Archive for the “Personal” Category

My best buddy. My constant companion for the past 5 1/2 years. The being solely responsible for ruining my house. It can only be… Moose.

At the dogpark this weekend.

Home in Icky-ta over Christmas with Sparky.

Me and Moose, 14 weeks old. Just a BABY!

When he was a puppy, I could hardly walk without him being right there.

Moose on my left, about 35 minutes after I first laid eyes on him.

It is such a treat for me to read the writing at Happy Fun Cog. From what I can gather, the blog writer’s name is Jack and he’s about 8 years younger than me, but he articulates things that I’ve felt over an over, and could never give a voice to, in almost every introspective entry he makes.

I think the thing that makes his writing resonate in the sea of babble on the Blognet is that he is writing for himself, but yet putting himself out there not for attention but for another purpose. I can only guess at what the other purpose is, but it’s definitely not the attention whoring that many recent blogs seem to wallow in. Maybe it’s to learn, examine, validate, discuss, discard, and grow his own philosophies and methods of living. If we don’t stop to examine ourselves, we never know ourselves. Our daily lives is like being on the front row of a rock concert. You start to ignore everything but the noise and the show, forgetting that the mundane details of traffic, bosses, annoyances, chores and responsibility are just a distraction to the real world around us all.

OK, end tangent. I can’t put words in the poor guy’s mouth, or guess at his motives for writing. I’m just glad he does.

Here is an excerpt from his most recent entry.

I am familiar with the concept of needing to go out and meet more people in order to meet someone with whom I click.

However, I was forgetting … what it’s like to have an intuitive connection with someone built on the fact that you’re simply similar people. I knew I had to meet people, I just couldn’t remember what I was looking for. And because of that, I’ve been very angry at myself because I believed that my lack of any romantic relationship was entirely my fault, that it was my fault I wasn’t clicking with people. Now, I am responsible for not going out and meeting more people, which is a necessary precursor to meeting people with whom I click. But I was blaming myself for not clicking, which is fucking ridiculous. You can’t will or think yourself into clicking with people if you just don’t click; well, you could if you made changes to yourself or just fooled yourself and/or the other person into thinking there was a click.

The revelation about “clicking” reminds me of how I was treated back when my friends considered me attractive enough to set up with other people.

If me and the mystery man didn’t hit it off perfectly, my married/attached friends admonished me for being “too picky” and “narrow minded”.

Funny; if I didn’t want to see the guy again, I was griped out.  “I’ll never set you up with anyone else then.  You’re too picky!”  But if the guy didn’t want to see me again, I can only assume he wasn’t griped out or questioned.  All he’d have to say was, “Dude, she was ugly,” and that would be good enough.  Men are allowed to reject someone on sight alone.  Women are held to a higher standard of behavior, and are expected to look deeper.

I guess they thought that 1) single, plus 2) has a pulse, equals “marry this dude or quit trying because picky people don’t deserve love”. This from the same people who waited for their own “perfect match”. What a bunch of hypocrites.

I read this or saw this quote somewhere this week: “It’s better to eat soup with someone you love than eat steak with someone you can’t stand.” I’m sure that’s some warning not to be a gold-digger, but the bigger message to me is that a kindred spirit is worth waiting for. Even if you never find it, it’s better to live with the hope that you may find it, than to saddle yourself up with a person with whom you know you’ll never have it.

Connections with other people get harder as we grow older. When we’re young, we’re still being formed by our environment. I can even say that when I was 33, I was a very different person than I am now that I’m 39. When there are big chunks of you that are still a blank slate, 1) it’s easier to fit with someone else, and 2) you are almost never aware that you are a blank slate.

I consider myself more open-minded than ever before, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t become more hardened in who I am.

It’s no wonder it’s so hard for us older people to find someone whose company we can tolerate for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I don’t have a list of demands about money or social status or education or looks. I care about intelligence, a warped but respectful sense of humor, passion about what a person believes in, and enough similar interests to give us something to talk about. Don’t get me wrong; if someone smells bad or something, yeah that is a deal breaker. But aside from hygeine issues, “Is he a good kisser?” is about as superficial as I get.

The person also has to have my energy level. At work, I run around like a chipmunk on crack. But at home, I have about as much energy as my Saint Bernard (who is a throw rug with paws). I’m not going to try and date a Jack Russell terrier.

I don’t think trying to find someone who matches you in interests, humor and temperament is being too picky.

Search on, Jack. I will too. And screw anyone who implies we’re being “too picky”.

I had a horrible dream. My best friend was helping plan a party for me and my ex-boyfriend (we were still together in the dream), when he tells me that he’s been dating my best friend and was leaving me for her. I confronted her, and she was all smug and cocky about it. So I tell her husband that she cheated on him, and it all culminates in a big screaming fight in a parking lot, with her kids watching us and crying.

The worst thing is that in the dream, I was actually feeling the emotions that I would feel if this had happened in the waking world. I can still remember how things felt during the dream too.

I actually woke up hyperventilating! I woke up because my dog was crying and woke me up; he could tell something was wrong.

I’m still upset and have this really negative mood about me.

Is 7 a.m. too early to start drinking?

Note to God: Dude, come on! It’s OK if you can’t give me miracles in real life, but good dreams are free. Throw me a bone here.

Afterthought: I’ve only hyperventilated one other time in life. When I found out that another boyfriend (who I almost married) was having a relationship behind my back.

So I guess bad things can happen to me in life, but romantic betrayal is the only thing I find hyperventilation-worthy. That’s good to know.

Confession: When I go to blogs and they have an entry about a dream they had, I never EVER read it. “Who cares about your stupid dream?” I ask myself, closing the browser window. Therefore, by posting this, I am a big fat hypocrite.

