Bah Humbug

December has been stuffed full of lots of ugly weather and work work work. I thought I was looking forward to the holidays but that was until I didn't get to my shopping until the last minute and couldn't get my niece to reply to my emails and put off dealing with a thorny family issue with my brother-in-law and then never had him call me back.

It seems my mother gave my sister Jane a baby silverware set to pass on to her children and children's children but when Jane died, it got lost in the shuffle and Mom found it abandoned and the fork and spoon missing in Bob's garage over Thanksgiving. Now, of course, my mother could not say anything to Bob about about it; she's too passive-aggressive for that. But she could bitch at me about it and make me feel bad enough to say something to Bob about it.

But, of course, I hate these kinds of things... I mean, really hate them. So I put off saying anything until trying to call Bob last night. And--of course!!--Bob doesn't call me back. So now what? Mom's still pissed, Bob may or may not know I want to talk to him about something, and I am pissed at Maddie and him for not responding to me at all.

We have been drifting apart for awhile. There's no denying that. My parents have never been particularly demonstrative and they have managed to pass that on to us... Karen and I and probably even Jerald and Jane, although theirs was tempered by Bob's family and by Addie's family, both of which are much more gregarious, if fruitier than ours... (I don't know, they probably think we're pretty fruity!)

So I didn't sleep well last night after crying myself to sleep because I was sad and lonely and wishing there was someone around to hold me, I woke up at 5 am and hurt all over from the ends of my greasy hair through the muscles in my back and down to my stiff ankles and aching toenails, and I thought that I'd just call everyone and tell them I'd been barfing all night and couldn't come over. Not go to Mom and Dad's and not go over to Bob and Marie's.

I certainly feel like I have the flu; my stomach is even queasy--just not THAT queasy!

And I just want to cry some more. Bah humbug. Pinky

PS: Figured out why I feel like shit and hurt so bad... forgot to take any of my pills last night, including three different painkillers, two sleep aids, and an antidepressant. Doubt the two different cholesterol medicines had much effect but the acid reflux medicine might explain the stomach issues. The antidepressant is one of those that takes awhile to interact so one missed dose isn't going to send me into a dive; I was already there and cleverly masking it as I usually do. Denial is a way of life when the things you deny are unhappiness, loneliness, depression, pain, dissatisfaction, etc. etc. Just put on that happy face and keep smiling and no one will ever know how you really feel because no one will ever think to ask... no one will ever care enough to ask...

Photos-Holiday Dresses

There seems to be any number of Christmas pictures of my siblings and I so I thought I'd start with a couple here for the beginning of December.

My mom told me that she found the dress for Jane and then my grandmother (her mother) found the one for me at a different store and they were a perfect match...

...and here I am looking too cute for words.

I distinctly remember wearing this dress and Jane wearing hers and going over to my Uncle Jerry's house for a Christmas get-together, of which there were additional pictures in my grandmother's slides.

The slides were dated January 1964 which would have made me almost two and a half years old when this picture was taken.

I'd say that was a very early memory... Pinky

Photo-Me & my Dad

Here is a picture of my father and I. I am unsure of whether the picture was taken at my grandparents' house in Amherst or at my parents' house in Wooster. The picture was with my grandmother's slides so it's likely at my grandparents' house.

I had never seen a picture of myself as an infant. The story went that my parents didn't have enough money when I was born to be able to afford baby pictures but that my grandmother likely had pictures in the form of slides. So this summer, I broke down and purchased a $700 negative/slide scanner and began going through my grandmother's hundreds of slides.

And, lo and behold, look who I found! Me!

You may notice that I appear to be sucking not my thumb but my middle two fingers. This is something I remember doing up until I was about four (maybe a little older.) Like biting my fingernails and chewing my hair, I just eventually stopped doing it. But I think it's funny that I obviously did it from the time I was very small.

Who da thunk it? Pinky wonders...

(I'm going to try to keep my entries short because I know how I tend to skip super long ones...)

Flaming

I flamed someone today.

And I'm not particularly proud of it.

The worse part about it is that I did it on someone else's blog where I shouldn't have. And I'm very sorry about that.

Everyone has people who rub them the wrong way and this woman just seems to do it for me.

(Come to think of it, I have been running into more of them as I get older... I wonder why that is. Is it that I do not suffer fools as easily as I used to or that I'm just becoming more of the misanthrope I was born to be?)
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I will fully admit that my family is basically lower class. My dad was a construction laborer and my mom trained as a beautician but never worked at it after she got married, she was a stay-at-home mom. All four of us kids went to college but neither of them did. My mother's father was a farmer and a machinist and my dad's dad was a tug boat captain, a tattoo artist, a reformed alcoholic and a gambler. Can you say white trash?

We lived in a small town and didn't have a lot of things other kids had because my parents didn't believe in credit cards. We never got an allowance and we started working at things like paper routes and baby sitting as soon as we hit about 11 or 12 for our own money. We got by but always I knew there were others that had it better, had more, and I wanted that too.

I was jealous of my cousins whose dad worked at the college and who got to do things there. My one cousin who was my age got to be in plays there and became a Singing Angel. (Considering I can't carry a tune in a bucket, that shouldn't have made me jealous but it was the opportunity I guess.)

And I knew that there were things I didn't understand because of my disability and still don't understand--like philosophy and some poetry and even some fiction. I could probably read Camus' The Stranger 18 times and still not get it. I just reread a short story by James Joyce posted on a friend's website and didn't get it. Comprehension is still a problem.
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Why did I just go into all that?

Because it all leads into why I flamed this woman.

You see, I knew who she was. I knew that she is a retired Spanish professor and that she comes from a scholarly family and that her husband was a chair at Oberlin and her children went to prestigious schools and that she can be quite arrogant about her background. I believe the word I used when I apologized to my friend whose blog it was is sanctimonious.

Basically, to me it appears as if she has/had all the advantages I never did... or her kids did. And she treated me as though I was as dumb as a box of rocks. I was thrown back into being that poor white trash kid who couldn't read and didn't understand and would spend the rest of her life working retail. (Maybe I collect books to prove to myself I'm not dumb any more.)

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I had written a comment about a short piece by Eliot about a man who was embarrassed by a woman he was with who was laughing too loud. The piece was called Hysteria. My comment which was prompted by the book I had just read that had the lamentable title of Scandalous Lovers but was actually a really excellent historical novel set in 1880's England talked about the lunacy laws at the time where men could put their womenfolk in an asylum for things like hysteria (I was thinking of laughing hysterically in this case) and the women could never get out--end of story.

Now our esteemed Spanish prof (with whom I have had both bad and good experiences while at work at the college) corrected me rather pedantically that hysteria comes from the womb--don't you know hysterectomy? Ah-duh! Yes, I know that. It was given an essentially female name but today the word doesn't apply just to women and disorders of the womb as it didn't back then.

There had earlier been discussions about how people will understand what you write and maybe this was just such a case. But she had gone from being coy in a comment before to being snotty here and I'd had enough. I'd come really close to true flaming before with her but this time I just let it rip.

Maybe I should have overlooked it because I know she is old. We had this discussion about my brother-in-law's mother this past weekend but my brother-in-law's new wife who is a lawyer put it rather succinctly: she's an adult, she should know better.

And so should I.

So Pinky is sorry for that, at least... I admit when I've screwed up...

Photo-Jane and Jer and I

Here is a photo from about mid-1967. The baby is my brother Jerald and the girl holding the baby is my older sister Jane. I am the one on the left. The white thing around my neck is a diaper that has been converted into a sling for my broken left arm.

