who needs a good swift kick in the rear. In fact, this person is rapidly becoming the poster child for bad behavior, and I find it harder and harder to stand by and watch them destroy everything they have.
It wouldn't be hard for me to put this person down. I'm quite confident that all I would have to do is give them "the look" (arms crossed, head cocked to one side, and and combination of pity and disgust on my face), and spend the next 20 or so minutes telling them not how angry I am, but how disappointed I am in what they've done, and are continuing to do, not only to themselves, but their friends and family as well. I'm also quite confident that after I was done, I could flick my pinkie, and knock them down like a ton of bricks.
So what's stopping me?
Like most people, I have an Inner Bitch. As it's generally unneeded, most of the time it stays hidden away. I don't like to unleash it unless someone is directly threatening or attacking me, my friends, or my family, or is committing some heinous act that demands immediate action. I pride myself on being a decent person, but those who know me well know that I can unleash the fury if I have to. A situation has to get pretty intolerable for me to do that. In some eyes, I can be seen as weak, but I pick my battles. There was a girl I worked with at my previous job that turned cattiness in to an Olympic sport. She took it to the next level, and heaven help you if she didn't like you (and it didn't take much to be added to that list).
On occasion, when her cattiness got too personal, I went to a supervisor, but I largely left her alone......until I left for my current job and had an exit interview. That's when good old IB came out, and rattled off a 7 year long list of offenses. When I was asked why I never mentioned it before, my reply was that I had to work with her every day. What good would it have done to complain about half of it? It would have just made the working environment that much more unbearable. However, now that I no longer have to deal with it, I'd like people to know what she's really all about, and what she's capable of. They took a lot of notes, and did a lot of head shaking, and apologized for years of putting up with it. Problem solved.
Right now, I feel about the same way with this person. Yeah, they need kicked, but I don't think it would serve any purpose just yet. Having walked a few people through programs in my life (including a few that have 12 steps), it's well-known that people have to hit bottom before they are receptive to change. By creating a pseudo-bottom for this person, I don't think I'd be accomplishing anything. They're not there yet, and I don't think what I would say would last much past 15 minutes. This person also suffers from depression at times, and I don't want to throw them in to a bad tailspin that I would be partially responsible for.
It's hard, though, to watch someone you care about sit back and destroy everything they come in contact with. After everyone else has walked away, it's hard to stick around and keep an eye on the situation, so to speak. I understand the motivation to walk away. Heck, some were told to go away. I don't think I've hit that point myself yet, but it may come.
It's pretty bad when my husband tells me he'd rather I not associate with this person anymore. He's very trusting with me in that I have a lot of friends spread out all over, and he's fine with that. It's just that the train wreck that this person's life is becoming is derailing more and more cars, and he's afraid I'll get caught in the momentum and get drug off the tracks too. Yeah, that analogy sucks, but it's all I can come up with. Perhaps it's just better to say that we believe this person has resorted to some scummy tactics, and he'd rather I just have no part of it. I've told him that I'm fully aware of that, and he trusts me to make the correct decision at the correct time.
I'm just watching and waiting for the time being. If the IB and my pinkie finger need to come out, so be it.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Scenes From A Mall
This is a long article from The Cleveland Plain Dealer last month. It's a good read, and worth it.
Scenes from a mall
A glimmer of hope at Randall Park
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Joanna Connors
Plain Dealer Reporter
Randall Park Mall may be on the endangered list at the Web site deadmalls.com, but it is not dead. Reports of its demise have not been all that exaggerated, but they're not quite true, either.
People talk about Randall Park the way you might talk about minor TV actors of the 1970s. First: "Remember that guy from 'Rockford Files'? You know - that guy. What was his name?" Then: "I heard he died, like, a few years ago."
Back in the '70s, Randall Park Mall was no minor celebrity. It was a star, a superstar, even before it was built. When Youngstown developer Edward DeBartolo Sr. announced in 1973 that he would turn the former Randall Park racetrack into a "shopping-living-entertainment center," the Cleveland Press put the story on Page One, topped by a headline in a type size once reserved for the declaration of war: "LARGEST U.S. MALL DUE HERE."
Three years later, in August 1976, DeBartolo stood at the entrance to his 2.2 million-square-foot mall. Crowds waited. Cameras flashed. Dina Merrill cut the ribbon.
Dina Merrill? Wasn't she an actress or something back in the '60s? Blond? But she's dead now, right?
(For the record: No, Merrill is not dead. But yes: She was an actress. Or something. In 1976, she had guest roles on both "Quincy M.E." and "Hawaii Five-O," but still had to explain to a Cleveland reporter that she was "a working actress.")
That's a useful phrase for anyone: working (blank). Randall Park Mall is not the glamorous star it once was. It has to take bit parts now. But in its new incarnation, something strange and almost hopeful has happened.
The mall stands across from Thistle down race track in North Randall, forlorn as a stray dog. Before we go in - before we pass the concrete planters filled with rainwater, cigarette butts and a floating Diet Pepsi can; before we inhale the aroma of onions and antique grease; before we even consider taking a look at the restrooms - let's take a minute to think about the mall, and America, and What It All Means.
It is hard to defend the mall - any mall, even the mall that has Banana Republic and Restoration Hardware and smells like $150 perfume.
It is harder still to love the mall. It represents everything Americans would like to forget about ourselves; it is the family snapshot that we tear up because it makes us look fat, or shows our nose from the exact wrong angle.
