All I Want Is A Normal Life

God, denial is a funny thing. Ok, not funny ha-ha, but funny fucked-up. Over the past week, I’ve decided that I should go to visit my Grandma again. My mom said she thinks that G’ma is well enough to recognize me, but I was trying to explain to my mom that MY G’ma went away three years ago, and the person there is just kind of G’ma-ish, but not really G’ma to me.

My mom and G’ma had a really strained relationship at times when I was growing up. My mom went and told them (both grandma and grandpa) that they had a “dysfunctional” family, since that was what her therapist told her and, in many ways, I guess her family wasn’t all open with their emotions and stuff when they were growing up… but that’s a lot of family stuff that a lot of families have to deal with. I mean, my family life wasn’t all that good until much later. I think the only reason we have such a good relationship now is because we’ve all been able to put a lot of that crap behind us and move on as friends. All families are fucked up in many ways. I don’t know a single one that isn’t. So there’s really no judgment there.

But Mom and Grandma didn’t really have that great of a relationship always, so now that mom is getting to know grandma’s kinder side — the side I loved her for — she’s getting to really appreciate the best thing about grandma: her heart. And that’s about all there is of Grandma anymore. So all that stuff that was some parent-child dynamic isn’t there and both of them just get to appreciate each other: my mom gets to appreciate grandma without all the weird mis-communications, and my grandma gets to appreciate how amazing, strong, and caring that my mom is. About all this, my mom feels like I’m judging her or like I’m saying she only loves grandma when she’s frail or something. But it’s not like that. It just that I feel like she’s finally getting to know the person I knew.

And even as I type this, I feel myself distancing from the situation, making it a story, not a thing I’m actually going through. I’m going to try to bring it back.

My grandma is not dead. But I’m acting like she is. I’m acting like the shell of the person isn’t important… like a husk or something. But she’s still in there. She’s still her. And even if all that’s left is her heart, that’s the best part about her. I miss her brain, her understanding, her caring, all these things are gone. But the best part is still there, at least according to my mom. And I’m avoiding — yes, I said it: avoiding — going up there, not because it’s not important to me, but because I’m in denial of my feelings about her. My feelings of love, my feelings of loss. I’ve done everything in my power not to think about it. I’ve even taken anti-anxiety medicine that my friends have very kindly given to me. All these things make me question what I should do. They make me calm, but I am not calm. Truly. Really. In my heart.

And I can never understand if I’ve done the “right” thing until it’s too late to do the “right” thing anymore. So I have to take a chance and face the panic of losing the person who has been, for most of my life, my favorite family member.

Since I decided to go up there, I’ve been all moody and needy to David, which has made him kind of pull away, which is really hard. Really fucking hard. Because I need a close friend now, but Teresa, my best friend from years ago who knows me pretty well, but who is just awful at getting back to me. And David is not really helping. He just doesn’t understand why I’m so insecure and constantly needing reassurance that he loves me. And I am not one to get hurt, so I, of course, have to pull away from him. I have to protect myself. I just really want Teresa, since she and I understand each other around stuff like this. But she’s also got her own problems and really needs a friend herself these days.

My mom says G’ma might not last three weeks. I am going to try to go up there on the 23rd.

Side note: Nick, this is why I haven’t written back about this and probably will never be able to pull myself to write back about this. I’m really weird about my emotions around this. This is my journal.

(sorry, I couldn’t resist the gratuitous Beatles reference)

So, here’s how this generally works: I write out some really general 5-year plans, then I struggle through some really far away 3-year plans based on the achievement of the far away 5-year plans, then I write some 1-year plans (again, based on the 5 and 3 year), and then I write some 6-month plans, and finally some 3-month plans, and then I review it all and go, “ok, what did I forget in my Memento-style approach to goal setting?” Usually, it’s quite a lot. In 5 years (2014, to those who want to be surprised by a year that looks very far away, but is actually right around the corner), I am not thinking about how much I’ll owe in taxes, whether I still have this 20 lbs to lose, visiting G’ma before she dies, and stuff like that. I’m thinking in huge generalizations like “have friends,” or “have a good relationship with my family.” But if I worked it from the 3-month out, I wouldn’t ever get to the bigger goals like “Hike the Pacific Crest Trail,” since that requires a lot of foresight that I typically don’t have when thinking of immediate needs…

