posted 2009/11/27 at 23:00
Yes, there will be a .journal update sometime this weekend to commemorate the .org turning nine years old earlier this month. My life has become painfully hectic since Mom went to the hospital a couple of months ago, and those of you who have been following my Twitter feed know about all of the other stuff that has popped up. I'm keeping the personal stuff close to my chest right now because I really can't talk too much about that, particularly when so much of it is ongoing. In the meantime, I kind of need to post an update here about what's gone on this past month with three members of the family.
First of all, Mom has finally been to see my sister and brother-in-law's doctor, who is a lot better than the one she'd been seeing. Unfortunately, the infection in her belly isn't going away through antibiotics alone, and she's going to need surgery so they can cut all the infected parts out of her. On Wednesday she got an appointment at a surgery clinic for the middle of next month, and while I haven't asked too many questions, I'm assuming that it's then that we'll finally find out when she'll go under the knife. As desperate as I am for Mom to get better -- she's had nearly no energy since her hospitalization -- the thought of her going under and getting sliced up is still something that really scares me. It's going to mean more time by myself in this house, and even though I can prepare for it this time, it's still not that easy to think about.
On my front, I had a bit of a relapse with my eye at the start of the month, probably induced by stress from what may have been the worst Halloween of my life. (Sorry, but I can't really go into details about that.) Since then, though, it's been getting better, even though I haven't had antibiotics to put in it for over three weeks because Giant Eagle hasn't gotten my eye gunk in. I don't know if there's a shortage of the gunk, or if Giant Eagle is just being really bad about filling the order, but whatever the case, I'd feel a lot better if I could start using it again, even if it is really gross. I'm on a steroid now to try to heal the scarring on my cornea (no small irony there), and while my vision is a bit better in that eye, it's still kind of blurry. I'm guessing that I'll wind up needing glasses at the end of this all; I'll need to ask my ophthalmologist if I qualify for Lasik or not.
Finally, there's my Aunt Jo, my mother's younger sister and only sibling. On the 15th of this month, my sister got a call saying Aunt Jo had died. More specifically, Aunt Jo had died on the 16th of last month, and this was the first that any of us had heard about it. Mom and Jo were far from close; shortly after learning about her death, Mom referred to Jo as an "enemy," and that was a term I never thought I'd hear Mom say about anyone. Emotionally this wasn't like losing Dad or my grandparents, but it was still a bit of a hit. More importantly, though, when their mother died in 2003, Jo was supposed to sell the family home in Michigan Center, Michigan (near Jackson) so she and Mom could split the money, and Jo still hadn't gotten around to doing that. Now we're having to hire a lawyer so we can try to get that situation handled, and having to come in more than a month after Jo died is, needless to say, likely to cause some serious problems. I just hope we can get those resolved soon, because having the money in hand for Mom's surgery, when the time comes, would be nice.
posted 2009/10/24 at 21:31
The medical issues this family has had over the past two years have been troublesome. I was hoping that at some point I would be able to write in detail here about Dad's death last year, but there are some outside considerations that are preventing me from saying much about what happened to him. For now, I drive past the hospital where he died (and where I was born so long ago) every time I go to and from work, and every time I see where the ambulances pull up, I can't help but remember what it was like that February day as I tailed behind the ambulance in Dad's GMC Safari, waited in the lobby and then in a waiting room for the family to arrive, and then getting the news. Those first few times I drove past the hospital it was almost unbearable, and while I've gotten better at handling my emotions as I drive by there, it's still a painful reminder of what happened to Dad.
You can imagine my terror, then, when last month Mom asked me to call an ambulance for her, and like Dad, she had to be taken out of here on a stretcher. Thankfully Mom just had a bad attack of diverticulitis, and after a week in the hospital she was able to come home. However, most of that week she was doped up on morphine to help her handle the pain in her abdomen, and she didn't even want me to come see her because she was so embarrassed about her condition. For my part, I spent a week in the house alone here, and even though I knew Mom's diverticulitis, I couldn't help but remember that a few years ago her mother recovered from a stroke at a hospital, but then at the hospital she contracted pneumonia and soon died from that. I guess that week was kind of a little test for me to see how I would handle living on my own if I were thrust into that situation, and while I took care of the things that needed taking care of around the house, emotionally I was kind of a wreck.
