I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like the time we went to the Bahamas in August of 2006. A hurricane had recently buzzed past the islands and the surf was up — ten and 14 foot swells. We had a beach house, but we couldn’t go swimming, at least not at first. Eventually, the waves grew calm enough for us to swim. My mom kept the kids in the shallows, but Chris and I and my brother went out into the deep.
It was too rough for me. I was still weak from pregnancy, tired from taking care of two toddlers. I had just weaned a few weeks earlier, and, although I didn’t know it, cancer had begun to spread through my body. I couldn’t keep up. I tried to swim in, but I couldn’t, so I asked my brother to help me get to shore, and he did. He and Chris both thought I was faking, or being selfish, or something, but it was my brother who swallowed his annoyance to help me get to a safe place. I was tired, and scared, and I really didn’t want to think about what might have happened. I went inside and took a nap. Read more…
I got the official “We’re through with you” report from the doctor at MD Anderson this past week.
I think it is time to start writing again.
I swore I wasn’t ever going to write about this. I always said it was too personal and too horrible, too unpleasant, and too petty — yet here I am. This isn’t the strongest post on this blog. It’s probably the worst, because my emotions, three years later, are still two raw to let me write as well as I’d like to. About guild drama. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t know who I really am.
Three years ago, almost four, Chris and I left our guild, Doom, the Warcraft guild we had been members of almost since we started the game, We joined the guild just after we got our first mounts, before we found out that what was wrong with me was cancer. Chris and I quit Doom for a lot of reasons, all of them excellent reasons, and if I had it to do over again, I would quit a lot sooner and make a much bigger stink, but even as it was, it was extremely ugly. I cried about it. I hurt a lot of people’s feelings. I’m not sure it ever came to any kind of resolution. I just moved on. What pushed people over the edge after we quit wasn’t that we left the guild. It was that we were honest and forthright about why we quit. Usually in the World of Warcraft, when someone quits a guild, they make the excuse “raid progression” and often times, this is at least partially true. People do play to win. However, in my experience, it’s seldom the whole truth, or even the majority of the truth. Players quit guilds to get away from someone. People who play Warcraft all the time don’t just play to win; they play to find community, because, for whatever reason, their real lives have an aching chasm where friendship and trust ought to be, and so we look for it, and find it, online. We quit Doom specifically because the guild had ceased to offer us the community we were looking for — and I said so. A few months later, we quit the game for the first time, in part to get away from the ugliness that followed us after we left Doom.
I’ve had a cold for a week or so, and it turned ugly, so I haven’t been writing nor posting, nor doing anything except watching Dr Who on Netflix.
1) Dr Who remains adorbz in all of his incarnations.
2) The Thanksgiving Soup did look exactly like Pepto-Bismol.
3) Modern medicine is fantastic. I went to the doctor and got a shot in the ass and now am feeling better.
This year, we will be joining our very good friends for Thanksgiving dinner. It is going to be pot luck, and I am bringing soup.
On the one hand, this gets me out of cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, thereby freeing up the turkey feast for Christmas day. On the other hand, I have to make soup.
I love soup.
I’m good at soup.
We eat a lot of soup.
But the show-off in me has emerged from latency and has taken over my brain. So I’m thinking, what soup is fantastic to look at and splendid to eat?
Vichyssoise.
That potato-and-leek soup named after the kings of France, creamed and served cold. It is a good soup, easy, elegant, and delicious. But it’s predictable. How can I up the ante?
My mom makes hers not with potato but with yuca, a Latin American root vegetable that has a better flavor and less mealy texture than potatoes, and so this afternoon, I made some chicken stock, thawed the bag of frozen yuca that I happened to have in my freezer, called my mom, and then sliced the cold slimy roots into 1/4 inch rounds and put them into the broth to boil.
So far so good.
Hmmmmmmmm, I said to myself.
Then I dug a beet out of the vegetable bin, peeled it, diced it, and plunked it in.
Tomorrow I shall slice the leeks and saute them in a little butter until they are mushy, then process the while thing in batches in the food processor, then run it through the fine mesh sieve. I’ll run out to the grocery store at some point and pick up some heavy cream.
It occurs to me that it’s going to look exactly like Pepto Bismol.
I wrote what I think is a great essay on Halloween for the web site Christmased.com.
We all woke up before dawn this morning. It’s the harbinger of fall, the late sunrise.
“Look outside,” I said to my kids as we ate breakfast (quiche). “The sun just rose.”
