You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2007.
Aw, man…
Walking in the door of our favourite local pizza place to pick up supper, I couldn’t help but think about a god of Greek Mythology and grin like a twit.
I sure hope somebody else grins at this post, too, otherwise I’ve either gone even nuttier than I feared, or too much alcohol was involved.
I can’t stand when older generations (or younger ones, for that matter) bitch and moan about the terrible state of the world we live in now. How crime and violence are worse than ever before, and society’s morals and ethics are in the ditch. Oh, puh-lease…
My mother used to be one of those who are quite good at bemoaning about… well… anything heard in the news, practically. Violence, sex, drugs, global warming, politics – really, the supply of topics is endless. But she doesn’t do it around me much anymore, because I have suggested, rather forcefully and repeatedly, that:
a) she should do what I do and simply stop watching the news if it upsets her so much, unless of course, she enjoys feeling angry and negative,
b) the news is NOT an accurate representation of society and life and should NEVER be considered by intelligent people to be such, and
c) living in the times of pioneers when everyone was armed, women had only slightly more rights than cattle, and the only lawmen were several days’ ride away; or when slavery was legal and encouraged; or when the plague (or polio, or starvation, or the army of the day, or whatever) swept through entire societies and decimated them, probably wasn’t much of a picnic for those generations either.
My, how selective our historical references and memories are!
Let’s get something straight: none of this is new. It is all the same shit that humans have dealt with since time began, just a slightly different pile and different era. Variations on the details, but the theme remains constant.
Whether you were born in the 800’s, 1400’s, or 1900’s, you’re going to find people who do bad things to good people using violence, deceit, and greed. But you’re also going to find just as many, and probably more, good people doing good things – if you just open your eyes and look for it, instead of looking for something to whine about.
This story (and the follow-up story here) is a fine example. First found on one of my top favourite reads, Cheaper Than Therapy, it’s about two Grade 12 boys/men in Cambridge, NS who showed pretty effectively that the youth of our nation are NOT all smart-assed, over-indulged, petulant little beasts as some people are wont to believe.
(I know, I know - I should paraphrase and write this up myself, but I’m sorry, I’m too tired/lazy, so I’m going to just paste excerpts from The Chronicle Herald story. Chalk it up to MY immorality at the moment if it makes ya feel better. Then go read the full thing here, and the follow-up article, as they’re well worth it.)
Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.
The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.
The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.
“It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” said David.
They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.
“I made sure there was a shirt for him,” David said.
They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink.
It was hard to miss the mass of students in pink milling about in the lobby, especially for the group that had harassed the new Grade 9 student.
“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”
I LOVE the time that we’re living in! The mere fact that I can hear about this wonderful act of maturity and thoughtfulness halfway across the country within days of it happening is nothing short of amazing! And if you read the second article, you’ll find that the story is already spreading through Europe and getting an incredible amount of attention.
As long as we look for goodness, and revel in it and share it with others with joy and excitement when we find it, it will always be there.
Much like hope.
I know it’s meant with the best of intentions, but I wish people would stop telling me to rest and “do nothing”. Yes, I’m struggling, and yes, I look like shit (but thanks for pointing that out – wow, I feel so much better now). But here’s a thought for ya: have you ever considered that “doing nothing” for a person who can’t always physically do what they want, is not the same as “doing nothing” for someone who’s able-bodied and has the choice?
Living with an unpredictable disease like MS FM RCD, it’s not the unexpected forward pitches or the walking into walls, it’s not the spastic muscles or numbness, and it’s not even the relapses that bring blurred vision or slurred words that make things the most challenging. What causes me the most grief and angst and, well, trouble, is my own healthy as a horse PRIDE! By far!
And yet, that same pride (and fear, which is the distilled version of pride) is what makes it so I can put one foot in front of the other and keep existing. Classic double-edged sword.
Slowing down is one thing, but stopping the push forward is one of the scariest and most threatening things of all. The best way I can try to describe it is that RCD is like living on the side of a steep and greased mountain. You have to always keep moving to some degree, or you’ll slide backwards. Not that doing nothing isn’t sometimes appealing – hell, constantly struggling just to stay in one place is no picnic, and it’s often damned tempting to just… stop. But anyone who has lived with a handicap for any length of time and has negotiated some semblance of an agreement with their body knows that giving up doesn’t make anything easier – it just postpones the climb and slides you further away from the trail and onto a steeper pitch.
