Raw

I feel so raw. I was flipping through pictures of the hurricane Wilma damage, and I am simply amazed. 98% of South Florida is without power, and they think it may be out for up to four weeks. A month with no power, which means - no lights, no air conditioning (yes, still quite necessary in S. Fla.), no gasoline (the pumps can't run without it), no hot water for most people's homes, no way to keep food cold - or to cook it (aside from a grill).

The street I worked on is littered with glass from broken windows from the high rises. The building next to it has close to 80% of the windows gone.

The building my husband worked at in downtown Ft. Lauderdale looks like a bomb went off.

Cell phone towers are down, so I can't get ahold of anyone to check in on them.

While I understand, and admit that the devastation is no where near that of Katrina as far as the loss of life - it's still horrific.

Fog

It's so foggy that I can't see out of my window at work.

It sort of sums up how I feel today too.

Foggy, grey... and well just hanging around without a real purpose.

Bleh.

Wishing for a moment

that today would end. I feel guilty, because I know how good I have it, but dear heaven am I exhausted.

Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton,
Oh Lordy, pick a bale of hay...

As long as their soda cans are red white and blue ones

I am going to seriously beat the damn printer to death. I wish I had a baseball bat and an open field.

I'm having a "PC Load Letter" day, and it's only 10:15.

Ugh.

How Long, How Long Blues

Another seizure surprised me over the weekend.

This time, I had no warning. This time the feeling of tenseness in my back, the way my vision tunnels before it happens was missing. Usually, that's how I prepare myself for it - giving me just precious moments to prepare for the inevitable. But it didn't happen, and that leaves me more frightened than anything.

Instead of a warning there was just blackness and the feeling that the ground was giving way beneath me. Afterward, it was the same metallic taste in my mouth and the unbelievable exhaustion.

I don't want to go through this anymore.

I am so tired. So tired.

And I know deep down that the doctor visits are going to have to start up again.

The drunk girl

Sitting three rows in front of me today was the drunkest, most obnoxious, loudest person I've ever had to tolerate in a sporting event. She was perhaps 20 - maybe a few years older, but I doubt it.

She spent the entire game screaming at the top of her lungs and shaking her large - but not really attractive - chest at those of us unlucky enough to be sitting behind her (i.e. in the opposite direction from the field). She was so wasted that she spilled her entire beer not once, not twice, or even three times - but FOUR times on the fans sitting around her. She became belligerent, and wouldn't sit down and just generally was a complete pain in the ass.

I'm a very laid back person. It takes a lot to get under my skin.

So it was a bit surprising when I went up to the guy she was with and said that if he was going to bring her back, he was going to have to bring a muzzle for her.

And then I yelled at her to sit her drunk ass down, and I swear - she turned around and urinated on herself. And then she kept dancing.

I wish I was making this up. But trust me, I will never ever be drunk again. Seeing her make an ass of herself like that basically completely eliminated the possibility of that ever happening.

Vulnerable

I have tired to ensure that I distanced myself as much as possible from as many people as I could.

I pushed away those closest to me. I kept secrets, even at times from myself. The truth about who I am, who I think I am - at least, was always hidden beneath a thin veil of secrecy. Little by little, I would let people in - slowly shedding the outer layers of protection. Inevitably the closeness became that which hurt me most. Inevitably my words were brought back - twisted and snarled. My misconstrued truths appeared pregnant with mendacity under the harsh light of criticism.

I had forgotten how precarious it is to be vulnerable. I forgot how simultaneously frightening and alluring it is to be raw - so open, allowing another to casually thumb through my pages, reading, interpreting as they see fit. To be disrobed of secrecy... my breath feels stolen. My heart pounds and my hands quiver.

Without anonyminity to cloak me, I am left defenseless.

With all my armor falling down, in a pile at my feet
And my winter giving way to warm, as I'm singing him to sleep

Learning to trust is so difficult.

Weekend

I'm an amateur photographer, and was hoping to get away this weekend to take pictures of the changing leaves in the Ozarks. Unfortunately, Mother Nature is running a little late this year, so my plans will likely be sidelined. A pity because the autumn sun is so beautiful for photographs, it seems to make everything take on a warm, golden glow.

