Category Archives: personal idiocies

It might be me.

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I’ve been searching to find out who might be the oldest continuing personal blogger in the U.S.  Not a blogger who hawks services or products or is any kind of influencer.  Rather, a female blogger who posts about her life and times.  My search has yielded no information. I have been blogging since 2001, starting at kalilily.blogspot.com.   Is there any woman out there older than I (84) doing the same thing?

Back in December of 2001, I blogged about why  I started to blog.  It’s worth reprising here:

So, there are some discussions going these days on about the purpose and value of weblogs. Oddly enough, the other night at my bi-monthly group meeting, I mentioned that I had begun a weblog, and I was asked to explain what that was and why I was doing it, and why I just wasn’t keeping a journal. As I’ve said, I’ve unsuccessfully tried keeping journals before and I write so much slower than I think that I got frustrated and quit. I can type almost as fast as I think (I got used to doing that at the job from which I retired last year, which involved mostly whipping out quick documents for others to share and claim as their own.) So, it’s easier to do it on the computer. And why don’t I just keep a journal on disk, I was asked. The truth is, I admitted, is that I’m used to writing for an audience. And I like having an audience. Even my poems are usually written with an audience (sometimes of one) in mind. It’s why I ballroom dance. I’m a performer at heart. I need ways to say to the world: this is who I am. Look at me. Pay attention. It seems to me that that’s at the heart of why everyone else who keeps a blog does so. In a world where we all have to live up to expectations and assume roles for survival purposes (our own and others) — caregiver, mother, employee, citizen — it’s so satisfying to have a place where one can BE who one is. Or in some cases, where one can BE who one wants to BE. It really doesn’t matter. We can create who we want to be or be creative with who we are. Either way, one has an identity, a voice. In a way, it’s kind of a new art form — or at least it can evolve in some cases into such. How cool is that!

 

No Charm School Charmer #2

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A version in poetry, in contrast to the prose version. This is a good example of how my poetry comes from a much deeper and more honest place than my prose.

Charm School

They sent me to Charm School
that graduation summer.
Each day I dressed for Park Avenue:
black high heels and gartered hose,
dress hemmed below my pristine knees.
Even white gloves, the eternal symbol
of lady-like correctness.

They sent me to Charm School
to smooth my ragged edges,
remove me from the music
and the bad boys who played it
and give me the face that they
wanted to show the world.
And I went, my last concession.

The sent me to Charm School,
where I learned to sit with ankles,
(not knees) crossed, hands cupped
demurely in a lap that never opened.
They amended my eyebrows, hair,
tried to dislodge my unpleasant
speech, bearing, attitude.

They send me to Charm School.
And the one thing I remember
is how Loretta Young could open
a door into crowded room and
gracefully turn her back
on her eager audience.

They sent me to Charm School,
but their bright fantasies and
those charming illusions,
could not defuse the dark fire
that fuels my recalcitrant soul.

No Charm School Charmer

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(Reprised from a piece I wrote that was published on a defunct blog called “Time Goes By”. I found it when I Googled myself.)

When I graduated high school in 1957 at the age of 17, my parents were reluctant to send me away to college for fear that I would get even “wilder” than they already thought I was.

I wasn’t really wild – I mean, I did date a guy with a motorcycle. I did once stay out until 2AM sitting on the curb talking with a boy I knew who had just run away from boarding school. I did come home a little drunk several times. Well, I guess I can see why my folks were worried.

So they enrolled me in the John Robert Powers Charm School on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and I spent three days a week that summer before leaving home getting my rough edges polished. I took the commuter train from Yonkers, dressed 50s appropriately in stockings, heels, a dress and white gloves. No white shoes, however. These were not considered appropriate for city wear, even in the summer.

There were several other girls my age in my charm school class, but the only two I remember are a slim, athletic and naturally attractive girl from Darien, Connecticut, and a short, ill-proportioned, homely girl who lived in a grand manor on the Long Island Sound. I know that because the wealthy girl invited the other two of us to a party at her house. She came to pick me up in a limo and asked me and the other girl to stay overnight.