My sister Karen and I had been over at the neighbor girl's house playing the Three Stooges on the top of her picnic table and I fell off, hitting my arm on a pine tree root, breaking the outside forearm bone near the wrist.

At the time my mother was in Amherst Hospital having her severely diseased gallbladder removed and my dad made the mistake of telling me that she was just down the hall when he took me to the hospital for X-rays. Of course, I wanted to go see her and wasn't allowed. I do recall going to stand outside the hospital and waving to her from the sidewalk while she looked out the window. Vastly different from today.

So Pinky says...

Photo

I'm going to try to post at least a couple photos a week. Some will be of me and some will be of places I've been or the like. I have a negative and slide scanner and I'd like to put it to good use. I have old negatives from my England trip as well as photos from college and farther back that I'd like to scan on the regular scanner and put into the record as well, before they are lost to time.

This is a photo of an Olan Mills picture my mom has in the upstairs hallway of their house. I remember these dresses. In the picture to the left Jane is wearing one just like it which she would grow out of and I would grow into.

Friendship

I don't think I make a very good friend. In fact I think I make a pretty horrible one.

But then I don't think I ever learned how to be one. I learned how to be a sister and that was about it and a sister doesn't necessarily need to be a friend; she just has to be a sister because that's a relationship that's not going to go away. (Though I have heard and seen ones that have and it boggles my mind.)

I just today send a long email to a woman I consider a friend, apologizing for getting nasty with her. (I am also sort of her supervisor at work but she only works in the evenings and I am only there one night a week so we only ever really work together 4 hours a week. I am the only full-time person so I am the titular "supervisor" although everyone does what they are assigned to do.) I asked her to do some data entry for me and, because of the new store configuration, I could hear that she was chatting with an off-work employee rather than working, and I came out, mad as hell and sarcastic, saying it would be nice if she could yak and work at the same time.

Now maybe that's not what she was pissed off at me about and maybe she wasn't pissed off at me at all--I'm really good at reading into situations things that aren't going on at all, it's what makes me a good writer but a lousy interpersonal communicator.

So who knows? But this isn't the first time I've been short with her or with other people and it's not the first time I've had to apologize.

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The older I get the more I think I was simply born a misanthrope. Maybe the career testing I took when I first got to college was right, maybe I would have done better as a fire spotter for the forest service, living in a remote tree house, searching the skyline of mountain peaks for plumes of smoke--all by myself!

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I don't think I really had a close girl friend until I was in junior high. You know someone you passed notes to and shared secrets with and talked about boys with. I was in seventh heaven that this girl was my friend. My older sister has a best friend and they did all kinds of things together and I thought that this was how Ruth and I would be.

But things fell apart at some point. I didn't want to smoke and I didn't want to defy my parents and go out with her and the guys she hung out with. So she "dumped" me and I was as heartbroken as if we had been lovers.

I had always considered myself unlovable as a person--family didn't count, I somehow knew in my heart that they had to love you, at least that's the way it was in my family--and so this just reinforced my lack of self-esteem even more.

This came along at about the same time as all the other issues that coalesced into what I'm now calling my nervous breakdown. Another brick added to the wall that eventually crumbled down and buried me. (Sorry, Pink Floyd, but I borrowed your metaphor.)

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I got through high school without any close girl friends, knowing that I would get out of that place of torture and go onto someplace far away where I could reinvent myself. And I did.

At Dayton, I made friends and had close girl friends and housemates that I still talk to occasionally. But I also had another spectacular girlfriend break-up.

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(Please note that none of these were ever sexual in nature. I'm way too rabid for a cock to care at all about getting into a cunt! But I firmly believe that you can love someone of your own sex as strongly as you can love someone of the opposite sex without sexual love being involved. Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of love with someone of the opposite sex without a cock getting in the way but that's a subject for another blog!)

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Sue wasn't my roommate to start with freshman year but we became fast friends toward the end of first semester and definitely into second semester. She was very charismatic and I think her original roommate hated her friendship with me because I was taking her place in Sue's affections. We went home for the summer planning to live with different roommates sophomore year but right next door to one another in the dorm. And we wrote each other back and forth twice a week it seemed (this was back when snail mail was the only way we had to communicate.) Her old roommate was moving to TX to live with her fiance.

Over the summer Sue worked for Kodak (she was from Rochester NY, the home of Eastman Kodak) and met an older guy. When she came back to school, she discovered that this guy was a nut case and he began a campaign to try to get her to come back home by threatening to commit suicide.

At some point, her roommate and I switched rooms so I was living with her and things just kept going down hill. He called the suicide line to say that she was going to commit suicide and we had everyone under the sun all over our room. She drank too much one night (and we smoked some pot) and I had to take her to the emergency room because it looked as if she was vomiting blood when it was really only sloe gin, and I had to pretend I wasn't drunk off my ass and stoned out of my mind and talk coherent to the dean of students.

It was a total screwed up mess. She was and I was and this guy was.

She finally ditches him and things settle down a little. We finished up the semester and went home for Christmas. When we came back, Sue told me that she met this other guy at a bar over Xmas that she really liked. I'm a little surprised but I say, what the heck, she's in Dayton OH and he's in Rochester NY and as long as no one is calling suicide lines, I'm cool.

And things would have been cool, except that she wanted him to come down for a Valentine's dance in February and she wanted to rent a car, she wanted me to rent a car. (Because I want to win friends, I can be talked into just about anything.) So I rent a car. She asks me if I won't also sleep on the floor of one of the other girl's room so she and her guy can have our dorm room to themselves. Sure, okay, it's an adventure, I say.

That is until I am driving us all back from having pizza the day after the dance and total the rental car by running up the back end of a city bus. City bus 1-rental car 0.

I have a broken leg. The girl in the front seat, Cheryl, has a broken wrist. Sue and Al have scraped up shins but are unhurt. I have to call the rental company about the car and call my parents and tell them what happened. (My mother had told me not to rent the car!)

And all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed.

I told Sue this and she went ballistic. She lost it. You would have thought I had betrayed her in the worst way. She vowed she would never speak to me again.

And she didn't.

We lived together in the same room from the middle of February until the end of April and barely said two words to each other. I felt as if someone had struck me through with a sword or a lance and I didn't yet have the sense to fall over dead.

I told her that I thought it was too soon after the break-up and turmoil with the other guy to fall for this one and that I was just thinking of her but she told me I was meddling in her life and to mind my own business and she didn't need someone in her life that was trying to lead it for her. So she vacated my life, figuratively if not literally.

I saw her once after that. She came back to Dayton for her first roommate's wedding. Joan and I had gone on to become good friends, roomed together in the house we lived in off campus junior year and pledged a sorority together. We weren't terribly close but then I wasn't terribly close with anyone after that.

When I saw Sue and Al at Joan's wedding, we said hi basically and avoided one another. As far as I know they are still married but I could be wrong. As far as I know they has two sons but that was a long time ago. She wanted to be a special ed teacher. I wonder if she ever did it.

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Since then, I've had women friends, some closer than others. One I've had a very long time and only recently have seemed to had some sort of falling out. I'm not sure what exactly that was about really. We've known each other for over 20 years and have been through some good times and bad on both our parts so I'm sure that each of us can reach the other.

I have made several old friends as well, my parents' age, who have moved away and that I wish were closer.

And then there are my work friends like the one I first mentioned--people I started out working with but who have definitely become more than co-workers.

