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Last login: 3 hours agoFindtheriver: d'Zhuoy is a 41 year old woman from Ex-Urbs, New York, USA.; Likes 948 pages, 44 videos, 88 photos • 122 fans • Received 32 reviews; Member since Aug 13, 2006

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Jul 3, 9:55am: Finally got to bed around 4, psychiatrist woke me up at 9. Showered, now going to lunch with friend/former boss -- very nervous about telling her I took the job (see 28 June blog).

In the shower I actually watched myself getting sad, aware of every step I was taking. When I noticed the sadness, I started trying to snap myself out of it -- "You fucking manufactured it! Get a fucking grip!" I think I'll be okay. It's a lot of change for a six-month period, plus money stress and asshole colleagues, and please, please, please, could the media please stop using their mouths as dick-warmers for McCain's tool!

Jul 3, 12:29am: I took the job. I'm leaving teaching and going back to publishing. I emailed the VP today to accept the job. I can't start until the last day of July, since I'll be traveling for three weeks and on jury duty one week (this will be an insane month). Before I leave for the Midwest next week, I'll go to the office and talk to "my staff" (an army of two!), go through details with Human Resources (am I the only one who automatically thinks of Soylent Green when this phrase is mentioned? ... and by the way, I have to fill out a four-page employment application that repeats, in longhand, everything on my CV), assess where all the projects are so I can hit the ground running (or at least not crawling), and sit down with the VP to write a formal hiring letter complete with details of the things he's giving me (my prediction is that he won't be here long, and without stuff in writing for the next VP, all this negotiating will have been academic).

Note to self: Remember not to tell scientist-friend Bill anything before lunch. Apparently, today at the scientists' lunch table -- about 13.1 seconds after getting off the phone with me -- he told everyone I was coming back before I even had a chance to hit 'send' on my email to the VP. That boy has no boundaries.

This will be my first job where I get to use one of those magnetic swipe cards to move through the various parts of the institution. And the parking is off-street and safe! And I'll be surrounded by real live smart people (unless I accidentally stumble into the administration building). I'll have a chair. And a desk that I can sit at. And no one will pee or poop on the other chairs in the office (I make no guarantees, express or implied, about my own chair). And the bathroom will have toilet paper in it, and paper towels, and soap, and the walls won't be painted black to prevent my colleagues from scribbling graffiti. Sounds like I done died and gone to heaven, don't it? ... Well, chalk it up to frenzied denial of the terror of having made an actual decision about my untethered life.

I haven't slept since Monday night. Over the past few weeks -- which included several nights that I didn't even go inside the house, much less the bedroom -- I've learned that the songbirds start up around 4:30 and the crows break in with their sinister cacophony around 4:50. The hummingbirds start coming to the feeder around 5:30. (Also, around 5:30 this morning Partner staggered out to the patio and said, "So what does the winner of the Loudest Bird Song Contest get?")

I'm debating whether to take an Ambien or a Rolling Rock, or both. I've got to get my shit together; this is ridiculous. Our biological trim line is not sleep-optional.

http://assets.236.com/images/photo2/3058/original/original.jpg: Jul 2, 10:54pm 1 review politics, mccain, govt-satire, rightwing-assholes, 08erection
http://assets.236.com/images/photo2/3058/original/original.jpg; McCain Campaign Test Logos Leaked to Press
I vote for #1 ...

Jun 28, 5:24pm: Did something way out of character today: went to a stranger's house, full of other strangers, to talk.

Okay, so it was an Obama house party -- there was one most important thing in common, a purpose that bound us together. To my surprise, there was a guy there who was even more socially inept than I, so again I went out of character and tried to draw him in. Interesting to be so outside my comfort zone, and I suppose it's good to do that more often than I push myself to do.

Anyway, it was at this massive house in one of the richest neighborhoods in the country (think major film stars, fashion moguls, and record company execs) -- an interesting juxtaposition to yesterday's trip to my school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country -- and was filled with people from many walks of life. There was even a black person there -- qu'elle exotique! We watched an Obama video and then talked about strategies for voter registration, phone banking, and engaging Independents and moderate Republicans in civil discourse. It really fired me up to be with so many like-minded people dedicated to the same cause.