Which brings me to why I think goals are important. When I’m unhappy with my life, goals give me a hope for the future. Instead of waking up every day and slogging through an endless march of shitty monotony, I know that I’m marching through this shitty monotony to the FABULOUS FUCKING CASTLE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MARSH! OOH a castle! But if I didn’t have that castle, I’d just look at the grime on my shoes and mutter about how no one knows the trouble I’ve seen. And also, I usually start wondering why I’m in this monotony and start taking actions –often quite drastic actions– to break the monotony, which sometimes isn’t the best from a long-term perspective. Likewise, when I’m happy with my life, it’s easy to coast through the years without noticing that time is passing, waking up at some later time wondering why I didn’t hike the Pacific Crest Trail [before I lost both my legs in the Revolution/before I got married and had children/while I was still insane enough to try it]. Don’t get me wrong… everything is great with loving the time you’ve got and being present in the moment and just being happy (in fact, Buddhists would say that this is the absolute in enlightenment, and that wanting all these goals and stuff is the path to unhappiness), but I think I’ll be happier knowing that I accomplished many things and had many experiences at the end of it all. I mean, I had to decide far in advance that I wanted to bike the Lifecycle, otherwise I never would have started training in time. And some day, I will want to accomplish things far greater than the Lifecycle that will require training of years, not just months.

So, that’s goals. Or resolutions. Or whatever.

Last year, I totally phoned it in. Those goals down there aren’t goals. Most of them weren’t even things that I cared very deeply about. Not that I’ll have more attachment to my goals that I’m working on now, but you’ll see the behemoth task of goals when I finally finish them up.

Right now, I’ve done up a 5 year plan and a 1 year plan, but I was distracted and people were talking to me and doing yoga and stuff like that, so I missed some stuff. My dad and I are getting together in a few days for more hours of goal-setting. It’s always great to do the goal-setting with my dad, since he’s so ambitious and taught me how to do them in the first place. Also, he’s wildly proud of me and it’s kind of nice to have someone cheering and who I can cheer for.

And as you’ve probably inferred from the manifesto above, you should really work on your goals, too. I’ve got some handy tips about categories and what type of things to include.

Anyways, off to do yoga!!

It’s coming to that time again… when I take care of the arduous task of working on my New Year’s Resolutions.

Last year’s were as follows:

1. Live in a place where Diva can run free – done
2. Find a hike in the SoCal area with miner’s cabins -OR- go up to Jorstead’s cabin
3. Read Jorstead’s book – no longer available
4. Go camping once per month – started well, but stopped
5. Write in Journal several times per week – started late, but in progress
6. Be in awesome shape for 4 consecutive month
7. Prioritize backpacking!
8. Do yoga for a few months – have started recently
9. Prepare to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in 2010
10. Take the Wilderness Travel Course – tried, but broke my arm. have re-enrolled
11. Be mayor of Gigsville – done
12. Go kayaking
13. Don’t get pneumonia – done!!
14. Don’t get tuberculosis – done

So, I did moderately ok, but still had epic fail on many levels of this. I’ll post my new resolutions here.

My mom just sent me a photo of G’ma. She warned me that she didn’t look very good, but she looks barely like herself. So frail. So small.

You may recall from the earlier post that she isn’t doing that well. You can see a photo from about a year and a half ago in the other post (maybe 2 years).

As long as I’m home sick watching Survivorman (I love Survivorman!), I might as well catch up on the bloggage.

I worked super late last night, despite getting sicker and sicker. Now, I’m all achy and my tonsils are impassable boulders. I’m going to go to sleep after this episode, even though “Twilight” (book, not movie) is getting interesting.

So, last night, when I got off work, I figured I should call my mom, since she called a few days ago. She called to talk about Grandma, who is sick and probably not going to be around much longer. A little bit of background on G’ma: she’s pretty much been my favorite relative, at least until she started getting more confused and my own direct parents started getting more like friends and less like parents. I have had years to get used to her aging. None of this is a surprise. But still, hearing the details of what seems to be kind of a confused depression (loss of interest in thing that used to interest her, general lethargy, refusal to eat) was really hard. I love her and I don’t want her life to be sitting around in a bed waiting to die. And she’s not aware enough to be depressed about the futility of her situation, which is kind of good and kind of bad. For her, it’s good. She’s not aware of this plight, even if she’s kind of deep-level depressed about it. For me, it’s sad. I’m sad on her behalf, and I’m sad because I miss the friend I used to have in G’ma.

My mom and I talked about it for a while, and then I talked with David about it for a long time, since he’s had a lot of experience with death.

And really, the thing is, I don’t know how to deal with this. First, she’s not dead. No matter how not there she is, she’s still with us and some part of her is in her head. She’s still mentally aware enough to be concerned with politeness and kindness, which is something that’s in her most basic make-up. She sometimes remembered me when I visited last time, and the rest of the time, she pretended to. Because, hey, that’s the way she is. Second, it’s not certain how close to dying she is. My mom thinks she’s really close, but the hospice people don’t think she is, and David said that even in this state, people can continue on for years and years. And part of me wants her to stop suffering, but part of me also feels guilty for feeling like she should die. And also, there’s some desperate part of me that wants more than nothing in the world for her to live forever, even if she’s a shell of her old self. But she’s not herself. It’s a little like pet cemetery… it’s just not right to wish for someone to be alive for so long that you’re willing to sacrifice who they are to achieve it.