Things would be bad enough if we stopped there, but shortly after my trip to the emergency room with Mom, my left eye started turning red and painful. My original thought was that I'd gotten pinkeye by touching something germ-ridden in the hospital and then touching my eye, but when I went to the doctor I was told that I had a scratched cornea. The doctor said he'd call an ophthalmologist who would call me to set up an appointment, but I never got that call, so I had to search out an eye doctor on my own. This past week I had two appointments, during which I found out that I actually have an ulcer on my left cornea. Apparently my rosacea leads to my eyelids getting infected, which in turn led to the ulcer, although I'm guessing that the stress of Mom's hospitalization probably had a big hand to do with it as well. If I'd known that rosacea could lead to problems like these, I would have gotten mine treated a long time ago; on all those commercials for anti-rosacea drugs they make it sound like it's just a cosmetic problem, and to be blunt, I couldn't care less about red patches on my face. I am not a physically attractive person, I have never been one, I never will be one, and that's just fine by me. For now I've got to put very expensive eye drops and ointment into my eye several times a day, and I have a follow-up appointment next week to see how this course of treatment is working. I can only hope that I don't need to take more drastic action to get my eye fixed, because for all of my physical problems, the one thing I always had was sharp 20/20 vision, and it's kind of scary not to have that any longer.
The punch line to all of this is that Mom's 64 years old, and of course I don't have health insurance because I'm still only working part-time (although I just picked up another online teaching gig), so we're having to pay for all of this ourselves. If we'd just waited a year for all of this to happen, Mom would have had Medicare, and maybe I could have gotten affordable health insurance. We're working out how to pay for this, and we probably won't need outside help to do so, but did we have to become poster children for the problems with the health care system in this country at a time like this?
posted 2009/09/25 at 10:39
Mom is in the hospital right now after coming down with diverticulitis. It appears that things are under control right now, but given Mom's advanced age, and what happened with Dad last year, I'm not taking anything for granted. Your good thoughts/energy/prayers/etc. would be most appreciated.
Labels: family
posted 2009/05/05 at 14:57
When the first trailers of the new Star Trek movie came out, I noted to myself that I wanted to say something about them. I guess that I was kind of nonplussed by the trailers themselves, except for at the end when it began to play the four-note sequence that started the classic Trek theme songs, played over a modern reenvisioning of the logo of the original television series. For a long time, that part of the trailer sent a chill down my spine. Watching episodes of the oriignal television series with Mom is something I recall quite vividly from childhood, and my parents took me to the openings of the second, third, and fourth movies. I suppose I identify more with Next Generation since it was one of the few good series I could get back before I had cable in my bedroom, but I guess I was a bit of a "trekkie" back in the day. (I use trekkie as opposed to the more "serious" term "trekker" because I wasn't that into Star Trek.) I remember the audio/visual lounge at Antioch being filled for the premiere of Voyager, which was around when my love for all things Trek began to decline. I was in college, I had cable in my bedroom at home, and there was this new thing called the Internet that was giving me access to all sorts of new worlds that I could explore on my own.
Anyway, I did my best to remain cautiously optimistic that the new movie was going to be something that I could be happy about, and perhaps something that Mom and I could bond over. As we've drawn closer to the release date, though, and as I've seen more of the movie and its promotion, I've already reached a deep level of disappointment. I've read all the news stories about how trekkies and trekkers feel about how closely the movie will follow Trek canon, but to me, looking at what I've seen so far, there really isn't anything Star Trek about Star Trek. It feels to me like you could take out the names of Kirk and Spock, and the names of the various races and planets and organizations, and no one would be the wiser for it. It feels like the generic, prototypical 21st-century science fiction blockbuster movie, just with a few names added to give it a false sense of historicity.
