OMG WTF, I’m Old

As I’ve mentioned before, since I have now been without cable a few years, instead of watching TV I usually watch original comedy stuff on YouTube – guys like this one and this one and this one, gals like this one, this piece of citrusy goodness, and, of course – these guys, as they’re the home team.

A month or so ago, I was voting in a Survivor-type contest among YouTubers, and I kept seeing this one three-letter acronym used over and over again in comments on people’s videos. It was confusing me terribly as to why people were repeatedly writing this acronym in regards to YouTubers they apparently liked.

Because when I was in college and thereabouts in the Eighties – and into the Nineties, for that matter – all those bad boys with their Black Flag and Minor Threat and Bad Brains records (i.e., the ones I always wound up with – go figure) used to stencil this three-letter acronym on guitar cases and skateboards and stuff. Or my ex’s slightly nerdy, acid-dropping, D&D-playing friends would fake tattoo it on themselves. It was spray painted on the walls (always either in black or red) of at least three apartments I remember in Murfreesboro and two in Nashville, and on the outside of one garage.

You’d have been hard pressed to walk into Cantrell’s, the Exit/In, or Elliston Square in the Eighties and not seen this acronym scrawled on a t-shirt, an Army jacket, or a pair of torn jeans in black magic marker. After all, it was all, everybody’s an anarchist, yada yada and all that… way back then in the ol’ Dark Ages. After all. (I just wanted to fit “all” into this paragraph somehow, just one more time.)

And it – said three-letter acronym – it wasn’t very, well… nice. (And understandably so, since everybody was an anarchist and all that.)

So a month or so ago, I was really having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why in the world people kept leaving in comments things like:

“(insert YouTube comedian’s name here)… FTW!”

I guess it’s one of the disadvantages to not having kids/teenagers to set me straight – and next time, maybe I’ll have enough sense to just go straight to Urban Dictionary instead of straining my brain over something like “For The Win!” for days. Or a week and a half exactly.

But I guess at least not having teenagers meant I got to spare myself the inevitable ridicule when Mom asked why all these people on YouTube were telling all these other people to f*ck the world, right?

The Usual, Unfortunately

Here’s yet another example of how rotten my luck is (and notably has been for some time).  I was getting ready to work on a project a couple of days ago that I badly needed to work on and finish before Christmas got much closer, and as I sat down at the computer all motivated and ready to get productive – the power went out.  Because at the house next door, they were chopping limbs off a tree… but had to get the utility company to kill my power line to do it.

The power was out for, I don’t know, seven or eight, maybe nine hours.  Just mine.  Not the house where the tree is.

In fact, the worker chopping the tree got through about 3:45, and had made several calls, but over two hours later, the utility company had yet to come back and put the (live) line back up.  So I called them too.  They finally showed up after 7 p.m., and by then it was really too late to do anything.

There’s something else I need to get done, but I need a large shipment of (free) Priority Mail boxes from the postal service to be able to do it.  I’ve been waiting a while.  I realize it’s the Christmas season and all with the mail, but just yet another monkey wrench thrown my way.  At this point, even though I badly need to get this done, I’m thinking maybe I’m better off waiting until after Christmas anyway.  Maybe people will have more money to spend on stuff they want but don’t necessarily need (which is what this project mainly consists of) by then.

In any case, I just can’t really catch a break lately.  There’s always something somewhere throwing a monkey wrench into everything.

I applied for a couple of jobs recently.  The very next week, both organizations announced major layoffs and a hiring freeze.

I’m very tired of things like having to choose between buying groceries or putting gas in the car.  Or whether to buy food to eat, or buy paper towels and toilet tissue.

It’s too bad I have to buy groceries at all, since it seems like nearly all the things I have to buy that are necessities have gone up 75-100% practically in the last few months.  Some of them have even gone up that much – yet the packaging has gotten smaller, there’s less of whatever it is in the package.  Other stuff is the same price but now, like, 11 ounces of whatever instead of 16.

Seems like I’ve been saying for months when will this all end?  Seems like it’s not going to.

People close to me will help, but by the time I’ve gotten another round or two of groceries and other necessities or bills paid, there’s nothing left and I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to make $1.49 or so stretch out for weeks again.  I need to put gas in the car again later this week and I’m thinking, OK, now how am I going to do that?

I eat maybe three, four times a week.  I know that’s not good.  But I do things like last week when I made the mistake, after having craved it for days and being hungry as heck anyway, of spending a little extra (less than ten bucks) on a spaghetti dinner from a fave joint around here.  Now I’m wishing I hadn’t and had that ten bucks back.

I have cut back virtually everything, pretty much, until there is no more.  The utilities are almost two months behind again, as that’s pretty much stayed for months now – it’ll get paid somehow.  I wouldn’t have Internet anymore I suppose, except since that’s my sole source of income I can’t very well not have that – of course if the utilities get cut off – well, you know.

Christmas?  I don’t get to participate in Christmas for the second year in a row.  I mean, we’ll have it, and it’ll be fine and nice and all that.  But I can’t buy anything for anyone, and just be opening presents I’ll wish nobody would have bought me since I can’t do anything myself.  I do have one thing for my sister that I just happened to wind up with, but I didn’t really intentionally go out and get it as a Christmas gift.  That’ll be it.

I’ve built up some residual recurring income.  It’s small now, but it will get better.  It’s just stuff that takes some time to grow and is going to continue to.  But it’s not going to solve any big problems right away, that’s for sure.

I do some work but there are issues with that too.  Always issues.  I’m actually constantly working, almost around the clock, sleep here and there when I finally crash, get up and get to work on something else again.  It’s some income, but not enough.  Working on other things too but again, more stuff that’s going to take time for anything to come of it.

I’m just really, really tired of it all.  Sorry.  I probably wouldn’t read here anymore for all the repetitive doom and gloom there’s been either.

Dobie is in such decline that I don’t really think we have much longer.  He is so frail and skinny now, it just breaks my heart.  And that in itself – him getting so frail and thin and pitiful, as well as blind – has posed all kinds of new problems, like today when he got stuck somewhere I wasn’t sure for a while I was going to be able to get him out of.  Last week he got a foot and claw stuck in the old furnace grill and I wasn’t sure I was going to get him loose from that either.  I keep thinking what if he does something like that sometime when I’m (rarely as I am) away from home and is stuck like that for hours?

He and the only other extremely elderly pet left are really throwing me for a loop.  Neither of them are eating as much as they should, although the cat is really doing all right otherwise for her 17 or so years.  It takes her hours to eat when she does eat, though, and she spends most of her time in there talking to her food.  Which is kind of funny, yes, but she’s always had this habit of talking to inanimate objects, starting with a roll of duct tape that was on the floor once years ago.

I always was big into Christmas.  I was thinking the other day of how nice it always used to be between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We’d have the tree up and on every night, and my parents had all this Christmas music on a couple of reel-to-reel tapes that were usually playing every night, and I’d just hang out laying with my head under the Christmas tree listening to music and looking at the lights and ornaments most every night.

Back when people used to have time to enjoy stuff like that, anyway.

I’d do the same at my grandmother’s house.  I remember what all the Christmas decorations she used to pull out every year looked like – probably because I was always helping get them out and put them up – even though I haven’t seen most of them in 25 years.  I guess my aunt still has most of them, I don’t know.  I don’t think there’s really anything I wish I had of all that stuff, except for maybe the little lighted Christmas trees that probably actually originally belonged to my great-grandmother.  There were two of them – one was silver and one was green – they weren’t anything special, just aluminum or tin with a light inside, and colored cellophane or something that made them look like they had lights on them.  Probably from the Fifties or Forties, maybe earlier.  They always sat on the end tables in my grandmother’s living room which, before that, was my great-grandmother’s living room.

I’m older now than my mother was when I left home for college.  Have I already written that here before?  I can’t remember.

