Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Why It’s A Really Good Thing I Have A Coach

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Lately I’ve been in another one of my having-trouble-sleeping phases. My coach and I have been working on this together, and one of the things she suggested was that I pull out my relaxation/meditation CD’s and listen to them before I go to bed.

So yesterday when I checked in with her she asked if I’d been doing that.

Me: Um no, I haven’t.

My Coach: Hm.

Me: I even got it out and put it in my nightstand drawer, but that’s it.

My Coach: OK well tonight, I want you to ACTUALLY LISTEN TO IT.

That’s why I pay her the big bucks.

Helping To Keep Me Young

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I really enjoy working with high school students, because they help keep me current on many things such as language.

I was recently tutoring one student, and in between Spanish exercises she was telling me stories about her various friends and how they’d “hooked up” with members of the opposite sex.

I had a vague idea of what that term meant when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it covered these days, so I asked my student to clarify it for me.

She said, “Well it doesn’t mean having sex, but it means you do everything up to right before getting ready to have sex. At least that’s what is means if you’re a teenager. I don’t know what it means to old people.”

You Know You’re In Your Thirties When…

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…you can no longer understand the messages conveyed by the music videos that fueled your teenage years.

I’m sure that when we watched the video for “Shout” by Tears For Fears back in the 80’s, we understood, on a deep cellular and metaphysical level, the reason for the angst that was consuming the band during the performance of this song.

But now it just leads to conversations like this:

My husband: “I’ve never seen quite that level of teeth before when someone is singing.”

Me: “I know. It’s kind of scary.”

TFF: “Shout, shout, let it all out, these are the things I can do without.”

My husband: “What things? What things?! We’d shout with you if we knew what the hell you were talking about!”

Flotsam and Jetsam

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Have you ever felt so tired that you have actually been drugged with fatigue? That is how I am feeling these days, due to my incredibly rigorous schedule of Helping 2 Clients A Week With Spanish. Apparently wrangling those reflexive verbs will really take it out of you.

So lately my mind has just been all over the place, and occasionally I just go in and skim off whatever random thoughts have floated to the top.

Like the fact that my 3rd grade teacher just retired at the end of this school year. That frightens me a little, because if the people who taught me and my generation are now retiring, that means that we are now going to be The People In Charge Of Things. And I don’t really know if that’s a good idea, because I know us. And we are kind of scary.

We are the people who spent our entire 3rd grade year playing with “The Empire Strikes Back” action figures inside our desk in lieu of doing any actual schoolwork. We are the people who may have graduated medical school, but who will always be remembered in my mind for carrying around a tin of snuff in their back pocket and spending all of 9th grade English with their feet hooked around my chair while jerking me around and making suggestive sexual noises. We are the people who are about to apply to law school and be charged with upholding the laws of our land, despite having spent most of college breaking said laws through excessive underage drinking and operating various watercraft while highly intoxicated.

I was 13 when that Whitney Houston song came out that proclaimed that “children are our future”, so I kind of feel like we’re the future about which she was speaking. And apparently the future is now. You just might not want to look at it all that close up.

I’m just saying.

Coming Up For Air

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I know I haven’t had a lot to say here lately, and that is due to the fact that I have been deep in the bowels of Being A Homeowner.

It all started so innocently back at the beginning of May when my husband uttered those four little words: “We’ve got wood rot.”

So that meant that I performed all my tutoring sessions for the rest of that month to the mellifluous background soundtrack melody of huge pieces of wood being ripped off the side of the house.

Because you know that the repairs did not stop with just the affected section. Oh no. Because that section was right next to the porch, a porch that of course became sadly shabby and run-down looking when compared to the brand spankin’, freshly painted new side of the house. So naturally we had to rip out the entire porch railing and prepare to “redo the deck”, a portentous sounding project if I ever heard one.

Apparently I then spent a lot of time beseeching the universe for Ways I Can Get Out Of Having To Do This Please!, because one day when I came home from working out, there, in my driveway, was Dave.