I have always felt that part of friendship has been doing things. I'm a worker bee, not a socializer.

I would rather help someone do something than sit around and chat on the phone. I don't mind talking so maybe what I need is a bluetooth headset so I can talk and do at the same time. But I also don't talk a lot of the phone (or call people) because I feel like I'm taking up their time. Surely they have more important things to do than talk to me and I always feel unaccountably (and unjustifiably) hurt when a phone call gets cut short because it's just reinforcing that notion that I'm not worth talking to.

(Do I need a therapist or what?) ;)

But anyway, this is my story of my friendships such as it is. Sad really, but I guess the point of remembering is to learn from your past mistakes, right?

That's what Pinky thinks...

Forget Me Not

That's the title of my NaNoWriMo novel. I changed it from Dance with a Dragon. Changed the entire story back to the one I had originally planned and began writing on the 10th, right after my last blog.

It was an interesting process actually. The scene I wrote first was actually the first "touch" of the hero and heroine--a scene that would end up about a third of the way into the story. In the course of writing the actual beginning of the story, I have them meet briefly in passing so he can see her condition--they haven't met in 17 years--and she can be jogged out of her static state of amnesia.

Here is the story premise--it's a fantasy where magic is accepted, reluctantly by some and studied by others as a science.

A man has been in prison for 17 years, placed there on the testimony of his wife who he thinks betrayed him to their mad leader's secret police. Now he's out of prison, he's come to find her and exact revenge.

Except when he finds her, he discovers that she was tortured and bespelled to betray the secrets of the conspirators who were planning to overthrow the country's leader. And she is still under the spell of her tormentor because she can't remember a thing about him or her life from the time she left her hometown until she returned to it. And if she tried to remember or hears about it, she gets violently ill.

So now he has to decide: does he still want revenge on her? Does he want revenge on the ones who really betrayed them? And what does he want to do about his wife? Everyone thinks he's dead. Should he stay that way? If he helps her to remember the past, will she want him back? Will he want her back?

All questions that need to be answered in 50,ooo words.

Last night, or rather early this morning, I got through 11,000 of them! And that was in just a week.

The point of NaNoWriMo is to get people to write and to keep the writing.

I would say this has been a resounding success once I was about to get myself motivated enough to actually do it. And I'm glad I did. I just need to find a way to continue it beyond November.

I was excited to see on Robin Owens website that she also writes out of order as I did which is not something I've ever thought of doing before. I guess I thought because I read a novel from beginning to end (usually, sometimes I cheat and read the end after about 50 or so pages to see if it's worth going on!), they should be written that way. But they don't have to be.

It's been pretty linear since then but I may just jump ahead again to another pivotal scene and work up to that as I did with this one.

the one thing that did disappoint me to find out on her website was that she and one of her commenters use more than one piece of writing for their word count for the month. The commenter is using short stories! I guess that's okay but I think it defeats the purpose. I know that if I collected all the writing I do between journaling and posting on the web and articles and such, I'd have over 50K of words by now for the month but that's not the point. The point is that I've worked on a single piece of work, a single story for an extended period of time and not stopped.

Oh, well. To each their own I guess. I don't know this woman. And for Robin, she has more than demonstrated on her blog that she has the discipline to write daily or nearly daily and hit her word count, so the month's exercise is just really a fun thing for her.

I'm the one that needs the help.

Well, Pinky shall just have to help herself.

Travel photos

I thought I'd add pictures from some of my travels. In 2004 I traveled to Europe with my younger sister and we went to Germany, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, and back to Germany.






I usually take a ton of pictures of scenery and architecture and not many of myself. I did get one of myself overlooking Neuschwanstein Castle. It was cold and snowing and we are on a bridge high over a gorge and I had fallen for the second time on the trip and re-sprained my ankle so it was and adventure to say the least but I has a great great time and would love to go back!















My aunt took this picture in Ireland. This is our second full day there and we are on a bus tour of Connemara (western Ireland). I'm kind of glad the picture isn't closer because I look a little obscene with my tongue out like that.











Karen is taking a picture with her back to the camera. The yellow flowering bush is called gorse and we were there at just the right time to see it everywhere. We started in western Ireland because this is where our ancestors came from.

















Here's a better picture taken shortly thereafter. The land was very barren and rocky and not very green but then it was still April. It wasn't until we got farther east (where the English settled) that the land was better. Here was what they called "beyond the pale."































This was in Dublin at the very end of the trip. We had walked from our hotel to this famous pub (once) owned by a distant relative of ours (Nesbitt has since sold out of the business.) Karen had heard that they would stand you a drink if you could prove you were a Nesbit or at least give you a souvenir shot glass or something but it wasn't true. By that point, she was in a snit at everyone anyway and walked back to the hotel on her own after taking our picture. Oh, well. You really get to know someone when you travel with them.



I have also been to England but that was before the days of digital cameras so I will have to see if I can dig out the photos for scanning. But as I mentioned above, I'm pretty camera shy so there may not be many of me around to be scanned. Perhaps more in the future.



I'd like to do some childhood pictures next though. Those are from slides and are already in the computer. More fun!



At least Pinky thinks so!

wyrd but not...

I have been trying to find a word to describe this concept I have come to believe in but can't seem to locate the word. I thought that the old English word "wyrd" might do it but it's not right because that's more about time than it is about what I'm thinking of, which is people.

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Wyrd is a lot like karma in that it's about about how past events affect the future, but wyrd is seen in relation to the three Germanic goddesses of life and death (time), the Norns, who have control of such things. Wyrd can also be about how the future can affect the past but is all about being unstoppable--fated.

Karma stretches across lifetimes and states that the actions, good or evil one does in one lifetime will affect what happens in the next. My understanding, albeit a bastardized oversimplified Western one, says that if you're a really bad human is in this life a la Hitler, you're going to come back as a louse in the next one. And if you're really good, you're going to go up the scale of consciousness until you hit nirvana and never have to be reborn again. Whether that is totally correct, I'm not at all sure but that's what I've been lead to believe.

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No, what I'm thinking of is maybe closer to the idea of soul mate but not in the sexual/romantic sense. I'm talking about the people we encounter in our lives and what they come to mean to us.

This is what I think:

1. There is such a thing as reincarnation and that certain souls are born again and again with one another because they must learn various lessons from each other.

2. Not every soul lives every life with a kindred soul and that in different lives, the souls may take different roles with one another. Lovers, parent to child, enemies, neighbors, friends, co-workers, mere acquaintances.

3. Sometimes, souls recognize one another from life to life. Not that I could go up to you and say, "Hey, remember me from the gold rush or the Battle of Gettysburg or the building of the pyramids at Giza."* But that I could meet you and feel a connection--or a repulsion.

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What made me think of this was reading a friend's blog about his adopted father's birthday. His mother wrote that his father fell in love with him (they first saw one another when my friend was 18 months old) the first time he saw him and never thought of him as anything but his son, regardless of his bloodline.

That to me is that kind of connection.

I felt that kind of loving connection when I met my friend. I've felt that connection when I've met other people too. I've always felt a very deep connection to my niece and nephew. I've felt it for my closest friends and my family. (I felt it for friends and lovers who have broken my heart as well; I must have broken theirs in another life.)

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And I've felt the opposite too. It's a hard thing to say because I don't want to admit that I could so thoroughly and immediately dislike someone, but I felt that way about a guy I was in graduate school with.