So, enough joy and good will to men from me for now.  Maybe sometime I’ll have something better or funny to write about, there just isn’t lately or I’m too busy anyway.

I was about to write that at least Tojo has been staying mostly out of trouble lately, but I just reached over to move him as he was standing over Maggie looking like he was about to jump on her (again), and he bit me (not hard).  So there’s that, too.

News from the Nursing Home

Living with an elderly cat in decline has certainly become a challenge lately. Of course, there’s also the fact that I have two more elderly cats who are doing okay for now, but Schuyler, my black cat, is presenting all kinds of new challenges lately.

I previously mentioned the recent loss of normal toilet habits. That’s gotten better in some ways. We now have this routine where I think he may be about to go, so about forty times a day, I pick him up and we go to the litter box, and about three or four of those times, we’ll have success. The rest of the time he just jumps out because no, he doesn’t need to go.

Or then we’ll have an episode like we did a few minutes ago, where we made it to the litter box and had a successful pee, and then a very short time he later he started acting like he needed to go again. So off we went again, and immediately he jumped out of the box. And then about five minutes later had an accident in the living room.

I would think he’s getting senile, but he’s apparently mostly with it. In fact, most times that I’m either not paying attention or asleep and he can’t make it to the litter box in time (honestly, I don’t know whether he’s even trying to anymore), he’s picked a ceramic bowl that used to hold keys and whatnot and really hasn’t been in use in some time to go in. Which is fine. Bowls can be washed, and that’s way better than a lot of places he could be going. And he’s going there every time, so I can’t complain too much about that.

Otherwise, he really seems to be doing okay and has even put on just a little bit of weight, which is not much considering he’s so pitifully thin and he was always such a big, stocky, strapping boy. He still purrs constantly, and he still keeps busy cleaning everyone else as well as himself (I’ve always called him my “hairdresser cat”). He’s eating better and keeping it down and other things have improved.

So really, we’re doing okay, but the forty or fifty times a day trips to the litter box is about to wear me out. I’m not going to complain much though; obviously we’ve been blessed with more time than I thought we had a few weeks ago.

And speaking of elderly cats with issues, Little has improved to the point of being on the verge of getting fat again (longtime friends and family will remember she used to look like a little basketball years ago). And the very strange sweet and lovable and clingy disposition that developed after her stroke-like episode (with the vestibular disease) a month and half ago – well, that’s all gone. She’s back to her normal crabby self and hissing at everyone in her path all the time.

With all that’s gone on this year with Rocky and Lulu’s illnesses and then deaths, Dobie and Little’s episodes with the vestibular disease, and now Schuyler and his particular challenges, I don’t know what I would have done if I was not working at home these days. We wouldn’t have been able to manage all this at all.

I’m also happy to report we are finally totally flea-free (or at least almost), no thanks to Frontline Plus. I keep reading where people are concerned that the company changed the formula because so many people are having such bad luck with it now and not killing fleas as it once did, and then there’s always the possibility, I guess, that the fleas are just becoming immune to it, but it no longer works here, I can tell you that; and, I believe Frontline Top Spot works better – or at least it seemed to last I used it. We have been using all that stuff since it first started coming out, from Program to Advantage to Frontline and then Frontline Plus, and then I was able to get by for a few years with some over-the-counter stuff and only on the dogs before the dogs next door moved in. Our experience with Frontline Plus this year was a nightmare, whereas going back to Advantage a month later, we had peace within a week, if even that long. Between that and the original Dawn dish liquid flea traps (still working, I’m going to keep one down 365 days a year now whether I see a flea or not), we’ve had super success. Pooh on Frontline Plus.

And Tojo the psycho kitty’s been out here for about twenty minutes now without causing any chaos or making anybody mad. He’s getting better. Sometimes.

Reality Bites

My hometown (one of them) newspaper publishes a little blurb every day of “25 years ago”, “50 years ago”, and “75 years ago”, highlights and snippets from that day’s edition in those time periods of the paper.  Lately there’s been some 90-something years ago ones, too, that I’m not really sure what happened to do because they were there for a few days, and now they’re not.  But anyway.

I always get a kick out of it (especially the “75 years ago”, that stuff is downright hilarious sometimes) and read it every day.  And it’s especially neat to me because a lot of days my dad or his siblings, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, other relatives, and even sometimes I will be in there (though not all that much for me, since we moved elsewhere when I was 13).  It’s usually a nice few minutes out of my day every weekday, and pretty neat to read things that were in the paper 25/50/75 years ago like my dad playing football or baseball, my grandmother’s piano recital as a young girl, things like that.

So yesterday I’m reading the “25 years ago” column and – this being the end of the school year – the local high school had selected the members of the varsity cheerleading squad for the next year, and I’m reading the names, all of whom I knew because I either went to school with them or knew them from other local activities during the time I grew up there until we moved.  I was reading, in particular, the names of the girls I actually did go to school with, the ones who were in my class.

Then I glanced at the “25 years ago” again.  And then it slowly dawned on me that those girls were the SENIOR cheerleaders on the upcoming year’s squad.

Nope, it just hadn’t really occurred to me that next year will be 25 years since I graduated from high school.  A quarter of a century.  Yuck.  And just where did that time go?

I’d be stunned, but I’m too old and tired to be stunned.  Pardon me while I go take a nap now.

Balancing Act

I figure if you’re going to have what is quite possibly the, but definitely one of the top ten, worst days of your life, trying to balance that out with a minute and a half or so of an absolutely adorable, not born very long (about two months) baby is not a bad idea.

But the other reason is because my mom has trouble sometimes seeing YouTubes, and doesn’t have a MySpace, so this way she can look at her too (we were just discussing said child a little while ago).

This is one of my oldest and dearest friend’s (since HS, and we were roommates in college) sorta newborn, third child and third daughter. Her eldest (now 19) is sorta like a godchild to me (except I’d be a terrible godmother), and there’s about ten years’ difference between all three girls.

My friend is a year younger than me, but already a grandmother, and I think that’s hilarious, though I’ve been pretty good about not giggling about it TOO much. (Plus I might as well get over it anyway, ‘cos pretty soon that’s not gonna be funny anymore anyhow. Most of my friends’ kids are entering college this year or next, some already there. Ugh.)

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to talk about anything else just yet tonight (but I will), so here’s an adorably cute baby.

As My Grandfather Used to Say, It’s Better Than the Alternative

Oops, I forgot to blog this week, huh?  Wow, sorry.  This week has just been crazy busy.

So even though it has not moved from my driveway since Wednesday, sometime within the last 48 hours the windshield of my not-even-a-year-old-yet car developed a crack.  It’s at the bottom of the windshield (well, mostly) and not all THAT bad, I suppose, but come on, this is a practically new car that doesn’t even have 10K miles on it yet – and it hasn’t been out of my driveway since Wednesday!  I know we had a bad storm last night, but I discerned no hail, and I don’t see any evidence around of why this would have happened, so yeah, I’m not happy right now.  Happy Birthday to me.

Yeah, I don’t usually make a fuss about or even remotely announce such things, but since LiveJournal already ratted me out to Smiley and I guess everyone else on my LJ list, I figured I would go ahead and acknowledge it so I could gripe some more.  Right now I’m enjoying my last seven-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Because 42 just sounds… older.

(Apologies to ‘Coma who is a little flipped out about 42 right now… hee.)

(PS When someone posted on Twitter last week about Gilligan’s Island‘s Mary Ann, Dawn Wells, getting busted for weed, I really thought it was a joke and didn’t pay any more attention to it.  Well, I’ll be.)

(PPS Technically I won’t be 42 until 2:24 a.m. so really that’s nine-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Hey look, I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s only two more hours of being younger.)

