laughing at funerals

Here I sit in my computer chair, laughing.

It is amazing how paralyzing it is when you slide one socked foot along the carpet to turn and stand...

and a sewing needle sinks itself 3/4 of an inch into the meaty part of your heel.

Now the throbbing.

And a little more laughter.

God dang that smarts.


Yes I pulled it out. Put down my bowl and sat in that slow motion way of "What the living hell is stuck in my foot?"

Incidentally, it took some serious pulling to yank it out.

Good thing I got that Tetanus update in September :)

once upon a stove top

I changed purses rapidly before leaving for class Wednesday night. Up on my toes I stretched my arms to lift down my busted at the seams firebox, willing the papers and newly replaced passport squeezed between the detached lid and nestled boxes of jewelry and old cat tags and Sylvia's very first collar not to slip free; balanced it teetering on the top of the floor bound TV and pre-accident reprimanded myself not to bump it over; needed the hook of a white plastic hanger to latch the strap and pull the bag down, catching it mid-air.

In spare time at a red light during my morning commute I fiddled into the front pockets of the purse I was sure I'd stripped bare last spring and dug out an old grocery list and a ticket- UMF (University of Maine-Farmington); Iolanthe (a Scottish troupe); Sat 09/25/2004.

I remember it was very cold that night and we crossed High Street from our apartment to the auditorium/business building with our breath in the air holding hands I bet unless my arms were folded for warth, and at intermission I walked fast back home and ran up the stairs on a cough drop mission because I was halfway into coming down with something nasty and trying hard to not cough on my row mates.

Two weeks ago I destroyed our collander. It's common sense is it not? If a burner has just been turned off, putting a plastic collander on top is going to melt that collander right to the stove.

I didn't tell Boyfriend about it because I'd have to explain why it happened. I'd have to tell him that I just got lost in the past for a little while; that one of those cozy little waves of yesteryear overtook me and I was back in our kitchen in Maine, making supper while my (ex-fiance) ran out to the store for blueberries or milk ; how I was at my future in-laws for Sunday dinner or maybe Christmas and wondering what my life would be like now had I gone through with the marriage; and how it doesn't truly matter because I love Boyfriend and he's my best friend but sometimes I just get caught up in a visit with the happies of yesterday.

Okay, so here is an idea- rather than government keep cigarette smokers in its palm like a money making pet why doesn't it make a move that would not simply line the its own pocket?

It's certainly well known how detrimental cigarette smoking is to the cardiovascular system but cigarettes are supposedly more addictive than heroin. Government knows this. Government also makes a lot of money off smokers. Does Government really want smokers to quit? I don't think so.

Illegalizing cigarettes would be ridiculous. Raising tobacco taxes sky high is awfully hypocritical don't you think? Get the people hooked on something quite addictive and harmful, keep producing it at the same toxin level even though you know its killing the people, then make the candy more and more difficult to get, but more and more lucrative for the suppliers.

Why can't the nicotine level in cigarettes by incrementally lowered all across the board? Is that chemically possible? Is this a completely unsound idea?

going about it

the dreams i dreamed in the days of olden
and time keeps passing
never come to be
and time keeps passing and the places i dreamed
changed without me
and i visit the places expecting the me
i left behind
expecting to find the me i used to be
and the you that dreamed too
the you that made the wind and tasted the salt and whistled my skin
the you that dreamed for me

and time keeps passing and the places they stay
while the dreams come and go
and the me passes by
with my baskets of people and harmonies
that used to be

reignition

For a long time I lost my fire and my passion. I forgot how to dive into life and lick it.

But it's coming back now. It's all coming back.


For a very long time I've done my best at being someone I wasn't ever supposed to be, and now might have the chance to practice being just who I've really been all along.

Remember the paper cuts

I was just typing to Boyfriend on the merits of Microsoft Word.

I have a paper to write today. Well, I've had it for two weeks but writing it took reading up until a certain point in my text; and it took procrastination for days and days hoping to be inspired by an opening sentence.

