Words

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

~Rita Mae Brown
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

~Alfred Adler

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On The Bedside Table
  • NOS4A2
    NOS4A2
    by Joe Hill
My Now
Old Writey Bits
My Thanks
Matt Fitzhardinge - Alaskan dogsledding header picture


Wednesday
Jun042008

XXX

I realized during that last post that I kind of missed Bumper Sticker day from the old site. I may just bring that back. Also, there's been no poetry here lately. Of course, there's been no much of anything here lately, right?

Part of working on that is giving myself reasons to write. For such a long time now I've been unable to write anything that doesn't deal with my day-to-day struggle and I'm tired enough of trying to deal with it in real life. Somehow, it makes it even worse to see it in writing.

So, for a little while, I'm just going to entertain myself with things I love, or things that other people have written that make me think or express something I wish I could express as well as they.

And we shall begin with a poem.

XXX

Spring darkness is forgiving. It doesn’t descend

abruptly before you have finished work,

it approaches palely waiting for you

to get outside to witness another illumined hour

you feel someone brush against you,

on the street, you smell leather, the lake,

the coming leaves, the rain’s immortality

pierces you, but you will be asleep when it arrives

you will lie in the groove of a lover’s neck

unconscious, translucent, tendons singing,

and that should be enough, the circumference

of the world narrowed to your simple dreams

Days are perfect, that’s the thing about them,

standing here in half darkness, I think this.

It’s difficult to rise to that, but I expect it

I expect each molecule of my substance to imitate that

I can’t of course, I can’t touch syllables

tenderness, throats.

Look it’s like this, I’m just like the rest,

limping across the city, flying when I can

Dionne Brand

Tuesday
Jun032008

A Leap Forward for Medicine

I've been working my way back up to pushing out a few writey bits, foremost in my mind have been ones variously titled, "Everybody Lies" and "The Honesty of Worms".

Real life, however, just won't get the fuck out of my way. And, frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of it.

1. 22 months after my injury, the military managed to squeeze out of it's massive inertial ass the paltry sum of $1260. After taking a full 5 weeks to process the EMERGENCY request. After approving said EMERGENCY request, they then took a further 25 days to get the money to me with a lovely letter about how their contingency fund was established to provide emergency financial aid and aids to daily living for injured members of the Canadian Forces. I was THISCLOSE to sending it back with a note saying, "I'm sorry, your emergency funding was sadly FAR TOO FUCKING LATE and PRIVATE LIPPY IS NOW DEAD. Donations in her name will be gladly accepted to the "Save the Worms" foundation.

Worm2

(as always, thanks to James for the bumper sticker)

I have also been utterly flabbergasted by the amount of people who expect me to be all droolingly thankful. Oh yes, thank you for sending me .025% of the money I've lost. That makes up for those 4 months I spent not being able to move my arms. You betcha. Now, how about another .025% for the 5 day migraine that's kept me in bed this week? Maybe a coupla bucks for never being able to run, swim, kayak, or carry things ever again? Thanks. You're just too good to me.

I'm not even sorry that I just can't squeeze out any enthusiasm and I have that look on my face when you mention how great it is that I got some money.

2. I had a great meeting with my Member of Parliament. Felt like I'd really gotten somewhere in at least a couple of policy changes that'll help soldiers returning from Afghanistan to not have to go through what I've gone through. Until I got the bcc'd letter to the Minister of Veteran's Affairs today that kind of got it all erm.. wrong.

3. My own personal Veteran's Affairs case has been stalled by my doctor. Who, although he has written a lovely 5 page letter - he did not fill out the FORMS required to assess disability. And, due to my "constellation of physical issues" nor could he provide an exact diagnosis.

Must.have.diagnosis. So, now I'm waiting 3 or 4 more months to see yet another specialist (a sports injury and rehabilitation doctor) with the specific purpose of DIAGNOSIS.

4. The entire claim itself is in the appeal process, as it took someone a year and a half to actually find the right program for me to apply to. Which, of course, was 6 months past the filing deadline.

The appeal goes in on June 9th. The board then has 5 months to make a decision. A positive decision then only begins the process to determine compensation eligibility. I'll be 80 before I see a cheque, I'm sure and I'm betting it'll be .050%, .025% of which I'll have to repay to somebody, somewhere. A requirement which, sadly, I'll learn of just as I'm being arrested for tax fraud.

