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Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: family

On Visiting

08 Sunday Dec 2019

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adventures, bus, family, friends, life, people, travel

My choice of title has a bit of personal irony about it. (The Alanis Morrisette kind, not the Greek drama kind. Just chill out, people.) You see, “Visiting” is the term used in my Cats and Mages books for magickal teleportation: No muss, no fuss.

Instead, I’ve been visiting the human way: by bus. There’s a reason bus travel is a fraction of the price of other methods; they are small packages of Purgatory. I am old school and if I had my druthers and a whole pile of money, I would take the train—smoother travel, more leg room, and civilized restrooms.

Planes are buses with wings and interrogation from Homeland; their only real benefit is that they get you there a lot faster, so if you abstain from caffeine, you won’t have to pee between, say, New York and Chicago. (Although their toilets don’t have a disconcerting rush of air on your ying-yang while you’re trying—and in my case, usually failing—to relax your traumatized and nervous equipment enough to do the job. In the interest of fulfilling the Interwebs’ true purpose of providing too much information, I will share that I can only pee on a bus if I am close to severe physical pain.)

And then with any travel, really, there’s the schleppage. Because I replaced my laptop with a tablet, and can’t negotiate its wee keyboard, I travel with an additional fullsize keyboard and trackball, which makes for a bulky backpack which is also stuffed with all the things I falsely think I’ll get to on the trip, or forgot until the last minute. I also have a CPAP machine, which, being a prima donna, has its own small case that needs to be stowed in the overhead and thus possibly forgotten.

But I digress. This essay is on visiting, not traveling per se, so we need to talk about the reason for the purgatorial urine retention, which is to see important people in my life. I love these folks a whole lot, which is why I’ve done an unprecedented amount of busing this holiday season.

First up was my trip to my sister and brother-in-law in New Jersey, which was a lot of fun once I got there. I returned home with loot from their fantastic thrift store and a quarter of a metric sheepton of silk scraps. (I’ve always wanted to make a classic crazy quilt, and the Junior Sister scored big on the going-out-of-business sale of a fancy lingerie maker.) And then there was the ride home, which is when the bus broke down halfway between Hartford and Boston. At night. It had lost power, which meant no heat and no phone charging. Our luggage was lined up on the side of the road in the dark while we awaited rescue. Sigh.

Second is my current expedition to New Hampshire two scant weeks later to see my good friend and writing, shopping, and schmoozing buddy, who abandoned Boston several years ago to my great dismay. So far this trip has also not gone as planned, because my hostess’ back went out right beforehand. (The shopping took place anyway, as she introduced me to Amazon’s lightning deals. Sigh again.)

The thing about visiting is that you are taken out of your usual routine. Each hostess inquired about my essential needs with some anxiety, and I replied that all I really needed was pudding to take my evening meds. But that expanded when I arrived—Sis had run out of distilled water, which I need for my CPAP machine, and the writing buddy hadn’t been able to get to the store because of the back, so she provided scrumptious homemade apple-and-pearsauce instead of pudding.

As it happens, neither household does dairy, so my Morning Beverage routine was disrupted. A well-meaning young plumber had misinstalled my sister’s john when replacing the wax seal, so the potty was catawampous, which the reader may by now guess was disconcerting, and my New Hampshire friend keeps her house at a temperature I find bracing, to say the least. (I have Raynaud’s, so keeping my core temp up seems to help keep my hands functional.)

The result of these small deviations from the paths of my life is that I have ended up feeling like a princess, and not in a good way. It’s as if a magnifying glass has been focused upon me, and the bright light of Difference is scorching the skin of my complacency. If I were honest, there’s a whole slew of things I find “essential,” and going somewhere else just points that up, because very few of them are in fact necessary to my vital continuance. I can get by without my CPAP for a night. I can take my pills with food. I put whipped cream in my tea at one house, and almond milk at the second.

What’s really important is maintaining connection with the people: getting to see their faces, hearing their jokes and stories, commiserating with their pain, and peeking into their own life paths. That’s priceless, and well worth a broken-down bus or two.

Back to the bus fail: I learned three things that night:

First: Don’t overpack. Even though I had my sturdy brother-in-law at one end and my son and faithful Sherpa meeting me at the other, I ended up schlepping all that silk along the roadway myself.

Second: Don’t travel with your sweet little messenger bag that doesn’t zip. I dropped all my stuff trying (and failing) to scramble onto the first Good Samaritan bus that stopped, and lost my pricey prescription reading glasses.