The days of my college papers were not that long ago, but well before computers in dorm rooms were common place. No one I knew had a personal computer at college in the very early 90's and my computer class that first Freshman semester focused upon the IBM pc.
(don't ask me the model, if that's even the term. oh, poor boyfriend- computer whiz extraordinaire and I had to ask recently what you call the blinking hookup box my cat likes to lie upon for warmth :)

Today I can type my paper into the Word program, save it, pull it up later and add my quotes, even send it to Boyfriend's to finish and print there if this printer decides to be pissy again.

In 1992, I had my electric typewriter and White-Out, and two or three drafts to hand write on note book paper before even thinking about typing on my quality white typing paper. In 1992, if I screwed up badly I had to start the whole page over, even if I was on the very last line and if I ran out of paper too soon and after the stores closed, I was usually SOL.

In 1992, I had to wait for the library to open enabling me to haul home piles of text books covering in crinkling, aged plastic slip covers with cracked egdes and yellowed encyclopedic copies with notes of former loanees falling out from between the smelly pages.

I could grow nostalgic for the hows of writing a paper in the 80's and 90's, but Lordee is this was simpler!

work in progress

when i am deep in the noodles
of duodenum doodles
and school is rotting my head

mounting textbooks of muscles,
fungi, and pustules-
study? i'd rather eat lead

with coffee and soda,
IM's written in Yoda
a fleece covered flannely bed


Give me a hand- I need a final stanza!

My newest endeavor

Massage therapy classes have been keeping me busy after work! We do often get out of class a little early though and it's nice sometimes to get home from a thirteen hour day, versus a fourteen hour day :) I am actually enjoying both the material and getting to know my fourteen classmates better. It is surprisng how much I do remember from previous anatomy and physiology classes- both the RN level college courses taken and passed 11 years ago, and the LPN level vocational courses completed 10 years ago.

One night a week we have Anatomy and Physiology, and Pahtology for the Massage Therapist. One nights is Ethics. One night is Body Mechanics. The fourth is Massage Technique.

Though this is an entirely new healthcare modality for me I feel my partial leg up (and each of my classmates has his/her own) is being already familiar with one form of professional client/caregiver relationship, and generally comfortable with confidentiality laws, medical terminology, and medical charting.

There are so many MT specializations! Going into it, I am most excited about a possible future in massage for the cancer patient, or sports massage for athletes and dancers, or chair massage at office's. Does Boyfriend know how serious I am about campaigning to become his office's personal Chair Massage Therapist?
Therapists can specialize and work in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit)!

This is going to be fun :-)

P.S. Boyfriend is being incredibly, outstandingly acitvely supportive. He is amazing! He is amazing every day, but some times outshine the norm.

No. 2 pencils

This is my second week back in school, this time to become a Massage Therapist.

Oh no, not the dirty kind. Only one person is getting that kind, and he gets his for free;-) Well, unless you count the price of putting up with me.

It's the fifteen month, 750-hour, four nights a week course and I feel like I'm getting in on the beginning of something that is only going to grow. But more on that another day.

I am stalling on getting ready for work- isn't blogging in pajamas and eating stove-popped popcorn with coffee much more fun?

Teeny Testicles of Might

A short mouse story-

I once owned 23 (or was it 26) Fancy Mice.
I started with two, but was stupid that day (well, a lot but we'll just stick to this incidence for now) and forgot all about checking for balls, even though I had hamsters as a kid and as an adult. And rats. Pet rats.
So I bought the little black mouse who was hiding on the water bottle, and sibling.
Little black mouse was already pregnant when I got her, but not showing. Her sibling had a penis anyway and tried to help.
Black mouse was apparently a fertile Myrtle and had 13 babies, all of whom survived.
She was an excellent mother and she also became my best buddy. Who wouldn't need an outlet raising that kind of multiple birth?
At least twice a day during my many visits to the mouse-errarium she would climb up to hang on the mesh lid and crawl back and forth, or stand with her nose poking out until I took her out and let her crawl on me. Sometimes I tried to put her back too soon and she would race the other way back up my arm.