A Small Town Tradition & A Lack Of Time

One thing I usually do every morning, since I have extended family all over Northwest Tennessee – not to mention all the friends and their families back in my two hometowns up yonder – is check The Jackson Sun’s obituaries, because you never know when something might have happened like that that you really probably do need to know about. Now that I’ve gotten to “that age” where things like that seem to happen more and more – no longer just people’s grandparents passing away like it once often was, but their parents, siblings, sometimes themselves – I try to stay on top of it all, and have ties to several counties up there to check up on. A couple of my friends are good about calling when it’s somebody or their parent or whatever that we know really well, but a lot of times someone’s mom or dad will have passed away or something that they won’t think to let me know about, and I’d like to send a card or whatever – that kind of thing – so I just try to make sure to check the Sun as well as my hometown paper’s websites daily (or weekly in the one case).

This might just be a Northwest Tennessee thing (or a rural group of towns kinda thing), but I find that since I’m scanning the obits real quick at a glance every day, it’s quicker for me to scan down the column list of funeral homes rather than the towns themselves. I guess it’s odd that I know the names of all those small town funeral homes so well that it’s quicker for me to look through the page that way, rather than reviewing the towns themselves – but again, I think that may just be a Northwest Tennessee, or at least rural-ish, thing. I know Karnes is in Dyer, and Shelton’s in Trenton, Stockdale-Malin in Camden, and so on and so forth all over the northwest part of the state. Sometimes I have wondered if Newscoma and Squirrelly do somewhat the same thing, or if it’s just some weird quirk with me, but it seems I just process the information much more quickly looking down the column of listed funeral homes than the list of towns on the page. I dunno why.

OK, so yep, that’s kinda weird. I’m well aware of that.

I also get e-mail obituary notifications from one of the funeral homes back home. Which is really convenient, but it’s also kind of a source of amusement for me because, well, if you’re from that particular town of my two hometowns, who’d have ever thought something like that via the information superhighway would EVER be available, you know. Until a few years ago, that town had all of one – ONE - traffic light. Things seemed to be getting really progressive when the OTHER, and first, funeral home in town put in a recorded obituary line you could call to see who’d passed on and was laid up there at the moment. Which that in itself is another source of amusement to me, because the fact that my little hometown is even able to support TWO funeral homes is just crazy to me. But apparently they’re both doing well, both the original and long-standing one as well as the newer kid on the block (which, admittedly, is really not so new anymore, I guess it’s been there about ten years now, but it’ll always be “the new one” to me and half of everybody else back home).

Now, in my other hometown, there have been two funeral homes for as long as I’ve been around and way before me; in fact, technically, there’s three, maybe even four (not sure about that). But the two main, large ones – they’ve always been there pretty much. And every family in town, no doubt, has their preference of where their people will go when the time comes.

Or you have families like mine where one side of the family (my grandmother’s) were all laid to rest by one funeral home, and my grandfather’s side of the family all had their preparations and funerals at the other. Nowadays that the older folks are all gone and it’s just the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I think we’re all pretty much sticking with just the one for those needs (the one my grandfather’s side always went to). The family that runs that particular funeral home includes folks that grew up with, went to church with, and/or went to school with both my parents, my uncle, cousins, etc., so it’s just kind of natural that in the end, all the “younger” generation has gravitated towards that one for all burial and funeral needs. I don’t know, nor do I know that I ever have known, the people that run the other one, and it’s been going on 30 years since we’ve had a family funeral there, my great-grandfather being the last one. So when the time comes for my Mom hopefully way far off in the future – assuming I outlive my mother, that is – I’ll be calling Leon (or his son), and they’ll do what they do, and there ya go.

The fact that everything I just wrote is so convoluted and complicated is actually one of the things I love about being from the South, or at least the more rural parts and small towns of the South. There are probably very few small town anecdotes you can tell or subjects you can try to explain that are specific to Southern small towns without it getting all complicated and convoluted like that, all those little details and stories and tangents.

Oh, there’s much, much more besides the funeral home deal, and I’m sure I’ll write about a lot more of it in the future, not enough time for that right now. But that stuff just cracks me up, plus I’m glad of it, I really wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s just the kind of stuff you just don’t find everywhere, just in Small Town USA, and some of it’s so very specific to small towns in the South.

Anyway, guess what, none of that’s really what this post is about. Not exactly, anyway.

As I mentioned above, I get the e-mail notifications from the one funeral home back home. So yesterday afternoon during my lunch break, as I’m trying to catch up all the conversation and lots and lots of clamor that was the local-ish blog world yesterday, my e-mail beeps and I go see what I got.

And it’s from that funeral home, and I look at the name. Which is not exactly a terribly uncommon name, even though this is a small town we’re talking about. There’s actually several people in town that share both the same first and last names in this case; in fact, two of them with the exact same name graduated with me, even though I graduated in a class of only 160-odd folks. They had different middle names though, so one was “Firstname D.” and the other “Firstname K.” – or “Big Firstname” – when you spoke of them.

Anyway, I saw it, and immediately said, “No…” And clicked on the link to go to the website and looked, where the birthdate confirmed yes, not no.

Look, this wasn’t someone I was particularly close to or knew that well at all. Just a few days ago I wrote about being a little shell-shocked recently over friends’ brothers and sisters, both older and younger than me, having recently passed away and how weird that was to deal with. Well, this is the older sibling of another one of my friends, one of my gang from school days. Again, not someone I knew well, even though his brother was one of my crew – but kind of ironically, someone else I was in school with myself, and someone else I shared a lunch table with for an entire year. And someone else who, though I didn’t know so well, was always pleasant and super nice.

It’s really kind of unnerving and is definitely sad and depressing in any case, but especially since this is the third time since the first of the year that siblings of friends have died, they’re all around my age, two I was in school with myself. It’s not the big city; it’s a really small town. And people that are 44 and 42 and 39 years old within less than two months in this really small town – it’s flabbergasting as well as depressing.

And I’m further bothered because in small towns like where I come from, when someone dies or someone’s people pass away, what do you do? You go to the funeral home for visitation, or the funeral, or both. But you don’t NOT go. You ALWAYS go. I am just not close enough to go every time something happens, which I know people understand. But even though I’ve been a city girl for many decades now, the small town girl in me wants to be able to go every time something like this happens, and pay my respects. And this is about the forty millionth time something’s happened and I can’t go. Yes, that’s an exaggerated number, but it’s certainly no exaggeration as pertains to what it feels like.

So in the course of all that yesterday, I just kind of took the night off last night from anything involving the online world, save for a big project I’m working on right now, and you can probably see why stunt legislators and their circuses and any other big major things that I was acutely aware of yesterday suddenly seemed very insignificant and small in the great big grand scheme of things. The fact that someone I know and think very highly of and like a great deal, and literally grew up with, lost his older – and only – brother, who was only two years older than the friend and I… that was much more important, as well as dealing with the disturbing fact of these other recent losses. It all bothers me a great deal as well as being, naturally, sad, so I “took the night off” to reflect and ponder. And talk to my mom since I hadn’t in a few weeks.

So basically what I’m saying, in a very roundabout way, is I am still in the middle of working on this huge project in my off time and suddenly yesterday the e-mail and everything else got really backed up, and all of that was even before this bit of bad news that kind of knocked me out of commission for the rest of the day. Then my big project kind of took an unexpected (read: taking more extra time to correct) turn last night, and the rest of this week is looking pretty busy for freelance work so there goes a lot of my catch-up time. So bear with me a day or two or three while I get caught back up, if you were waiting on something or if I’m slow to respond, that’s why… thanks mucho grande bunches.

A Slice of Life

I didn’t write about this at the time because there was a lot of other stuff going on, but the older sister of one of my best girlfriends from high school died several weeks ago. When I say “older”, I mean 44 years old; would have been 45 this year. I actually thought she was a little bit older than me than just four years, but no, she was 44, and died after a long battle with cancer that I wasn’t even aware was going on, since I don’t live locally and I guess nobody thought to tell me until it was too late.