The mall is all about our appetite for stuff, our greedy habit of consuming more than anyone else in the world. It is about our relationship to cars - off the freeway, with plenty of parking! - and our abandonment of our cities. It is about our infantile attention span, our embrace of the artificial, our transformation from a country that makes things to a country that buys things. Things we do not need.
AGGGHHHH! Tear it up! Now! Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Victor Gruen did not mean for his creation to lay waste to civilization. He wanted to save civilization.
Gruen, an Austrian architect who came to the United States in 1938, designed the first fully enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, which opened in 1956 in Edina, Minn., near Minneapolis. After that, nothing was ever the same.
Not being a born-and-bred American, Gruen had the crazy idea that his invention could be about more than just shopping. He was a socialist - in the '50s, in America - who envisioned a place where commerce and community would meet, a utopia of climate-controlled gardens and cafes, shops and living spaces, where we could all just get along.
So, indeed, did DeBartolo (though he was definitely not a socialist). When he announced his plans for Randall Park, he laid out five phases. Phase 1: the Holiday Inn. Phase 2: the mall. Phase 3: a 4,500-seat theater-inthe- round for "the performing arts." Phase 4: four 14-story office towers. Phase 5: high-rise apartment buildings.
Gruen died in 1980, and thus was spared the spectacle of Phase 6: the dead mall. A 2001 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Congress for the New Urbanism came up with a count of 2,076 traditional, enclosed malls, 140 of them stone-cold dead and 249 on life support.
Those figures inspired a Los Angeles competition a few years ago that challenged architects to come up with new uses for the dead malls. One of the entries: a minimum-security women's prison. (Which is what malls always were, anyway, right?) W e are inside Randall Park Mall now, walking through the darkened empty spaces, our footsteps echoing like Gary Cooper's at the end of "High Noon." We pass a row of planters, one with a single green shoot struggling toward the light. We pass the fountains where kids used to throw coins for good luck, dry now, the bright-blue paint peeling. We pass the escalators, unmoving and barricaded.
This mall once had nearly 200 stores and five anchors. Now it has 66, including three anchors:Sears, Macy's and Burlington Coat Factory. The other stores, scattered through the wings, sell flash and youth: urban fashion, nail salons and jewelry shops, almost all of them with banners proclaiming: "We Make Gold Teeth."
It may be hard to love a mall, but it's easy to feel sorry for one. What happened here? Over in the food court, the old folks who have been coming here mornings for 20 years, to walk and drink coffee, name the usual suspects: the "near-riot" of 1992, when an encounter between a couple of white security guards and black teenagers turned into a clash between 50 police and 200 kids. The time in 2002 when a Dillard's security guard beat a suspected shoplifter, who later died. The shooting at the Magic Johnson Theater in 2000.
People in the eastern suburbs started calling it "the black mall." But racial tensions were not the only, or even the primary, culprit. More dazzling malls opened, farther out. Wal-Mart and Target took departmentstore business. The unsteady economy of recent years took its toll.
Robert Young, who is 96 years old, holds court at a long table while Mamie Giles passes around a plate of homemade cookies. His theory: "It was the young hoodlums." The hoodlums don't show upso much anymore, after the mall beefed up security. There was a robbery at Kay Jewelers a fewweeks ago; the guy stole a diamond.
Still, Young and his friends feel safe; they keep coming. "I just come out for a couple of hours to keep from staying home," Young says, but if you sit with him and his friends for a while, or walk past the jewelry shops into the shadowy wing that once ended at Higbee's, you might see something else - something more hopeful struggling toward the light like that slender green plant.
There's Pulse, a fitness center, where co-owner Barbara Board counts out killer crunches for one client - "23! C'mon! Give me 24!" - while co-owner Patrice McKinney tells another that she'll never lose weight or build muscle if she skips breakfast.
Across the way, kids with backpacks head into classes at North Coast Academy, a charter school. Next door, Church 'N the Mall is quiet, but come Sunday you'll hear the drums and electric guitar backing the gospel choir.
At the other end of the mall, next to Sears, Cleveland Merchant Music Family just opened a month ago, with recording and dance studios, classrooms and a pool table. Like Gruen before them, director William Lynch and CEO Barbara Coffer-Bell are dreaming big, utopian dreams: of a place where parents, children and grandparents make music together, where kids come after school to learn to be electricians, or poets.
Over at his jewelry kiosk, 33-year-old Yuri Poklyak, who came over from the Ukraine at 18, is at first confused when asked what he thinks of the mall's reputation for having racial troubles. "Race? You mean the Pakistanis and the Indians?" he asks, looking around at the shopkeepers: Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Jews, Russians and Vietnamese and Koreans.
"Back home, nobody would be friends," Poklyak says. He does not see Randall Park as a place where racism divides people. "Business at the mall made everybody peaceful. It's a perfect world here, a neighborhood," he says.
Maybe he's onto something.
Randall Park certainly isn't the mall that anyone envisioned when Merrill cut the ribbon in 1976.
But maybe it is becoming the mall that Gruen envisioned in 1956.
What makes a community?
When Americans were settling the West during the Gold Rush, three things made a camp into a town: a church, a school and a saloon. Randall has those - if you count the food court as a kind of dry saloon. You can even catch a card game there.
The towns had outlaws and sheriffs, immigrant shopkeepers and shoppers, old-timers and kids. As for the gold that brought them all together, Randall has that too.
