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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}