Our overall gang of gals was pretty large and we all hung out together and with various ones of the other separately, and granted, I went to high school in a small town that was oddly not very cliqueish, so everybody just kinda hung out with everybody. But there were 15 or so of us that were really tight, and then that was further kinda divided into smaller core groups of two to five people.

My little branch was the group of five, you rarely saw one of us without at least one, or more, of the others. And it just so happened that all the other girls in my little core group had one older sister apiece, so I sort of inherited four big sisters by default. Only one of them was I particularly close to, and she is still alive and well and we still see each other once in a while today; but I certainly was fond of all the rest, and all of the older girls not only tolerated all five of us teenagers, but were actually really cool with us and hung out with us quite a bit. We got to go to lots of bachelorette parties, quarters sessions and parties at a lot of the older college crowd’s apartments in Jackson and Martin, “adult”-ish functions like barbecues, and all kinds of other stuff (usually involving a fair amount of underage drinking) thanks to the big sisters.

This one that recently passed away, however, I was always especially fond of because she was just so sweet. Everyone adored her, and you never heard her say a bad word about anyone. Her best friend and former neighbor also worked with my dad for many years, so he knew her pretty well and was fond of her, too. It also just so happened that my high school sweetheart, at the time we started dating, was her brother-in-law, though she had just begun the process of divorcing his older brother then. Still, she and my boyfriend were buddies and remained friendly, so there was that tie to her, too.

A few years ago, the phenomena that has now become an ongoing and continual thing of many of my friends’ parents passing away began. As another friend and I discussed shortly after there had been a one-two-three hit of three parents in a row dying one right after another, we said we guessed we were just getting to that age, and it was likely going to happen more and more.

And so it has, though it really took some getting used to in the beginning, and since has included my own father. With me living far from home and not seeing or being in regular contact with a lot of my friends from home these days, it seems like the only time I talk to or e-mail with some of them is when someone else’s mother or father has died, whether I’ve called or e-mailed to tell them, or vice-versa.

I wasn’t really prepared for a rush of people’s siblings to start passing away, though. I know 40 years old sounds old to some people and, granted, technically it is indeed middle-aged (ugh). And granted, too, I am certainly no stranger to loss, which Kathy T. recently managed to chronicle so well in the latest installment of her Wrinkles series. How she did it, I don’t know, because I am a terrible interview – it’s got to be like listening to a person with the worst case of ADD in the world – but Kathy is an excellent writer/reporter and somehow managed to make sense of all my babbling. There is a REASON why The Lynnster Zone has been “babbling since 1997″, and not “intelligently blogging in clear and concise thought since 1997″, yep.

But I can handle, and have come to expect, news of friends’ parents’ deaths. It’s always sad, but never such an unexpected shock and surprise anymore like it was at first.

People’s brothers and sisters passing away, however, is starting to freak me out a little bit. And much, much worse – someone’s younger sibling passing away – that is freaking me out even more.

Almost all my friends had kid brothers or sisters, many of whom often came over to my house to swim in the pool, or that we took to Opryland with us when we went, or Lisa and I (who saw at least two if not more movies a week) would take along with us to the movies, or my high school sweetheart and I would load up in the back seat and take along to the movies with us.

It was just that way, small-town way I guess. Our friend Angie’s house was on the way to Waverly and the walk-in theater, so we’d drop by on the way out of town (we all practically lived out there anyway), as we did when we were headed over to Waverly to see Sixteen Candles. Ang’s kid sister was having a slumber party that night, they begged to go, so we squeezed a half dozen seventh grade girls into my boyfriend’s car and toted them along.

So the thought of any of my friends’ younger brothers and sisters, all of whom are younger than 40 – these are kids I babysat, took to the movies, fed them peanut butter and jelly and tuna fish sandwiches in the summers when they came over swimming, played countless board and card games with, all kinds of stuff – the thought of something happening to any of them is just terrible and not something I want to see happening. Sure, they’re grownups now. But anything happening to any of them, it just horrifies me and takes my breath away, really.

And so it does.

The other day I flipped thru the Jackson paper’s website, as I usually do most days, and spotted a familiar name in the obituaries. For a second I really didn’t think about it, because the name is kind of a common one, and I thought, “No, can’t be.” But then I glanced at the age, and clicked on the link to the actual obituary that listed family member names and such, and my heart fell.

Honestly, I didn’t know this boy as well as I did many of the others, and while I knew his older brother fairly well – he had dated a girlfriend of mine for some time when she was in high school and he in college – I was not as good friends with him as I was many others in the same general crowd and age group. But yeah, I knew both of the brothers. They were both very nice, and very quiet, guys.

This one particularly bothers me, though, even though I didn’t know him as well as many other friends’ siblings. I spent an entire school year having lunch with this guy, and the memories are not only very clear, but very specific.

My junior year in high school, all five of us girls in my little core group had lunch at the same time that year, so we sat together every day, and early on commandeered on one of the two tables that were in adjoining room to the main room of the school’s cafeteria, a little side room where all the vending machines were. Convenient for me, since I spent most of that year either not eating and having a Coke for lunch, or maybe I’d have a Coke and a Twix bar, or a Whatchamacallit. Or I’d be filling up a cup of water and mixing in Cambridge Diet powder – this was before Slim-Fast – which I didn’t need at the time but thought I did.

I was never a good eater – still not – and the only days I ever ate cafeteria food, usually, was when they were having pizza. I LOVED school pizza. My friend Chris’ mom was a teacher at the elementary school, and she used to buy big boxes of school pizza to keep at home, which I would raid any chance I got an opportunity. That year, he and I were arguing and not on speaking terms more often than not, especially after I threw my drink in his face when he tried to make nice and kiss me on the cheek at midnight on New Year’s, which resulted to full-out war for a few months afterwards. In any case, my access to school pizza outside of school and school hours became severely limited that year, so that’s probably why my hitting people up for their pizza on pizza day in school became so exacerbated. Like a crack addict begging for drugs or money, I was hitting people up for their school pizza.

Then for a while, one of the two arcades in town started buying it from the same place and selling it at the arcade, which was wonderful. If not for school pizza, I’d have starved to death that year, or at least been down to probably 70 lbs. from the 95 lbs. I already was and thought was too fat. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old girl’s brains operate in an entirely alternate reality from the logical and reasonable world most of the time, in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, back to my junior year and lunchtime. We girls shared the table that year with a group of mostly freshman and some sophomore boys, most of whom were football players. We sort of big-sistered them all year long and there wound up being some kinda good fringe benefits for them, because (A) we all had driver’s licenses, and (B) seeing as how my girlfriends and I threw a large number of the outdoor parties every year, they had an in for not only those but other parties around town by virtue of hanging out with us.

Lucky for them it was our junior year, when we had something going on somewhere nearly every night of the week, rather than our senior year, when we all had boyfriends and didn’t have near as much fun as the year before. Anyway, I spent quite a bit of time that year being taxi service for not only my girlfriends who didn’t have cars yet, but a large number of younger guys that hadn’t turned 16 yet, including our lunchtime crew.

Three of those boys were really, really funny and had us cracking up the entire lunch period. A couple of the others were just really good guys.

And then another one who was generally pretty quiet and just listened to all the jokes and babbling and cackling and such at the table and laughed along with us all. But when he did have something to say, it was always really hilarious. He was the one whose older brother moved in my crowd of friends and dated one of my girlfriends.

My near-anorexic habits were always a big joke around the table, but then would come pizza day. I’m pretty sure (because I can think of no other reason why I would have been hounding people every pizza day for their pizza, so it must be true) that they limited everyone to one slice of pizza, probably for fear of running out; otherwise I would have just bought a second slice. Plus we were the first lunch period that year, so they were probably even more strict about it; third period lunch, if there was still plenty left, you probably could have begged and paid for another slice.