Third: People are awesome. As soon as the other passengers heard about the loss, at least four people leaped off our cold and dark bus into the colder and darker night, looking for my glasses with their cellphone flashlights—and they were found. It utterly transformed the night for me.

And in the end, that last is what visiting is all about. People are awesome, and each treasured friend is worth the adventure.

“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”—Bilbo Baggins

Blizzards, Paychecks, and Sloth

26 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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blizzard, cold, dollhouse, family, ferrets, fun, poverty, reading, snow, writing

My governor has shut down public transit for tomorrow, which means no work for me. Although I do have a vision of making the two mile hike over the Longfellow Bridge, pretending to be Eliza crossing the ice, or Matthew Henson, or maybe one of the Yeti who might be poking their snouts into my 2014 unfinished WriMo, I probably wouldn’t end up being paid anyway. We have a policy of being closed when the Boston public schools are, which is a pain in the sheep because the Boston public schools are wussies. Last month when we had a cold snap they closed down, which at least gave me a *quiet* day here at home, as the Cambridge schools laughed and told the kiddies to pile on another sweater–as well they should.

But tomorrow there’s no arguing from me, because we’re SUPPOSEDLY getting up to 30 inches by Wednesday morning. Even the new boots Sunny gave me this past weekend ain’t gonna cut it. I’m just hoping we’re dug out and back to quasi-normal by Wednesday, because we had two weeks of enforced “vacation” cutting into the budget this month as it is. Grrrr. I had always assumed that this was a way of balancing the department budget, but was told when I complained to the leadership committee that it was “just tradition” because “peers don’t ever take breaks.” Until my as-unwhiny-as-possible email, it apparently hadn’t really sunk in that “peers don’t really like being forced to eat ramen noodles,” and now for 2015 it’ll be only one week break. Yay!

But it is what it is, and with both spawn working, we’re hanging in there, doing much better than we have in the past, and much better than the people I serve, so I can’t really complain. (Much.) So much for blizzard, so much for paychecks, and on to the sloth!

Snow days have an American magic about them, because even the vaunted Protestant Work Ethic has to bow before Nature’s divine tantrum. I suspect we’re really supposed to clean out that closet we’ve been ignoring, but instead everybody treats it like a free Saturday, when we can’t even do errands because everything is closed. (Sort of like Christmas, only the Chinese restaurants may not make it either.) We sleep in, we read trash (which is all I ever read anyway, even though my trash has mellowed for a century or so), we eat whatever we find in our larders. (This depends on when we got to the store the night before and whether or not we staggered home in a daze, clutching only the last battered packet of toilet paper and half a box of butter.)

I myself will be doing at least some work, as I have a couple hours of graphics stuff piled up and I haven’t entirely forgotten the paycheck–and there’s always *shudder* query letters and Real Writing–unless, of course, the power goes out. But I have charged and loaded up my Kindle accordingly, and can always do the next stage of dollhouse repair, until it gets dark at teatime. Then all bets are off, and I don’t know what will happen. We might even play a board game by candlelight–at least until the cold drives us to huddle under our blankets in defeat. I’m almost looking forward to it, because it always makes our usual impoverished prosperity so shiny and valuable by contrast.

All in all, I’m a lucky girl. Even if Amaterasu the ferret did drag the insoles out of my new boots.

Update: Boss called and informed me that Boston schools are closed Wednesday too. Sigh.

That Kind of Face

01 Sunday Sep 2013

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Boston, faces, family, imagination, painting, theatre, vanity

I have that kind of face. The one where people love to startle or appall me because my eyes get huge. I am making capital of it currently for a project. (Well, not literal clinky capital. It’s a freebie.) I have to do three large paintings for a play about bullying; the paintings are supposed to be by a talented eighth-grader, so I’m on my A-game, or feeling that I have to be, being insecure and all. But the first one is of his favorite teacher, and I thought, “Hey, swell! I can do a portrait of my daughter and maybe get some actual life practice in!” But no.

The teacher is explicitly described as having that kind of face. He has apparently not only caught her with her eyes bugging out, but in the middle of being about to laugh. The princess’ eyes do not bug, so it’s self-portrait time. She took an uproarious and unflattering photo of me, and I’ve sketched it in. God, but I have a fat head.

I used to think I was really unattractive because most photos of me do this. It’s hard to have strong self-esteem when you apparently look like your own caricature. Then when I was in my forties I woke up and realized that I was quite pretty; in fact my face matches the Golden Mean triangle thingy (which I am not a fine enough person to find and link for you) pretty well: Math says I’m lovely, so it must be so.

