Weathering the lesser storms

Confession: One of the things that most sucks about being “relatively newly single” is how bitter I sometimes feel about my friends’ happiness. It’s awful. I am truly, down to my toes happy for my friends who are head over heels in love, buying their new homes, glowing and pregnant with their first or even second or third babies, cooing over their babies, posting pictures of said babies looking precious, etc. etc. Truly, I am. I don’t begrudge them their happiness. Nor do I want them to hide their happiness from me because they’re worried I’ll react like they are rubbing it in, or that I’ll cry (though, if I’m being honest, I might cry about it. And I have.) Their happiness is not spitting in my face. It’s not about me. It just…well… has a tendency to hit me like a sucker punch.

I’m aliiiiiiiive!

I was just having a conversation with a friend the other day about the supposedly profound question of whether authorial intent matters in literature. I said it’s a question that misses the point of literature. If I write something, it means something to me; I get something out of putting my thoughts on paper (or, in this case, online.) I’m not trying to achieve some societal mission by doing this. I’m quite frankly being selfish and writing because it’s semi therapeutic for me. If something I say happens to resonate with you– makes you realize something about yourself, makes you see the world in a way you hadn’t before, whatever– well…then that’s valuable, isn’t it? Even if what you get out of it isn’t what I was trying to convey to you.

I suppose that though I’m mostly being selfish in my writing, I do hope in some distant corner of my brain that you, “dear reader”, will somehow benefit, if even a little bit, from investing the time in reading my words.  If just one person reads this entry and feels better about their own life or choices, or feels like “Hey, I’m not alone in this experience”, then it will have been worth it for me to have bared my soul on the world wide web.

So the story is this: I did it.

A Lesson at Wal-Mart

In general, I avoid shopping at Wal-Mart. Not because I don’t like shopping there– I love being able to buy a CD and a box of cereal and a bike helmet and Christmas lights and a waffle maker (for example) all in one place. I love that it’s always, or almost always, open. I love that I can count on there being one pretty much anywhere I travel in the U.S.  And who doesn’t love low prices?

BUT then I remember: Wal-Mart also treats their workers like crap– paying them just enough that they can’t escape poverty,  that they need food stamps and other public assistance programs just to get by.  They never close, which means someone is always obligated to be there, eventually at the expense of their own health and well-being. Where those someones are parents, this in turn takes it toll on kids, whose parents are working long and crazy hours to pay the bills and don’t necessarily have the time or energy to prepare nutritious meals, help their kids with their homework, meet with teachers, or get involved in the PTA.

Losing Grammy

I’m not sure if there’s really a normal way to handle the knowledge that someone you love is dying. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time—perhaps since April, when my grandmother was rushed to the hospital with stomach pains the doctors assumed indicated appendicitis.  I was livid. “She probably has a kidney infection,” I said to my cousin. “Tell them if they cut her open without knowing for sure it’s appendicitis, we’ll sue their socks off.”  Though they did hold off, the next morning, her pain localized, and they were confident enough that it was appendicitis that they went in.  The surgery went well, my uncle said. Except that the surgeon saw “stuff growing” in her abdominal region that he thought looked like uterine cancer. Oh. God. And so it began.

How to recycle properly

There’s this awesome little thing that you can do, that takes very little effort, and saves resources. Win. It’s called RECYCLING. You may have heard of it. The problem, I’m finding, is that people, even in the reportedly “smart” and “progressive” Washington, DC metro area, do some pretty stupid things when it comes to recycling. Why do I care? Because those stupid things result in “contaminated” recycling bins whose contents are often thrown out– that’s right– EVERYTHING in the bin gets thrown out– because some bozo put something in there that shouldn’t be in there. It’s another case of someone ruining it for everyone.

To avoid being that someone, here are some tips from your not-so-friendly neighborhood recycling girl:

Musings on another life event

I really should stop getting so personal on my wide-open public blog, but I feel the need to reflect on another happening in my twenty-something life.

First, some history.

It was the summer before I started kindergarten when we met for the first time. Like any five year old on a hot day, I was running around my yard in my bathing suit, leaping gleefully through my parents’ garden sprinkler.  The sun was getting dangerously low in the sky– the time of day when my parents’ announcement that it was time to go inside was imminent– when I saw her down the street.  She was too far away for me to see her face, but I could tell that she was about my age and that she was looking at me too. Wondering who I was.

Yay Royal Wedding

I love this. It’s like a real live fairytale wedding. The church bells even sound like the wedding in Cinderella! And like any woman, I have my thoughts about all the outfits and so on and so forth and I feel like writing about them.

Minding my inner child

I have always been one of those people who  delights in all things “inner child.”  I decorated my college dorm room with little plastic Care Bear figurines, got a Barbie VW Beetle complete (with the flower power stickers!) for my 20-somethingth birthday, and gave a friend an Easy-Bake Oven…my Christmas tree ornament is always decked out with happy mementos of Strawberry Shortcake, the Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, and yes, more Care Bears… and I am totally down for watching reruns of David the Gnome, My Little Pony, Captain Planet, Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers, Duck Tales (and pretty much whatever else you can think of)  at more or less any time.  You get the idea.

At the breast care center

So I’ve spent some time at the radiology place that specializes in, well, boobs. They do mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, you know, that kind of stuff. Even though it wasn’t especially “fun” to be there, the whole thing kind of felt hilariously cliché. There I was, sitting in a pink chair in the waiting room, next to a table with a fake boob with a lump in it, a bunch of women’s health magazines, and a poster about a Race for the Cure, watching P.S. I Love You while I waited for them to call me back to see the doctor.

Musings on breast care

So if you read Part 1 of my breast lump saga, you probably remember that Dr. Hot Shot and Dr. New Guy left me with two sheets of paper: one specifying that I needed to make a follow-up appointment for two weeks, and one saying  was allowed to schedule an ultrasound appointment in about three weeks.

So! I took those papers and went back to the scheduling desk, where they asked me which doctor I was told I should see in two weeks.