Coming from a middle class family, I was pretty overwhelmed by the family portraits on the walls, the tennis courts overlooking the Sound, the maid who served us breakfast in the morning, the rugs that seemed as soft as pillows. I don’t think the girl from Darien was as impressed; I think she came from a similar background.

I had nothing in common with those two girls, but for three days a week for six weeks, we helped each other get through the training that each of us was being forced to endure because our parents felt we had something lacking.

We had elocution lessons from a dramatically made-up young woman (probably an aspiring actress) who had us repeat “the little bottle is on the metal table” and “the man ate a ham sandwich” to train our ears and tongues away from our New York City area accents.

We learned to put on a fur coat without elbowing anyone nearby (I have never owned a fur coat). We learned how to sit on the edge of a chair with our ankles crossed and how to gracefully get up and down from sitting on the floor without exposing anything private.
We learned how to style our hair, what clothes we looked best in, and how apply makeup. And, yes, we learned to walk with a book balanced on our heads. I still have the ring binder with notes and pictures that I cut from magazines to illustrate what I was learning.

Most interestingly, for me, we learned how to enter and exit a room like Loretta Young did at the beginning and end of her television series in the 50s. (I have made use of that technique many times.) The trick is to turn you back on the people in the room with a graceful flourish. The swirling skirts give it that extra flair.

I never kept in touch with those two girls whom I met in charm school. I imagine that the girl from Connecticut wound up marrying a doctor or a lawyer and continued to play tennis. I thought often of the girl from Larchmont-on-the-Sound, for whom no amount of learned charm could change her acne or large nose or her odd shape. I still wonder how her life went. Maybe her parents made her get plastic surgery. Maybe she grew into a strong, self-aware woman who took control of her own life. Maybe she became a therapist who helps other awkward young women discover who they are and want to be.

As for me, I went away to college and I rarely went back home except for major holidays. I even stayed on campus over the summers and took courses. I stayed out late, drank, partied and procrastinated. I wrote poetry, danced in musicals, joined a sorority, was feature editor of the school paper, and graduated. I stayed through graduate school.

I found that I rarely used any of the techniques I learned in the John Robert Powers Charm School. And when I did, it usually was to get a laugh.

Ooops, I did it again.

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With my DSPD, I tend to fall asleep between 3 am and 6 am. Two nights ago, however, I was never able to fall asleep at all. So, I got out of bed at 9 am, took a shower, and sat down at my computer and ordered some Sleepy Time Cheeba Chews from my local medical marijuana dispensary. There are 20 chews for $30. Each piece is a 5.43 mg of a combination of THC and CBN.

I haven’t had any edibles for a while because they are so expensive. At least they are for me. 5 mg is considered one dose. It usually takes me 20 mg to have any effect.

Last night, I didn’t want to take any chances. I had to fall asleep. So I took 30 mg. around 11:30 pm. Got me totally stoned, so that all I could is lie in bed and space out. And I didn’t fall asleep anyway until 3 am.

I’ve done that before, took too much and just had to ride it out. It’s not a bad sensation, but it’s not really what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to fall asleep.

It is now after midnight, so I’ll try taking 3 chewies first, and it that’s not enough, take another one. They take from 1/2 to 1 hour to kick in. In the meanwhile, I’ll get ready for bed and work on a crochet project if my arthritic thumbs can take it. Maybe watch some tv. Or read. When I start getting sleepy, I’ll go to bed.

It’s all trial and error. No one knows how the cannabinols will affect an individual. But hey, I’m a risk taker, right?

It’s Not Insomnia, It’s DSPS

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I don’t have insomnia, I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

Over the past decade, I consulted with various sleep specialists, none of whom ever mentioned DSPS as a diagnosis. I finally had to diagnose myself. All of them told me that I, indeed, had a sleep disorder and provided various suggestions, all of which I tried and documented here. The last sleep study I endured, several months ago, required two Ambien to even get me to sleep on their schedule. Then they woke me up after 4 hours (5 am) because I had to leave, and I was barely able to walk out of the lab and find a place to sit and wait for my daughter to pick me up. I have found that few doctors do the investigations necessary to actually find an accurate diagnosis. It has become cookie-cutter medicine. One size fits most.

