LaurieWrites

Holy Cross

I slept upright in a chair last night, in the emergency room of the hospital where I was born.

When I do classes for new international students, after we talk about the places they just arrived from in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and Europe, I ask them where they think I'm from. Some of them guess I'm from Kentucky or West Virginia, based on my less than upper crust accent, I presume. I tell them nope - I was born about five miles away, which is why I need to live a bit vicariously through their stories, and is also proof that our community is made up of people from around the world, and 'round the way.

This always gets a laugh, but they know I'm mostly serious.

Now I am in a chair in the corner of a cafe, feeling a bit sorry for myself, tired, stiff, and a bit more chafed by the family ties today than grateful. I was in the ER with the second grandmother in as many weeks who needed medical care, this time the one with whom I'm much closer and hands-on. I responded to the call to go be with her and wait for a room last night, after a typical wacked out August day at work. I got there around 6 p.m., and didn't leave this morning until 6:15. My aunt, who is a champ, stayed with me. We both kept telling the other one to go home. She instead got the pleasure of watching me prop myself up against a wall with a pillow, with my feet up on the mattress and my hand intermittently curled around the cup of coffee next to me on the table, waking myself up every ten minutes or so, tempted to lie down on the floor.

This hospital now has a 24-hour Starbucks in the lobby, the goofy soda machines that put your individual bottle in a little conveyor sort of contraption to deliver it through a window, and a bird and butterfly waiting garden outside. It lacked these amenities in 1971.

The emergency room at night is one of the most bizarre environments in all of existing civilization. This particular one depressed me more because it was like heaven's waiting room, populated with several elderly people in various stages of physical breakdown, and what I can identify as different stages of dementia, based on my years working with people with Alzheimer's disease and other kinds. The makeshift "rooms" - more indented space with curtains - were full, so many of them were scattered around in the area outside the square nursing station, sleeping in the cruel fluorescent light. Right outside my grandmother's little cubby room curtain, an elderly man lay curled on a stretcher, the top of his bald head the only thing visible to me, filled as it was with nicks and age spots. The sight of it upset me but I had to work not to see it, so my eyes kept drifting back. When I witness such things, I feel twinges of physical pain myself.

I stepped outside the curtain at one point, when the nurse came in to catheterize my grandmother, something I have zero interest in witnessing and didn't think was necessary, but the doctor said this was the only way, as dehydrated as she was. I stood miserably and listened to her cry and moan, shifting from foot to foot, uncomfortable, looking anywhere I could to forget what I was hearing. Down the hall, at the same moment, a woman in the room on the end vomited in technicolor into her bedpan. At the same exact moment, an EMT team pushed a wiry man in a stretcher through the far doors.

"Ma'am, I am sorry. I am sorry I said that. I didn't mean it," he said.

One of the EMTs was a woman.

"Actually, yes. I did mean it. I'm sorry ma'am, I meant it. I DID. But if you too had seen the ghost of Bob Marley, you'd know what I was trying to say."

It is a testament to my lack of sleep and the completely overwhelmed nature of my evening that I somehow mentally mistook Bob Marley for Bob Cratchit, and called to mind an image of a tall, grey, Britsh man balancing a ledger, and wondered why the hell anyone would think of him when it wasn't Christmas time. It was a little bit later when I realized it was "Redemption Song" and a big fat spliff that he was probably thinking of instead.

I could never be a nurse. A tall, very handsome African man named Manfred was her nurse after they moved us over to what I called the shadow side, an annex of the ER that was barely populated, after 1 a.m. It was creepy over there, and we were even more bummed out because we thought when they moved us that it was going to be upstairs, to the regular floor. There weren't even any machines on this side to monitor vital signs. Just us, and him, and an orderly playing solitaire on the computer. Manfred, though, moved dutifully, purposefully, capably. He called her "Ma'am." He was completely everything one needs in a person, especially of the opposite sex, who is providing what is often quite personal, invasive care.

"You want a new Depend, ma'am?"
"I am going to move you to one side, ma'am."
"I am going to take this sheet out from under you now, ma'am."

