I 'm flooded in tears. Finally, I have allowed myself to sob, let the snoot run down my nose, let tears jump into my cheeks, and most importantly, find a sympathetic ear of an old time friend to let me cry. My friend is bstanbery at YouTube. We met in February, maybe, of 1981. (CONTINUE)
I have a big headache. The surgery of NPH seems to have been successful. I get aggravated with people who come "help" but "cannot." That was the case this morning with the physical therapist, who kept on using the verb "walking" with meanings unknown to me. He meant assisted walking, walking with a walker, and so on and so forth. Other than that, I have a headache the nurse won't give me anything for because she already gave me something. And I am still tired. Rats!
Today is Emanciipation Proclamation in Brazil. I thought of Nina Simone, and I found this on YouTube.
Next stop will be Freakytopia. Later, folks !
Anarchic_Universe® by tina oiticica harris
My husband left for a meeting in D.C. My son sleeps like a log. At a tad before one a.m. I had to go number one. I called for GHR. NADA. When he finally got to me, I was sliding off the bed. I ended up on the low pile wool carpet. I'm allergic to wool.
I call the home-grown Ph.D. HIs proposal is simple: lie on the floor till 9:30 a.m. That's when my helper arrives. I called 9-1-1. And I refuse to tell you about the horror story there at UCLA Student-Hospital in Westwood. A dominatrix nurse, pretty-young-thing, a nursing mother, very likely, "If you walk to the bathroom with me, I'll let you have a spinal tap. No walker, no wheelchair."
It was quite night-day-marish. The blood samples people made eleven holes in my arms to find a vein. The worst was yet to come. The chief of the E.R. a cute young cat from D.C. missed the spinal tap four times. He hit my sciatica instead(right leg.)
My C-Pap machine broke down. I've lost track of the days. I missed my insuline shots at the E.R. and some ambitious blogger went to the corner to buy cigarettes on me. Play me Liza Minelli. From Cabaret, by Bob Fosse. Please.
Tomorrow we have our del.icio.us links as usual, gathered by André_Marmota, Seth A, Tom_Watson, and Tina, yours truly. I hope you enjoy them. The photo is of a ground cover that spreads like this newer generation's belief they'll never be old. Sigh. All rights reserved.
Suddenly I missed the big moments in politics, my passion second only to my soccer club, Botafogo, and my samba assn. "Grêmio Recreativo de Samba Acadêmicos do Salgueiro." Salgueiro is a willow tree, which can be found on the way up the mountain where the "acadêmicos" live. When I was a kid, I lived with my grandparents for a while, a few steps from the willow tree. In the era of smaller spectacle, the school, or samba assn. would come down already parading for us, the dwellers of Tijuca, a beachless neighborhood, peopled with middle class folks, especially elementary school teachers married to young guys they met on the cable car, who'd gone to the military academy.
Those were the fifties, early sixties, pre-coup d'état, pre-bikinis, pre-D.I.N.K.s.(Insert dorky "Those were the days") Escolas de samba were made up of people from the favela that housed them. The animal lottery masters paid for the school, gun power was a lesser evil than today's machine guns.
I missed Carnaval, too. Today Freaky Deaky's comment motivates me to get in touch with you, my thirteen readers, my little monkeys - you can see I have watched my share of Craig Ferguson.
I have been gone and out of reach, but I feel a lot better now. It ain't over yet; some more stuff needs to happen for me to become whole again. But I shouldn't have made promises like a politician.
I'm happy to be back to my Anarchic_Universe, where I have fewer problemas to administrate. Freaky Deaky, my husband doesn't like me to devote my attention to others when he is home. It's always been that way. Go figure. My advice to you is to think carefully about what a marriage means, taking the good with the bad and all the bulls*tology. We have been together for 23 years now, so there's got to be something there.
Some of this news is old news. In June-August I was hospitalized and the diagnostic by a team of specialists was medication intoxication, by "default." I changed medication, went back to Saint John's UnHealth Hospital on emergency on September 7.
Now, I am not doing well at all. I have had an MRI which shows my brain shrank prematurely and a deposit of liquid under the lower lobs. To get my medical staff to send the paperwork to my two insurance companies is like pulling crocodile teeth in the Mississippi.
Now to our North Pole status for a week. EconoAir shows the aptitude for customer service of a bunch of illiterate and rude sloths who cannot communicate. There is one guy I must be thankful for, Ryan, a recent hire, the technician who just set heat back in this house, a freezing health hazard.
Amazon.com promised a delivery by December 22. Today that date has been pushed all the way to January whenever. By that time we have no use for the Santa toy for my niece will be back in Brazil.
It was simply a grueling week with phone calling and trying to convince the neuro nurse to fax in the specifications to my insurances today before the end of the day today.
I regret to inform you I will be off the Net, except to post my Anarchic_Universe del.icio.us links, culled from Portuguese, Spanish, French and Anglophone cyber info sites. The difficulty for me to key in is too much for me to find blogging pleasant. How can I comment on my favorite blogs?