When the babies got to a certain age- the age when they started to practice nookie like a couple of awkward thirteen year olds in the basement. It was time to separate.
Did you know little boy mice can hide their balls? I mean really hide. Or maybe it's that some just descend later than others. After all, people have late bloomers.
I know about the differing distance between urethra and anus in male versus female, and differently shaped abdomens, but try to figure that out with bad eyes and a hellbent 1/3-inch worm shaped tube of squirm.
Picture a giant, furry Tylenol with big ears.
I learned to gently push on the lower abdomen and look for bulges and that helped loads, but inevitably down the road I'd see somemouse previously female humping or chasing somemouse else and darnit if those little boy nuggets didn't suck right back in as soon as I went after the pertpetrator. Not always soon enough.

Some litters didn't make it at all. Some mice were horrible mothers. One litter had been decimated down to two babies and I finally turned them over to the again newly delivered original Momma who adopted them and raised them with her own.

At final count I had 23 mice and possibly ten cages. All the females cohabitated, and each male had his own domicile.
My two favorites were Mommma, and Scruffy. Scruffy was missing patches of fur from the skin rash that broke out among the males while they were still young enough to share a cage- a skin rash I hand treated each day with peroxide and cortaid on q-tips. Scruffy's tail was bent at the distal end from the day he tried to climb back onto me and I accidentally dropped the lid. His ears were incomplete from sibling squabbles before the separation. Scruffy was gentle and also loved to come out and sit in my hand. He would often sleep (in his own, private cage) on top of his bullet shaped unclimbable water bottle with one hind foot wrapped around the wire hanger. Scruffy outlived almost every one.

Today

Last time we met we weren't much more than kids, and I wonder what you would think of the adult me, and I wonder what I'd think of the grown up you;
and maybe, just maybe, we'd be two half-grown kids with beautiful crow's feet and laugh lines and a couple of gray hairs and we'd stare and marvel for hours at how really no time elasped at all.

dreaming

In the wet of water's edge, at the fun place where water slides its coolness up my legs and pulls upon the ends of my rolled up pants only to tickle back down and slip away again sucking on my feet and challenging my balance, I understand the Mermaids and urge the ocean to take me safely too; tempt it by wishing with every step further out to sea. And isn't the moon trail of glitters and sparkles but a beckon, a path to follow all the way? As if in that one place it is safe to walk on water.

I stood under the New Jersey stars missing the Maine stars with tears crowding my eyes and wondering how a place left behind could break my heart so in the very being away from it. But then I also wondered once how it was I fell in love with a state.




Unrelated P.S.

Playing, Where's Katie??? with a small child who's head is lost mid-dress in a sweatshirt is fun and cute.
Playing Where's Karen??? with my self, when my own head is lost in a sweat-shirt mid-dress, is kind of sad.

to the sea, to the sea...

I need to go look at the fluffies in the sky and feel the Fall on my face and think for a little while about where I am now and where I'm coming from and where I want to go and how I'll get there. It's been an emotionally busy week.
The waves coming in and out always take me home.

So you think you can run

So last week the fear of my own body's rapidly creeping girth and fluidity escalated and I decided the time had come for some wickedly serious dieting. It was time for some purposeful calorie reduction and getting this body moving.

As far back as I can remember I've been captivated by the strength, speed, and agility of runners, the power of the human body. All my life I've secretly wished for the legs of a giraffe or a horse- dreamed of four legs whisking me gracefully across the landscape. In my sleep I sometimes dream I'm running effortlessly and wake wanting to go.

I've gone through periods of running, the most successful being last spring and summer when I trained myself on the local (to Farmington, ME) half mile college gym track. I've never been a graceful runner and my lungs often give out before my legs. And I often give up when the knee pain or the inclement weather kick in.