We have a Chiefs game on Sunday against Washington (and growing up - as I did in Dallas you are taught from a very early age that the Redskins are mortal enemies) . And how offensive is that name anyway? I can deal with the Utah Utes or the Florida State Seminoles for mascots, because they are actually named after a tribe. My great grandfather lives on a reservation in Oklahoma and although upon looking at me you would have no doubt that I am anything but 100% Irish or German, they are my people too. But "redskins" is just a racial slur. It would be similar to calling a team the Niggers or the Wetbacks or Beaners. It makes my skin crawl.

I'm hoping to get the 400+ tulip and daffodil bulbs I have in the ground this weekend, and hopefully doing some more writing, and perhaps work some on a quilt top that I'm planning.

Sometimes, not having big plans is the best plan of all.

Fragments

I love to write, and for the last fifteen years or so have been scrawling poetry into the margins of books, on errant receipts and airplane napkins. Most of it I never keep, although I wish I had.

My mother was a voracious reader, and taught me to read when I was in kindergarden. Incidentally, I also was taught to write in cursive before most of my classmates had conquered printing their name. I always asked for books instead of toys, reading and rereading the books until the spines literally split and the pages fluttered. In my basement are a stash of my favorites from childhood - Twiddlebugs at Work (a Seasame Street book), The Penguin Who Hated the Cold (a Goldenbook I think - but maybe Disney), The Dollhouse Murders, The Witch of Blackbird Pond - and perhaps fifty others from various ages that I hope someday to pass along to my own children.

I loved all sorts of books, and still do today. I wrote a lot - finding it cathartic to make up stories to escape the emptiness in my own life. Eventually I branched out into poetry, and occasionally I still find my earliest poems tucked into my grandmother's books. I've never been comfortable sharing my writing with people, as I am perhaps my own worst critic and tend to throw away most of the better pieces.

I was heavily moved by e e cummings, Marge Piercy, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Sylvia Plath and an untold number of other poets - their names not remembered, but their verses etched onto my heart.

In particular, I remember in seventh grade flipping through the poetry books in the musty public library and finding a poem about birches - their branches inextricably linked "at the ruined end of summer" or something similar. For the first time while reading I was moved to tears. I have been looking for a long time for the poem, as I only remember snippets of the lines, and those, I am afraid may have been warped by a faulty memory and the passage of time.

I wish somehow, these fragments of memories were larger - that I could sew them together and remember.

Why is the pineapple smoking?

Yesterday evening by the time I got around to making dinner I was beyond bushed. Pork chops were sizzling, the stuffing was nearly done and I thought I'd throw a loaf of french bread into the oven.

After a few minutes I noticed that it looked like a fresh pineapple I had sitting on top of the stove was smoking. Curious, I picked it up - smelling it - trying to find out why it was smoking.

Now mind you, I was really really tired. Too tired in fact to probably have been cooking dinner.

As I sat there smelling the pineapple, wondering what the hell was making it smoke, a realization hit me.

I had left the paper wrapper on the bread when I put it in the oven. I opened the oven door and smoke and fire billowed out. Instinctively, I grabbed the FLAMING bread with my bare hands and threw it on the counter. By this time the entire downstairs was covered in smoke, and the smoke alarm started howling. I was rushing to open doors and windows, and dancing like a crazy woman trying to fan the smoke out of the kitchen.

Michael walked in and said what the hell is on fire?!?! And I said I can't tell you. I really can't. This just goes beyond stupidity. I finally fessed up and he spent the entire night looking over at me and laughing, telling me that I'm adorable.

Apparently my husband, he has a thing for arsonists, or at least pyros.

The bread had curled into a U shape. And you know what - I still served part of it.

Pepto Fountains

I live in the city of fountains. Seriously, this place is a hidden gem of beauty - nothing like the back woods cow town I imagined before I moved here. The only city in the entire world that has more fountains is Rome. They're beautiful (and I'm going to grieve when they're shut down for the winter. With temps dipping into the low 40s tonight I noticed one was turned off on the way into work this morning).

