The Room - Part 2

The Room - Part 2

Today, after my cat came home from what seems to have been a 3-night adventure in the underside of an old vehicle (probably the very old white van permanently parked outside my apartment) I bathed her and laid down with her to take my weekend nap. (See previous entry called Dizzy.)

After that and after several very successful attempts at sidetracking myself I dove into the boxes that have been haunting The Room since I moved here. (I avoided the incredibly urgent need to go shopping for a St. Francis statue to keep in the house as a sort of thank-you for bringing my cat back home safely.) There are books I haven't seen in a year, art supplies, pieces of art from here and there in my life and notebook binders galore.

But, how can I possibly work on this sort of thing in the quiet? I need music, and not the radio; I have to, I MUST buy songs for my iPod. I received a gift card for iTunes and I have been planning on making an Austinatious playlist ever since. Now I have 12 songs (some of which I already owned) in this playlist, and a nice start to an alternative music playlist as well. (So, I wanted Creep by Radiohead. I love that song so I bought it and played it. I learned that I will have to remember to pay attention to the label "Explicit" when looking at songs. [Again, see in Dizzy where I address issues I have with warning labels.] I played Creep and, WOW! On the radio he sings "You're so very special..."; on the recording he uses a very different adverb. It's almost distracting enough to keep me from enjoying the rest of the song. It certainly gives the whole song a different - more angry and jaded feel over-all.)

But, back to The Room now. I have stacks of books, 2 boxes of art supplies (some of which might not be of any use at this point) and other stacks of things: things to throw away by the door next to the pile of things to donate to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. I'm not sure what amazes me more, the amount of things that can accumulate in my life or the amount of dust that can accumulate since I gave up dusting in here 6 months ago because I couldn't reach anything.

Next step, closets. There are things that I plan to donate or give away. Clean out those spaces and I'll have room to store the art supplies that I plan to keep.

At some point I'll have to go through the books and really get rid of a lot of them. Truly. It's almost embarrassing. The word 'almost' in that last sentence was truly superfluous.

I have to remember only to put into the closets things that I actually plan on using. Not to say I'll use them every day, but if I do use them it's worth keeping them. Otherwise, they gotta go. In a memoir Carol Burnet wrote about her grandmother and the stacks and stacks of magazines that she kept because there were recipes in them that she planned on cutting out. For years those magazines sat around. I'm already 3/4 of the way there simply because I technically own 7 cats (only three of which live with me). I have to keep the image of a hoarding, old cat-woman in my mind to keep me on track.

Now I can see the floor. I can dust the CD's. I call that progress. Not good progress, but progress nonetheless. Now that it's almost midnight I think I'll go to bed.

Good night.

eArnie

March 1, 2012

I don't have anything to say, and I should really be sleeping. So, here's a picture of a rubber chicken singing. (Please note the Redwing Blackbird Valentine in the background.)

I imagine that she's singing a song originally sung by The Carpenters. It goes something like this:

Sing,
Sing a song,
Sing out loud,
Sing out strong...

Thank you and good night.

eArnie

Follow-up to Dizzy

I thought about my last post today, and about my weekend in general. One thing I forgot to mention, that I had completely forgotten about, is how tired it makes me when I miss a dose and then get back on the next day. If it happens to be a weekend I usually end up taking a (long) nap, whether I want to or not. Sometimes I almost don't make it to the bed or sofa in time, the sleepiness hits me so hard and so suddenly. But, nap or no (I didn't get one last Saturday) I end up feeling drained. The entire weekend was kind of a fog for me – I said that more than once on Sunday. Maybe if I had taken a nap on Saturday it would have been better. But, even today I'm a little lethargic.

I don't like it. I need to not miss a dose again.

eArnie

Dizzy

February 25, 2012

I was going to write about how discombobulated I was today, but instead I think I'm going to write about something else, something that been affecting me since all of that started this morning. Please note that I wrote "since all of that started" and not "what caused it all."

I take a medicine daily. It's called Atripla. All medicines come with a list of side effects and one that I see frequently on bottles is that it can cause dizziness. As a matter of fact, I see it so frequently that I had long since stopped paying attention. So, when I first began to take this medicine I didn't think much of that little yellow notice on that bottle. I lived in Elgin at the time and I was about to drive into town. It was a Saturday. I took the pill and waited the required hour to eat. It specified that you have to take it on an empty stomach, so I had to wait, not eating for a while before I was able to take it, and then wait 30 minutes to an hour afterward in order to eat again.

