With my erratic posting, I'd be shocked to find I had any readers! Still, the urge to 'blog' lingers on my fingertips.

I made almost all of Thanksgiving this year, driving to Boulder every day this week to use my parents' kitchen and going to 5 different grocery stores, almost all of them on more than on occasion! Damn the prevalence of specialty stores! I can get canning supplies in our middle of nowhere King Soopers, but nowhere in Boulder sells jars! The same, local eggs are nearly $1 cheaper per dozen here than at the same chain store in Boulder. How does this even happen?
I'm happier every day I manage to avoid driving into that town!

Everything tasted wonderful and everyone left with enough left-overs for plenty of sandwiches today! Still, I've made better meals with much less effort, so I doubt I'll go down this over-the-top road again, at least not alone!

Also, we've added another example of why I'm hesitant to lend my mom my car:

Monday, my mom tore up the front walk and had my sister and me help her lay a new flagstone path/patio. She can't life the heavy rock slabs and buckets of fill dust, so we spent 5 hours moving everything around. On Tuesday I drove my mom to the gravel place and helped her load more rock dust into my car, then lent my mom my car for an appointment and started cooking. She got back about 3, and comes into the house saying she's too tired to finish the patio so why don't borrow her car and leave the dust alone for the night? I say okay, and keep cooking. At 7, Mike comes in and says to me, "why is your car in the middle of the street with the lights on, a door open, and the keys still in it? Are you getting things out?"

Yeah. My mom left my car in the middle of the street, lights on, driver's side passenger door AND trunk door open, and the keys in the ignition. For 4 hours. Her excuse? "I was really letting go of not finishing the patio, I guess I just relaxed too much. Oops."

Unlike all the times my sister has wrecked my car, my mom has no karmic punishment attached. The car was not stolen, it started again just fine, and even if everything had gone as wrong as it could have she has the money to just 'make it right.' She ran over a huge rock in my ancient, ground-hugging Saab and destroyed the radiator? "Oops!" and a new radiator for me. Not that I don't appreciate her taking financial responsibility, but I do wish she'd acknowledge that doing something she knows is going to lead to damage is irresponsible and, well, stupid!

Sister car wrecks were pretty amazing, though. Especially the last time she drove that old Saab:
My sister got arrested for having a bong in her purse when she was 16. The anti-pot laws here are rarely enforced, but it was this cop's first day and he was a bit over-zealous. The judge sent her to alcohol classes as the lowest available punishment, which is ironic since she had chosen not to drink because she felt more in control smoking... Anyhow, right after her 18th birthday she had borrowed my car to go to a choir performance. If you don't know Saabs, their ignition is in the center console and is completely removable, and sometimes you can knock the key out on the older ones if you swing your elbow just right. My sis did not know this, and as she was about to turn onto a main street she apparently knocked the ignition just enough to turn the car off. The ignition was misaligned now, and since she had no idea it came out at all she had no idea she needed to fix it. All she knew was the car wouldn't start and the key wouldn't come out!
A cop driving by on the main road helped her push the car into a parking lot, then ran her license as protocol. Turns out, the paperwork for finishing her alcohol class had never been filed, and there was a warrant out for her arrest now that she'd turned 18! My sister when to jail, and my parents got to argue with the cops all night until someone found her paperwork and allowed them to take her home.

Okay, off to bed. Hope anyone had a lovely Thanksgiving!

More evidence that PETA needs to spend more time in reality

When you've created a flash game to protest a video game about cooking, you're not paying enough attention to the real animal right's issues of our world.

PETA protests Wii Game

Seriously.

My sister comes to Colorado on Wednesday! Yay!!!

HOOORAH!

I am VERY happy about our 44th presidential pick! Voting against Bush in my first election, and having him legitimately win even after all the BS that'd gone down during his first miserable 4 years in office, destroyed my idealism that every vote counts. He won by less than 600 votes in Florida in 2000, and lost by nearly half a million in terms of popular vote, but he still became the president. Now, tell me, how does that work again?

