(Crohn's) disease of the week

After a half-hour fight with my gastroenterologist last night, he finally agreed to put me on short-term meds to try and control the too-earthly delights I'm currently housing in my 5'2", 106 lb. (and rapidly shrinking) frame.

While we argue a lot, a function of our positions on opposite ends of the Western Medicine Cures All spectrum, we really do love each other. He calls me stubborn, I call him Graham and, despite my refusal to march with him in pharmacological lockstep, we've always come to some kind of mutually satisfying compromise, usually involving my taking some incredibly toxic medication for less time than he'd like and more time than I'd like.

This time, however, we're running into some unusual problems. This flare I'm in now, which we both agree has its roots in an overly-long, overly-strong course of antibiotics I stupidly took after some minor skin surgery, is manifesting itself quite differently than previous Crohn's flares, so much so that I'm starting to question whether I have Crohn's colitis or ulcerative colitis.

There's a lot of overlap in the symptoms (blood and diarrhea and fever and weight loss and the scent-of-the-dead flatulence no one discusses), and the way my disease presented initially, there was some question as to which disease I had. Frankly, as far as end-user experience goes, pain, medications with dreadful side effects, an illness one will never actually be "cured" of, this rose is pretty stinky, no matter what name it goes by.

Several of the treatments are similar, too: steroids, immunosuppressants, anti-inflammatories. There are more medications approved for use in Crohn's disease, but finding the right one for either disease is hit or miss.

So now I'm on another, milder course of antibiotics, metronidazole, used to kill certain "bad" bacteria in the gut which are believed to be a contributing factor to Crohn's disease. And, oddly enough, I find myself hoping I have Crohn's disease (there's no known effectiveness for UC treatment), so this antibiotic will spare me the hair-shedding, liver-bashing nightmare of the big gun meds like 6MP.

Me. Hoping I have Crohn's disease.

The world changes by degree, except when it changes all at once...

xxx c

UPDATE: I realized after re-reading this with some sleep that the juxtaposition of paragraphs made it sound like a geyser of blood and poop is shooting out of my ass at regularly timed intervals. Alas, no. If it were, things would actually be easier because we'd know what to put me on. As it is, I'm having the regular bowel movements of a healthy, high school football player, with no blood whatsoever. Just fever, aches and endless fatigue. In fact, the only thing that makes me sure this isn't just fibromyalgia kicking in at a late date is the ungodly flatulence I'm still dealing with. Really. I could kill a puppy with one of my farts.

Photo by Ga Music Maker via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Colleen of the Future

I found a cool site thanks to Stumble Upon, my new-favorite source of time suckage*. It's called FutureMe.org, and it's nothing more than an email form that collects words you write, to someone else, I suppose, but mainly to oneself, and sends them to that person in the future. (The default is set to one year.) This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me. From time to time, when I'm feeling particularly brave and strong, I'll pull out an old journal from college or my early 20's or, who am I kidding?, my late 30's and early 40's and cringe and cringe and cringe...and then I'll spot something that saves me: some glimmer of insight or truth that runs through from the pure me to the me-currently-enmired in crap to, hopefully, the future me who will finally be beyond all this petty nonsense. (Although I will not be wearing any motherfucking purple, straight up.)**

I don't write much in a journal anymore; after a year and a half of this, it'd feel like a busman's holiday.

Then again, I don't need to look too far to find Colleen of the Past anymore. Just an inch or so to the right.

xxx c *Thanks, Bon...for NOTHING!!! Sigh...

**UPDATE (8/27/12): Except for my purple sweater, my purple sweater I had before that, my purple shirt, and my purple scarf. And so it goes.

Photo of monkeyed-with scene from a great Honeymooners episode via Schrom.com

One pill makes you larger

Thanks to my family, I have an interesting relationship with medicine, both the kind with a small and a capital "m".

In one corner, we have my (dead, workaholic) father, whose response to any and all corporal malfunction was to (a) ignore it and soldier on or (b) have something prescribed or excised and then soldier on. In the other, we have my (dead, alcoholic) mother, who was basically the same, only she thought the "(b)" part of the equation needlessly complicated.

Dad died nominally of liver failure but really of systemic decline from years and years of refusing to deal with his Crohn's disease at anything deeper than a symptomatic level. (He did not drink alcohol.)

Mom died nominally of cervical cancer that had metastasized to her lungs, but really of her outrageous refusal to tend to even the basics of personal wellness (i.e., the annual pap). (She drank like a fish.)

Given my illustrious family history, it's kind of miraculous that I'm hobbling along as well as I am with my own disease. Like all chronic illness, Crohn's is an up and down proposition: unlike something discrete (a cold, say, or a broken arm), it flares up on its own schedule, brought on at times by something you didn't know could trigger it (hormonal birth control), at times by something you did, but neglected, forgot (antibiotics, stress, Aunt Flo'). Managing it takes a sometimes delicate combination of vigilant self-care and willingness to accept outside help.

I have gotten much better at accepting help in the form of other people stepping up when I'm too tired or sick to deal. I am still wicked stubborn, however, about help in the form of medicine, mainly because the medicines I have to choose from range from bad (mesalamine, or as I like to call it "the hair loss drug") to worse (purinethol, or as I like to call it, "the cancer drug that also causes hair loss"). In between is the pill I both love and dread the most: prednisone.

Yes, prednisone. King-daddy of the synthetic hormones, that magic steroidal elixir responsible for Jerry Lewis's good looks a ways back. It stops the immune response, makes you feel strong like bull and blows you up like a human balloon. When I was released from my 11-day vacation at Cedars Sinai, I was on 60mg of the stuff a day. I put on 10 pounds in a day and a half. My good friend, Lily, had to bring me granny panties three sizes larger to accommodate my mystical instant tubbiness.

Prednisone is also the one drug that can hoist me out of a flare. I have a reserve prescription I keep around the house just in case. I've been eyeing it more frequently recently, weighing the costs of not only ballooning but turning my bones to butter and leaving myself open to whatever opportunistic bacterium or virus wants to wander my way. It's a deal with the devil in many ways: it works amazingly well, but each time you use it, you lessen its potential effectiveness the next, until you're taking Jerry Lewis doses.

This flare? It's different than the others (I've had two since my initial onset in October of 2002). I'm not losing weight at the frightening rate I have in the past. There's no blood or diarrhea this time, either, although the room-clearing gas has commenced (hooray!). Mostly, I'm just dealing with some low-grade fever, aching joints and a level of fatigue that forces me down earlier and earlier. Hardly the stuff of hour-long prime-time medical drama.

The thing is, there's no way of knowing if I can pull myself out of this with diet and rest or if I need the big guns. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, whose miracle Crohn's-curing powers I've written of before (here and here), is good, but even its major proponent always said to work with medicine when you need it.

