Something Strange is Happening

It's a strange new world.  For years...decades...my sleep has been erratic and most days I function on 4-5 hours of sleep, or less.  I just took it for granted that I just didn't need as much sleep as most people.

Lately, I've been sleeping.  I've been going to sleep when I feel sleepy, rather than forcing myself to stay up and finish my journal entry (which then wakes me up and starts me doing other things on the computer), and I've been sleeping a reasonable number of hours.  The other morning I woke up at 10:45!!!  I couldn't believe it.  I had been awake for a couple of hours during the middle of the night, but added together, I had slept 8 hours.  That was unheard of.

I sometimes laugh when I focus on how much (or little) sleep I had in a night.  Gilbert was a terrible insomniac and obsessed with his inability to sleep.  Whenever I saw him...and sometimes he would call me to check in...the primary topic of conversation was how little sleep he had the night before.  I didn't want to get like that, but it seemed (seems?) like I'm there already.

I read somewhere recently that a normal sleep is sleeping for a few hours, being up for a couple of hours and then going back to sleep. I can't remember who said that but I found it comforting because that's exactly how I sleep--and am becoming more "normal" in my hours of sleep.  

Which is a round-about way of saying I chose to sleep last night instead of writing this entry.  Walt has just come in here complaining that he woke up and didn't get his Funny the World today  I told him to wait a few minutes and it would be up.  This is, after all, the day that the entry is date, though I usually write it the night before.

Yesterday I had my second meeting with Debbie, my new therapist.  I had to confess to her that I had done none of her suggested things concerning meditation exercises because of the confusion of the last few weeks.  I also expected to have started on the anti-depressant she wanted me to take, but my primary care physician said she didn't want to prescribe it until she had seen me, and, since she has been on vacation until this week, I have not seen her yet.

I thought I had an appointment on Monday and got myself all emotionally geared up for the scolding I knew I was in for and dragged myself to Kaiser, only to be told that my appointment was for Tuesday, not Monday, and Tuesday morning our car was being taken in for an oil change.  So I didn't start the anti-depressant and now I have to go through the emotional gear-up all over again on Friday.

But I feel like with the start of the new year, I'm kind of cleaning house and organizing myself.  Working with Debbie I think is going to be very productive.  After I've seen Dr. Akanda, I will be free and clear for another year (whether or not I actually do all the things she wants me to do).

I am also realizing that I am way past the time when I should get my glasses replaced.  I needed a new prescription two years ago and just have never gotten around to doing it...and after struggling to hear a recent show I was reviewing, I know that I have to bite the bullet and get hearing aids.  There is no logical reason why I haven't done any of these things (and it's one of the things I am discussing with Debbie...why I put off doing things that would take care of me)

Also, I have to bite the bullet and call my computer guru and decide what to do about my computer situation.  I just don't want to hear that it is dead and there is no hope of recovering the data stored on the hard drive.  But I've been working with the laptop (which also is in serious need of work) and have realized that things are not quite as bad as I feared.  Yes, I have lost massive amounts of data that I will never get back, but I did a WordPerfect back-up to my external hard drives in 2011, so it's only the data from the last 3 years that is gone.  That in itself is terrible, but it isn't as catastrophic as I originally feared.

So with all this new sleep I'm getting, maybe some of the cobwebs that have been accumulating in my head are starting to be swept away.

When the Well Runs Dry

When I started this journal in March of 2000, I did it for a couple of reasons, mostly inspired by my friend Steve Schalchlin, the fifth person ever to post an on-line journal.  But what I really wanted to do was to see if I could write a daily newspaper column.

I had long admired Erma Bombeck and dreamed of having a column like hers. On the off chance that The Davis Enterprise was ever looking for a writer for a column like that, I wondered if it could be me.

I tried to produce an ~750-850 word column every day...and discovered that I could, though I also found out that it was waaay harder to be Erma Bombeck than it seems on the surface.  I still haven't done that.

Well, eventually they offered me the job of theater critic, a job I have enjoyed for 15 years now, and there came a time when they did want someone to write a journal entry once a week and the job went to Marion Frank, a wonderfully talented writer who approaches my Erma aspirations more often than I do.