Three months ago, I had a serious emotional meltdown, which prompted me to find someone to prescribe more effective anti-depressants, since there would be days I would only get out of bed to eat and go to the bathroom. Struggling to change my circadian rhythm — and failing over and over — finally sent me on an internet search to see if my 3 or 4 am to noon or later sleep schedule was something others were experiencing. And they are. Many. All of the world. Almost all just learned to live with it because nothing worked when they tried to change it. One woman who lived on the east coast took a job on the west coast because she figured that would put her bedtime at midnight, and she could live with that. But it didn’t take long for her body to relapse back to a 3 am bedtime, even on the west coast.

This household shuts down around 11 pm each night. That leaves me with a good four hours to find something to do that won’t wake them up. It’s so easy to just sit, watch tv or read, and eat. I wish I could use that time to write poetry.

Anti-depressants, at the potency at which I am now consuming them, dull the sensibilities that I need to be inspired to create poetry. Even my prose becomes drab and spiritless. But now that I have a diagnosis and an actual official name for what I am experiencing, I will try to ease off some of what I began taking to climb out of the Major Depressive Disorder that I fell into because of all of my failed efforts to change my circadian rhythm.

What I wonder is, why now, since most folks with DSPS are adolescents or young adults. I think there’s a connection to the 5 year trauma I lived through taking care of my increasingly demented mother while dealing with the constant harassment and abuse heaped upon me by my brother. During that time I had no set sleep schedule and often had to resort to sleeping pills to get any rest at all. While enduring my recent meltdown, I realized that I really do have PTSD as a result. Knowing is always better than not knowing.

I’m back writing on this blog to fill up some of that time until 3 or 4 am, when my sleep switch activates. That’s really what it feels like. While I feel relaxed and tired during those wee morning hours, there comes a time when I simply fall asleep, as though a switch is flicked. There is nothing I can do to make that happen. When my brain is ready, it shuts off. And then I sleep deeply for 8 or 9 hours and wake up rested.

So, this is my life now, at age 81. It could be worse, and I try to be grateful that I can still see and hear (with help) and drive (but not at night) and I don’t have any serious medical conditions. I can live with that.

09/18/2020, 7:45 PM

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I never worried about getting old. I figured that I would deal with it when it happened. Well, it happened, and I’m not dealing with it very well these days. Objects seem to fly out of my grasp. I’m constantly misplacing things. If I get down, I can’t get up without help. I trip when there’s nothing there to trip on. The technology that I used to use without a second thought now requires too much figuring out. It doesn’t help that, back in March, I accidentally sent my removable partial denture down the garbage disposal, making it unusable, and it’s taking forever to get a new one. I lose track of my finances and find myself owing more than I thought. My crazy sleep pattern doesn’t help, of course.

It wouldn’t have helped if I had worried about getting old before it happened. There’s no way to have known what it was going to mean for me. Everyone is different. My mother lived until she was 94, but her last 10 years were lost in dementia.

I wonder who those old people are who go out dancing, marathon running, paddling canoes. Of course, I’m assuming the Pandemic has put the kibosh on all of that now — unless they are the deniers. Good luck to them, I say.

I finally let my hair go gray more than a decade ago, and I was very happy with it. Only now, my hair is thinning. Not so happy, now.

The other day I took a magnifying mirror outside so I could see my eyebrows, which are also thinning – except for the long wiry white ones, which I plucked out. I suppose I could get one of those eyebrow stencils, that so many of the folks on tv seems to be using, but I think they look horrible. Not many choices here for me.

Over on Ronni Bennett’s blog, she has been chronicling what it’s like to get older. Exactly my age, she is now chronicling how she is dealing with the pancreatic cancer that is literally killing her. She is heroic in dealing with her situation. I wonder how I would handle it.

Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful that I can still drive, blog, see the tv, chat on the phone with the one close friend I’ve been able to make in the ten years since I’ve moved here (more on that another time). Grateful for the support of my family, especially during this time of quarantine.