That's what I'm trying to determine now: need. How well do I need to feel, and how soon? How wise would it be to wait, and for how long? If I go the meds route, should I go on the long-term meds, too, or trust the combination of fanatical adherence to the diet and the launching pad of prednisone to do the trick?

This is an unusually personal post for me, I know. I suppose it's the closest I'll come to a public admission of addictive behavior (at least, I hope so). But here it is: I'm addicted to whatever is the opposite of change. Like my parents before me, I'd rather ignore what's right under my nose, currently, a thermometer that reads 100.2ºF, than deal with it.

I know why they did what they did now. They were afraid. Afraid of addressing the root cause of their poor health. Afraid of being called out as human beings trying to avoid the emotions of all human beings by hiding behind work, or in a bottle. Afraid that if they went in for help, they'd be told the inevitable: what you are doing, the way you are treating yourself, will kill you.

The sad thing is, it did anyway.

Fortunately, I've got my own number. It connects me to my G.I. doctor over at Cedars, whom I'll speak to in the morning about going back on the prednisone, and perhaps something longer-term afterwards, until I'm sure I can fly on my own power.

My. Own. Power.

xxx c

TAGS: chronic illness, Crohn's disease, Crohn's flare, relapse, medication, prednisone

Behold! the fugliosity that was me in advertising!

Today I auditioned for a spot I'd really like to book. The part is funny, the casting director is smart (meaning, the spots he casts are low in cheese factor) and, imagine, I could use the money. Casting directors often give a group explanation prior to a string of individual auditions to save time and so we don't stink up their tapes with super-creative, actor-y input. Today, after reiterating his usual acting directive, "Very small, very real, very 'film'", a directive which I now hear in some form from nearly every casting director on nearly every call, leaving me to wonder why there is still so much bad, over-the-top acting in commercials, this casting director drove the point home by letting drop that the director of this particular spot also directed Junebug. The implication being, if you know Junebug, you know what we're looking for and if you don't, you're going to give a bad, over-the-top performance which we will waste no time in erasing from our tape.

Now, I have not, in fact, seen Junebug, but I am familiar with the vernacular the CD was tossing out. You see, I like to keep up with my worlds colliding, so I happen to know that Junebug was directed by one Phil Morrison, with whom I worked on a series of Wheaties commercials which I wrote in my previous incarnation as an advertising copywriter.

Normally, this ain't no big thang. That life was long, long ago, and most people's memories don't extend that far, especially when it comes to remembering the copywriter, who is slightly less important than an apple box on a commercial set. In fact, we're seen as so inconsequential, we're frequently not invited to the shoot at all: I wrote a Gatorade commercial shot by the notorious Joe Pytka, but was subsequently hired as an actor on a couple of his commercials. Of course, I was not in attendance at the former and saw no reason to bring up the connection at either of the latter, so it really didn't take much to fly under the radar.

The Wheaties commercials, however, were a slightly bigger deal. There were lots of verbal shenanigans in my tricky little scripts, so I was actually consulted on this or that more than once. Plus the spots starred Michael Jordan! Michael Effin'* Jordan!!! This was a huge break for the then-very-young Phil, whom we found via some groovy interstitials he'd done for MTV. Plus...Michael Effin' Jordan! Surely Phil would remember every minute detail of that week we spent together on a Chicago soundstage, I thought.

That is, I thought until I uncovered this commemorative photo of me**, MJ, and an assortment of client-side and agency dorks:

Now not only am I certain Phil Morrison will not know me from Adam, I am also sorely tempted to submit myself to that Oprah show where they're looking for people who look better today than they did 10 years ago.

Because (a) I am pretty sure I'm fugly enough in my high-waisted, reverse-fit jeans to win a free trip back to Chicago and (b) if they give me two round-trip tickets, maybe I can convince The BF not to break up with me for revealing my shame...

xxx c

*And if his middle name isn't "effin'", I'd like suggest right now that he change it; my god, could he have a more appropriate middle name?

**If you can't find me in the group, I would be the one on second from the left, doing my impersonation of a really unattractive lesbian. Good at it, aren't I?

UPDATE: Link to larger sizes of my fugliosity at Flickr, here.

Things change, especially in my colon

This was supposed to be a post about a surprisingly fun and interesting college alumni event that I attended last Thursday.

It was also supposed to be posted last Friday, maybe Saturday, at the latest. Because it really was a fun and interesting event, complete withon a cool seminar delivered by a lively speaker in a spiffy venue with bitching food and bev, which, frankly, I think is some weird, Cornellian point of pride because of that hotel school they've got.

However, as long-time readers of communicatrix-dot-com well know, I have Crohn's disease, which basically means:

1. My colon is a tyrant
2. Like most tyrants, is willful, capricious and wildly oversensitive
3. My colon likes to exercise its supreme power over me at the most inconvenient of times
4. In the war between posting and colon repair, [my colon always wins.]*

As much as I seem to rattle on about personal stuff here, I really keep the bulk (ha, ha, I said "bulk") of my personal shit (ha, ha, I said...oh, never mind...) private. Because really, how sexy is it to go into the gory details of your life when you're in the 45th year of it? You catch my drift.

Anyway. Major fires have been put out. Pesky low-grade existential crisis lingers, but all hands are back on deck, er, in L.A., safe and sound, which has done wonders for my peace of mind, which, in turn, has done wonders for my lower intestine.

But I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to, one more time, plug the wonders of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which continues to be the single greatest thing I've ever done for my intestinal health, and possibly my health in general.

It's not an easy diet to follow (quick: give up sugar, starch, and all even minimally-processed food!). I'd strayed from it over the last year because, ironically enough, I'd been feeling so good. But as anyone with Crohn's or UC (or celiac disease, or IBS, or other pesky intestinal illness) will tell you, stress is a huge trigger for flare-ups. And for me, flare-ups are only stopped with the double-edged sword that is prednisone, king-daddy of the steroids.

Thankfully, five days back on the diet with fanatical adherence and things are looking up. I have a goodly portion of my energy back, and no longer feel like I might have to drop to whatever horizontal surface I'm on to nap. (At one low point over the last few days, I actually curled up in a ball on a closet floor for 15 minutes, rock on, party girl!)

Which is good, because right now, I've got to drive a motor vehicle downtown and beg the cold-hearted DMV employees to overlook a mailing deadline I missed while I was passing out on closet floors.

So, posts on goal-free living and other fun and exciting stuff soon. Meanwhile, if you see a middle-aged woman passed out on the floor of the Metropolitan Courthouse, for god's sake, don't give her a candy bar thinking it'll help...

xxx c

*Left bracketed part out in the original post. See? My colon really does rule.