I realize that new generations reinvent series like Star Trek, and that Star Trek itself has gone through a good deal of this; no one can deny the gulf of difference between the original television series and the films, let alone the later television series. At least with those early films and Next Generation, though, Gene Roddenberry was at the helm, and you had the feeling that Roddenberry still conveyed that Trek essence in the newer material. (Roddenberry came from a time when an artist's vision still meant something in big commercial productions.) It seemed like the later series, like Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later films featuring the Next Generation cast, seemed to stray away from that vision, and now it feels like the only vision J.J. Abrams had in this new movie is the vision of his bank account increasing by tens of millions of dollars.
What gets me is that I'm beginning to have more and more of an emotional response to this, when I haven't really cared that much for anything Trek for over a decade or so. (I'd like to get some of the Next Generation DVD sets eventually, but I've been horrible lately when it comes to buying DVDs and then never watching them.) I suppose that because this touches on what to me was a touchstone of family bonding, and it's coming not that long after Dad's death, that it's provoking a very emotional and irrational response from me. I mean, yes, wincing at a car chase in a Star Trek movie makes sense, but I shouldn't be jumping to the conclusions I am based solely on the trailers I've watched and stories I've read about the movie. I really should watch the movie all the way through before I have this kind of visceral hatred of it. The thing is, I've never been one to watch films in the theatre (the last time I did that was eight years ago when the Final Fantasy movie came out), and, well, it doesn't feel like there's much of a point in getting the DVD when it comes out, given how many other DVDs I need to watch here.
Labels: family, television
posted 2009/03/29 at 20:03
GM CEO Wagoner to step down at White House Request (AP via Yahoo! news)
I have the vaguest of recollections of Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981; I remember it happening, but I had no idea what it all meant. (I was five years old at the time.) I do remember that Dad was deeply upset by it, and it was one of the many things Reagan did that eventually drove Dad to avoid politics and become bitterly cynical about them. I still can't help but wonder, had Dad lived to see the election of Barack Obama, if maybe he might have picked up some of his old enthusiasm again. Needless to say, as my own political journeys and self-discoveries have gone on through the years, I've come to realize what an important event this was in American political and labor history. I know that some on the right will say that Reagan did not, in the strictest definition of the word, "fire" the controllers, and that his actions were legal under the Taft-Hartley Act, but neither of those factors mitigates the fact that what Reagan did was morally reprehensible, and perhaps the single most destructive action in American union history. This was one of the biggest bombs the Republicans have dropped in their open warfare against the lower and working classes, a war that has gone on now for nearly thirty years with little mitigation from the Clinton and Obama presidencies so far.
As the avarice of the upper classes has caused the rapid dismantling of the foundations of our economy, I haven't been able to stop myself from daydreaming about a president -- the daydreams usually involve a President Nader, since I know Obama is both incapable and unwilling of doing so -- who comes out to deliver a nationally televised speech on the lawn of the White House, saying that all of the bank and financial and automotive and other CEOs whose greed caused this financial collapse -- were fired, effective immediately, and ineligible to serve in management jobs for the rest of their lives, just as Reagan barred the striking air traffic controllers from serving in other federal jobs. Granted, there are no laws on the books enabling a President to do this, but that doesn't make the proposition any less absurd than what Reagan did under Taft-Hartley. If nothing else, the fact that we, as a country, now have an 80% stake in AIG, should mean that we get to pick who runs the company.
It sickens me to hear pundits say that we need to keep the executives who ran the banks and financial markets into the ground in their current positions because "no one else is capable of running the companies." If they were capable of running their companies, then why have they all cratered, taking the rest of us along with them? Say what you will about the responsibilities air traffic controllers have for making sure that planes don't crash into one another, but already this financial crisis has hit middle- and working-class America in a nearly catastrophic way, and we're probably not yet at the worst part of this crisis. This country's universities churn out MBAs at an alarming rate because if there has been any growth industry in this country since the Reagan days, it's in unnecessary corporate bureaucracy. Don't tell me that we don't have enough people who possess the skills needed to run these companies.