I blame it mostly on the waxing moon but last week my legs felt surprisingly powerful and telling myself how the other guy doesn't matter, it's only about my body and my satisfaction, I let myself go as far as I could again and again.

No great accomplishment there. Not to anyone but me.

I don't know who the hell I am thinking I can run when the practiced runners are gliding by my plodding self, but I know we all have to start somewhere and I know I feel best when my body is lean and strong, and I know I am going to get my skinny back!

I also know there's little better than flying down the boardwalk or the road with the full moon over head and the breath in my lungs and the wind on my sweaty face.

Does anyone have any beginner's running tips or thoughts to share? Is anyone else trying to start a running program?

A link for the animals

I found the home page to this link last night, on http://2carolinacats.blogspot.com/

It is a tear jerker.

Busy Weekend

Interior painting is one of my favorite learned skills. How easy it is to make a room or a home I don't enjoy very much into a place that makes me smile every time I see it; into a place I want to linger.

My back is letting me know it isn't completely happy with me right now; warning me I'd best watch my step- and there are still books to return to the book shelf (at least 100 of them) and knick-knacks to replace and arrange.

It is mostly done though, and I can't wait to wake up to it all in the morning :-)


P.S.
I'm pretty new at this uploading photos business and they are backwards, ending with the photo of the happy painter pre-work (sideways as I forgot to edit first) and beginning with the finished product ;)

P.P.S.
Actually, they are all screwed up. But you are smart! and I know you get the idea:)

Little wonderment

My cousin's baby, now four months old.

How do they do it?

How do they go so quickly from being warm sleepy bundles of cuddly lump, to being interactiving, animated people?

More than anything else, the hope of this is why I wanted to move back from Maine.

My link,

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

... and share I will. I can't remember any more whose blog linked me to PostSecret, but I've grown addicted and check almost first thing every Sunday. Reading it makes me poignantly feel how very close and how much alike we all are, and yet how very alone and different too; how there is a place inside of all of us known only by ourselves, and the conjoined beauty and danger of that place.

sinking in

Have you ever eaten a mango? Sunk your face in deep til yours cheeks are wet and sticky and the threads of fruit are slicing between your teeth? Held it up to your face to tight you have to close your eyes and hang over the sink, syrup juice freckled with flesh dripping from the tips of your tightly flexed elbows?
Have you peeled off the skin to drag your teeth all the down sucking the meat off with your tongue and swallowing it in sweet gulps?

Who are the big cheeses around here?

Boyfriend gave me his previous digital camera with all the hardware for uploading to the computer and the television; with the battery recharger, the batteries, the bag- he really set me up! Of course, so far it's all nothin' but cats!!

The teeny silver tabby is Sylvia, one of my two kitties. She is 8 or 9. Honestly, I keep myself in denial that she is aging at all.

At 1 1/2 years old she became a rescue from behind a restaurant in Asbury Park, NJ. Two days after she was 'rescued', I impulsively walked into the pet store in Sea Girt, perused the cages, came to a little gray kitty who rubbed my hand and wanted to snuggle- brought my then-live in boyfriend (who is still a good friend) back to see her, and adopted her the very next day.

At first she did not know what to do with a full-time Human. If I got down to play with her, she took it as an attack and swatted my face. No holding, no snuggling, definitely no cuddling up to me in bed. We took it slow, and worked on the trust.

She became my best buddy and once you are accepted by her she'll cuddle on your lap, sleep up against you all night, stand on your shoulders. She barely weighs seven pounds. Never bites, never scratches, never hisses. Even if I am doing something she hates- like clipping her nails or cleaning a wound- she will lie in my lap and growl, but let me do what needs doing.

The little ball of black is Fuzz; or, as Boyfriend calls her, E.L. Fuzz, for everybody loves Fuzz- because they do :) She belongs to my sister, who does not know I'm pimping out her kitty as she sleeps. Fuzz is like a tube of fur covered cartilage. Fuzz is a nut. My sister tells her all the time- "Fuzz, you're crazy."