Horrors heaped upon horrors

I'm of divided opinion on the clustering of good and bad events. On the one hand, I've lived through some pretty compelling real-life evidence for the Bad Luck Streak; on the other hand, I'm rational and objective enough to understand that at any given moment, there are people going through much worse for much longer who manage their troubles with relative equanimity, so attitude clearly plays a large role in determining what is 'good' or 'bad' (cf Anthony de Mello's Chinese farmer story*).

The more I read about Buddhism, and I haven't read much, the more I think they have something with this non-attachment thing. And a bonus-extra goodie with Buddhism (or Method acting, or talk therapy, or lots of other ways-in) is that you can benefit from its tenets (hey! that rhymes!) no matter where you step into the river. When you're feeling crappy and resistant or angry and resentful or joyous and light, you can examine why and, if you're honest about it (and when I say 'you', I mean 'me'), you'll probably learn something incredibly useful about yourself that you can apply not ony to alleviate your situation, but to do a quicker end-run around it next time.

What's tricky for me is that I usually don't feel much like dispassionate self-examination when I'm feeling good. Feeling good is the goal in this part of the world, with the added implication that feeling good as quickly as possible is even better.

Am I preaching? I don't mean to. This is about no one else but me right now, me not getting down with whatever is happening in my Now, me being crabby and cranky and resistant. Me willfully shifting my gaze from the undeniably good, The BF, my health, my friends, financial solvency, to fret over the shadowy parts that lie just ahead. Fear slips its cool, slippery tentacles around me, one by one, and starts to squeeze slowly, until I can't remember what it was like just to breathe easily.

Okay. I'm being a little histrionic for effect. Not that fear isn't doing its slippery, squeezy thing; it is and it probably always will. The difference between how it happens now and how it happened 20 years ago is that I've gotten a little better at recognizing it ("oh, that old thing") and understanding that (a) my hard-wired, primal reaction is not the only one at my disposal and (b) if I can keep it at bay, I will probably come up with one that will be far more useful for dealing with the situation at hand.

And so I add yet another category to the messy sidebar that communicatrix-dot-com seems destined to remain: fear. I've written about it before, of course, but I've always couched it in some more positive term: 'change' or 'life' or, let's face it, 'rants'. Sometimes, though, it's just plain fear, of moving forward, of what will happen next, of the coat on the chair that looks like a monster, and there may be value in calling that particular spade a spade.

Besides, 'negative'...'positive'...who's to say?

Putting aside the real horrors of the world (which are all and always too recognizable), there's a good deal of room for interpretation.

xxx c

*It bears noting that both the title of this post and the Chinese farmer story come to you by way of my favorite ex-boyfriend, who has been nicknameless and seldom-mentioned to date, whom I now christen "The Whippersnapper" and to whom I say:

"Be careful what you wish for...Trevor."

PHOTO CREDIT: akoestner's "Bellagio Ceiling" copyright akoestner, via Flickr.

What happens when I lose my shit

About three weeks ago, I lost it.

I didn't plow into some a-hole in an SUV on that stretch of Rossmore that narrows to one lane, even though they were honking up the road and totally deserved it.

I didn't call out some a-hole at the grocery store who jumped into the newly-opened lane ahead of me even though I was next, or push someone into the poop their pet just left on our parkway or sidle up to some loud, self-important, cell-talking loser at Marshall's and cut a ginormous fart. Oh, no, nothing so plebian and tawdry as that (although where urban civility has gone, I'll never know, and as a civilian who's sick of loud-talking, SUV-driving, poop-leaving a-holes, I'm not promising I won't in future).

I cleaned The BF's laundry room. With a vengeance. And without his express permission.

I'm not a particularly neat person, or even a particularly clean one. L.A. Jan, whose own apartment has been known to be liberally sprinkled with cat hair upon occasion, confessed to sometime repulsion on coming into proximity with my cooktop; suffice it to say there are several hundred things I'd rather do than clean my appliances, including emptying my own trash. It's just that I have a certain threshold for dirt and/or clutter (which is pretty high, by the way) and every once in awhile, it's exceeded. If I happen to be somewhere it would be ill-advised to touch anything, I hightail it out of there. If not...

I try to time these freakouts to coincide with some necessary task chez communicatrix, but since I spend a great deal of time at my country house (a.k.a., The BF's), sometimes it happens there. Three weeks ago, it was a blocked laundry room passageway (note: no one needs more than ONE gigantic Hefty bag full of rags); today, it was a bedroom door that wouldn't yield for all the stuff hung on the backside of it. First, a door that won't yield; next, a pantry cabinet full of expired medicines. Pretty soon you're wandering around a battlefield of moldy dry cleaner bags and ancient Tupperware.

Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how, I managed to make my gumption even out with the piles. It is not always thus. In my own little place, I am living with the neatly stacked manila folders that house the start of a major familial photographic overhaul, along with several other begun-and-abandoned projects. There are shelves that await relining, crap that awaits eBay-ing, dirt that awaits removal. No matter. I hit my ceiling today, opening a door that wouldn't quite.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll trip over the manila folders that hold my 1099s and blaze through my taxes.

One can only hope...

xxx c

Photo: Me as the Weird Family Mom in Peace Squad Goes 99

Poor, dead, #1 Chris Penn

I have no idea what Chris Penn really wanted out of life. I spent a total of maybe eight hours with him on the set of a small short film many, many years ago, and I use the term "with" loosely. He was playing an exhibit at an outdoor museum; I was playing a tour guide. It was about 40ºF and raining and every second we weren't shooting, we were all off huddling for warmth, Chris in his trailer, me in some kind camera grip's loaned parka (tour guides wear short-sleeved safari shirts and shorts, regardless of weather). Even those few times we ended up talking in a group of people, he didn't do much talking. He seemed...well, pissed, but hell, the weather did suck and his trailer wasn't much better. I'd be pissed, too. Only I wasn't, because this was my second part in a movie, ever, and I was getting to act. I honestly couldn't believe my good fortune.

It's probably different if your brother is famous and your other brother, well, he's pretty famous, too. Along with your brother's wife, his ex-wife, your other brother's wife, your dad, your mom, and probably several dozen of your closest friends. I used to have anxiety over being compared to my father and grandfather, who were both in advertising, and no one cares about advertising, even the people in it; I can't imagine maintaining my equanimity in the face of grocery lanes and billboards with my fucking family album on them.

Maybe he just wanted to act. They say there are actors out there for whom the just-acting is enough. I don't know; in my 10+ years as an actor, I've yet to meet a single one who would turn down the money and/or the accompanying fame. Yeah, sure, we blather on about our love of the theater and art and 'the work', but let's face it: we didn't exactly pick a profession where you can toil away in obscurity. You have to have an audience to be an actor, even if it's only one; that's how the work works. (And I've acted for that audience of one, for the record. In the world's worst production of The Seagull. You know, the one by that dead Russian guy, that runs almost three hours. Uncut. For one person.)