Recently she was stuck for something to write about.  It happens to all of us.  You know the deadline is looming and there is just nothing there.  As it happened it was around Christmas time.  While her family traditionally had a big celebration on Christmas eve, this year their children would not be arriving until Christmas day.  It would be the first year she and her husband would be alone on Christmas eve.

Then she got a flyer from Capital Stage in Sacramento, advertising its holiday show, Santaland Diaries (apparently she didn't get her information from my review. Harumph.  But let it pass) and she decided maybe they would have their "Jewish Christmas" ("I'm half Jewish myself," she admits), go to a nice Chinese restaurant for dinner and then see Santaland Dairies.

The truth is, I had two concerns that were prompting me to buy tickets. I was afraid of possible loneliness on Christmas Eve and I needed to produce a column by Jan. 1.

When she bought the tickets only 8 other tickets had been sold and she figured that writing about how a comedian does a one-man show for a handful of people would be an interesting angle.  But by the time the show arrived, about half the house was full so it wasn't going to be interesting to write about the lack of patrons.

She and her husband tried to check out the audience to see the kinds of people who go to the theater on Christmas night, but found them all just ordinary looking.

My husband and I left the theater saying to each other that Christmas Eve out isn’t very different from a normal night out. We weren’t having a unique experience and — worse yet — I didn’t have a column.

But she did.  She wrote a whole column about how she tried to find something to write about...but came up dry.

When I don't have anything to write about, I usually turn to an old meme that I saved years ago.

Tonight, however, I could write about my fellow writer, who was having the same problem I was tonight.

Impulse Purchases

Amazon Prime's free shipping and the site's "one click" button (meaning that in an eyeblink you have set in motion a purchase which by the time you think about it more seriously is already on the conveyer belt and off to the post office) have taken impulse purchases to a whole new level.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  I now routinely order the Duck easy-stick tape that I use for journals and scrapbooks from Amazon.  They come in a 4-roll pack for $12.49, shipped free.  If I were to buy the tape locally, I would make the drive across town to Office Max and find the tape there and while I'm in one of my favorite stores, pick up a few other things and probably walk out with more than $50 worth of things I hadn't intended to buy in the first place.

When we were in Santa Barbara, I borrowed a pen from Joe, which I just loved. I'm a sucker for pens and am always looking for something that feels good in my hand and feels good when I write. I looked it up on Amazon, bought a package of five pens for $9 and ordered them with one-click. They were there when I got home.

I tell myself I save money on gas and other impulse buys this way.  

But occasionally, I make impulse buys just because Amazon is easily available.  The other day, I was in the car and listening to a program of the Best of NPR interviews of 2014 and someone was interviewing a woman named Roz Chast about her new book, "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" which was a book about the last years of her parents' life, when they developed dementia and were in first an assisted living facility and then a nursing home.

Before I got out of the car, I had whipped out my cell phone, connected to Amazon and purchased the book, without even paying attention to the price.  I knew I had to get this book.

The first surprise was learning that it was written in handwriting, and secondly that it relied heavily on cartoons.  I hadn't picked up on the fact that Chast is one of the top New Yorker cartoonists.

But once I adjusted to that, I realized that this was a woman who knows me.  Her situation was a bit different from mine (she was dealing with two parents, at first, who were united in fighting her), but many of the situations we face as our parents age were the same.  In fact, when I listened to her interview, I thought this was a book my children should be reading!

There are whole conversations with her mother that could have been transcribed verbatim from conversations I've had with my mother.

Chast's mother died in 2009, outliving her husband by three years.  Chast's story is a no holds barred look at everything from realizing that she had to start overseeing things through the decisions, the paperwork, the opposition from her parents, then worsening dementia and then the astronomical cost of broken bones, hospitalization, nursing help, and finally death.  It's a subject we don't want to think about, for our parents or for ourselves.

We all have this Pollyanna view of how the end will be.