The problem is not a deficit of skills; it is a deficit of morals. No matter how many studies are done to debunk the myth of supply-side economics being good for all classes, the upper classes, and the venal politicans they help elect through their massive infusions of cash and distortions of the public dialogue, continue to push through this idea that helping the rich get richer benefits everyone, despite all of the empirical and anecdotal evidence of how it crushes the wallets, the homes, and the spirits of the working class. If we are going to rebuild our economic foundation, if we are going to climb out of this very deep hole that the upper classes have dug this country into, then we need to take the shovels away from the people who dug the hole (and made themselves plenty rich doing so), and put in charge people who aren't going to build themselves mansions off of the money they could make charging us for ladders to climb out of the hole. We need moral, responsible executives in finances, banking, and every other industry, who will put the needs of their workers, their customers, and their country, above the needs of their families, their boards of directors, and their shareholders. The executives still in charge of these failed companies have already proven that they cannot do that, so we should throw the whole lot of them out.
posted 2009/03/22 at 16:22
Although I'm not the strongest believer in numerology and related sciences, I do think that they deserve paying attention to, and that made this past week and a half so odd for me. It started with the second Friday the 13th in as many months a couple of weeks ago, then moved straight on to Pi Day (remember, I was always much better at maths than English growing up, so I still note Pi Day and Mole Day and all of those things), and then a week ago today was the Ides of March. The 16th was the anniversary of my parents buying this house, and of course St. Patrick's Day was the day after that. I turned 33 on the 18th, and then I couldn't think of anything that special about the 19th except I vaguely remember it being the birthday of an elementary school crush whose name I've long forgotten. The 20th was the equinox, and then yesterday Dad would have turned 63. I'm out of that series of days now, but it was definitely odd to have so many of those days all in a row.
My birthday itself went okay, although I had to cut short a meeting with some friends after work so I could come home for the big party; in the past, spending the birthday with non-family members usually hasn't worked out so well, so I'm making a point of having birthdays at home from now on. The birthday booty was kind of big, including several CDs, a couple of books, Wii Points (although I haven't had a chance to play on my Wii in forever) from the family, and the deluxe Pulp Fiction (I'd only ever bought the original DVD release, strange to relate), and a Barnes and Noble gift card from friends. Unfortunately, I've been so busy with other things, my book and DVD piles are both back to being absurdly large; even if I make extra time for reading here, I doubt I'll get through all the books I already own by the end of the year, and I've still got more on the way.
Although I'm not blogging as much as I used to -- something I've noticed with everyone else whose blogs I follow -- I am trying to keep my Twitter account up-to-date at the very least. (I need to put a Twitter feed on the .org, I know.) It doesn't help that I've got a social life again for the first time in about four years, and I've got all sorts of special stuff coming up. Part of me wonders if moving to tweets is part of the natural evolution of the Internet, but it's probably something I should resist, given that I'm trying to make a living, at least in part, on my writing. It's not that I don't have things I want to talk about here -- I still have a huge list of potential blog topics on my whiteboard -- but finding the time to blog these days is very, very difficult, even with a reduced teaching load this semester. Someone needs to prod me to write here more often.
posted 2009/03/04 at 17:26
One of the stories I've been reading recently is set at a dinner party. It's not exactly Mrs. Dalloway, but it is good, and I can relate to it better because it's set in America, albeit 1950s America. There is something about the 1950 American dinner party that seems so remote to me; at first when I was reading the story, it was hard for me to identify with the kind of upper-class people being depicted in the story, the whole idea of "summering" away from home, and most of the things they were talking about. (There was a brief debate about literature, though, which was accessible for me.)
As I kept reading, though, I realized that, well, I used to be involved in this sort of thing. My paternal grandparents had a cottage on an island south of Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, and when I was younger I would go up, sometimes with Dad and sometimes with the entire family, and spend a weekend or a week up there, and while I was up there we usually did have dinner parties two or three times a week much like the parties being depicted in the story. It's no wonder that I blocked out the memory of those dinner parties -- they're one of the main reasons I've been a teetotaler my entire life, and that island was where I was raped when I was thirteen -- but even if I hadn't been blocking out those memories, I guess they really wouldn't have helped me that much because those dinner parties mean much different things to children than they do to adults. Apart from everyone (save my parents, thank Goddess) getting drunk, the main thing I remember about those parties is everyone talking about boring, boring stuff.
