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Jonny Lee Miller. Zero Cool. On the tv. Every week. If ABC cancels this show, I'm bombing their corporate offices.
Also, SPYDADDY!
http://www.meghanohara.org/wordpress
- Location:Georgetown, dammit.
- Mood:depressed
On June 10th, my mother had an acute stroke to the Broca's area of her brain.
She's making remarkable progress, but the damage is severe. The right side of her body barely works, she can't see on her right side, she speaks mostly gibberish, and she has "impaired impulse control", meaning she acts like a toddler.
Theoretically, I have her power of attorney. I say theoretically, because we can't find it. It's not on file with the state, her former lawyers, or anywhere to be found in either house.
Mom didn't have insurance. The hospital counseled me to hide her assets as quickly as possible and that they'd give me thirty days to do it... to sell her house to myself, to take her name off our joint accounts, etc. Unfortunately, without the power of attorney, my hands are tied... I can't even get her name off the things that are actually just mine.
The thirty-day deadline was bad enough -- but the rehab center that Mom needs to go to doesn't have the same liberal policies as the hospital, and they want her financial information now and call me all day long about it while I stall
I can do absolutely nothing right. My boss wants me cranking out ads, my mother's friends think I ought to be spending 24 hours a day in the hospital with Mom... oh, except when they want me to show up at one of their parties to efficiently update them on Mom's condition. Her friends came to me with dire warnings about how the hospital in Georgetown blew and I needed to have her moved to Charleston. I did some research and discovered that there was a hospital in Chattanooga ranked #1 nationally for critical care and announced that I'd move her there, and quicker than you can say "backstab", I was in a showdown with a bunch of Steel Magnolias who thought I was just horrible for wanting to take her away from them. And after I held my ground and pissed them all off, the funding fell through anyway.
My boss had his assistant call me last Friday and tell me I was fired if I didn't work all weekend, so I drove back to Chattanooga that afternoon in a panic with my mother's cat shoved in the Jeep. Discovered on Monday that the time I'd spent in Georgetown keeping up with client e-mail and posting ads had been considered unpaid leave, and that my boss would let me go back to Mom provided I worked until Wednesday and was back by Monday. It's $100 in gas one-way to go back and forth.
I was already putting half my checks straight into Mom's account, but her expenses way outstrip that; she's been selling off her retirement fund to pay her bills in Georgetown, and it's an account that, without the power of attorney, I have no access to. That means that somehow, my dinky salary is supposed to pay two $1000 mortgages, two light bills, two water bills, two cable bills, two cable modem bills, etc. Not to mention the hospital bills, the dog and the three cats, my brother... and the omgwtfpwned expensive laptop I just had to buy, since the only way my boss agreed not to fire me was if I agreed to buy one, transfer my work computer to it, and continue to do my job (video editing, photoshop, etc) from wherever.
My phone rings off the hook with Dad's family and Mom's friends. Lectures and guilt-trips and new things to worry about, more things they want me to handle, baby I know you have so much on your plate but when you get a chance...
Roughly forty-seven million times a day, it pops into my head -- I want my mommy. She's the one who knows about all this financial and legal crap, she's the one who talks me down when I'm on a cliff like this, she's the one who makes the decisions. She's my best friend, she's the whole reason I'm living the life I've been living.
And I can't have her. I can have something that looks like her, a frightening alien creature that talks like a Sim and says the same word over and over and over and claws the air and grabs things from my hands to stick in her mouth.
I feel like a five-year-old standing in the middle of the Interstate. Everything's so much bigger than me and going so fucking fast and the odds are almost certain that I'm going to get clobbered if I move, or even if I don't. I'm just cowering between the cars wishing like hell someone was coming for me.
No one's coming. No one can come. This is all on me, and I just have to deal with it.
But God, this is one of those times I wish I wasn't single. I come home from the hospital and I lie in the center of Mom's bed and I hug her pillow and wish someone was holding me and I feel so fucking alone it burns.
I'm moving to Georgetown to take care of Mom full-time, as much as I can and keep my job. I'm hoping that if I demonstrate I can work just as fast remotely as as I do in-house, my boss will let me stay there. There's a precedent for it... the person who had my job before me phoned it in from Jersey. If not, I'll try to find another job I can do from home.
My great hope is this: that if I spend the six-month recovery window absolutely busting my ass, I can get mom back to the point of self-sufficiency, and move back to Chattanooga secure in the knowledge that she's okay and can get back to the life she calls "paradise".
At any rate, I need to hit the road and get back to Georgetown...
Am still going to paint the appliance knobs the wall color, and the floor will look the same as the kitchen's whenever Todd decides he wants me to buy him something badly enough... but overall, yay.
This gave mighty lulz unto The Lord.
So... Friday, my co-worker Kelly Ann tells us that three dogs have appeared on her parents' property. There is, apparently, a no-kill animal shelter being constructed next door to their house, which will not be open until December... but someone forgot to read the fine print and thought dumping the dogs somewhere near the shelter would work.
