I depend on me.


Brilliantly illustrated by the band Elbow and the clever bloke at rathergood.com

I had my braces adjusted yestiddy, and the Dr. put a 3 link segment of evil rubber rings on 3 of my lower teeth, and yeowch! It's hurting like a mutha. I will not be sad to see the last of orthodontic pain - it is evil.

So, at last, the thank you letter has been written.

In the week between my grandmother's death and her funeral in early July, I composed a letter of thanks to the staff at the amazing Good Samaritan Medical Center in Arizona. The first draft was long, sentimental, an obvious stab at self-therapy in the wake of a devastating loss. Happily, I am a procrastinator by nature, and had time to go back and heavily self-edit. The letter has been much on my mind these 7 weeks, but I haven't had the heart to print the final draft. A few days before the funeral, I busied myself by going to a fine stationer's and purchasing a new quill, ink, and some fine paper for the task, and still it has been a sword of Damocles hanging heavy in the air above my head. It's rather like flipping through my address book on my cell phone and I can't bring myself to delete her phone number entry. Too painful.

Today, I finally put ink to paper and will send it off at last. This grief is terrible. Bertie understood and loved me unconditionally, and you don't get many of those in this life, and such a blessing if one of them is a grandparent. For posterity, this is the final cut:

"Dear Dr. Kalayah, Dr. Syed, et al,
Recently you and ICU staff at Good Samaritan shepherded my grandmother, Alberta Kent, through her final hours of life. I wish you could have met her in other circumstances, but I want you to know that it was a tremendous comfort to me that you so capably attended her needs at that time. Your direct but gentle presentation of options to our family was, for me, an anodyne after a battery of confusing diagnoses elsewhere. Thank you, finally, for allowing my sister and me to visit her one last time early on the morning we departed Arizona. As I left, I was too overwrought to adequately convey my gratitude. May you be eternally blessed for the work you do. Best wishes, etc..."

The greater North American doglet in her native habitat.

Today is a day of gloriously leaden skies with crackling thunder and flower-hammering rains. Only the arrival of a biting chill in the air could render this day more perfect. Fittingly, I have lolled away the day in a fit of languorous dissipation. I have fiddled with plants, napped, ate at my favorite Indian eatery - Pasand - napped, read a book, napped, read magazines, read my book some more, and now I'm overdue for a spot of napping. Heaven.

A mortgage company asked for a comment from me after a recent transaction, which they have posted on their website front page. I can't believe it. "Thank you so much, you just increased my monthly shoe allowance by $230." Seriously.

Guns don't kill people: flip-flops kill people.

I think I scare the shit out of my husband, and yet he seems mesmerized by me. He loves me so much despite the obvious fact that I possess all the cuddly qualities of a pit viper. I think it's Pandora's box for him - as long as he doesn't understand me, he'll be intrigued. Hiss!

There's a really cool woman from Creek Nation at my orthodonist's office. She's is elegant and clever and someone I'd like to be friends with. However, in the brief bit of time I've been around that office, I have been appalled at the golly gee ignorance of her co-workers. Another (caucasian) tech in the office said her local pub hosts a Gong Show, and that she wants this Native American woman to come and do a rain dance for the show one night, "as a gag." If this white woman is Catholic, would she be offended if someone asked her to come to a smoke-filled booze-joint and re-enact sacraments of Catholic liturgy? It's not that I think the rain dance is a religious act so much as an invocation of tradition and honoring one's lineage, which are wonderfully sacred to this continent's indegenous peoples. The sad thing is I honestly believe this girl thought it was in some way a compliment to invite a Native American to share something of her culture in this talent show. For being the vitriol-spewing potty-mouth that I am, I strive not to offend people with my ignorance - sometimes I just shut up and listen rather than making big statements about things I'm unversed in. I'm sure I'm guilty of staggering ignorance, too, but I really do try. How can people be so thoughtless?

