life with talking trees

I did indeed call my disability lawyer about the latest developments.

Me: So I'm scheduled to see a neurosurgeon and an orthopedic specialist about my back
Lawyer: what's going on with that? is it the meningitis?
Me: no, well I don't know, I just have a problem. My back has been in pain, like serious severe pain, ever since my last stay in teh hospital. Its been going on for three months now
Lawyer: Oh that's GREAT!
Me:...
Lawyer: oh! uh, I'm sorry. wow, that's not what I meant, I mean, I'm sorry, that is probably really awful for you but um, ah, its great for your CASE. wow, I'm really embarrassed. I'm so sorry. that was awful of me...
Me: [bust out laughing] that's okay, you're a lawyer, you're allowed to say that

Someone in Australia is doing research on the families of Autistic children. I thought it was a pretty good survey and it's kind of nice that for once a research actually gives a shit how family members are affected.

( So here is the essay part of the survey )

The body is getting up from a chair, walking and talking. Walking becomes stomping; rythmic stepping becomes pacing. Talking becomes shouting; volume and gestures rise together. The figure becomes larger, taller; standing straighter and stiffer with each passing second. Hands are shooting out in staccato motions that go faster and faster blurring into whirlwinds of sharp violent movements, while the legs are rapidly turning into a tighter and tighter circle. Eyes flash bright with raw power and the face is taut; drawn into an aura of tension that threatens to explode the entire structure. All the stabbing fingers and sharp heel-toed turns suddenly STOP as if an invisible wall has come into being. The body slams into the imaginary wall with all the psychological force of a sudden betrayal.
The body falls down into a crumpled mass of fetal helplessness and the hands that previously shot into the air are reduced to pounding the floor. Rebound effect sends the body rocking back and forth. Curled into defensive constriction the body is unable to flail any longer. Frustration drifts out and the mouth opens to follow in an familiar wail from childhood.

All that control, lost in a moment of clarity.

What's Going On?

niggerkojak has deleted his journal and that REALLY worries/upsets me. I hope I hear from him soon.
ptwarhol has gone AWOL again IRL. Frankly, you probably don't wanna know all the things I'd like to say to his sorry ass. If you do, I'll possibly post it after I track him down and let both barrels fly.
My business went kind of dead for the last three weeks and financially that hurt a LOT. Now suddenly I've got bunches of people clamoring for my time.
aka_baphomet is applying for a different job that will net him a significantly smaller paycheck and has thus told me I need to get on the ball finding a part-time job of my own.
ladylabyrinth and I are applying for teller positions at bond credit union where I currently bank.
I have had another meeting with the advocate and it looks like second son may be going back to a decent educational situation within a couple of months.

What Are You Pissed About Today?

Third son has not been bringing home his homework/reading sheet (which also has his math facts on it for studying), I plan to have a talk with his teacher; she sent a note home saying it needs to be signed and turned in at the end of the week. I wrote back saying he's not been bringing it home. She wrote back saying it is given out and thus I should look for it. What arrogance. I'm getting rather fed up with school people telling me that I should be doing more for my kids' schoolwork. Excuse me but I thought that's why we paid teachers and administrators? To teach our children? But I keep being told that it's the parents' (MY) fault when kids don't do well in school. My kids do great in school, so is that attributable to me as well? If so, then I suppose my insistance that the boys take some responsibility for themselves is not such a bad thing after all? Look at me, making my kids do their own homework, remember their own reports and study every night (almost) unassisted! I'm so lax. Isn't it enough that I get requests to help raise funds at least twice a week? I mean, geez, I'm supposed to oversee their work, check their upcoming projects and test dates, read to them every night, quiz them for upcoming tests, go to meetings and conferences, look in their packs everyday, provied snack and/or lunch, deposit them on-time to class (third son has been dragging his feet to class so I get a notice about his tardiness), sign forms and waivers, pay for trips and project materials, chaparone possibly, AND raise money for the school? What does the school do?

