The Comeback Kid

So, this is what Michigan looks like, more or less.  Ice, snow, crummy roads.  All of the glory that winter has to offer.  For anyone new to the party here, I got my ass  proverbially kicked by winter this year when I slipped on some ice and broke my arm.  Or at least I thought I just broke my arm.  Turns out, no, I royally fucked up my arm.  I ripped every muscle and tendon that attaches to my elbow.  I dislocated the joint.  I chipped off a piece of bone.  I basically took my arm and said "What exactly can I do to make you as useless as possible, short of removing you all together?" and then did exactly that.  I ended up in surgery to fix it all, and then I had a week off of work to basically sit around and do nothing.  The thing is, when you sit around and do nothing for hours on end, you start getting the urge to write things, update your blog, let yourself be clever, and then you remember that you only have one hand and typing is a real bitch.  So, instead I just sat around, bored out of my mind.

Now I'm about a month post-surgery and things are starting to get back to normal a little bit.  Not normal enough for my liking, since I still don't have full mobility of my arm, and I probably won't have it for a while since they had to re-anchor all of my stupid muscles and now it's new tissue that has to learn elasticity.  Thanks, muscles.  So I can't do a lot of normal stuff like lifting or holding anything with my left hand that has too much weight.  I can't bend my arm enough to wash my hair with both hands, or fix my shirt when it's all twisted around on my right arm, but I can lift a little more, and my grip is slowly getting better.  Things still hurt, but at least I can notice some small amount of progress.

The thing about this whole busted arm thing is that it's made me see myself, and my life a lot differently.  I've come to appreciate Jason immensely, because when I had to be taken care of he did it without complaint.  Even when it was me waking him up at 3 a.m. to get me more pain meds. I'm not good at letting people look after me or losing my independence.  I hate it, actually, but he did so much to make life easier, and he never made me feel like I was a baby who needed to be taken care of.  I loved him for that.  I'm slowly learning to be dependent on someone else, and while it's a big struggle for me, it's nice to have someone who doesn't make it feel like dependence.  I've also learned that sometimes, even if you're sick or injured and can't do certain things, some people still won't step up and do anything without an engraved invitation, and that was frustrating.

I think the worst part is that for some reason, I can't shake the flashback of everything that happened.  I have dreams about falling and cracking my face on the ice at least once a week.  Even though my arm got the biggest injury, I seem to remember smacking my face on the ice the most vividly and even now if I think about it, my nose starts to hurt where I smashed it.  I start to physically feel panic when I think about having to go in for surgery, even though there are no surgeries on my horizon.  I will spend a day minding my own business and then out of the blue I'll get this image of me falling, and start thinking about how much worse it could have been, and then I get upset by that idea even though I'm really grateful that it wasn't worse.  I don't know why I can't seem to shake the memory of it all, but it's proven harder than I thought it would be.

I have been trying to look for the bright side of things.  It could have been worse, but it wasn't.  It could have been Jason, or my friend Scott, but it wasn't.  I'd honestly rather it be me than someone else, since at least I've been through surgery and all of that before.  The damage is temporary and everyone thinks I'll be back to normal without any problem.  I'm a month out from the surgery date and I'm sitting here, typing with access to both hands, gaining a small amount of mobility back in my elbow, which is awesome.  I was only on pain meds for 4 days total, including the day of the surgery.  I'm able to pretty much shower and dress myself now, and I can do most of the cooking I would normally do, with just a few things that I find myself needing help with.  All in all, I could be in a very different place right now.  That doesn't mean I don't have my moments of frustration where I get upset and think I'll never be able to do certain things by myself again, or where I break down a little and feel like I haven't made enough progress, but when I get my head out of that frustrated space, I have to admit that I've come a long way, even though I have a long way left to go.  I just keep telling myself all of this is temporary, and in a year I'll look back and it'll seem like it never happened.

