I’ve gained 7 pounds. Not sure why. I have been exercising. Isn’t that the point of moving, to LOSE weight? Or at least not gain any?
Sigh.
Waiting. I hate it. Yesterday, I waited with Mom at the doctor’s. Almost an hour. With weak Edge, at best.
Visit went well. Mom is now officially without both her leg brace and the thumb brace. We should hear from PT this week to schedule her therapy. You couldn’t pay me to be in that room when they start working her knee. I’m not ready to hear my Mom talk like Hilly.
Fucking cocksnuggling sonofaWHORE! Touch that knee again and I’ll rip off your head and shit down your neck, you festering pool of donkey piss!
Today, we went to Social Security to ask a few questions. They have a brilliant system. If you go into Social Security at, say, 15 years old…then, by the time you get to the window, you’re probably eligible for Medicare.
They also tell you to turn your cell phone off before entering. Whatever. Listen, I’m barely convinced that my cell phone is a threat on a plane 33,000 feet in the air. I’m certainly not shutting it off in the Social Security office. I did, however, mute it.
Patience. I don’t have much of it. I quit asking God to give me patience, because it inevitably means He provides me a shitton of situations in which I HAVE to be patient. Screw that. I don’t have the patience to gain patience legitimately.
I don’t like waiting, especially when the ball is totally not in my court. I chomp at the bit, grasping at something to do while I sit around and do, well, nothing. Waiting on YOU. Ugh.
Waiting on friends. Waiting on doctors. Waiting on the assclown in front of me in the checkout line at the grocery store to pay with all coins. Waiting on my meds in the mail. Waiting on 2HT to be finished. Waiting on April to get here so I can see Shannon. Hate it all.
SecondHand Radio Returns
One thing I have been waiting for is SecondHand Radio to return. It’s been months since Mom broke her kneecap. I tried one show after that and it didn’t go over well. I needed a break while Mom healed from her break. Well, she’s walking around now – slowly, but steadily – without a splint, so that’s good.
Thursday at 10pm Eastern, 2HRadio comes back. My guest is the lovely Maria, aka Mommy Melee.
Please mark your calendars, tell your friends. We’re back. I’m returning to one show a week, though. Thursday nights. Twice a week was too much.
Live chatroom to play in while the show is on. You’re all welcome to call in and talk to Maria, say hi, ask questions, whatever. Go to the SecondHand Radio page and get all the info.
Looking forward to it. I’ve missed my show. Thankfully, the waiting for that is nearly over.
I haven’t lined up any other guests. If you know of someone you’d like to hear as a guest, let me know. Even if it’s you.
By now you’ve probably heard…I mean, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook. My mother broke her kneecap Monday morning. She slipped on the icy sidewalk and broke it. The kneecap, not the sidewalk.
Perhaps now is a good time to remind you that I live in FLORIDA. Yes, my mother slipped on the ice IN FLORIDA, fell down, and broke her kneecap.
Here’s the part where I discover the fact that my mother is probably some rogue Black Ops agent who can chew up nails and spit out BB’s.
Mom’s cell phone battery was dead (bet that never happens again), so she couldn’t call me to come help her. So she crawled on a below-freezing sidewalk. With a broken kneecap. 40 FEET to the front door.
Then she reached up and rang the doorbell around 175 times. What can I say? I sleep hard.
The last thing I expected to see when I opened that front door at 8am Monday was my mother on the ground looking up at me.
It was like that Life Alert commercial: “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Except less funny.
Not that seniors falling down and not being able to get back up is funny, mind you. It’s the Life Alert commercial that’s so funny; or rather, the actresses they get to portray the fallingdownedness. Course, maybe that’s just me.
(And credit for that Life Alert reference goes to my niece, Lauren, who better not have this blog in her fucking browser.)
Got Mom to the Emergency Room and after a series of x-rays she was given the official, “You broke your patella.” Patella, by the way, reminds me of Nutella, which is very yummy…but I digress.
We go to the orthopedist in about 90 minutes. It’s going to require surgery, that we know for sure. Just not sure when yet. Within 2 weeks, most likely. We’ll know more in a while.
My mother is going to be 65 this year. Sorry, Mom. I believed you for many years that you were 36 - for decades in a row - but I suspected something was up when I turned 36 myself and realized you were either slightly exaggerating or had, in fact, discovered a way to bend the laws of time and space.