But the reality may be much different.  In many of the situations Chast discussed, I saw myself every day dealing with my mother.  Today, for example, she called me and I didn't hear the phone so it was 2 hours later when I called back.  By then, of course, she had forgotten why she called, but thought it had something to do with pills I was supposed to bring her.  I told her I brought her pills two days ago and asked her to check on them.  She didn't know where I put them (though they have been in the same place ever since she moved to Atria--she didn't remember having to take pills).  She finally found them and I asked her to read me the letter that was on top of the next closed box.  She didn't understand what I meant but after a long series of descriptions from me, she finally told me that her box still had the T, F, S boxes unopened, which means she has not taken her pills for 3 days.  Fortunately none of those pills are keeping her alive, just keeping her healthier.

But what this means (probably) is that I will start going over there every day now to make sure she has taken her pills.  Not looking forward to that, but if she can't remember from the time she puts the telephone down to when she takes her first step away from it, there's not much choice.  

Yes, there is a level of care at Atria that will have someone stop by and make sure she takes her pills, but it raises her rent significantly and with me living so close, it seems an extravagance we don't need to pay.  For every extra $1,000 she spends in fees at Atria it cuts the time she will be able to afford to stay there if she actually lives to hunnert.

I feel this was a very good impulse purchase.  I literally devoured the book in a day and want to reread it.  I don't know that it has taught me anything (except to be terrified of any physical ailments my mother may develop), but it sure is good to read something by someone who has walked through this valley before.

The Agony and the XXXtasy

In the first year of this journal (nearly 15 years ago, believe it or not), I wrote an entry about buying a bra.  I called it something like "buying a bra is not a spectator sport."

We were visiting out of Davis and I had a "bra emergency."  A strap broke or something like that, and I needed to buy a new bra.  There were four of us who went in search of a new bra for me, three normal sized people and me.  I was taken to a local department store and everyone was going to come in and help me pick out my new bra.

I managed to convince them this was an activity I could do by myself without assistance. Mostly I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of not being able to find something in my size.

I went into the lingerie department and found the bra section.  I knew what to expect.  I was adrift in a sea of boobie binders.  There were plain ones and fancy ones, white ones and all colors of the rainbow.  Some were utilitarian and some more provocative.  I went to the wall where the larger sizes were and chose the largest bra there.  No lacy pink gems for me.  I just wanted something that fit.  

And, as I suspected, the largest bra in the regular department store was way too small.

I reported back to my cohorts that I had been unsuccessful and we found a fat lady store where I did manage to find something that worked.  

Normal sized people can't imagine the difficulties of being a plus-plus size and trying to find clothes that fit. In the days when she still did such things, my mother loved to go shopping and would always try to take me along so she could find something for me to wear, unaware of what a nightmare it was for me.  

First you go to the department where the ugly clothes are, then you pick something, not by how you like it and how cute it is, but by the number on the tag and the hope that maybe it will fit.  

Next you go to the dressing room, where your physical faults are displayed in depressing floor length mirrors.  Then you put on this elephantine thing that you hope is going to fit all right, but it doesn't.  You can't believe you have to go and get yet a larger size.  If you find something that fits, you buy it just because it fits, not because you fell in love with it on the rack.  That's when you check the price and wince at how much you are going to spend on something that you are buying just because it fits, not because you love it.

I must get at least 2 fat lady catalogs a day delivered here and countless "get 'em while they're hot" e-mails every day from the same stores, yet I rarely buy any clothes, except maybe a t-shirt with something on it that I like that I can order from the internet.  Even then, I hold my breath when the package comes, hoping that I've chosen the right size.  Tops are usually OK, but buying anything for my bottom half is terrible, which is why I have a wardrobe of about 3 or 4 things that I wear all the time, all in black so you can't tell if I'm wearing "good" slacks or sweat pants, unless you notice how baggy they are.

Normal sized people don't have these problems and have fun shopping for something cute to wear to a party.  For me, shopping for any clothing is a nightmare and I avoid it at all costs.

If I were rich, I would shop in more expensive stores or have clothes tailored, but since the end result is, like Sarah Palin would describe, like putting lipstick on a pig, I stick to what I think will fit from those catalogs and avoid the unforgiving mirrors in department stores.  And I wear the things that fit, especially pants, until they are threadbare to avoid having to go through the process all over again.

The Kenya 7

Sometimes surprising things happen!

