Laundry day

Doing laundry is like taking a shower. I hate doing either. They require prep, forward thinking and clean-up afterward. They are both disruptive. The only things that help me through doing them is that they both include the use of powerfully pleasant perfumed materials, and they both serve as reminders that as a human, bad smells mean bad things might happen... poor hygiene leads to boils and unpleasant reactions by others, and stinky clothes can mean mold, Goodwill clothes may carry lice or bed bugs.

Don't get me going on bed bugs... or my weird thoughts when it comes to "contamination".....

Too late.....

Here is a bed bug. These pests used to be a thing of the past. Fleas used to not live in Denver. But by some twist of fate, they now are a real part of our modern lives. I saw a documentary about a woman with these huge welts, and she was being horribly misdiagnosed and hence mistreated, until she searched the internet and found that her symptoms matched perfectly with a bed-bug infestation. Turns out that during a vacation, her belongings were infested from the hotel she stayed at. Anyway, now I have a rule that no porous item is brought into the house from Goodwill until it is first laundered.

And we are back to laundry.

So, it's laundry day. The day for renewal, potent perfumes, prep and clean-up. Once I have put laundry away, and same with after a shower, I feel so stupid, because doing these simple acts make me feel better, happier, more confident, full. Why do I put them off? I know it is odd, but I think I fight them because they are tangible proof of my physical reality. That I am, right now, encased in a physical body. I know it sounds absurd and maybe a little elitist, but it's true. There are plenty of other physical activities I revel in. But these two, they point out that things here get dirty and have to get clean.

Just another Sirian wanderer looking for a perpetually clean place to think.

Our Amazing Bodies

Everyone gets hangnails. It's is a part of the human experience.
 So are other things that are just as benign and unpleasant,

such as ear crud.

Then there are things that people don't talk about alot. They are more to do with excreta, and as such might be best left alone, so here is just a hint such things.

ROSIE'S HOME

She is just skin and bones, but she appears to be no worse for wear. Our canvassing paid off...

While doing so last evening, a neighbor in E building said he laid out a little bed and some food and water on Monday night because he'd heard from a neighbor about a missing black cat. On Tuesday morning he checked his patio, and sure enough there lie a little black cat, but she took off as soon as he opened up the patio door. I gave him my phone and apartment numbers, just in case she decided to come back

A couple hours later he was buzzing our door to tell us that his neighbor on the 2nd floor had a stray black cat in his apartment! Sam and I were so excited... we hurried over there, knocked on 210, and there before us was Not Rosie.

But the neighbor did not want this cat, so I consented to taking her. She was a huge, meaty black cat with white belly and neck. She felt pregnant to me.... it was clear she was a very loved and well-fed cat, and I knew someone would be missing her. I figured we could give her shelter and put up signs, maybe even take her to the Dumb Friends League.

As we were leaving their building to go to ours, the Good Samaritan who'd gotten the whole ball rolling told me the little black cat he returned to his porch! At that moment, the fat black cat who'd been such a lover became violent, scratched my arm, struggled and got free. We went over to look at this new black cat, and there before us was Rosie.

She's been too out of her mind with fear to let anyone approach her, but it took just a minute or so of cooing and quietly calling her name before she allowed me to grab her by the scruff of the neck and hold her. I could feel her skeleton through her dirty fur. She was silent on the walk to our building. The only time she made a sound was when we got on the elevator, and then she yowled like I was skinning her. We unlocked our door, put her down, and she was HOME.

Minky was so happy to see Rosie. Minky has not eaten the canned tuna we prepared for Rosie. Rosie spent the night stuck like glue to me, and once her belly was full enough, she took her place under covers and slept.

This morning she is perhaps more docile, and certainly more hungry than usual, but I think she'll be fine. The biggest change is that this once aloof cat now refuses to leave my arms.

I should have made more of an effort to locate this sweet cat. At least with her home I can forgive myself my laissez-faire approach to this wonderful creature's fate. As atonement, I vow to make no disparaging comments about her awful tuna farts.

This sign maker is either really stupid or really weird.

Spring, Seasons and Mortality

Spring is definitely here. The six-story tree just outside our door is more green than brown, all the little finches have returned, and somehow sunlight is now less an intrusion than a blessing. The earth is waking up. 

Two or three years ago I entered a profound existential phase, but just as spring has returned to our patch of Earth, so spring has returned to my spirit. I cannot say my soul has rediscovered spring, because I see the soul as Spring, and as The Spring, but the spirit, that's a horse of a different color. 