In any case, come every pizza day, I was always scoping out who I could maybe talk into giving up their pizza, because even though I ate next to nothing most days, on school pizza day I had to have two slices whether I was really hungry or not, I just loved it so much. I remember always paying special attention those mornings, looking around the halls and in class to see who all had lunch at the same time as me that was sick and not feeling well – because more often than not, somebody who wasn’t feeling well (or hungover, whatever the case might have been) could be easily talked out of their pizza.

The guys I was friends with in my own class that had lunch at the same time sat at another table in the main room of the cafeteria, and they were always greedy with their pizza; unless I got lucky and one of them was sick, they’d see me coming and shoo me away on pizza day before I could even ask. Same with the senior boys, except they’d at least be polite and friendly about it; still, no amount of flirtation or bribes ever got me a single slice of pizza out of that table.

Most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with any of the girls, because too many of them either brought their own lunch or, like me, were on a Coke or Diet Coke diet and weren’t having pizza anyway. Sometimes I could get someone to go through the line for me and get an extra tray, and I’d take the pizza and distribute the rest among the guys at our table. A lot of times I wouldn’t even have to go beg and be a pizza pest; someone would just walk over and voluntarily give theirs up. Yep, that’s how much I loved school pizza.

It was always a fair trade, I’d make it worth their while. You want four bags of potato chips out of the machine for that pizza? Okay, here you go. Two Twix bars and a Dr. Pepper? Right here. Since I worked at the hospital, I always had money and change, which many kids didn’t generally have because they didn’t work, so vending machine bribery was always an option for me. And, I can still tell you today, could make a list of names, of who would never give theirs up without a trade and who would toss me their pizza out of the generosity of their hearts.

I rarely hassled the boys we sat with, because they were mostly pretty big guys, football players, and would often be eating their whole school lunch tray AND a brown bag lunch from home. If one of them was sick (or hungover), sometimes they’d offer on the front end, but I just didn’t bother them otherwise usually. I had my three or four tables in the main cafeteria I’d go hound, and rarely came away emptyhanded.

The one quiet guy at our table was probably the one that most often volunteered his slice, though, and would never accept anything in return, even though he was the biggest guy at the table – not fat, just big, football-player big. He’d push his pizza over to me, then say something hilarious – because like I said, what little he did talk when he managed to get anything in edgewise in the rest of the noise at the table – when he did say something, it was always very, very funny.

Maybe he just wanted to see me eat, as most of those folks at our table were always trying to get me to. Laughing and cracking jokes about it, but there was always kind of acknowledgement of my all-too-apparent budding eating disorder under the surface.

And he was just a nice guy anyway, a really good kid. Not unlike his older brother, who also a very quiet and nice guy, and whom I knew.

So it kind of bothered me the other day to see that this guy, someone else’s kid brother, had passed away. I don’t know what happened – from the way the obituary read, I assume illness of some sort. He was 39, had a wife, some kids, and now he’s gone. Someone else reads the paper and thinks, maybe, it’s sad that this 39-year-old man died.

I read the paper, and for me it’s So-and-So’s little – LITTLE - brother has died. It just seems so not right.

I don’t like it. I don’t like being a grown-up. Not this week.

Before I Get Old

First it was having to wear reading glasses sometimes. While I am also wearing contact lenses.

Then it was wondering if I am getting early Alzheimer’s because I honestly don’t remember the Wonder Twins.

Now, I just turned up the text size in my browser from “smaller” to “medium”.

Sigh.

It’s Been a Long, Long Time

Here’s what happened: I got this e-mail the other day, which I still haven’t responded to (because I am just as pathetic as ever about answering e-mail unless you’re my mother or my future mother-in-law in which case you’re probably going to wait a day or maybe two but not much longer since I am lazy but not stupid) asking if the site had died and/or was ever going to get updated, to which I almost replied “Yes” and “Maybe”, but then it occurred to me that that’s a pretty snippy and sarcastic response to some poor soul who’s not had the misfortune (but you LOVED it) of direct exposure to my smart mouth so I thought I’d just shut up and be nice and respond later when I was feeling a bit less KC-ish and just quietly update for now and pretend I wasn’t about to be unnecessarily rude to someone. Yep, I’m afraid in lieu of being haunted (which he always swore he would do, nyah nyah didn’t work) I am instead apparently doomed to channel the only person I’ve ever known that’s a bigger smartass then me at some of the most inappropriate times.

AND I also have become a really big fan of a few web writers (I’m sorry, the words blog and blogger are just like trying to pull teeth without anesthetic for me so I guess I really am old and grumpy now) and I was really wanting to drop ‘em a couple of lines but I was too embarrassed at how pathetic I have been updating here so, you know, I’m attempting to save face and not embarrass myself totally. Although I suppose I should be disturbed that I have kept this on AOL for this long but you know what – I am paying PENNIES for FREAKING TONS of web storage and I have never once had to be preoccupied with the word BANDWITH, not EVER – so, you know, I don’t really care. There’s better ways I reckon but after having dealt with these files on here and all the major renovations and whatnot for getting pretty danged close to ten years now the thought of moving them is as tiring and trauma-inspiring as the thought of moving me after 17 years in the same place… and more on that shortly (heh)…

AND I also killed another computer (of course) in the interim since I was last here and my files are all being held hostage on the old hard drive and I haven’t retrieved them yet, but once I resolved my technical issues with AOL (it was the freakin’ stupidest thing in the world and I can’t believe it took me four years to figure out what was wrong and was by far worse than the 18 hours straight I spent one weekend trying to repair a sick 486 only to find the drive cables were hooked up wrong, tho I swear I checked them a few dozen times and which was my previously most stupid computer geekette f-up in the world ever)… so there was that…

AND Paul Westerberg is on tour again which doesn’t mean a whole lot here since I’m not updating that page tonight anyway but he’s ACTUALLY COMING TO MEMPHIS THIS TIME and I have no one – N-O O-N-E – that can go with me so I just felt like bitching about that.

So anyway I figure there are maybe 4.5, maybe 6.5, people in the world who will show up here eventually and mutter a shocked expletive or two or three under their breath (something along the lines of “daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayum…” – and yeah, if you’re from down here it’s pronounced pretty much just like that) at the fact that I have actually updated after two years of silence. Heck, I don’t even know why I’m here updating when I’m just about dead exhausted, other than the above and the fact that I have extreme stress-induced insomnia at the moment and am sitting here typing, seeing as how I’ve run out of names and other stuff to Google and useless junk to look at and all the other dumb things I have a habit of doing when I’m bored, when I really should be in bed. But, all in all, that’s beside the point. Plus anyone that knows me at all knows I don’t go to bed at a decent hour ever anyway. Nope, some things never change.

But truthfully and seriously… even tho this Graffiti stuff started as an experiment (of some sort, what I couldn’t say) and I really could have cared less who read it or didn’t at the time (eight freakin’ longass years ago)… when I lost my biggest fan (and foe) and his sidekick I kinda lost most of the urge to purge my brain of all thought, intelligent and otherwise, publicly. I dunno, after a while as years progressed here on the Wall, there got to be this cycle where I’d upload a new update, there’d be some smartass (or sometimes downright nasty, or sometimes just a great big laugh) comment in my mailbox the next morning, I just got used to it. Call-and-response, or what have you. So the last couple of times I updated, now lo all those two years ago almost, when I knew that response wasn’t coming ever – I really just kinda started feeling hateful about the whole Graffiti thing. Plus I got busy – real busy – and stayed busy. Busy enough most of the time that now I could use about a dozen clones of me, instead of just the one I was begging for previously…

Then lately – here’s the rub – I’ve been finding myself, when I do have a little spare time – or I’m eating dinner or something, which this is really kind of pathetic but now instead of flipping on the TV while dining, when I do manage to eat which is almost never, I’m liable to go catch up on my reading at Reality News Online (Ken Kellam and Phil Kural ROCK!!) or some such instead or something (since I continue to be a reality TV addict but have become much much much more choosy about what I get into these days) – anyway, I’ve gotten to where there are several personal websites I’ve become fascinated with and read daily. Again as per above – I know, I know, these days they’re called blogs, and now that blog has actually been officially recognized as both a noun (as in, this is my blog) and a verb (as in, to blog), I should be saying that what I’m doing is blogging rather than the ancient dinosaurish updating my Graffiti Wall because the latter now sounds so old-fashioned – but give me a break, I’ve been doing this for eight years now so, yes, in the world of personal weblogs I suppose that makes me old-fashioned. I am old and I’m grumpy, leave me alone.

