2006-03-31 - 4:19 a.m.
i just don't know what to do with myself.
i keep wanting to take him for a walk before i do anything else, to greet him with a "hi puppy!" every minute of every day.
i still expect him around every corner, i still walk carefully in the dark to avoid stepping on his toes.
there's an awful emptiness that's also a painful knot in the middle of my chest.
everything feels so empty.
words fail me. i'm truly at a loss.
2006-03-25 - 12:06 p.m.
my heart is breaking. i try to put up a brave front, for him. but i haven't stopped crying since i got home yesterday.
the best dog in the world isn't at his best any longer. we celebrated his 14th birthday february 17th, and i had a funny feeling he wasn't going to get to see the next one. call me morbid, horrible and pessimistic. i just knew.
he's been having a lot of trouble walking the last week or so. his back legs just don't seem to be responding to the signals you know his brain is trying to send. he's sick, i'm not sure with what. sometimes it's better not to know.
he's had a long, happy life. there's been rough patches, of course-- he got hit by a car, was really hung over after a rowdy halloween party one year, had a really bad ear infection and he's lost a couple toe nails because he refuses to let us cut them. but even through all that, he's been the best dog anyone could ever ask for. he's a snuggle dog, he's happy when i'm happy and cheers me up when i'm sad. but he doesn't have the energy to do that now, and so i know it's not long before he's not going to be around for me to love anymore.
i try not to cry around him because i know he knows it's because of him and it makes him feel worse. he's fading, fast. i can see it in his eyes. but he won't let go, because he knows how much i need him here. it tears me up to be the cause of so much suffering, especially for someone i love so much.
as much as it hurts, i'm ready to let him go. i can't stand to see him like this, and i don't want him to see me like this.
Cody, I love you.
2006-02-23 - 4:12 p.m.
So I didn’t get as much done yesterday as I had planned, I was too tired and Cody was sick, so I spent most of my night snuggling and watching him. We made the mistake of buying him some canned food, because he was looking a little gaunt. Within a day or two he wouldn’t eat his food unless it had the canned food mixed in. it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even like his bones anymore, which he used to absolutely love. Last Friday was his 14th birthday, so we did get him a can of food for that, but now that it’s gone we’re not buying anymore, because he stops eating his crunchies for days afterwards, expecting that we’ll just feed him “good” food. On Tuesday the only thing he ate was actually one of those bones he’s been refusing to eat. But yesterday he had the poops when I got home from work, so when we came back in I made him some watery pedialyte and he drank 2 whole bowls of it. That made me happy—I don’t want him to dehydrate. Around 12:30 I took him for another walk, just to make sure he didn’t have to poop again. When we came back in the house he happily went over to his food dish and crunched a couple mouthfuls of food. He had a couple gulps of water, then proceeded to walk around the dining room table, and do the same thing all over again! He crunched and circled a total of 3 times. My puppy is a little Monkish.
I’ve discovered that the easiest way to get myself to drink more water is to put some lemon juice and a straw in it. Not that I don’t enjoy plain water or anything like that, because I do, I guess I just forget I’m thirsty sometimes until I’m so parched I gulp down a couple glasses, and then I forget again. But the lemon flavor is refreshing, and the straw is a fun little toy. Somehow things always taste better when you drink them through a straw.
2006-02-22 - 5:04 p.m.
More tired than I am bored, at least for the moment. I’ve a lot going on in the back of my mind, but until the caffeine kicks in, I know I won’t be able to reach it.
It’s cold in here. My Southern Comfort vanilla spice eggnog coffee (try saying that three times fast) is good, and it gives a pleasant warmth to my esophagus. It does not however take the chill from my bones, nor does it take away the burning ache in my stomach.
Ok, now I’m bored. My standard busy work is done. My phone isn’t ringing. I went through all the boring common drive folders yesterday. My saltines are slightly stale, I can’t stop yawning. It’s a struggle to stay awake.
I have a funny cartoon at my desk, it’s an older man and his dog, and he scratches the doggie’s head, and the pup’s so happy he nudges the guy’s arm, so the man scratches the pup’s head again. Then the pup starts whining for attention, and the man says “scratch a dog once and you’re busy for the rest of the day.” This cartoon gives me the fuzzies. Cody does the arm nudge so well he’s mastered picking up your arm and placing it on his head so you don’t have to. And of course, once you start petting him, you can’t stop. I love puppies!
In this week’s Time magazine:
$270 million—the estimated street value of the 135,323 marijuana plants seized by law-enforcement officials in Washington State last year.