/rant

What Happened?
Saturday night.
No, no, back up to wednesday before Saturday night. My Lady mentions "you're going out Saturday night so I'll do your makeup for you and-"
"we're going out?"
Okay. We're going out Saturday night. Yay!
Online, a friend of Baph's from Florida says he's hankering for a road trip... says they'll be up here Friday. Visitors. Yay! Plans to go to Tenn and pick up comorbid do not work out. Boo!
By friday I find out that EVERYONE we know and love is trying to plan to be out with us Saturday night. Hmmm... so I figure Baph is going to give me the ring Saturday night. I figure he'll hand it to me around friends while we're eating or something. We're going to the Cleremont Lounge. Baph doesn't seem happy about this. Says he wants to hear live music. Get that: Baph wants to hear live music. Hmm.... okay. Last minute searching reveals that one of my favorite bands fusebox is playing FOR FREE! Call everyone, rearrange plans. Get directions.
Manage to get out the door only 20 mins behind schedule. Pick up Kisses. Get to Restaurant. Eat delicious satiating food. As usual, eat too much. Kisses is trying to get her boyfriend to get his ass over with us. Directions to tavern are given out. Everyone is coordinating schedules. Doors open at 9:30 and I don't want to miss the band. We leave the restaurant. Follow directions to somewhere (nice looking) in Norcross. Wrong place. Call tavern. Get new directions. Call everyone to give out new directions. Kisses boyfriend and The Lady's boyfriend are not answering their phones. We are starting to get agitated with the both of them. In defense of The Lady's man (aka the_yellow_king) he was dealing with some NOT fun stuff and is not in the habit of carrying a cell phone around. There is no excuse for Kisses' man.
Arrive at tavern. Fusebox is just setting up. I haven't missed a note. Yay! Drinks for everyone. (on top of $50 worth of sushi and seaweed salad and sake with plum wine) I start getting pretty happy by my second drink. Still waiting on out-of-towners who got waylaid picking up someone's husband who ends up NOT going. The Lady's man is still not arrived, nor Kisses' man. None of us care too much once the band begins. Baph keeps disappearing. Hmmm. Band starts; sound is horrid. I mean, it was so bad I felt the need to apologize to everyone. By the third song, they improved (I guess the sound guy woke up finally) but still not close to how good they really are. Fifth song, and third drink, band stops playing and says "we have a T-shirt to give away. The winner is.... Cassandra Paisan!"
Whoa, big surprise. Not. I figured Baph paid them off for it. Sweet, huh? What a nice boyfriend! I get up on stage to receive my T-shirt and turn around to see Baph standing next to me with the microphone in hand and goofy grin on his face. "I have spent the last two years of my life with this woman..." he begins and I throw the T-shirt in front of my face and start giggling hysterically. Someone shouts out "get on your knee!" Baph complies. He's kneeling down in front of me, grinning goofily, tears in his eyes, holding the ring we picked out together. He says the words. I am giggling so much I am not saying anything. Someone shouts "SAY YES!!" and I finally take the T-shirt away from my face and say "yes" into the mike. Then we kiss and everyone screams and cheers. It's nuts.

Afterwards, random strangers kept coming up to me and saying congratulations. Some women had tears in their eyes. Most people hugged me and told me it was sweet and beautiful. I kept giggling. My face started hurting after a while. I couldn't stop giggling. Went outside, showed off the awesome sapphire on white gold ring. Everyone agreed it was perfect for my tiny fingers. Baph and I meet up occasionally in the craziness and kiss and hug some more while whoever is around us cheers. At the bar, a lady tells me how nervous he was before hand. Says she was encouraging him but he was sooo nervous. People are melting and cheering and hugging and it is all happy madness.
We break away to go thank the band for allowing this to happen during their set (it was acompetition that night and two other bands played as well but I really dont' remember them at all). We find the singer who thanks us profusely and promises that we can get a copy of the videotape that was being shot tonight. We are then invited by the band to the after-show party.
The singer and Kisses sit in the backseat while we go. The party is nearby but on the way I realizE I am feeling somewhat ill. I'm still happy, but I'm nauseaous and sleepy too. when we get to the party, I cannot stop gagging. It wasn't the spins, it wasn't exactly dizziness either. I just kept gagging. No heaving, no hurling, just gagging. Finally I got fed up and went into the bathroom and MADE myself throw up just to get rid of the gagging. It worked for about 20 mins. But a nice 20 mins! I was still grinning, giggling and occasionally squealing. Baph and I had a chemistry that was oozing out all over the place all night. We didn't even need to be touching each other or in the same room at all times.... but when we did meet *pow!*
After 20 mins passed, the gagging returned. Not as bad but still gagging. I got a little irked with several people saying I had simply drank too much (yeah three drinks can be a lot but I know when I'm trashed and when I'm not) I was NOT trashed. I was sick and the alcohol just made it worse was all. So I go back into the bathroom and MAKE myself throw up again. Then, I was no longer gagging. I was just ravenously hungry.
We leave the party with Satia and Rob in tow. We go to Denny's. A very pleasant dinner/breakfast (it was 5am by this time) and conversation. We go home. We collapse. Lucious, lovely night in a soft bed with the one you love.