She’s a nurse in (ironically) home health-care. (I say ironically because her health insurance doesn’t cover home health-care.) She’s also fiercely independent. While she may be in a lot of pain physically, I’m sure she’d take twice the pain if she could only do everything by herself. But she can’t. And that, as they say, chaps her ass.
Mom hates feeling helpless. She hates being idle. She hates being a pain in the ass. Not that she IS, of course, but she FEELS like she is.
I had to break it down for her. “I know you hate the situation, Mom,” I said. “But you’re gonna have to suck it up and deal.” Then I shoved a handful of percoset into her mouth, knocked her over the head with a ball-peen hammer, and let her sleep for a while.
The prospect of mothering my own mother is a tad scary for me. “What you should be most scared of, Mom, is the notion that I’m in charge of feeding you for the foreseeable future.” Hell, that’d terrify the entire Al Qaeda network.
I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve seen my mother’s panties twice now in the last 24 hours, and if that doesn’t make the Matrix Therapist’s mouth water, then the prospect of helping Mom bathe has GOT to make the MT’s nether regions all a-tingle. (Fortunately, Mom’s girly friends offered to help with the shower part. Whew.)
We’re slowly getting a system down. I think we can get Mom from her bed to her toilet in a matter of minutes instead of hours. If she needs me in the middle of the night, she has to call me on her cell (which is fully charged, believe you me) because her room and mine are on opposite sides of the house.
And she did call me this morning so she could go pee. At 6:15. In the MORNING.
I may have my moments, but I didn’t have the heart to say, “Mom, can’t you wait 45 minutes till my alarm goes off?”
I’m overextended. I know that now. This isn’t a rare thing for me, I often take on way too much shit. And post-BlogHer it’s only worse.
I KNOW I’m overextended when I start forgetting guest posts I’ve promised to do. First, I forgot Bluepaintred while I was still in Chicago for BlogHer. Ugh. And then yesterday, I forgot about my guest post for the Dutch Bitch. I feel like a heel when that happens, even though they’re both incredibly gracious ladies who told me not to worry about it.
Nevertheless, I DO owe Bluepaintred a guest post. And it will happen. Just not today. I have to get my “house” in order.
While I was filming my video for DB yesterday, I remembered that I had a therapy appointment, and that it was due to start in 20 minutes. Thank God I remembered. And I probably wouldn’t have if I weren’t already driving around town doing some silly video.
Yesterday was Session #3. We talked about a great many things, and my therapist asked some hard-hitting questions. She seems to get me, and that’s both cool and terrifying. Cool because I hate starting with a new therapist, having to re-explain ALL MY SHIT to someone, re-say things I’ve said over and over and over again. So it’s cool she’s caught on very quickly.
Terrifying because she DOES ask the hard questions, and that shit usually doesn’t come until around Session #7. Hell, it was Session #2 where she was quoting philosophy at me from “The Matrix.” So I should have known she’d be onto me fairly quickly.
She asked me if I’m a loyal friend and I answered that, yes, I think I am. For example, if you have my cell phone number, you are welcome (though not encouraged, I want to make that very clear) to call me any time of the day if you need me.
Matrix Therapist: Even at 4:30 in the morning?
Me: Yes.
MT: Do people call you often at that sort of hour?
Me: Not often, no, but I do have a friend who took advantage of my open-phone policy just last week at 5 in the morning.
MT: And you answered?
Me: The second time I answered. The first time I was just dreaming about Hanson singing “Mmm Bop.”
MT (scribbling furiously on yellow pad, probably something about how she’s going to drop me after this session because of my shitty taste in music): Why is that?
Me: That’s my ringtone. It’s hard for even me to sleep when Hanson is blaring right next to my head. And I’m a heavy sleeper.
MT: And what happened when you answered the phone?
Me: I went over to her house and took care of her for a while.
MT: And she doesn’t call you like that regularly?
Me: Nobody calls me like that regularly. But I figure if someone IS calling me at 5 in the morning, it must be fucking important.
MT: Is it always important at that hour?
Me: It damn well BETTER be. My friends know the sorts of hours I keep, and that I go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning.
MT: Hmm…
I hate when therapists say “Hmm.” Because I know they’ve probably heard way more fucked up shit than I’ve heard, and I’ve got enough group and individual therapy hours under my belt to FUCKING *BE* A THERAPIST, if only by osmosis.
So anything that makes a *therapist* say “Hmm”? That’s got to be some wacked out stuff.
Me: “Hmm,” what?