Take Compassion Int'l, for instance.  I figured there was no way I could sponsor more than 10 children, but after I read "Enrique's Journey" and found out about the conditions in Central American countries for kids while at the same time watching ugly Americans attacking buses carrying children trying to find a better life, I decided that while I couldn't do anything big, I could do something small and convinced Walt that we should sponsor a young man in Honduras.

Brayan was 12 when we chose him and will be 13 in a couple of weeks.  Just the age when I would think that the kinds of problems and temptations are starting to get very serious for young kids.

I don't know that we have saved him, but we have helped and I am looking forward to this young boy turning into a young adult who can perhaps work to bring a change for other children his age around him some day.  Just getting a nourishing meal a day will make a big difference in his life.

I see wonderful things that Compassion does all the time, but never quite on the scale that I saw this week.

Some corporation--I don't know which one--decided to sponsor 1,000 children in Kenya.

Of course they were going to provide the financial aid, but couldn't possibly write to that many children, so Compassion put out the call for Correspondence Sponsors.  We are the ones who make the connection with the kids, write to them, encourage them, and make them realize that somebody who has never met them cares about them and believes in them.

I already have 3 kids I sponsor in Kenya (I think one of them is a correspondence kid -- I can't keep them straight; I think of all of them as my kids!)

Anyway, I requested some of the 1,000 and said I would take as many as they needed me to take.  I figured I'd get 3 or so, given the tide of enthusiasm from others for taking on new correspondence kids.

A couple of days later, I got 2 kids, Emilymueni and Mwongela added to my account.  She is 4, the youngest child I have ever been assigned to write to.  He will be 5 at the end of this month.

So many people were posting on Facebook about their new kids, I figured that these were the only two children I would be assigned and I sent off welcoming letters immediately.

To my surprise, today there appeared five more children in my account.  I am calling these kids "The Kenya 7," adding to the three I already had.  This brings my total number of kids, sponsored and correspondence, to 26.  Whew!  I used to set aside an hour to write to all of them every 2 weeks, using Compassion's e-mail tool, where you can write a letter and include up to 3 photos...and then duplicate your letter for another child (or more).

I may have to set aside 2 hours after this!  But I'm glad to have the new additions to my "family" ... and isn't "Brightone" the best name ever?  I wonder how he got that name ... and if he is indeed a bright one!

Old Farts

The nice thing about having a New Year's Eve party for a bunch of old farts is that by 12:10 the last guests are leaving and you can clean up and be in bed before 1 a.m.  That probably doesn't sound appealing to younger folks, but it sure does to me.

For many years we attended a wonderful New Year's Eve party hosted by our friends Helen and Cap.  The house was always full of interesting people, most of the people we knew in Davis.  Because Cap is a musician, playing with a group called the Putah Creek Crawdads (whose oldest member is just slightly younger than my mother), there was always lots of music, everyone sitting around the living room singing familiar old songs.

There was a groaning board of good snacks and, at midnight, a crab bisque to share from the big soup pots which had been simmering on the stove.

About ten years ago, we received an invitation to another party.  This one was smaller, but all the guests had been members of the Davis Comic Opera Company and probably are the people we know best in Davis.  We ate, drank, and played games.  The conversation was always stimulating and my favoritest thing was sitting between Stephen Peithman, one of the smartest guys I know, and movie critic Jim Lane, another one of the smartest guys I know and listening to them talking movies and theater.

I missed Cap and Helen's party, but really, really loved this DCOC party.

 

Two years ago, the DCOC party hostess announced it was getting to be too much work for her and she would not be hosting the party for 2014.  One of the others in the group agreed to host (we did not attend because I was home sick and was asleep before midnight).  This year nobody offered to host the party and so we were free to go to Helen and Cap's party again.

It was like stepping back 10 years.  Most of the same people were there, though fewer in number since age and, in some cases death, had taken their toll.  Those who were there were older looking, more had infirmities or new body parts.  The most sparkly of the group was there with a new boyfriend on her arm, his and her spouses having died several years ago.  

This year the bisque was served in the middle of the party, because more and more people were leaving before midnight in recent years.

