Sunday, March 27, 2011

I Need Help

No big secret to anyone who's read so much as a single post here, right?

But, in reality, I do need help, actual physical help. I was never the world's greatest housekeeper, but since getting sick that's gotten much worse. I used to have regular cleaning binges, and if someone was coming for a visit, I could do the twenty minute clean and have my house be halfway decent...you know, as long as no one checked my closets or looked under the couch cushions.

The sicker I've gotten, the worse the arthritis and the worse the fatigue has gotten, the more sporadic my cleaning binges have become. Most of the time my house looks like a giant picked it up and shook it. There's crap everywhere, and laundry...dear god, don't get me started on the laundry.

The midget is a good kid, but she's a kid, and unfortunately has inherited my innate messiness and laziness. She takes advantage of the fact that I'm too tired to stay on her and push her to clean up after herself. She also takes advantage of the fact that my memory is a sieve these days and if I ground her in the morning I rarely remember that by mid afternoon.

When the midget's dad shows up to pick her up he makes it clear he disapproves of my slovenly nature. Of course, he isn't sick and taking care of a kid full time 24 hours a day, and even my four days a month minus the kid have shrunk down just a few hours once a week because the exgirlfriend has finally hurt the midget to the point that she refuses to see her at all. Which presents difficulties because, after all, the exgirlfriend is still living in the midget's father's house...the one his parents own.

Yeah, my kid isn't able to go visit her dad at the house her grandparents own. Awesome.

So...my few hours without the midget are spent sleeping, or doing homework, trying to get caught up on the things that are hard to do when a child, even one as old as the midget, is around. So..my old habit of resting the entire first day she was gone, and housework or schoolwork on the second...that's out the window...you know...along with my sanity...and my hopes for ever seeing her bedroom floor.

I know I need to ask for help. Ask my cousins, my sisters...my mom. Any of them would be willing to put on gaiters and wade through my mess and help me clean it. But I CAN'T ASK FOR HELP. I don't know why. I only know that it's common amongst people who suffer from chronic illness. There are so many amorphic offers of help, but no concrete..."Let me do this." "I am willing to do this." And asking for help feel like such an imposition, to do the things I should be able to do, even if I never really liked doing it in the first place. And worse, it feels like it makes the illness more concrete, more real.

Which is, simply, ridiculous. But I excel at the ridiculous, don't I? It's my forte. Because, refusing to acknowledge it's effect on my life doesn't lessen the impact, it only compounds it, because I wait until hope comes in late, comes in after the mess has completely demoralized me.

My cousin, the one who I'm always helping with a paper, or childcare or organizing or sorting laundry...she finally made me a concrete offer to help me clean my living room and kitchen. I had her for an hour and the front of my house, the largest part of my home, is now clean...I am not embarrassed to have company, not afraid the midget's father is planning another called to Children's Services, rather than offering help himself.

I need help...and I need help asking for help...

Saturday, March 19, 2011

I'm Baaaaack....

Disneyland was epic. The midget and I (along with the fam) had loads of fun, loads of bonding, and very little in the way of unhappiness. We drove home today. Yesterday? Some time after I woke up the last time at any rate.

We are mucho tired. Like beyond words tired...only I'm typing, so clearly I have words, they just don't make a lot of sense. I guess that's not really anything new, though.

While driving home this evening, once we finally in range of my usual radio station, we were listening to the radio and and the DJ told us about this story in which a woman hides various things (drugs and drug bags) inside her vagina. That part was nothing new if you've ever watched an episode of Locked Up Abroad, which being a NatGeo junkie, I totally have. What caught my attention was the $5.22 she was also carrying in her vagina. I mean...had the woman never heard of wallets, or even pockets for fuck sake? Of course, the DJ had it partially wrong...she actually had $51.22 up there.

I have some pretty big unanswered questions here, the biggest of which being whether or not that money will be returned to circulation. Also...how precisely do you come to the decision to stick not just dollar bills, but coins, in your vagina? And how the hell do you keep it there? And why the empty drug bags? I mean that has no value, does it? The drugs, the money that all has value, so it sorta makes sense you'd want to keep it close (I'd recommend a purse, but what do I know?), but the empty drug bags are basically just evidence against you so, I'd say...go ahead and not stick that in your vagina, if you must stick random items in your vagina.

I really want to talk to this woman. I mean, I want to know how you make the decision to stick these things in your vagina, and then how you go about making it all fit. 54 bags of heroin? Really? And even if you manage to cram it all in there, how do you make it stay? And who the hell would want to buy your vagina drugs? If nothing else, I want to give the woman a purse and explain to her how it works....