Even when people tell you what they want, it isn't always what they really want. Most of us aren't willing to cop to our secret agendas. I've seen marriages fall apart, organizations crumble and too many people freaking out on or near their deathbeds to take people at their word. True, Chris Penn was in the same little AFI short that I was for no money, so maybe it was all for the love of a-h-h-h-t. On the other hand, everything you do as an actor has the potential of raising your profile: maybe it's a coincidence that Martin Sheen ended up playing the President on a more famous show after this one; maybe not.

The point, to me, is to get super-dee-duper clear on what you want. Then say it out loud ("I'm black and I'm proud!"), even if you only say it to yourself. Say it over and over, to your friends, in a blog, in your journal, on your résumé, but don't stuff it down. I hid my longing to be an actor, and yes, the famous kind, for many years out of shame and embarrassment and fear. I still do, sometimes, although I now know it's not so much "actor" that I want to be, more like "font of immense inspiration, insight and joy". (Yeesh...talk about embarrassment.)

I hope Chris Penn had a happy life. I hope he loved every minute of what he did. (He certainly was good enough at it.) I hope he never compared himself to his brother or his other brother or his mom or his dad and felt like less-than. I hope he was a raging iconoclast who was fully self-actualized and couldn't have given a hoot about being #1 in the IMDB Pro StarMeter.

And for me? I hope the exact same thing...

xxx c

TAGS: Chris+Penn, fame, ambition

The dreaded dread

My name is Colleen, and I am a procrastinator.

(Hello, Colleen!)

It has been four years since I balanced my checkbook. I recently renamed my backlog of unread New Yorkers "The End Table". My closets and drawers and to-do lists have cruft so crufty, they've developed their own cruft.

I know that I have to let go and let David, but it's hard sometimes, I won't lie. I leave just a couple of messages in "in", you know, where I can see them. I might make myself the occasional daily checklist of errands and such, not trusting my collection and retrieval system. I have drunk the Kool-Aid, but I sort of fake-drank it and went "mmmm" and kind of spit it out when no one was looking.

You see, I like closing my eyes and covering my ears and going "lalalalalala, I can't hear you!" It makes me livelier in public. It is oddly comforting in private, even though I know it is bad for me and makes it also hard to watch Project Runway and answer the telephone.

But you can live in denial a long time, my friends. A long time, indeed. Hell, usually if I could just wait long enough before turning around that phone call or replying to that email, the problem would pack up its tent and go away. Of course, clients like for you to return calls inquiring after your availability or that project you said you'd finish two weeks ago, but really, how much income do you need? Not much, if you don't ever balance your checkbook.

Yesterday, though, I hit rock bottom. I'd been holding off on telling my writing partner that, for a variety of reasons, I just didn't want to work on our two person show, #1 & #2, anymore. I mean, how could I tell her? I might as well stab her through the heart and tell her I hated her and she was un-invited to my birthday party. Because this would kill her. Or our friendship. Or both.

She had gotten back from her holidays four days ago, though, and I'd had one stay of execution already when she begged off of a meeting, claiming exhaustion. I'd put off our get-together until the end of yesterday, a long day filled with its own bouts of foot-dragging and humiliation and potential disappointments. A good callback fueled me with the fire, I guess, along with that Airborne I've been popping like Tic-Tacs since everyone in L.A. has the plague right now. And I must have been filled with the spirit of David because once I was in the door, I only had a half a grapefruit, some cheese, and 15 natural segues before I blurted it out:

Speaking of wondering what projects you want to focus on for the rest of the year, I don't think I want to work on the show right now.

L.A. Jan stopped cooing at her cat, Mister, for the briefest of moments and said,

Yeah, me neither.

I think today might be a good day to start at the bottom of the list.

Who's with me?

xxx c

TAGS: GTD, procrastination, fear, satire

Illness as meditation

I had a smallish chunk of communicatrix carved out of my shoulder yesterday. It's not a particularly alarming event; given I get more sun walking from my front door to the car than most of my ancestors got in a lifetime, these occasional hinky patches of skin are to be expected.

What is alarming, and annoying, and frustrating, is having the lines of my physical limitations redrawn so abruptly. Like any 'illness' that descends swiftly, there's no time to adjust from being the together, go-go me who can burn through a to-do list with amazing speed to the sad-ass gimp who is continually making adjustments and compromises to get by. Instead of just reaching for a can of tuna, my Quasimodo-pressure-dressing hump and I have to wait for my left hand to drag the stool to the shelves, step up and grab it, then hand it off to the (gimpy, for all intents and purposes) right hand.

One of the most annoying aspects to my five-month recovery from Crohn's disease was having to sleep on my back. (There was simply too much gastrointestinal activity to risk stomach sleeping.) Last night, my hump and I had to sleep not only on my actual side, propped up with pillows all around like a baby on a king-sized bed, but on the wrong side. Suffice it to say it was not one of my more restful nights, and was mainly filled with odd dreams of attending a veddy British country wedding, with lots of pomp and changes of clothes. What-ever.

On the other hand, the hump is a good reminder to see things differently. Of necessity, I must slow down. And it's prepping me for the even more annoying task of being almost better: while the hump comes off tomorrow, I still have to baby that shoulder for the next eight days if I don't want to rip it all open and bleed on the furniture. Having a governor preps me for driving without one, which is a good thing when your tendency is to live your life with the pedal to the medal.

So I'm going to an audition today as a meter maid with a hump; after that, I'll head over to the printers (slowly) and play graphic designer with a hump. I suppose later on, I'll see if I'm up to play humpy freakshow at the Trader Joe's, and figure out what kind of dinner me and the hump can put together without using the cast iron pans. (I don't know; I'm thinking scallops in some kind of lime, chile and butter sauce.)

And in between, or during, I suppose I should say, I will probably see things I haven't seen, and hear things I haven't heard, just because I've slowed down enough to see and hear them. With every move, if my experience so far is any indication, I'll appreciate the movement I do have so much more, just as when I was imprisoned in the IBD ward at Cedars, I relished the few hundred feet I could walk outside in the courtyard every day, rolling my IV stand alongside of me.

Audition. Printer's. TJ's.

Hell, they're as good as Disneyland, when you get down to it.

xxx
c

How to get to happy

What are the things that make up happiness? What does happiness look like? Forget the fleeting kinds of happiness; they're pretty easily recognizable. I mean the deep, abiding kind: the kind that separates the people who pulse with joy for life, seemingly regardless of circumstance, from the ones who don't.

