Just.....AUGHHH

I'm not really sure this blog has a direction; I just felt like writing, so prepare for ADD or ADHD or whatever the hip thing it is to call when you can't organize your thoughts these days. I feel like that book "Woman, Thou Art Loosed," except I don't know what it's about, and I'm not black. I'm just kind of existing on emotions and nerve endings at this point.

Chantix is making me feel beyond weird. I had a near-48-hour period of basically not wanting to move. It did totally mess with my head and make me feel like complete crap, but as this is supposed to be "normal," I am forging ahead. I feel so much of the last year has been me "forging ahead." I hate to think that I'm missing out on anything by just trying to get the hell until the end of the day, so I can say, 'I made it...one more day."

I'm not a super emotional person. Yes, I cry at movies and other appropriate times, but I don't go around unloading my personal business on anyone who will listen (unless you read this blog, of course), but I feel like my emotions are at maximum capacity. There have been so many profound changes in my life in the last year, that once I step back and consider them, I'm not sure that I'm processing them correctly. I know, who's to say what "correctly" or "incorrectly" is, but other people in similar situations seem to be doing just fine.

Like my estranged...he seems to be doing A-okay. Let's separate for no apparent reason...BAM...let's say we're working it out, but secretly we're not..BAM....let's get divorced because you don't accept this namby-pamby approach to marriage...BAM I don't believe in arranged marriages; it's not my culture, obviously, but I do believe in giving good, mother-jumping reasons for divorcing. We could say that society has progressed and brought us further in life-fulfilling efforts to the point that divorce is less taboo than it was in say, the 50s, OR we could say that we're all so selfish and full of dishonor and able to reconcile those negative traits while professing to be good and wonderful Christians, that here we are. I will say, that I was not a perfect wife. I have never claimed to be a perfect anything, EVER. I went through deep lulls of depression over many things, namely the death of my father, the most important person in my life, but if you join yourself in spirituality and beyond to another person, you don't abandon them because they didn't turn out the way you wanted. If marriages ended that way, no one would be married. It's called being adult. Come visit me; it's nice.

I did not think I would be here, except that if I had been born in the 50s, I most definitely would've been one of those women that thought there must be something better than making a pot roast in heels, pearls, and a pinafore. So, maybe it doesn't matter when or where I am, but I do know that I'm just pissed. I always return to "Flowers for Algernon" a book by Daniel Keyes. The basic premise of the story is that Charley, the protagonist, has a sub-Forrest Gump level IQ. These scientists, based on tests on Algernon, a mouse, give him therapy to make him really smart. He becomes really smart, realizes what his life could be, falls in love, and then...parallel with Algernon's progress, reverts to dumb ol' Charley the blue-collar worker. The beauty of it, though, is that he never remembers that he was ever smart or aspired to anything above his current station in life.

It's extremely sad, and yes, like a big emotional girl, I cried when I read the book. However, my point is...wow...I so wish sometimes that I could just be a big, happy conformist. I could just take a pill, be modern-day Donna Reed/Ally McBeal, and everyone would be happy. I don't take pictures to chronicle my every step in life, I don't know the difference between a valance and a curtain. I like to drink wine, but I do also dearly love my nieces, nephew, and great-nephew, and they love me. I don't know how to make a roux or a chutney or can things, but I can outspell and out-sass the best of them. I simply don't know how I got to this place in my life, but I will make damn sure that I will never really be able to say that again. My choices will be just that, MY choices, and I am done with the guilt and second-guessing and feeling "less than." I have not changed my personality since I was five years old, and I'm not going to start now. Take it, or it was nice knowing you.

The Things You Don't See Coming

Life can just be ridiculous. I mean, it's great, too, don't get me wrong, but no matter how hard you try, you can't prepare for everything. That includes the good and the bad. I was sitting here, just languishing in the notion that I have a three-day weekend, and it hit me, as the dark thoughts do, enveloping my brain like a tree with the knotty roots that seem to be beckoning the tree to the dirt, I am a 35 (nearly 36) year-old with no grand plan.

In thinking about it a lot in the last few months, maybe a grand plan is not so smart. The world, our country even, is filled with uncertainty and indecision; hell, the government can't agree, so why should I be having anxiety attacks over my personal life? I'm not, actually. I think I can count my anxiety attacks on one hand, one involving IKEA. It just made me dizzy, as did their "instructions" on products, which consist (or did) of some bizarre graphs and then a rudimentary drawing, at best, of a really long telephone line leading back to IKEA. Are there no cordless phones in Sweden? I digress.....