He didn't just jerk her around like some of them do, shoving rolling stretchers around like couches on moving day with no notice that there's an actual human being involved, transferring from bed to bed with the gentleness shown a sack of potatoes. He narrated the experience quietly. He told her what was going to happen to her body, whether she understood him or not. And every time she bellowed "WHAT HONEY?" he repeated himself. I loved him. If he hadn't been married I'd have married him.

The job plain sucks. And as I roamed up and down this little annexed area, trying to get a third or fourth wind, and shook out my vertebrae before cramming them back in the chair, I wondered how it was that some of us come equipped to do it and some of us don't. I don't. Now, the Bob Marley guy I can handle. I saw him later in the waiting room, fighting with the security guard, and it just fascinates me, the many twists and turns the brain can take, and what we define as normal, anyway. I can work with mental illness, which admittedly is beyond the scope of some people who can dress a physical wound or change an adult diaper. We all have our abilities and comfort levels.

Many family members of other patients left last night. For some there's a need to, and I guess we could have too. But the question of when she would be moved was never fully answered, and if one thing is clear to me in health care, it's that the person who has a visitor, or an advocate, or a family member sitting there dozing in a chair, tends to get more of a response if they're unable to fully express themselves. She woke up several times in night, forgetting where she was. She'd open her eyes, yawn, and say theatrically, "I'M SLEEPY." My aunt and/or I would jerk out of our book chapter or semi-REM sleep and say, "Go back to sleep," and she'd say "Okay" and then she would. My uncle showed up at 6:10 a.m., pissed that we'd all been through this bizarre waystation night, and my aunt and I stumbled home. My day was a waste, and my grandmother didn't get a room until 6 p.m, when another uncle was down with a meal from Wendy's, her favorite hamburger place, just to get her to eat something. Tonight, she's still agitated, and not sure where she is, and not interested at all in eating (that which landed her there in the first place.) I told her that if she continues this hunger strike without a cause, we're going to have to go through this hospital hell again, living as she is in an assisted living that likes to send people ot the hospital at the first sign of a crisis.

She doesn't really understand. This is a person who used to save me a HALF of a LEAN CUISINE for when I came in after work. Half. A half of something that wouldn't fill me up in its entirety if my life depended on it, that after I'm done eating, I lick the little plastic plate, and might be encouraged to gnaw on the box if some of the sauce dripped on it. She doesn't care about food, and at 86 it's showing.

Tonight she is in a bed on a regular floor. I dropped by and she was in a foul mood, was unspeakably rude to my cousin who had driven some distance to see her, and was confused about the reality of being in a hospital at all. We offered her dinner and she didn't want it. I told her I was leaving and she told me I couldn't leave her there alone. I told her I had to, that I was tired, and that she was safe. When pressed, I told her that my neck hurt and I needed to get some stuff done.

"YOU don't have to work tomorrow," she said.

She was never like this. She was not clingy or needy or in any way nasty about our personal responsibilities. I know her brain isn't working in the same way anymore. Still I find it difficult to separate myself from the guilt that I know is irrational. I left her in the capable hands of a nurse's aide who she seemed pleased as punch with after I pissed her off.

"Sali," she said. "That's a beautiful name. That is just great."

"You push the red button, and I will come," Sali said. "I will help you."

The Copters Have Landed in Facebook

This is absolutely ridiculous.

I mean, really, really.

"Wark recalls getting a call from a parent who had "psychological and sanitary concerns" about a student's new roommates, both of whom were gay men."

Call me judgmental, but, first of all, sanitary concerns about GAY men? Talk about barking up the wrong tree. (I live with three straight men, by the way.) Second of all, what the hell? I know that jerkdom is by no means restricted to parental status, but please I hope that for every parent who is a jerk, there's a non-jerk in the wings to cancel him or her out. (And also note that I cannot explain why this topic resonates so much for me, all the time, for reasons of employment and other perks that I enjoy, but it DOES.)