"We Make Gold Teeth." And so America reinvents itself, once more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This all started with a friend sharing a video that had footage of 3 dead malls in it - Randall Park was the 2nd mall of the three. I couldn't believe the footage - the emptiness. I had planned on paying a visit when I was supposed to be in the area last August. That trip never materialized, and maybe it's for the best, as seeing that in person would have been sad indeed.
It's no secret to most who know me that I'm a mallrat. I love malls. I also have a strange affinity for dead malls. This mall, however, was not dead by a long shot when I hung out there in the early 90's. Spent a lot of time there with my then-boyfriend-now-husband. The first time we held hands was there. The first gift he ever bought me came from the Things Remembered there. As it dies, a part of me dies with it in some way.
Retail Centers have come full circle. They started out as open air plazas, then came the indoor mall in the late 1950's. Now, everyone wants open air centers again.
For me, and many of my generation, we have an affinity for indoor malls. They were a destination. They were a place to meet and greet. A place to network. A safe place to hang out. Malls were once thoughtfully designed, and had beautiful architecture. Now they are a stale, bland, sterile environment.
I was discussing this topic, and the decline of Randall Park with a co-worker and fellow mallrat. He had this to say, and it's better than anything else I can say:
Scenes from a mall
A glimmer of hope at Randall Park
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Joanna Connors
Plain Dealer Reporter
Randall Park Mall may be on the endangered list at the Web site deadmalls.com, but it is not dead. Reports of its demise have not been all that exaggerated, but they're not quite true, either.
People talk about Randall Park the way you might talk about minor TV actors of the 1970s. First: "Remember that guy from 'Rockford Files'? You know - that guy. What was his name?" Then: "I heard he died, like, a few years ago."
Back in the '70s, Randall Park Mall was no minor celebrity. It was a star, a superstar, even before it was built. When Youngstown developer Edward DeBartolo Sr. announced in 1973 that he would turn the former Randall Park racetrack into a "shopping-living-entertainment center," the Cleveland Press put the story on Page One, topped by a headline in a type size once reserved for the declaration of war: "LARGEST U.S. MALL DUE HERE."
Three years later, in August 1976, DeBartolo stood at the entrance to his 2.2 million-square-foot mall. Crowds waited. Cameras flashed. Dina Merrill cut the ribbon.
Dina Merrill? Wasn't she an actress or something back in the '60s? Blond? But she's dead now, right?
(For the record: No, Merrill is not dead. But yes: She was an actress. Or something. In 1976, she had guest roles on both "Quincy M.E." and "Hawaii Five-O," but still had to explain to a Cleveland reporter that she was "a working actress.")
That's a useful phrase for anyone: working (blank). Randall Park Mall is not the glamorous star it once was. It has to take bit parts now. But in its new incarnation, something strange and almost hopeful has happened.
The mall stands across from Thistle down race track in North Randall, forlorn as a stray dog. Before we go in - before we pass the concrete planters filled with rainwater, cigarette butts and a floating Diet Pepsi can; before we inhale the aroma of onions and antique grease; before we even consider taking a look at the restrooms - let's take a minute to think about the mall, and America, and What It All Means.
It is hard to defend the mall - any mall, even the mall that has Banana Republic and Restoration Hardware and smells like $150 perfume.
It is harder still to love the mall. It represents everything Americans would like to forget about ourselves; it is the family snapshot that we tear up because it makes us look fat, or shows our nose from the exact wrong angle.
The mall is all about our appetite for stuff, our greedy habit of consuming more than anyone else in the world. It is about our relationship to cars - off the freeway, with plenty of parking! - and our abandonment of our cities. It is about our infantile attention span, our embrace of the artificial, our transformation from a country that makes things to a country that buys things. Things we do not need.
AGGGHHHH! Tear it up! Now! Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Victor Gruen did not mean for his creation to lay waste to civilization. He wanted to save civilization.
Gruen, an Austrian architect who came to the United States in 1938, designed the first fully enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, which opened in 1956 in Edina, Minn., near Minneapolis. After that, nothing was ever the same.
Not being a born-and-bred American, Gruen had the crazy idea that his invention could be about more than just shopping. He was a socialist - in the '50s, in America - who envisioned a place where commerce and community would meet, a utopia of climate-controlled gardens and cafes, shops and living spaces, where we could all just get along.
So, indeed, did DeBartolo (though he was definitely not a socialist). When he announced his plans for Randall Park, he laid out five phases. Phase 1: the Holiday Inn. Phase 2: the mall. Phase 3: a 4,500-seat theater-inthe- round for "the performing arts." Phase 4: four 14-story office towers. Phase 5: high-rise apartment buildings.
Gruen died in 1980, and thus was spared the spectacle of Phase 6: the dead mall. A 2001 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Congress for the New Urbanism came up with a count of 2,076 traditional, enclosed malls, 140 of them stone-cold dead and 249 on life support.
Those figures inspired a Los Angeles competition a few years ago that challenged architects to come up with new uses for the dead malls. One of the entries: a minimum-security women's prison. (Which is what malls always were, anyway, right?) W e are inside Randall Park Mall now, walking through the darkened empty spaces, our footsteps echoing like Gary Cooper's at the end of "High Noon." We pass a row of planters, one with a single green shoot struggling toward the light. We pass the fountains where kids used to throw coins for good luck, dry now, the bright-blue paint peeling. We pass the escalators, unmoving and barricaded.
This mall once had nearly 200 stores and five anchors. Now it has 66, including three anchors:Sears, Macy's and Burlington Coat Factory. The other stores, scattered through the wings, sell flash and youth: urban fashion, nail salons and jewelry shops, almost all of them with banners proclaiming: "We Make Gold Teeth."