So, medicine taken, time waited, I ate and got ready to go to town. Then it hit me. I don't know if you, Gentle Reader, have ever taken multiple tequila shots and then realized that there is a waiting game with tequila. It's like this: You take a shot, you feel nothing. You begin to feel empowered and you take more shots. Then they start to kick in and you realize that even if you stop taking shots at this point, the rest of what you've already consumed is still going to be kicking in and you're probably in trouble. You might notice this when you stand up and turn to go to the restroom and the room stays in place and then catches up with your line of vision, which has already shifted to a different part of the room. You then realize that you can't walk with very much dignity, so you just do your best. While in the restroom you discover that you're very aware of your face, particularly your upper lip because it's tingling. Later you discover that you can't really feel your upper lip at all any more. Now, depending on how much you consumed before you realized the delayed reaction qualities of tequila you might at this point throw dignity to the wind and stumble helplessly to the bathroom to meet your new best friend, the porcelain toilet. Or, you might decide to make your escape only to witness your vomit beat you to the door of the establishment you're trying to exit. Projectile vomit is rarely considerate enough to actually open the door for you, it just makes it incredibly messy to do so and absolutely impossible to leave without everybody in the room looking at you and possibly laughing, applauding or threatening to call the police, or even all three.

Not that that's ever happened to me.

But, the "dizziness" that the bottle warned me about took me about halfway there. I was absolutely drunk, to the point that my upper lip tingled. I could still feel it (my lip) mostly, but I had to sit down and reconsider my trip to Austin.

As the days went by I tried various approaches to taking this medicine. Taking medicine on an empty stomach is much more easily done first thing in the morning, but clearly taking it when going to bed has benefits when this particular side effect is involved. Then I learned something. I don't know if you were paying attention before, but I wrote something earlier, a clue shall we say?  What I learned is that this dizziness doesn't kick in until I eat. So, taking it at night doesn't help because when I eat breakfast it kicks in then. I suppose that I could really work to make it happen properly by not eating for the required 2 hours (which is difficult enough as it is and only possible in a controlled environment, which doesn't leave room for hanging out with friends) and then taking the medicine and then eating 30 minutes to an hour later so that the dizziness kicks in and gets itself out of the way before I start my next day. I can't even guarantee, though, that it wouldn't kick in again when I ate the next day. I decided that taking it at night wasn't going to work for me. That's too much planning and I don't like to try to plan my life around taking a pill, even if that pill is keeping me alive. Besides, I fail miserably at taking pills every night. I do better first thing in the morning. So, being that it is a Very Important Medicine I felt I'd better do what I knew would work.

So, I stuck it out. I took the pill first thing in the morning and waited until I went to work and then I ate and then I was intoxicated at work, but I wasn't driving. I was just taking a very long time to do something that should have taken me 10 minutes to do.

As I ventured through life I found that this effect lessened. I also found that the medicine had other undesirable side effects, so now I take an antibitch medication along with it, which makes me clench my teeth so I take Advil as well. Before I began taking the antibitch medication I further learned that a side effect of the medication, aside from the dizziness, was that it made me stupid. I forgot things, like to take the medication that started all of it in the first place. This caused me to learn that the effect comes back when I miss a dose or several doses. It's not at full-force, upper-lip-tingling strength, but it does make me sit in my chair and swoon and it even makes me walk like I've had 1/4 of a drink too much. (By the way, nobody that I've talked to – nurses, doctors or pharmacists – has acknowledged that stupidity is a known side effect of Atripla.)

But, a couple of years down the road I think I've got it more under control. I carry a man-purse now, so I can keep back-up medicines with me so that in case I discover that I didn't take it in the morning I can take it at work, or wherever I happen to be. The messenger bag, as I like to call it and as it was sold to me, is so handy in so many ways that I can't even begin here to describe the benefits. But, before I digress completely let me come back around to my first paragraph. I was having a rough morning in a confused, disorganized way. I also noticed when I took my dose today that yesterday's dose was still in the daily pill dispenser, and I know that I didn't take it later in the day yesterday from my emergency stash. So, I realized that today is going to be one of those days. When I was sitting at Starbucks and found that my Nook wasn't in my bag I couldn't blame it on the meds because I hadn't eaten anything yet, so I had to chalk it up to a bad, disorganized morning. Halfway through the coffee the intoxication began to kick in so I headed home and clumsily began writing this instead of outlining the events of the morning, which are probably more humorous, but don't have as much socially redeeming value.