Life With Evil Grandmamma left me with this knee-jerk "There's a problem? Hang on, I'll fix it" complex. It's not even conscious anymore. Someone says "Crap, the printer's not printing," and I am out of my cube and fixing it before I even have time to think about whether or not this is the most appropriate use of my time.
So my mouth opened... and shut again. My volunteeritis is something I've really been meaning to work on.
And then Kelly Ann tells us that her father has been shooting at the dogs.
Brain freezes. Mouth opens.
Kelly Ann told me that the dogs were in the yard behind their house, near the pond. We made a plan to go there after work and round them up.
Couple of problems with that plan.
One: It started pouring rain when we left work.
Two: When Kelly Ann said the dogs were in the yard behind their house near the pond, she actually meant that they were on the farm behind their mansion near the lake.
This is how I ended up barefoot in my work clothes on a farm in a downpour, chasing a dog in circles.
In the end, I only managed to nab two... the third was far too speedy. I made Kelly Ann promise to call me if the runner showed back up and sloshed back to the Jeep with my crate full of wet, stinky prizes.
I am not a dog person. I think they're cute too look at, and I've loved specific dogs in the past, but on the whole they sort of disturb me. To put that revulsion in context... I used to sleep with my three pet rats.
So, yeah, two dogs. Two wee little chihuahua/papillons (I think), with half their hair gone and bloodshot bug-eyes and gone-so-long-unclipped-they're-curved-li
Scrubbed them up, got their predators off as best I could, and was immediately charmed by their unswaying devotion to each other. Everywhere the girl went, the guy followed... wasn't that just the sweetest thing ever?
I freed them from the bathroom, my brother's dog Patch came galloping upstairs, and I realized.
Devotion my ass. She was in heat.
Immediate chaos followed. The girl dog was tiny and capable of bobbing and weaving through the nine-foot-high-piles with grace... Patch, on the other hand, was utterly enormous, freakishly strong, and determined not to take his nose out of her ass for one solitary second.
Crash! Smash! Thud! Thump! She'd duck under my computer, he'd follow her and disconnect half the cables. She'd pad underneath a stack of kitchen boxes, and he'd shoulder them all aside with a nauseating crunch. Meanwhile, the boy dog was super-pissed that the big jock was honing in on his piece of tail, and would end up this train growling incessantly. Determined to prove that this was his house, by God, Patch peed everywhere, which meant the boy dog had to pee everywhere too.
The cats wisely scattered to the four winds, and I longed to join them. Girl dog did not have lovin' on her mind, and kept a-runnin'... so the two frustrated boydogs humped everything. Her forehead, the air, the couch. It was like being trapped in the holodeck with it permanently set on The Worst Porn Ever.
By Saturday, I was so desperate to end the growling, smashing humpapalooza that when my brother said he'd like to take Patch camping, if only he weren't broke and driving the Bonneville, Insert Meaningful Throat-Clearing Here, I handed him all my cash and the keys to my Jeep and wished him godspeed.
Oh, God... blissful silence. With Patch gone, boydog was content to nap with his nose planted firmly up girldog's butt... and with Todd gone, the house was actually quiet. (Todd likes to run several stereos and the TV simultaneously at excessive volumes, which drives me battyapeshitcrazy.)
I stared at the wreckage of my to-do list for the weekend and tried to make amends. I scrubbed the kitchen down, cooked lunches for the week, excavated the horrible pile of the laundry room, ripped off the quarter-round, took all the hardware off, put a first coat on all the trim and cabinetry, and pulled out the washer and dryer to reveal a wonderland of grody behind it that I then annihilated.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I wandered out of the grody to discover that boydog had finally scored, and that the two of them were unhappily locked together in the middle of the kitchen, trying frantically to go in opposite directions and mostly just spinning around in circles as a result.
Fortunately, Amber -- who they are hopefully going to live with when she comes up next weekend -- seemed unfazed by the idea of puppies. I'm taking them to the vet on Tuesday and to the groomer afterwards, because I really really want her to think they're cute and take them awaaaaaaay, oh yes, oh yes indeed I do.
The rest of the week shall be spent in an orgy of frantic housedoings, as (surprise) I've volunteered to drive to Soddy-Daisy every night after work for eleven days to feed Schwartz's cats and have had to pump up the volume on my afterwork accomplishments beforehand accordingly. Also, my boss informed me last week that I am spending a weekend in Nashville attending a film shoot. Why I need to be there when my only involvement is post-production, God only knows, but it's another two precious weekend-flavored days off the table.
I expect to explode in a white-hot supernova of stress somewhere around July 4th. Mark your calendars.
Before:
After:
- Mood:exhausted
Gardening folks -- does anyone know what this plant is? The one that's absolutely everywhere? My brother says it's phlox, which I think is crap. I suspect it's a weed.
If it's not a weed, and anyone wants some -- OMG PLEASE COME AND TAKE IT, IT IS EATING THE ENTIRE GARDEN.
Everyone's journals have suddenly become all foodified, so I thought I'd join in... especially since (much to the amusement of my coworkers when I informed them) I made seitan for the first time tonight.That's it on the right. The thing that looks like cow.