But that’s only when my face is behaving and holding still for a special event, instead of doing its usual squirmy bit. If I am writing fiction (or thinking about doing it) it twitches and wriggles and grimaces as if there were something more wrong with me than there really is. So I generally look like “benignly goofy fat lady who might give you spare change.” (I’m assuming, because beggars seem surprised and disappointed when I sail on past without remunerating them.)

But I don’t get any rewards for being pretty per se, no more than having passed it on to a pretty daughter. No, what people care about is that I make The Face in all of its myriad shades of meaning. And they love it. They burst out grinning and practically jiggle up and down. They’re not laughing at me (much), but just plain old enjoying creation: I have a gift.

I’d rather have emotional privacy; be able to tell a lie if I had to. To be thought of as that stately, attractive beauty who is aging so well. But I’m betting that the world would run smoother if we all just shut up and appreciated what our friends do about us, without wishing for somebody else’s imagined something-or-other.

It has taken me fifty years to realize that the very best thing about my face is that I am looking out of it, and as I do so with some transparency and it’s well-received, I should take that as a fine compliment indeed.

Although perhaps not, as the complimented face is one of the scrunchier squintier ones. Sigh.

And it’s only Tuesday . . .

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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art, bad luck, Boston, family, farmers' markets, food stamps, injustice, lost wallet, poverty, whinging

I’m having a bad week. And it’s only Tuesday.

Yesterday I went to my studio and found that my portfolio was missing. Plain old gone, and I have no idea where several other pieces of art went either. (They’d been held separate, having been in shows.) Nobody as much as mentioned the $90 check I’m owed for a piece that sold (for a hundred bucks less than my asking price because I caved)–God knows where that is in their machinery over there. All the people who would know what’s going on are on vacation this week.

On my way home, I thought of stopping by the farmer’s market, which has historically been kind enough to not only take food stamps, but to double their value in the little cards or plastic coins they give to pay the vendors. Thought of grabbing a bunch of basil for this fried rice dish my friend had told me about. And whatever else looked good. Farmer’s markets are great for the “What IS that? Hmm, let’s find out” enlargement of the palate.  Although I found having to use food stamps humiliating even before the last election year told me what a waste of oxygen I was, it was worth it to even see what these heirloom tomato things looked like.

So I went up to the place where they take your food stamps and do the conversion thingy, and was flabbergasted. No doubling. (Oh well, whatever.) But no face value. Instead, they were halving. E.g., if I gave them $20 off my Card o’ Shame–they would give me $10 in tokens. There are so many things wrong with this that it would take a really long blog which would end in my fingers hitting random keys to indicate random rage-filled sputtering. What immediately struck me is that this is the sort of food stamp fraud people have been pompous about: I’d be selling food stamps: getting a value from my stamps–and somebody else would be turning a profit: What the sheep were they doing with the extra money?

I was a Nice Lady, and didn’t tear off the guy’s head, move aside his laminated tag saying that he was the SNAP/EBT person, and piss down his neck. I just asked him twice over to make sure that was what it did and went away before I cried from being too tired and having skipped lunch and the injustice of it all.

I went home and wrote not-tantrumy email to the city employee listed on the website, and she called me within five minutes and was horrified and disbelieving. She promised to look into this, and I am interested in what she will find. I also posted this on my Facebook page, which alerted the brimstone-breathing professional lobbyist friend, who really doth hunger and thirst after righteousness. Bwah ha, crooked market people!

And then I found out that for the second time I had been passed over to take a professional training class which I need to retain my employment. (They won’t actually sack me, thank God. It wasn’t my fault–there are only 30-some spaces and over 100 people apply. And it means I won’t have to leave my house every August Wednesday at 6 a.m. to go to Woostah. But still.)

So I curled up and cried so piteously that my daughter gave me her Klondike bar.

Today, I woke up feeling better, and went to work, where I had the usual Tuesday case of too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time. No badness there. I stopped off at the Indian store on the way home, to grab rice and incense . . .

. . . and somehow . . .

. . . lost my wallet.

Fortuitously, my bank was on the next corner and shut down my card immediately, leaving me a week of replacing the other stuff at a price of some $50. Which isn’t the nightmare burden it once would have been, but will of course also take a great deal of time.

Needless to say, I’m depressed. I am superstitious enough to wonder if my run of bad luck will continue, which scares me. My life is filled with fragile pets and people and computers.