So anyway, I am highly addicted to reading up on a few, like that of former Real World-Miami cast member Dan Renzi (who was hilarious back then on MTV and is even more hilarious on a daily basis now – I adore this guy), whose blog in turn introduced me to one belonging to this cool chick named Brittney, which at first grabbed me because of the Sparkwood & 21 reference and then when I realized where she is, I find myself somewhat reliving my own disaffected pissed-off youth of my twenties in downtown freakin’ Nashville through her misadventures, which seem to be at least somewhat less debauched and deranged than my own were. Well, unless all her friends turn out to be strung out drugged-up musicians hanging naked off balconies in West End at 4 in the morning and sleeping twelve to a one-bedroom flat. In which case I’d be worried that she is actually my doppelganger walking around the N-town, just 15-20 years younger… it’s already kind of scary that she’s from a small town and obviously dearly loves Twin Peaks. However, she’s not a blonde so probably not, just maybe walking in my ghost’s footsteps from time to time. If it’s true that parts of our spirits sometimes get left behind in places where there was extreme trauma and/or emotion, I’m sure the ghost of 20-21 year old me continues to walk around Elliston Place, pissed off about one thing or another as usual… anyway, I should probably drop her a note or something but then she’d probably think I’m some crazy almost-middle-aged woman obsessed with lost Nashville youth for some strange incomprehensible reason and she’d be right, so I won’t. Ah, the City Without A Subway. Wish for the thousandth time I’d never left.

By the way, I actually had to go up there a couple of weeks ago for a family funeral and that was the first time in a long time I’d really driven right in and around town, not just passing thru, and that was pretty freakin’ weird. I can’t tell you exactly what was so weird because I have given up incriminating myself over past misdeeds for Lent this year, but for those that care driving south on Nolensville Road was not fun and my old route to work down Harding Place was no less sad than it ever was.

Anyway, so back to people that keep their websites updated… then there’s my other new favorite, dooce, run by an expatriate Memphian (well, Bartlett anyway – Bartlettian? Bartlettonian? What exactly do people from Bartlett call themselves anyway?) named Heather who is also somewhat younger than me and is such a fabulous writer I am in tears of laughter and joy and shrieking daily. It’s a total hoot and I luv her daily photos. And her dog looks suspiciously like he might be a relative of Dobie, but I don’t think she got him in Memphis so I guess not…

Well, so anyhow, I got to reading other people’s stuff on a regular basis and kept thinking about this here Graffiti Wall and finally just gave in and came back. Lucky you, huh? You know you missed me…

But really the really disturbing thing tho, now that I’m here, is there is just not THAT much new to report. Oh, I’m sure if I think real hard for a while (which I can’t right now, I’m too tired and too delirious) there are some dormant rants just waiting to be let out and maybe I’ll get to some of that soon, but really, as far as what’s new since 2003… well, not much.

But I guess there is some… for one thing, I have a new job, for the first time in 14 years. It was kind of a have-to situation – no, I didn’t get fired – my boss more or less retired to do something else so I had to by default. I had three months’ notice almost, but the job market was so crappy down here at the time that by the time those three months rolled around, I still didn’t have a new job to go to – but I had two interviews the day after my last day. I stayed unemployed for almost a week this past summer (which of course threw me into a state of near-panic), but by the next week I had two job offers and that was weird – that was the first time in my life I have EVER turned down a job! And, of course, took the other one… still in healthcare but somewhat of a different position than I have ever worked before, and much lower key, less responsibility. Frankly I was ready for it as I was verging close to burnout in the field and, well, sick of dealing with people, patients, doctors, insurance companies, co-workers, etc., about to go postal and all that cheery stuff – so this felt like a good move (and I was right). Lower pay, but only because I had gotten a raise in January of last year – my salary at my new job is the same as it was before I got the raise, so no big deal and frankly – because of this next part – I could have really cared less if it was even less…

Now, here’s the part where you start to hate me (it’s OK, everyone does, even my mother and isn’t there a law against hating your own child, especially when it’s your only one?!?!?)… because… I work at home! Hahahaha! Oh yeah, baby, make noooo mistake – I LOVE IT!!!! I get up in the morning, I take the dogs out, I fix my coffee, I sit down and go to work. Sometimes I even work in my pajamas. It’s really awesome, I love my job and I love the people I work with, and I am spoiled forevermore about traditional jobs, I will never want to have to “go into” work again anywhere ever. The good thing is I can probably stay at this job indefinitely no matter where I may go, since 99.99% of it is over the Internet anyway. And, though I do work a set schedule and have to be online working when I’m scheduled… as far as extra and overtime I can work anytime of the day or night, naturally. I just love it. Very very happy with this. Best decision I ever made and I totally lucked into it coming up when it did.

There are some strange unexpected things about working at home, though. Like, for instance, I find that most days at the end of the day working I feel like I need a shower again… but that’s mostly because I have four almost 10-month old puppies at home that are constantly rolling around in the dirt and mud outside (often dragging each other by the tail thru the mud) and they are usually getting their muddy paws on me during our outside breaks. But that’s been a nice perk – we can have our little outside breaks through the day, which has been a godsend with young ones around again (more about that later). I also actually, even though I work only four days a week (I work 10 1/2 hour shifts), feel like I have even LESS spare time than I did when I worked five days a week, which seems strange. But it’s still really killer to have that third day off every week – would be nicer if it was a Monday or Friday so I could stretch out the weekend a bit, but maybe someday, for now I’m just happy to have what I have. Since I interact with my boss and co-workers mostly via e-mail and the occasional phone call, and the boyfriend is currently residing about 450 miles southeast of here, I sometimes spend days on end where I don’t speak to any living soul in person other than canines and felines, but that’s OK, I kind of like it that way. Were KC here, he would be torn between deeming me regressed into total and complete social retardation and being beside himself with glee that I was now available at his EVERY beck and call and whim 24/7 and he and Greg and I would be on 10.5 hour IM all day every work day. It would have been fun, now it’s just sad, but that’s okay now.

Anyway, that’s some of the biggest news since March 2003 when I was last here… other than that, what else have I been up to, oh, I don’t know, just things. I still work a part-time job I always have had (always worked at home there but that was just “extra” work) which is getting harder and harder to keep up with lately but I’m managing. And I have the equivalent of another full-time job because I am one of three senior administrators of a rather large (almost 40K members) international website that I have been involved with for a couple of years now… not really at liberty to say what or where but it’s about a cause that’s been pretty near & dear to my heart for some time now. I guess that’s probably another reason I haven’t been here messing with the personal site for a while… I get most of my techgeekchick urges out there, playing around in the back end techie stuff on the site. From a techie aspect, it’s really awesome, man… 14-15 years ago when I was running my little BBS in Memphis, I never dreamed there would one day be the kind of stuff like the software we use on site now. I get to playing around with the buttons and switches just to see what stuff will do. And haven’t crashed it yet… I don’t think it’s really crashable unless you have direct access to the server tho (which I don’t – yet) and the server’s located in Texas, soooo… I might be a little more careful flipping switches when I have server access, heh. Anyway… as far as my work with the site, it’s not that I’m not proud of what we’ve done – I’m very much so – but that leads to some personal issues that in this day and age are best not publicly divulged, at least not at this point in time. I’ll just say that I spend the majority of my spare time pouring effort into this cause and we have already seen many, many positive changes and improvements just in the little over two years I have been involved in it, and it’s nice to be able to witness direct results of something you have worked hard towards and given so much effort like that. Plus – we have annual conferences/conventions/what have you! Last year was spent in sunny Florida, this year headed to San Francisco (I hope, still not positive I’m going to be able to go) – I visited SF when I was 14 and have been wanting to go back as an adult ever since so I am really, really looking forward to it and hoping the trip will pan out for me. (UPDATE – since I originally started writing this a while back the conference has been cancelled so no SF for me, not this year anyway.) Anyway, what an awesome thing and force in my life this has been… and having now met most of my colleagues in person and many have become friends for life… including my adorable French friend who would just give me his car – his car!!! – if he could ship it over here to me because my current one is so old and pathetic (apparently one doesn’t have much use for an automobile in Paris, but I would certainly make use of it going to Paris, Tennessee, hahaha…). Damn shame too ‘cos it’s one of those funky little bitty European cars with some kind of animal name like Panther or something. Shoot. Free car and I can’t even get it… which is, as usual, my luck…

