Day: February 7, 2007

OK, I just returned from the ladies room, and I believe I went into the wrong facility. For whatever reason, despite the knitted scarf, earrings, long skirt and obvious bosoms, today, I look like a man in drag. I just applied some lipstick, which I’m sure is cementing the Drag Queen Within look for the rest of the afternoon. I need to go back to bed so I can wake up a woman, dammit!

Special Orders DO Upset Us.
I think my senior years are going to be spent as a shut-in. Mostly as a defense mechanism to avoid being thrown in JAIL. I went through the drive-thru at Sonic at lunch, and ordered a double burger. No fries, or tots, none of that stuff, I just wanted one big ol’ hamburger for lunch. And I had a coupon. I might as well have garrotted myself with some piano wire and saved everyone the trouble. See, the coupon was for a FREE BURGER, because we drove in a few weeks ago and they were closed, and they handed out free burger coupons as a “woops! We sorry!” sort of gesture. And it clearly states that it’s for one free single burger, anything else is extra. You’d think, what with this being a four-color process coupon and all, not someone’s ghetto publishing extravaganza, that it’d be pretty easy to deduct the cost of a single burger. Here’s some math to indicate how it was going:
That’ll be eleven…….. (my eyebrows are hitting my hairline, waiting for the other shoe to drop)
That’ll be seven (something). I got a Sweetheart Shake, too. Which, by the way, is pretty darn tasty, and yet my life would be so much better if they came in a SMALL. I threw half of it away.
I told him about my coupon, and I could see the entire axis of the store’s foundation start to spin. He tried to add another burger to my order. No. More silence. Finally, I drove up to the window. A manager got involved. I finally said, fine, just give me the regular burger. OK, $2.50. Manager reappears. He took my coupon and tore it up. (?) I just wanted to LEAVE and didn’t enquire about his Sinead O’Connor act. Then he came back and said they’d make it work. $4.49. OK. Finally, the Burger of Discontent is done. Oh, it’ll be a few minutes on that shake. It had been 10 minutes at this point, I didn’t even ask what sort of paralysis I had caused, I just took my meal and left. And concluded that in the interest of gravitational rotation and staying out of the pokey, I should stop trying to do anything different from the Great Menu of Life. Yeah, right.

So, I am just hoping that this day picks up. Or that DAMN I start to feel like a woman….. ba ba da da daaadeeeyaaaaah

That was the subject line from some spam I got today; I thought it had a nice ring to it. Of course, I didn’t open it, because we don’t smoke & I haven’t found much of a need for ashtrays, burly or otherwise.

Today’s somewhat better on the health front, probably due largely to the nap I squeezed in yesterday. My coughing didn’t stop last night, and this morning, it finally dawned on me why my back hurts: the coughing! My entire ribcage area feels like I’ve been treated to a visit from a loan shark or something. I’m hoping that a couple more days of the meds will start kicking this bug out of my system & life will get back to normal – a term that’s always relative.

I’m blue (da bo dee da bo dah), because I had to sign the papers that say my dad’s will & all that stuff is Final. Since he left nearly all of his estate to his wife, that also brings up some issues that I keep stuffing into a footlocker and piling books on. It reminds me of the bright hot Springtime afternoon that I had a blowout fight with him over his decision to leave everything to her, and how he finally got angry with me, and stopped trying to protect me and said, “Jennifer, I wake up in the morning and wonder if this is the day I’m going to die.” He hid the severity of his illness from all of us, but I think in that moment, it helped set the stage for what would come later – which still came far too soon. I remember feeling panic and regret for a few days after that conversation, but I don’t anymore. I’m glad we talked about it and scrappled through it like we did with anything else we didn’t see eye-to-eye on. I wish things were different, so many things, and no amount of money or stuff will ever take from me the relationship he and I had. Sometimes with blended families, it’s hard to dissect the semantics and definitions of words – both my dad & his wife viewed their partners’ children as their children as well. Call me selfish – and I know my dad WAS a dad to her kids – but I was his kid for 31 years before he even knew them. And it sounds petty and yet, with everything I could get wrapped up in and off-track focusing on, that is the one thing that makes me feel a little better when my Panic Gnomes try to get me swirling over what’s fair and 100 other things I can’t control. The other part of my blue is that I’m going to have to go home & go through a whole bunch of stuff, things I’m dreading seeing and remembering and the tidal wave of emotions that will come with it. Part of it is my hatred of who I was when I was a teen, and all the reminders I’ll have of my fractured, broken relationship with my mother. The regrets of knowing now what I didn’t know then, and the mistakes I made. I prefer to live in a candy-colored bubble of avoidance.
It’s so much nicer than a burly ashtray.