My spirit, the tiny spark of my soul currently inhabiting this flesh, was shocked into a crisis of sorts when it became more and more plain to me that I would not have time to realize all of my dreams, and worse, that many of the dreams I once held so dear no longer held my interest.

I was working Hospice at the time, so I was routinely exposed to people younger than me dead in the beds, having finally succumbed to cancer or some other shitty end. I began to think about what would happen to me if I got a death sentence disease: where would I live if I couldn't pay rent, and what would happen to my son?

Gosh, what a madcap time for my friends and family.

As time passed, I got used to the spectre of my grave. You see, I don't say "the grave" because I have always been supremely comfortable with the thought of death, and have always viewed it as a good thing, as going home, going someplace exciting and familiar and maddeningly out of my reach, yet I began to realize I held death as an abstraction. Once it became a cellular reality, it was my grave, my tombstone, my loved ones grieving, not just me going on my Final Joyride.

And now I am on the other side of that dark time. I don't think about the turbans I might need to find online to cover my bald head. I don't consider catastrophe. Neither do I see my life as endless, and this reality is neither a relief nor a cause for alarm. It just is what it is.

Really, the only important thing I have taken from those years wrestling with mid-life shock and awe is that I have wasted a lot of time. I didn't spend enough time doing things that I remember well. I spent too much of my time metaphorically covering up in a warm blanket, protected and warm and neutral.

So with spring comes rebirth, and as spring approached this year I didn't spend any time considering that my seasons are numbered, that I have just so many springs left. Jesus, what a waste of angst. Nope, I just have been more willing to do stuff that I can remember clearly. Physical stuff, stuff that engages all of my senses, not just my head.

And I made this my desktop picture, because it's just the kind of thing that a person devoted to laughing out loud once a day needs to see at this time of year.

Happy Spring, everybody. Spring's happy too,

Rosie

So, my neighbor has seen Rosie, our cat who fell from our 3rd floor balcony 3 weeks ago.... he told us about the weekend sitings yesterday, and we spent the evening calling for her. We saw her dart from the bushes in front of 'E' Building to the undercarriage of a huge-ass truck parked across the street.

We laid on the grass next to the truck and left food out for her. Sam sang a beautiful song for her while we lay there in the sun. Then we said a little prayer for her and went back inside for the night.

After seeing the dismembered bird wings scattered around the grounds, I wondered if Rosie would even consent to be an indoor cat again. Scampering in the wild is what a cat like Rosie was hard-wired for.


I stood where Rosie would have landed after falling off the balcony. Good God, what a drop. Standing there I shivered, wondering how in the hell any animal could survive such a thing.....



I like the thought of a cat always landing on their feet. I think when all is said and done, most of we humans have the same capacity.

What do you think?

Coincidence?

revisit this post to lol anytime

Foreign signs about dogs are funny.

Issues With Authority, Continued

"You know, sometimes I think that I could be the Lord God Almighty and you'd still find fault with me. I've really tried to be a better manager lately. What is your  issue with me?"

"I have noticed your recent efforts. But, working under your supposition, I'd still feel very comfortable saying to you,  'Jesus Christ, you are a world-class douche bag.'"

war and ringworm

Just got done watching Stephen Colbert (who is maybe less funny but far more subversive than Jon Stewart) interview the editor of wikileaks (see link below). Then I watched the video on wikileaks titled Collateral Murder, then I watched the analysis of the video on Al Jazeera English by the editor of wikileaks and a former DoD dickhead.. Here's the link to the wikileaks video:

collateral murder

It is shameful that as a country we have yet to apologize for the mess we have made of Iraq. Just shameful. So it is gratifying to me to see this video, and all the press it's been getting (though obviously, not any national/mainstream press). It is awful to watch, and should fill American breasts with abject shame, but it should galvanize viewers toward the ever-obvious conclusion that the Iraq war is and always has been obscene and unjust.

So after getting my fill of political chaos, as outlined above, I googled ringworm. That's because yesterday I showed my neighborhood Walgreen's pharmacist my scalp and she said, "Oh, yeah, that's ringworm."  Here's what the pharmacist saw:

Three weeks ago I paid a board-certified dermatologist $30 to ask her what the fuck was wrong with my scalp. She told me it was "a fungal infection", but that I shouldn't take an oral anti-fungal to cure it. Instead she handed me a coupon for a couple bucks off a brand-new type of anti-fungal gel. The gel she prescribed cost $180.00, so I didn't get it.