But basically, I just don’t know how to react. I’m dealing. In many ways, I’ve had to deal with this for years.

And then, at 4:00 in the fucking MORNING, I woke up in my footy pajamas in a pool of URINE. No, I’m not kidding. Diva has been getting older (seems to be a common theme around me) and in the past year or so, she occasionally (really occasionally) has incontinence. If it wasn’t infrequent, I wouldn’t let her sleep with me, obviously. But this morning, I woke up in my fleece footy pajamas (which wick moisture, both conveniently and inconveniently) and I was soaking wet.

So I had to get out and change, take a shower, change the sheets, and check the blankets (it wasn’t actually that much when I turned the light on, but it’s sure enough to make me spring up and shower). And it’s not that easy to get back to sleep at 4:30 in the morning after a freezing shower (my shower heats up verrrry slowly) and a lot of jumping around (if you’ve ever been soaked in urine that isn’t your own, you know the kind of jumping around I’m talking about).

And keep in mind that I’m still super sick and all I want to do is sleep for days.

After about an hour of laying in dry pajamas and fresh sheets, thinking about G’ma and how depressed she must be, I finally got to sleep.

And then at 6:00, Diva woke me up and wanted me to go feed her and let her out to pee… and you better believe that I jumped up to let her out to pee.

Ok, this entry is getting long and probably tedious, but there was one super-awesome cherry on the shitty sundae of that 12 hour span: the hydrogen peroxide gargle. My doctor advised that I mix 50% water and 50% hydrogen peroxide and gargle with it to fight the infection in my tonsils. I hesitantly tried to gargle with the mixture this morning, holding the foul-tasting stuff in my throat for as long as I could, and then spitting it out. But anyone who knows anything about hydrogen peroxide knows what it does when it hits infection: it foams. And when your whole mouth is a cesspool of infection, it foams A LOT. And it doesn’t just foam forward, it foams backward, down your throat, which causes a gag reflex, which causes whatever you ate to fly forward with great velocity, which leaves you puking in your own sink and foaming at the mouth like a sick, rabid animal.

And then I went to work.

And then I realized I was too sick to be at work, so I came home. And now here I am. So, yeah, that’s how my day went.

As y’all know, it’s vegan time in my life. In fact, I was thinking about the calendar and I started being a vegan on the 12th, which means that today is the end of my two weeks of being vegan. Wow. What do you know? I celebrated by buying myself a vegan cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance, which comes highly recommended from many people I know. Not saying that I’m going to be vegan forever or that I won’t sneak an egg noodle now and then, but I’m definitely going to cook vegan meals at home and continue to bring vegan food for lunch.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for life… mine, the turkey’s, everyone’s.

Happy Thanksgiving!

OK! The time has come for the massive weekend explanation. I find it easiest to illustrate with photos, so I’m linking off to my Flickr set.

Yucca Valley
I have no photos from our visit to Deeze and Annette’s. Their house feels so much like home to me that I don’t even really think to take photos there. My mom and I stayed up late talking to them and it was so nice to see my mom genuinely appreciating my friends.

Pioneertown
Similarly, the photos from Pioneertown really were pretty lame. My mom took some pretty good ones, but she doesn’t use Flickr, so it’s a little hard to get the photos in here without some amount of effort. Plus, she doesn’t read this blog (as far as I know), so I don’t want to give her indication of how to find it.

The Walk Near Pioneertown
Mom and I went for a walk through the burned out brush near Pioneertown, CA, outside of Yucca Valley. I took some photos of plants and found two cans from when there were pull tabs that pulled off the can! One is a reaaaaly old Coke can and the other is a Coors with a bullet hole in it. I didn’t take photos of those, but they’re sitting in my car in arrested decay.

The Windmills

On our way down to Salton Sea and Slab City, we stopped off at some of the huge windmills that are in the mouth of the Coachella Valley. I’d never seen the windmills up close, so it was quite a thrill. As you may or may not know, Jetfuel, Connie-Lynne, and I all undertook to build windmills for the Burn this past year, but they actually completed theirs (I did not).

Salton Sea
This warrants a large photo:

Mom and I drove off the main road and down to the Salton Sea shore (no, she didn’t sell sea shells by the shore of the Salton Sea). I was amazed (disgusted?) to find that the whole place smelled AWFUL (truly stomach turning) and it was pretty clear why after about 40 seconds of standing there: the entire shore was covered in mounds of dead fish, fish bones, and bird poo. Really, every gross thing you can imagine was all over the place there. I don’t know how to describe how gross it smelled, but it sure was picturesque:

Why are all the fish dead? It’s seasonal and based on agriculture in the area. Nitrates and other fertilizer runoff causes a huge algae bloom in the Salton Sea, resulting in a reduction of oxygen in the water. As the algae consumes all the oxygen, the fish literally suffocate in the water, dying by the thousands. They wash ashore and rot.