5. After my tenant, lovely man that he is - not, refused to set a date, be polite, or refrain from hanging up on my real estate agent - for us to assess the condo for sale (original plan - no renos, sell it as an investment with him in it), I finally just packed it in and gave the fucker his 3 months notice. Which felt kinda good. Until I realized that I now need $10,000 to pay the bills while I renovate and sell it.

Shall I stop now? Have you had enough? Is that you weeping and moaning "uncle, uncle" out there?

I have a diagnosis for these people. And it's not polite. Rather than set myself up for some heavy duty jail-time, I've come to the only conclusion I can....

...it's time to start lobbying for a name for my condition, life etc. "Chronic Jenopathy".

Chronic: This important term in medicine comes from the Greek chronos, time and means lasting a long time.

Jen: The state of being Jen. The static state of nothing going right the first time. The inability to move forward without a fight - in every instance of its occurrence.

Pathy: a suffix derived from the Greek "pathos" meaning "suffering or disease" that serves as a suffix in many terms including myopathy (muscle disease), neuropathy (nerve disease), retinopathopathy (disease of the retina), sympathy (literally, suffering together), etc.

If I'm going down, I may as well go down in the medical history books as well.

Have good things happened? Of course. I'm just not inclined to speak of them today. They're pretty boring anyways, as you can imagine, things I take to be "good" in my world would be "normal" in your world. Think clean underwear, waking up in the morning, propane for the BBQ, ripe fruit, 2 arms, 2 legs and 2 eyes. I take it where I can get it.

my words are like a rope

that's wrapped around my throat

wash my mouth with soap

for words unfit to quote

i have lost my way

but I hear tell

about a heaven in Alberta

where they've got all hell for a basement

Saturday
May242008

Creeaaaaak....

...creeps in, runs a finger along a shelf, frowns at the dust, sends out an experimental puff of air, sneezes continously until vaguely nauseated, swats at an annoying wraith, turns around, walks back out....

I am percolating. I wrote a whole post in my head on the way to work. The other day, I pulled off every key on my keyboard and cleaned it out - that sludgey slimy disgusting mess- and now she is all good to go once again.

I'm. almost. here.

Thursday
Apr172008

Push Me

In a fine fit of frenzy, the Universe has decided not to do me any favors these last couple of weeks and I've had a couple of massive hits in the bad news department.

However, as my lovely friend Vicky puts it, "I have never met anyone as resilient as you." Which means, although I am having a bit of a hard time rallying lately, I steadfastly refuse to lose my faith.

So, until the higher beings decide to erase my student loans for this Masters degree in the school of hard knocks, I'm opting out of anything even mildly taxing.

Which is really just a long roundabout way of saying.... this post is fluff.

Lifted from RunJenRun...




Your Slogan Should Be

100sizemattjen



Jen. Stronger than Pain.




Your Slogan Should Be

Uncommonlygood



Jen. Uncommonly Made, Uncommonly Good.



Unable to decide between the two, I've adopted both and added my own pictures instead. And narrowly avoided including "Jen just keeps going. And going. And going." as well.

I'm working until 10 pm on Friday and then Vicky is picking me up at 0745 Saturday morning whereupon we will be boarding the ferry to Galiano Island for, among other things, our yearly weekend away.

This time, however, we'll only be staying one night as I have to be back at work on Sunday at 2 pm. Nevertheless, once we've landed we're meeting straightaway with the real estate agent to take a look at what I'd begun to think of as "my land" (although yesterday I found out that an offer had been made on it) before checking into the Sunrise Suite at Serenity by the Sea for a little girl-time.

At Serenity by the Sea Retreat you can feel intimately connected with forest, cliffs, ocean and sky. Each window is like a picture, framing gifts of Nature on every side. The hush of breezes and waves are undisturbed by the sound of cars, planes or boats. Sleep is deep.

We both need it.

Some of you may remember that I spent a week on Galiano with Matt before he left to go back to Australia and so, yes, this is the first time since then I've been back. I'll be doing my best to see it as a joyful return to the island as opposed to a floating land of sad memories. The only approach I think I can take actually, seeing as I may end up living there.

push me till I have to fly

i've shed my skin, my scars

and take me deep out past the lights

where nothing dims these stars

Sunday
Apr062008

Tea Leaves

I've always always said that all I ever wanted was a piece of land in a forest. One that was big enough so that if I built a house in the middle then no matter what got thrown up around me, I wouldn't have to be bothered by it.