For a long time I was out of town more often than not, though not so much anymore… part of that in recent months anyway has been because of the influx of very young canines, as previously mentioned, tho they have finally gotten old enough I can leave them overnight once in a while thank goodness. I have lost some and gained some in the past year… my beloved 11 year old lap dog of a Doberman, Baby, finally left us last fall after having spent a year of her health deteriorating and having gone blind the year before as well. Less than a month later, a black Lab mix I had wound up with – and not unlike how I wound up with Baby who begat Dobie, because the neighbors really couldn’t keep them and unbeknownst to me at the time she moved in with me Baby was pregnant with Dobie – so too was Satin, who was a very young thing who’d become my buddy after moving in next door. She had gotten lost for a couple of weeks and I had told her owners if she showed up, she could stay here – they’d been having trouble with her indoors and outdoors and she had been practically living over here with us anyway. Well, on her little two week “vacation”, she got knocked up, which I found out for sure several weeks later, and on Memorial Day weekend last year gave birth to five pups – none of whom looked anything like her. They were about the biggest newborn puppies I’d ever seen – and, they were (another very unexpected surprise) white with black spots, except for one. Tho the white with black spots would lead one to think “Dalmatian” – nope, that wasn’t it. I wasn’t supposed to keep any of them, then everyone who was going to take one but one wound up backing out at one time or another – so now, ten months later, I have four young dogs who do not look like Labs and I have NO clue what their paternal parentage could have possibly been. They don’t even look alike, other than the white with black (and two with brown) markings. In short, their paternal parentage has been about as clear as Dobie’s ever was (though I have some better guesses about him these days at least). But they’re all adorable, especially my one little perfect girl (the only girl) who when her intended home backed out I knew wasn’t going anywhere. It’s like living in a nursery school 24/7 – and I was NOT intending to ever acquire more dogs, ever – but you know, things happen. Their mama, however, unexpectedly passed away less than a month after Miss Baby, an acute onset of what I could only figure out must have been hemorrhagic gastroenteritis and which happened so fast she was gone before there was time to do anything, which I hated not only because she was a really good dog, but she had been only a baby herself, just 15 months old. So now I only have Dobie, who just turned 10 (!!!!!), and my great big fat huge Beagle-Dachshund, Lulu, who is also elderly…. and these four little brats. And of course the cats, all of them still, no new additions and no losses there. So still a houseful… we manage. I had just been looking forward to eventually having one day only cats, because they are so much more low maintenance… but obviously it wasn’t in the cards and I’m frankly not all that surprised. By the way, I also think one of the puppies is either retarded (really) or autistic, Bruiser – he poses a bit of a challenge sometimes, but he’s a sweetie. Daisy is, again, my perfect little girl, who is cute and prissy but don’t let that fool you ‘cos she can beat the crap out of all of her brothers even tho they’re twice as big as her, and she also thinks she’s a vicious guard dog (the boys are too lazy to care). Buster with his white body and black head, I kind of intended to keep all along and he very oddly has always kind of looked like a pot-bellied pig when he’s laying on his side on the floor sleeping. Then there’s Petey, who is HUGE and has this GREAT BIG HEAD and was born with a big (now much smaller tho) white question mark on his black head and minds me perfectly and is so gentle even tho he’s the biggest, and is allllll about food. Anyway, yes – it’s very active around here these days. Pictures soon on the site I hope, one thing at a time right now tho…

My father, who as most know had been sick for a long time, passed away in September 2003… miss him, hated it to happen, but on the other hand was glad all that suffering and pain was finally over. You would think that at 38 years old you wouldn’t feel too terribly orphaned, losing a parent like that… but I have decided I don’t think it really matters at any age, except it probably sucks worse when you’re still a kid. I guess, I’m just theorizing there. And of course I’m no stranger to death, having lost nearly two dozen of my friends at this point… but yeah, it’s different.

And on a final note of news… I nowadays am what one would call, um, betrothed… yes, such an ancient and biblical word courtesy of my VERY Catholic significant other… anyhow, well, couldn’t be happier, story’s been 16 years in the making, right under my nose all those years and didn’t even know it, and so on and so forth, yada yada. Don’t mistake my flippancy for lack of enthusiasm – I’m just tired plus I can really only say so much. Call it crazy, here I am pushing 40 but still feeling just a smidgen (not much, ‘cos the truth is I really don’t give a ****) of guilt at having violated one of the cardinal rules of small town girlhood, one of the ten commandments if you will, that being thou shalt not get in a serious relationship with one of your best friend’s boyfriends, even if it’s been 15 or 20 or more years, by god. If you didn’t grow up in a small (and probably Southern) town the severity of this violation will likely be a somewhat incomprehensible concept, but suffice it to say that even though Kelli and I have been best friends through our teens, college days and thus far into adulthood, there is still a part of me that will never ever forgive her for having kissed my high school sweetheart, the one whom I almost married, before I did (another one of those cardinal rules – don’t be sucking face and messing around with someone whom one of your best friends could end up married to or at least in an otherwise long-term relationship later or you may live to regret it, possibly for life). Likewise, she can hold a similar grudge against me for messing up one of her own potential life partners – once upon a time we were dating cousins and I dumped the one I was dating, after which not long after the other cousin dumped her (which leads to another rule – if you and one of your best friends are going to date brothers, cousins, or any such tandem pair then you make any and ALL decisions together or risk being held responsible for god only knows WHAT for the rest of your life). However, in retrospect, and I think she will agree, this rotten lousy selfish rash act of mine actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise as her half of the cousin team has reappeared later in life and turned out to be a real **** so now one could say she has me to thank for saving her from potential lifelong misery! Yep, there are many nuances and anomalies in the whole concept ‘cos, well, you know, we come from small towns and you run out of new people to date after a while and things get potentially (and all redneck jokes aside, not literally) sort of incestuous, but you realize what I’m talking about here is really super serious, long-term, maybe you almost got married and maybe you didn’t but still pretty damned serious relationships. But I digress, and how’d Kelli get into this conversation anyway since she has nothing to do with this current thing…

Well, to make a long story short, my significant other and I were once a part of two OTHER couples 15-16 years ago and, well, we are just slow. (ha!) It took us that long to figure out the wrong two people were together in those two couples and so, well again, here we are, now over two years after we both became aware of that amazing discovery at almost exactly the same moment, socially retarded as we both are (ha! again). Probably needless to clarify at this point (rolling eyes, I know I have begun to ramble… oh you missed me, admit it…), the female half of that other couple was one of my best friends since I was a kid, so yeah, even tho I have not lived in my hometown in 21 years almost now and even tho I’m, again, pushing 40 now (in case anyone forgot), there is still just a little teeny tiny bit of small town guilt about that fact just on the basis of violating probably the number one most important cardinal rule (but really when it comes down to it I don’t feel one bit guilty about it… in other words, pshaw!). But still, as the aforementioned Kelli herself (who has violated such rules over and over and over again and totally sans guilt pretty much every time) said to me a couple of years ago when I informed her of whom I had hooked up with, just to be sure and remind me in case it hadn’t crossed my mind already -