8—rank of the pot harvest’s value among the state’s agricultural commodities, edging out sweet cherries.
Imagine the revenue our declining state could generate if “it” were legalized, or at least decriminalized.
Did I mention how bored I am? Guess I could plan out my evening. Since Ana’s not going to be home, I don’t have to try and entertain anyone but myself. I’ve got to make dinner first, which won’t take too long—eggplant parmagiana subs, to finish up the eggplant from dinner on Monday, and whatever random couscous mix is in the cupboard. Ana comes home from training for lunch, so at least we can have dinner together. Once she leaves I’ve got a little over 2 hours to myself before she calls on her last break at midnight, at which point I start getting myself ready to go to sleep. Or at least I try—I never seem to be asleep when Ana gets home at 2.
So what am I going to do with myself? Of course first I have to walk the .4 miles from the bus stop to home, then take Cody out to do his business. Once that’s done, I need to quiet the beast—i.e. feed Azrielle, who runs around the apartment screaming for her crunchies until she gets fed. I figure I can finish up the vacuuming Ana started on today, and then make and eat dinner. After dinner I’ll toss the dishes in the washer, scrub down the counters, etc… and once that’s all done I think I’ll sit down with a cup of tea, a bowl, and the dozens of magazines I have sitting around waiting to be clipped for collage-ing. Once I’m done with that—which I doubt will be today—I have to find all my stashes of clippings, and organize them by where I intend to include them. I also have hundreds of recipes to organize and put into a cookbook, various nutrition/herbal/healing tips I’ll someday get around to compiling, and snippets of story/poem ideas scribbled into margins and stored on 20 page word documents.
Wow, I’ve got a lot to do.
2006-02-21 - 3:18 p.m.
“Nothing to do when you’re locked into vacancy.”
I’ve been thinking, or at least trying to think, of something pithy to encapsulate and capture the way I’ve been feeling lately. Since Ana’s started in training at FedEx, however, I’ve been mildly sleep deprived, which is preventing my brain from functioning at full steam. I’ve been trying for months to get myself out of bed earlier in the morning, but I’ve been finding that the later I go to bed, the less likely I am to get up in time to get ready for work at break-neck speed, let alone early. My sleep cycle is certainly out of whack—no sleep during the week, and then over-sleeping to compensate on the weekends. Of course too much sleep makes me stay up later, thus keeping the cycle spinning around… But back from my tangent, the familiar Breakfast Club quote above will suffice for now, because I really do feel locked into vacancy.
Half asleep, and bored to tears—yep, I’m still at ACS. Biding my time until I get hired at FedEx or my head explodes—at this point, whichever comes first will have to do. I’m sick of contract work and stupid people, on the phone and in the work place. Sick of students who know nothing about how their education is funded, sick of parents who don’t read what they’re signing, so long as their childs’ educational expenses are covered up front; at least until after they get a bill. Sick of schools that care too little, or too much, about the records they process and the students they affect. Tired of getting in trouble for spending time online, tired of having nothing better to do than deleting my junk email and sorting and resorting through the few emails I want to keep. Sick of wondering how the schools, my schools, will react once they find out COD’s life span is shorter than the average sea monkey. Sick of missing my sea monkeys—once I have a spare few bucks I’m buying another egg packet and refilling my magic sea monkey castle tank. And maybe my day-glo yellow one, too.
We had a nice 3 year anniversary celebration, even though we didn’t spend the actual anniversary together. We went to the Eastern Hills Cinema and saw “Imagine Me & You,” a cute dyke flick with Piper Perabo and an even hotter chick who, if she isn’t, really should be a lesbian in real life. We planned on Chef’s for dinner, but the line at 6:30 on a Saturday was practically out the door, and so we had pizza, I had fries and she and Cody had wings. I ended up making my own eggplant parmagiana yesterday, and I bet it was better than it would have been at Chef’s.