At first, I thought it was simply jealousy. He was from the East Coast and has gone to Yale and had the arrogant asshole act down perfect. The professor in our research methods class loved him and our writing workshop instructor thought he walked on water. He had had several well-known literary critics at Yale as professors including Harold Bloom. I thought our RM prof would have an orgasm right there in class. And he was a classic suck-up, always posturing and praising the profs and making little inside comments. ICK! I supposed that's how things works at a hyper-competitive place like Yale but, come on, this was Cleveland State.

But then something odd happened.

We went over a variety of different poetry in the class and the prof often had us read aloud. He asked Hugh to read a section of Beowulf (probably because he he knew Mr. Yale would have had Anglo-Saxon as a class there....)

Hugh read the lines aloud and, while I could not really understand it per se, I knew somehow that his accent was wrong. He was reading it with a German accent. It was too guttural, too harsh.

And it frightened me--practically scared the shit out of me!!

What the hell was going on?

Why did I want to dive under the table?

Why was I sure something awful was going to happen to me?

And he was going to do it?

Goosebumps rolled up my arms and back. Muscles tensed all over my body and my eyes teared up.

Was it the words? Was it the accent? Was it him?

I'd listened to Beowulf before, translated it, read it. There shouldn't have been anything about the story to frighten me. I wasn't that familiar with German. Didn't really care for the language really but didn't necessarily hate it. But I certainly didn't like his voice or seeing him speak something that sounded like it.

The class ended and I left as quickly as I could. Not sure at all at what had happened but sure intuitively that it had something to do with why I felt as I did (and do) about him.

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He finished grad school long before I did. He was there for two years on an assistantship. I was going part time, one or two classes at a time while working full time and quit after four years out of sheer exhaustion and overwork.

He went on to publish a novel or two. The first one was called Everything's Impressive and was, of course, set at Yale. I have a signed copy that I had another student get for me. I think it was supposed to be another Bright Lights, Big City or Less Than Zero but it never got off the ground. (And I never read it to know if it was any good.)

I did, however, read the back cover bio. And found I should have been ashamed of myself for making stereotypical assumptions. I assumed because he went to Yale, he came from a wealthy East Coast family--his family name is Kennedy after all--but he came from a poorer background than I did--was a scholarship student and probably acted so arrogant as a shield to hide his insecurities (or I'm just giving him some humanity because of my own guilt at disliking him so still.)

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But none of what I know of his current life circumstances explains the instant dislike or the "weird" experience during the Beowulf recitation?

Our word weird is derived from the old English word wyrd although the meaning of weird has wandered away from the meaning of wyrd. But there is something inexplicable about both of them just as there is about that instant attraction and revulsion we feel sometimes for a person.

Pinky knows you've felt it too... admit it.



* Seems everyone I ever met who believes in reincarnation and was willing to ramble on about it was sure they had once been Egyptian royalty. Hell, if I was ever Egyptian I was probably one of the slaves squished between the stone blocks of the pyramids!

Hunger and Thirst

I am only going to write a short entry today because I have to get ready to go for another medical test. Ugh...

This time it is an upper endoscopy or EGD. I've had one before. The gastroentrologist sticks a scope down your throat and looks at your esophagus, stomach and small intestine. Last time the GE found that I had GERD, a hiatal hernia, and bile reflux (the bile which belongs in the small intestine was seeping up through the lower stomach sphincter and into the stomach--not good!)

This new GE that did the colonoscopy for the ischemic colitis I don't think believed any of that so he wants to see for himself and treat me for it. He was also unhappy with one of the meds that my family doctor had me on, felt that I shouldn't be taking it, and so I think wants to prove that I shouldn't be taking it.

Whatever...

So I am currently fasting from food and drink since last night when I went to bed.

That was actually quite early for me--about 10 pm--because I was exhausted from work. I was there until about 6 o'clock which put me home too late to really nap so I just sat on the sofa like a zombie with a massive headache. I've been having the headaches almost daily now for the last week and a half and been so so tired. And I wonder why I can't write and can barely even read...

Well, I said I wouldn't drone on and on, so I won't.

I just want to go back to bed. After I drink about a gallon of water and eat about six eggs a half a loaf of toast and a pound of bacon. I'm not usually hungry but I think it's just knowing that I CAN'T eat that makes me want to!

Pinky out!

NaNoWriMo finds a title!

I am trying again this year to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. So far, the results have been dismal, but I have been unsettled at best.

I thought I had a storyline with characters, setting, and plot up and running--until October 29th when I totally lost interest in the story and decided there was no way I could carry the dead weight of it over that many words, over that many hours of work, over that many days. I had everything but no title.

Panic set in very soon after...

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I have wanted to be a novelist since I actually wrote down my first story when I was in fifth grade.

I had been making up stories for years before that; we all had as children. All children do, I think, just as all children draw pictures and make play-do figures and sing songs they make up the very moment they open their mouth. But they forget they can do all those things as they grow up or are told they can't or aren't good enough or develop inferiority complexes because they can't write like Charles Dickens (who'd want to?) or they can't paint like Leonardo daVinci (that would be kind of cool!) or they can't do any of the other creative endeavors children love and adults think they can't possibly do any more...

Some of us never learn that about creative things. We know we can write stories; we are compelled to write stories or poems or plays or lyrics. We are compelled to paint or sculpt or carve or chisel or weave or weld. We have to sing or act or stand on street corners and shout out our words or go crazy. So we do our thing.

I'm like that.

But I doubt too and I worry that I'm not good enough and I'm afraid that I'll be laughed at.

A lot of creative people get laughed at, it seems, because they don't conform. I got laughed at because I was shy and because I was smart and because I couldn't read at first in elementary school and then when I could read in junior high and high school, I read things that other people in my school didn't ... War and Peace, Ben Hur, Andersonville, Johnny Got His Gun, 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, The Bell Jar, Siddhartha, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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When I first started writing down story ideas, it was usually just lists of characters and descriptions of settings and plot outlines. I wish I could say that I wrote every story that I wrote up characters for but that's not at all true. I've had thousands of ideas and only a very minuscule output of actual stories.

I could say that I'm a perfectionist and that would be partly true.

I could say that I'm incredibly undisciplined and, dare I admit it--lazy, and manage to find everything else to do beside writing, and it would be partly true.

But honestly I am subconsciously afraid to write them because then that would ultimately lead to the expectation of submitting them for publication which would surely lead to rejection.

(And who wants something so incredibly personal and heartfelt to be rejected? Even if it's by someone who probably spent all of a minute scanning it before stuffing a form rejection in the SASE you sent along.)

I know it's all about believing in yourself, but sometimes it's really hard when all you can hear echoing in your head is the laughter and snide remarks of all the ugly people who've ever belittled you in your life. They may not have even been laughing at you about your writing, they may have been laughing about you having toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe but that hyena laugh is still there...

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I know. I sound like a lunatic and there are ongoing discussions about the relative sanity of creative individuals. I am inclined to think that all of humankind is insane so I don't like to single out just the creative for the distinction of depressed or bipolar or schizoid or whatever.

I think we notice the creative individuals who have mental issues because they tend to talk about their issues--a lot!

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But back to the problem of my 50K of words for November.

I have files of story ideas.

I have the story I worked on last year and never finished. (I didn't realize last year, my first year of participating, that the idea was to finish an entire story in 50K words. I was about 3/4ths of the way through my story at 50K.)

I have several other worlds I've created for stories over the last two years.

