saving me (writing)

Last but not least, the ability to put words to paper is the one thing that has saved me time and time again. It's the whole reason for this blog. Well, that and my crippling inability to display my latent narcissistic tendencies. (Kidding. Mostly.)

saving me (vulgarity)

You know George Carlin's famous seven words?* Shout them out. Scream them at the top of your lungs. If you're not quite ballsy enough for those seven, something milder is okay. Find the dirtiest word that you can comfortably say out loud and yell it. Think of it as catharsis: there's all that darkness and filth and pain inside of you, and it has to come out one way or another. This way is fast and a lot more fun than you might think.

*Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.

saving me (time)

There is no quick fix. There is no perfect solution. There is no switch to turn the lights back on. Work as hard as you can, fight as hard as you can, but know that you will have to wait for the dawn.

saving me (revolution)

Find something new, something that excites you. Find something old, something that bothers you. Find something you want to change. Find a change being made that you want to get behind. Find something you want to oppose. Find something you want to support. Find something to be passionate about. Revolt. And in so doing, revolt against the darkness.

saving me (quiet)

Sometimes you just have to burrow into your own head and stay quiet for a while.

saving me (poetry)

It's what i do. Rock bottom produces incredible poems.

saving me (obstinacy)

See defiance.

saving me (negation)

Sometimes when everything is slipping away from you, you can hold onto the things you're not. I'm not poor. I'm not alone. I'm not unintelligent. I'm not untalented. I'm not living at home. The list could go on and on.

saving me (love)

Love in all forms. Love from others. Love for others. Love of others for each other. Love for books. Love from my cat. Love for steak. Love from the earth. Promised love. Past love. The hope of future love. Making love. The love of others for one another. Ingrid Michaelson's songs about love. Love, love, love.

saving me (knit)

I've been knitting for over half my life. It's nostalgic, it's simple, it's absorbing, it keeps me busy when i get twitchy, and it produces something beautiful.

saving me (justice)

It's also important to have something outside of yourself to hold on to, something that you want to save. Get out of your own head and focus on someone else's needs. In my case, i'm holding on to things like the fight for civil rights and social justice.

saving me (intelligence)

My own intellect has never failed me. It's important to find something inside of yourself to hold onto, something about yourself worth saving.

saving me (hope)

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
--Emily Dickinson

saving me (grammar)

I can't help it.

saving me (absurdity)

The top of my desk is decorated with entries from my thesaurus. I wanted to find one item for each letter of the alphabet that has been saving me as i've been in another free fall. Because i'm obsessive and list-y that way.

A is for Absurdity. Because nothing distracts you from inner turmoil like a phone call from a confused person or overhearing a conversation between two of your dumb coworkers.

When you're down the rabbit hole, nonsense is the only thing that makes any sense at all. It is the only constant in a fluid and shifting world. It is entertaining and soothing, hilarious and sobering, jarring and comforting.

what's saving me (illustrations)

I've been in free-fall a little bit for the last few weeks. It's not a total plunge toward rock bottom, but i can feel it coming. Lately, the thing that's been saving me is my new desk. My wonderful boyfriend helped me haul it up to the second floor from the basement. The stairs were narrow and twisty, the ceiling was low, it was late at night, and we both ended up with scraped knuckles. And my shin was pretty badly skinned, too.

Since then, i've been settling into the corner of my room, arranging pencils and notebooks and drinking rum and coke with peaches. And then i spent a lot of time decoupaging.

I found an old dictionary and thesaurus set and did a little tearing and cutting and coloring. I left plenty of room for things i might want to decoupage in the future, but i'm pretty happy with it so far.

The old orange desk that i keep on the corner was the perfect canvas for a selection of illustrations i cut from the dictionary. I went letter by letter, finding illustrations i liked. Not all letters had illustrations, and not all of the illustrations were memorable. But here's what i ended up with:

Plenty of room for movie tickets, stickers, fabric scraps, and so on. But it's a great start -- both to my workspace and to saving myself again and again.

playing house, part two

When someone bought the lot with the mountain on it, the dirt was carted away somewhere. There was a smaller mountain further down the street where we played, but it wasn't the same. One day, when i was eight or nine, i was at the smaller mountain and i made a strange discovery. There was a cedar log -- really almost a whole tree -- abandoned in the dirt. There were no large trees for miles around, and this was not fresh. The branches and roots had been stripped away long since, and the trunk was weathered and dry. It had not been there before, but it had appeared that day, quite inexplicably. I decided that i needed to have it, and i dragged it all the way back to our house, a good two or three blocks.