I called the dermatologst right back, and had to leave a voice message saying I couldn't afford the gel she'd prescribed, so I needed to know what else I could use. A week later, the doctor's secretary got around to leaving me a voice message telling me to use Tough-Actin' Tinactin  (yes, the jock-itch medicine) twice a day, and to come back in a month.

Holy crap. My internet diagnostics today taught me that scalp ringworm is the most tenacious variety of this infection, and because it is so hard to get rid of, the first line of defense is an oral anti-fungal medication. 


Additionally, during my visit she should have told me to:
1- check my kid for symptoms because this shit is contagious as hell
2- throw out my hairbrush
3- dunk my newly-adopted cat who has a weird skin issue in buttermilk
4- use super-strength Selsen-Blue daily for at least one month
5- dab on some Tea-tree oil once a day
6- bleach-wash all my towel and bed linens

Otherwise, I could end up looking like THIS:

I would have a gentler walk on this earth if I didn't have an issue with authority.

But today I am mad as hell at authority in general. Therefore, today I want to:
1- break all the speed limits
2- tell someone just doing their crappy little job to go fuck themselves
3- stamp and grind on the foot of Sam's doctor if she is even ONE minute late for our appointment
4- call my boss and lodge a formal complaint against the bitch charge-nurse who has made a dear patient of mine suffer two Sundays in a row
5- stop thinking such dark thoughts right this goddamned minute or else these stupid heart palpitations I'm having as I write this will probably kill me.

You know, there are still two wars going on right at this minute, and I still have ringworm, but today connecting with others on the internet made the thought of them easier to bear.

It has done nothing for my issues with authority, however.

"Grandpa's Off His Meds Again"

Ah, to be so bold, so free from worry that pink pantyhose belted with plastic-bottle fringe just Makes Sense, but only if paired with that wig he wore that one Halloween when he got high on mushrooms and partied all night at the Boulder Art Museum.

Dream

Had a dream that drunk waiter guy on that show on Showtime about catering came up to me and gave me a note to ask me to call him since he was so taken with me. This after just getting two other dates from very desirable people. But the actor guy was a doctor who'd just finished his Cardiology residency. Dad was talking with him and I overheard that he was divorced, his wife had left him because of the demands of his education. And he thought I was funny.

Also in the dream, I was roped into helping a little kid whose foot was jacked up, and I discovered some medicine that I enjoyed practicing. And that's how I met drunk-waiter-but-I'm-really-a-cool-doctor-who-is-just-a-guy-in-love-with-YOU.

Also in that dream, we were in a car in the city trying to get somewhere fast and we encountered a bad scene, fires and autos abandoned, and we were getting zapped/tingly in our car because there was a car electrified next to us.

So we got out of the car and were under a 5 story underpass. A big, burly, pleasant cop came up to us, loaded to the teeth (machine gun strapped to his back, grenades), and all of a sudden, his bat-like crime-fighting super hearing made his head cock to the left, he politely excused himself from our pleasant conversation, and scaled the walls of that underpass just like spiderman, just up, up, up, and I was filled with awe and a great sense of safety, that the world was about to be Put Right.

If you were Mary reading this, you'd be laughing because this story went on and on and on and on and on. It was self-indulgent and, more than that, absolutely thrilled with itself.

magma

"So what's wrong with it?!"
"There's nothing wrong with your business plan..."
"Yes, she's right. Your plan is great, Kate. It's the name"
"Magma. It's just too close. To close to..."
"Too close to miasma. To smegma. To..."
"To anything unrelated to a coffee shop. Christ, Kate, the name sucks."

Craptastic.

What a weird day to start in earnest my daily blog dedicated to laughing out loud once a day. I just learned I am being garnished for 1/4 of my paycheck for the next 10 paychecks. Those vultures. Oh well, what can I do? I'll plead with the attorneys who have heard it all before, and who will tell me to just deal with it. I planned on taking this weekend off and now I think I may have to cancel those plans. I don't see how I can skip out of work in this new set of circumstances. So all plans for extra expenditures are on hold until August.
So what is there to laugh about?
This is a debt I incurred while married but when my husband was taking my earnings, and giving me nothing to live on, so I took out 3 credit cards to buy baby stuff and household items, like food for all of us. Those cards bought my eventual freedom. I used them to leave him and set up shop in a different town with my 3 year old!
So an old debt has come home to roost.
They tend to do that.

So I will pay my debt. We will get by. I will state my apologies with my cash and move on. And I will still find a way to laugh out loud today. Maybe today when we are at the Goodwill we will find something that is very nice but for the horrible stains, I'll call out to my son, "Hey! This thing is CrapTastic!!!"