(Well, giving up makes things easier if you, ya know, give up give up. As in dead! It may be work but I quite like the view from my mountain, such as it is, thank you, and I’m not leaving without a fight.)
It’s no coincidence that I busted my ass to accomplish a lot around the house and yard this summer, knowing that I was going to be costing our family some major medical expenses. I pushed my luck pretty heavily (especially considering the high temps), and I spent the last month or so in some heated arguments and negotiations with my body as a result. My eagerness to pull my own weight and be productive didn’t start out as a conscious goal, but I’d be a horrible liar if I pretended that the price of my jaw reconstruction hasn’t weighed extremely heavily on my mind and emotions. And pride.
Because it’s orthodontic, implants aren’t covered at all by provincial health care, regardless of how medically necessary it is for me at this point. Doc doesn’t have dental insurance through his job, and I’m an independent contractor, so… yeah. I’m pretty sure family and friends are sick of hearing about it and I apologize if I’ve been crass and mentioned it too often, but it’s not every day that I cost us the equivalent of what had been, up until quite recent memory, more than an entire year’s income for our family of five.
I can’t quite wrap my brain around how I had to pay $24,000 for the recent surgery and the hardware, and it’ll still be another $10-15,000 for the prosthetic next spring, and I’m not even getting bigger boobs or a tummy tuck out of the deal!!!
(Why yes, I am Canadian, is it that obvious?)
$35-40,000 is a fuck of a lot of money to be spending on one person’s mouth, pardon the language. It makes me choke just thinking about it. If I had teeth, I’d be gritting them.
So with that in mind, I have been trying for quite a while to figure out a way to bring more income into our family, without jeopardizing what we’ve already got. And by that I don’t just mean money – there’s family time and relationships in general, my overall health and happiness, my existing job and interests… it’s taken a lot of years but I’ve carved out a balance that works pretty well and that my RCD has tolerated for the most part. That’s nothing to muck around with too much!
Because that greased mountain thing? It’s rather tricky to live normally on one. Sometimes it’s all you can do just to hold your ground, but other times you hit spots that are significantly easier to move across, and that’s when you forget about the climb, and the pack on your back is almost weightless, and you think “Sure! Hell, I can handle a full time physical labour job – sign me up!”
The thing is, after you’ve climbed, slid back, climbed, slid back, climbed, slid back enough times, sometimes you almost fear getting to those easy points, because you know they don’t last, and the pain of the disappointment and frustration batters and bruises you mentally and adds, like, another 40lbs on your back physically for a while, until you eventually get to a spot where you can shed it and start chugging along again.
Plenty of times I get to those plateaus and I’m the grinning dummy saying, “Hey, let me carry your load for a while! I’m feeling great and you look tired.” In that respect, there’s more than enough precedent and justification for my loved ones to get frustrated with me and tell me to just chill out when they think I’m pushing myself too hard.
But those are the times when I LOVE those plateaus. That’s when I take on more weight, even though I know it’s temporary, because it reminds me that I still CAN! That I’m still just as whole, and able, and useful, and strong as I ever was! Just… not for very long. But that short sprint refills my pride for the next time that I really want to do something and CAN’T, and I have to limp back and admit defeat, and choose a different path than the one I was hoping for.
Other times, I choose to slow down and just put one foot in front of the other and struggle to feel honourable in that alone. I become a big chickenshit and I don’t try new paths I come across, or even old paths I used to walk and love before, because I feel too worn out to handle failure on top of everything else. Which pains me to no end to admit to anyone, and no matter how many times I make that choice, it never gets easier.
But, see, here’s the thing: the simple act of making the choice, for myself, is a step. It’s a movement. Made under my own steam, and fueled by my own instincts and sense of my own body. And that means a ton. Yes, I misjudge and get off track at times (like probably now). But given how much of my pride and independence I’ve had to leave behind on this climb, don’t I deserve to make that call myself? I gotta tell ya, sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me on the trail looking up.