Was that enough?
*grin*
*giggle*

When I was about 21 and living in New Jersey (Leonia - about a twenty minute walk from Teaneck) Nikki and I used to take road trips. Actually, we didn't really RoadTrip per se, we just drove to hellanback in order to go see our favorite bands. We went to Boston, NYC, Providence, and a buncha little cities in crusty old new england states with weird names like "Hochtoosulley" and "Woonsocket".
At some point, we had sent a letter to a friend of a friend who was a singer in a band. He wrote us back with one of the strangest letters we ever received. He told us we should send him information on Charles the 3rd of Spain (I think that's right) and we should tape record our adventures and send them to him. He told us to light candles for a certain mutual friend of ours (even though there was no bad things happening to our friend at the time) and that we should consider wearing white robes occasionally.
So we had a cheap tape deck with a mic on it and we started taking it with us on our road trips. We didn't leave it on all the time, just every now and then we'd switch it on and say something odd. I wish I still had copies of those tapes... I imagine him getting it and playing it and having no earthly idea what the hell kind of hi-jinks we were getting into.

I recall one particular trip to Boston. THat was the time we decided "Woonsocket" was a good replacement for "Moonshadow" in the famous Cat Stevens song. We sang along to it, occasionally switching on "Andy" - as we called the tape deck - and cracking inside jokes that probably made absolutely no sense to anyone else. At one point, Nikki was bitching about slow drivers - pokeybutts I dubbed them - and I began to scream "pokeybutt! Pokeybutt!" in my best imitation of Diamanda Galas. Screeching out "pokybuttpokybuttpokeybutt!" as fast as you can while garbling your voice so you can sound like Linda Blair on a very bad day can really wreck your vocal cords. Then again, leaning into a tape deck mic only long enough to whisper "closer... closer!" probably doesn't do much for an adult frame of mind either. SUfice it to say, we were nearly hysterical by the time we reached our destination. Our mutual humor society seemed to be vague and inarticulate to other people standing near but we certainly amused ourselves quite well. We brought a camera with us and while in town, ran around taking pictures of random people. I caught a couple making out in a car (Jump out of car, run to hood, snap picture, jump back in car yelling "gun it!" and tearing off), a business man trotting home (grinning and waving at me - at 11:00 at night?!?) and a lady coming out of the bathroom ("that crazy bitch jess took Mah Pick-toor!")

On the drive back, we had a blow-out.
Providence is a nice town. Boston is a nice town. Vreehonken (or whatever freakish name it was, I really can't recall) was NOT a nice town. That is, if you call a dunkin' donuts, one gas station and one bus terminal sitting next to the one government building a town. We walked into this throwback to the golden age of man at about 4am covered in highway dust and babbling incoherently. The gas station was closed, not to open for another 3 hours. We had the luxurious option of either renting a hotel room (only about 5 miles from the gas station but maybe you could convince Arnie at the dunkin' donuts to give youse a ride, he's a nice kid) or standing around in the dunkin' donuts. Being as the DnD was across the street from the repair station, we opted to stay awake and wait for the gas man to open up shop and sell us a new tire.

4 hours in a dunkin' donuts. Drinking non-arabica coffee. Counting pennies to see if we could buy a donut too. Chattering on and on about Calvin and Hobbes, pretending to be foreign musicians, and trying not to smear more dirt around on our faces. At some point, we tried to stick pennies on our foreheads -saying something about increasing psychic abilities - throw wet toilet paper on the ceiling (Of the dining room) surreptitiously, and made up voices for her cat (assumed to be indignant since we were obviously late coming home to feed her) We postulated on the average intellectual capacity of the man who was coming to sell us a tire, the possibility that this town even had a library - much less one with a copy of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" - and whether or not people around here ever went to NYC.

Delirium city.

We had a total blast.
I think the citizens of Podunktinytown were on the verge of tossing us back towards the highway and insisting we walk back to our own godforsaken town and never come back. Eventually, though, the man came to fix the tire situation. By then, we were getting grouchy and sprouting fangs. His chipper attitude did not amuse us.... but then again, how can you help but be grouchy after 12 cups of coffee, two pounds of dirt on your face and watching the sun rise through the beer-bottle brown sky of a should-be-nameless town in noweheresville Rhode Island? We had a blast but after 4 hours, we cottoned to the fact that no one else found us amusing in the least.

Of course, I don't remember the ride home. I don't remember much of anything. Nikki's got a picture of me gripping a humongous coffee cup labelled "The Big One" grinning like a Stepford idiot while pointing at it. Man, I wish I had that picture.

I still mourn. I once sat in the office of a therapist and at some point I was crying over the death of my best friend which happened when I was barely 18 years old.