We had a dirt pile in our back yard (you know, until i wrote this all out, i had no idea how many large piles of dirt were integral parts of my childhood. I really was Tom Sawyer.), left over from when we had put in our pool. It was an above-ground pool, but it was necessary to dig out a small foundation to protect it from tornadoes and windstorms and vigorous swimming. Anyway, with the disappearance of the mountain, the dirt pile in the back yard became more important to us. Though it was nowhere near as large as the dirt pile down the street, it was a lot closer. 

I brought the tree to this pile and set it up in the "house" i had carved into one side. Pieces of the aforementioned playhouse were sometimes integrated into this particular house. My mom hated the dirt pile and often wanted us to move the dirt to the garden, where it could be spread around and used and stop being an eyesore next to the deck. But we loved it and couldn't stand the thought of losing our favorite outside play space.

Somewhere around this same time, my grandparents had a rotting tree in their back yard. Afraid of it falling and breaking the swingset or the shed or the house, or even falling into the neighbor's yard, my grandfather cut it down preemptively. It was a big job and took some time to complete. Step one was piling the branches and logs into a huge stack, easily as tall as a house. While step two was formulating, i began examining the beaver dam-like pile in the yard and discovered that the branches had naturally formed a hollow space in the center. With some judicious rearranging of sticks and wriggling of my childish frame, i managed to crawl inside.

This was my house for what felt like weeks, but was probably no more than ten days. One day, i went to my grandparents' house to discover that my grandfather had fed all of the wood into a mulcher. My home was dissolved. There were other log homes from other fallen trees, but there was never another beaver dam.

Yesterday, my boyfriend asked me to tell him a story. I was bored at work and he was bored at home and we were on Facebook chat, and i started telling him stories about all of my childhood "houses". When i told him about my beaver dam and how sad i was at its loss, he said, "That's because it wasn't our house. If you still had your house there today, we wouldn't be able to live together. You would have had a happy little life by yourself in the beaver dam-esque abode, and never have come to Quincy to meet me . . . and we would never have loved each other."

"I would always love you," i replied. "I just wouldn't know that it was you."

I've been waiting a long time for him.

well okay then

This weekend, John and i went to Bethesda to visit my brother. My aunt brought us a copy of our hometown newspaper, which featured a front-page story about my brother going home for the first time and seeing friends and family.

This story was just above one about a bee colony being moved.

The bee colony story beat out the article about bomb threats to local schools and my gynecologist running for congress. The bomb threat story had a typo in the name of the town.

This is the same town where there was once a fifteen minute traffic delay because a cow got onto the bridge.

You can't make this shit up.

Aunt Sis

When i was nine, my great-Aunt Sis moved into our house. She is mentally disabled. I can't be any more clear than that; she was diagnosed as "mentally retarded" in the early 1940s, and has not ever been evaluated since. I have my own theories, but that's a post for another day. Or maybe a doctoral dissertation. Something.

Anyway, she is an amazing person in so many ways, and she has been a blessing in my life. Although at times she is frustrating, and although there are moments when her disability makes her nearly impossible to be around, i love her dearly.

Below is a song that my dad wrote about her (to the tune of). I will provide annotations after each verse.

I have too many shoes to count,
My hair is flaming red.
There's money in my bank account,
No matter what I said.
My skin is cold,
And I'm so old,
You'll wonder if I'm dead;
But don't call me "Sis"!

She has hundreds of pairs of shoes. No one knows where they all come from.  

One of my uncles used to say that she had red hair. It's actually silver-white, but the joke stuck.

She has a small fortune, but can't grasp the concept of a bank account. Since she rarely has more than a few bucks on her in cash, she always says that she is poor. 

Her hands are always ice cold.She is pretty elderly, and we often tease her about her age. 

She usually insists on a title, like "Aunt" or "Mrs."

Gamma gamma, mannerosis,
Everything I own is dusty roses.
On Thursdays, I'm a nurse
And when I flip my lip,
The green grass grows!

