Cheese!

Owners of classic cars (beauties!) joined together one recent Saturday to raise funds for a local historic site. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and the scents of grilled beef and car exhaust wafted through downtown. There is a sizeable fountain at one of the main intersections, and it was too irresistable not to let my son play in the water on such a stifling day.

a month with no job

Desperation will set in soon. I can feel it mounting.

It’s not like I’m not searching for employment. Maybe I’m just looking in all the wrong places. At any rate, I just put the child in day care this week. The structure and social setting have done him worlds of good. He kept saying, “I wanna go work.” He calls day care “work.” It’s toe-curlingly cute; his vocabulary and sentence structure are growing every day! He sorely misses the day care he was in before we moved, and I regret having to remove him from such a great environment. But here we’re paying half the tuition, which is great.

I miss my work, too. Finding a new job is scary — all the unknown factors. I don’t know if I’ll find something in this town that’s as good as the job I just left. Certainly I can hope for that or better, but at this point my hope is waning. I hate the task of having to sell myself just to get a frickin’ job.

Here’s a pic of my son from Father’s Day 2007, age 1.5 year:

 

bring out your dead

I’m not dead!

For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Python, a scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

I haven’t been online much in the past month. Well, blogging anyway. Moving back to my parents’ has been interesting. My two year old son takes up every bit of oxygen and energy when he’s conscious, so my parents and I haven’t really had much of a chance to get in each other’s hair. My son is very active and very curious. He can’t just leave well enough alone when he’s told, so he has to be watched every second. When he isn’t under sharp supervision, he wanders off or he gets into dangerous/ destructive circumstances. Oh, the child. Most of the time he wants 100% attention anyway, so simply watching him won’t do. He makes me smile, that rotten little boy.

Time has slipped away so quickly. I’ve spent so much time dallying that I’m ashamed to admit how little I’ve done in the way of searching for new employment.

There was a tornado in the neighborhood just before sunrise on Mother’s Day. Two times in my life I’ve been so scared that my body shook uncontrollably. The first was when I was being rolled down a hospital corridor to have a C-section and all the cords had been unplugged and I couldn’t hear my baby’s heartbeat and I was scared for both our lives. The second was the morning of Mother’s Day this year when the wind was so loud and the only other thing we could hear were the loud cracks and enormous thuds of trees. Mom and Dad were awakened upstairs by the falling of limbs onto the roof. They quickly grabbed the baby and brought him to the basement (he had gone to sleep upstairs the night before). We emptied a safe closet of spare luggage and huddled in fear; listening to the wind made every second feel like an eternity. Mom told me to run to my room and get shoes and something to go over my gown. I stood with the flash light for a moment and stared at the window, listening to the wind howl. My knees and legs were trembling. I forced myself to go into the bedroom, but I couldn’t make my mind focus on grabbing anything, so I ran back to the safe closet with nothing but the light. The worst of the wind lasted only a few minutes. My son was still disoriented from being abruptly awakened, and he was scared because of the palpable fear emanating from the three adults; he stayed in my mother’s arms without complaint. How long we stayed near the closet after the wind died down, I do not know. We were frightened that the tornado might come back. Times like those are what make me realize how very precious life is.

As dawn approached we disbanded into our corners of the house, dressing for the day, preparing for what we knew would be a long one. I peaked out the window on what used to be a lovely thick horizon of trees at the far end of the back yard. Only a few tall trees were silhouetted against the dark gray sky. A new cherry tree, which we planted only the day before had been blown to perfect diagonal in its muddy spot. As the light grew stronger, the scenery grew increasingly grotesque as more and more of the aftermath became visible.

Nature is awesome and stunning. Thankfully, the house and the cars were untouched, but several large trees in the yard were either snapped like twigs midway up their trunks or had been completely uprooted in the wind. All of the day was spent recovering as best we could. Other home owners in the neighborhood were not so fortunate. We learned that a married couple just a few houses down were barely out of their bed during the tornado when a tree landed in the middle of their bedroom. We think our houses and our lives are untouchable until something like this comes along. We have been very blessed to have very good friends and members of my parents’ church come to help with all the trees in the back yard.  It has been amazing to see how people have come together to help each other in this disaster.

All this to say: there has been quite a bit of upheaval and complete disarray keeping me from updating the blog in recent weeks. Things will settle down eventually, but not any time in the near future, I think.

blah!

Dead blogs are a bummer. I haven’t intended to neglect this one, but my time and energies have been very limited lately. My proximity to computers is either at work (where I’m supposed to be working) or at home (where my new blog isn’t supposed to be known). So, I don’t have much time to devote to this blog. I suppose I could wait until the genius is sleeping, but I go to bed before he does, and I really value staying asleep these days.

We are down to one vehicle for the family. My car — my dependable, faithful, practical car — perished last Tuesday in an accident I cannot talk about for insurance and legal reasons. I cannot even divulge the severity of anything to do with the incident, but you can glean from this that it was not my day to die.

