Why I don't like parties

On balance it would have been more satisfying to stay in but had I stayed in, I would have made the mystery of what the evening could have been a reason to be disappointed in myself. The party was a lot of standing, a lot of small talk, a lot of people surprised to see me there, and a lot of relief when I left to go home. I'm still not happy with myself and for practically the same reasons I'm always unhappy, but at least my instinct about the fun I was sure I was not going to have was spot on. There is at least that. I wore my good blue jeans, a flattering top. Truth is most women don't dress for each other and they don't dress for all guys. They dress for the guy they hope will notice them. And not just notice them but appreciate them in a way that makes them wonder what you're all about.

I grow sad on many things, especially lately, but right now I am sad over missing that rare fitting puzzle piece for me in relationships. The one where the guy thinks I'm awesome, the guy who likes the things about me I never expected in addition to the things I hoped he would admire or like. The one where I never once wish I was someone else. Where I'm so glad I'm me and not more or less of anything. It's a real damn shame that didn't work out when I did have that. It's made it impossible to want anything else. I do genuinely get people who feel they've peaked. That life has nothing more to offer them but sorrow, struggle, and disappointment. Everyone has sorrow, struggle, disappointment, the insult of my existence is there is nothing good to break it up. I've made my absent minded, work friend boss the best thing in Philly to happen to me. He's my closest friend here and we aren't even friends. But he's good to me so I'll try not to diminish our relationship by outlining what it isn't.

Rejection

Man....it's been a whole month since this started. My mother transfers to a new hospital tomorrow where they will investigate why she's not getting better. One of the theories is an infection of the donor kidney. I really don't think I could do much worse in trying to do good. First she suffers then she almost dies. Great job Ava. Got any other assassin organs you want to donate? As Homer Simpson would say, "Never try."

Would it be wrong to consider this an object lesson for anything I try to love? The head knows that sentence was uber-dramatic, the heart wonders if it's true.

Hatin on a G

There's a great piece of poetry by the rapper T.I. in his single You Don't Know Me;

Contrary to your belief, I'm as a real as can be,
Fuck your thoughts and your feelings * you don't know me.

I just like that song. No particular reason to bring it up other than I just discovered it and by discovered I mean my Dad told me about it. My Dad is into trip hop too. I don't even know what that is but my brother does and it kind of messed with his head a little to see it in my Dad's play list. That man loves him some music. I love that about him. He doesn't care if it's Sinatra or whatever trip hop is, if it speaks to him on some level, he likes it.

I just got an e-mail on the dating website I insist on being on so I can maintain a baseline depression. He sent me a picture of a puppy and the following:

Hello, you are really friendly--and---cute!
Would you consider an interracial?

I responded:

Thanks for the gift (the puppy picture). A puppy picture-you really can't go wrong with baby animals. So you're an interacial, eh? As soon as I know what races those are, I can make a final determination as to whether I do your particular mix. That's only because I'm insanely racist against certain Caucasian heritages and really fond of others. Sorry, sometimes I
can't help myself.

I am open to dating anyone I get along with.

Ava
--
I keep seeing guys only three years older than me and forgetting we're only three years apart. I'm getting old. 39 is not too old for me. When did that happen? My gray hair is making an increasingly visible march through my hair and while it's still a bit of a novelty, I'm starting to think it ages me a bit. It's one thing to wonder if something is going to last forever and quite another to wonder if you'll ever have something at all. I keep wondering if I should stop being so hard on myself and get my hook up on because I'm simply not a relationship person or keep waiting for nothing to happen while I nurse impossible crushes on the worlds least available men (to me). I have no reason at all to think I will ever be a different kind of girl. I'm just not the girl who always has a guy, I'm the girl who never has a guy and who I'll bet had her girlfriends wondering at one time or another if maybe I wasn't into guys (not that there's anything wrong with that). I wish I was that girl but that girl can no better survive without a guy than I can manage to have a guy of any sort interested in being with me for any reason. And no, I am NOT counting bus drivers, security guards, or street sweepers. If my girlfriends dated those guys, I would but they don't so I won't.

Arg

Sometimes I wonder

Every family has their dynamic and likely to outsiders it seems strange or dysfunctional but in our family, I think I've always kind of been one of the grownups. When my father was away in training, I balanced the checkbook and reconciled the books with him. When I was in college, I arranged my classes to pick up my sister from school. When I left home I sent for her during summer vacation, paid for her summer camp. I've slept on the floor next to my sister's bed while she was sick so I could catch her vomit in a bucket and my Mom could get a full night's sleep; now I'm holding a bucket to my mother's mouth so she can spit her phlegm. I have told my sister repeatedly she is the reason I won't have kids but perhaps I've had my kids. Perhaps I've done it all already or at least my version. Sometimes I wonder if this role of being a third parent and helper to my dad is supposed to be preparing me for something or if it is the substitute for the family I'll never create.