It's a New Year

It's a new year again.  Those seem to keep rolling around and finding their way to us.  In the past, I've been all "Let's make some resolutions" or something, and I realized that all resolutions do is make me feel like some sort of lame-o when I don't accomplish them.  I also sometimes set unattainable goals for myself, so...there's that.  I don't know what I want or expect in this new year, but I know that if I keep my expectations low, I'm not likely to find myself disappointed.  I feel like I might say this a lot, but the last few years have been rough.  There's been a lot of emotional turmoil in the Berry household.  We've lost connection to something we both dearly loved working on, and in the attempt to try filling that void with something we both thought was equally rewarding, we've come up short.  In fact, we've come up with a lot of nothing.  Last year we saw lasing ripples from our break with the school, and they seem to keep cascading out and touching our lives in some way or another, no matter how hard we have tried to put it all behind us.  Even now, two years later, it still stings.

We've been working with our own theater company, but that is proving difficult due to lack of help, lack of money, and lack of dedication from members.  It's sad, and I don't know how to fix it, but I know that we can't keep the train moving all by ourselves.  That's just the reality of the situation.  But helping hands don't appear, so we're left floating alone.  I hope that improves, but I'm not really so sure it will.

Mostly I look back on 2013 with a lot of sadness.  Friends went through really hard times that I wish I could have helped them with more than I was able.  Family connections in some cases became more strained, more brittle, more prone to cracks.  Even friendships became that way with some people.  Life as a parent to a college freshman started, and I can't help feeling that I've failed over and over in so many ways when it comes to that piece of my life.  I'm sure there are always struggles, but this year I've been faced with a lot of exasperation and a lot of questioning why I talk when no one listens.  It's been hard.  It's easy to want to give up.

I think, overall, 2013 has felt like the year of not enough.  Not enough time.  Not enough help.  Not enough love.  Not enough cooperation.  Not enough kindness.  Not enough honesty.  Not enough forgiveness.  Just...not enough.  And this isn't isolated to myself.  That illness of "not enough" runs rampant through my friends, my family, my peers.  It seems like everyone needed more of something last year, and it kept dancing out of their reach.

For some reason I feel like this year might be a year of change.  I don't know why.  I just feel like after two years of hard times, something has to get better, right?  Maybe the theater company will suddenly get the help it has desperately needed.  Maybe Jason will get a new job.  Maybe friends who are struggling will find their way to an easier path.  Maybe some positives will start cropping up in abundance for people who so desperately need them.  I hope that happens.  I am grateful for all of the positives that did come out of last year, but this year I hope they aren't so hard earned.  I hope that happiness finds its way to the people in my life, and that it spreads through them like wildfire.

It's been a long December and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.....

Frozen

The past few days have left me feeling like I have somehow stopped living in Michigan and started living somewhere akin to Alaska.  That pretty snow covered photo over there to the left?  Yeah, that sucker is a pipe dream, because it has sunshine in it, and we haven't seen much of that in conjunction with this latest snow storm.  All in all, the snow isn't that big a deal.  Sure, it's inconvenient and it makes your commute to work a bit of a pain, and there's that whole "I have to shovel this crap" element to it, but I don't mind snow.  I actually kind of like how pretty it can be.  What I hate is cold.  Blistering, biting, gnawing cold.  The kind of cold that stings as it touches your skin, and frosts your lungs over for having the audacity to attempt to breathe in.  It's the cold that I have a hard time with.  I tend to be on permanent freeze between November and May, where no matter how hard I try, warming up is never quite achieved.  I usually ignore it, since there's no getting around it, but today it's several degrees below zero and the wind is brutal, and I can't help wishing that we could just edge up to 30 degrees again.  At this point, it would be a treat.

So we have snow.  We had snow to usher in the New Year, and I imagine we'll have snow for months to come.  It makes me appreciate Spring a bit more, to be honest.  When we have mild winters, I just begin to take Spring for granted.  Now I think I'll be looking forward to it, and that will be nice.  Just about two more months before we can start having some hope that we'll thaw out of all of this.  Is it just me, or did fall go by very fast this year?

Positively Apathetic

The other day, the incomparable Keely-Rain posted these tweets, which showed up in my Twitter feed as I was scrolling along killing some time at work while waiting for a meeting to start.  What followed was a severely truncated Twitter discussion on the subject, choked off by our 140 character limit.  This is a subject that has hit home for me a few times, primarily because there have been people in my life who seem to think that if you're just positive about enough things, the world will get better.  I find this way of thinking to be detrimental, in the long run.  