Whatever happened to going out and living your life? I'm so close to my parents it's ridiculous, but I have been free to decide with whom and where to spend my time, independent of their judgments (and sometimes to their panic and disappointment) for many, many years now. I was given what I believe is one of the most important things you can get from a family situation, and that is the open ability to form my own opinions and relationships.

It hasn't always worked out to my advantage. I used to be particularly slow on the uptake when it came to who and what was good for me and who and what wasn't. But I had things to work through relative to common developmental issues, like "the popularity myth: self-loathing, jockeying for position, and other adolescent joys" and "just because you say you're my bff doesn't mean a damned thing when you ditch me for someone else at 2 a.m." You know. Stuff like that.

It must be done. This is America, home of "Mean Girls" and "Heathers" and "Bill and Ted" and cowboy movies rife with betrayal of homies right and left. And although I've made many missteps, often in the white hot glare of my mother standing there going, "I just don't knooooooowwwww about that girl/guy", with  my dad in the background going, "Whatever you think is right. It's up to you" (maddening!) it's common psychological knowledge that that which our parents refute and judge is that which we are either going to likely want to consume in mass quantities or reject outright in fear that they will no longer love us and kick us out of our dysfunctional family units, not knowing for a hot second what we ourselves would do if we were open to independent thought. I don't know why this is. I'm a counselor, not a clinical psychologist. I'm sure you can find it in Freud's stash somewhere. Maybe I'll look it up later. I believe there is a reason though why every person I knew raised in a particular fundamental Christian church was either a missionary or a drug addict by their second year in college. When things are black and white, no essay question, parent knows best and don't you forget it, it gets really freaky when life doesn't turn out that way, or your FEELINGS send you in a direction that you never dreamed you'd go, or you were told that you under any circumstances whatsoever must not. It's an unavoidable part of the beautiful disaster of life that people do not exist in checklist form. So either you try to make it that way and head for a remote location to teach English or you throw out the list and fire up another joint. (And I'm NOT saying that ALL people who do these things are doing so in response to anything other than free will. Just most of the people in my old circle.)

It's a different situation if you think a person you love is in harm's way, and is too ignorant or brainwashed or like adjective to get him or herself out of a situation. If my sister were moving in with someone I'd seen smoking crack on a couch or raising his hand to her, I might be trolling Facebook with a little more reckless abandon, knowing full well however that no matter how much I knew I was right, she might reject my attempts to help her and consider me the one with the problem. But if she moved in with a gay man or woman? Awesome! Let's add some extra dressing to the stereotype salad and say "YAY! Softball tourneys, Natty Boh, and black labs running amok in the backyard!" or "A pink fuzzy couch and Top Chef marathons in the living room for everyone"

But we have a winner. We have, because that is what we need, someone to blame. And it's a PROFESSOR casting stones at the late Mr. Rogers.

Anyone who blames Fred Rogers for screwing up kids by being one voice of sweetness and light in a cruel world that also included 9/11, George Bush, and the Smurfs with their degraded language skills ("That's just SMURFY!" What?) missed the politics, pop culture AND pop media train about fifteen years back. This kind of reasoning would also allow me to blame the Wicked Witch (and her sadistic dog-killing alter ego Miss Gulch. Yeesh. I need to seek out a biography of L. Frank Baum to see what went on in his childhood.) in the Wizard of Oz for my occasional lapses into unexplained tears and gently neurotic core. Let us always blame pop culture, and take the responsibility squarely off of our shoulders. Forget killing my television - apparently it killed ME. It's not like any of us have brains, or central nervous systems, or learn anything from books.

Mr. Rogers belonged to my people anyway. He was the Grandpa changing his shoes for millions of Generation Xers, and we still churned out a mass of people who died in the name of grunge and Tiffany in Playboy years after she hit the shopping mall. He cannot be co-opted for the millennials, who would also not know a thing about the homoeroticism of Land of the Lost either, taught as they were to fear the Teletubbies and THEIR leering, seductive ways. Fred Rogers was old news by the time these kids were out of pull-up pants, so back off.