My own path to happiness has been a bit on the winding side. My mother's side of the family has more than its share of depressives, some diagnosed, most self-medicating with alcohol. And Dad's side? Well, they put on a good face, but I fear there were horrible pangs of what-ifs that buzzed about them in their final hours.

While I'm far from There yet, since my whack upside the head a few years ago*, I pretty much bound out of bed every morning (provided it's not too early), eager to greet the day. I find I worry less than I used to, and complain less, too. In fact, a highly unofficial poll of the people who know me pre-Epiphany and today reveals that I am far less of a pain in the ass than ever I was before**.

Anyway, anyone who knows me at all knows I am the last person to claim Buddhic-like contentment. On the other hand, anyone who knows me at all knows I cannot help but spill it if I have something inside I feel might be of any kind of use to anyone.

So, without further ado:

1. Get to know your owner's manual

Before you can identify where you want to go, you gotta know where you are. What makes you feel heavy? What makes your heart truly sing? Start small, if you like: keep a running list of what you love to do, or what you're looking forward to. Or start with what you dread. The important thing is to look at all of it. Which leads us to...

2. Don't even try to lie.

The Truth is big and scary. The Truth is small and encouraging. But the truth of the Truth is that, once you make it your friend, it will never, ever let you stray too far from the state of happiness.

3. When things look bad, focus on what's good.

Never underestimate the power of gratitude. Nothing snaps you out of a funk faster than realizing things could be far, far worse, and probably are for someone, somewhere. Shifting your focus is at least as important as gratitude. Which means the corollary of this rule is...

4. Look at what you're looking at.

If you're feeling good, see how you're seeing things. If you're feeling not so good, see how you're seeing things. Attention can be a good teacher. So, of course, can unpleasantness.

5. Let the yucky be your teacher.

There's a huge temptation to skip over parts of the process that one finds difficult, but really, you never skip steps: you just delay them. Lather-rinse-repeat may be a part of your own growth process, of course, but ironically, you can probably get to Happy faster if you take the "slow" road. (I wouldn't know; I'm a step-skipper from way back. It took me 40 years and a whomp upside the head to get it.)

6. Understand that happy may not look like what you thought it would.

Starting out in your tiny, one-room log cabin, Happy may well look like a bling-filled crib to the stars. On the other hand, if you live in a bling-filled crib (and aren't happy), you may fear the road to happiness lies in renouncing all of your beautiful possessions. Neither is true. Money and happiness are neither mutually exclusive nor hopelessly intertwined. Good news, I think.

7. Staying fluid helps. A lot.

Some people are naturally more relaxed and open. Flexibility is something I had to learn, both literally and figuratively. Stretching and yoga helps the physical part of it, and something about it (probably the slowing down necessary to do it right) also helped me to be more flexible in my thinking. But really, happiness in huge part involves embracing change, something that not all of us (ahem) are naturally good at.

8. So does having fun.

This one sounds really self-evident, but it's easy to get all serious on The Pursuit of Happiness and suck the fun out of it. Unless you're in a critically depressive phase (in which case you should seek professional help), Getting To Happy is a life's work. So relax. Whoop it up, even. Think of this as the MG in the garage you'll be tinkering at for a lifetime. No biggie.

9. Doing trumps reading about doing.

Yes, it's helpful to find good books and articles and thoughtstarters and motivational quotations and links and a million-billion other things. You know they're no substitute for doing. Go ahead and do your reading, but also do something. One thing, every day. Make it a little project for yourself, if that helps. (Of course, if you're a do-er and an anti-reader, the opposite advice is probably true, but I've a feeling if you're on squidoo, you fall in the former camp.)

10. Put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to place the mask of the person sitting next to you.

This is a tricky one sometimes: we need to balance our need to take care of others with our need for self-care. I guess I'm hoping that native common sense will prevail here: your happiness should take a backseat to your child's getting fed or clothed or comforted. Period. (Perhaps you could even derive some happiness from knowing your child is well-cared for.) But striving to find one's identity, or love, or self-worth, through the making-happy of someone else? Well, I've taken that detour. It's the road to nowhere.

11. When in doubt, get quiet and look within.

It's a big, loud, noisy, distracting world. It can be hard to make the time for quiet ventures that don't immediately pay off in goodies like money or fame or power. Thus is confusion born. Take a step back, take a few deep breaths and look at the problem or the situation or the confusion again.

12. Be nice to yourself.

When you fall, pick yourself up kindly. If you make a mistake, take the steps you can to correct it, make a note of where you erred, and move on. Be as gentle and sweet to yourself as you would a baby or your beloved. You are both. You make the world shine bright like a brand new penny. Treat yourself thusly.

xxx
c

*Whack provided by an acute onset of Crohn's disease back in 2002 which landed me in the hospital for 11 days. You can read a little more about the experience here and here.

**A highly unofficial poll of my shrink revealed that at one point, she had not only considered me a lost cause, but was ready to dump me outright into the lap of the nearest dispensing psychiatrist she could find.

Photo by carf. Check the Creative Commons license before sharing, please.

TAGS: happiness, personal+growth, self-actualization

100 Things I Learned in 2005, Part 2

Oh, god. I'll do anything to put off "Getting To Empty", won't I?