Beyond the name, seitan is a bit perverse to me; I've spent a year with a guy who can't have gluten or casein, figuring out how to do bizarre things with rice flour and scrutinizing packaging for the dread pirate wheat. Reading the seitan recipe was like discovering that the main ingredient in your souffle is rat poison.
Making seitan is a strange experience, too. It's basically uberbread, and you knead it... but the dough smells, tastes, and looks freakishly like meat, ripping apart in ghoulish tendons as you work it, like you're Superman battling a particularly nefarious turkey.
I made sauteed portabellas in a mushroom gravy with truffle oil to go on top, mashed potatoes, and lemon pepper broccoli. Then I realized I wasn't actually all that hungry, saran-wrapped it, stuck it in the fridge, and had five Junior Mints for dinner instead.
Yay, nutrition.
"When I was a kid, my father had this dog that started to get all weak and sickly. He takes it to the vet... he examines it and says a fly must have laid eggs in the dog's butt. The baby maggots have crawled up, now they've started to grow, and eventually they're gonna eat the dog alive from the inside. He says it should be put to sleep, 'cause it's an old dog anyway.
But my father won't do it. He takes the dog home, he puts it on the bed... and he reaches up into the dog, picking out the maggots with his finger, one by one.
It takes him all night, but he gets every last one.
That dog outlived my father.
That's love, Sam."
-- Maggie, "Addicted to Love"
So, I was talking to a friend tonight about how I Will Never Publish A Book Fo' Reals Because All My Endings Suck Or Do Not Exist, and he asked me why I didn't pull a Joe Peacock and try to get my online journal published and/or do it as an eBook.
If you're thinking "Meghan, you post once a year, wtf" let me explain -- I've had an online journal since 1995, and it used to be my primary writing outlet. I wrote essay-length entries almost every day for years and years; some of them were damned funny. I was all A-List and written up in magazines and got creepy marriage proposals.
So, I was just wondering if this idea was feasible at all, and I figured I'd ask you guys... if I did a book of selected entries (not the angsty I-Hate-Annie-zomg-Nathaniel-Is-My-Soulma
Thanks!
To whom it may concern:
I have Black Lung. Or something. I can't talk above a wimpy little whisper, and all is full of ouch. I have no idea if I'm allergic to something I unearthed while defilthing or if I've caught some sort of communicable disease, but I'm quarantining myself for a few days. Consider this my high-as-a-kite-on-Benadryl blanket RSVP and apology for the stuff I was supposed to do with/to/for everyone. If I am contagious, oh-dear-god-believe-me, you don't want this stuff.
Also, if you call my apartment and just get heavy breathing, don't think you accidentally dialed the Perversons. Just say which roommate you want, and the phone will be passed over.
Snotface out.
Have put them up on Flickr temporarily -- click to see.
Not having a car is bloody annoying. The only thing worse than scraping up dog feces with your fingernails is walking to go scrape up dog feces with your fingernails. I actually got so annoyed with the walking back and forth from my apartment to Mom's house earlier that I dragged my old bike out of the garage.
Note for cliche writers: you can forget how to ride one.
Particularly if you are wearing flip-flops, a skirt, and no underwear.
Yeah -- I walked back instead.
Back hurts. Knees hurt. Fingers riddled with steel-wool cuts soaked in bleach. Have only managed to take laundry room from "Jesus Christ, people live here?!?!" to "Eeeew!".
WHERE ARE MY MAGICAL POWERS I WANT THEM NOW KTHXBI.
My roommate has agreed to drive me back to Mom's house so that I don't have to walk, so I'm going to go find a horizontal surface and pass out upon it until he's ready to go.
Oh, yeah -- Happy Birthday, Dunlap. Wherever you are.
I am in total hate with the establishment and our "justice" system right now.
The guy who conned my mother out of her life savings? Not in jail.
Molesto stepdad? Not in jail.
Every person who's ever raped one of my friends? Not in jail.
The drunk drivers that have given my friends permanent health problems? Not in jail.
The guys who roofied my best friend? Not in jail.
My @#$%&ing Glee Club teacher? GOING TO JAIL.
FOR SOMETHING THAT HE DIDN'T DO.
I have to go listen to rap now.
P.S. If anyone's reading this that went to my high school, the defense is asking people who know how inutterably awesome said teacher is to write character-recommendation letters to the judge asking him to give the minimum sentence. Leave a comment, and I'll give you the address.
Shining
Something Blue
Mount Brokeback
Fast and the Curious
So... Hal wanted me to put together a portfolio of my web-design work, which prompted me to spend about eleven drunken (long story) hours going through about 25 unlabeled backup CD's.
In the process -- when I wasn't groaning at the crap I used to call poetry or shrieking in joy at discovering backup copies of long-lost vids -- I found some old pictures I thought folks might be amused by.
Being too lazy to go through uploading them to my normal gallery, I put a slew of 'em on Flickr temporarily.
Click on me in my pimpin' uniform to see.
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