I was committed to sitting out this election cycle, staying uninvolved beyond showing up to vote. I worked hard on the Kerry campaign in 2004, and it all evaporated after his paralysis in the face of swiftboating. I woke up the morning after the election, burst into tears, cried all day at work, and felt the veil of another severe depressive episode coming down upon my head. I literally felt the blackness descend on me, and within a year I was hospitalized. So yeah, I didn't want to get involved this year.

But I believe in Obama and I believe in his vision for this country and in his ability to bring that vision to fruition. And as I talked about some of the ways people could become meaningfully involved, I felt something stirring inside me. We'll see what happens. My primary goal right now is to protect the precarious biochemical balance that is my mental health. Maybe I'm not enough of a patriot. I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way; I mean it in a Patrick Henry kind of way.

Jun 28, 11:53am: Went again yesterday to school, since I left my car keys in my room and anyway had to meet with my prospective VP just up the street a ways.

Clomped again up the stairs, again was snubbed. Found out that there's a rumor of me not returning -- only one person who knew of that, so there's no mystery there and no trust left for anyone. Got keys, left for meeting.

VP seemed less distracted as we talked this time for a couple of hours (while Partner roamed the grounds seeing the sights). He got a more reasonable salary approved. I asked for a more authoritative title than Managing Editor -- Associate Director, the former guy's title, seemed appropriate, I said, given that I have ten more years of experience than he had. The remaining issues he said could be worked out between us, except for one that would have to be formalized by Human Resources.

I was still not sold, and he made a gambit of mentioning that the job was posted on the institution's web site; but when he looked to show me, he found it hadn't been posted yet. I countered, "Well, that gives you time to remove required skill set X, because you'll never get any applicants with such a specialized esoteric skill set." Translation: I will walk away from this. A few minutes later he said he really hoped I would take the job.

At the end, I told him I would mull it over during the weekend and email him something in writing on Monday or Tuesday. What I'll do is touch on the points of our discussion and tell him what I would need in writing in a formal letter offering me the job.

It's looking likely that I will take it, despite some misgivings. My first-grade colleagues' high-school-mean-girls-clique behavior and the 40% pay increase from teaching are compelling factors in this. There are three factors that give me pause.

First, the former director who hired me 14 years ago, now a close friend of mine, has been plying me with cautionary tales. I can see that she really doesn't want me to take the job, and I'm concerned that taking it will damage our friendship. In our last email exchange, when it was seeming likely that I would go back to the job, she said I'd go it alone the rest of the way, that she no longer wanted to be involved, and that it wouldn't affect our friendship.

Second, the VP doesn't seem to be a strong administrator. He had some good ideas, but in terms of his status in the institution, I am doubtful of his ability to get things done when they need to be done.

Third, ... well, I forget, but I'll say it when I remember it.

Jun 28, 11:28am: 26 June 08
Man, I knew today was going to be like this. I felt it in the pit of my stomach last night, this knotted-up feeling of despair. Tomorrow I'm going to school, for the first time since I left in December, to pack up my classroom. I saw that my therapist was online last night around 11:30, and I emailed her asking if we could talk. She said she'd call me shortly, and she did, and we talked for about 20 minutes about this terrible uneasiness.

I was told yesterday that my classroom is a mess. I strapped on my Iron Man boot (for an outwardly visible, incomplete but not-untrue excuse for my medical leave, my torn achilles tendon) and had Partner drive me down. The report was true. When I got to my room, about a fourth of my stuff was gone, pilfered, and the rest was strewn about as if Vikings had passed through. Partner went to her office for a couple of hours and then came to my classroom to help me clean. "Organize and put away" would be the euphemistic description for what we did. Basically we dumped everything into closets helter skelter and left just as the principal was throwing everyone out of the building.

But the part that I was knotted up about was how my first-grade colleagues would receive me. I had a feeling that they'd snub me, since my calls and text messages from the previous night had gone unanswered, and none of them had signed the sympathy card that was passed around (three months after my mother's death) for all the teachers to sign. Sure enough, when I got there the grade leader, Ms. McN, looked directly at me in the lobby and walked away in the opposite direction without a word. Same with the next one, Ms. J. When I clomped upstairs and passed Ms. P's room, she and the other teacher in there, Ms. R, said nothing.