Friday, March 11, 2011

Effing Disneyland, Ya'll!!

I'm getting ready to depart for The Happiest Place on Earth. We're leaving early Sunday morning (4 am) and making the 8-10 hour drive to Anaheim. We'll be in Disneyland and California Adventure Park for five whole days. This trip has been six months in the planning and we cannot wait to get there and have fun.

All this Disneyland stuff has me remembering a Disneyland trip when I was just a wee little girl...probably 30 years ago, now. (When the fuck did I get so old?) It's a somewhat clouded memory, but one that made me deeply afraid of Winnie the Pooh for years. It wasn't until my kid was born that I started to be able to handle exposure to Pooh Bear. I was there, at the happiest place on earth, and out of nowhere this giant yellow bear comes at me with his arms stretched out, intending to devour me, no doubt. I took one look at that menacing beast, noticed that no one was making any kind of move to save me and hauled off and kicked Winnie the Pooh in the leg, and ran and hid behind my mom.

Laugh if you want, but those fucking characters are huge and scary, especially when you're all of three feet tall. I couldn't even read a Winnie the Pooh book for years. It wasn't so much that I was scared of him (okay, I'm totally lying here...I was afraid of a fat yellow bear), especially as I got older and realized that there was nothing to be afraid of, that Pooh Bear wasn't an actual bear looking to devour little girls, that he'd much rather snack on honey than me, it was just that I couldn't get over that feeling of being intimidated by something so much bigger than I was.

I'm ready now...I want to get my picture taken with Mickey and Minnie, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. I'm going to be one pissed off camper if she isn't at the princess meet and greet. She's always been my favorite.

I haven't been to Disneyland in 15 years, and I've never taken the midget, so this trip is a really big deal for us. I'm not about to let anyone (not even some scary ass yellow bear) ruin it. The midget's been pretty sad lately...bullshit drama with the exgirlfriend who should be damn thankful that I'm a civilized woman and that it would hurt me more to punch her in the taco than it would hurt her. But that shit isn't going to interfere with us being happy at the Happiest motherfucking Place on the motherfucking Earth. I've kicked a six foot yellow bear with a gaping mouth and paws as big as my head. I'm hardly afraid to deliver the same treatment to some selfish bitch who isn't worthy of being spit on by the midget.

I'll be updating my Twitter stream but otherwise I'll be MIA here on the blog (Nothing unusual, right?). I'll be sure to put up a lengthy post complete with pictures.

As Aunt Becky of Mommy Wants Vodka has said...being sad is bullshit, and I'm totally hopping on her Bringing The Happy Back bandwagon. Because the midget and I have had a couple of shit years and Goddammit...ENOUGH IS FUCKING ENOUGH!! The midget and I are going immerse ourselves in the happy, happy, joy, joy that is the motherfucking Happiest Place on Earth, and we're going to bring that happy back and pound it firmly into our lives with a big fucking mallet. It's time to make 2011 my bitch, ya'll, and Disneyland is just the place to do it!

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Use it

For my entire life I've been fascinated with putting words together. I love writing. I love playing with words to make prose and poetry. Putting the constant running of words in my head into print was always my outlet.

When I was 24, ten long years ago, I lost a beloved friend. I wrote a poem for him, and then, I was visited by the worst case of writer's block. I still have it. I've written only a handful of poems since then, and hardly any prose.

I started this blog in the hopes that I would write more, get more of what goes on in my brain into print. And it's been fitful, and part of that is knowing that my audience includes people I know in real life, and a very small portion of those people would love to find something here that can be twisted into something ugly and use it against me. Having that kind of censorship built into everything I write certainly doesn't help.

Thankfully, I found the sparkly, and awesome Aunt Becky's blog Mommy Wants Vodka. If you aren't reading her, and you're not a member of her loyal Prankster army, you're totally missing out. And as if sharing her twisted brain with the world wasn't enough, she's also the force behind the collaborative blogs Mushroom Printing and Band Back Together. The beauty of a collaborative blog is the variety of voices you find, and the sense of community. And for me, it's a place to publish things that I can't publish here, which gives me a freedom this blog hasn't given me.

I'm not giving up my blog. I am the Queen of the Universe, and nothing will ever change that, and in fact, I think getting to publish elsewhere what is unpublishable here will grant me the freedom to really explore the rest of my brain. So, while I will occasionally cross post things from my blog on one of the above blogs, for the most part the two worlds will remain separate, unless I find something there that absolutely must be shared.