I wish I had found some of my links sooner. Such is life. wish in one hand, piss in the other, see which fills faster.
As soon as dokterrrs find out what my neurological problem is, I will have a better idea about what will happen. Even if I die, I'll make sure to let you know when that happens.
Blogging has been a saving grace for me, especially after I became homebound. There were some creeps in the Lusophone blogosphere. In the Anglophone all I found was helping hands. Same as in the French-Canadian and French.
See you soon, best wishes to all!
I'll take advantage of a spurt of energy to write an entry for my favorite blog. We have been cooped in the dining-kitchen area, all of us: Nic, GHR_ my son, my sister and her daughter, the cat and the dog and I. It's been colder than a witch's tit, as my professor from Ohio used to say. Our heating system went kaput for a week now. The service of Econair makes you feel you are going mad.
Needless to add my sister and daughter misunderestimated (click, please) the cold outside and my sister caught a cold. They deserve the bushism for being stubbornly unwise.
Other than being confined to one area of the house, thanks Econoair, we know how vital rain is for California and are thankful for the future water in our pipes. However, Southern California is ill-equipped for rain. The sewers clog, umbrellas make a disappearing act, rain jackets become scarce.
I remember a time I flipped when my husband and I were stuck west of downtown, somewhere like Alvarado by Silver Lake, trying to cross a street absolutely flooded.
Yes, I have seen worse. Rio floods. My father went to work for USAID, where he was the Rio-based radio-operator, with water up to his knees. Our street has a river flowing under it and above it in flood times.
Here we are used to "Every day is a sunny day in Southern California." In Rio people endure tropical storms with finesse, even.
So, taking a break from the warmth of the kitchen area, I tell you: inefficiency in service in the USA matches easily the gerundism of telemarketers and customer service phone operators in Brazil. The trend is to say "I will be + Verb+ ing . This is an alien construction in Portuguese. In Portuguese one would simply say, "I will + Verb" or "I won't + Verb". Maybe it's an Anglicism.
Y'all know how smart we are in the United States. Okay is said to be an expression derived from the military intelligence's Oll Korect, abbreviated to O.K. And you know military intelligence is a "contradiction in terms" as in "oxymoron."
When did you suspect there was something fishy about the Iraq war? Since the underlying theme of this hello to my readers is "fish", here is a song by Milton Nascimento, "Milagre dos Peixes" played with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and other great jazz musicians. Enjoy.
This week of Thanksgivings gave us a chance to thank friends and family for what they do for us and for being there. It also gave us a chance to re-organize home affairs totally out of sync. We needed in fact a few more days to solve the kinks about my blogs, visitation of links, comments and all that good stuff hidden behind a blog, plus a few more days to straighten out our affairs. Alas! Did I say I was thankful? The opening statement reads like a contradiction to the body of the paragraph.
Malibu was hit again by firestorms. We haven't had any rain, but water from gardens and other waste forms is attracting birds to Long Beach, at the mouth of our dry but not quite L.A. River. I wish I could get in a car to go see them. Playa del Rey, near us had a lot of mallard ducks, my fixation as a child, but got developers come in. I wonder if there are marsh fowl left there. I haven't been back there in twenty years.
There are many pockets of Greater Los Angeles I wish I would get to know or revisit. Although we have a reputation for dull architecture, there are distinctive neighborhoods here. I guess it takes trained eyes for the beauty of Los Angeles and its deco, nouveau, "modern" and contemporary architecture. We must not forget the forged styled millionaire mansions, in Gothic or Spanish or name it we've got it copy-cat whims of the rich and famous.
This week was a quiet one, with some computer problems solved, not all, very few blogs read, some physical pain beyond my control, and lots of videos or VH1 Classics. I mentioned we spent Thanksgivng Day with Bob Dylan. Later on there'll be a great article I scooped from a blog into our del.icio.us network.
I knew an architect who was fond of saying, "The poor don't have friends; they have relatives." True enough, I received a couple of calls from my American relatives. It is nice to hear they are all well.
The story of the Texan who shot his neighbors' burglars(and killed them both) amused me. Sorry for th eloss of lives, but it seems we live in the days of Oregon Trail. A Mexican felt upset at some hoodlums and shot them, too. That is the way in the little pueblito he came from.
My source for music has been the feed of Nialler 9, the MP3, videos, everything music blog from Ireland. One day I hearda great electronic song and there are these synthesized sentences. I thought it was a Laurie Anderson revival. One of my home tecchies had added voice to every change I made in navigation of the Mac. It was nutty.
We have kinda started a Scorcese festival -light. We caught "The Nutty Professor" with Jerry Lewis on cable and followed it with "The King of Comedy", a dark portrayal of Jerry Lewis entrapped in his fame and a character whose schizoid dreams lead him to want the life of a comedian, but he's not really that funny. The wannabe is played by Robert De Niro. We have till Tuesday to watch New York, New York, which I haven't seen in over twenty years. A madcap ensemble cast played in a Henry Fonda-Barbara Stanwick first coupling for a film, "The Mad Miss Manton."
