pressure with it. They call high blood pressure the silent killer, well, it's true. I never knew my blood pressure was excessively high until I went in for a doctor's visit in 2004 and, after the nurse had to go forage for an extra large "thigh cuff" to fit around my rather huge arm, she pointed out that my blood pressure, at 160/120 was not so good. Having gotten a degree in exercise and sport science, I tried not to say, "Uhhh... DUHHHHH!", but it was something that scared me. My doctor started me on some meds to bring it down and insisted it was weight and some "white coat hypertension", meaning I am a bit anxious around doctors, so my blood pressure tends to skyrocket around them.
In 2007, I had nearly the same blood pressure and had decided that, maybe 3 years into the same meds, that he needed to try something else. Having spent some time reading up on blood pressure issues for this very reason, I suggested he try me on some ace inhibitors, as he'd only been trying beta blockers on me until that point. He was hesistant at first, but then prescribed both a cheap generic ace-inhibitor and a water pill to see what it would do for me.
I think that was the start of something. Since then, my blood pressure has been 128/84 (give or take a point or two, but not much more) and I've been feeling remarkably better. My partner and I have also decided to go back on the wagon. This time, we were lured back to NutriSystem for two good reasons... (1) It's cheaper for us to buy NS food than it is to cook or go out, and (2) We're kinda lazy, and having pre-proportioned foodstuffs in the house is really awesome!
Since joining a month ago, I've lost 24 lbs. I didn't notice that I'd lost it, actually, because let's face it, I was 365lbs when I started and 24 lbs doesn't even begin to put a dent in that amount of fat (or so I thought.)
Although NutriSystem food is pretty good, we cheat every now and again, and go off the diet and have dinner out at a restaurant. Usually it's for something we've been craving, and usually it's not anything that's really dietetically terrible for us.
Last week we had dinner out at Mami Nori's Peruvian Chicken in Durham with our former neighbor Susan. Susan is an amazing woman who unfortunately got the cold damp, fuzzy end of the lollipop in her divorce and child custody battle last year with her... uhh...ex-(I don't want upset her if she were to read this blog post by trashing that heartless, cheating *insert multiple descriptive epithets here*, who is unfortunately also the XY chromosome provider for her two absolutely wonderful boys, they got all the good genes from her, of course.) In a sad turn of events early this year, she had to move away from our neighborhood to cheaper diggs on the other side of town.
Well, Susan showed up at the restaurant and grinned at me and the first thing she said, "Wow... do you look amazing! You've lost so much weight."
*pause* *SMILE*
Yeah... Weight loss is hard and it really sucks, like the first part of that MAD poem says, but Susan's words at that restaurant made it all totally worth it!
And you know what, this is only the first 20 or so pounds so I'm just gettin' started! I am going to keep with it and see if I can get under 200 lbs this time, and you know what, if I get close, I'm going to get some nip/tucking done because I can afford it and then I won't look like someone let the air out of me like a balloon, or like Peter Griffin from that episode of Family Guy where he wishes all his bones away and becomes an amorphous blob.
This time, I'm gonna make more of an effort to keep it off because (tho I don't like to admit it) I'm not gettin' any younger and I don't want to have to go through the whole "heart attack/bypass" thing my dad went through when he was in his 40s.
But let me tell you something, if I ever get so thin that I look like that second part of the poem, I can GUARANTEE that you won't hear me bitchin' about it!
Friday, January 4, 2008
The Gay Art Monkey? What the hell is that?
"What the hell is a Gay Art Monkey?" This is probably the first question I will have to address in my blog. I heard the term "Art Monkey" applied to myself and my co-workers about 9 years ago when I started working for an adult video direct mail company. I dunno who first coined it, but it basically is any graphic designer who is part of a marketing team, but yet has little to no control over the art that he or she produces.
As a single member of a creative team, sometimes one has to bow to the wishes of the majority, and thus what a seasoned graphic artist would deem "a good design" is then sent through what the author of the book, "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads, Second Edition", termed as the "Koncept Krusher 2000", wherein it is smashed and diluted and generally niggled to near death, until the resulting design is a tepid, gangly awkward abomination that bears little resemblance to the original great artistic idea that was eventually (horribly painfully) destroyed in its creation.