Facebook is a thing. It is a place, as is MySpace (which I blame for poor spelling and pink lacy banner graphics, among other things, but not the decline of civilization, because clearly Mr. Green Jeans is to blame for that, right?) and that dinosaur Friendster and Flickr and whatever other place you choose to dump your personal information online. Facebook's powers can be used for good or for evil. You can wish a friend a happy birthday or be a creepy stalker (she's not that into you. Stop checking her status.) or you can play Scrabble, or do what most people seem to be doing and spend endless amounts of time adding and removing these tacky applications that are turning it into a wasteland of unnecessary drop kicking and pwning. Using Facebook for roommate shopping is an activity for college students. If you want an account of your own, for your own, you know, LIFE, that's fine. If you're using it to profile your kid's friends for ANYTHING unrelated to criminal activity (and even then, if they're 18, it's their bag and the university's, no matter who's paying the bill) that's just a shame.

If I show up and the person in my room has swastikas on the wall and a white hood in the closet, I'm going to residence life and I'm probably going to cry at some point and they'll move me or I'll move myself. They may not have put that on their profile, so like most things in life, I have to see it in person. My graduate school roommates had an argument one weekend while I was home, and I came back to a house full of profanity-laced notes on doors and the knowledge that the one with the "good girl" persona drank a beer every morning before class and buried it in the garbage can. Why this bothered the other one - a compulsive shopper with a rage disorder who then paraphrased Sheryl Crow by constantly singing "JULIE likes a good beer buzz early in the morning" while stalking around the house in a green mud mask, I don't know. It wasn't my business or my problem. They were both gone by Christmas, and I got an apartment off-campus. Most roommate situations turn out to be a little bit sketchy and given to extremes.

Regardless, Facebook alone cannot give you the sum of a person, and in many cases misrepresents them entirely. A photo of my old roommate would never have let on that she needed a beer to face the day on campus, or that the other one would get her car keyed by an Ohio housewife in the WalMart parking lot for shouting "F'ing MOTIVATE!" behind her in the parking lot. If you looked at my profile now, you'd think I was a fuzzy, glowy, chubby girl with a thing for pop culture who lived my life in the blogosphere.

Wait. Haha. No, really. I'm much more complex than that.

You would not know that if your daughter or son had lived with me at 18 that I would have been friends with people who were WAY higher up in the social hierarchy than I was, who still considered me a commodity because I gave advice that only a square peg can give, because I lived on the outside of a number of worlds that never really let me in. And also that I was funny, and was friends with a ton of different people, as my friend Heather says, "infiltrating many groups, aligning myself with none." You would not know, independent of my sexual orientation or the color of my skin, that I would not by any means allow your child to die in a pool of their own vomit after a night of ill-advised freshman year drinking. You would not know that I would have the courage to stand up to a 200-pound asshole with additional beer muscles who was harrassing your child of either gender, and I'd sooner let someone pound on me than any friend of mine.

I'm really glad I didn't have Facebook in college, because I wasn't secure enough then to know that a social networking site is not indicative of who anyone is, or certainly who our friends are. If you'd seen a page of mine from 1989, you would have known the surface, and what I chose to represent to the world to make sure, in my immature need for "friends" and acceptance, that I got it from wherever it was willing to come. I may not have had the courage to tell you, at that time, if I were, that I was gay, or maybe I would have pretended to be even though I'm not, because it was cool. I had no idea that external motivations and rewards aren't where it's at. I did not know myself at the time, in all my current self-aware glory.

I know there are more distractions now. I know parents love their children. But I also know that discriminating against another for reasons of religious, ethnic or sexual orientation is against the policies of most institutions of higher education in the United States, and certainly against Federal law, so if colleges and universities are doing this to satisfy "customers", they are not only breaking their own often enforced policies, they are killing the intention of a university education. It is not, as is currently often believed, to hook a kid up with a high five figure job, or provide a home base for spring break trips. It is to teach critical thinking skills, and to increase intellectual knowledge and personal productivity.