I honestly cannot wrap my head around all the things I've lost in the last four years, and I guess it doesn't matter all that much, except that I keep thinking that you have no idea when life can turn on a dime. I remember Baz Luhrmann, the director (Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby) came out with a bizarre spoken song in the early '00s called "Wear Sunscreen," and one of the lines that has always stuck with me was " The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday."

My father died on a Monday morning, and it wasn't unexpected completely, but the fact that when we thought it would happen, and waited and waited, and it didn't, until his stubborn ass was ready to go prove those song lyrics. The slap in the face of my separation leading to pending divorce (?) took me completely by surprise. It happened on a Friday afternoon, and to say that I was not expecting it would be akin to my saying Pearl Harbor was a little surprised.

I don't know what my point is; I often have no point. Oh yeah, maybe this at least resembles a point. I never thought any of the bad things that have happened to me in the last few years would happen. Well, duh, why would I have? However, I also would have never thought that I would live for my nieces and nephew and great-nephew. When I was in high school, I eschewed children, thinking I would never want to have children, and the little irony upon me now is that I ACHE for children, but I'm not in a position to do that right now. I love that modern medicine hasn't closed that window for me, but I am also mindful that God and nature have their own ideas, too.

I think, now, in my pre-mid life, I want to rediscover life and the family I have that I was too self-involved to engage before. I want to reach out to my dad's friends...I may even have a tentative book idea, and experience parts of his life that I didn't know. I think sometimes it takes a lot of irritation to make pearls...oh, wait, the oysters have the market on that. Too bad, I have thumbs; I call dibs.

My View of Racism

I can't say that I'm an authority on racism. Yes, I was raised in Mississippi. I spent K-9 in private school, no black people in attendance, and I went sophomore year in high school through graduation at a public school. I've heard racism on both sides, believe me. I once asked a teacher in private school if she should've said the "N" word, and she sent me to the principal's office. He couldn't do anything; she shouldn't have said it. He said something stupid about not questioning teachers and sent me back to class.

I thrived in public school. I reflected a lot on how much better Macon, Miss., would be, had the schools been more integrated. I made a lot of friends, both black and white, and I repeatedly thought how I wouldn't have had that experience in Macon. You didn't do that there, or so we always were told, but I never really, and to this day, don't understand why. When I go to visit my mom in my hometown, it's still very segregated, which is weird to me after living in Philadelphia, Pa., and even in Birmingham. I get so pissed when I see racism in the news, and people automatically assume everyone in the South is still 100 years behind the times.

With every situation, I try to see it from all angles. I've never been a black person. I can't say what they've experienced or try to identify with them. I can only speak from my experience. In light of recent news items involving Paula Deen and George Zimmerman, here are my thoughts, and because clearly, this is my blog, these are my opinions only:

I think Paula Deen is a fortunate businesswoman who got unbelievably lucky because people bought into her homespun charm and plucky attitude, and the sponsors didn't realize how strongly the public would bond to her. She is a person who found herself at the right place at the right time, and maybe thought she didn't need the best PR people money could buy, and God knows, she had the money. I don't think that she is a racist. I think she is a Southern woman who maybe doesn't think the "N" word is awful. She thinks that because of the generation in which she grew up, and that is not okay. She should have had handlers that told her talking about race the way she has done in the past is not okay, and her going live on TV crying and seeming like she was the victim was not okay. She could have done things a million different ways and come out looking  alot better than she does now, and she chose not to.

In the long run, she'll be fine. She's already amassed a small fortune, and losing her endorsements is not really going to break her. America loves redemption. She'll do Oprah on Oprah's network in a year or so and come out fine. If Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford and that Weiner guy, all politicians, can do it, I'm sure she can. She just needs to understand consequences.

Transversely, I guess, I want George Zimmerman to get off scot-free. That case, or issue, has bothered me since it happened. I'm not used to being on this side of a race issue, if you have to delegate sides, but I think he was within his rights to shoot that boy. I heard the base facts of the case when it happened, and I thought it seemed cut-and-dry. The boy attacked him after being confronted, and he retaliated in self-defense. I thought if something came to light between then and the trial, I was all for it. Nobody wants to think about a 15-year-old being a jackass, especially when he had to die.