When visited in her convalescent home, my son told Mommy it was Thanksgiving. She replied, "Where is the food?" And got losti n her Alzheimer's fog again.
To a nice week, with plenty of exercise, healthy diet and upbeat feelings, even if they won't make your life longer, they may make it better to handle. But then again, look at all the irascible French old ladies reaching 92 to a hundred years of age. Duck Soup anyone?
The verdict is out, loud and clear. We're having foreclosures and will have more, marching their way into the affluent westside. Source: breakfast reading of the Los Angeles Times. Breakfast: fake bacon, fake egg, grapefruit, tomatoes and butter lettuce. Some coffee. I am exhausted. Already. Yesterday was an intensive day; productive yet exhausting. We met about my mother; about our son's special ed. needs, a meeting we had awaited to go our way for almost three years. The caveat in this wait is the inability of special ed. to cater to kids whose IQ is very high but are performing below their potential. We did some HW and the meeting went fine, in a mostly amiable ambiance.
The last meeting was a stop worth stopping for. My gyn knows an endocrinologist whose methods combined to Weight Watchers group talk can reduce my weight, condition new eating habits and educate me towards a new perspective on food. This was a long meeting, filled in the end with a gift package.
I can feel the pain of displacement here in California, the fires are still a possible threat. Natural disasters elsewhere are worse. Talking of natural disasters, the talking heads were here, at the edge of the abyss, but prudently didn't step ahead. A photo of grey noon, when snow-like specs filled the air. Click to enlarge, please.
Continue reading "Another Brown Sunset Day in Sunny California" »
It's not fun to have some paranoia or to be bipolar or to be the memory for members of the nuclear family. The ills of our century are psychiatric as much as those of the Romantic era were in the lungs. However, psychiatrists know about the brain only, may know how to read lab results, and not much else. They are specialists. I wish I had one doctor who could take care of all of my health issues.
My main Doctor Feelgood is blogging. Music from last.fm, my little radio on the net. iTunes. iPhoto. Flickr, Google and Facebook. del.icio.us, which I master poorly. I ace Google. We are in good terms and I even believe in the link transfer from orkut to Facebook. The view of the garden, a hug from my son, my real post-early retirement, all of these form both souvenir to remember and rappeler to recall in my head. My souvenirs, my lucid memories, my stories.
In a miracle of sorts, my ailing mother is talking up a storm. Yesterday she told me she'd "copied the lesson of the 'teacher' very well." That is her spiel of ages of attending centers for the aged. Maybe her move to a bigger center excited her neurones. She was "always filled with wind, piss and excitement," said my grandma.
I like the fact French has two verbs for remembering: souvenir and rappeler. My mommy's rappeler is going-gone. Her souvenir is spotty but there: the snakes in the plantation where she lived, Paris, her favorite ciy in the world along with Rio de Janeiro. Latin, studying.
This morning I read a beautiful post in Pensar Enlouquece, by Alexandre Inagaki. It inspired me to write about areas of reality he touched on so well. From death to Alzheimer, to the unbearable life/youth without an end, like Dorian Gray's.
Anarchic_Universe has some recurring themes. Its audience is a forever changing one. Except for Freaky Deaky and Seth Anderson, few people comment. It's a reflection of my own souvenirs, and its title a tribute to my great grand uncle, José Oiticica, the
anarchist- linguist.
It's a universe of ideas, of topics, of subjects. At this point in time, when left or right are useless concepts in a one-world economy, I go for universe. Between peace and love I go for peace. Even when induced.
Thank you all, see you later. I have reduced my blogging hours. That calmed me down from a frenzy of "have-tos".
Straight from my Mac,
Tina Oiticica
This blog will be under construction this coming weekend. I need to improve its ping with Technorati and do some other stuff.
I received a piece of news not unlike "The cat went up the roof." The expression comes from a folk tale and then just the expression remained in Brazilian Portuguese. It's euphemism for bad news.
One day Manuel is coming home from a long absence. A friend tells him not to go home. "But why," asks surprised Manuel.
Oh, the cat went up the roof.
But why did it go up the roof.
It went up the roof it was afraid of the fire.
What fire,
The house caught on fire.
But how did the house catch on fire.
It was due to the candles,
What candles,
Candles on the table,
What candles,
Around the coffin.
What coffin.
Your mother passed away.
She passed away when your father was shot. He owed too much money.So if someone tells you ... "The cat went up the roof," is there any news of Iraq I should know about?
Next post will be on "look on the brighter side and stay alive." I nailed it. Ennui. In a bit. I am having a bit of a problem with my keyboard. The home computer men aren't here right now. Enjoy the Eurythmics instead, won't you? Men are great for three things: fixing stuff I can't fix, killing surfboard sized cucarachas and, enjoy Annie Lennox.