This idea, popularized by books like The Secret and media moguls like Oprah, postulates that if you just think positively about the things that you want in life, the universe will give those things to you.  It's really a consumerist and commercialized way of thinking.  If you want a new house, think positively and the universe will find a way to give you one.  The problem with this line of thought is that, while I'm sure that thinking positively does a lot to improve your mood or keep you focused, it doesn't do a whole lot in terms of actually creating forward momentum for any individual.  In fact, the idea that you can just think positively and good things will happen is the most passive way to participate in your own life.  It's a way of feeling like you're actually doing something without actually doing anything.  For someone like myself, who is decidedly not religious, it's sort of akin to praying.  Praying is feeling like you're doing good and enacting change without actually doing anything more than talking to empty space.  I'm sure if you're faith driven, you do feel like there is a god out there listening and responding to your prayers, but for a cynic like me it's just a way of feeling like something good is being done without standing up and taking action.  

Principles taught in books like The Secret allow for the every day man to think he's going to get exactly what he feels he deserves, and moreover, it takes responsibility off of that individual to take action in their own life.  If you don't get the thing you want, it's because you weren't thinking positively enough, or the universe wasn't able to sense that you wanted it.  It wholly removes the ideas of hard work, fiscal responsibility, and education.  These ideas give people to basically be lazy while still believing that they will get what they want.  It appeals to individuals who are content to behave passively in a world that does not reward passivity.  But when you think about the vast majority of people that these ideas are heralded by, with the exception of Oprah, it's people who are always looking for the easy way out of something.  Magic weight loss plans, get rich quick schemes and the like.  Or people who don't vote because no one "represents their ideals" while at the same time those individuals make zero effort to find and promote a candidate who would represent those ideals.  This is a school of thought housed in the minds of those who believe that by simply existing in this world, they have done enough.  Now the world owes them something in return.  Their charitable contributions to the planet are small, if they exist at all, and yet they still feel somehow entitled to a world that rewards them for their inaction.  In the long run, it's a little sad.

Ideas like this are hard for someone like me, who has always been taught to stand their ground and create change if no one else will.  I can't understand these passive ideals that so many embrace.  In truth, it feels like a very American way of thought.  We've passed by the idea that we should work toward a greater good long ago.  Our capitalist mentality has the majority of the nation looking out for #1, and organizations who work to protect the average person are quickly being broken apart.  The word "union", for example, is a dirty word in most companies, and as the unions have dissolved, wages and benefits have also dwindled away.  We no longer care about each other as long as we are taken care of ourselves.  This leaves a lot of room for these self fulfilling ideals to creep into the edges of society and take root.  Think positive and you get what you want.  Don't worry about working hard for it, or being responsible so that you get it.  Just think about it.  It's as if we're all drinking the kool-aid of Harold Hill's "Think System" like a bunch of country yokels from a stage musical instead of being active, responsible members of society.  The willingness to remain passive in your own life is just a concept that I can't get behind.  What the world needs is people who stand up.  People who take action.  People who, above all, work to create the change they want to see in this world.  Positive thinking doesn't get you anywhere in that arena.  I think there's merit in thinking positively that you will succeed in your efforts, but just sitting around thinking that things will be good eventually is never going to be enough.

It's as if no one remembers reading Dr. Seuss as a child.  The Lorax probably said it best when he said "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It's not."

I think what we need is less positive thought, more caring a whole awful lot.

Adventures With An Elderly Dog: The Close

This past Wednesday we said goodbye to Simon.  While I could have posted a more recent picture of him, one that showed him as he was when we said our goodbyes, I prefer to use this one because this is how I like to remember him.  Young, energetic, and waiting for us to throw the goddamn ball.  This is the Simon we all fell in love with, and while we dearly loved him straight through to the end, I don't think anyone would argue that he was an echo of his former self.  At the end, his limbs were weak, his hearing was gone, he was thin, and he was having trouble walking around.  This Simon, captured so perfectly in the photo, is the Simon I want to remember.