The one thing I certainly never expected to happen when I got old is the Great Orange Turd, who has made all of our lives a nightmare. And I just heard that Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died. Fuck it all.

Dear Diary: Of Course

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Of course, I’m late again. Of course I’m still trying to get my crazy sleep schedule under control. Of course I’m eating too much chocolate. Of course I’m still experimenting with medical marijuana, which is the only thing that can get me to fall asleep. Last night, I put some alcohol tincture in a glass with V8 juice. It tastes like a Bloody Mary.

It still took at least an hour for me to fall asleep, so while I was lying there, I listened to one of my playlists on Spotify. It includes most of the songs I liked over the past 50 years. As I listened, I realized that I could put the songs in an order that reflected where I was in my life at the time each song was popular. I might try to do that at some point.

Listening to each song brought back very specific feelings, some of which I wish I could choose to forget. I have always tended to make choices based on what I wanted or needed. It’s not that I didn’t consider the wants and needs of others involved; but, ultimately I did what I wanted.

When I lie in bed at night, waiting for the THC to kick in, I let each song take me back, like the images in a photo album, to past places. When my mind reviews what my life was like each time, I feel regret. Regret about how little I understood myself and what little wisdom I had. Regret that I never learned how to “plan” — financially, physically, inter-personally. Regret that many of my choices negatively affected other people. Regret that I must have been very emotionally immature.

Throughout these 80 years I never set long-term goals, but rather I took advantage of opportunities (which worked out fine as far as my various careers, but not so fine in terms of my various relationships.)

It’s obvious to me, now, that the men with whom I chose to have a relationship were chosen because I knew they would not be around long. (The exception was my late ex-husband, but that’s a whole other story.) I knew, instinctively, how to get them to leave when I was ready to move on. In the meanwhile, each contributed, in his own way, to something I wanted or needed in my life. (Perhaps I also knew, instinctively, that there was no one man who could give me all I thought I needed; and now I see that I didn’t particularly care what they needed as well.)

From the perspective of decades, I am finally realizing several things: I am a bit of a narcissist; I am good at manipulating situations and people; I need people more than they need me; I like beginnings and endings and don’t do well keeping things going in the middle; I never knew who I really was. I’m not sure I even do now.

The Power of Images, Symbols, and Icons in the #Resistance

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Five years ago, I crocheted something for “The Snatchel Projet” and posted about it here. (And you can see a photo of what I made.)

This is how I started the post:

What’s a “snatchel”?

Before I get to that, let me just explain that I have in my life marched in protests carrying banners with symbols proclaiming my positions on critical issues. During the wartime 70s, I sewed a gigantic “Peace” banner and hung it from a tree limb that hung over our driveway. I believe in the power of symbols. I believe that sometimes you have to get in the faces of those who refuse to hear what you’re saying.

Well, thanks to tRump, things have gotten even worse. And that’s why the Pusshat Project and the Ides of Trump postcard project are important.

Symbols are powerful. While you might not be interested in reading this book, the cover says it all. It worked in Poland.

I would love to come up with another project that uses images and symbols to further the cause of the Resistance — something that we can send to legislators (knit, crochet, draw…) and post various places that would be a shout-out of our Crone voices. I’m looking for ideas and collaborators.

How can we add our creative resources to help stem this tide of fascism that will ruin our nation for sure. Yes, there are efforts being made by those with some governmental effect.

But we have to keep giving the symbolic finger to remind those who have stolen our power to uphold our American values.

Too much or too little. Stop #6 on My Medical Marijuana Mystery Tour

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While there are all kinds of articles online these days explaining how to make cannabutter and how to calculate dosage if you are going to make brownies or cookies, I like this one because it includes both descriptions as well as other helpful information.

I think that I have pretty much given up trying to make my own edibles because I can’t seem to get the dosage right. Of course. everyone is affected differently, so it’s trial and error. I also wish I could get the leaves rather than just the buds. Edibles baked with buds have a strong skunky flavor. I don’t remember that happening when you use the leaves.