I…
sigh
Ach, I’m all over the place on this post, aren’t I? Sorry. But I guess it’s not that inappropriate given the title and mountain metaphor. I just wish it was easier to explain, and for others to understand, why standing still in life and doing nothing isn’t helpful (or health-ful) to me, no matter how weary it seems to them that I am. (Or, often, it’s more a matter of how weary they think I should be!)
But they can’t relate, because they’re not me, and they’re not on the same mountain (thank God). They try to have patience and faith in my choices, and I love them for it, but it’s hard, if not impossible, for them to comprehend how it affects every aspect of who I am, far more than just physically.
Just like it’s impossible for me to relate to how difficult it must be for them to watch someone they care about constantly struggle. Both with her stubborn pride, as well as her self.
Oftentimes, I think I have the easier part.
We were making supper together and he was being a big meanie and teasing me, so I decided revenge was in order. I put on my best “you’re gonna get it now, boy” look and pushed him as far back as I could, then molded myself tightly against him.
Being married for 20+ years does not, in any way, preclude spontaneity and playing.
He chuckled, because we both knew that our kids were due home any minute.
Bending down to kiss me, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me even closer, leaning back with the full weight of us both. I couldn’t escape, if that was part of my evil plan, but he didn’t look too worried that it was. Probably because whenever I try to lay a seductive web, I always seem to get just as caught as he does.
Rrr…rr…rrr…kerthunk…rrr…rrrr…..
I know we’re getting older, dear, but since when do we make THAT noise together?
The kiss temporarily abandoned, we stared questioningly at each other, completely baffled by the weird sound and its close proximity. Then with a sudden yelp and a low curse, he shoved me away from him so forcefully that I would’ve fallen had he not held on and saved us both.
If you’re going to get frisky in the kitchen, beware of doing so leaning against a refrigerator with an ice water dispenser in the door.
Our kids found us on the floor, red-faced and with tears in our eyes, saw their father’s darkly-stained jeans in the back, and quickly walked past. “Hup! Nope! Don’t even try to explain. Not unless you’re going to pay for our therapy.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m serious. Isn’t that hilarious? Well, after the fact, I mean. In the moment, things weren’t nearly so amusing.”
“Of course.”
“But the blacking out computer and crappy internet problems are just the warm-up.”
“And the renovations.”
“Right, and the renos. And their warping of time and money by three. What every homeowner knows but I stupidly ignored.”
“So there’s more?”
“Oh, darlin’, from there it gets interesting!”
So I outlined to our friend what I think I’m going to call:
My Unglued Diary
How our van was stolen on Saturday, then on Sunday, my less-than-a-year-old laptop fell and completely shattered the 17 inch LCD screen.
Monday was when I discovered that I had lost every last bit of my research, spontaneous ideas, and brain-storming notes for my new business, as well as the website layout and all the custom graphics I had designed (and their raw source images). Everything. Gone.
Tuesday was the implant surgery day, and that was more complicated and detailed so it took a while to tell. How I was scheduled for 7:00am, and after not sleeping all night, I signed in and paid for them to take out four horizontal screws left in from the last (bone graft) surgery, and put in ten permanent, vertical screws/posts, putting us another $23,758 in debt. (Psst… buy stock in titanium!) When I woke up, the nurse had me move to a chair, but since I was still semi-dopey, my entire right side wasn’t responding to my usual re-wiring coping tricks, and I could barely walk. It was a scary and harsh reminder of what my physical reality would be like if I’m not constantly on top of things. Then we got home that afternoon just in time for another internet repair guy, who decided to try bypassing our underground line and running a new above-ground cable. That little endeavour involved four hours of coming in and out the house and drilling through masonry at the service panel, which was directly under our bedroom window where I was drooling blood and trying to find a way to pass out. I eventually gave up and checked email (since we had internet for a change). Turns out that when you’re hopped up on narcotics and still feeling pain but not caring, while simultaneously being oversensitive and pissed off at the world, that’s NOT a particularly bright time to even read emails, let alone reply back to them.
I skipped over Wednesday and Thursday because they were a total blur.