“Lynn, you just don’t DO that!!” – emphasis on you, meaning the very idea that I would do such a thing was so incomprehensible as to possibly be a sign of the apocalypse. And she is right – I never dated ANY of my friends’ boyfriends, with the exception of two and they, frankly, just don’t count. One I was sent out on a date with as a proxy when that friend had to go out of town, so that was what one would call sanctioned or endorse – and another whom we all kind of just passed around anyway, plus it was just impossible to truly get serious about him and listen to me and listen to me well here, a few dozen gals besides myself would say the very exact same thing, I’ll have you know. So, in summary, up until quite recently, I have been squeaky clean on that deal. Unlike some of my friends who will remain unnamed but their names start with K (but she recently married a really really nice guy whom none of us have ever dated before so I should really cease picking on her about having dated EVERY single young male person within two whole counties for lo those 20 or so years)… I was a saint among Southern divine sisterhoods and all that rot. Heh.

Anyhow – yeah, I’ve violated the big one, so sue me. Actually my significant other has as well – the fourth, other male half was his friend as well – but he’s a city boy (not this city but another) so those small town rules don’t matter (and therefore he could really and truly give a ****), but still there’s just no getting around that I’m with my former best friend’s former boyfriend and he’s with his former best friend’s former girlfriend. As for him, the only thing that’s even mildly interesting to him about small town sort of stuff is the fact that once when he had the chutzpah to call me a “country girl” I very quickly reprimanded him and corrected him that I have never ever even once lived in the country except to have lived one mile outside the city limits, which really doesn’t count, once for a couple of years and I am most certainly and assuredly NOT a “country girl”, I am a TOWN GIRL, dammit. Which continues to this day to be an endless source of amusement for somebody but personally I just don’t find it very funny at all… anyway…

But yeah, I’m still kind of waiting for this inevitably uncomfortable and touchy situation to rear that aspect of its ugly head – somehow miraculously it didn’t at my 20 year high school reunion last year, tho I was fully expecting and prepared for it, but since the eventually offended party didn’t show it didn’t happen. I just know that while it frankly doesn’t matter a bit what either of the eventually offended parties think ‘cos it’s obvious now who belonged together in the first place – it ain’t gonna be pretty. (shrug) Although in the case of my former significant other, in that case I REALLY REALLY don’t care, matter of fact I am looking forward to the day the phone inevitably rings – because it always does, eventually – and boy won’t THAT one be surprised when I hand the phone over so Mr. Right can tell Mr. Waaaaaaaaaaaay Way Way Wrong exactly why I don’t wish to speak with him and exactly what I feel he should go do with himself… (Mr. Right hates the idea of that whole concept by the way, mainly because of his dislike for his former friend my ex, but I just think I’ll have SUCH a sense of peace I haven’t quite had in darn near 20 years at that moment… ahhhh… some things are worth waiting for…)

Anyhow, well, there ya go, that’s about as much high drama as I get these days ‘cos frankly me and him are both getting old and boring and all set in our ways and stuff. I mean, you know, technically I could be somebody’s grandmother at this point (thankgodthankgodthankgod NO, but my old and dear friend Julie who is a year younger than me is, hahahaha…). So I would like to think I am beyond spewing much spite about how I wasted pretty much all of my twenties for absolutely nothing, but just on the off chance Mr. W.W.W.W., who probably still hasn’t figured out how to operate a computer yet anyhow, does drop by here, I have three things to say: (1) Nope, you’re not imagining things or having an acid flashback; (2) you’re damn right that’s who I’m marrying; and (3) You know what, you were absolutely right to try to keep us apart all those years, even though you were not only too self-centered to be conscious that you were doing it, but too selfish and self-centered to be aware that the reason you were doing it was because you felt threatened and inferior – and rightly so! (To everyone else – sorry – I’ve been getting impatient and waiting about two and a half years to say that, it just feels good to practice… but isn’t it kinda fun to be in on such a potentially icky and ugly and uncomfortable domestic squabble when it’s not your own? Heck I’m right in the middle of it and I think it’s funny, believe you me I will be laughing…)

On an almost ending note, and this will be a huge surprise to some… I think it’s finally time I blow this joint, i.e., uproot and leave where I’ve been the last 17+ years. Matrimony is still a little while away but I really outgrew being here ages ago and there’s not much reason to be here anymore and think it’s time for a change, still ironing out the details but think I might be back among my old stomping grounds before too long. It will be a much desired and nice change of pace – this city’s grown nasty and most of the fun left it a long time ago. And I won’t, if I do this, be far from the aforementioned City Without A Subway… plus they got Blockbuster and 24-hour Wal-Mart and a UPS Store and even Walgreen’s (!!!) in my hometown now!! But tune in later when I will be inevitably griping about not being able to attack Best Buy and CompUSA and the lingerie department at Dillard’s at my every whim now… not that I do a lot of any of that nowadays anyway but you know, it’s the principle and contrary to what SOME people think is soooooo funny, I have actually been a City Girl for a pretty long time now, twenty years in fact. Been a looooong time since this chick has been permanently stuck in the sticks. Next stop after that is that city in East Tennessee, but it should be amusing for a few years while I lament the lack of a Waffle House within 50 miles and get used to small town stuff again. Good thing I have gotten used to doing most of my shopping online anyway…

And finally – I must say this because even tho I hate it like you don’t even want to know what, there are those it will make feel ancient and I think that’s hilarious and just can’t resist – I will turn a whopping 39 years of old, old, horribly old age next week. Heck, really, I don’t even look like I did at 29, ten years ago – I haven’t been this skinny in probably fifteen years, my hair (still blonde of course) is halfway down my back and has never ever been this long, and tho all the females in my family age very well I really thought five and ten years ago I had missed that gene and was going to age horrifically so it’s kind of a pleasant surprise and very unexpected. But turning 39 is still kind of icky… I would probably feel horrible about it but just in the last couple of months one person has commented directly and I have been informed secondhand of two other persons’ comments that in some pictures of me they recently saw I looked like I was (A) in my early twenties (yes!!!) and (B) a teenager (double yes!!!) and the ones that made the early twenties comment couldn’t BELIEVE I was even in my thirties at all (triple yes!!! SCORE!!!) so even though I responded that they were all blind but that was very nice of them to say so, secretly I am, like, – and secretly pleased, especially since ain’t nobody telling the significant other that he looks like he’s in his twenties even tho he’s a little over two years younger than me and especially since he thinks it’s real damned funny that I’m turning 39. So pardon me for a little vanity here, I can’t really gloat (and gloat, and gloat, and gloat) about it anywhere ‘cept here with y’all ‘cos everyone else just rolls their eyes and makes smartassed remarks from the significant other to my mother (isn’t there a law against insulting your own child, especially when it’s your only one?!?!?). Well, so anyway, it just goes to show you that there’s something to be said for being immature and unmarried without children and socially retarded after all!!…

’til soon… hopefully not too long, but I don’t think it will be. Thanks for still dropping by now and again if you’re still doing so… and hey, if you’re someone I’ve not heard from in a while or none of the 4.5 people I know still do come by on occasion and hear from here and there (and not the loser I wasted ten years of my life with, natch), maybe drop me a line or something. I probably would either (A) love to hear from you or (B) maybe be past biting your head off and chewing it up and spitting it out, depending on what you did. Oh, I’m just kidding (maybe) – but seriously, say hi and say you’re alive and we’ll all be… one step closer to world peace! Or something. See ya.