So, if you are going to start trying to use Medical Marijuana for insomnia, I suggest starting with the caramel nuggets, and the most cost effective way and easiest way to use them is to cut each 50 mg nugget into four or five pieces and suck on one before you go to bed. That is what is working for me. Not all dispensaries carry a wide variety of ways to consume Medical Marijuana, although all seem to carry capsules and lozenges. I just didn’t want to swallow capsules.

Between 10 mg and 12.5 mg of Indica seems to be enough to help me fall asleep and be able to go back to sleep after I wake up to go to the bathroom. It works better than any prescription medication I have tried.

So, for now, this tour is taking a break, since this dose and product seems to be working for me. If I have any great subsequent revelations, I will post them here.

I do have to report that one night I accidentally took a double does (didn’t cut the nugget correctly) and really tripped out. The worse part was panicking because I was alone in my bedroom on the other side of the house from everyone else and felt very disoriented. Suppose I got a heart attack! I was afraid to get out of bed because I was dizzy and the walls were circling around me. I learned my lesson. All I want to do is be able to sleep; I guess I don’t like feeling that much out of control any more.

Final Note: Remember, there is a big difference between hemp oil, CBD oil, and oil made from Marijuana with THC, and this article explains it clearly. http://www.mintpressnews.com/hemp-oil-versus-cbd-oil-whats-the-difference/193962/

And this “Ultimate Guide to Cannabidiol” is a thorough examination of CBD, its history, and its benefits.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Stop #5 on My Medical Marijuana Mystery Tour

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Since I moved in with my daughter and family about five years ago (they are my assisted living arrangement), I have not done much cooking or baking. I never really did much baking anyway, but so far I’ve made two tries at pot brownies and one at cookies. I thought that buying the actual buds and baking my own edibles would be cheaper.

Before I did any baking, I ground up the Indica strain buds, slow heated them in coconut oil for hours, and then used the oil for the baked goods. That is the simplest way to do it. The most elaborate, and supposedly the most effective, is the Rick Simpson method, which up until last week, was a secret. Simpson makes his oil using the leaves as well as buds and begins by immersing them in a solvent. At the moment, the only place that you can buy Rick Simpson Oil is in California. I have decided that, even with my short cut version, not only is making the oil too much work; its impossible to figure out how much oil to mix with how much weed and equally impossible to ever know how potent the result is going to be.

Not only did my baked goods have an underlying skunky smell, but I had to eat too many of them to feel any effect of relaxation. And they didn’t taste that good either, whether I mixed the gunky residue in the the batter or not. I’ve given up on making my own oil and baking brownies.

I wish that I could grow my own plants. All I would need is a couple of them. But, in Massachusetts, you can only grow a few plants if you are disabled or can’t get to a dispensary, or are very poor. So much for legally growing my own. So, back I go to the dispensary.

As soon as I step through the door, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. alice

Each time I go, the “menu” is different, with different strains available with names such as “Amnesia Haze,” “Afgooey,” and “Sour Tsunami X Cataract Kush.” The “Edibles” on the menu are usually the same: chocolate bars, caramel nuggets, and lozenges. There’s tincture that I would consider, but it’s not available in the Indica strain (which is for relaxation). This time they also are advertising some kind of “shake,” but I don’t bother to ask.

Instead I get into a discussion about the menu with a gray-bearded guy in line ahead of me. He does the caramel Dose Nuggets, he says. I look at the prices. They are the same as the lozenges, which I have tried and don’t like. The capsules are $4 each at the lowest dose. I don’t like swallowing capsules at bed time, and I’m still playing around with “cost vs benefit.”

I notice that the caramel nuggets come in 50 mg doses as well as 10 mg. I look at the price of each and start doing some math. An individual 10 mg nugget is $5. A 50 mg nugget is $15, and if I cut it into five pieces, that would give me five 10 mg doses ($3 a piece). It’s a lot cheaper to cut up the bigger nugget, so I that’s what I get, enough to cut up and last me for several weeks. I also buy a cannabis chocolate bar to try. What the hell, right?

What a difference a “dose” makes. Next time.