I also, truly know that there is a distinct fear of sending ourselves and those we care about off into a world that we can't imagine is better, only frighteningly different, a world where we (oh my WORD) have to live with people who don't act and talk and look and partner exactly like we do. But if people are going to these lengths to protect what I KNOW are the most precious things in their lives, with no knowledge of any personal harm done to anyone involved, this just isn't the right way.

And by teaching this kind of openness and honesty, I'm sure their kids have a triple-protected secret profile in the Singapore network. If you're looking for trouble, it's easy to overlook your own backyard.

Please for to write a blog post?

I'm so behind.

I mean, in everything. Case in point: I could not keep my eyes open last night. I was trying, and failing, and finally got so I couldn't produce anything because I was so busy alternately trying to stay awake and failing. So I planned to wake up this morning early because I work late today, and get some pictures downloaded (hello, hundreds of pictures, languishing on memory cards, laughing at me in my dreams) Reality: I woke up this morning having slept on my neck wrong in my hot-ass room, pondered moving through the pain for awhile, wondered why in the hell it's no cooler at 8 a.m. than it is at 10 p.m., crawled to the shower, came back, and sat in the path of the fan until I could move my neck and, therefore, my arm, pondering the ferocity of the searing headache undoubtedly caused by whatever odd neck position that I remained in for approxmately eight and one half hours, and why I felt so much more like shit after the recommended amount of sleep than I do after five hours.

My life is so totally glamourous. How jealous are YOU?

So that means now I'm running as late as I ever am, which is usually at least a little. And all I want to do is sit here with my messed up neck propped up against a bedrest, eat licorice, and zone out while downloading photos.

Can't. Must go, must work through the pain, ignoring all things downloadable and writeable until later tonight.

Meanwhile, here's my latest bit over at BlogHer, and here's another one from the site, Ten Reasons to Ditch the Bottled Water Habit, by Greenlagirl. Freaky. Upsetting. And also a little confusing, because why does so much tap water taste like ass, and bottled water so fresh and lovely?

WHY MUST MY LIFE CONSIST OF ELEVEN MILLION CONFLICTS AND QUESTIONS? This is why my head hurts.

Excellent article from the Sunday Post here , finally, about reinventing your life. Right now I kind of wish I'd chosen Antarctica instead of my current spot, but reinvention is reinvention, friends. Check back with me in a couple of months and I'll give you a pull quote or two from my own experience.

You make it a good day. Stay classy, Internet.

BlogHer 07 Scavenger Hunt

I'm very much doubting that I've won anything in this scavenger hunt, but I did take a ton of photos and got some wonderful people in them, so I figured I'd link to them anyway.

Who knew there were two other Lauries (at least?) in the house?

It was fantastic to meet Laurie from Not Just About Cancer, who writes beautifully about her experience with the disease and about her life in general. She was one of the people I got to talk to at the unconference. 

I got to talk with Laurie Toby Edison from Body Impolitic, and also heard her on the  "Our Bodies, Our Blogs" panel. I realized that I am sorely unfamiliar with most of the online discourse about body image and weight, and this really shouldn't be, since this is an issue that has framed my life experience in SO many ways. (I did, however, get to meet Wendy! Wendy McClure! From Pound, who was the first blogger I ever read, and remains one of my favorite voices in any kind of media. She was on the panel too.)
Anyway, here's Laurie and me. (Hi, my hair! Meet Lake Michigan! SPROING!!!!)

Duh, I got a photo of Wendy too, if we're talking "blog idols". They didn't turn out well, since the light was funky and my focus was off, but meeting her in person was much more fun anyway.

Let's see, what else?

How's this for a money shot?

I can use it for one thing, right? I'll take Susan Wagner from Oklahoma for five points then. But only because I have the BlogHer cofounders here. 

...AND the lovely Cooper and Emily from BlogHers Act here.  

Also geographically speaking, Dana from the Dana Files is from Wisconsin, and is on the far left of this shot of the opening circle at the Unconference on Sunday.

Finally, I met Jen B. from Canada (another country, for me), while she was helping out at the wine table.

And here's BlogHer community manager Denise Tanton (and Elisa and Jory, too) on her red cell phone.