The first story I wrote was a fairy tale/fantasy about a princess named Germaine who had to disguise herself as a boy to reclaim her kingdom. And, over the years, I have tended toward the fantasy and science fiction genres although I wrote contemporary literary fiction in grad school and was working in historical literary fiction for my thesis before I drifted away from it.

My three most often reread authors have been J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jane Austen. (I would use that as the best gauge for favorite author.) That should give some idea of what I like.

So I looked at those worlds and characters and stories and found that most were too developed.

Too developed?

Yep, I have gotten so far into the creation of the worlds and multiple story lines that it would have taken me a week to get back up to speed with the governments and religions and creatures of the worlds. Too involved to start over with them.

50K is a relatively short novel so I needed a smaller idea for the story.

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I found a folder with three pages in it. A list of names and two pages of an story line. That's kind of rare because I don't always write out a story line like that and sometimes have to extrapolate the plot from the descriptions of the characters. (I always think I'll remember everything about the plot because it's so fresh at that moment but I inevitably forget.)

And I had a title. Dance with a Dragon.

A title can be a good jumping off point. A great cliff from which to throw yourself.

Ray Bradbury once said: First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.

This is what a title is like for me.

How does one dance with a dragon? Why would one want to? What would it accomplish? Is it a metaphor for something else--the dance? The dragon?

Oh! Oh! Oh! It's practically orgasmic when things start to click like that, when whatever it is that's inside you that lives to make up something new rises up to break the surface of the water of creation and looks around and smiles at the world...

... is it the dragon?

Pinky thinks it must be!

(Too bad I can't count this in my 50K worth of words!)

End of the World as We Know It

I've always had a weakness for science fiction movies and books as well as old horror movies. But most of all, I've always been drawn to apocalyptic fiction and movies... end of the world stuff.

Tonight TNT has on Independence Day with Will Smith, Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum. Classic alien invasion movie where the humans win in the end but only after almost getting wiped out altogether. Randy Quaid, abducted by the aliens, sacrifices himself in the end to destroy the ship that would destroy area 51 and Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum must fly the alien spaceship from Roswell to the mother ship to deliver the computer virus that will bring down the defensive shields that will allow the humans to defeat the aliens and only escape at the very last minute before the mother ship gets blown to smithereens in true spectacular sf special effects tradition.

Gotta love it!

My interest in all things apocalyptic, I think, goes back to the being born on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. That happened in 1945 and I was born 16 years later but that was also at the height of the cold war and the middle of all the nuclear testing. I don't know that I actually made the connection between Hiroshima and my birthday until into my teens but do know that I had also by that time already been reading dystopian literature like 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. There was also an underlying understanding of the threat of nuclear war and the threat of communism.

And there was a certain anxiety underlying my childhood from watching the news. I remember watching the Vietnam War on the national television news. Mostly remember watching helicopters landing, blowing tall grasses around while soldiers jumped out and ran, rifles held out. Did they show many wounded soldiers being brought to helicopters on stretchers? Or is that just video I saw later that I am superimposing on the past? I doubt they (being the government) would have allowed such footage during WWII (if there had been TV) but I don't think they had as much control over the media during Vietnam so it would certainly have been possible.

What would draw anyone to stories about the end of the world? What would draw anyone to horror stories? I can only come up with catharsis. You come out the other side alive. You the reader and (usually) you the narrator of the story. Life may be forever changed but it is still life.

In most cases, you have been tested against something horrible. In the end of the world scenario it's usually communal. (When I say end of the world, I don't necessarily mean the total destruction of a planet but it could be so, but in which case someone must also escape--by the skin of their teeth! But that something so catastrophic happens--whether man-made or natural--that entire societies are left in the balance.) But horror can be much more individual and even internal. A mystery or a suspense/thriller is similar in some ways in that something has happened to disrupt the social order and balance must be returned. In a thriller, it may be that only one or two people know of the disruption and must get others to acknowledge it or must hide it all together and solve it themselves. In a mystery, it's usually about justice but not always.

No doubt humankind has thought about the end of the world for as long as they have been aware of a world that could end. The authors of every holy book certainly have. No doubt the people who lived through the black death thought about it!

And me... Weird I know. But that's me, Pinky...

Paint It Black

Today would have been my sister's 50th birthday.



Instead, I put flowers on her grave, ten years after she died. She was 36 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and was six weeks away from her 40th birthday when she died from it. I stayed with my mother by her bedside the night before she died and did as my mother asked. I told her that it was okay for her to die; that we would take care of her children for her, that she should rest now. The next day she was transferred to the Hospice of the Western Reserve in Euclid and the doctors thought she would last a week or more longer. Because of that my mother and brother-in-law had gone home to Jane's house to shower and rest and so missed Jane's death.


I had gone home that morning when the doctor had come in and agreed to the hospice transfer. It was obvious that she had had another small stroke over night; her hand hung limp over the side of the bed and she was unresponsive to any one's touch. Bob had come back to the hospital and had brought some fruit from a basket someone had brought to his house. That night I was trying to cut up an overripe mango when my dad got the phone call from my mom that she was gone. My uncle, one of my dad's brothers, had come up from North Carolina and he drove us over to the east side of Cleveland once my brother and sister-in-law arrived from Sandusky. My sister Karen drove herself up from Kent.


It was a beautiful early September night. September 6th by the time we arrived. September 4th is my father's birthday and when Karen visited Jane on the 4th she told Jane who was unconscious at the time that she was NOT allowed to die on Dad's birthday. If she was going to die, she had to wait until the next day--and so she did.


The hospice is right on the shore of Lake Erie and her room was right on the beach. The window was open and you could hear the waves and the breeze. I thought it the most peaceful place I could imagine and I am glad that she could hear that as she went on to whatever there is after this place. I like to imagine that my grandmother with whom she had a special relationship came to get her and that they are together now somewhere without pain and sorrow and worry.


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When Jane fell into her final illness, she first went blind. The doctors thought that the cancer had spread to her brain and so they had immediately begun radiation treatments before doing all the other tests in an attempt to preempt any further damage by the spread of the cancer in the brain. However, that was not what was going on. Instead, the cancer was in her liver and was causing small blood clots which were traveling to her brain, one of which was in the optic nerve area and those the blindness. So not only did she lose her hair again from the radiation but they immediately put her on heparin (a blood thinner). Every time they then drew blood or took any type of tissue sample she bled all over. This all began in mid July and lasted until September 5th. In all the time, my mother and brother-in-law spent nearly everyday and night with her in the hospital, taking care of her because there were never enough nurses to do the job.


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When we got to the hospice, Bob and his parents and my mom were already there. We all stood around and talked. Some of us touched her. She was cool to the touch and very still. The room looked like a bedroom and the lights like bedside lamps so the light was the dim yellow 60-watt sort so she looked a lot like a wax figure to me. I remember her head wasn't on a pillow but her neck wasn't bent so her chin was down to her voice box, it was as if she was posed to look straight up but her eyes were closed.


I don't really know how long we stayed. I'm sure there were some nervous jokes and laughing. What the hell do you say in a situation like that? It's as though you're in an alternate universe where nothing makes any sense and time flows in odd swirls and eddies, jerks and stops that don't fit together later.


My uncle drove us home and I think it must have been sometime around 3 am when I finally got to bed. The next day was a Sunday and I remember it was a very bright and sunny day.