Friday was when I dragged my ass out of bed and, half-stoned, cleaned the house. My parents (who have never been here before) would be arriving the next day, and we gave them detailed instructions how to navigate our somewhat confusing neighbourhood Roads and Drives with their large truck and 25 foot camper trailer, and arranged with the neighbours that it was okay if my folks parked their rig in front of our house for the weekend.
Saturday, we woke up to find our street completely closed off for re-paving, notices to move vehicles or they’d be towed, and no detour signs. My parents don’t have a cell phone. We eventually found them parked and stressed out a block away, and later that night, we had eleven adults, three dogs, and a toddler shriekingly afraid of the dogs, all crammed into our living room. Our friend groaned, then laughed, when I described the 150 pound dog fight of which I found myself in the middle.
Wrapping it up (well, relatively speaking), was Sunday, which was our daughter’s 18th birthday. She and I had planned to go together and get navel rings as a bonding, mother-daughter thing, but I had to disappoint her and confess that I wasn’t up to any more pain or metal foreign objects stuck into me for a while.
It was very therapeutic and calming to reconnect with one of my best friends, and catch up and laugh together about the craziness that is each of our lives. We lost our connection for a while there, which had made me sad and concerned.
“I’ve thought about blogging about it all but, as usual, I have no idea how to write it without it coming across the wrong way,” I said.
“Like you want sympathy,” they added, understanding immediately. “Yeah, I don’t know how you could do it either. It’s a tough one. I just went through the same thing, where I wrote something that I found funny, and people wrote back, all kind and sweet and caring. Not that it’s not appreciated, but it wasn’t what I was going for.”
One of the very few people who understands me, we both see stuff that happens to us as being neither good nor bad – it just is. It’s the stuff that we do that ultimately counts. And one of those things is, wherever possible, keeping a sense of humour and perspective. Although it’s sometimes a little slow in coming.
Having that mentality can make it difficult to share many details of your life with others, because often what you say in a “Wow, what a ride this life is!” kind of fascination, is heard as being self-pitying or insecure.
My world is a full-on paradise compared to what many people have to deal with on a daily basis. There is no way that the occasional challenge, or even a frustrating cluster of shitstorms like these, makes me want for even a minute to trade my life for anyone else’s!
I had implant surgery.
Sadly, not THAT kind of implants. I wish it WAS something that I could put to work and recoup some of the buttload of money it cost me! (Kidding, relax.)
What a maroon I am. Cripes. It was pointed out to me that nowhere had I mentioned what kind of operation it was. It wasn’t intentional – it just never dawned on me that the back story of the car accident and all that, was written on the previous blog and not on this one. Duh…
So I dug up what I had written on the old blog and I’ve posted it on a individual page called “Me and my big mouth” here, for anyone curious or masochistic enough to read through the long story.
I also took a draft post that I wrote when I first created this blog, and made another page here. I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to explain the rubber chickens, but I guess if I’m ever going to, now would be a relevant time. I naively hoped that I could just leave that aspect of my life undetailed on this blog, but it’s a significant part of my daily reality so, really, trying to write as if it isn’t seems kind of… stupid.
Our son passed out at his job today, from drinking. He blacked out, bruised the side of his face, and scared the life out of his co-worker when she came in to investigate the noise and found him flat on the floor.
Ari is legal age now and he has a beer with us sometimes, but he’s always been an overall great kid. We never would have ever suspected that he had a drinking problem, let alone that there’d be an incident at his work!
Especially since it wasn’t even alcohol, but Dr. Pepper.
The details were a little hard to catch because he and his dad were laughing too hard when he told the story, and all I could think was MY BABY+UNCONSCIOUS and my maternal brain started to melt down.
Near as I could gather, Ari was on his lunch break and he went to take a big swig of his Dr. Pepper. It was fizzing heavily and the ice in the fountain cup shifted at the same time as the whole thing half-spilled, while he simultaneously took a deep breath, causing him to accidentally get a huge, honking, lung-full of the carbonated bubbles. He said he felt a really sharp pain in his chest (which nearly gave ME a heart attack to hear), and then the room went black.