For the last few days the fountains in the city have all been spewing bright pepto pink water, and placards have been placed around the fountains to remind people to "think pink" and to get mammograms. I guess that October is breast cancer awareness month.

Now, I am a big supporter of breast cancer research - namely because well, I'm quite fond of my tatas, and can readily appreciate other peoples as well. I donate every year to the Susan G. Komen foundation, a very good family friend (who incidentally is a man) nearly died of breast cancer two years ago. Michael had a colleague pass away from breast cancer when she was only 26 or 27.

I was grousing on the way home that the fountains looked ridiculous - I just kept thinking of Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias ("Paaaaank is my signatuh colah"). This morning though, my check on the girls in the shower rendered up something that just didn't feel right.

I have fibrocystic breasts, so things there are always unforunately a little lumpy. Vitamin E seems to help sometimes, but with normal hormone fluctuations things start to feel like cream of wheat that has been cooked too long. But the spot I found was rock hard, and it didn't move like the normal cysts.

In the end, I am sure that it will turn out to be nothing. In the end, I am sure that everything will be o.k.

But right this very moment, things are a little worrisome to say the least.

I wouldn't have remembered to even check had it not been for the fountains last night. I usually never check because I always assume I'm too young to worry about it.

Half Baked

They decided, (and who "they" is, I'm not really sure) that my office needed to be repainted today. Not this evening, but twenty minutes ago - when I am in the midst of writing a legal opinion letter regarding the tax qualified status of a multi-million dollar deal. Not really spectacular timing if you ask me, but then again, no one did.

Since I am forced to keep my door closed to concentrate (I'm at the end of a hall and all the noise tunnels directly into my office) I am also simultaneously concentrating toxic paint fumes.

Dude. I want some doritos.

Bile

I had a dream last week that I was working in the early hours of the morning, and that as I was walking to the kitchen to make more coffee he was standing there in the shadows. At first I walked right past him. His face was foreign somehow, forgotten - a mere shadow of a memory, but yet there was an undeniable familiarity. But then I heard his voice, and my heart stopped.

And I knew it was him before I ever turned my head to see. And I knew, that it was too late to scream. Too late to get away.

I won't go into the minute details of the dream, how I ran screaming from him down a hallway, how I tripped on the beige carpet and slammed my entire weight into the door to lock it before he opened it. How he used a fire extinguisher to beat my office door down. I won't go into how people heard me screaming and went about their business like nothing was wrong, or how after all this time I woke up with a scream caught in my throat and my heart wildly - madly beating my mouth full of bile. After all this time, I am still afraid.

It had been nearly a year since I last had a nightmare about him. Old roommates complained that I used to scream every night - that they felt as if we were living in a haunted house. How do you explain that the haunting is in your own mind - hidden truths buried in your own heart? How do you explain that after the bruises fade that the scars still remain? When we were first married, Michael said I screamed every night- begging for someone to stop. Beseechingly crying out for mercy. Over time, I gradually felt safe in my new life and the dreams faded, only occasionally coming back to haunt me.

It had been nearly a year, but the fear was so tangible - so incredibly strong that I found comfort only after locking myself in my bathroom and rocking myself on the cold tile floor. After all this time, I am still that afraid.

I thought by now it would be over. I thought by now I would be healed.

But instead, now when I find a car coming up fast behind me on the street, I instinctively look in my rear view mirror to see if it's him. Instead, I find myself afraid to be alone in the house again, afraid to venture out in the dark. Instead, I find myself full of self-hate that I allowed it to happen. I find myself angry that I didn't stand up. I find myself utterly devoid of hope.

I hate being afraid. I hate that you did this to me. I hate that this fear will never go away.

I am still a prisoner to an unspeakable truth that bears down with greater force than you ever did. I just want it to go away.

Finally

My house... is finally mine. For the first time since we've lived here - it's actually just the two of us here.

Well, aside from the last remnants of her stuff in the basement. We helped her move out on Saturday morning, and do you think we got even so much as a thank you for being the only ones to help her move out? Do you think we got one for housing her rent and bill free for over two months? Uh - not so much. Not even a simple "thanks."

But it's over. And that is cause for serious celebration.