It's fuzzy, but Liza from Culture Kitchen

was with us at dinner the first night (that's her with Maria Niles ) and she had braids in!

Here's the lovely Catherine Morgan (and my girl Deb) drinking water, which is pretty much her drink of choice.

Here's the wonderful Elizabeth Perry of Woolgathering,  crafting. She always says that she's "learning to draw in public", which I can relate to cause that's how I feel about my photography - it's all be pretty much out there from day one - but her work is gorgeous! Really.

Cynthia Samuels from Don't Gel too Soon rocks the pen and paper.

New favorites? Here are two in one shot (although there were many, many  more). This is Skye Kilaen of All-Access Blogging and Heroine Content, and also Vero of Little Elephants. We had a great conversation about being childless, childfree, and then "with child" that spanned all of our experiences.

 

I think Jack Vinson got a lot out of talking with us at the "unconference" on the last day. He was a great addition to our discussion on what you reveal and what you don't when you blog. He left with a brand new idea for a personal blog that I believe he's already started up, called CoffeeNeeded.com. His posts about the Sunday gathering at his original site are great.

Okay, I believe I have more on my other memory card, but that's all for now. I'm going to post to make sure I get in before the deadline today, but will likely add more later.

A COUPLE MORE!!!!! Alert! Alert!

Here's Erin Kotecki Vest managing her queendom in Second Life. That's social media, right?

Here is Heather Clisby, whose site I had never read in spite of the fact that she is the new photo editor for BlogHer, and I am the old.

Heather (that's her on the right in the SXSW shirt) is awesome. And she is the person whom I did not previously know and nor did I read, but now I will. Oh yes, I will. (And she's also the only person I've ever met who has almost immediately christened me her fairy godmother, and the scary thing is that I believe she means it.)

I already knew Maria Niles before this conference, so she is familiar awesome. It's a bonus that they're both in this photo.

I don't have a blog look-a-like. On the outside. On the inside, I look and feel JUST like Christine Kane, when I'm rocking out. For serious. And also I'm about fifty pounds lighter, and just glow like she does. Seriously - she's so lovely, and so nice.

   

And this little dude qualifies in my book as the youngest blogger - CLEARLY liveblogging his experience on the way back to the W. (If anyone can identify mommy or baby in this picture, please let me know.)

Them Duggars

My grandfather was the oldest of 18 children, ten of whom are still living. There was one set of twins. So I figure my great-grandmother was pregnant for a total of fifteen years or so, the whole 17 if you count recovering, nursing, what have you. Let's just call it 17 years. In fact, let's just call it 5,000 years, because that might have been what it felt like to her. Many of my great aunts and uncles have license plates that say, for example, "1 of 18" or 9thof18 or something, which is sweet. They get along. There's a huge second, third, and now fourth generation. We get together a couple of times a year, and many of us vacation at the same South Carolina beach condo farm. So big families? No biggie for me.

I love the Australian news story about the Duggars in Arkansas, who just had their 17th child, because I love reading about American news and oddities in international terms. Some people say having this many kids is freakish, and I'm all whatever about that. Excessive fertility is just as possible as the opposite situation in this world of checks and balances, and some people just don't believe in birth control. They seem to be supporting themselves, and although I'm guessing from what I've read that we wouldn't agree on anything political or religious if we sat down for a drink, I leave them to their child-heavy existence. I don't have to change the nappies.

I just have to say though, after clicking on the "How many Duggars can you name starting with J" (uh, hello, news.au, ALL OF THEM!!!! Dad's name is Jim Bob and it just cascaded on down the line!!!) list on the right, that if I were Jinger, I'd be pissed.

"Hello, I am strapping young Joshua Duggar. This is my little brother Jinger." It just screams sidekick to me, and does a middle child (especially in the middle of this sea of Js?) really need that? If I were him I'd rechristen myself a studly as-yet-unclaimed J name and rock it. It worked for Zowie Bowie.

Friday and not a creative headline in sight.

This has been a head-in-the-blender week for sure. Therefore, favorite text received so far today:

R: Beer after wk?

Me: Oh god YES! This f'd up week calls for Schwartzbier, friend.