Simon isn't the first pet I've lost, but he is the first one I've had to make any sort of end of life decisions about.  Growing up, my family pets were typically dumber than your average rock and had a habit of Darwin Awarding themselves out of existence far before we ever had to make a choice for them.  The exception was my parents ancient cocker spaniel, Lady, who was obscenely old and one day just disappeared.  I assume she wandered off somewhere to die on her own.  We never saw her again, at any rate.  Simon is the first one who lived to a point where we had to decide what was going to happen to him.  Two weeks ago, he ate two socks.  Things were looking pretty grim at that point.  He had stopped eating and drinking (probably because socks are a filling delicacy) and once he passed the socks, he was still uninterested in food for a few days so we thought that was going to be it.  Then he rebounded, started eating and drinking again.  Then we noticed his balance was all off, and he couldn't really stand or walk.  Then he started barking all the time, for unknown reasons.  After 4 days of barking and not walking, we had to make a choice that none of us wanted to make.

As heartbreaking as it is to lose a pet, and believe me, it's akin to losing a family member, it's even more heartbreaking to watch your loved ones lose a pet.  Through this process, I've been more resolved than Jason was.  I knew it was time, and I knew we couldn't keep taking care of him much longer if things continued to get worse.  As it was, we were already diapering him multiple times a day, carrying him up and down stairs, picking him up off the ground when he had to go outside because he couldn't stand anymore, cleaning poo on a daily basis, carrying him across the wood floor because he couldn't keep his balance on it, and a variety of other things.  All I could think was that if he fell and broke a limb, what would we do? How long were we going to be able to continue to look after him and keep him safe and comfortable?  Jason saw it differently.  Jason never gives up on anyone, which is part of what makes me love him so much.  Plus, this is HIS dog.  I wasn't going to push him to make a choice, but offered to take the lead when he felt like it was time.  I knew it was hard enough to say the words to me, let alone to veterinary clinic receptionist.  And at that point, we began the process of saying goodbye.  I held together so that Jason could fall apart if he needed to, and when we got home that afternoon, Simon had been laying in poo for what appeared to be several hours.  Jason scooped him up, took him upstairs and carefully bathed him as I scrubbed the floor.  I went upstairs to find Simon resting on our bathroom counter top, lying on towels, being carefully blow dried.  Jason just kept standing there, brushing and blow drying, and then brushing again, pampering the dog more than we would have dared as of late out of fear of hurting him.  By the time Jason was done, Simon was as clean and as well groomed as he's been in the past year, and I kept having to leave the room to stop myself from crying.  What I saw wasn't just a man giving his dog a bath, it was a good friend saying goodbye to his companion in the most gentle way possible.  By giving him as much dignity as he could before sending him away.  No regrets to be had.  Just a last memory for Simon of his best friend gently giving him a bath and showing him some affection.  Even now, as I'm remembering it, I'm fighting tears.

Jason rode in the back seat with him, Simon resting on a blanket, his head pressed against Jason's leg, looking weary and resigned.  I cried on the way there, quietly, in the driver's seat where no one had to notice, and then I pulled myself together to go in and set things up with the vet.  Once we got in the room, he just laid there.  No fight, no curiosity, no sniffing out other dogs.  He just laid there, almost as if he knew, and was ready.

It was quick, and oddly clinical.  I kept waiting for someone in the office to be empathetic, but it was all....procedural.  Efficient, clean.  A small amount of sympathy at the end from the vet tech, but on the whole it was just sterile.  We all cried on the way home, and the house felt more empty when we came back to it.  Oddly still.  More quiet.  It's still sad, and probably will be for a while.  But I like to think he's happier.  I like to think it's beautiful over there.  I don't know where there is, but I believe it exists, and I hope it's beautiful.