When we went outside to see it, the ground was covered with a thick fog, lighting up in the early morning sunlight.
Nicholas said, “It’s like Sugarloaf,” the mountain in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee where our family goes camping. Catherine didn’t say much, but she grinned.
I felt the same way. I remember so many happy foggy mornings: biking to school in the fall. Getting up early to take the SAT (yeah, really). Countless vacations. Ordinary days made memorable by the way the light shone through countless water droplets suspended in the air.
I hope that my children look back on this morning and remember how happy they were.
My kid is now attending public school. It’s a change, but a good one, and one of the things we’re getting used to is participating in all of the institutional stuff that the Powers That Be deem important. Specifically, I’m talking about D.A.R.E. Next week is Drug Free Schools Week. Now, I’m all about drug-free schools. I do question the effectiveness of D.A.R.E but that probably has to do with a distaste for the whole “Just Say No” mentality that I was already mocking in my youth, when Nancy Reagan first introduced that band-aid approach to the greatest public health menace facing our society. And so I’ll let my kid participate, and I’ll talk with her about what addiction is, and what it is not, and anyway, it’ll be fun. I’m always in favor of fun.
The culmination of the week is “Hero Day” in which kids come to school dressed up as their personal hero, a woman or man who best exemplifies the school’s seven habits of highly effective students. So far, so good.
Yesterday, my kid told me that she wanted to dress up as the doctor, my doctor, who discovered the cure for my particular kind of cancer.
So far so great.
We had some discussion about how best to carry off the costume. The radiation oncologist who figured out how to cure breast cancer that has metastasized to the fixed lymph nodes above the collar bone is an African-American man, and he’s pretty average in size. We decided that she would just wear a doctor costume with a name tag that said Dr. George Perkins, Radiation Oncologist — because what’s important about him in terms of his work is just that — his work — so a skinny white girl dressing up as a big black guy shouldn’t even be part of the equation (whew).
There’s a whole lotta good stuff in that story, but the best part of it is that she knows exactly where to place the credit for my survival. She doesn’t talk about it. She doesn’t ask about it. But then it bubbles up.
I swear I’m gonna take a picture of her and send it to my doctor so he knows exactly how much he means to our family. Treating cancer is one of the hardest jobs there is. But people tell me it’s worth it.
I’m kinda proud of my kid right now.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement began, I got a heads-up from reading The Daily What that it was going to happen, so I followed the story, and I’ve been following it ever since.
It’s a hard story to get my head around, because I am not there, although I might start spending more time hanging out downtown with the Occupy Dallas protesters — to see the spectacle, but also to be part of a bigger presence. I want to see whether the reality matches up with what I’ve read.
The movement has done a good job of articulating itself. It’s got a clear message: that unregulated corporate greed has had a devastating impact on millions of Americans. The movement claims to have no leadership, although someone, somewhere is doing a good job of getting a consistent and clear message out there — We Are the Other 99% — and of organizing peaceful protests nationwide. And of staying out of the spotlight, which is harder than you might think.
It looks like a movement of young people, kids in their early 20’s, the mini baby boom who were born in the 1980s, kids whose professional prospects have been stymied by their inability to find a job. Kids who grew up hearing their parents natter on about the glory days, the 60s, when protests against the war in Viet Nam and Jim Crow laws were in vogue.
What do I think? I think they have a point. I think the relationship between money and political influence is too great.
I think Wall Street is dominated by flawed hiring and HR practices which perpetuate a culture of exclusion and exclusivity in which the other 99% are often the subject of derision and cruel banter, with no one to say, “Hey wait, that’s my father, my cousin, my friend you’re talking about.” I think that for far too long too few of the same types of guys have been eating all the cookies.
I think that my favorite long shot Presidential candidate, Buddy Roemer, has been both smart and wise to align himself with the movement — after all, he’s been talking about the unhealthy relationship between corporate America and our government since he came out of the gates.
Am I going to go hang out my freak flag and live in a tent downtown? Absolutely not. I have a family to take care of. My kids need a mom who will listen to them, bathe them, feed them, and kiss them, not be off chanting and banging drums and what not, and I don’t want Chris to come home from work to a dark house with cold pots.
But I will continue to watch, and read, and clutter my facebook feed with re-postings about the protests. I have never before witnessed how a social movement takes hold and transforms, although I have read about it. Now that it’s happening five miles from my house, I’m not going to miss the chance to check it out.
I think this is going to go somewhere.
Dance with the Reaper 