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When we were young, my parents and my sisters and I were very close to one of my father's uncles and aunts and their two daughters. One of the daughters lived with us for a year or so while her parents were building a house so she could go to our school and I just idolized her. Aunt Joyce used to babysit us and loved to have us brush her hair. Her younger daughter Sue is seven or eight years older than I am and she went from being someone who babysat us and who I just adored to someone I babysat for when she married and had her two children.


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That morning Aunt Joyce came over when she heard as did Sue. As is traditional when there is a death in the family, the first impulse is to bring or go get food. So Sue grabs me and piles me in her truck and drives me over to the Vermilion Farm Market. The Farm Market is a really good grocery store with a full meat counter and good vegetables. She gets me a cart and goes up and down the aisles pulling out loaves of rye bread and wheat, ordering sliced bologna and chopped ham, and checking out the tomatoes and lettuce.


Meanwhile, I am standing in the middle of the store in a daze, listening to the Rolling Stones sing "Paint It Black."



Have you ever listened to the lyrics:


"I see a red door and I want it painted black
no colors anymore I want them to turn black..."




"...No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you..."




"...Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts
It's not easy facin up when your whole world is black..."


I didn't cry then but I've cried every time since when I've heard that song. I don't think I cried then because I was still too shell shocked and it was just to surreal that it should be happening at that exact moment.


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So, for this moment at least, my world is painted black. I miss you horribly and wish you were here (another song that makes me cry every time dammit!) Love, Pinky






(This is one of the first pictures I have of myself as a baby as well as with my sister Jane. I think she is probably telling me a story or something of the sort although it looks as if she's going to ping me in the head!)

Picture profile

I have updated my profile and chosen a photo--reluctantly. I chose a side shot because I thought it less recognizable than a full frontal. And I like the books in it as well. If I could take one of myself showning the back of my head and my books, I'd post that!

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Part of the appeal of writing, I think, has always been anonymity. The ability to hide behind my words and to use them as a shield against potential rejection seemed a wondrous thing when facing the very personal taunts of the other children in grade school, junior high, and high school.

It seems a contradiction now though when you think that a writer is much more permanently rejected in writing when a manuscript is sent back or when a reviewer or critic rips them up one side and down the other in print. But it's not typically done in public in front of others.

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My name was easily corrupted from Peggy to Piggy and the bit at the end of my last name to butt. And there was a little fat boy in my class who was picked on for his size who struck out at me, the quiet awkward one, for 11 of my 13 years of schooling (he wasn't in the same kindergarten section as I was) by calling me names and telling me I was stupid and all the other sorts of obnoxious hurtful things kids do to one another.

Between our junior and senior year, he lost his extra weight when he took up jogging and got a personality transplant. He came back a changed person and was nice. He apologized to me and we were friends of sorts, wrote to each other for a while during college, and he's stopped into the bookstore occasionally to see me.

I doubt he ever realized how deeply he ever hurt me. That an apology could never make up for what he had done. I'm sure he would be surprised by it, being the rather shallow and arrogant person that he is.

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Anonymity can serve other purposes as well.

Pinky likes her privacy. And prefers her personal life stays personal...

Memoir Writing

Yesterday I was reading in an old issue of Writer's Digest (from this summer I think) a column about memoir writing. The columnist had written a memoir of his adolescent years as part of his master's thesis and looked at it recently and found it just awful.

Likewise, my beneficial friend (BF) had been blogging recently from his journals. which he is using to write his own memoirs. As noted earlier, his life has been eventful and certainly worthy of publication. And he is definitely a talented enough writer to do the job.

Both of these have led me to consider the genre of the memoir, my life history, and my memoir, in particular.

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I wrote one once, you see, or what I saw then as something that would become one in the future. Then it was a journal but, because I just knew I was going to become a rich and famous author some day, it would become the foundation of my memoirs.

At least that was how it started. In junior high, I started a journal in a five-subject notebook that was scavenged from my classes. I don't even know what I wrote exactly except that what may have started as a record of day-to-day events morphed into a fantasy of life where I hiked the Appalachian Trail and built myself a loft bedroom in my parents' house and at some point ended up in to hospital and had sex with my boyfriend in a hospital bed (!!!)

I filled up three partial wire-bound notebooks before eventually hiding them away. In my outward life, I do recall that I had a major falling-out with my first real friend, used to get blinding migraine headaches, had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, and seriously considered committing suicide. I used to hide in closets, tried to see how tight I could pull a scarf around my neck and how long I could keep it there, and used to get so mad that I would see how small of a ball I could twist a coat hanger into. I obsessively read an awful novel called The Other by Tom Tryon and was particularly enamored with the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. She killed herself, you know.

Let's just say I was a really screwed up kid and leave it at that.

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But I don't have the journals any more. When I was a sophomore or junior in college, I was cleaning out my closet at home and came across the notebooks. I was so embarrassed by them, I hand shredded the pages and threw them out. Now I'm sorry for that. I wish I had them to read so I could get into the head of that screwed up kid again.

I had totally blocked out the scarf episodes and it wasn't until about 6 months before my older sister Jane passed away that she reminded me of that. I think there were probably other incidents that may have been scribbled there in those notebooks that I've found too painful to remember.

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I have always thought that memoirists (and sometimes bloggers--like this!) are narcissists par excellence. Me me me yada yada yada. Let me post more pictures of me me me. (Note there are no pictures of me--yet! I actually hate to have my picture taken but I'm going to as my BF if he will do the honors the next time he visits. He is very good at many things ;)

But I think that memoir for me is more about self discovery. (And that is the cool thing about blogging as well. I can write it here. If anyone else chooses to read it, they can. Otherwise, it's for me.)

I have read others say the same about writing poetry; they write poetry first and foremost for themselves. I write prose, creative nonfiction (essay), for myself.

Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way recommends morning pages. These are three handwritten pages of whatever comes to mind every morning.

I have been doing morning pages for at least 5 years now, possibly more. I have missed days and sometimes even weeks and there was a time where I did stop but I came back to it. There are some days when I do not get to finish all three pages but thankfully those are in the minority as well. Morning is not always the clearest time for me to think and there are days when I will write my morning pages in the afternoon and those will be much more philosophical or at least coherent. But often they will be about the stories I am working on so if I ever do become famous and some future biographer gets to comb through the pages, they will certainly have something to read...

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Is it possible that an average life with little excitement can become a good memoir?

I was not mistreated as a child. My parents were not rich and famous. I did not do anything infamous or spectacular during my lifetime (so far.) Short of doing the James Frey thing and making up half my life (did that in my adolescent journals!), I would have only my own voice and outlook and understanding.

But is that enough to work with?

Pinky wonders...

Whoa, Baby!

I have spent the last three weeks worrying about being pregnant.



Yep, pregnant... at 47.



There was a possibility, though it was slim based on two things: age and the pill. As noted in the previous post, I was on the pill but was taken off because of a bout of colitis but I was on the pill and had been on the pill faithfully for months, no, years.

The caveat about the pill is that it could have failed due to the colitis cleaning out the gut and the colonoscopy preparations doing the same. The sexual encounter was between the colitis and the test.

The other reason why I really thought I might be was because I thought it would just be my luck. That would be the kind of thing that would happen. It would be a karmic thing, payback for the previous pregnancy that was terminated.

For any of you who don't know how the pill works, you take the hormone-laced pills for three weeks and placebos for one week. In that one week, you have a (usually light) period. So when I went off the pill on October 4, I fully expected to get a period by October 9. Except there was nothing, nada, zippo, zero, zilch... not a drop...

