Some of you folks who have known me for a while now may remember my glory days bicycling around my neighborhood, happily burning calories, building (leg) muscle, and seeing which neighbors took care of their yards and which ones didn’t. The above picture is all I have to say about that, period. (It isn’t MY bike, but it might as well be.) Okay, where’s the complaint department? Winter has gone on for entirely too long, now, and it’s about time somebody put a stop to it. If I were 30 years younger, I’d organize the neighborhood, make protest signs and picket….um….where? Well, we all know that these extreme weather patterns are the result of global warming, and if we all reduced our own personal energy use and left smaller carbon “footprints” in our wake, it would help, but the keyword of course is “all”. And, it would mean some really humongous lifestyle changes. Like, in my case, quitting my job in Boston because I have to drive 40 miles in and 40 miles out every day to get to and from. And I do drive a car that gets amazing mileage out of a tank of gas, but all the same…anyway, back to what I was saying about being sick of this weather. Can anybody say S.A.D.? I seriously need a jolt of sunshine, and may have to book a last-minute flight out to L.A. for a visit with my darling son. I miss him like crazy, anyway. We talk on the phone a couple of times a week, but that’s such a poor substitute for hanging out with him. He’s the kind of person who just generates excitement - lifts your spirits, and energizes everybody just by being in the same room with them. Even his sisters are talking about how it’s time to get together with the “bro” again. I think DD3 & her husband & little girl are going out to see him during the April school vacation week (her DH is a teacher in Boston) So, maybe I will. Go out there soon, I mean. It’s 2008, and I have a whole new 24 days of vacay to use. (Don’t ask me how they calculate that! Wouldn’t 25 make more sense? Oh, well, I can combine four days with a holiday week when we get a Monday off anyway, and still have a whole nine days at a stretch if I want to do it that way, I guess.) Well, we’ll see. I need to save time for summer trips, too - and DH & I were talking about going out to L.A. in the fall, so I dunno.

ANYWAY. I have so little to report, and that’s mostly why I haven’t (reported in). Life (and winter) goes on - day after gray day, work is the same, my sis is home and doing okay, but now her son - who was diagnosed with a malignant tumor on his brainstem five years ago, and with whom we all, but she, especially, went through a grim two years of trips back and forth to the Duke University Oncology Center (I flew down to drive them there once every few months, and she drove on the in-between months), and one absolutely terrible month-long bout when he was hospitalized with and nearly died from fungal meningitis - has just had a routine (every six-month) MRI at their local hospital in Asheville (NC) and he’s been ordered to report back to Duke for some unknown reason - one assumes an abnormality in the MRI. My sister has had more trouble to contend with than it seems humanly possible to handle. I mean, compared with hers, my life has been one of surprisingly few problems.

Yes, you all know that I’m a little dotty, and I wasn’t going to go out on a limb and say anything about it, but what the heck? All you can do is say, “Omigawd! I’m not reading THAT lunatic’s blog anymore!”, right? Well, some of you know that I had an absolutely terrible relationship with my mother. In restrospect, my (clinical) diagnosis would probably be that she had Narcissistic Personality Disorder - NPD - which has only become an actual DSM diagnosis within the past maybe 30 (?) years. One of the major symptoms, if you will, is an inability to empathize with anyone else’s feelings, and therefore, a person with NPD doesn’t CARE about anyone else’s feelings the way a *normal* person does (Keeping in mind that *normal* is pretty fluid, as well). But for the most part, someone with NPD feels quite superior to everyone else, and feels completely justified in manipulating and controlling others in order to get what they want. And they become quite expert at manipulation, and equally expert at “pretending” human emotion that they have no way of feeling. AND they have no idea whatsoever that they are really quite monstrous.