The continuation of the Shaken and Stirred context is underway, albeit slowly. I am simply letting you know that I am here, and I have not forgotten. Carry on!

.

Bit by bit I’m working on a post that explains the current situation. Of course, it’s not a simple situation, so completing the post is taking ti ⁱ i ⁱ i ⁱ i ⁱ i ⁱ i ⁱ ime. Detailing it is exhausting. I thought about posting it as installments, but I have a hard time compartmentalizing any given piece. It has to be all together. It’s just not something I can easily pop out right this moment. So please bear with me.

Details

Sorry, you all.

Setting up a new blog does require fine tuning, and I missed the “comments must be moderated” part. I’ve taken that option off, so no more delays with comments posting!

Broken People

Working in a hospital can be heart-breaking.

A man lies in a hospital bed. His emaciated body is straight and rigid — feet pointed and arms supporting him as though it hurts for his torso to touch the bed. His skin is paper-thin, a mix of yellow and pale gray. His face searches for something, but the vacancy in his eyes keeps him from finding the answer. The permanent position of his mouth is half yawn, half “oh.” He has barely any hair on his head. He looks to be in his mid-seventies.

The man is fifty-three years old. He’s supposed to be sowing some mid-life oats somewhere, not lying in a hospital bed. Alcoholism has ravaged this man to the point of no return. He barely understands what is happening around him. I wonder if he still wants another drink.

One of my uncles drank himself to death. Literally. My childhood memories of him bring back the rotten smell that his body always radiated. He was dying for a long, long time. I don’t know what made him want to keep drinking, even when his organs began to fail. He had incredible talent with miniature woodworking. He had children and a family. No amount of love would have saved him from whatever it was within his own psyche that kept him reaching for another bottle.

If you or someone you know is affected by alcoholism, the links below are a good place to start the healing process. First must come understanding.

http://alcoholismhelp.blogspot.com/

http://www.rochester.edu/UCC/online/audit.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/alcoholism.html

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/GettheFacts_HTML/facts.htm

http://csat.samhsa.gov/NACOA/family.aspx

Where’s the cheese?

Sometimes I feel like a little white lab mouse. Poked and prodded, sent chasing in circles to catch the elusive cheese. Lab mice are small.  Vulnerable. I feel that way sometimes. The suffocating feeling of being squashed under an over-large thumb — this sensation has haunted me lately.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “no one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” Certain intimidating or bullying behaviors are meant to claim dominance. I feel like I’m in the wrong for allowing myself to be bullied. I wasn’t taught, or never learned on my own, to be assertive and stand up for myself. It’s a slow process, learning something that goes against the grain of one’s nature. I try to please people by being agreeable; I ask how high when I’m told to jump. This behavior over the years has been my training to be a doormat for lots of people. I am making efforts to break the pattern. It is not easy to retrain whole thought processes.

Saddam Hussein, Hanged

I have never had a peace about US military presence in Iraq. The search for weapons of mass destruction was a farce, and continued occupation has brought the unnecessary deaths of too many people, be they Iraqi, American, whathaveyou. It struck me as strange when Saddam Hussein was finally found. He was living in a hole in the ground with roaches and a few household items; his appearance was that of someone who had lost touch with himself.

All my life I’ve learned to value life. More to the point, death, to me, is a very serious occasion. To be responsible for the death of another human being is a profound charge. This man, Saddam Hussein, killed many without remorse. He used his people as human shields — seeing this on the news when I was a child left a very strong impression on me. Hundreds of thousands of souls have been extinguished as a result of this man’s reign of power. His actions were his condemnation.

Did he deserve to die? I’m not entirely sure. He needed to recognize his crimes against humanity before his death. Perhaps he could have lived the rest of his days in a secure facility, his room plastered with pictures of all the people who have been killed, directly or circuitously, by his command. Or maybe a television that only played interviews with all the families of those who were killed. Maybe a history of those who loved fellow humanity — Gandhi and Mother Theresa come to mind — and the affects these people had on the lives of so many. It would be a true brainwashing — a cleansing of poisonous beliefs. Maybe this type of attempt at psychological reform wouldn’t have worked; maybe he would have remained as stalwartly Saddam Hussein as he ever was. Maybe he would have thought himself a captive martyr to the end of his days. Maybe, but we’ll never know.

Hussein’s mindset was a result of generations of training and beliefs, but what kind of twisted logic severs a person so cleanly from humanity’s innate sense of community? It’s sad that power hunger can bring people to such insensitivity and disconnection. Assertion of power is in all levels of society in every part of the world. It is an infection of the human mind. It was Saddam Hussein’s reason for life and death.

so-called friend

It’s not really a friendship when someone is nice to you personally but cuts you down when you’re not around.

That doesn’t fly with me, nor should anyone put up with such despicable behavior. Life is too short.