Doesn't make any sense. What should I think but pregnancy. I'm too young for menopause (aren't I?) But would an over-the-counter pregnancy test tell me if I were nine days pregnant?

I knew I was going out of state for training the week of October 13 and I knew I didn't want to take the burden of the truth (if I were) with me, so I bought the test but didn't take it. Instead, I spent the entire week thinking about what I would do.

What would I do? What could I do?

Would I tell the father? Should I tell the father?

Yes, not telling him was a serious consideration, although I think he would have been seriously hurt and upset and angry about it. His life position is unique in some ways in that, due to circumstances, he is unable to work and so must rely on his wife's income and, for the same reasons, would have a difficult time divorcing her. (It's a long story and one that is not mine to tell.) I could not and would not ask him to leave her; he would need to decide that for himself but I also don't know that I could support a family on my salary alone either.

I love him but don't know that I know him well enough to live with him. (And so you say then you should not be having sex that could lead to a child... no shit, Sherlock!) If that would be what he would decide--to leave her and come to me (if that was the situation), I would take him in, of course.

So I had decided I would tell him. The problem then is that I have no real way to contact him directly. It's more of a case of he contacts me when he's free... (yes, sometimes I do feel like a doormat.) I have an email address but I don't think it would be fair to just email and say: Hi, hope you're having a good day. Please get in touch ASAP. You're going to be a daddy in 9 mo.

Then there was the decision to abort or not to abort.

I did it before and I never ever want to do it again. But there are several considerations here. 1) I am on some serious high-powered drugs that can cause birth defects. 2) And age and old eggs increase the risk of birth defects exponentially over the age of 40. 3) I have a chronic disease of which a major part is fatigue along with pain and sleep disruption; caring for an infant (possibly multiples since the chances of multiple births also increases with age) would no doubt exacerbate that. 4) And, in all likelihood, I would be doing most if not all of the child rearing by myself at some point in the child's life. 5) I would be 68 when the child was 20. I would be 88 when the child is 40. Is that fair?

Are those selfish reasons? Just excuses? Guilt screaming in my head and heart? I still can't say.

But there's also a part of me that regrets terribly never having had children. I have women friends who have teenagers who get into trouble or just exasperate them and they tell me I should be glad I don't have kids, but I can't be. Just like when they say the same about not having a husband when they get mad at theirs. What I wouldn't give for one? I would probably give all the books I own at this moment but it's not happened and it may never--child or husband.

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I came back on Friday, intending to take the test right away, but I didn't. I was too much of a coward.

I had convinced myself that I wasn't. I had finally found an infertility website that had some statistics about the drop-off in fertility rates after 40 and I felt reasonably sure I wasn't but I was still afraid.

I got the test out and read the directions. It sat there on the bathroom vanity all through Saturday and into Sunday. I decided I'd collect the urine and dip the stick; I found a clean container and sat it beside the test. Time after time I emptied my bladder into the toilet but just looked at the stick and the cup.

Finally, I did it. I set the timer for 3 minutes and walked away. Only one pink stripe appeared. NOT pregnant. Thank you, God~! Then I wished I'd done it days before!!

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But it all did serve a purpose, I think. After the scare of the colitis and the realization that the BC pills were no longer an option, it made me think about additional life shifts. First, that I could be pregnant and what would that mean for my relationship with my beneficial friend. Second, that I am aging, there really is no going back, and I must go forward and decide what I want out of what is left of my life--what is important here. Third, that I must consider my life's decisions carefully and in light of what I believe is moral and ethical.

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There is a card in the major arcana of the tarot deck called the Tower and on it is a picture of a castle tower being hit by lightning and people falling out of it. The interpretation of the card is one of change, usually sudden and unpleasant, but leading to something different and often better.

I feel as if I've drawn the Tower card. The lightning struck and I am still falling, not sure where the hell I'm going to land and how many pieces I'll be in. I will land though, eventually.

So Pinky says...

Copper Birth Control

Because of the ischemic colitis, I can no longer take birth control pills.

For years and years, I took the pill as a way to lessen painful cramps, control PMS, and keep bleeding to a minimum. There was no need for the real purpose for the pill because I was celibate for 16 (or was it 17?) years.

This was not necessarily by choice. I did not date during this time or, if I did, there was nothing beyond a kiss or two. I do remember my ex- from college contacting me in 1990 before I started graduate school--that was the last time I had sex until just recently.

There were probably several reasons why I never went hunting for a man and for sex. Work was one; I was store manager and very into that, very busy. School was another; I was working full-time and going to graduate school at Cleveland State at night to get a Masters of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Health was another; I worked and educated myself into being sick, too much teeth grinding which led to headaches which led to poor sleeping which led to aches and pains which led to fibromyalgia. (I'm sure it was not such a linear progression but the TMJ did lead to the final diagnosis of FMS.)

And, finally, it was drugs; I was on a variety of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics that made me not give two shits and a good goddamn about much of anything. I was unhappy about no relationships but only in a vague sort of way and hadn't any interest in changing the situation really. I lived with my parents and eked along at work (no longer as manager but in a lower position with less responsibility) with my MA waiting to be finished, nothing published and nothing written and nothing happening at all.

I did make a little effort toward some sort of dating. The Internet helped there. I met several guys and found one with whom I have developed a "friends with benefits" relationship with. This means that we see each other when we can (he's married) and we get to screw each other's brains out. We've known each other for nearly three years now. (This is not what I would prefer but that is a topic for another entry...)

So, since I'm not post menopausal yet, I've done the abortion thing once and don't ever want to go through that again, and can't see bearing a child at 47 and chronically ill, I need birth control.

The ob/gyn suggested an IUD. The IUD was banned for years because of the Dalkon Shield which caused lots of deaths and maimings and other awful things. The doc told me some rather gruesome things about septic abortions and fetuses with IUD's embedded in them. My friend Lillian received a large settlement in the class action suit against Dalkon because she had an ectopic pregnancy caused by the Shield and nearly died.

The some of new and improved IUD's come with copper on them. (The one he is suggesting for me isn't copper and is coated with progesterone.)

The thing is copper is a spermicide. Who would have guessed?

As I was leaving, the doctor tells me that in China, women use copper pennies inserted into their vaginas as birth control.

I retorted, "And they used to use coat hangers to do abortions."

No doubt they still do in China and elsewhere.

I never expected this to be a political commentary but in the end it is. Do you want to go back to coat hangers? Do you want to make health care so expensive that women are forced to use pennies as birth control?

What's wrong with the world that this is true? That this happens?

Pinky says... get out and vote!

Imp of Perverse

I am working on an article for my work's staff newsletter about Edgar Allan Poe. The article is about Poe not because of his horror stories which would be appropriate for the the month of October and Halloween but because someone somewhere decided that October is Mystery Series Month. And Poe was the first to write a series of stories using the same detective--M. C. Auguste Dupin.

Yep, Poe really was quite an extraordinary and talented fellow if not also very troubled and unlucky and just plain unfortunate. I understand the latest theory about his death is that he was used by a group of men who went recruiting voters, taking them from polling places to polling places to vote again and again, for their candidates and getting them drunker and drunker along the way. Poe was already sick and was left abandoned in the street, passed out and with possible alcohol poisoning, and simply died in the gutter.

I first learned of Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination, in a detective fiction class at the community college where I work. We read the three stories: "The Murders on the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and it was quite plain to see that a famous English author based his own rather eccentric detective named Holmes off of Dupin. No doubt many people thing of Sherlock Holmes as the first literary detective simply because there were many more stories and books written about him but Poe was the first.