In a random bored search of the 'net yesterday, I found it.

I mean, I found *IT*. The one.

The one that the profit from the condo would make mine, mortgage free.

Of course, we all know that I'm not financially in a position to buy it without waiting for the lease to run out on my tenant, renovating and then selling the condo - which would put me somewhere in erm... next May.

Unless. Unless this was supposed to be. At this time. If my newly minted real estate agent friend and her boss can work out a way for me to sell it to someone who just wants an investment property for something close to market value, then maybe, just maybe, this is the right time.

Tentative looking-intos are now going on.

Just now, poking about in my horoscopes in a half-assed attempt to justify such a "rash" decision I came across the Tea Leaf Reading site saved in my favorites many moons ago and when I asked it if I were buying this land, this is what it said to me....

Reading No. 38

You are much more likely to regret things not done than things done.

Take the opportunities that are presented to you, and don't be afraid.

Who knows when you will have another chance to climb that particular mountain?

So, I'm putting this here so that I can one day look back on today and see if this happened. It's too early to even know what I'm doing. It's beyond early tentativeness. But overnight, my heart and my mind made the decision.

All I can do is go forward and see what happens.

What's it like? It's 2.25 acres with an ocean view in a 160 acre co-op. That means that 30 shareholders each own roughly 2 acres and collectively hold 100 acres as common land. With a lake. An orchard. Wetlands. Old growth forest.

On the edge of a 350 acre water-access only provincial park. On an island that's only 19 miles long (22 sq miles total) and is home to about a 1,000 people, yet close enough for me to commute a couple days a week to work. If I wanted to.

That's what it's like.

Sunday
Mar232008

Yes Please, I'd Like Some More

Over the last few months I've been getting into making my own 'product'. There's a couple of reasons for this, one being that my good friend Casey is an amazing aromatherapist and I routinely go to her for some all-natural Jen-loving which has naturally spilled over into my home life and the other being that shit, I'm broke, so it's sort of a long-term money saver.

I've found as I go along that I love being able to whip up something that is 'aromatherically suited' to what's going on with me that day (my leg hurts!) or that week (7 am shifts? good god, I need something for the shower to wake me up!) etc. So far, I've made bath oil, body wash, leave-in hair conditioner, hand soap, mouthwash, clay masks, bath salts, various skin oils and perfume. I also love being able to make specifically tailored gifts for friends such as the bath oil for N that helps with her fibromyalgia and the body wash for T that makes his skin all lovely (in that uber-manly, non-sissy way, of course).

That above bit is some background for this next bit so forgive me if it seems like I'm changing the subject...

A couple of months ago my face started to get all eczema-y. It started around my mouth and gradually seeped up over my cheeks and into the space between my eyebrows. I assumed it was stress-related although, to be fair, in a life chock-full of stress I've never ever had a problem with this particular symptom before.

But, whatever, I'm getting on in years and we all know that things change as we age, right? Otherwise, why would my doctor be advocating massive doses of Vitamin D (get thee to the sun-vitamin, pasty white British devil!) and calcium? Would I rather become prone to the horrors of scaly face or would I rather suddenly lose my ability to effectively metabolise the bag of chips and chip dip, chocolate chips in the jar of peanut butter with the spoon (see! another way of saving money!) and bowl of ice cream I had for dinner last night well enough that I can do that regularly and still weigh, without any kind of exercise but walking a couple km's a day, what I did in high school - 22 years ago?

Eh, simple choice there, I'd say. Bring on the skin cream!

I'd thought that maybe my little homemade skin stuff was the problem as well so I've been avoiding putting anything on my face besides a nice neutral moisturizer.

Six weeks later, it's continuing to spread.

Whilst at work today as I was idly leafing through a magazine during a lull in the high-maintenance flood of patients I noticed an article about sudden scaly face. The 'doctor' commented that the sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) used in foaming toothpaste will cause such a phenomenon.

Behold! The Aquafresh Extreme Clean Toothpaste I JUST started using 2 months ago.

I've noticed on the site where I order my supplies that they've got a line of SLS-free soap. And, yanno, I sort of wondered what that was all about but I just kind of assumed that was something the rabid and freakish organic people demanded or whatever, blah blah, it'll all kill us help help!