My grandmother died today. Her last hours were spent in the I.C.U. of Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix. I wondered what their staff thought of this shrunken little lady with her daughter and granddaughters huddling about, clinging to the hope she would recover. They couldn't see a woman who was a stellar talent in a more than one hundred year family tradition of folk music, with a voice that could cut through fog. They had no inkling of a woman whose biscuits and gravy are legendary in our family. Mostly, they couldn't have any idea of the boundless love it must have taken for a woman to imbue her every child, grandchild and great-grandchild with a unique bond to her and each with a secret suspicion that they were her very favorite. In her prime, Bertie stood stalwart and strong with the spirit of the most daring generosity - her feelings were so tender, and yet she never withheld aid to the least among us. Like the gift of music and the gift of a natural cook - the alchemy that spins tiny efforts into the Herculean manna of nurturing was a formula Bertie knew well. Rather than being a footnote in this grandchild's life, Bertie was a grace note. May her soul be eternally blessed.

I have a great hanging basket in the back of my house, and Bryan noticed a dove lingering about quite a bit. I have a bird feeder, so it's not so unusual to see lots of sparrows and several doves at any given moment. Yesterday, however, I went by this basket of plants and apparently spooked the dove, who flew away chortling. I looked into the basket and on top of one of the ferny plants was a rough-hewn nest with two perfect white eggs fairly glowing in the late afternoon sun. I'm going to have grandbirdies!

Great quote from Christina Ricci's character in The Opposite of Sex:
"My mother was the sort of mother who always said she was her daughter's best friend. I thought: Great! Not only do I have a shitty mother, my best friend's a loser bitch"

OK: I'll bite. If you think it's mercy to starve another creature to death, whether it's a dog, a horse, a goldfish or a person incapacitated to the point of not producing a taxable income, and yet you oppose the death penalty for confirmed murderers, you are a hypocrite. If you believe in euthanizing people who can't choose AND you support the death penalty--I can respect your consistency. If you're enough of a jerk-off to abandon a critically ill spouse and start another family with someone else, at least have the dignity to relinquish power-of-attorney to your spouse's loved ones who are still devoted to that sadly altered individual. Terri Schiavo was not being kept alive by extraordinary means-like a dialysis machine or something to keep her heart going-and in this case, it was irresponsible to starve her to death, regardless how much she was or was not aware of.
I'm sure you know that Bubonic Plague is spread by fleas. The bacterium which causes bubonic plague--Yersinia pestis--causes the entrance to the infected flea's stomach to swell shut, preventing blood from entering, and the flea can suck blood till the cows come home drained, and never sate their increasingly ravenous hunger. They then jump from host to host hoping to alleviate their suffering, biting everything and making more filthy pathogenic contacts than a toilet seat at Madison Square Garden. Now, if a mere flea with its infinitesimally small brain can be driven mad with hunger--what of the suffering of a human being when starving, even if they are in a vegetative state???
The human brain-- states of consciousness-- is a complex thing, and we are not even remotely close to unraveling its mysteries. Anti-death penalty activists cite the dozens of tragic executions of people later exonerated by DNA evidence, etc., as reason enough to discontinue the practice. Well, conversely, I argue that if there is a chance that a person may have a degree of awareness which we can't be assured of, isn't it better to continue to sustain that person if it may be done so simply as a food and water supply? It is sheer arrogance to say definitively that she can not possibly have any degree of awareness--it's hubris, sheer human folly to state otherwise. The degree of her ability to perceive is unknowable, and to act otherwise speaks volumes of a desire for taking the easy way out and getting rid of a person other people consider to be a nuisance. It's a slippery slope, and we're not wearing the right shoes--we are soleless. Today, it's people in a coma. Tomorrow it may be ALS sufferers or people with Multiple Sclerosis, and then it won't be much of a stretch to justify getting rid of groups of folks. The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson should be mandatory reading for everyone pondering this subject. You may not give a shit about Terri Schiavo, but you may give a damn when it's someone you love who is deemed expendable by society. Ask German Jews, circa 1940.

Being a lifelong Roald Dahl fan, I am ecstatic that Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is being remade, and I saw the new trailer at cinema yesterday, and it looks to be worthy of my rapt anticpation. *Giddy*