1. I really really really like living on my own.
2. I can see the day I'll be ready to give it up anyway.
3. Despite my good intentions, I probably will not finish the curtains before that happens.
4. Surprise miracles are even better than the ones you wish for.
5. The best way to make peppers is to sauté them in a bunch of olive oil, garlic and onions, a wee bit of red wine, then throw in a crapload of spinach at the end.
6. The best way to cook steaks it to let The BF do it.
7. My sister, Liz, makes the most amazing silver jewelry.
8. My sister, Cathy, is amazing, period.
9. My spirit guides were right.
10. I don't need a lot of stuff, but I need the stuff I have to be nice.
11. The red sofa is too big for my living room.
12. I am not, perhaps, the white tornado, after all.
13. I have a visceral dislike for the color mint green.
14. Vonage is cooler in theory than it is in practice.
15. My jewelry isn't worth as much as I thought it was.
16. I need more art in my life.
17. If my gut tells me something, I need to pay attention.
18. That goes for literally as well as figuratively, in my case.
19. That colorectal surgeon who withheld results from me, sending me into a tailspin of illness it took me a year and a half to climb out of didn't realize what he wasn't doing, and didn't do it on purpose.
20. I really and truly understand this.
21. I'm ready to forgive him.
22. Everything changes.
23. It is 100% worth it to buy the wireless mouse.
24. For each computer.
25. Including an extra for your boyfriend's house.
26. It is way harder to design your own logo than it is to design someone else's.
27. There will always be some version of having to go to your friends' shows just because they are your friends, even when you have effectively left the building.
28. I have way too many clothes.
29. I have more than enough money, even when I think I don't.
30. There will never be enough time.
31. Should it come to that, it will be much easier to give up booze than it will coffee.
32. Bloggy crushes are as much fun as show crushes, and very similar in nature.
33. Except for short stretches, I will never be as glamorous as my mother, either of my grandmothers, most of my friends and both of my sisters.
34. I am okay with that.
35. They always have been.
36. You do not know how beautiful life can be until you have added a delete button to your Gmail.
37. The difference between love and attachment is the short step between living and shadow-living.
38. If you buy a forest-green rug from Urban Outfitters and use it as a bedspread, you will wake up every morning with forest-green snot in your nose.
39. Holidays are better for me as an orphan.
40. My eyes will always be bigger than my stomach, so I better get jiggy with the workarounds.
41. Estrofest is at least as transformative as morning pages.
42. Implementing GTD is both easier and harder than I thought it would be.
43. My level of ongoing commitment to something is dictated by delight, shame and money, in that order.
44. I learned more about piano and guitar than I thought I would.
45. The nano was made for the podcast.
46. Despite 43 years of evidence to the contrary, I can get fat.
47. I don't need presents at Christmas, but I must have them on my birthday.
48. The St. André at Trader Joe's is not bad, not bad at all.
49. Vodka is good for summer and scotch is good by the fire but my favorite flavor of hootch is bourbon.
50. Writing things down makes all the difference.

May the lessons and gifts of 2005 make your 2006 all the richer.

xxx c

2005

• 100 things, Part I

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

100 Things I Learned in 2005, Part 1

I have been busy gorging myself on movies, sex and certain foods I will have to give up when I resume the diet I must observe to keep the blood from coming out of my ass. Such are the holidays for me. Of course, the holidays were supposed to be devoted to organizing, blog-moving and other dorky things, but before I could properly set about arranging things for 2006, it was important that I sort out 2005.

And so, without (much) further ado, I give you that which I have learned this year, part the first:

1. Online dating works.
2. The courts don't always.
3. Tasty Bites makes one type of heat-and-eat Indian food that is SCD-legal.
4. Making your bed every day gives one an odd sense of accomplishment.
5. John Waters gives good theater.
6. Coffee tastes better in the yellow mug.
7. Tea tastes better in the blue one.
8. Given the work is interesting, I'd rather do it than a vacation.
9. Del.icio.us rocks.
10. Ditto Bloglines.
11. Double-secret-probation ditto ELF.
12. When the diet that stopped the blood from shooting out of you like a backwards bidet specifies "fanatical adherence", don't be an asshole, fanatically adhere.
13. Clogs are a lot like crack, only more expensive and your first taste isn't free.
14. Sometimes when The BF wants to spend 25 bucks on a doohickey from Dwell magazine, he's right.
15. After health, my well-being on a given day is most directly tied to how good my hair looks.
16. I cannot begin to describe how rattling that admission is.
17. Amazingly, grocery-store sushi can actually be good.
18. Even more amazingly, so can something with the total asshole name of "engagement chicken".
19. Tom Leykis and Dr. Laura Schlessinger have more in common than they'd like to admit.
20. I would rather design the postcard for a play than be in one.
21. I'm okay with that.
22. If you are the kind of chick who says "I feel more comfortable around men," you have yet to become the super-fabulous chick you can ultimately become.
23. Meyer's Dark tastes nothing like Maker's Mark, but they are apparently interchangeable in a noisy bar.
24. You cannot, under any circumstances, turn left on a red arrow.
25. If you do, it will cost you $400.
26. If you don't reply in time because it is your first mover EVER and you are too stupid to read the ticket properly, it will cost you an extra hundred and untold hours in lines at traffic court.
27. A stronger prescription has absolutely zero effect on night vision.
28. The Brits make the best soaps.
29. The Yanks make the best trash.
30. Sometimes 12" beats 15".
31. To make a really good SCD-compliant pizza, you need to put the cheese on first.
32. Then the toppings, then the sauce.
33. It still doesn't taste as good cold.
34. Old boyfriends never die; they just lurk on communicatrix.
35. Sometimes you have to wait to be proved the funniest boy in class, but when you do, your victory will be all the sweeter.
36. Grocery-store sushi kicks ass.
37. You can make a roomful of complete strangers laugh with other people's slides and videos.
38. People who drive SUVs really are ruder.
39. A bunch of cats playing pop songs from the Middle Ages makes for a mesmerizing show.
40. A bunch of cats howling in Icelandic makes for an even better one.
41. Vegas is one and a half hours too far away to be worth it.
42. Blunnies look better online than they do in person.
43. No matter how many oaths I swear not to, I will always buy more books than I have shelf space for.
44. The clients you think will be difficult can turn out to be your staunchest supporters.
45. The clients you think will be easy will inevitably turn out to be the biggest pain in the keister.
46. Given the option of any fancy entertainment available in one of the most exciting metropolitan areas in the world, I will most likely choose burgers and a movie in the 'Deener.
47. Just because someone dumps a pile of crap in your lap doesn't mean you are obligated to keep it.
48. The best movie of the year is less than 90 minutes long and has a kid wiping spooge on school lockers.
49. The Americanos are best at Kings Road and the eggs are best at Lulu's, but overall best breakfast score goes to Backdoor Bakery.
50. To spare yourself untold private misery and public humiliation, change the default setting on your blog software to "draft."

xxx c

Previous editions:

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

The city mouse and the inner-city mouse

The BF grew up on a farm and hates nature; I grew up in downtown Chicago and have quaint notions about how great it would be to live in a small town, i.e., someplace with a smattering of the goods and services I need within walking distance, adjacent to a shitload of nature. You can see the potential problem here.

Right now, we're both still relatively young* and able to cross large, busy intersections before some turd in a Hummer mows us down. But I can see the day ahead when I'm going to be over the filth, done with the congestion, and stranded on that tiny island in the middle of the street, clinging to the traffic light for dear life until the 'walk' sign comes back on. Not a pretty picture.

Plus I want to make sure we are compatible for the long haul. The BF is adamant on the issue of city life; I am adamant on the issue of The BF. Could someone, somewhere, be kidding herself here?

Fortunately, in a stroke of Christmastime serendipity, my blog doppelganger, Samantha Burns (I swear, it's like we were separated at birth, 20 years apart), came up with the answer: the Where You Should Live Quiz.

I took it immediately and pressed The BF to do the same. Surely this rigorous scientific measuring tool would provide us with the answer to our future, something more actionable than "ask again later".