When I first joined my current company, this "artistic castration by committee" was a day-to-day occurrence, and I got to see some really cool ideas and concepts get beaten to death faster than a poorly performing pitbull at Michael Vick's house. Over the last few years however, either my ideas have conformed more to the box that the teams I work with like to think inside, or my intonation of "artist prerogative" in regards to drastic design changes to my art has finally landed with them, and they've realized that there's only so much "koncept krushing" I'll tolerate.
So, for the first few years, I was an Art Monkey. My parents find it greatly amusing and somewhat ironic that, as a gay man, I go to work and pour through thousands of str8 XXX movie pictures each week in my attempt to throw together catalogs, flyers, order cards and other mailing pieces to appeal to horny str8 men in their mid-20 to their mid-70s. They found the term "Gay Art Monkey" equally entertaining in its explanation.
I've come to believe my parents are finding out that kharma is a very real thing, and that all the grief and shit my three sisters and I gave them growing up is now coming back to bite us all on the ass. Two of my sisters have children, which are the living embodiment of the kharmic comeback, and my other sister has two cats and a husband that we secretly refer to as "Princess." I won't go into that much further but to say that if you knew her (and him), the kharmic smackdown she's getting would be pretty obvious.
Me? I get my kharma back by having to look at pictures of some of the worst god-awful boob jobs since women started going under the knife, gaping pussy lips, man-foam facials, girls that are more hirsute than most artists' renderings of the elusive sasquatch, and other sexual positions and variations that would make most gay men cringe and throw up into their mouths on a regular basis. Although after 9 years of somewhat desensitizing myself to most of the stuff I see, I can honestly say that I enjoy my job, though I probably could have seen the irony baseball bat swingin' at my head on my 5th day of employment, when my co-workers snapped a delightful polaroid shot of a porn star named Carly Sparks giving me a pair of "mickey mouse ears" from behind... with her boobs.
My father asked if I could send him a color copy of that picture. He believes seeing it will be the proudest moment of his life. Yeah. Kharma's a bitch.
As a single member of a creative team, sometimes one has to bow to the wishes of the majority, and thus what a seasoned graphic artist would deem "a good design" is then sent through what the author of the book, "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads, Second Edition", termed as the "Koncept Krusher 2000", wherein it is smashed and diluted and generally niggled to near death, until the resulting design is a tepid, gangly awkward abomination that bears little resemblance to the original great artistic idea that was eventually (horribly painfully) destroyed in its creation.
When I first joined my current company, this "artistic castration by committee" was a day-to-day occurrence, and I got to see some really cool ideas and concepts get beaten to death faster than a poorly performing pitbull at Michael Vick's house. Over the last few years however, either my ideas have conformed more to the box that the teams I work with like to think inside, or my intonation of "artist prerogative" in regards to drastic design changes to my art has finally landed with them, and they've realized that there's only so much "koncept krushing" I'll tolerate.
So, for the first few years, I was an Art Monkey. My parents find it greatly amusing and somewhat ironic that, as a gay man, I go to work and pour through thousands of str8 XXX movie pictures each week in my attempt to throw together catalogs, flyers, order cards and other mailing pieces to appeal to horny str8 men in their mid-20 to their mid-70s. They found the term "Gay Art Monkey" equally entertaining in its explanation.
I've come to believe my parents are finding out that kharma is a very real thing, and that all the grief and shit my three sisters and I gave them growing up is now coming back to bite us all on the ass. Two of my sisters have children, which are the living embodiment of the kharmic comeback, and my other sister has two cats and a husband that we secretly refer to as "Princess." I won't go into that much further but to say that if you knew her (and him), the kharmic smackdown she's getting would be pretty obvious.
Me? I get my kharma back by having to look at pictures of some of the worst god-awful boob jobs since women started going under the knife, gaping pussy lips, man-foam facials, girls that are more hirsute than most artists' renderings of the elusive sasquatch, and other sexual positions and variations that would make most gay men cringe and throw up into their mouths on a regular basis. Although after 9 years of somewhat desensitizing myself to most of the stuff I see, I can honestly say that I enjoy my job, though I probably could have seen the irony baseball bat swingin' at my head on my 5th day of employment, when my co-workers snapped a delightful polaroid shot of a porn star named Carly Sparks giving me a pair of "mickey mouse ears" from behind... with her boobs.
My father asked if I could send him a color copy of that picture. He believes seeing it will be the proudest moment of his life. Yeah. Kharma's a bitch.
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