A Season of Giving

The other day I was thinking about my favorite holiday memories, and while there were the usual things like going to my Aunt Pat's house every year for our family Christmas gathering, or getting to open just one present on Christmas Eve, or making the trek out into the snow to cut down our tree every year, I realized that there's another piece of my holiday memories that I remember pretty vividly.  Growing up, my dad was the president of his union at the paper mill he worked in.  Say what you will about unions, but their members usually have their hearts in the right places. When I was very small, the union would adopt families every Christmas and all of the members would band together to buy gifts for those families who had fallen on hard times so that they could still have a Christmas.  I don't remember a lot of the details of it, but I remember that every year my dad took me along when we delivered presents to these families.  I have very clear memories of going to visit an elderly woman who needed a blind person's cane (the kind with the red tip, my dad explained to me, so people knew she was blind), and I remember her smile as my dad explained what he was giving to her, and how many times she thanked us for being so kind.  I remember a woman who kept trying to hide that she was starting to cry as gifts got unloaded from the car and piled onto her doorstep.  I remember being four or five years old and going into my dad's factory after hours, through a different door than the one we used if we went to visit dad at work, which seemed like such a big deal.  We left fruit baskets on the desks of each of the secretaries the night before Christmas Eve so that when they came in on Christmas Eve, they would have gifts waiting for them.  I remember being so excited that we were leaving them a surprise, and imaging how happy they would be with their surprise in the morning.  It never clicked in my tiny kid mind that the union did this every year, and the secretaries probably expected to come in and find those on their desks.  All I knew is that I was playing Santa for these people, and it was awesome.

Sometimes my parents would take me shopping with them when they bought their contributions to the adopted families.  I remember them explaining to me that we had to find something that other families would like, and we have to think about what would make them happiest and what they would need.  Sometimes I was allowed to contribute an opinion on what we should buy.  I would stand the bar at the bottom of the cart, clinging to the end of the cart basket as they wheeled through the store, wondering what these people were going to think when someone came over and did something nice, just because they wanted to do something nice.  There was no other reason.  Just to be nice.

As the years passed, the union shrunk, wages didn't go up as cost of living did, and the years of charitable giving disappeared.  I'm not even sure any of my siblings were ever old enough to tag along on the deliveries before they ended all together.  But I remember it.  I remember looking forward to it every year.  I remember feeling happy about making other people happy, and although I didn't pay too much attention when it all ended, looking back I'm a bit sad that it did.

It's had me thinking lately about what sort of example I want to be to the young people in my life.  To my niece, my nephews, even Jasmine and Tori, who are pushing their way into adulthood but still young enough to be influenced by the examples around them.  On the whole, I can't remember more than a handful of gifts I received when I was little.  I remember ones that were especially prized, or that turned into favorite toys, and I'm more than grateful that I received them, but I'm not sure I remember any quite so vividly as I remember that woman smiling as we handed her a cane so she could get around more easily.  We didn't give her just a cane, we gave her some independence, and that is priceless.  We didn't just hand a bunch of wrapped packages to that mother who tried to hide her tears.  We handed her a reason to smile when life might not give her too many of those.  That is the example I want to set for the young people I know.  That giving of yourself, your time, reaching out to touch the life of someone else, that is what is important in this world.  It's through giving that we learn to receive with grace.  And it makes you appreciate what you have so much more.

Next year I think I want to gather some friends and adopt a family together.  I might not have the means to purchase gifts for an entire family myself, but I think that if I gathered a lot of friends and family together, we could change someone's life a little bit, if even just for one day.  It takes a village, after all.

No, Thank YOU

Recently I've come to an understanding that the thank you note, once an expression of gratitude for kindness that has been received, has sort of become a source of canned responses.  Thank you notes are now the yearbook signatures of the adult world.  They're trite, and often impersonal.  Like yearbook signatures, they mention vague things that happened and contain only the requisite number of words to be deemed acceptable, and then they end in that generic, non committal fashion with something like "Hope to see you soon" or "Stay in touch".  I imagine that in the days of hand written letters, the thank you note held more weight, but now it's just an obligation someone has to get through in order to look as if they have done all of the necessary steps.  This is particularly true in thank you notes that are received after a gift has been given.  If someone is diligent, the note includes reference to the specific gift you gave to them.  If they are not, you get a nondescript "Thanks so much for the gift", which makes you sort of want to mention to them later how you like the gift you gave them to watch the scramble where they try to remember which thing came from you.  Or, even better, mention a totally ridiculous gift and imply that you gave it to them and watch the web spin about how much they really love it, this fictitious item you have bestowed upon them.

Basically, all I'm saying is that thank you notes are usually crap.