Carbonated=carbon dioxide=no oxygen to the brain=thwaaack! on the floor
Have you ever heard of such a thing? He thinks it’s all pretty hilarious, as did his coworkers and the rest of our family once it was determined that he was okay. There’s been a plethora of riffs and puns about drinking and passing out, and at least there was a “doctor” nearby, hyuck, hyuck….
Oy.
Meanwhile, his little brother was at a dollar store in the same strip mall where Ari works. When Cob started to head home he walked past a fire truck and heavy rescue unit pulling up to the fabric store, which was missing the entire front of the building. Some little old lady mistook it for a drive-thru business.
Just a few weeks ago, the same thing happened to the deli in the same mall, just across the parking lot. And less than a block away from that, somebody took a corner too wide and drove up onto a person’s lawn, miraculously squeezing between two trees that were only eight feet apart before crashing into their living room.
Two days ago, a deer jumped and crashed through the front window of a grocery store at another nearby strip mall.
Oh. Okay, I get it now!
I’m living in the freaking Bermuda Triangle.
I want to kiss Corey the Cable guy. If he’s lucky, I might even have teeth again by then. I don’t know what he looks like or how old he is, but at this point I hardly care. He seems to have (knock on wood) finally fixed our internet problems, and for that alone I’m in love.
For almost a freaking month, our ultra-high speed underground cable internet was worse than dial-up. We would have service, but often too slow to even download anything, for an hour, maybe two, and then lose it completely again for several more hours – the only rhyme or reason seeming to be that the more desperately we needed a connection, the longer it stayed down.
With five users in the house, three of which are teenagers and two of which work exclusively from home for their jobs, reliable internet connection isn’t a luxury in our family – it is a necessity for our employment, education, and overall mental health.
I’m aware of how pathetic that sounds, yes.
After countless phone calls to support, and five (FIVE!) different on-site service calls, where the techs collectively tested and replaced every single component from the panel box in the alley right through and including the modem, we still had no reliable internet. Doc is a computer programmer who builds and maintains custom applications and networks, so he was forced to forfeit a week of his available vacation days just to account for the accumulated work time lost, and his clients were getting less and less understanding and patient.
As was his boss.
As were we. The loss of his vacation days and the risk to his job were NOT good for either of our stress levels.
I have more flexibility with my job but it, too, was becoming extremely stressful not knowing what messages were getting through, what was disappearing into the ether, and when I would be able to actually upload or connect to anything.
We were assembling coat hangers, tin foil, and duct tape and wondering where to make the splice in our neighbour’s cable when our case was assigned to Corey, our sixth repair guy and last hope. As senior field technician, he said that he was the end of the line. If a problem got to him, it stopped there and he stayed on the case until it was resolved. He chatted with my husband for over an hour, didn’t even bother looking at any of our connections because they’d already been overhauled completely, and drove off in his truck, with the promise to be in touch.
Yeah, right, we thought, and retreated back to our own padded rooms to grieve, away from each other to avoid bloodshed or divorce.
But, miraculously, he reported back several hours later and said that he’d found multiple problems in the community service grid and he’d done a number of fixes, but if we continued to have problems to call him directly on his cell phone.
Since then, (I hesitate to write this out loud) our connection has been perfect.
It was a huge relief to not only have it finally fixed, but to get confirmation that it wasn’t anything on our property that was the problem. The bill for all those service calls would’ve been astronomical.
I knew, of course, the underlying root of the problem. See, the internet is technology, and technology and I have had a barely civil, and often hostile, relationship since I was about five years old and playing Hide-the-Thimble. Being the bright wee lass that I was, I found the perfect hiding spot. Firmly pushing the thimble onto my finger, it was a perfect fit when I deftly shoved it into a lamp’s empty light socket, promptly arc-welding the metal thimble and almost killing myself in the process.
My mother still has that thimble, by the way. There’s a hole in one side, burned through the metal when the current passed through it and into me, so using it for sewing requires care that the needle doesn’t come through the hole, but my mother throws nothing away.
A lamp is TOO technology! Uh-huh! Psshtt… if it has a motor, a circuit board, or plug-in, it’s all technology in my book, and completely untrustworthy and out to get me. Computers and the internet are just the most insidious and torturous of them all.