The eerily-true stuff

Relatively speaking, The BF is, no surprise, The Yuppie of the relationship. He is constantly dragging me out to breakfast, lunch and dinner at charming neighborhood eateries when there is perfectly good food in grocery stores lying there uncooked and on special.

Also, the test mavens see him in a loft; so does he. I, on the other hand, lived in a crap part of Brooklyn for two years, and have had enough pee stink and garbage to last a lifetime (although I do miss the 'F' train). And he definitely has a better job than me, The Bohemian Gentrifier, or, as my friend, Scott Ferguson, used to call our little cohort, the Downwardly Mobile White Trash Who Make the Neighborhood Safe for Land Speculators.

The not-so-true stuff

Contrary to test conclusions, The BF does not think he is cooler than everyone else: he thinks he's cooler than everyone else...in Indiana, which is probably true.

The BF is also less likely to patronize a chain store of any sort than I, cheap bastard that I am, and I think he'd rather eat moth balls than a Big Mac. Me? If SCD allowed it, I'd still be enjoying my monthly Extra Value Meal #9, a.k.a. Filet-O-Fish with fries and a Coke. Supersize that baby and I'll meet you at the vomitorium.

The final result: a lifetime of mutual bliss, albeit the urban variety

Fortunately for our relationship, The BF and I still enjoy significant areas of overlap: both of us loathe resort vacations; neither one of us would feel one whit safer if the government and military were the only ones armed (especially under this particular administration); and, despite living in the American city that most resembles one, we are united in our hatred of the dreaded suburbs.

In fact, my acceptable population-to-land-mass ratio is only slightly lower than The BF's, and I'm in the 81st percentile for my age and sex, making me an utter fucking freak as far as lifestyle choices go:

Perhaps that's a good thing**. If I think about it, I'm just as happy with my fellow citizens not knowing, or, more accurately, not caring, whether my recycle bin clanks on the way to the curb and how much I like my nooners. God bless my gay, hophead neighbors.

And yes, that goes for you guys, too.

xxx c

*Quit laughing Neil, Jenny, Brandon and the rest of you baby-something punks. You are so much closer to the senior citizen discount than you know.

**It's definitely a good thing for The BF, who has said flat-out that one of the reasons he likes me is because I'm a freak.

Where You Should Live Quiz by TwelveFloorsUp, a city planner from Arlington, VA.

Wherein we explore, a year into the process, exactly what the hell a "communicatrix" is supposed to do

I had an interesting session with my shrink yesterday. In the four years (off and on, give or take) I've been seeing her, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting towards self-actualization, leaving room to focus on some "problems"* that are really luxurious in nature: you know, the philosophical biggies like "why am I here?" and "how can I best use my talents to help others?" rather than "how can I keep myself from sticking my head in this oven and making the rest of my family's lives a living hell on earth?".

So...why am I here? And what the hell should I do with my life, or what's left of it?

The truth is, while over the years I've become a passable copywriter, a decent actress, a fairly good designer and made money at all of them, nothing** has proved as rewarding as writing this stupid blog.

Not financially, of course: you make a helluva lot more jack shilling for General Mills and Toyota than spewing random meanderings. But occasionally, I'll get a comment or an email or even a face-to-face exchange where someone actually thanks me for what I've written and/or says it's helped them in some way and boy, howdy, let me tell you, that shit is better than the finest sipping whiskey. It's the feeling of plugging in to the universe, the all-that-is, the matrix/collective-unconscious/what-the-bleep pool of love that epiphanies, Singular Glorious Moments and holding fresh babies are born of.

That, along with my recent shrink-rap, have gotten me thinking: maybe I'm just supposed to share. Maybe the reason I went through hell and made it through to the other side was to show other people how they could get there, only without the hell part. Or if they're in the hell part, maybe I could help them see the gently air-cooled room at the other end of it.

I'm planning to spend the next few months really focusing on what it is I'm "supposed" to do, and my winter holiday jumpstarting the process by reading Is Your Genius At Work?***, a book I found via Dave Pollard's excellent How To Save The World.

In the meantime, I signed up for a lens at Squidoo, Seth Godin's new social bookmarking/aggregating/web-2.0-ing venture where, as they say, everyone is an expert at something. I maybe would shun the term "expert", but I know a fair bit about happiness, specifically, the kind you're not born with. (I've met those people; I marvel over them.)

Anyway, I know that a lot of the people who come here do so for the random meanderings or the reviews or the pissy rants about stupid Vegas and stupid online daters and stupid Hollywood horse-pokey. And that's okay, because I dig writing that stuff, too. Hey, I'm a generalist!

So rather than suck all the fun out of communicatrix-dot-com, I figured I'd continue to post all the wacky things that make me, well, me, but occasionally, do a more of a how-to entry that I can link to (Squidoo is more of a pointing device than a place for long-winded diatribes...er, lessons.) We'll see how it goes. I'm actually a big fan of the oblique method of nudging, kind of a wax-on, wax-off approach rather than the three-steps-to-kicking-ultimate-ass way we like here in the U.S. But maybe it'll be a good exercise for me to help clarify some of my own thinking on what's necessary to get to happy (or tequila-mastery, or whatever else I decide I'm an 'expert' at).

xxx c

*Please understand, I am fully aware of what a luxury it is to have the time and money and lack of immediate food/shelter/clothing worries to see a shrink at all. I'm painfully aware of the below-subsistence life that so many on the planet are forced to live right this second, and for the foreseeable future. I'm just trying to leverage the good that I have into something better for everyone. Namaste, and all that.

**With the possible exception of the writing and performing of #1 & #2, my collaborative piece on illness as the road to wellness. The #1 refers to my writing partner's interstitual cystitis; the #2 stands for my Crohn's. Or poop, if you prefer.

***The author uses the word "genius" to define that exact particular thing that you and only you are good, nay, the best, at. Not genius. I am not a genius. Believe me, I only wish I were a genius.

Images via kunstradio. Danke schoen!

TAGS: Squidoo, Seth+Godin, happiness, How+to+Get+to+Happy, communicatrix

A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 6: My Crohn's Disease

Have you ever been sick? Really, really sick, the kind where you and God enter into heavy negotiations?

Do you remember how for the first few days you feel well after being sick, you appreciate your health for what seems like the first time, ever?

That's what happened to me after my acute onset of Crohn's...times ten. I've written about it before, but it merits repeating: the gift that my disease gave me was nothing less than my happiness. I have nothing but gratitude for my illness (and the people who helped me through it, too, of course).

Not that I'd wish it on anyone else. One of my main hopes in writing this blog is that I might help one or two other people find their own happiness without having to go through quite as much blood and toilet paper.