I was reading an article in Art Voice today telling me that Buffalo wants to close more schools, one of them being the bilingual school #36, where I went for preschool. While its been my joke for years that I had to learn Spanish as a toddler, or else I couldn’t make any friends, my jest is truer than ever in not just that school, but for most schools on Buffalo’s West side these days. And now it’s closing, forcing even more students into smaller and more crowded class rooms. They’re thinking of condensing #36, 77 and 38 into the building for 38, which I think is insane. That’s a ton of pre-k through 2nd graders, and I feel awful for the parents, students and teachers alike. I don’t have too many memories from my brief stint at good ol’ 36, but I do remember vivid bits and pieces of a play we performed, where I was upset at only having a flag to wave while other children were dressed in costume as we sang “it’s a small world (after all).” I remember missing my bus one day, and having my Spanish-speaking teacher wait with me while we got ahold of my parents. Even at Montessori, who pride themselves on being so progressive, the teachers left right after class let out, and if you missed your bus, you had to wait in the office. So I’m upset the small school is closing, and feel bad for the little ones who’ll be stepped on, and also feel bad for the older kids doing the stepping. I know at BAVPA while in high school we’d trip over the miniscule 5th graders, and we wondered if we’d ever been that small. PA coincidentally is moving, to, of all places, the building that was Buffalo Traditional until they closed it, too. I’m a little off-put by this as well—I have so many memories of the 7 years I spent in that building, it’s hard to believe I won’t be able to go to another mediocre performance in the cramped theater with the broken and horribly butt-numbing chairs. A couple years ago Janit-from-another-planet and I went, and it was so horrible we left at intermission. The quality of the performers has decreased, we reasoned—when we were in school there the dancers and actors were still top notch, or at least a lot better. Truth be told the quality has been declining for years, as they lose all the teachers we had and as BPS budgets shrink. I remember hearing one year that Hutch Tech’s jazz band actually beat PA’s in some competition, and sadly I wasn’t even surprised. Of all the teachers I had there, only 4 remain—Mr K, chemist extraordinaire, Ms. Davis, teaching theatre and journalism. Then there are the dance teachers, Mrs Lipa-Ciotta, to whom I’m grateful for the ballet technique she helped instill in me, and Ms. Wexler, the Cowboy Junkie addict who thought I was anorexic because apparently all fat girls are.
My day is almost half-over and I’m still half-asleep. I could caffeinate myself but that would only result in me being exhausted and jittery until 4 a.m. I can’t wait until we’ve both been working long enough to save up a little money, so all our bills are current and we can start saving for Ana to go back to school so we can get the hell out of this one (dead) horse town. In the meantime there are some cultural events I’d like to participate in, but that will also have to wait for paychecks bigger than the rent check needs to be. We got free movie tickets from Diana for Ana’s birthday, so we’re going to go see Brokeback Mountain this weekend, I think. In the meantime I’m bored.
Not that anyone reading this cares, but my health lately has been down the tubes. Besides being exhausted and in a half-asleep daze most of the day, I’ve been having terrible pains I just can’t ignore away. There are the usual culprits, my heels, head and jaw, and any muscles in the vicinity of either seem to be feeling sympathy pains. Since I hurt my back there’s a new pain along my left side, and it hurts whenever I breathe too hard or bend down to pick something up. My left arm has been bothering me as well, a new sharp pain in my elbow and up my forearm. The pains in my fingers and toes are excruciating at times, running from the knuckle in my hand to the first knuckle, on either side of each finger (and toe). They get very swollen and tender, usually with stabbing pains as well. I know it’s not the joints themselves, but the tendons or whatever they are, but good lord do they hurt. And of course I also have shoulder, back, leg, hip and stomach pain. My reproductive organs are broken as well, and since I don’t want to gross anyone out, I’ll keep the details of those problems to myself. Sometimes I feel like I could use a complete body replacement. Unfortunately I can’t even afford obnoxious doctor co-pays right now.
I keep meaning to clear my body from all these “bad” foods and start eating better, drinking more water and exercising a little more. But there’s exhaustion and pain to keep me sitting on my ass and berating myself for it. One of these days, I keep telling myself… and then I start to remember how many years I’ve been saying that for, and the self-debasement starts all over. Call it lack of will power, laziness, whatever.
What I want, more than anything, is an entire week to myself. I want to be in an isolated cabin, out in the middle of nowhere. I want a refrigerator stocked with all sorts of organic fruits and veggies and pure water. I want to wake without the aid of an alarm, at my own pace and time. I want to be able to come and go as I please, and not have to worry about how long I’ve been in “after call work” or if I’m on time coming back from my break. I want to take long walks with Cody, strolling through the trees and absorbing the fresh air through my skin. I want to read an entire book in one sitting. I want to meditate by pouring my heart and soul into a journal while sitting by a lake, Thoreau-style. I want to experience life in more meaningful ways than the daily drudge provides. When people ask me how I’m doing, and I reply “I’m alive,” I want to say it with enthusiasm instead of sorrow.
I think I’ll check my email…