But I found the tales of ratiocination in a volume I recently purchased called The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I bought it because a poet friend who has been compiling an online library of poetry and fiction recently included some of Poe's work and I wanted more. I wanted to reread some of the horror stories and look at some of the poems.

While reading the introduction by Wilbur Scott, I came across a story called "The Imp of Perverse." I read his discussion of it before I read the story which at first I thought was an essay and I thought it a very interesting observation of human nature.

What is it about human nature that compels us to do things that we know are patently wrong?

Why are we always attracted to the bad boy/girl?

Why do we always take stupid risks?

Why do we follow impulses that we warn others against?

Scott suggests that the "Imp" stands for impulse or impulsiveness and that's certainly possible. But the idea of the imp, a demon that prods us into doing things we wouldn't normally do, would fit just as well into Poe's weird worlds. Because, in the end, the imp/demon is really just another part of us--the shadow, the dark side, whatever you'd like to call it.

So, Pinky says, think about what the imp of perverse has led you to do in your life. I can think of any number of things the little bastard has led me on to do.

My return to Blogland

I haven't posted in forever.

Not much of a surprise there really. The last two months have been Hell really and I have discovered the last week (the most hellish of all) that if I don't take the time for myself to do what I want for me, then I may never get to do it at all.

Do you want to know what happened? I spent the week going from doctor to doctor to determine why I suddenly started shitting blood. Yes, bright red in the toilet bowl Tuesday morning.

After a colonoscopy yesterday, I was diagnosed with ischemic colitis. The specialist who did the colonoscopy said that it was already healing but something caused the blood flow to the colon to become blocked which caused bleeding into the colon and out the other end.

Now, the blood could have been anything from a hemorrhoid to colon cancer and that scared the shit (literally) out of me.

And it made me think--

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die without writing and publishing the stories I have in my head,

I don't want to die because all I've ever done is work myself into the ground,

I don't want to die without living a life.

If that means I need to change what I do and how I live, well, then I guess I'll have to work at changing.

I've always been shy. I've always been in awe of other writers, too in awe of them to ever think of approaching them for advice or even to praise their work. (Maybe that should be reversed--start with the praise and then move to the advice!) I've always held back from putting myself forward out of fear and always been jealous of others' successes but why?

Time is short. I know that now.

It didn't sink in when my sister died 10 years ago but it did four days ago.

Maybe because it was my lifeblood being flushed down the drain. It's one thing when it's menstrual blood, quite another when it's not.

So, I shall not be neglecting my dear blog, dear reader.

Pinky says so...
....and she means it.

First Fruits

Today is Lammas...

Once a pagan Sabbat. It celebrated the first wheat harvest and was co-opted by the Catholic/Christian church when they moved into northern Europe as the loaf- or lamb-mass.

Most of the other sabbats had the same thing happen to them but not all are still celebrated and only a few are still celebrated within the church. they include Christmas (Yule) and Easter (Ostre). Halloween (Samhain) is one but it is more a secular one now than a religious holiday; the same goes for groundhog's day which was once Imbolg then Candlemas and is now nothing more than a joke really. And some are completely forgotten like Mabon which is in September and few remember Beltaine though they may have heard of May Day, if only in reference to the Soviets parading nuclear missiles through Red Square.

But, Pinky defies the born-agains, even those who are her friends and co-workers when it comes to things like the sabbats because she believes that there is nothing wrong with honoring the beliefs of the old religions as well as the prevailing ones. (The word prevailing always puts me in mind of prevailing winds and how they sweep over everything--a frightening analogy really!)

I'd rather know more than less about the past because I think what has been thought of before can inform me about what someone might think of in the future. There may be someone out there who thinks they have a new great and original idea but ten to one someone else has thought of it and it's good to know what this contemporaries said about it. It's good to see the connections between ideas too.

Anyway, I'm tired and could keep rambling but to what purpose? None really.

Either You Are or You Aren't...

Pinky's pissed...

You see I have this friend who has a friend who was convicted of a felony sex crime and who served his time in prison. He paid the debt that the judicial system required of him and he got out of prison and tried to start his life over.

Except, because a bastard ex-lover used a little known loophole regarding his parole, the guy who was trying to make something of himself after four and a half years of exemplary behavior gets his ass thrown back in jail. All because he wouldn't give into the blackmail of the ex-lover.

Now... before you get your knickers all in a knot and think that I am defending pedophiles and want rapists to run wild up and down the streets randomly attacking little old ladies, that's not what this is about. I know that there are evil and twisted men (and women!) out there who use sex as a weapon against others and who deserve punishment and who should never ever see the light of day again. (I went to catechism with one!)

But I also believe that there are other people who can be rehabilitated or can learn from the things they have done in the past and won't do them again. I have to believe (or at least hope) the prison system is serving some sort of purpose and that people are coming out of it without the inclination to commit the same or another crime again. (Though the rate of recidivism seems to negate that idea totally.)

So either you are rehabilitated when you get out and you should not continued to be punished for your previous crime or you aren't rehabilitated and what is the point of letting you out at all? Right?

RIGHT???

Pinky Says: Sex is Exercise too

Sex is the best kind of exercise there is... or so says Pinky.

And exercise releases endorphins which are the body's very own pain killers.

Ergo, engaging in sexual activity will kill your pain. Just don't hurt yourself doing it! And remember--be sure to follow the golden rule:

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.

Makes sense to me.

May you all get all the exercise you can today and everyday.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Apropos to nothing at all, as trivia for the day:

Napoleon's grand nephew, Charles Bonaparte, was Teddy Roosevelt's Attorney General and founded the FBI in 1908.

Looking like the plague...

I went to the dermatologist two days ago for a beautification treatment (I wish!--it was actually supposed to treat rosacea...) and came out looking like a plague victim...

My face is covered with swollen scabby black and purple bruises over chin, cheek, nose and forehead. According to the eye-witness accounts I have read of the appearance of those with the worst type of plague, they had these awful hemorrhages under their skin rather like swollen bruises... sound familiar?

This is certainly a case of the treatment being worse than the disease. Why trade an everyday existence of a little scaly redness on cheek and chin that gets worse in the cold for 5 to 7 days of serious disfigurement every three months?

But we have all been brainwashed to believe that medicine, the medical establishment, and most especially the pharmaceutical industry can cure all our ills, make our lives perfect, save the world, assure us we'll go to heaven when we die--or guarantee that we never will or that when we do we'll look like we did when we were 20 years old...

And I've fallen for it just like everyone else... better living by chemistry and then you die.

What will Pinky Say...

Pinky is the alter ego of a mostly mild mannered bookstore buyer from Northeastern Ohio named Peggy. Peggy is totally conventional--a 46-year-old single apartment dweller with two cats, a car loan, aging parents, arguing siblings, a sister dead from breast cancer, who's burnt out from a job she's been at for the past 21-plus years as well as a frustrated novelist.

Pinky started out as a joke between friends. If I were ever to choose a stripper name, I'd be "Pinky Flamingo"--don't ask me why, but that would be it! And I figure a stripper can be as loud-mouthed and politically incorrect as she wants.

So while Peggy the book buyer may talk about books and writing and her cats and her family and day-to-day happenings, Pinky will want to take a few jabs and hits at the stupid, screwy and weird things that irk her off.

It could be that Pinky is just a manifestation of the recent change in Peggy's medication but who's to say for sure... Pinky's loose now and she's liable to say anything!