The job stuff is becoming more and more bizarre. In an exchange of emails, I told him what documents I need to look over before we next meet to tie things up: the approved FY09 budget, the official job descriptions for the staff I am to manage and that for the prospective director, and the institution's most recent finalized seven-year plan. In his response, the VP said that there were no job descriptions for existing staff and no electronic version of the seven-year plan (and-oh-by-the-way, the Press is barely mentioned in it); he did attach a budget, but when I looked at it, it was the FY08 budget with the projected FY09 budget. And, finally, he admitted that there was not going to be a director hired above me, that I would report directly to the VP. So that was his response when I noted that the job description he sent me (three weeks after he said he would) seems to include responsibilities that would typically belong to a marketing person, a business manager, and a director.

Expressing puzzlement, I told him I needed to see the job description for the biz mgr/dir that he proposed to hire; that's when he admitted that there was no such thing because there would be no such hire. And that's when I told him that we need to restart our discussion from square one. He agreed, and so I'm going tomorrow to meet with him after everyone leaves. I am this close (thumb and index held a micrometer apart) to telling him to fuck off.

Jun 23, 7:56am: It seems like a convergence worth noting: Today, my mother’s birthday, I literally awoke to news that George Carlin had died. What I imagined would be an intolerably sad day actually began with a grin about a memory of the improbable crossing of my mother with George Carlin.

In 1972 Carlin put out a comedy album called Class Clown. My mom, seeing the early affinity I had for comedy, bought me the album the following year for my seventh birthday. Long before Tipper Gore even dreamt up the idea of parental warning labels, Class Clown came with just such a warning sticker on the front of the album’s shrinkwrap. Mom thought it was part of the comedy and paid no heed.

I was delighted to have another spoken-word album. I grew up with the complete Little House on the Prairie set of records, and I recall many happy hours spent sitting on the bed listening to the tales of Half-Pint Laura, her sister Mary, and Ma and Pa Ingalls. In the same way I sat and absorbed Class Clown, and soon was able to recite some of the routines by heart.

My favorite one began like this: “There are some words you can say part of the time. Most of the time ‘ass’ is all right on television. You can say, ‘Well, you’ve made a perfect ass of yourself tonight.’ You can use ‘ass’ in a religious sense, if you happen to be the redeemer riding into town on one — perfectly all right.” Carlin then went on, in this routine titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” to enumerate what he called “the seven dirtiest words in the English language.”

Being the precocious snot-nosed brat that I was, I proudly circulated the house repeating the routine. The first time I recited it for Mom, she knit her brow. But still I went on to repeat it around the house, ad infinitum. I'm pretty sure I also regaled my school friends with the routine.

Shortly after my standup comedy career began, I went to listen to my beloved album again and it was gone, vanished, nowhere to be found! Now, I may have been precocious, but it took me years to put two and two together to come up with a pretty good idea of what happened to Class Clown. And that, I also learned, is how my mother came to understand that the warning label was not just part of the comedy.

Anyone who knows me well knows of my liberal use of foul language. And now they know that they have my mother to thank for that.

Paula Fries a Cheesecake: Jun 20, 10:47am 8 reviews bizarre, recipes, wtf, ummm-okay
http://video.stumbleupon.com/?p=5gw52fhp9w; What the hell is this? She needs to be topping this bad boy with some chocolate-covered bacon, just to make sure the plaque loosens completely to block the arteries. I can't even begin to decide whether to thumb it up or down. Jeebus!

Jun 20, 9:41am: Yesterday I went to the post office to mail a package to a friend. On the way there I realized that this is about the time I would be sending a belated package to my mom for her birthday. Belated because I didn't want to spring for the Express or Priority postage. But she always understood.

She, on the other hand, would think nothing of sending packages Express so they'd arrive on the day of the occasion they were intended for. So on my birthday I would get a package with $24 postage on the outside and inside (another tube of) expensive fancy gardener's hand cream and a package of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Partner and I would chuckle about the hand cream -- "Put it with the other eight tubes we haven't got to yet" -- and she would watch me scarf down the cookies without asking for so much as a bite nor accepting when I offered. She knew they were considered a currency more precious than gold in my family.

Mom was famous for her chocolate chip cookies. Even though the recipe was just from the back of the Nestle chocolate bits bag, there was something special she did to them.... When she had a fruit and vegetable stand at the roadside by the main barn, every day there were the cookies and/or homemade fudge. People would come from adjoining counties for Mom's goods, and would wax enthusiastic over the sweets if they were still there or frown if they were sold out. Even though the stand has been defunct for about 30 years now, I still run into people at home who recall the stand and the cookies. (I think I was about 11 when she closed it and went back to college as she approached 50.)