One other thing I've learned that's worth mentioning is that, though I feel intoxicated – I walk and often talk like I'm intoxicated – I don't experience the dropping of inhibitions that accompanies actual, alcohol-induced intoxication. So, while I am a little concerned at work that somebody will see me walk crooked, I don't really have to be concerned that I'll make bad decisions with regards to the maintenance man who I've been planning on doing unwholesome things to for 5 years now.

And now, I'm going to eat lunch and take a nap.

eArnie

Valentine

February 15, 2012


I received a valentine from a friend of mine in Dallas. She's an artist - an illustrator and a sculptor. She works in watercolor, ceramic and bronze. And, now in iPhone. 


Frankly, I consider it an honor that she counts me as one of her friends. If you ever have a chance to see her series of field hands in bronze don't miss it. I would post some pictures, but I'm writing this in a moment of flattered inspiration and I haven't received permission.


I met Glo Coalson through a friend, who shall remain Nameless. This is the valentine that I received from her, via email. She created it on her iPhone, she says.

She called it in her email, "Redwing Blackbird Valentine". I printed it in color and hung it at my desk. It makes me happy to see it. Then, a coworker walked up and said, "Wow, it's a redwing blackbird."    I had no idea it was a real bird. So, another coworker and I googled the term Redwing Blackbird (because apparently we had nothing better to do with our time while at work) and lo and behold there were hundreds of pictures of black birds with red spots on their wings and a yellow strip next to the red. I should have known, though. Glo is an avid birder (I say this on my own; I don't know if she would agree with me or not. From what I can see she's avid.) and an animal lover in general.


I am so touched by my valentine. Thank you!


I love you, Glo.

The Room

February 12, 2012

I’ve been in my current apartment for about a year an a half. It is a two bedroom apartment and one bedroom is almost half filled with boxes that I haven’t done anything with. At first it was a matter of “I’ll get to them soon.” Then it was “I have unpacked what I need and that’s what’s important.” Now it has become a monster that haunts me.

This story has many levels. First of all, I’m not a hoarder, but I am a pack-rat. So, I have stuff. Everybody in America has stuff. It’s what we do. Imagine the stuff they have in Europe. They’ve been there for thousands of years, not just hundreds. Those attics must be full of pieces of furniture that are hundreds of years old, but that they just can’t bring themselves to part with. Crowns from wardrobes long since removed, doors from buffets. Me? I just have boxes of things that are mostly useful, if I would just sit down and use them.

For instance, I could put some things on my walls. I have one picture hung. That’s it. I have many framed pictures, wrapped in newspapers in boxes along with other pieces of art. I will say for myself that I did unpack a lot of ceramic art and put it on shelves. And, my bookcases look nice… two of them anyway. The one in The Room still needs attention. I can’t get to it at the moment, though. I mean, I literally cannot get to it because of the boxes that are stacked in front of it.

So, what’s going on? I just can’t face it. It’s that simple. It’s like mail. A couple of months ago I overcame my phobia of checking the mail. I think that taking small steps is healthy, as long as I keep taking those small steps. Now that I have begun checking the mail, I need to do something with that mail. I remember there was, when I was growing up, a table by our door that had stacks and stacks of old mail. My dad’s truck had mail completely covering the dashboard and the passenger seat and the floorboard. I’m not trying to slander my father, but I do remember those stacks and my fear of them is one of the things that contributed to my fear of checking the mail. Not checking the mail leads to the post office thinking you’ve moved without telling them and they start returning your mail and soon the companies you do business with start asking what’s going on and then you start saying thing like, “I have no idea why the post office would send my mail back to you marked ‘No forwarding address on file’”, which is a lie and lies only compound themselves and soon you begin to look and feel like the true hoarders and alcoholics who lie and make excuses to justify their behavior while hiding bottles of vodka in the toilet cistern and/or unopened boxes of things they’ve ordered online in closets.