I’m going to slowly re-post some of my most popular posts from my old blog (around 2003) so that I don’t lose everything before I delete it.  That blog is on pMachine and there’s no way to import all of the posts automatically or I’d do that.

My old blog was called Rant-O-Rama and I certainly did just that… it truly was rant after rant.  I still think I’m a pretty angry person, but I’m not as angry as I was back then.

The last post, Judgment from “the marrieds”, was written in 2003 and it angrily calls out the “smug marrieds” but doesn’t clarify that  I believe “smug marrieds” to be the vast minority of marrieds.

Let’s talk about the majority of married people that I talk to.  The “lonely marrieds”.  I’d say for every 10 people I meet who are in a marriage or long-term live-in relationship, probably only one of those people are happy.

As a single person,  loneliness comes with the territory.  But at least being single, I have hope that things could change in the future for me.

Married people who are lonely, who no longer have that connection with their spouse… they’re just trapped.  They have no hope.

We’re so conditioned by what we see on TV and in advertising, even by the stories we’re read as a child, that marriage is the solution to a “happily ever after”.  Even though logically I know better, I still assume that people who are married have this 24/7 love story going on in their homes.  I make assumptions that really cause me to put my foot in my mouth when talking to my married acquaintances.  You never know what goes on behind closed doors, and it’s never as magical and fairy-tale-esque as one would assume.

I guess I was lucky in that my marriage was so horrible, I had to leave (it was leave via divorce or leave via bodybag, so that’s kind of a no-brainer).  But what about the ones who are in miserable relationships, but relationships that aren’t QUITE bad enough to leave?

Year after year of loneliness in your own home, the gulf between you and your spouse getting larger and larger, with no hope of things turning around because you’ve already tried everything and nothing helps, and the spouse doesn’t even value the relationship enough to go to counseling or put any effort into it on their part… now living with THAT has to be a very, very bad feeling.  Especially if you have kids and you know your kids are watching this, growing up to think that a normal marriage is supposed to be like this…

My heart goes out to some of the married people I know.   We live in a society where people are selfish, don’t take blame, and think that the world owes them not only someone to love them (with no return effort on their part), but someone to wait on them hand and foot as well.  If you find yourself married to someone like that, it’s a sad, desolate dead end.

The bitter single girl hating Valentines Day is so done, I won’t even go there. I don’t hate V-day either, in fact I like all holidays. But everyone has to admit, V-day can kind of rub some salt in some wounds. Even if you’re in a relationship, for your boyfriend or husband to not even say something nice to you on V-day can be wounding.

The job I work at now, I don’t feel like a freak for being single because many of the women who work there are single. But I had a job in the past where I was only one of two single people on the entire floor. This is my recreation of Valentines Day working there:

So if you are part of (what seems like) 99% of the world’s population that is in a relationship, all I’m saying is be nice to your single friends on Valentines Day.  Don’t make us hate you more than we already do. 

So my dad, who works full time and plays in tennis leagues three times a week, ended up in the hospital on my birthday last June.  He started off running a fever and then got a rash and it progressed to severe muscle pain and deformity in his legs, and by Friday he couldn’t walk or stand, even with assistance.   Then liver and kidneys started to fail, he stopped eating, etc.  Very sick man.  At first they thought Lyme Disease but after a week of specialists, MRIs, ultrasounds, muscle biopsies and blood tests, guess what they found?  The Lipitor that he had been taking for over seven years was the cause of it all!  Seven years, no problem.  Then within five days, hospital.  He had rhabdomyolysis.  As the muscles broke down in his calves, large proteins were released into the blood, causing kidney and liver problems (helped by IV fluids because it was caught in time).

He was in physical therapy and had to walk with a cane after getting out of the hospital.  The PT told him that he saw guys almost crippled or permanently crippled because of Lipitor “all the time”.  Dad even saw a guy come into the waiting room with forearm crutches who remarked, “Hell of a high price to pay just to have lower cholesterol, huh?”  That guy was permanently disabled.  Luckily my dad wasn’t; he’s back to playing tennis.

United Health Care was AWFUL to him.  My dad couldn’t walk, couldn’t pee, was in severe pain, wasn’t eating, was running a fever over 102, and had to be on continuous IV fluids of 150cc/hr or more or else his BUN/creatinine went way up, and United Health Care would call the nurses’ station multiple times a day, harassing the nurses asking “Why isn’t he sent home yet?”  Then they also called my dad’s hospitalist, his Infectious Disease doctor, the hospital’s case manager, and my dad’s family physician to harass them into releasing him (only one of the harassees had the power to actually release him from the hospital and any insurance employee would know that).    As an RN I’ve heard nightmare insurance stories but I’ve never heard anything like what my dad went through.

Applying for jobs is such a pain in the ass.  First of all, you waste so much time because most jobs don’t post even a ballpark salary range.  I’m in a profession where salaries range from around 35K to 85K and there is no use of me applying for a job that is 30K less a year than what I’m making now.

Also, you can’t tell what the culture of the company is really like.  Often, the person interviewing you isn’t who you’ll be working with closely.  It’s such a gamble.  And for a mood sponge like me, morale and integrity in the workplace is of utmost importance.

Then there is the “experience required”.  I can learn anything in a short amount of time and out-perform many people who have been doing the job for years, because I’m smart and I have a work ethic.  But it seems employers would rather hire an incompetent employee who has been incompetent at that line of work for 10 years, than hire an employee with demonstrated success in diverse workplace settings who could learn any job in about three months, and then be a great addition to the team.