It may be hard to love a mall, but it's easy to feel sorry for one. What happened here? Over in the food court, the old folks who have been coming here mornings for 20 years, to walk and drink coffee, name the usual suspects: the "near-riot" of 1992, when an encounter between a couple of white security guards and black teenagers turned into a clash between 50 police and 200 kids. The time in 2002 when a Dillard's security guard beat a suspected shoplifter, who later died. The shooting at the Magic Johnson Theater in 2000.
People in the eastern suburbs started calling it "the black mall." But racial tensions were not the only, or even the primary, culprit. More dazzling malls opened, farther out. Wal-Mart and Target took departmentstore business. The unsteady economy of recent years took its toll.
Robert Young, who is 96 years old, holds court at a long table while Mamie Giles passes around a plate of homemade cookies. His theory: "It was the young hoodlums." The hoodlums don't show upso much anymore, after the mall beefed up security. There was a robbery at Kay Jewelers a fewweeks ago; the guy stole a diamond.
Still, Young and his friends feel safe; they keep coming. "I just come out for a couple of hours to keep from staying home," Young says, but if you sit with him and his friends for a while, or walk past the jewelry shops into the shadowy wing that once ended at Higbee's, you might see something else - something more hopeful struggling toward the light like that slender green plant.
There's Pulse, a fitness center, where co-owner Barbara Board counts out killer crunches for one client - "23! C'mon! Give me 24!" - while co-owner Patrice McKinney tells another that she'll never lose weight or build muscle if she skips breakfast.
Across the way, kids with backpacks head into classes at North Coast Academy, a charter school. Next door, Church 'N the Mall is quiet, but come Sunday you'll hear the drums and electric guitar backing the gospel choir.
At the other end of the mall, next to Sears, Cleveland Merchant Music Family just opened a month ago, with recording and dance studios, classrooms and a pool table. Like Gruen before them, director William Lynch and CEO Barbara Coffer-Bell are dreaming big, utopian dreams: of a place where parents, children and grandparents make music together, where kids come after school to learn to be electricians, or poets.
Over at his jewelry kiosk, 33-year-old Yuri Poklyak, who came over from the Ukraine at 18, is at first confused when asked what he thinks of the mall's reputation for having racial troubles. "Race? You mean the Pakistanis and the Indians?" he asks, looking around at the shopkeepers: Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Jews, Russians and Vietnamese and Koreans.
"Back home, nobody would be friends," Poklyak says. He does not see Randall Park as a place where racism divides people. "Business at the mall made everybody peaceful. It's a perfect world here, a neighborhood," he says.
Maybe he's onto something.
Randall Park certainly isn't the mall that anyone envisioned when Merrill cut the ribbon in 1976.
But maybe it is becoming the mall that Gruen envisioned in 1956.
What makes a community?
When Americans were settling the West during the Gold Rush, three things made a camp into a town: a church, a school and a saloon. Randall has those - if you count the food court as a kind of dry saloon. You can even catch a card game there.
The towns had outlaws and sheriffs, immigrant shopkeepers and shoppers, old-timers and kids. As for the gold that brought them all together, Randall has that too.
"We Make Gold Teeth." And so America reinvents itself, once more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This all started with a friend sharing a video that had footage of 3 dead malls in it - Randall Park was the 2nd mall of the three. I couldn't believe the footage - the emptiness. I had planned on paying a visit when I was supposed to be in the area last August. That trip never materialized, and maybe it's for the best, as seeing that in person would have been sad indeed.
It's no secret to most who know me that I'm a mallrat. I love malls. I also have a strange affinity for dead malls. This mall, however, was not dead by a long shot when I hung out there in the early 90's. Spent a lot of time there with my then-boyfriend-now-husband. The first time we held hands was there. The first gift he ever bought me came from the Things Remembered there. As it dies, a part of me dies with it in some way.
Retail Centers have come full circle. They started out as open air plazas, then came the indoor mall in the late 1950's. Now, everyone wants open air centers again.
For me, and many of my generation, we have an affinity for indoor malls. They were a destination. They were a place to meet and greet. A place to network. A safe place to hang out. Malls were once thoughtfully designed, and had beautiful architecture. Now they are a stale, bland, sterile environment.
I was discussing this topic, and the decline of Randall Park with a co-worker and fellow mallrat. He had this to say, and it's better than anything else I can say:
Very sad. Not just because they are so vacant, but because online buying has put an end to one thing that I (and I'm sure you) hold dear from the 70's
and 80's, and that is the mall.It used to be a major Friday night event, where me and my friends would meet and "hangout" for HOURS! Oh, the arcades and just the feeling that you had a safe place to go.
I love malls, as does most of our generation. The architecture in that video is priceless and should be preserved. I remember the same "feel" at the York mall and Park City.
There should be a law that keeps iconic malls in place. It is a sad commentary on what the computer age has done to personal interaction. Ironic that the most popular place to buy a computer in the mid 80's was...the Mall!
Monday, January 22, 2007
Blast From The Past
I had been discussing this with a friend, and managed to find a copy. It's in two pieces, unfortunately, but given the rarity of it, it'll do. I have a number of things around on old VHS, but I have no clue where they are at this time. I saw this performed live, and it was hilarious! Enjoy:
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Thought Provoking TV
It's a compelling story. It's also gruesome. It's the story of Jim Jones, and Jonestown.