There were also a lot of birds hanging out:

Salvation Mountain
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen is Salvation Mountain

Crap. I have to go to work, since my mom needs to use the internet and I need to send a big file.

Also, there was this sunset:

I mean no badness towards my mom or anything, but it’s pretty hard to wake up, converse with my mom, converse on my way to work, then talk with people all day, running from meeting to meeting where I have tons of deliverables and such, and then come home and entertain my mom. She’d say that I don’t have to entertain her, but really, it’s entertaining. Right now, she’s down in Long Beach visiting Sheena, which is kind of a relief, since I get to sit around at home and watch Kung Fu Panda and pretend like it’s a normal night where I have a calm night and go to bed at 9:00.

It turns out that I don’t require the social interaction 24 hours per day. I need quiet time to watch dumb movies and read books on mountaineering.

But these days I don’t get much of that time… so I guess I should appreciate the moments I get it.

A full report of the weekend through photos is coming next.

Also, it’s pouring rain, thank God.

Well, I kind of was, actually. It was completely within my intentions to do so. But then I started looking through all my photos from the weekend and, well, here we are.

Last weekend was so phenomenal. My mom and I went out to the desert (first the high desert, in Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree) and then the low desert (Salton Sea and Slab City). I feel like photos will really tell the story better than any old words I could throw around, but I haven’t finished processing the photos, so the big photodump will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon, when I have the whole afternoon off to just dork around (which, of course, includes writing in the blog). However, because I know that you’re all hanging on the hope that I’ll update this blog with photos (har har), I thought I’d add my favorite self-portrait from the set: me and my tallest and most favorite power source.

My mom is visiting this week and will be here until next Friday, which is awesome. My mom is one of my best friends. I feel really lucky to have been raised by someone so compassionate and cool.

This morning as I was walking Diva, I saw some kids throwing rocks at a dog in a yard. The dog started barking and they ran off, but if they had been there continuing to throw rocks, I would have started throwing rocks at them. And it got me thinking about my mom and how she always raised me not to needlessly maim stuff, to tenderly carry out spiders (in fact, the other night I found I had laid down on a spider in my bed and I felt its little spidery legs all flailing in a panic and after executing several rapid, panic-filled shrieks, I picked up the pillow it was on and helped the poor terrified thing to the door), and to take care of the animals we had as if they were our own children. When I was in kindergarten, our class had a bunch of eggs that hatched in an incubator and my mom valiantly allowed me to bring them home and mature into adolescent chickens in our kitchen. She just put a bunch of paper down and the little chicks ran in chick circles until they started getting their adult feathers… and then they kind of got too big to live in the tiny kitchen, so we had to give them to 4H. We’ve always had cats, or rats, or dogs — sometimes all at the same time.

And so the idea of throwing rocks at a dog would have never occurred to me. I mean, really, who the fuck does that? Where are their parents? Why would humans tease a poor, defenseless animal who lives his life behind a fence? Who says that’s ok? Of that, my opinion is definitely “eye for an eye.” People who throw rocks at dogs should have rocks thrown at them.

But I’ve got to assume that has something to do with how I was raised. I think it’s because my mom and I always had another species living with us, be it feline, rodent, or canine (or once, for a short bird-sitting experience, avian). I’ve always felt a kind of symbiotic relationship with the pets. We’re different but equal (this has driven every boyfriend I’ve ever had completely crazy). Every pet has had its own personality, thoughts, desires, interests, and goals (albeit in a short-sighted kind of way). Diva, my dalmatian, for example, is the kind of dog who would high four* you all the time for how awesome you are. She has all the faith in the world that whatever you’re doing, it’s the best possible thing you could be doing at that moment. “Somehow,” she thinks, “this is all leading to a walk, some food, or some petting.” She’s all fun and games — completely goofball. Layla, our german shepherd on the other hand, was always focused on getting everyone in the same room — keeping the pack together. She was serious a lot of the time, even serious about having a good time scouting ahead on walks or fetching balls… all of this was very focused. And Gray, our little old lady cat, was always very tender and caring, while Yellow, her son, was always super macho. And then there was the completely batshit crazy cat, Spot. Spot would have been institutionalized if he was a human. There was not one single normal brain cell in that cat’s head.

Anyways, it’s late and I’m done reminiscing about my pets of yore. Right now, Diva is all snoozypants waiting for me to stop typing so we can get to some serious log-sawing.

* no dew claw