I mean, we all know that everything is harmful, right? Life's goal is to kill us. I'm not, however, a big believer in avoiding eating, smoking, drinking, sun, fun, sex and breathing in the hopes that I will be able to climb mountains when I'm 90. If the Alzheimer's doesn't get me first. All that stuff, frankly, is too far in the future and I AM a firm believer that cancer is going to kill us all. What form of it is really just a toss-up so I normally don't bother to worry about what I'm doing and how it can/maybe/could/would/should affect me. I don't have to look at my mouth, tongue, skin cancer etc, since I don't yet have it. I frankly couldn't see the lung cancer, even when I did. Maybe all the coffee gives me an ulcer and the red meat is shrinking my heart but I can't see it and neither can anyone else. I've realized, though, that I do I have issues with doing things that I can WATCH hurt me. Crashing cars. Walking out in front of buses. Stabbing myself in the neck with a plastic fork. Pouring bleach in my eye. Hanging out in a colony of recluse spiders. Whatever.

You get what I'm saying, right? There's a LINE there that each of us have drawn in our heads that defines what is enough to make us stop doing something.

Turns out that SLS is an ingredient used for its thickening effect and its ability to create a lather. It's nice and cheap. Cheap as chips, as some of you would say.

Unfortunately, it's also a bunch of terrible terrible things!


Perhaps the most dangerous ingredient in personal-care products is Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS). Because SLS has a foaming property, it is added to toothpastes in order to generate foam and give the impression that the toothpaste is working. However, SLS has been found to be quite corrosive and harmful to skin tissue says a report by the American College of Toxicity.

In the cleaning industry, SLS is used in products such as garage floor cleaners, engine degreasers and car wash soaps. Elsewhere, SLS is used for clinical testing as a primary skin irritant. Laboratories use it to irritate skin on test animals and humans so that they may then test healing agents to see how effective they are on the irritated skin.

The journal of the American College of Toxicology reports that SLS can penetrate and be retained in the eye, brain, heart, and liver with potentially harmful long-term effects. Also found in most shampoos including "no tears" baby shampoos, SLS can keep children's eyes from developing properly, can cause cataracts in adults, can retard healing, and can impair hair growth.

I especially liked the part where it can impair hair growth and (not noted above) causes DANDRUFF. My shampoos actually cause dandruff and could be making us all bald? Where's the common fucking sense in that? Hello?

Another article about it is here.

I could be wrong about this but it seems a pretty big honking co-ink-y-dink that my face went crocodile on me when I got the toothpaste.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll start ordering some of that SLS free shit. With a mental apology to the rabid organic freaks.

As a side note, last time I was getting my mouth scraped raw in the dentist's office I noticed a poster on the wall that indicated a mouthwash/gargle that included essential oils was the best defense against gingivitis and gum disease. The 8 oz one I make for myself is mostly distilled water with baking soda, a little bit of peroxide for whitening slash bacteria killing, a couple drops of tea tree oil for same and peppermint for that minty fresh feeling. It costs me about 50 cents.

Not only does that rock but for the first time in my life, I'm actually doing something my dentist recommends. I'm so proud.


what these years have brought me

what these years have taught me

heartache and fame

a chance to change

a hope to be stronger

that beauty can smolder

a stage and a curtain

that nothing's for certain

oh these years have been hard on my bones

Friday
Feb292008

Ancient Mystery Finally Solved!!

I doubt that any of the three of you left remember back about three years ago when I had the night sweats and short-of-breathness and my doctor kicked into high gear doing blood tests and pulmonary function tests and pee tests.... before we finally just decided I had that mold thing from living in an RV in a west-coast rainforest?

Eventually, as mold things go, I just got better. Especially once I moved. But, off and on, I've remained little Miss Midnight Pool-O-Sweat. Disconcerting. Gross.

This week, after three nights of wine with dinner and three nights of revisiting the joy of swimming in my own sweat.... well, you see where I'm going with this, right?

Not red wine. Which is what I usually drink. But white. Which I don't drink much of, since, it so happens, I was drinking a lot of after Matt went home. And I lived in the RV. With the mold. And the rain. And the no heat thing. And the profuse sweating. And my unhappiness.

I can't find any information about white wine as opposed to red, or for that matter, any wine at all causing night sweats on my beloved intraweb but I still have the feeling that I've made the right connection. If only for the simple fact that nothing in the world works the way it does for everyone else when it comes to me.

In hindsight, so much becomes clear.

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