I hardly ever think of myself as belonging to the kind of social class that has those kinds of dinner parties. Although my family wasn't without its financial troubles over the years, by and large we've been fairly well-off. At the private school they sent me to, though, our family was one of the poorest families there, and the students there loved to lord that fact over my head. (It wasn't like I didn't give them other things to pick on me for, believe me.) When I was a student at the University of Toledo and I visited other students' homes and apartments, though, I was reminded that, yeah, my family wasn't all that bad off financially. Still, we live in a part of town that isn't exactly upper-class, and there are a lot of union families here, and I certainly identify more with them than I do the upper-class families I went to school with when I was younger. I guess I feel a kind of dysfunction when it comes to identifying my own social class, and stories like the one I've been reading make me think about this stuff a lot. I can't really figure out how to clear up this mess in my mind, though.
I mean, I've kind of been a hermit for the past four years or so, although I'm getting better at that. I'm trying to figure out why these dinner parties I read about are drawing so much of my attention right now. How are they that different from the "pizza and video games" parties I went to in college, or the meetings at restaurants I've been doing lately? If anything, the parties I actually go to should be holding more of my attention, simply because I don't have to worry about booze at them. Maybe it's that discussion of literature in the story I've been reading; it would be nice to have someone with whom I could discuss literature and similar topics. I don't see myself hosting, or going to, any "dinner parties" anytime soon, though.
posted 2009/02/25 at 11:23
When we took in Spookytooth last year, we also took in his mother, a calico cat we alternately called Cali, Hobbes, and Mikeneko. After Spooky's death, Mikeneko took on even more importance in our lives. Sadly, recenly she had begun to show signs of the same disease that claimed Spooky (Feline Infectious Peritonitis, or FIP), and last night we finally took her to the vet for tests. When the vet said this morning that Mikeneko had either FIP or a severe brain tumor (most likely FIP), the decision was made to put Mikeneko to sleep.
The worst part is that it doesn't really seem to be affecting us like it should. Due to the proximity of the first anniversary of Dad's death, we're all feeling so numb right now, and with having to deal with Spooky's death in between the two, I fear that we may, in a sick way, be getting too accustomed to death.
Labels: family
posted 2009/02/21 at 12:25
Monday will be one year since Dad died. In a lot of ways, though, today feels like the anniversary, because the 23rd fell on a Saturday last year. Having his death on a Saturday afternoon was especially painful for me, because when we were younger he'd always take me out to the mall to shop and play video games. (I'm only now beginning to realize that this was mostly done to get me out of the house for a few hours so Mom could have some peace and quiet.) It's disconcerting for me to think that it was about a year ago that I was pacing back and forth in the lobby of the hospital, with so many thoughts racing through my head. I'm watching Hockey Day in Canada on CBC right now, which is helping me to take my mind off of things, and I have a full day of teaching on Monday to distract me as well, but the shadow of the anniversary is definitely weighing me down right now.
I hadn't expected that the anniversary would hit me as hard as it has. I thought that the other "firsts" -- our first birthdays without him, the first Christmas -- would be harder to deal with, but I don't think it's been this hard for me since the first weeks after Dad's death. I've been having stomach pains on and off for several days now, and my energy levels have been fluctuating like crazy. (Ironically, this is happening at a time when I've gone through a lot of good personal growth, and I have a social life again for the first time in nearly four years.) All of us who remain have been crying more than usual lately, and the memories of that Saturday a year ago are becoming more vivid for all of us. I'm hoping that these feelings become easier to deal with once we get past Monday, but I know that getting to Tuesday isn't going to be a "magic bullet" that makes everything all better.