MT: I was just wondering… It’s great that you’re a loyal friend and that you’re dependable -
Me: There’s a “but” coming, I just know it.
MT: - buuuut… who do YOU call at 5 in the morning when YOU need help and support?
Fuck. I told you, she’s good.
Me: Oh, that’s easy. No one.
MT: No one?
Me: Nope.
MT: Why is that? You don’t think you could call some of these same friends that depend on you?
Me: Oh, I know I could. But I don’t. I won’t.
MT: Why?
Me: Because…
Again, fuck.
Me: Because I deal with my own shit.
MT: By “deal”, you mean you bottle.
Me: Yes, I do bottle a lot. It’s not that I don’t have very close friends that I don’t talk to, I do. And frequently. We talk about a lot of stuff. But I won’t lay the shit on them that I need to lay on them because it’s really heavy and I don’t want to drop that in their laps.
MT: You don’t think they could handle it?
Me: (sigh) I don’t know. They probably could, I guess. But I’ve never told ANYONE some of that stuff, except for in therapy. I don’t like talking about it.
MT: But you need to…
Me: That’s what you’re for.
MT: But you told me about this… [looking at notes]… Grace person you met in Chicago? You talked to HER about these things.
Me: That’s different, I explained to you why.
MT: So you CAN talk about it.
Me: Yes, of course I CAN. I just…don’t.
MT: I think we need to explore that more.
Me: I know you do. You fucking bitch who is getting too heavy for me way too fast. Clearly, I didn’t say that out loud, but I sure thought it.
Then we got into my perfectionism. Now, I know it might be hard to believe that I am a perfectionist, when I’m clearly such a fucking mess/slob. But there is a method to my madness. The reason why my bedroom is such a disaster is one of those Catch 22 situations. Yes, I’m lazy and I hate chores, but after a while it gets so cluttered that cleaning it all up is a task that seems akin to cleaning all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with a toothbrush.
And so, rather than not be able to get it all perfect, I…just…do…nothing. It’s easier for me that way. The cluttered room sort of matches the wallpaper in my mind, anyway. A cluttered room seems somehow appropriate for me. Worse, it feels like it’s what I deserve.
And yeah, we talked about that shit, too, yesterday.
Specifically, though, we talked about my perfectionism as it relates to my creative side. Writing, videos, even karaoke…I cannot tell you the rituals I go through, the HOURS I spend “perfecting” my shit.
The guest video I did for DB yesterday and today is a prime example. Once I get started on a project, I’m in this freaking psychotic Zone and I can’t stop until it meets my vision. Well, that’s not true. Nothing I ever do meets my vision. I just finally get so exhausted rewriting and editing that I finally have to say, “Fuck it, I’m done.” Then I publish it, or upload it (whatever) and look at the post or video online, thinking how many things I could have done better.
I hate that about me. It’s draining. But I don’t feel like I can control it.
Matrix Therapist asked me, “What if you just set a limit for yourself on this video you’re working on? Say, two hours, and that’s it…no matter what.”
Me: Oh, I couldn’t do that. Two hours? That’s like five minutes.
So she’ll be thrilled to know that I spent 9 hours filming shit yesterday and another, um, 7 or 8 today putting it together. All for a silly-ass 11-1/2 minutes of video.
Two hours. HA! That’s crazy! How am I supposed to get anything done in only two hours?
That’s crazy.
Right?
“Wonderful” - Rob Thomas
look at me i’m made of wonderful
wonderful
i’m all easy breath and steady walk
steady walking
but underneath i’m barely moving, no
its like i’m nothing
all the ways they have to make me smile and then they go and break me
-CHORUS-
wait, i think i feel like hell
though i can’t be myself
and i can’t be nobody else but if i could
would you love me then?
look at me, i’m made of wonderful
it’s terrible
i’m all easy come and easy go
as far as you know
but underneath, man, i’m just killing time
i guess i’m past my prime
and now i’m overrated, overdressed, and overstated
-CHORUS-
if i put my hands up, put your hands up
if i fall down
if i lose my place
and i dont know just where im supposed to go
or if you’ll be there when i wake
would you love me then?
and i come home tired
and i come home late
everybody wants me
so i give it away
i’m a wanted man
i’m a wanted man
i’m a wanted man
i’m a wanted man
Thursday at 10pm Eastern, 2HRadio comes back. My guest is the lovely Maria, aka Mommy Melee.
Comments for Men