I could come out and say it. I’m a mess. There, I just did. The problem is it’s not cute. When a twenty-something thin blond female says that she’s a mess it’s adorable. When a 40-something, balding overweight single man says it, it’s pathetic. That’s just how I feel about it. When I was a twenty-something thin gay man it would have been adorable as well; I just didn’t realize it at the time.

Recently I got a little sick. I think it was allergies – a really bad case of allergies that kept me in bed for two days. This was the Thursday before Christmas and I was supposed to go to San Antonio on Friday to be with my family. On Thursday I didn’t leave work early because I had gone the entire year without taking any sick time and I wasn’t going to blow it 4 working days before the end of the year. That’s not to say that I was the most productive person that day, but I was there. Friday I got up and was getting ready to go to Boerne to pick up my dad and take him to my sister’s house in San Antonio. I was moving slower than usual, but I was moving. Then I had to sit down and rest just a bit before I took off. Somewhere around 10 AM I realized that I wasn’t going to make it, so I called my sister and she sent her husband – who is just the most awesome person alive – to pick up my dad. (The fact that he drove to Boerne to pick my dad up says a lot about how awesome my brother-in-law is.)

The point of this rambling story is that I stayed in bed all afternoon Thursday after work and then all day Friday and it was WONDERFUL. I read Agatha Christie mystery novels and I slept. I got up every once in a while to get water or soup. My cat, Anastasia, laid right beside me the whole time, just purring away to have me in bed so much. We were a happy house. I repeated this on the day after New Year’s Day and I’m not sure that I was even sick. I think I just wanted to stay in bed all day long and that’s just what I did. I went through many mystery novels during that time. (I choose mystery novels at these times because they’re light reading and don’t take a lot of thought. Notice that I didn’t say Kathy Reichs mystery novels.)

All of this is not getting my second bedroom emptied of boxes, though, nor is it getting anything on my walls. I was looking forward to living on my own so that I could arrange things my way and have fun doing it, and so far I haven’t done very much of it at all. Plus, those boxes are truly becoming the fodder of nightmares and bouts of depression. After a while a person will just lay in bed, immobilized by the pressure of it all.

Another trick is to leave the house. Last weekend I was going to work on that room and then suddenly, inexplicably, I had the Very Urgent Need to have a pouch to keep my rosary in. (That rosary is a story in and of itself.) Obviously I can’t put my attention on the project at hand until I’ve taken care to make sure that my prayer beads are in a pouch and not just thrown carelessly into a drawer of my nightstand or a pocket of my messenger bag. Then, somehow, that trip to find a pouch ended up taking all day and then it was time to go to bed and the next day was Sunday and I spent it with friends and then I was back to work and who could possibly address an issue of this magnitude on a work day?

So, now I’ve decided to address my spare bedroom the same way I would address an overwhelming issue at work. People say that it’s not good to take your work home with you, but if I spent my time at home the way I spend it at work I wouldn’t have issues like this. Somehow I’m very efficient, dedicated and thorough at work. It’s home that I don’t want to face. So, I’m facing it as if it were somebody else’s issue and suddenly it’s become an issue that it much less daunting. I don’t want to jinx myself, because I haven’t actually cleaned out the room or opened all of the boxes. But, I did empty one and peak into some of the others and I think that if I just make piles of like things then it will help 500%. (The boxes were packed rather hastily while I was at work by my ex-roommate who was inordinately anxious to have me out of his home.) So, I stopped to breathe. I stopped to write this down. I stopped to have a salted caramel mocha latte at Starbucks. (I actually was dreaming yesterday morning about a caramel coffee beverage before I woke up.) Now, I sit here at Starbucks and I think I’m ready to face the bedroom that has taken on dungeon characteristics in my mind.

Who knows what I could accomplish next?