But never mind! No more bitterness needed! I will only be more thrilled by this election if more than 65% of eligible voters actually cast ballots :-) That will be an amazing day for our democracy, when more than 2/3rds of the population participates in selecting our leaders!

But, wait a second... What about Prop. 8 in California?

What about the couple on the right? They've been together for over 20 years, and they were finally going to get legally married this spring. My uncles prove that true love exists and overreaches all prejudices. They have always been an inspiration to me, of what a relationship should be like. The final tally is not yet complete, but it doesn't look like they'll be able to get married after all. Strange, Mike and I have been together a little over 3 years, and people politely nag us all the time about when are we going to get married. It gets old. My uncles have been together nearly as long as my parents have, they are each others' pillars of strength. They own a home together and have dog and cat kids that are spoiled rotten, but people are disgusted at the idea of them being married. I honestly don't get it.
The divorce rate in this country is over 50%. If you want to preserve the sanctity of marriage, focus on your own damn families and keep religion out of our government! Or, limit marriage to committed and loving partnerships, gay and straight alike. If you want to be married, you want to be with that person for the rest of your life, right? What's two years of demonstrating this commitment out of the rest of your lifetimes? Nothing, that's what. So I say, 2 years of demonstrated commitment in order to get married, in order to preserve the sanctity of this tradition.
Or just let everyone who wants to get married, get married.
Whichever.

Anyhow... Hoorah Obama!!!!!!!

Accidentally by my Side, Again

Lately, again, I've been feeling at odds with my past. I've been meeting a bunch of new people- at school and at the horse rescue and in our bowling league- and it's hard to answer simple questions, well, simply.

"The Onion" had a headline about college recently, something along the lines of "How much is too much complaining about how tired you are." This gets me a lot, because everyone's exhausted whether they're getting all their homework done around 2 am, or they're still drinking at 2 and failing most of their classes, or anywhere in between. In genetics recitation, everyone at my table is finishing a degree they started a while ago or getting a second bachelor's. Things like, "I barely got the homework submitted by 11 last night because my daughter's band concert went so long!" or "Work scheduled me during this lab, again." are common excuses. Which makes me wonder how the 19 year olds get away with turning in work late because "it was rush week and we were out celebrating with our sisters" but then again, that's where they are in their lives.

But for me, I'm exhausted because I only got 9 hours of sleep last night. I can't say that! With the bags under my eyes, I can't deny it, either! Ever since the head injury, sleep is the most important part of my life. Without sleep, I'm worthless.

As much as I hate to talk about it (in person- writing is cathartic), my medical history defines a lot of who I am.

This is the first page of the first manuscript I wrote at Naropa. It was a bitch to write. 50 pages?



I do not want to write this down...






Begin:

Broken ribs prevent pained kisses...

Hospital horrors
(the inherent beauty that is Death)
Tired, at night, in the ER
(blackened blood)- inside and out
Pulsating flesh and bone
(broken
ankle
femur
wrist)

Frantic hallway echoes
Nurses and Doctors bounding through blue curtains
Saving others.

Bumpy roads make it hard to poke
Took ten minutes in the ER anyways
Will take thirty minutes on the mountain, anyway.
(but we won’t know this about each other, not for many months)

Pancakes for “age; 17”

Menu for “age; 20”

Then the Beepings return
(frantic)
Blood pressure = Death
(too low)
Attached to me
(attached to him
but only when a new aid
takes his blood pressure and pulse
at the same time)


I am considering putting my name on an 'intent to adopt' list for a new horse at the rescue. I know this is a mistake, but I cannot get myself to fully accept it. We will have the money by the time he is up for adoption, but I can't ask Mike to do this. No one in my life wanted me back with horses again anyways. They do their best to support me, but I can see it in their eyes. Five years is a long time to not know who you are...

We're all still afraid of what could have happened.