It probably doesn't help that we're at that same time of year when Dad died again, and I see that every time I go outside or look out of my bedroom window. We'd had a pretty extended thaw here lately -- it got rid of the huge amount of snow we'd had the month prior, but melted it so fast that several rivers in Ohio and Michigan have been overflowing -- but now today we're getting a few inches of fresh snow, and I can remember we had a fair bit of snow on the ground when Dad died. Really, though, since the start of the year, I've been waiting for Daylight Savings Time to come. As much as I was a creature of the night in my younger years, I've found myself affected more by Seasonal Affective Disorder these days, and having that extra hour of daylight in the evenings should help me feel a little better. In the meantime, it's grey and snowy outside, and I can only hope that a full day of hockey helps me take my mind off of how quickly we're approaching a year since Dad's death.
posted 2009/01/16 at 20:08
My apologies for going dark on the .org for the past few weeks. By mid-December I had already become quite frazzled, and the confluence of the semester ending (and me having sixty student portfolios to grade in a very short period of time), Spookytooth's death, the holiday season, and a cold on top that all, just left me feeling out of it. The combination of emotions resulting from Spooky's death, going through Christmas without Dad for the first time, and feeling lonely since I didn't have classes to teach, put me in a position where I felt like I needed to shut down and deal with my internal issues before I started writing here again. (I did keep Twittering over my break, but Twittering and blogging are two very different animals.) In the eight years since I launched the .org I don't think I've taken an updating break longer than ten days, so perhaps I was overdue for a vacation from here.
As far as what happened in the interim, we survived the holidays somehow. I got about ten different video games, a few books, and some new cookware for the holidays; I gave Mom enough sweaters and sweatshirts to get her through the winter. (Speaking of which, aside from one sixty-degree day in December, it's been unbelievably cold, with temperatures below zero most of the past twenty-four hours.) I didn't have my car for a week, as a small, routine repair took forever thanks to the incompetence of the repair shop. I've also been buying an unbelievable number of CDs off of Amazon because they have so many classic CDs of artists whose material I crave (Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) between five and seven dollars. I pampered myself a bit while I was sick, and now I'm trying to get back into the old routines here. I can't say that I'm feeling 100%, but at least I'm feeling better than I was four weeks ago.
The new semester started this past Monday; I'm only teaching two classes this term, but one of them is creative writing, my first time teaching the creative arts. It's a once-a-week class, so I don't want to make any assumptions based on just teaching a single class, but so far the teaching and the planning have made me think a lot about my future career, and whether I want to focus my teaching on creative writing or composition. Unfortunately, I'm moving past the point where I can really afford to take my time making these decisions, and I don't have that many people whom I can turn to for help. I'll have more to say about this later, but for now I'm just trying to get a better feel for my creative writing class and how well I think I can teach that class (and what good teaching it will do for me).
posted 2008/12/19 at 15:13
Spooky was in bad shape when my sister came to the house yesterday, so she had her husband take Spooky to the vet right away. Spooky's brain problem had gotten to the point where nothing could be done to alleviate his pain and make him better, so my mother and sister agreed that he should be put to sleep.
Needless to say, the last thing this family needed when trying to deal with our first holiday season without Dad is yet another death.
posted 2008/12/17 at 16:49
This past summer, shortly before we took Skooter to a shelter, the calico cat who had been hanging out on our property (alternately called Cali, Hobbes, Mikeneko, and Momma by the rest of us) gave birth to five kittens, who eventually joined their mother getting food on our porch. Four of the kittens eventually stopped coming here, presumably going their own way, but the fifth cat, an all-black boy, kept hanging around with both his mother and his presumed father (Lion King). When the weather got bad and the mother got pregnant again, we took the mother into Dad's old office (after getting her fixed and aborted) with the intent to eventually take her to a shelter as well. (She hasn't been that cooperative, though.) The black cat we named Spookytooth (Spooky for short), and took as our own to fill the void left by Rowan's death in 2006, Spyder moving out of the house with my sister and brother-in-law late last year, and Skooter.
