captain's log for a personal trip through my own uncharted future
Friday, January 09, 2004
Every so often I get these wild hormone swings, like when I was 12, and then those same issues seem to come up like it hasn't been nearly 40 years since I started adolescence. Pouf goes all the time and money in therapy--well, not really, because instead of crying and feeling worthless I am able to sit here writing about it while SRL puts the Squid to bed. Due to being fruit of the loins of some very disturbed and not overlying bright people, I grew up in an alternate demon dimension where the people outside our immediate environment were beings superior to me and who could never accept me thanks to my own demon nature. Now that we have had the Buffyverse for lo these 7 years, I finally have the proper vocabulary to describe my childhood. I was able to escape through a dimensional portal into the real world at 17, that portal being located in a small college in Sarasota. Alas, you can take the girl out of the demon dimension but it's hard to get those early influences out of the girl.
It's a little hard to make new friends and harder still to live without them. Some of the life changes I've made to get to where I am now, a place of love and fulfillment as well as mood swings and impending layoffs, have cost me much of the community and friends I counted on before. Cool, new beginnings are new chances. New chances are new ways to get myself rejected and/or fucked over as well as getting rewarded. Being old enough to understand my own mortality has made it harder to ignore risks in general.
My son is a sweet and sociable being. He seems to be popular with other kids and is friendly. I never though of myself as someone to live through my child. I fear I will find myself feeling a failure if he ends up not being the popular social butterfly I wanted to be myself but was too fucked up to manage when I was younger. I must find the strength to let him be as geeky as he wants, if he ends up going that way.
It's been a low key day. Took the kid to the gym so I could swim and then chased him around the gym awhile trying to get him to drink a smoothie while playing in one of the workout rooms. Someone took away the pilates balls, darn it. He really likes them. They're soft and you can throw them anywhere.
I decided not to pursue police action on the drug addict who was after me on the weekend. Revenge for being annoyed seemed too petty a reason to cause someone that much trouble.
tetris is sucking out my brain. I can just feel the neurotransmitters running down pathways of compulsion when I play it. O insidious Russian inventor, why have you done this to me?
On a more worldly note, I was on call for my medical group this weekend and a woman who calls basically every weekend, who isn't even our patient, called again asking, as usual, for narcotic containing cough syrup. I had to listen to a long rambling account of her recent illness and visit to a nonexistent doctor at a clinic I was covering, which was kind of identical to the recent illness she had when she called a colleague two weeks ago, sitting there thinking okay, when does the request for hycodan come? It came. I got really annoyed with her and ended up calling various pharmacies and finding out she'd gotten it from four other doctors in the last two weeks. So I called the police. I really am opposed to jail time and wasting time in the court system for drug offenses, but I'm also not into being jerked around by liars trying to take advantage of my desire to help the sick and injured. they never tell you in medical school how easy it is to be held hostage by abusive people and systems because of one's medical ethics, and how many hostage-takers there are out there. The Republican party is much better at it than drug addicts, but unfortunately it's not illegal when they do it.
Today a power line fell down in front of the house. The Squid liked watching the cherry pickers go up and down. When the old power line was dead on the sidewalk, he walked round and round it pretending it was a train track. Of course when you're three, everything is a train track.
The fire department and police came to check out the live wire and block off the street so no one would drive on the live wire. It's nice we still have public safety people for now. The fire department has been trying to do extra fundraising so they don't have to lay anyone off. Hope it works.
It's really true that time goes by faster as you age. Seems like I was just here...
Since my last post I've lost my back-up job doing coverage for an oncologist. He laid me off the day after the new Medicare bill was signed by the president. He thinks he's going to lose $200,000 next year due to its limitations on outpatient cancer drug reimbursement and may have to close his infusion center. Thanks a pantload, federal government.
I've been reading Al Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them. I really think we need to start putting antipsychotics in the water supply, along with the prozac I already thought should be there. ML is right, dirty tricks and power grabs are the MO of the right wing. I have trouble believing those people can do the things they do without destabilizing society into a vast pool of foul smelling chunky mucus.
Meanwhile the city job I have isn't looking very healthy either. Who cares that the sucky economy is dumping more and more desperate patients onto our doorstep? The more we are needed, the less money there is to keep us going. Maybe I can be like the Gropinfuhrer and hold my breath waiting for the economy to get better and generate more taxes.
Arnold Schwarzenneger is going to be governor of my state. He plans to roll back the vehicle tax which helps supports cities, deregulate the power companies again, cap spending. If he doesn't raise taxes for the deficit then services will get cut. Basic services like health care and public transit, not to mention homeless services, are already in trouble and will be in worse trouble soon. As a city employee who provides health care services to the working poor, I feel panic rising up from deep inside me like a big fucking tsunami.
My friend ML thinks there is a move afoot by those who play dirty in order to gain power, that this movement involves derailment of the democratic process, and that the recent recall election was an example of that derailment. I fear he may be right. The outlandish world view in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, with the end of the US Government as we know it and a medieval array of burbclaves and FOQNE's and ruling franchises in a lawless ex-country, is starting to look a little more realistic. Or maybe we'll just end up like mainland China. The next time a group of college students riots for more rights, they'll get shot. Very effect crowd control
I feel like there has to be something I can do to oppose the eroding of our rights and liberties, other than blogging or writing letters to my congressperson. But I feel handicapped by my basic commitment to decency in public behavior. It's the whole don't fuck over other people philosophy I'm teaching my child, the attitude I look for in friends. The thing that makes me weaker than the person whose ends justify any means. Moral superiority feels nice but it doesn't help anyone survive in a totalitarian state. And it sure doesn't counteract this feeling of uselessness. Hopefully this is just a developmental phase I'm going through and I'll grow on into something more effective soon.
Went to a fun ice cream social at the home of another blogger. It was fun and full of people and unique flavors of homemade ice cream but it was a bit like being in a sea of nerds like myself who are shy and sometimes blurt out opening lines that are impossible to follow up. The lines then lie about like dead perch, waiting to be tripped over.
Pop culture has entered my life at a new level. My son is learning to use the commode. The potty seat we got him has Sesame Street characters on it. Did Elmo say "sit on my face" or is it my imagination?