Well then.

I'll write more about August later. There's a bunch of stuff swirling around in my head about it. It's one of my recurring themes, for some reason.

Have I ever linked to Bird in the Hand? It's Lisa Congdon's stream on Flickr, where she posts an illustration on a sticky note every day. I don't visit it enough, but I love it. I'm slowly but surely finishing up the BlogHer photo set. My house is so, so hot that it's actually making me tired enough to fall asleep at a regular hour, which is probably a good thing, all things considered. I also like that I actually have so much more sunlight in my room than I have since I lived with my grandparents in high school. It's going to be just gorgeous in the fall and make the winter much more light-filled, hopefully, so I'm not so bothered by the heat in the summer. I'm starting to think that air conditioning screws with my sinuses a lot, because not having it has actually helped. It seems that I breathe better at night, even with my sleeping/breathing issues...and the fans also bring the white noise action, which is actually kind of relaxing.

Rationalizing heat stroke. I've reached a new level of mental gymnastics. I'm supposed to be outside for the Virgin Festival shenanigans all day in Baltimore tomorrow, when it's supposed to be a balmy 97 degrees with high humidity like only the MidAtlantic can bring it. Check back with me on the whole "I love the heat" thing when I report live from the first aid tent. I hope they have plenty of water in the rave tent for those crazy kids.

If you've had a trying time, I highly recommend cultivating a friendship with someone who will let you cry into the phone only like a person who's been trying not to cry for real for a long time can. As in, that person can rock the shit out of the whole crying enterprise, getting tears in the receiver and eyes swelling up like...er, something that swells up....and snuffling out, "I'm not AVAILABLE" when someone knocks on the door. Because of course no one's knocked on the door all day, until you hit this particular wall. Whoever Murphy was, I'd like to kick his ass sometimes. And also, that friend should promptly invite you down for a Peruvian chicken and shrimp and orzo salad and vanilla ice cream with peachy rum sauce dinner. And let you sit on your ass and upload a hundred pictures via her neighbor's stolen wireless while conversing.

I recommend these types of friends. I'm incredibly lucky I've got a couple, but only one who cooks for me.

Speaking of tears, my favorite search terms that have led people here in the past week are "washing jesus' feet with tears" and "topples dancers." Dancers that topple. I can't believe I ever wrote the word "topple", or anything remotely resembling the first phrase, but in this world where we're all just Google's bitches, I'll have to take their word for it.

= Me, happy it's Friday.

Minneapolis

Lucinda Williams wrote a song called "Minneapolis". and I keep thinking about it today.

"I can always trace it back
To that night in Minneapolis
Here on the seventh floor in a room I can't call mine
Deadbolt on the door, do not disturb sign
Shaking and trembling
On the clean white linen
Slivers of starlight across the ceiling
A dozen yellow roses
All that's left in Minneapolis"

That could be any city, really, depending on your state of mind. I've never been there but I hear it's a great literary spot and clearly there's a heart and soul in the music, too. I can't even organize my thoughts yet for the people there, suffering today beyond my comprehension. Of all the many ways I see and hear of human suffering and loss of life, the ones that really strike at my heart the most are the times when people are just going about their damned business, and tragedy strikes from out of the actual blue. I mean, if you're on the way home from work, you're stuck in traffic, you're singing, you're thinking about what to pick up for dinner or a story you want to tell your wife or did you actually really pay the credit card bill?

And the bridge goes out from underneath you, and you end up trapped in your car under the Mississippi River. It's so unthinkable and yet these random losses seem to happen quite frequently.

After 9/11 there were so many stories about people who called in sick to the World Trade Center that day, people who had doctor's appointments or got stuck on a late subway train, and missed the disaster. I remember reading them, and thinking about what to me seems the randomness of life - or is it indeed, as the cliches go, "part of the plan"? "Not your time"? There really is no way to know the answer to this, other than the ones we create for ourselves to make sense of a world that mostly doesn't.