But on this day of Thanksgiving, I think it's appropriate to give the biggest cosmic shout-out to my wacky colon for all that it gave me. And, um, continues to give me every single day, with delightful regularity.

xxx
c

A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 5: evidEnce room

Bart. Alicia. Jason. Ames. I remember what I thought after seeing my first evidEnce room show back in 1995, a production of Harry Kondeleon's The Houseguests: how do they do it?

Kirk. Dorie. Lauren. Rand, Colleen, Nick, Megan.

It was the same question I felt after seeing the next few shows: how do they do it? Find these great plays? Produce them like off-Broadway shows on no money? Get to work in this unbelievably cool space? Soon enough, it was replaced by another question: how can I do it with them?

John, Ann, Leo. Ignacia, Lori, Don, Katie, Burr, Sissy.

My friend, Tom, a longtime company member, called one day and said they were looking for an understudy to cover performances for the formidable Pamela Gordon, who had just been cast in a recurring role on Buddy Faro. The part, half of a wealthy couple quarantined in their London home duing the last great plague, was enormous and way beyond my capabilities at the time, but the dress was teeny-tiny and already rented for the run.

I was in...sort of. It took years of scrabbling along in tiny parts before I felt like I got any kind of a foothold. Even then, I would alternately burst with pride over being part of such a prestigious company and fester with fury over my lowly status within it. Why was I not front and center? Why were my career and stature not improving, clusters of awards not accumulating, sonnets not being written in my name?

Dylan, O-Lan, Tad. Ken. Johnny Z. Liz, Alex, Alain, Uma, Ryan.

But a funny thing happened somewhere along the way: these people who had started out as, let's be honest, the means to an end became the end, in and of themselves. I found myself caring less about being in the shows and more about being with the wonderful people who made them, both at the theater and outside of it. As a delightful and wholly unexpected bonus, the flyers I'd initially created semi-grudgingly as my contribution to the company somehow turned me into a graphic designer. A good one. A happy one. Jessica. Michael. Lisa.

The adage has it that you shouldn't be an actor unless you have to be. It seems like I don't need it like I used to, and, accordingly, am letting it go, bit by bit: the search for a theatrical agent; the hustling for TV and film work; the constant cycle of rehearsal/perform/repeat.

Toby. Barbara. Beth. Wendy, Justin, Travis, Tommy.

I know that the hardest thing to let go of is going to be the Evidence Room; I also know it's as inevitable as change itself that someday, I will.

With great sorrow. With a wee bit of wondering if I might have done things better.

But mostly, with a gratitude I never knew possible.

xxx c

A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 4: Jannicups

There are only two people I've ever met whom I believe to be capable of unconditional love: my paternal grandmother, who never even said a bad word about Hitler; and Jan Kostner, my oldest friend in the world.

Or, as Jan prefers to say, "my friend I've had the longest."

For a woman who's managed to move through the world at impressively high levels, Jan is jaw-droppingly guileless. I consider myself a fairly earnest fellow, but I am Machia-fucking-velli compared to Jan. Plus she's nice. And loyal. Holy crap, is she nice and loyal. I can spew the worst kind of bitch-venom around Jannicups and feel secure that (a) she will not judge me and (b), what goes in the moment, stays in the moment. Hell, she even puts up with me calling her "Jannicups."

Which is not to say Jan is above a good, chatty evening of gossip and Chardonnay; she's not. When I'm starting to feel a little butch, a dose of Jan sets me right up. When we meet to eat, it's usually for tea or cocktails (or tea AND cocktails) at some fabulous hotel bar. She took me for my first pedicure and gave me my first gift certificate to a Four Seasons massage (which, three years later, I still haven't used;I swear, they're going to take away my girl card if I don't start stepping up my game).

Legend has it that our mothers met when we were two, pushing strollers on Michigan Avenue. Neither is around to confirm or deny this any more, but it doesn't matter: Jan and I are long past needing reasons to be friends; we're family, and family, for better or for worse, is yours for life.

Jannicups? She's all about the better...

xxx c

A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 3: The Baby of the Family

When I was about 8 and she was about 3, my sister bit me in the stomach. Hard. Not enough to draw blood, but then, she was too smart for that, even at 3. And when I complained of this filial abuse, our mother replied, "You're the oldest; you're supposed to be above that." Score one for Liz.

We had a rocky time of it for a long time. I was always older and wiser; she was always prettier and more adorable. Our paternal grandfather (the smiling gent in this snap) used to say, "You we had to chase around the room for a hug. Your sister? She was a big, fat, slobbering bundle of love."

The bundle of love is taller than me now, and thinner, and still much, much prettier, dammit. But these things are not what make her remarkable. What is most extraordinary about my sister is her willingness to try...and try...and try again. To overcome the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to strike out past the safe but dreadful boundaries we were taught to live within, to bravely go where no Sexton or Weinrott has gone before: to the Truth, and the very heart of it.

She hauled my sorry, 'fraidy ass to the hospital when I was too stubborn to admit I was dying. She was there without question when the other kind of love crumbled to bits in my hands. She is my rock; she is my family-family, or all that is left of it when the rest have died or worse, left us to twist slowly and alone in the wind.

And so together we stumble and fumble towards a relationship that neither of us was raised to have but that both of us hope to achieve someday.

Somehow, I have a feeling we will get there.

xxx c

A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 2: The BF

Ten-and-a-half months ago, I woke up hungover from what I hope will be my last New Year's Eve alone. Not because I have a problem with being alone or even being alone for New Year's Eve, but because on January 1st, 2005, I was lucky enough to meet someone so wonderful and so brilliant and so perfect (for me), the only hope I have left is that I'll die before he does because the idea of a life without him breaks my heart.

I use the word "meet" loosely. I emailed The BF via The Onion personals; he answered via Salon's personals. I, you see, am a dork and a hussy. The BF, on the other hand, is a geek and a gentleman, far, far too polite to turn a lady (or even me) down flat.

Sometimes we joke-wonder about why we didn't meet each other 10 years ago. And whatever the reason, the truth is I wasn't ready for the likes of him, so gentle, so true, so tolerant and supportive. Do you need something? Do you need it now? Or worse, the Hollywood version of 'now', which is yesterday? The BF's got your back. I have learned to be careful what I wish for out loud around him, lest it show up on my doorstep, metaphorically or literally.

And of course it goes without saying he's in the 99th percentile when it comes to brains, sense of humor and sheer sex appeal.

Let me tell you this: I don't generally go in for corny sentiment. I'm generally a guy's gal, the kind of tough, hard-talkin' dame that makes John Wayne look like Jake Gyllenhal. But when my friend, Vic, inquired as to details of this fine romance, I replied without hesitation: The BF is the answer to a prayer I didn't know I'd been praying.

A-fucking-men.

xxx
c