"Gamma" and "mannerosis" are both nonsense words that she sometimes says. 

Dusty rose was her favorite color when she first moved in, and many of her apartment furnishings were in that shade. 

She likes to pretend that she is a nurse. 

"Flip my lip off" and "green grass grow" are two of her nonsense phrases.

My uncle smells like boiled eggs,
My aunt did this to me!
I want to use the same bag for
My second cup of tea.
My sugar's made of chemicals,
My food is all fat-free,
But don't call me "Sis"!

She has a nephew (who she calls her uncle) who she always insists smells like boiled eggs. 

"Look what my aunt did to me!" is what she says when she has done something wrong and wants to avert blame to a different (imaginary) person. 

"Same bag" is another phrase. This one has a backstory, but it's too long for this post. 

She only uses artificial sweeteners and insists on fat-free or reduced-fat foods.

Gamma gamma, mannerosis,
Everything I own is dusty roses.
On Thursdays, I'm a nurse
And when I flip my lip,
The green grass grows!

Bagels, cuppachina, yogit, 

Coffee cake, and tea:

These are the only kinds of food

I need inside of me.

Whenever I get near a store,

I go upon a spree.

But don't call me "Sis".

She loves bagels, cappuccino, and yogurt. Sometimes she can't pronounce words correctly. 

She also loves coffee cake and hot or iced tea. 

And shopping. She LOVES shopping.

Gamma gamma, mannerosis,
Everything I own is dusty roses.
On Thursdays, I'm a nurse
And when I flip my lip,
The green grass grows!

moments

*NB: This post is about my brother, and it is real. Though i may occasionally make light of the situation, this is my coping mechanism for my own personal grief. My tone is in no way meant to mock the reality of my brother's injury or future prospects, or the suffering of others in similar situations.

When someone has suffered a traumatic brain injury and has been heavily medicated for several weeks following, you don't talk about their cognitive function in terms of days. They don't have good days or bad days. They have moments.

This weekend, John and i went to Maryland to see Adam in the hospital. Physically, Adam's recovery continues at miraculous rates. Mentally and emotionally, it goes in fits and starts. It's hard to say with any confidence whether he is improving or not.

There were moments when he knew exactly who we all were and what was happening. There were moments when he was able to calmly discuss his medications, his pain, and his future plans. There were moments when he would do his PT exercises, or practice swallowing, or work on his breathing tests. There were moments when he would simply sleep.

There was also a moment when he began to speak Chinese into an imaginary telephone. He interrupted the conversation from time to time to ask my dad questions in Chinese; he would then say, "Wait. Let me ask them." Eventually, he ended the conversation and told us, "They're on their way in the car. They'll be here in a few minutes." And then he fell asleep. None of us speaks Chinese, but my dad knows a few words and was able to confirm that Adam was indeed drawing on the memories of the Chinese he'd studied in college.

There was a moment when he announced that the TV had told him that he would be giving birth soon. It also gave him a list of names. He became distressed about his pains and medications, afraid that the baby might be injured. He was soothed only when we told him that we'd consult with the doctor about it. He never made reference to the baby again.

There was a moment when he spoke Chinese to me, insistently repeating the same phrase over and over until i finally repeated it back to him. He told me to remember it (i forgot it almost instantly), and then began to consult with me about some issue.
"Who in your family speaks Chinese?"
"Just you, buddy," i told him.
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Well, who writes?"
"Who writes . . . Chinese?"
"Yeah."
"None of us do."
"Really. Well, okay."
At this point, my dad interrupted to ask Adam if he knew who he was talking to.
"No, not really."
My heart stopped.
Dad continued, "Okay, can you see her? Turn and look at her. Does she look familiar?"
Adam turned. "Yeah, kind of. I know I've seen her before. Is it . . . Ashley?"
"No, i'm Diana."
"Diana," he repeated. He didn't recognize our youngest sister, Ruth, either, but knew Lizzie, the middle girl. He knew my dad and remembered his name, and our mom's name as well.
"Okay, Soldier," my dad said calmly, "How many sisters do you have?"
"Three."
"Do you know their names?"
"Ruth, Diana, Lizzie," he said obediently.
It was several minutes before i could speak again.

There was a moment when he woke up and tried to leave, and we had to tell him -- again -- where he was and what had happened to him.