We have so much trust in our infrastructures, the literal and figurative bridges that get us across to wherever it is we need or have to be. We really need to, I guess, or it would be difficult to go anywhere. But the reality is, as this story shows, that these things can go out from under us - both the bridges themselves and the psychological constructs that tell us that they won't, they surely won't, how could they. Of COURSE he'll make it home. Of COURSE it's safe to drive in the snow. And how in the world could a supposedly stable pile of concrete just collapse?

I used to work at a bookstore with a mechanical engineer from Croatia, likely considered a genius in his own country, but working alongside me in a retail gig where people treated him like an idiot because of his accent, his dreamy way of pondering questions, and his limited grasp of our incredibly flawed and clumsy computer system. One day I was getting into my car in the parking garage outside of our store, and he was standing there, staring at the pillars and the cement walls.

"If I make this in my country, I go to jail," he said, marveling at the ineptitude of the original garage builder as I did at a place where you'd go to jail for shoddy workmanship. He was completely serious, though. I wonder where he is now, and if he's watching the news. Our country and our cities are aging. There are so many more of us. We have to share the space. It seems so much more complicated, and I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that it is.

I'm not a "she's in a better place" sort of person, except in extreme circumstances of painful illness that ends in death, where the person is ready to go. I don't know where that "place" is, in spite of the efforts of my parochial schooling to convince me. I don't really ever want to go there, if I'm honest. I want every day of this messy and fascinating life that I can possibly be allotted, because I never get tired of it, in theory, even when it practice it is as challenging as it is today. I'm still here. I don't want to drown in my little orange car underneath a collapsed bridge, just because I left work ten minutes early or late, or bailed out of a traffic jam to take an alternate route home. And I certainly don't want that to happen to anyone who makes my life with their love and friendship. I'm selfish that way, and I know that the people who were on that bridge and didn't make it - and certainly the people who love them, who might still be waiting for them to be brought home - felt and feel that way too.

The Red Cross has a site for families and community members just like they had for Katrina.

Posts I hate writing

I am so pissed.

This was supposed to be my Blogher post. I've been back for two days and immediately got sucked into the hell of an extremely busy work schedule (HEH-ROOOOOOOO, John Cusack, wherefore art thou, to save me from this hell?), so I've been uploading pictures in tiny groups - totally unsatisfying. Tonight was supposed to be my catch-up night, but it got all wrecked, and now here I am crying honest to God real tears into my keyboard for the first time in months, because I am a nasty ass bitch, on the one hand, but on the other hand I remain heartbroken that people who used to get it just don't. That people who I used to trust, I don't. Is that too much to ask? HUH??? I'm so, so tired. So, so frustrated. It sounds so terrible to say, and I feel like the worst person in the world which is a result of "my Catholic guilt" (that I don't feel), according to some of my nearest and dearest. But I'm tired of taking care of people and answering a million questions and making everything okay. I don't know how to make anything okay, and that is my religion, as it were - making things okay, for you and you and you. And also you, just in case I need extra karma.

I am not just a chat name. I am a person. A person with a history that does not always bear repeating. Sometimes I just need a fucking HUG. Where in the hell is DEB ROBY when I need her???

There was family stuff today, part eleventy seven million, and it sucks. I don't like it. I came back from Chicago (Blogher! Haven't joined the rest of the world in writing about BLOGHER. What the fuck is wrong with me?) on Monday, and was all, just, FULL. Full of this sweetness of connection with lots of people who get it. I know at this event, like no other, that I'm in the right place. People recognized me from my writing, which was all surreal and lovely and kind of frightening at the same time. I felt like I had a....what?...a toehold in something. People would look at my nametag or my card and go, "Oh, Lauriewrites? I know you." And only slightly  because I hate the blog name, but mostly because it freaked me out, I got really nervous each time, and thought so many things simultaneously that I think my head exploded. I thought things like, "Wow, your last piece sucked. Who would read your stuff?"

I'm over this again, by the way.

I need a love ice cream sundae from the universe, right about now, people. I do. I'm blogging while angry, and frustrated, not at all drunk, but completely displeased with the outcome of a day that started really well. I guess this happens sometimes.