I have no idea why I find this so very fascinating, but I do. Cult leaders in general just fascinate me. Don't get me wrong - I do not condone what they do in any way, shape, or form, but we studied serial killers and cult leaders in Abnormal Psych, and I am just absolutely riveted at their ability to get inside of people's heads and make them blindly follow. The mindset and methodology that they use is amazing, as many are uneducated or learning disabled, but will hatch elaborate plans. The scholar in me just can't turn away - I have to know more about this. I need to analyze it. I need to find out what went wrong and why, in the hopes that in the future, people like this can be caught or stopped.
I don't know why Jones just rivets me. Like others, he started out with good intentions, and for all appearances, enjoyed the power that came with it, and power can and often does corrupt. Combine that with mental instability and rampant drug use, and it's a powder keg that will eventually blow up and take a lot of innocent people with it. I know I'm not alone. Almost 30 years later, they're still talking and analyzing. In a demented way, he's probably somewhere (albeit very warm) enjoying that people still talk about him.
Lately, there's been a number of specials on television about Jones, The Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Most are documentaries, and analyze what happened. The fact that Jones filmed or recorded most of what he did makes it easy to reconstruct a lot of what happened, but other things, like how many people willfully took the poison and how many resisted and were injected will never be known. In the end, it doesn't really matter. There are 908 people - 300 of them children - who gave their life either voluntarily or involuntarily for this man, and nothing will bring them back.
Earlier this week, I taped a special that aired on The History Channel called "Jonestown: Paradise Lost". I watched it last night. It was two hours long, and differed from the others in that it combined interviews, and used recreated footage, reconstructed with eyewitness testimony and actual footage. The actors did a good job, and there were some different viewpoints presented from other shows I've seen. This was the first time that I had heard Jim's son speak. He was not at Jonestown that day. His father demanded his return, but he refused, as he saw his father as having gone over the edge, and knew something bad was happening. He provided some fascinating insight in to the whole situation, and his father.
For anyone who is interested in this piece of history, I highly recommend this show. The History Channel is airing it again January 20 at 8pm EST, January 21 at 12am EST, and January 27 at 5pm EST. I would not recommend viewing for the squeamish, or anyone under the age of 15 or so.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
A Good Cure For The Winter Blahs
Although I've been familiar with this guy's website for years, I had missed this little gem until someone turned me on to it a while back.
It's just too good to not share the love. Those who don't have a touch of off-beat in their sense of humor may not find it as absolutely hilarious as I do, but it's really worth a look:
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/partycake/index.html
While the April entry is really funny, my favorite one doesn't have a month assigned to it. You'll find it between August and September.
Check it out, and enjoy!
It's just too good to not share the love. Those who don't have a touch of off-beat in their sense of humor may not find it as absolutely hilarious as I do, but it's really worth a look:
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/partycake/index.html
While the April entry is really funny, my favorite one doesn't have a month assigned to it. You'll find it between August and September.
Check it out, and enjoy!
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
The Mind Is A Terrible Thing
When it's as overactive as mine is. Mix in that I've got a bad cold, and am 2 weeks post-op, and it's not a good thing at all.
I was feeling mighty fine up until Sunday. I started feeling a bit run down, and had a lot of post-nasal drip. Last night, the throat got a little sore. This morning, full-on throat pain - very raw and sore. Is there much worse than a sore throat? It's minor compared to other stuff, but the annoyance and pain make it one of the most miserable things to deal with, and there's not much that can be done for them.
I'm not a hypochondriac. Really, I'm not. My fear is the unknown. I'm also impatient.
I started on with some strange stomach "pain" (minor but just there enough to be annoying) the other day, and was a bit freaked out by it. It came and went, and the doctor did tell me that miscellaneous aches and pains would be perfectly normal if they stayed in certain boundaries, and this did. Today, it's back, and it's changed location. I have some soreness of the area - like a bruise. My mind runs wild. Then I have to take a deep breath and realize that it's only 2 weeks since my stomach was cut open, a foreign body (in the form of reinforcing for the weakened area) was inserted, part of my body was "disposed" of, and I was stitched back up again. I feel so good otherwise and bounced back so quick that I demand of myself that I shouldn't be feeling this way. Then I panic. Having the cold on top of it, I'm sure, doesn't help the "achiness" any better.
I did realize that I haven't had enough to drink today, and that is cause for concern, but it's so darn hard with this sore throat. Ironically, staying hydrated is good for a sore throat, but tell my raw throat that. Perhaps it will stop the pain long enough for me to get rehydrated. Not likely, but you never know. I think I need some hot tea.
I have to resist the urge at least once a week to phone the surgeon regarding any number of miscellaneous things. My next appointment is on 2/5 to check a Seroma I developed, which may or may not have to be aspirated (either via needle or incision), which just brings up a whole new set of neuroses. I'm just trying to hang until then. Perhaps I need to find a nice rock to crawl under. Then again, I'd just develop some new miscellaneous pain, and crawl back out again, so I guess I'll just hang, and give the doctor a break. ; )
I was feeling mighty fine up until Sunday. I started feeling a bit run down, and had a lot of post-nasal drip. Last night, the throat got a little sore. This morning, full-on throat pain - very raw and sore. Is there much worse than a sore throat? It's minor compared to other stuff, but the annoyance and pain make it one of the most miserable things to deal with, and there's not much that can be done for them.
I'm not a hypochondriac. Really, I'm not. My fear is the unknown. I'm also impatient.