Over the past couple of weeks, though, Spooky's behaviour kept getting stranger and stranger; she was losing energy, losing her appetite, and appeared to have gone blind. This past weekend we took her to the vet, where she was diagnosed with some kind of disease that affects the brain; I forget the exact name, but Mom kept calling it "FTP." (I've tried looking it up online but I haven't had much luck.) Apparently the disease could potentially take Spooky at any time, although there was the possibility that he could still lead a normal, healthy life. The disease is also communicable by other cats, so anyone in contact with other cats (namely my sister and brother-in-law) has to wash his or her hands thoroughly before leaving here. It was impossible to know how the disease would affect Spooky, but we all agreed that we would give Spooky the best life we could, and that if we couldn't relieve his pain then we would put him to sleep so he didn't have to suffer any more than he already has.
When Spooky came home from the vet on Monday, everything seemed to be okay; his energy hadn't completely recovered, but he could see again and he was eating again. However, today he had been totally lethargic as soon as anyone in the house was up. He was still responding to physical stimuli and purring, but he just didn't want to move anywhere. About a half hour ago, though, as Mom was taking Spooky to the litterbox, he began to spasm and twitch. It was momentary, and he seemed tired-but-okay after that, but he's going to the vet right now. We think he might have had a seizure, and that they'll be able to give him steroids -- like they did over the weekend -- at the vet's office to restore his energy. Needless to say, though, it's hard to avoid assuming the worst, especially after the horrible, horrible year this family has had in terms of deaths. If you all could please keep Spooky in your thoughts and prayers -- whatever you do -- over the next little while, my family would be most appreciative.
posted 2008/11/26 at 16:15
I suppose it's hard for me to think of this upcoming weekend as a "holiday" because I only teach Mondays and Wednesdays, and MCCC has class today. In a lot of ways this may be a busier weekend than usual for me because tomorrow I get to cook my very first vegetarian turkey for myself (I'd looked for them locally in past years but they always sold out before I could get one), and then Friday I'm actually going to do some Black Friday shopping against my better judgment. Mom is going up to Michigan to visit with relatives, but of course they don't like me showing up to those things, and I don't particularly feel like going anyway. As usual, Thanksgiving will also involve lots of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and waffle consumption, but I'll be toning it down this year because I gained a lot of weight during my two illnesses, and I just started back on my diet this past Sunday and I don't want to screw things up so soon.
While I was sick, I made a point of going to Kroger on the first of this month so I could grab some of the leftover Halloween candy on deep discount. Apparently I wasn't alone in this desire, because by the time I got to Kroger that afternoon, there was no Halloween candy left to buy; they were even out of candy corn, for crying out loud. (I love how candy corn is becoming to this generation what Christmas fruitcakes were to generations past, with all the tales of how no one ever really eats it and it just keeps getting passed down from generation to generation.) What bothered me more than the lack of cheap candy, though, was the fact that Kroger had already put up two whole aisles of Christmas displays. I understand that the retail Christmas season keeps coming earlier and earlier, but it feels like Kroger decided to skip Thanksgiving entirely and go straight to Christmas. I would imagine that Kroger normally makes a lot of money with Thanksgiving dinners and their accoutrements every year, so this hardly seems like a wise strategy to me. Then again, it's not like I have intimate knowledge of their sales figures.
Needless to say, this being the first holiday season without Dad is starting to get to me. It's been hard to come up with things to write about for my annual "year in review" .journal entry here because I don't really know how to describe something like this. Certainly there are a lot of bad emotions I'm feeling right now, and I can write about those, but I think that more than anything I'm just feeling a real absence right now. I don't mean just the physical absence of Dad; there's also an emotional absence to the season that I can't put into better words than that. The only thing I can think to compare it to is when your favourite player leaves, or retires from, your favourite sports team, and you try to watch the team's games after that but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't really feel like that's an apt analogy, though, because sports are just sports, and family is something infinitely more important. I don't know if the absence is necessarily painful, but it certainly isn't a good feeling, and I can tell that from now through the end of the calendar year it's only going to get worse.
posted 2007/12/27 at 21:31
Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don't feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they're probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I'm still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.
I'm still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I'm not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I've never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I'm definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it's going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it'll mean more stuff to put on my CV.
This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it's a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann's new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I'm going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.
The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I'm guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I've had with them lately that's kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they're taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we'll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don't like that it'll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I'm hoping that the fact that I've already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I'll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.
Labels: family, personal, teaching, work
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