I think I joined a choir

I think I just joined the choir at church. I’m not certain exactly how it happened, but my meds are making me “dizzy” at the moment, so maybe it will make more sense later. What I remember is this:

I recently went though a retreat call Christ Renews His Parish and I am currently going through formation. I can’t say anything more about it, and I might have already said too much. My point is that I was looking through the list of ministries in my church last night and there are apparently over 70 of them. I went through the ones listed in the bullet points of the main page of the Saint Thomas More website. The one that appealed to me most was St. Vincent de Paul. However, the list of contacts was just a list of names; it gave no indication how a person was actually supposed to contact those people. I didn’t write it off, but I felt the need to do something so I continued to look at the other options. This was Saturday night and I was looking around for a ministry to join because even though I’m going through formation I’m still feeling a little lonely in the parish.

Let me back up just a little bit. I don’t think I’ve introduced myself to anybody who might not know me, so there are probably some things that would be important to know before much of this could make sense. First and foremost; I’m single. That speaks volumes in the way my family interacts with me, and the church as well. (I didn’t write The Church because I don’t mean the entire entity which is The Roman Catholic Church. I’m speaking directly about the church to which I currently belong, and the church before that and the church before that. All of them Roman Catholic and all of them very family-oriented and I don’t have a family except for my cats and I haven’t found the official stance of The Roman Catholic Church regarding cats, or pets in general, though I’m certain that it would be a very charitable one. The Right to Life and all. I mean; I don’t think they would picket a veterinary clinic for fixing animals, even if those animals happened to be pregnant at the moment, but I’m sure that they would require the humane treatment of animals in general and pets especially.) So, the church where I have landed is very, very family-oriented and I feel somewhat more isolated here than I did before. I felt alone at St. Ignatius, Martyr; I felt very alone at Sacred Heart in Elgin, but that was mostly because all of the people who would stop and talk to my roommate – and me when I happened to be with him – didn’t look at me twice when I was by myself. An interesting thing about Saint Thomas More is that they have an organization for adult parishioners who are single. However, you have to be 45 years old in order to belong and I haven’t reached that landmark yet. So, instead of waiting around, lonely and wondering why nobody loved me every week when I went to mass I decided to do something, which in my experience produces 23% fewer results than doing nothing. Yes, I wrote the word ‘fewer’. Perhaps it’s because I make bad decision – and I do – or perhaps it’s because I should let Providence have its way, but I’ve discovered that for the most part doing nothing works out better for me than doing something when it comes to personal matters. Professional matters are different, as are charitable ones. As I mentioned earlier, I’m single, and it hasn’t always been that way and it’s better this way than how things were when I did something instead of nothing and made my own decisions about who I would be with. So, when I moved into my present apartment and joined Saint Thomas More I did nothing for a while and then I was invited to attend a CRHP retreat and I did. That was a great experience and if you have the opportunity to attend one I highly recommend it. It’s also another example of my doing nothing and good things happening because this fell in my lap; I didn’t go looking for it.

So now I move on and look for something and it’s getting outside of my comfort zone a little bit. As I said I was up on Saturday evening looking for a ministry in my church (which says a lot in and of itself) and I made a mental note of several that seemed interesting to me. The page for the Music Ministry was subtle about its acceptance of new members. It read something like this. “WE NEED MUSICIAN! OMG WE ALWAYS NEED MUSICIANS. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED COME JOIN US.” Of course, it didn’t have the acronym ‘omg’ because that stands for something that would not be appropriate on a church web site, but you get the idea.

I thought that maybe I should put those years of voice lessons that I paid for in my youth to work. Of course, I need to warm up the vocal chords again, but that’s okay because it’s almost December and I’m certain that the choir is preparing for Midnight Mass and I can join in January. Not so. Yes, the choir has just begun to prepare for Midnight Mass, but I receive an answer to my email this morning (Sunday morning?) that there will be a hymnal and a STM Music Ministry tote bag waiting for me in 2 weeks when the traditional choir meets again for rehearsal on Tuesday evening at 6:30 in the music room which is opposite the main RE office just down from the Family Center and Gift shop in the building south of the

Church. I’m not saying that they are desperate because the choir makes beautiful music and obviously they have their stuff together. But, he didn’t seem to be taking any taking any chances when it comes to my joining – the date, time and location were crystal clear.

So, now I’m going to go warm up these vocal cords and stretch my range out like it used to be. That will take time; weeks. I won’t be there by Christmas, but I’ll do my best. I feel better already. Fortunately, I’m sitting at a wooden table so I was able to knock on wood because I shouldn’t really make any pronouncements about this new experience until it has actually begun.