I started on with some strange stomach "pain" (minor but just there enough to be annoying) the other day, and was a bit freaked out by it. It came and went, and the doctor did tell me that miscellaneous aches and pains would be perfectly normal if they stayed in certain boundaries, and this did. Today, it's back, and it's changed location. I have some soreness of the area - like a bruise. My mind runs wild. Then I have to take a deep breath and realize that it's only 2 weeks since my stomach was cut open, a foreign body (in the form of reinforcing for the weakened area) was inserted, part of my body was "disposed" of, and I was stitched back up again. I feel so good otherwise and bounced back so quick that I demand of myself that I shouldn't be feeling this way. Then I panic. Having the cold on top of it, I'm sure, doesn't help the "achiness" any better.
I did realize that I haven't had enough to drink today, and that is cause for concern, but it's so darn hard with this sore throat. Ironically, staying hydrated is good for a sore throat, but tell my raw throat that. Perhaps it will stop the pain long enough for me to get rehydrated. Not likely, but you never know. I think I need some hot tea.
I have to resist the urge at least once a week to phone the surgeon regarding any number of miscellaneous things. My next appointment is on 2/5 to check a Seroma I developed, which may or may not have to be aspirated (either via needle or incision), which just brings up a whole new set of neuroses. I'm just trying to hang until then. Perhaps I need to find a nice rock to crawl under. Then again, I'd just develop some new miscellaneous pain, and crawl back out again, so I guess I'll just hang, and give the doctor a break. ; )
Friday, January 5, 2007
Since When Is This News??
I booted up Internet Explorer at work to search for a phone number. The headline read "Trey Anastasio arraigned on drug charge".
Who??????????
And so it goes again. More space cluttered up for mindless updates of the goings on in the Celebrity world. I had to google that name to find out that he was once with the group Pfish. I know little about them, but what I do know tells me that this charge should come as no surprise.
Apparently I'm not the only one who is fed up with being bombarded with the constant barrage of celebrity updates everywhere I turn, yet it continues in full force. Every time I turn on the tv, every time I stand in line at the supermarket, and every time I boot up IE, there it is, staring me in the face. I don't care that Lindsay Lohan needs an appendectomy. I don't care that Nicole may be back with DJ AM again. The fact that I even know those names scares me.
Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of some people - actors, musicians, etc. When I was a teenager, I bought Tiger Beat and whatnot, but mainly for the pictures. I always found the articles mind-numbing. Case in point: I have a complete collection of New Kids On The Block trading cards - both series - hold your comments please - you were once 15 too. They come with such interesting factoids as "Joey likes Cheeseburgers" and "Jonathan likes girls who respect their parents". It's nothing new. My 1967 Monkees trading cards tell about how they love french fries and the like.
What slays me is how you just can't get away from it any more. It's constantly in your face. Time was that if you didn't want to hear about it, you just didn't watch stuff like Entertainment Tonight or didn't buy tabloids. Now it's in the local newspaper, on the local news, and I can't seem to get away from it. I know that every generation has scandals, but since when is the fact that actress "a" is divorcing actor "b" because they have a nasty online porn addiction breaking news of any importance? How about helping real people - everyday schmoes - who are addicted to bad things? Everyone cares that Nicole Ritchie has a drug addiction, but how about my late Uncle, who struggled all his life? No one shed a tear for him. Unwilling to saddle his family with funeral costs, he donated his body to science. Who was there to help him? Most certainly not Paris Hilton......
I was pleased to see celebrity name combinations was on the most recent list of stuff that should be banned from the English Language. I once had the misfortune of helping to try and moderate a forum largely populated by teenagers, which was for a tv show. The talk was always "Who do you like better: Cranny, Crashley, Spaige, Pemma, Jaitlin, or Jiberty?" . It got so they'd argue over what was the best way to conglomerate names, and they finally demanded a FAQ be pinned with the "accepted" name conglomerations. Needless to say I did not last long there. Then again, some of these kids thought that "Growing Up Gotti" was a great show to provide role models for them. Yes, they actually said that.
To the people who just can't get enough of Tomkat: please pay a little more attention to your own life and perhaps we won't be bombarded with so much from theirs. Hey - I can always dream, can't I?
Who??????????
And so it goes again. More space cluttered up for mindless updates of the goings on in the Celebrity world. I had to google that name to find out that he was once with the group Pfish. I know little about them, but what I do know tells me that this charge should come as no surprise.
Apparently I'm not the only one who is fed up with being bombarded with the constant barrage of celebrity updates everywhere I turn, yet it continues in full force. Every time I turn on the tv, every time I stand in line at the supermarket, and every time I boot up IE, there it is, staring me in the face. I don't care that Lindsay Lohan needs an appendectomy. I don't care that Nicole may be back with DJ AM again. The fact that I even know those names scares me.
Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of some people - actors, musicians, etc. When I was a teenager, I bought Tiger Beat and whatnot, but mainly for the pictures. I always found the articles mind-numbing. Case in point: I have a complete collection of New Kids On The Block trading cards - both series - hold your comments please - you were once 15 too. They come with such interesting factoids as "Joey likes Cheeseburgers" and "Jonathan likes girls who respect their parents". It's nothing new. My 1967 Monkees trading cards tell about how they love french fries and the like.