Mom grew most of her own produce. In the early spring my father would use the tractor and a field plow to turn over the soil in her garden, and the planting and nurturing would commence. Mom would be out there at first light, picking the produce for the day, weeding, staking vines, etc. The other kids helped her some, and I hear she paid them. (I wouldn't know, because the six of them were born in an eight-year period and the youngest is nine years older than I.)

Besides the cookies and fudge and delicious tomatoes (I still go into fits of ecstasy at picking a tomato from a vine and eating it like an apple, salting each sun-warmed bite) and other forms of grown deliciousness, Mom sold flowers from her cutting beds. She was more of a gardener than she ever was a farmer or businessperson. Long after she left the farm and her cutting beds to seek a life of independence, she wrote a poem about the flowers. Because she admired me as a poet, she asked me to help her revise it, and my perennial response was, "Cool! I'd love to! How about tomorrow?" Because I am a procrastinator, and because Mom was ever so slightly passive-aggressive, it never happened.

When we were planning Mom's memorial service, my sisters told me that her wish was for me to write a poem to read at it. I tried, I really tried, but all I could do was write about my pain and my experience of the illness. I remembered her poem, ferreted it out, and revised it, posthumously. Here it is:

Deadheading
by Mom, revised by d'Zhuoy

I have two rituals in summer days among my flowers.
Mornings I water. As their roots drink,
Their heads nod in the cool air –
A graceful bowing I take as a thank you.

And at eventide, when I walk among them
And I thank them for their modest magnificence –
At eventide, when the day is closing,
Some flowers, too, have finished.

I pinch off those spent blooms
To make way for further growth.
Horticulturists may call this deadheading;
I call it caring.

I had prefaced it with a simple little thing I was finally able to write:

Garden Psalm
by d'Zhuoy

My mother’s flowers, my psalm:

Snapdragon, hollyhock, baby’s breath
Hen-and-chicks, sweetpea, queen-ann’s-lace

Peony, iris, silver dollar
Goldenrod, lamb’s ear, dusty miller

Bachelor’s button, johnny-jump-up
Cheddar pink, dahlia, rose, tulip

Zinnia, marigold, stock, cranesbill
Shasta daisy, yarrow, coral bell

Jun 19, 11:13am: Tuesday I made my pilgrimage into the city again for the psychiatrist. No train fiasco this time. But it is a six-hour round-trip (from my door and back to my door), and I don't know how much more of that I'll be willing to do, with the total price tag for each journey coming to about $250.

I was distracted during the session. I was blank. I had nothing to say. Psychiatrist was puzzled, brow furrowed, concerned. He asked questions to to draw me out, but everything was a dead end. Until this: "Is there some kind of anniversary or event in June?" I shook my head? Pause. "Is your mother's birthday in June?" Yes. Tears. Bingo. I was hoping he hadn't remembered that, because I was perfectly okay with my lack of affect.

On the train ride home I texted my friend M (Mom's surrogate son who became my surrogate brother) about Mom's upcoming birthday. We exchanged a few texts, and he was steadfastly spiritual about it -- light a candle, say a prayer, honor her love, blah blah blah. It was unsatisfying to the tattered soul. I expect it will be better when he and I actually talk, but for the time being I let go of the hand he was offering. I'm sure he hightailed it to his energy healer that night and tried to send out some waves to me. Candy floss -- very sweet but nonetheless insubstantial.

Last night with therapist I was okay with letting my guard down (most of the way -- I didn't tell her that I hope I die on my mother's birthday; maybe I'll have one of Elvis's deep-fried peanutbutter and banana sandwiches, or whatever it was that he ate before he plotzed on the crapper). I cried the whole time I was there and I cried all the way home and I cried until I went to bed (except for a much-needed belly laugh at something on The Daily Show).

One of the things my therapist asked was what I imagined my mother would say to me if she saw me feeling this way. My initial reaction was one of distress that she isn't here anymore to say anything and that she hasn't been present to me since she died. That latter is very painful. It seems to be a common experience for people to feel the presence of a dead loved one, and I wasn't having it.

Eventually, though, I played along and in my head I heard what she always said when she knew I was feeling very sad. I would hear sadness in her voice, and tears, and a longing to be able to take away my sadness, and a frustration that she couldn't. We had a deep connection and empathy for each other's sadness.

I can't stand to write about this anymore right now. I have to distract myself with errands for a little while. Constant intensity isn't good for anyone, I think.

.

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