It’s been two weeks today since my surgery. Most of it has gone by in a blur. The rest of it I’d love to take back and have never had happen.
I flushed the pain drugs that were making me freak out – overreacting and straight up imagining things. And thanks to my dentist who insisted that “There’s no way you can handle that kind of torture,” and changed my post-op plan, the pain is getting back to within managable range.
So I’m on the mend. It sure would’ve been nice if I could have gone loopy quietly here at home without anyone else ever knowing. Nothing like adding humiliation and deep regret to the list of stuff I need to learn to cope with.
Trying to distract myself, I did some surfing and stumbled onto this blog, and this post in particular.
There are four things that you cannot recover:
- The stone… after the throw
- The word… after it’s said
- The occasion… after the loss
- The time… after it’s gone
I also read the comments, which I almost never do on a blog. I hope this person is right when he says “in appreciating the shadows, light arises spontaneously”.
How does one learn to hug a shadow, I wonder.
Men, I’ll let you in on a little secret. If a woman goes off her rocker and becomes completely unreasonable and impossible to deal with, it’s virtually always because of one thing: she is hurting and/or scared.
There are a lot of women who spend their entire waking hours feeling hurt and/or scared. It becomes what defines them – what gives them power. Some even actively resist anything that will make them feel less hurt/scared, because it’s such an unknown.
We girls can be pretty fucked-up like that.
It gets even more complicated because the last thing a hurting/scared woman wants to deal with is the possibility that she’s hurting/scared. That would mean facing the fact that she’s vulnerable. No, no, not just everyday, vanilla vulnerable – we’re talking FUCK WITH YOUR MIND vulnerable. If she wasn’t over the edge before, acknowledging that she’s losing control of her thoughts/emotions will certainly finish her off. So there’s no god-damned way she’s about to let anyone else know that she’s hurting/scared – she’ll flip out and be pissed off instead! That isn’t nearly so risky.
Fortunately, in a unhealthy-but-society-can-still-function way, you have to have a decent amount of self awareness to ever realize, let alone admit, that you’re losing your ability to cope. And since self awareness is about as common as common sense, you don’t generally see females the world over publicly freezing up, shooting up, or cracking up in mass numbers.
But I, I am self aware. Granted, I’m also stubborn and proud as fuck… but I’m self aware.
Eventally.
My family is fine, my marriage is fine, and everything else truly important in my life is, I think and hope, now fine again. But I’ve gone fairly loopy lately, with the recent surgery following an almost comically unbelievable number of life hits and frustrations. I’m not far enough through the mess yet to be able to blog about it easily. I’ll get there, and when I do I might write in more detail about it then. Or I might find that it’s not something that I feel the need to write much about, after all.
Typically, I write when I’ve got a good chunk of a concept in my grasp and it’s… aargh… oh, so… close… but not… quite… there… yet. Writing helps me hear it back, which often fine-tunes and polishes it. I’m not sure yet if I’ve found the edge of a deeper part of myself that I need to pick at and process and face, or if I’ve just stumbled from one shitstorm, into another, into another, and there’s not really any significantly deeper or life-altering meaning behind it, beyond survival!
I’ve blogged before about personal and emotional stuff (on my old blog), but whenever I do that, it’s always after the fact. After I’ve gotten through the muck of it and am well on my way to having a handle on things and have grown from it and don’t feel so vulnerable. I write when I can see the light again and am secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) feeling pretty cocky and proud to have dug my way back.
I’m not feeling cocky and I’m damned sure not proud of myself right now. When I was sinking in life’s quicksand, I thrashed about and made things worse, so I’m in a pretty deep humble hole at the moment.
And I’m still hurting/scared.
But I’d like to try to blog at least *something* about it all, because I also have a somewhat faulty and selective memory. If I don’t document it to some extent, I’m liable to lose perspective over time and there’s NO WAY I want to ever have to revisit or re-learn this. So if it seems like I’m just skimming along the surface, or if I start to dip my toe into a subject but then don’t step whole hog in, please forgive the shitty and disjointed writing. I’m not being deliberately vague, or dramatic, or self-absorbed. I’m just trying to get back on my rocker.