What slays me is how you just can't get away from it any more. It's constantly in your face. Time was that if you didn't want to hear about it, you just didn't watch stuff like Entertainment Tonight or didn't buy tabloids. Now it's in the local newspaper, on the local news, and I can't seem to get away from it. I know that every generation has scandals, but since when is the fact that actress "a" is divorcing actor "b" because they have a nasty online porn addiction breaking news of any importance? How about helping real people - everyday schmoes - who are addicted to bad things? Everyone cares that Nicole Ritchie has a drug addiction, but how about my late Uncle, who struggled all his life? No one shed a tear for him. Unwilling to saddle his family with funeral costs, he donated his body to science. Who was there to help him? Most certainly not Paris Hilton......
I was pleased to see celebrity name combinations was on the most recent list of stuff that should be banned from the English Language. I once had the misfortune of helping to try and moderate a forum largely populated by teenagers, which was for a tv show. The talk was always "Who do you like better: Cranny, Crashley, Spaige, Pemma, Jaitlin, or Jiberty?" . It got so they'd argue over what was the best way to conglomerate names, and they finally demanded a FAQ be pinned with the "accepted" name conglomerations. Needless to say I did not last long there. Then again, some of these kids thought that "Growing Up Gotti" was a great show to provide role models for them. Yes, they actually said that.
To the people who just can't get enough of Tomkat: please pay a little more attention to your own life and perhaps we won't be bombarded with so much from theirs. Hey - I can always dream, can't I?
Monday, January 1, 2007
I'm Not Much Of A Fan
of holiday-type music. I'm a music fanatic, and I'll listen to most anything, but I find most holiday music to be too archaic, repetetive (Twelve Days Of Christmas, anyone?), depressing (anyone ever hear Christmas In Jail, or Spending Christmas With Jesus?), or just inane (I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas - shame on you Paul McCartney!). Yeah, yeah - I've heard it all before, and I assure you, I'm not a Scrooge. Not in the least. I just have no desire to sing carols or join in another rousing chorus of Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. That's not to say I don't like some holiday songs. I rather enjoy Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses, or Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid (Duran Duran - nuff said).
Among the handful that I do enjoy, you will find Happy Christmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon. I know it's a protest song, but I really like the message it conveys - anti-war sentiment aside (and don't ask me for my opinion on the current conflict - I refuse to discuss it with most people). I was thinking of that song today (it usually gets me bleary-eyed). Every year I find myself echoing "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, and a new one just begun." Then the annual inventory starts. So what have I done in the past year? I've taken in a few concerts. The CDB show last month was good. Charlie was a doll, as usual. Reminds me that even though I'm not in to country music, I'm willing to try something new and I give respect to raw talent. I got to see John Valby again in February. I know he's not most people's cup of tea, but how we laughed, and not a moment too soon - literally on the way to the show, we got the results of Nelson's biopsy, and it wasn't great news. I'm thankful that we caught it early, and the cancer is gone. We took Brenda along, and that reminds me that I have good friends, and that means so much.
Speaking of friends, I got to travel this year. Took my first trip to the Chicago area, to meet up with some new friends I made. The hours we spent lost trying to find the museum were just as fun as if we would have actually made it. Never underestimate the amusement value of conversation! I made two runs to Virginia to meet up with friends old and new. We were blessed with another baby in the family, and I got to see her for the first time on one of those trips. I'm thankful for all my friends, who were there through good times and not-so-good times to help me through. I'll never be able to pay that back, but I can try. Conversely, I've had to let go of a few friendships, and that has hurt, but life, like people, moves on.
We were blessed with a new, better-paying job for Nelson, and I continue to have a good job that I enjoy. We were able to pay off some bills, and inch a little more out of the hole we got in 10 years ago. I contributed time and money to various efforts and charities, because I believe in giving back. So as this new year begins, looking back on my year, I think that I've done a lot, and certainly some things of consequence.
Had the traditional pork and sauerkraut dinner up at mom and dad's today. Grammy decided to join us. We're fortunate to still have her, but I do grow more concerned every time I see her. She still gets around fairly well, despite her spine curvature and the fact that one leg is now shorter than the other. Her mind, unfortunately, is not what it used to be.
At first, she was forgetting things and repeating things, but not too badly. I would always say that I hoped when I got to be 86 that people would cut me slack any time that someone would mention it. Dad takes her out every Saturday for groceries and for lunch, and he said that he has been a little more worried about her, but it would serve no purpose to force her out of her home - we'd just be hastening the inevitable. My cousin mentioned to me that Grammy couldn't remember her two young daughters names. She kept calling the baby by the first name of another cousins daughter (they are similar, and start with the same letter). She told my cousin and her husband that it was nice that they came up from Texas for Thanksgiving - they have never lived in Texas. No one in the family currently lives there, though my dad and his brother have in the past.
I brushed it off - we all have bad days. Today, however, I really began to notice. She couldn't remember the name of my uncle's youngest daughter. She kept confusing her with the oldest. They all live in Oklahoma. We called down to talk to them. He told us that she was trying to show her older son how to skateboard (the skateboard was his birthday present) and the board went out from in under her, and she broke her leg - badly. Almost as badly as I did. Grammy had literally just handed the phone off, and she had already forgotten what happened to her, and then whom it happened to.
She then asked me if I had watched Gerald Ford's funeral. I said no, we weren't home. She then said that he had been the president in the 1930's. Nelson said "No, grammy, he was president in the 1970's - remember?". Then she said that she was confusing him with someone else. We were watching the Penn State/TN game, which took place in Tampa Bay, and Grammy made a comment about how nice Penn State's football stadium was, and that she liked their Pirate ship. Normally, I'd let that slide, as Grammy isn't a football fanatic, but "TAMPA BAY" was plastered all over the place, let alone that Tampa Bay looks nothing like State College. PSU is also not the Buccaneers (also plastered all over the place), don't use the skull and crossbones, and their colors aren't copper and red.