But it was still the wonderful celebration of friendship that I remember from past years.  I ended up in a group of 3, each of us telling childbirth stories, this prompted by the recent birth by the 50 year old daughter of good friends of ours.  We talked about how childbirth and breastfeeding practices differ today from "our day," but how the "gimme a pill and make the pain go away" generation less frequently chooses natural childbirth and how that seems a shame to us old timers.

At midnight we stood around the living room  in a huge circle, holding hands, and singing Old Lang Syne, accompanied by Cap on the banjo.

At 12:10, Walt and I were among the last to leave and I'll bet Cap and Helen were asleep before 1 a.m.  What great fun it was to be at that party again.  I missed the DCOC people, but this was really a lovely evening.

Books of 2014

Each year, I go through the list of books I read the previous year.  I keep track of the number of books and the pages I read.  I'll never equal 2012, when I read 78 books, or 24,837 pages.  I had just started working at Logos Used Book Store in 2012 and made it a goal to read a whole book every day I worked...and I did.  But after 2012, I read books I wanted to read and if I didn't finish in a day, I took them home to finish--so fewer, but longer books.  The past two years have been more representative of an average year for me.

In 2013 I read 34 books (14,940 pages) and this year, having finished Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," I read 36 books (11,543 pages).

Of the books I read,

- 8 were "real books" that I read at Logos
- 5 were "real books" that were NOT Logos books
- 13 were Kindle books
- 9 were audio books

Using the classifications I use on my Kindle these are the genres that I read

- 19 were crime drama books and I discovered author Ruth Rendell this year.  I've read several of her books at Logos.
- 8 were "contemporary fiction" (fiction books not considered "classic" by Logos!)
- 7 were non-fiction books
- 2 were travel books
- 1 was a classic

In the "non fiction" category there was great variety, from "Upstairs at the White House" to "Exceptional Depravity."  The former was a tale by J.B. West, the usher at the White House from Truman to the very early Reagan days.  I learned so much about how life at the White House works.

"Exceptional Depravity" was the story of a horrific murder of two people I knew here in Davis, the capture of the sociopathic teen ager who murdered and eviscerated them just to see what it felt like.  He liked it so much he planned to murder someone else with a baseball bat, but was captured first.  The trial portion of the book was very, very detailed.

There were also a couple of biographies there, like "Happy Accidents" by actress Jane Lynch, which was a delight, and "I am Nujood" by Nujod Ali, 10 years old and divorced at the time of the writing of the book.  An eye opener as to the practice of child marriage in middle eastern countries.

"The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" was a weird story of a book thief and the world of theft among book collectors.

"Enrique's Journey" was fiction, but based on fact and it told about the conditions for children in Central American countries who become so desperate they risk unimaginable hardships to try to come to the United States.  I was so moved by that book that we ended up sponsoring a young man in Honduras so that he can have a better life.  We can't do big things, but we can do a little thing.

Armistead Maupin's "Days of Anna Madrigal" was bittersweet, the end of Maupin's decades-long "Tales of the City" saga, wrapping up the stories of all of the characters we have come to know and love since his work first appeared as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"40 Years of Chez Panisse" was an odd book I read for book club.  It was mostly interesting for the fact that I lived in Berkeley when Alice Waters was establishing her restaurant and experienced many of the things of which she was a part.  As a reading book, it's not very interesting -- but a nice coffee table book.

"Gidget" was another book I would never have read if it had not been for book club.  Definitely not what a 70 year old woman is interested in.  It was written by the real Gidget's father, and I wonder what it was like to be him writing about his teen aged daughter and the surfers in Malibu in the 50s-60s.

A surprisingly interesting book was Bill Bryson's "Shakespeare: the World as Stage."  I am not a Shakespeare fan, but love Bryson, and this book was filled with fascinating information and non-information (nobody really knows who Shakespeare was or what he looked like, for example!)

The most looked-forward-to book was "Written in My Own Heart's Blood," Book 7 in the Diana Gabaldon "Outlander" series.  I have come to love those books (and now the STARZ television mini series).  I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but not as much as some of the earlier ones.  Still, I will be eagerly awaiting Book 8 which, if history is any indicator, won't be out for another 2-3 years.