That was dear old Mama. For some reason (probably an inherent will to survive) I never bought into her “loving mother” act, and as a result, we were at odds for as far back as I can remember. I DO remember that although she was a registered nurse, when I became deathly ill at around the age of four, she fought with my father about getting me to the doctor. Apparently I had become quite ill, running a high fever, vomiting, etc., etc., and she labeled it “a flu” and brushed off his insistence that I needed to be seen by a doctor. Ultimately, he had my sister bundle me up, and they (he and my sister) got me out to the car and to the emergency room where it was determined that my appendix had burst, and I needed emergency surgery. I survived. End of story. No thanks to Mommie Dearest.

My sister was always the dutiful daughter - anxious to please, whereas I didn’t give a hoot, apparently - and she always did her best to “stay on Mama’s good side”, even after she was herself a grown woman, married with a family of her own. Even then, if Mama snapped her fingers, sis ran to see what she wanted. My dad died at 69 - and I often thought he probably did so just to get away from my mother: they had been snapping back and forth and bickering endlessly since he’d retired four years before. My mother lived to be 86 - and lived very comfortably on the proceeds from stock they owned in Exxon (Can you imagine what that’s paying now?), Shell, and a few other oil companies as well as Texas, California and Washington State utilities and some other pieces of this and that, and a pension, and other little income streams that I probably don’t even have a clue about.

Anyway, she moved to Florida (where my sister was living) when she was in her mid-seventies. Bought herself a place down there, and didn’t want to be bothered making transportation arrangements for her miniature poodle (who had managed to win my father’s heart and followed him around everywhere when he was still alive) so she had him (the poodle) “put to sleep”. She and my father had that dog for a good twelve years, but he was in the way of something she wanted to do, so it was “Sayonara, Pepi”.  Jesus.

So began her Florida chronicle of consistent ill health (she was a hypochondriac all her life, and as she got older, it only got worse) and my sister - the *dutiful daughter* - ran and fetched and stayed with her more often than not and suffered her abuse, and nearly decimated her OWN marriage in her devotion to our mother, and finally Ma died and left everything to sis. Everything.

And sis felt bad, and suggested that she write me a check for my share, and I refused. I knew, somehow, that if I took anything from my mother’s estate, it would come to no good. I sure could’ve used an influx of money right about then, too, because it was when I was getting divorced from my ex, and having to run in and out of court to get anything from him - I owed my lawyer money, my daughter was getting ready to go to UMass and needed her tuition money, and so on and so forth. But, somehow, I just couldn’t take anything that came from my mother.

But sis did, and as a result, has been very comfortable financially ever since. And it’s most likely nothing but mere coincidence that her eldest daughter (who was only seven years younger than me) died two years later of a prescription drug overdose, after which her husband took a deliberate overdose and also died; my brother-in-law now has alzheimer’s disease that is causing him to become progressively more difficult to live with, and my nephew has had a brain tumor. Sis’s heart disease isn’t all that remarkable, certainly, but by the same token, in the years since my mother died and left everything to my sister, the health of HER family has crumbled down around her.

Probably no connection at all between all of that and my mother, but just speaking for myself, I’m not about to take any chances, and I’m really, really glad that I said “no”.

See? A certifiable lunatic. That’s me. But you know how it is when you get these ideas that you can’t seem to shake loose of, right? Better safe than sorry, at any rate.

LOL. Cabin fever. I’ve been home from work for two days now. I’m hallucinating.

I did, however, stick to my “eating plan”. My bag-o-fiber with an orange for brekkie and lotsa coffee. Pants still loose. Not planning to weigh in. Not yet. Soon.

Maybe when spring comes, I will be able to go outside, take long, rejuvenating walks, smell the green stuff budding  all around me, and my sanity will return. I don’t count on it, of course. I may be too far gone.

Man, this stuff - the snow and ice - is starting to look ugly.

I’m picturing myself lying on a tropical beach somewhere …okay, I’m picturing myself walking along Venice Beach out in L.A. I think I’ll head on over to Orbitz and see what kind of fare I could get for - hmmmm - next week?

Cheers,

Z