Something, Anything

I thank the Lord for a sound mind and the activity of my limbs. I grew up hearing people say that. It was a common preamble during testimony service, one people would say but rarely have any experience losing either faculty. I know I had my moments during boot-gate 2009 when I lamented my foot jail, sleeping with it, hot muggy days in it, not being able to drive because it was on my right foot, the totally clashing ankle brace I wore for a month after including to a friend's wedding (the one picture I saw-not happy, eyes go right to the ankle). Total bummer. But tonight at the gym (which I badly needed), I was taking a break between sets and thinking of my mother who can't even sit up without assistance. The shoulder presses were hard but not as hard as it is for her to go from the hospital to rehab so she can try to walk again even while she struggles to eat still. A person who has absolutely no expertise in renal patients told my father there was nothing they could do about her inability to eat or keep anything in her she does eat, that's what renal patients to. Total sack of shit community hospital fucking attending physician said that to my father. What. the. fuck. I seriously want to burn the place down--actually I just want to lock him in his car covered in napalm and set him on fire, just him. Tell him that's just what napalm does, nothing I can do about it. My father wrote us devastated. I told him no one is less credible than this attending since Mom's doctor at Hopkins (a diabetic nephrologist-kind of an expert at this) kept hunting for this thing that has ailed her since the transplant and made it really hard to stay healthy. Same thing with her less competent current nephrologist. Never said what was going on with her was normal. Kept trying to figure out what it was. My god. Every vet I've ever met is leaps and bounds better than any medical doctor I've ever met. That's what's wrong with healthcare. Not a damn thing caring about it.

So I started this post intending to speak of how lucky I am to have the activity of my limbs, that I dug deeper tonight knowing my Mom is struggling far harder than I am with a bicep curl. I'm conflicted about what to do next. A part of me says stop everything, go home, stay until everything is better. Or stay until...until what? I stayed until the transplant, now I wish we hadn't done it. This is just a very hard time. I've been short with friend and foe alike. A person I do not like is coming into our office tomorrow and I'm not sure I'm going to make it without saying something inappropriate. My mother said she understood how people become addicted to drugs when I saw her last weekend. They had to give her morphine for her pain and she felt so good after, she said she wished she could always feel that way. This is a woman who wouldn't take tylenol after her hysterectomy. Seriously God, coming through with that healing would be pretty great and well-timed right now.

We're all coping or not coping in our own way. I'm trying to use exercise but I do feel often like none of this matters and I should just invite either one of the worthless guys I knew over just to have the company and distraction. I just want something else to think about before I go to bed and wake up in the morning and throughout the day. I want something good to happen.

I'm on my period

That's more an alibi for what follows than a piece of information the world just needed to know about me. I read a story long ago written by a woman who was very close to her dying father-in-law. She wrote about her grief and about her husband's grief. She asked her husband at one point what she could do for him and he told her, have sex with me every night. He wasn't being facetious or crass, he just wanted the comfort, release, the life affirming thing that sex can be. Most of my girfriends have rarely been without a man in their life. Even when they say they need to not be with someone, they are still kind of seeing someone. I've only met 2 other people who are, as Ashley coined, 'sex camels' who go without for long stretches. I am without a man in my life and at times like these, I could really use the affirmation, the comfort, the release.

I know I *just* said I was happy being unmarried but can a girl get a boyfriend or something?

This is the hard part

Dear Dad,

Oh holy mother of god. I've been thinking about it and yes, you did say absolutely every soul crushing, hope stealing, deadly thing you could have said to Mom tonight. The part of me that wondered as a teenager why she stayed married to you kind of hoped she would ask for a divorce instead of turning her head and looking out the window to be somewhere other than listening to you say she couldn't go home. A part of me wondered if it would have been better for her to have slipped away from us without having to endure this hardest part, especially since she has to do it with you.

~Ava

It is only a matter of time before we blame the sick for their ills. Why do we do this? Why do we pretend life is fair? That if you eat healthy and blah, blah, that life won't just steal your health anyway. Why do those of us who enjoy health feel like we've done something to earn it? Don't get me wrong, my chubby ass is in the gym working it out to try to mitigate the ass kicking life has in store for me but I'm not 'healthy' because I'm good, I'm healthy because my ass is lucky. I want to tell my mom it's okay if she doesn't want to fight to stay here. I hate to see her so miserable, so alone, so without hope that she can even eat normally again. Who would force someone to stay here under those circumstances? I want to quit my job and just stay home to get her better. I don't want to leave her to the psychological torture of my Dad. It was truly awful. He went without a breath for 3 minutes covering themes like the hospital sending her home to die, sending her a shitty rehab place where she would be left in a corner, all the things she couldn't do right now, how he would figure out how to live on a fixed income so they could both retire, things he needed to do for work, how he didn't want to move to be close to her family.... I finally said, 'this isn't really hospital talk.' I mean, Jesus man why do I have to tell you that? We didn't know this time last week if she was brain dead or would ever regain consciousness. She sat up today. For fuck's sake, calm yourself man. She's in a really tough spot. It's hard to be so weak you can't reposition yourself on the bed. Give. her. a. break.

Dear Mom,

This is not your fault. You are a trooper and continue to be. We didn't help you as much as we should. We left you to your own care and hoped our nagging and goading would motivate you when you were clawing your way through every day just trying to get by. We failed you. I'm sorry. I love you and I want more than anything for you to be well. I question my very faith in the face of your suffering and I know you wonder if it will ever be better, if it's worth all the hard work just to be here miserable. I know my answer will always be yes, I want you here in whatever condition you are in, but I also know my answer is selfish. I love you and want more than anything to see you healed whether this side or beyond. I guess what I'm saying is you don't have to stay here for me. I will never be over you and I wish you didn't have to suffer.You have done so much. You have seen the world, visited me every place I've lived, held wise counsel both in my youth and now. You have remained married to a very flawed man. I don't know how you did it. Seriously. I mean, you had some money and you know your family would have helped raise us. If they were handing out Nobel prizes for living with him, I think you'd sweep. I hope it's the gall bladder. I want so much for you to feel better. If there were justice your drug addict sister wouldn't be the healthier of the two of you.