I lost my wallet this winter, and to my joy and amazement, the guy who found it immediately tracked me down and handed it over. No such luck so far. The finder (enriched by about $4) knows that I’m poor and disabled, and knows where I live and has my business card. But nada. The likelihood here seems that it’s your average creep. I am bummed beyond crying.

Instead, I posted the next-to-last chapter of Damascus, and decided to whinge to you here. Let’s just cross our fingers about tomorrow. My daughter is going out and getting me a wallet with a chain. Maybe it will be pink. Or leather or something. Ya never know.

Alone with My Thoughts

09 Sunday Jun 2013

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family, imaginary friends, imagination, introvert, overcrowded, solitude, sprained ankle, writing

Like I suspect most people who end up writing fiction, I have what one might call (if one pins me to the wall and makes accusing eye contact) imaginary friends. This was long the Secret of My Soul, until I hit 50 and decided that a lot of stuff doesn’t really matter. I mentioned this casually at a lawn party to a delightful woman who then boldfaced shared that she wasn’t alone with her cats either, if one might put it that way. This made my summer. I wasn’t alone anymore.

I don’t make them extra cups of tea (although for a split second in a supermarket back when I was really sick I wondered if the roast were big enough) but it’s handy to have somebody to talk to (to think to?) who has the inside track and can call me on my sheep when said sheep hit the fan. Moreover, when my pals overlap with my fictional characters, I find that I can give them extra depth because I, you know, know them. (This doesn’t always happen. I’m not sure why not.)

But this essay isn’t so much about my imaginary life (the life I imagine), as it is about my imaginary life (the faculty within that births such imaginations). For the first, it centers around “I’d rather not be alone;” for the second, it’s more “Leave me the sheep alone NOW because I can’t think, thank you very much.” That is, I need to be alone with my thoughts.

I share a tiny apartment with two ferrets, two cats, two other adults, and the various toys, books, and art supplies pertaining thereto. The neighbors are . . . um . . . boisterous. Things were at a bearable status quo when my daughter, who describes herself as “surly,” hid in her room all day playing World of Warcraft on Skype with her boyfriend, but then my son moved in. It turns out that he plays World of Warcraft on Skype with his buddies. I play World of Warcraft all by myself, thank you. (OK, I’m in a guild, but all that’s probably another post for another day.)

My son is living in the living room pending our moving to a three-bedroom apartment. I hang out in the living room because I have this sort of ghetto desk out here consisting of an artist’s drawing board propped on a TV tray, because my desk (which takes up I-am-not-kidding half my miniscule bedroom) is covered with jewelry making cruft. My son and I get along very well (he isn’t surly), but when he’s not Skyping with several people at once, he shares his random thoughts with me. He has a lot of random thoughts, because I gave him the genetic gift of ADHD.

Moreover, things at work have conspired to keep me in the center and out of my office, and I’m um, stressed. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and have acquired an inner surliness of my own. My imaginary friends are cowering somewhere beneath my corpus callosum.  I can get a little inner peace by working on my artwork, but my own ADHD yips when it’s more than an hour and a half of that.

However: I have a nasty sprained ankle, gotten while tripping over a bag of old clothes and other detritus that I (in an attack of pre-moving virtue) was actually chucking. And I have found that I’m lucky not to be alone.

Several years ago, I had this idea (which I only wish I could blame on an attack of mania) that fat me could perform high-impact activities like jogging and club-style dancing. I micro-tore my Achilles tendon, which I ignored until I had a lump the size of a prune–and an orthopod who ‘splained that enough was enough, and my butt was going to be on the sheeping couch for six weeks, with crutches to be used to so much as go to the bathroom. I surfed up a terrifying blog on the surgery, with pictures (not linking you because it traumatized me, and I like autopsy shows) and decided to play against character and behave myself.

I lived alone at the time. I watched all of Buffy and all of Angel on Netflix, knit myself a giant knee sock to go under the nasty chafing boot, wrote a lot, and whimpered when I made myself tea, let alone had to go to the grocery store. It sucked.

But this time here I am, with the son making me the tea and the daughter cooking without much fuss. Even the kitten curls up with me at night. And it’s pretty swell. So I’m writing this with Pandora on my headphones cranked up to a suitably isolating level, and I can at least talk to you. Stress happens, and I’m lucky to be having it in a family that loves me and shakes me away from being alone with my thoughts, which all in all is good for me.

Sometimes.

Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

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custody, family, home, homecoming, trauma, waiting

My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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