"does it ever go away?" I asked sobbing "does it ever stop hurting?"

very softly, she said "no. Sometimes it hurts for the rest of your life. Sometimes it never goes away, but that's good. Would you want to ever forget her or how much she meant to you?"

"of course not," I said.

"you'll learn, over time, how to deal with it better, but it will never really go away, not if you truly loved her"

Of course, it's been 19 years since she died and it still hurts just as much as it ever did. When I truly think about it, and remember that night, that phone call, all that screaming. all that numbness, all that disbelief, it still hurts just as painfully, just as raw, just as jumbled, just as sharply and just as wrenching as it did that night.
I deal, though.

She was right. Some pains never go away. Some pains pile on top of other, similar, pains and keep on digging at you. Every now and then, you stop and mourn again. It seems like you'll never cry enough, whether your tears are on the outside or the inside.

I'll never forget her. I think about her once every day. Most times it's fine and good because I'm thinking about the wonderful stuff, and how great it was to have her as my friend. Once in a while, though, I think about how much it hurt me when she died. A part of me was killed that night. A part I'll never get back. That's okay, though, because that part belonged to her and it's right that it should die with her.

But I still miss her. I'll never stop. That's okay too. My therapist was right; I did learn to deal with it, but I'll never stop mourning.

For Jill, yes I still love you, even after all these years. I told you I would.

There's a little girl who screams louder than anyone on the playground. She has long scraggly hair that's possibly pulled back in a loose ponytail and she runs around in hand-me-down clothes that won't be handed down one more time.
She has long hair, because who wants to sit still long enough for a haircut, or she has a "pixie-do" (girl version of crewcut) because who has the patience to wait for their hair to grow long enough to pull back?
She has bright searing eyes that look straight inside you, making you squirm when she says nothing. Maybe she has deep intense eyes that seem to cover her feelings but hint at your own. Perhaps she has heavy lidded eyes that never seem to really open, making her seem shaded, hiding behind what she's thinking about you.
Her eyes can bother you though... because you just know she's looking through you, through all your facades.

Her voice is clear and ringing, when she wants everyone to hear her. Her voice is soft and trembling though when she's filled with teary emotions. Her voice is harsh and questioning, when she's got something she needs to know. Her voice is cool and calculating when she knows she has the goods on you. Its the detachment that worries you most; her air of objectivity cuts away all the posturing you might have considered with anyone else.

She runs the school yard, bossing all the boys and ordering the girls around. She yells frequently but can just as easily change to a slow, modulated pace, hissing her words at someone who won't play along. Her feet are thin and pale, from all the stamping and hustling and kicking and tromping. These feet never really stop moving. You can tell that stagnation is this girl's enemy. No one is allowed to rest when she's around.

She waves her arms dramatically. Her hands never fold up and her arms never align properly. Flailing her scenarios before a capitavated audience, she mesmerizes them all with theatrics Olivier would die for. Her ability to enthrall and place you IN the story is what shows her power.

This girl rules the playground. Her chameleonic reign cannot be duplicated; for she is whatever is needed at the moment to keep the action happening. She is verb personified, this girl.

Did you look at her closely? Did you sit her down and listen to her intently? Did you pull her away from her adoring minions and test her kinetic power?

I bet you never did. I bet you saw this girl once and dismissed her easily from the childish view of the playground you remember: she's too bossy, why do the kids follow her? she's a wonder, what an imagination! she's a fake, always bullying others. She's just another kid on the heirarchy of the school yard.
What if you did look at her? Did you ever think to examine such a child? Were you afriad of her too? Were you jealous of her? Despise her? worship her?

Were you her?

If you were, maybe you remember... most likely you don't.
Because if you did, you'd have to remember the things that made this little girl into the kiddy-tyrant that she is... you'd have to bring back the memories of things better left alone. Things no one likes to think about.

She has scraggly unkempt hair, or she has super-short utilitarian hair. She has old hand-me-down clothes that won't be handed down again. She has thin legs and pale feet with callouses. She has vertigo arms that enfold every story just so. She has a theatre voice that will never be lost in a crowd.

Mostly, she has those eyes. Eyes that see straight into you. Beyond you though, is where she's really looking. Because behind her telscoping gaze is the image of herself, scared, alone and ashamed of who she is. She'll die before she'll let you see that, so do her a favor and look away.

Because she's not looking inside you to reveal you; everyone thinks that but the smart ones realize the truth. She's looking inside you to hide herself from herself. She's looking inside you so she won't have to see herself broken again. You are not her and that is what she wishes for more than anything.

No matter what you thought about her, there is one thing you never knew. No matter what you thought she wanted from you, all she ever wanted was to be somebody else.