My cousin gave me a picture of me, Grammy, and my late Pappy for Christmas, which I love. It was on Pappy's birthday, 1977, making me all of 3 1/2. They both looked so young in that picture. That's the Grammy that I think I always have in my mind - she was younger in that picture than my mom is now. Looking at Grammy now is hard. She still looks like Grammy (albeit a little older), but it's like Grammy just isn't there anymore. As hard as it is, I'm going to really put forth the effort to spend more time with her (more than just my monthly visits where we bring supper - it's just not enough anymore), because the time we have left where she even knows who I am may be drawing short.
To all my friends, I leave you with John Lennon's final thought from Happy Christmas - "A very Merry Christmas (or whatever you believe), and a happy new year. Let's hope it's a good one, without any fear".
Among the handful that I do enjoy, you will find Happy Christmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon. I know it's a protest song, but I really like the message it conveys - anti-war sentiment aside (and don't ask me for my opinion on the current conflict - I refuse to discuss it with most people). I was thinking of that song today (it usually gets me bleary-eyed). Every year I find myself echoing "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, and a new one just begun." Then the annual inventory starts. So what have I done in the past year? I've taken in a few concerts. The CDB show last month was good. Charlie was a doll, as usual. Reminds me that even though I'm not in to country music, I'm willing to try something new and I give respect to raw talent. I got to see John Valby again in February. I know he's not most people's cup of tea, but how we laughed, and not a moment too soon - literally on the way to the show, we got the results of Nelson's biopsy, and it wasn't great news. I'm thankful that we caught it early, and the cancer is gone. We took Brenda along, and that reminds me that I have good friends, and that means so much.
Speaking of friends, I got to travel this year. Took my first trip to the Chicago area, to meet up with some new friends I made. The hours we spent lost trying to find the museum were just as fun as if we would have actually made it. Never underestimate the amusement value of conversation! I made two runs to Virginia to meet up with friends old and new. We were blessed with another baby in the family, and I got to see her for the first time on one of those trips. I'm thankful for all my friends, who were there through good times and not-so-good times to help me through. I'll never be able to pay that back, but I can try. Conversely, I've had to let go of a few friendships, and that has hurt, but life, like people, moves on.
We were blessed with a new, better-paying job for Nelson, and I continue to have a good job that I enjoy. We were able to pay off some bills, and inch a little more out of the hole we got in 10 years ago. I contributed time and money to various efforts and charities, because I believe in giving back. So as this new year begins, looking back on my year, I think that I've done a lot, and certainly some things of consequence.
Had the traditional pork and sauerkraut dinner up at mom and dad's today. Grammy decided to join us. We're fortunate to still have her, but I do grow more concerned every time I see her. She still gets around fairly well, despite her spine curvature and the fact that one leg is now shorter than the other. Her mind, unfortunately, is not what it used to be.
At first, she was forgetting things and repeating things, but not too badly. I would always say that I hoped when I got to be 86 that people would cut me slack any time that someone would mention it. Dad takes her out every Saturday for groceries and for lunch, and he said that he has been a little more worried about her, but it would serve no purpose to force her out of her home - we'd just be hastening the inevitable. My cousin mentioned to me that Grammy couldn't remember her two young daughters names. She kept calling the baby by the first name of another cousins daughter (they are similar, and start with the same letter). She told my cousin and her husband that it was nice that they came up from Texas for Thanksgiving - they have never lived in Texas. No one in the family currently lives there, though my dad and his brother have in the past.
I brushed it off - we all have bad days. Today, however, I really began to notice. She couldn't remember the name of my uncle's youngest daughter. She kept confusing her with the oldest. They all live in Oklahoma. We called down to talk to them. He told us that she was trying to show her older son how to skateboard (the skateboard was his birthday present) and the board went out from in under her, and she broke her leg - badly. Almost as badly as I did. Grammy had literally just handed the phone off, and she had already forgotten what happened to her, and then whom it happened to.
She then asked me if I had watched Gerald Ford's funeral. I said no, we weren't home. She then said that he had been the president in the 1930's. Nelson said "No, grammy, he was president in the 1970's - remember?". Then she said that she was confusing him with someone else. We were watching the Penn State/TN game, which took place in Tampa Bay, and Grammy made a comment about how nice Penn State's football stadium was, and that she liked their Pirate ship. Normally, I'd let that slide, as Grammy isn't a football fanatic, but "TAMPA BAY" was plastered all over the place, let alone that Tampa Bay looks nothing like State College. PSU is also not the Buccaneers (also plastered all over the place), don't use the skull and crossbones, and their colors aren't copper and red.
My cousin gave me a picture of me, Grammy, and my late Pappy for Christmas, which I love. It was on Pappy's birthday, 1977, making me all of 3 1/2. They both looked so young in that picture. That's the Grammy that I think I always have in my mind - she was younger in that picture than my mom is now. Looking at Grammy now is hard. She still looks like Grammy (albeit a little older), but it's like Grammy just isn't there anymore. As hard as it is, I'm going to really put forth the effort to spend more time with her (more than just my monthly visits where we bring supper - it's just not enough anymore), because the time we have left where she even knows who I am may be drawing short.
To all my friends, I leave you with John Lennon's final thought from Happy Christmas - "A very Merry Christmas (or whatever you believe), and a happy new year. Let's hope it's a good one, without any fear".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