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The Best Thing I Heard This Weekend

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

This past weekend I went up to North Carolina to visit my family. I spent a night with my brother and sister-in-law who just got married last summer and are settling into their own domestic routine.

They talked about how they don’t really get out so much anymore, now that they’re married, and I said that the same thing had happened to me and my husband too. Then my sister-in-law said to my brother, “Ooh, tell Jenny what you got last weekend.”

“Oh yeah!” said my brother, brightening.

I looked at my brother expectantly, excited to hear what had gotten the two of them so excited.

“I got a new pair of nasal hair trimmers” my brother exclaimed. “It was the best Saturday night ever!”

Government By The People

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Tonight in the car, on the way home from voting.

Me (to my husband): “What is eminent domain?”

My husband (so stunned that he physically recoils): “Did you take Civics?”

Me: “Ye-es.”

My husband (in a tone that clearly says, I cannot believe I let you sleep in my bed every night): “Do you watch the news?”

Me: “No. Could you please just answer my question without trying to make me feel bad?”

My husband: “Um, no, apparently not.”

Chain Reaction

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Have you ever had one of those days where you have clearly mapped out everything you need to do that day, but Thing #2 depends on Thing #1, and Thing #3 depends on Thing #2, and everything is woven together in an interlocking chain of Stuff That Is Not Getting Done because you can not, for the life of you, figure out how to complete Thing #1? Well the other day was like that for me.

Normally this is entirely my fault, since Thing #1 is usually something like, “Put on clothes.” (Dammit, you mean there’s no naked grocery shopping today? Well, forget it. There’s no point in even showing up for this day then!) But this day was a bit trickier, because Thing #1 was, “Make The Vacuum Cleaner Not Smell Like Poo”. [Read more…] about Chain Reaction

Beauty or the Crone?

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I had an interesting experience the other day, and I can’t decide whether it makes me feel old or young.

Last week I had to go to the dentist for my 6-month cleaning and checkup. There are very few things that cause me greater discomfort than getting my teeth cleaned. (Pretty much all that’s coming to mind right now is anything involving snakes and creatures that sting.) You know that feeling you can get if someone scrapes their fingernails down a chalkboard? That is exactly how I feel when they are scraping my teeth. (Interestingly enough, I also get that feeling whenever I have to touch any kind of fabric with a nap-velvet, silk, suede, velour, etc. But I digress).

So as I was sitting in the chair, enduring, my dental hygienist said, “Today is my anniversary.” Always ready to celebrate longevity in marriage, and always ready to put off more teeth scraping, I was about to ask her how long she’d been married when she said, “Thirty-three years ago today I came to work here.”

Now, leaving aside for the moment the question of why anyone would want to choose a career that involved dealing with people’s insides, much less stay in that same career for thirty-three years, here was my quandary: next month I will be turning thirty-three years old, and so,  as I told her, “You came to work here the same year that I was born.” So, should this fact make me feel really old, or really young?

It certainly made her feel old, and while that wasn’t my intention, it was a nice role reversal from the conversations I usually have with my new tutoring clients.

Me: “So, what year were you born?”
Tutoring Client: “1990.” (and sometimes even later than that).
Me: “Hm. That’s the year I graduated from high school.”
Me: “Wow, I’m old.”
Tutoring Client: (silently, to themselves) Wow! You’re old!

And what I want to know is, just how did this happen?! I became an adult in the 1990’s, and the ’90’s were on the leading edge of everything. We were the ones with advanced technology. We were the ones with advanced degrees. We were the ones who elected the president who would take us into the 21st century. We were on the cusp of everything.

And now the cusp has passed me by, and it is time for my 15-year high school reunion.

So now as I sit in the suburbs, writing the check to pay the mortgage, listening to the music of the 80’s and 90’s being referred to as “oldies” or “classics”, watching shows like “Veronica Mars” satirize every single aspect of my high school experience, and seeing my tutoring students show up in their flip-flops, and their pants with the waistband down at their knees, and their backwards-turned tennis visors, and their attitude of complete self-assured coolness, I hold onto this hope: one day, someone will be laughing at them, too. Possibly even today, if I have anything to say about it.