However, the more I hear testimony from police and witnesses, I'm resolved in that I think this was not a good kid. You don't want to say bad things about a dead teenager, and I feel for the attorney doing this, because I guarantee you, he may have his face and name splashed across the national news, but he does not feel good about bringing up derogatory facts about a dead teenager.

The media or whoever keeps trying to portray this as a "racial" crime, with Zimmerman being the "white" nemesis, and I don't understand this. He is clearly Hispanic; I have not followed the trial enough to know if he was born here, or second-generation, etc ... but I just don't see how this can be a racial crime. If a person looks suspicious and you confront them verbally, why should they attack you, or even in the first place, if they are freaked out by your suspicion, why would they go back to where you are and purposely antagonize you? I'm sorry, but I think George Zimmerman defended his neighborhood and his person according to what he knew best. I am very sorry that Trayvon Martin died, but I think he was either not in his right mind, or he had an odd way of trying to exhibit his dominance.

Coping: Emily Style

So in the last three years, I've lost my father, my grandmother, my marriage (pending), my 13-year-old dog, and my brother. Why am I not suidical, you ask? I have no tangible words of wisdom, really. I can't say: Do this, and you'll be fine. In fact, platitudes like that really piss me off. I've never had good coping skills. I have no good explanation for this, except that the first 21 years of  my life were pretty sun-kissed. I had it good. My family was close and funny and smart, and I had great friends and a bright future and endless possibilities. I was wrapped in that tight-knit bubble that all young people cling to that ensures invincibility and infinite happiness.

Each of these things has taught me a lesson. Whether I use those lessons to make a difference, even if only to myself, remains to be seen. I miss my father and my grandmother so much, it literally causes an ache inside me if I think about it too long. I want to pick up the phone and tell them something, and then, like a crazy person, I just tell them myself. I guide parts of my life by advice from them that I hear in my head, and that's what's kept me from drowning in grief.

With my precious dog Norton, I am okay with the fact that he lived to be almost 92 dog years and had a good life and was a happy, spoiled dog. When I think about him, a lot of his memory is inextricably tied to my father, and I don't care what they say about Dog Heaven. He and my dad are "at play in the fields of the Lord," as my dad used to say, and Norton is chasing squirrels, and my dad is throwing a ball that Norton will never bring back. Even in death, I don't think he deigns to fetch.

I imagine that my grandmother and my brother are driving each other crazy with the remote controls in Heaven, and my grandmother thinks it's too cold. I'm sure my brother reminds her she could've gone the other way, where being cold wouldn't have been even the slightest issue, and she tells him to hush. It's hard for me to personalize my brother's Heaven, because we weren't that close. He was 15 years older than me, and even besides that, we had grown apart in the years before he died.

I stupidly thought that I had a lot of time to repair our relationship, and I was wrong. I don't look back and have huge regrets, because he made some personal decisions that made it a lot harder for our relationship to be repaired. However, I regret that he died possibly thinking that I didn't love him. I did, but I wanted the Superhero Big Brother that I remember when I was little. I wanted him to forget about the crappy hand he was dealt and turn it into a success story and live to be a great father to his daughter and a great grandfather to his grandson, Jackson, but my wanting something doesn't make it true.

Here is what I know: In the week after my brother died, I got to spend much-needed and long-overdue time with my niece Claire, who I worry about every day, I got to spend time with my great nephew, Jackson, who is a big, hot handful of Terrible Twos (I changed two diapers!!), and I got to literally collapse into a tearful hug with my still-husband, whose presence at the funeral touched my heart in a way I can't explain, and I've gotten to take care of my mom, which seems only fair, since she's been taking care of me for 35 years.

I have no Deepak Chopra answers. I don't do things the right way. I decided to cut and dye my own hair today and just did it. I have no idea how it looks yet, because it's still wet, but I do know that I brushed a small Muppet of hair into the trash and left the dye on as long as possible because this gray hair nonsense has been going on long ENOUGH! But, I also know that my best friend of 20 years had a baby today, and that helps with the Lion King-Circle-of-Life coping....a baby! We were 17 five minutes ago. These are the things that keep me going.