42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

“I Grieve”

It was only one hour ago
It was all so different then
There’s nothing yet has really sunk in
Looks like it always did
This flesh and bone
It’s just the way that you would tied in
Now there’s no-one home

I grieve for you
You leave me
’so hard to move on
Still loving what’s gone
They say life carries on
Carries on and on and on and on

– Peter Gabriel, I Grieve, from the album Up

This is a hard time of year for me. It has been for the last 15 years. Or rather, the last 14 years. Fifteen years ago, my life changed forever.

Each passing day, then week, then month, calculated in my head. It was only one day ago… One simple day. A few minutes that could have made a difference.

I’d like to think that I’ve moved on in many ways since I lost my mother. I know people don’t really want to know how I feel or what I think about being a motherless child some 15 years after the fact.

So I’ll just say this. I still grieve. It’s still like yesterday sometimes. Maybe I’m too emotional.

My brother and I had a conversation the other day. It was a painful conversation in a painful time, so we kept it short. He said he didn’t know if 15 years was supposed to be some kind of milestone.

I think it is. Not for anyone else, but it is for us.

I’ve thought about all the milestones throughout the years. The first birthday and Christmas without her. My first college graduation, without her. When my brother had his first child, I thought, mom threatened to kill me if I made her a grandmother before 50. That would’ve made her feel old.

I miss my mom in so many ways I can’t express to people who haven’t lost a parent young. And now I’m no longer young. I can’t believe it’s been so long, and I can’t believe it still hurts so much sometimes.

The next big milestone will be in a few years, when I turn the same age my mother was when she died. I’d like to think that I won’t even think about it, but the chances are I will.

I think part of my problem is I have so many regrets and so many unspoken words. So sometimes it helps me to talk about it, or helps me to be sad. And sometimes, life carries on, in the words of Peter Gabriel.

Life carries on
In the people I meet
In everyone that’s out on the street
In all the dogs and cats
In the flies and rats
In the rot and the rust
In the ashes and the dust
Life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on

It’s just the car that we ride in
A home we reside in
The face that we hide in
The way we are tied in
And life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on

Did I dream this belief?
Or did I believe this dream?
Now I can find relief
I grieve

The running William Shatner beat poetry thing on Conan O’Brien keeps getting better.

I saw this present this morning:

Shatner performs Sarah Palin, and then Palin performs Shatner. Sorry, Sarah Palin, you were really only funny because Shatner was there.

This time of year makes me happy.

Birthday wishes are closely followed by the food of Thanksgiving. I like Thanksgiving because it’s just about food. There’s no entanglement with present opening and anticipation and then the weary clean-up of wrapping paper surrounding the loot. Plus, at Christmas, you’ve just had a good meal a month ago with Thanksgiving. Whereas with Thanksgiving, you’ve had to wait a full year for your turkey-stuffing-mashed-potat0es overeating pleasure/pain.

Thanksgiving is going to be pretty low-key this year. We normally have a friend or two eating with us, but now we have so few friends up here, and most of them will be going home or otherwise adopted.

I also have to work on Thanksgiving, which is no great hardship. As someone who is underemployed, it’s hard to say no to working a holiday when that’s really all an on-call worker is good for.

Another thing I love about this time of year, even in California, is the bite in the air. It is pretty cold in the mornings here in Sacramento, and this tiny house is much easier to heat than that drafty condo with the inefficient heating system. Sometimes, I actually get hot in the middle of the night. I can’t complain about that.

The air feels and smells like fall. Whether my friends and family believe me, there are fall colors here, though to a lesser extent than up in the foothills. You can smell smoke in the air from fireplaces. You can feel the cold air caress your cheeks. And everything is right with the world.

I might even temporarily be in a holiday spirit, which probably will soon be destroyed the the realities of the crass, gimme shopping season that is always fueled by bad temper and a dislike for crowds and rude people.

Perhaps the best way for me to hold on to whatever holiday spirit I might have now by not going into a store for the next month. No holiday music. No smells piped through the store. No ornaments, no newest gewgaws for the lawn.

I can’t afford much in the way of presents this year anyway, so I can also afford to stay out of the store. Let’s see if I can make this work.

I don’t like shopping. I don’t like people. Therefore one can accurately predict that I will not like shopping at a discount and seconds store on Sunday. And that I will like it even less when said store, dd’s Discounts, is next to the 99 cent store.

My first clue about hell was the parking lot, which I had to circle several times like it was Christmas Eve at Wal-Mart. The empty parking spaces I could find were full of broken glass.

Two security guards inside the store and a bunch of people with shitty kids running amok. Yes, happy happy day for me.

I was shopping for new sheets. I’m getting a new bed tomorrow, and dammit, I wanted to splurge on sheets. Discount sheets.

A woman came into the narrow aisle behind me and I sighed and tried to let her pass. But alas, she was staying. With her three shitty kids, including the one that screamed inexplicably four or five times. I think that’s when my migraine started today.

The short end to this story is that I pawed through the disorganized selection of sheets and didn’t spend as much time as I would like because this woman with her kids and shopping cart kept inching into me. I decided to take a quick look at the clothes and then circle back to see if she was gone yet. She was not.

But there was a bright spot to this part of my expedition.

The knock-off Snuggie.

What, you say? The Snuggie isn’t cheesy enough?

Well, for the low low price of $5.99, you can have the Cuddle Up TV blanket, which is “similar to seen on TV.”

Not seen on TV.

Reminds me of Are You Being Served, where the staff would often sell genuine faux mock leatherette gloves or the like.

I don’t know what the full price of the Cuddle Up is, but the Snuggie is now offered in stores at a low, low  price of $14.99, as seen at Target, complete with the handy reading light.

I bookended my shopping trip neatly with a much more pleasant trip to Target in another part of town, as I bought too-expensive sheets and passed up yet another chance for a Snuggie.

Looks like they spent the big bucks designing their packaging.

I want a Snuggie. I’m not joking. I continually get made fun of for wanting one, but I have even wanted one before they became a joke.

It looks like the Cuddle Up might have a hood. I don’t know if the Snuggie does. But I am certain that I will accept no substitutions for the Snuggie.

So if you were wondering what to get me for my birthday or Christmas: the answer is a Snuggie. Genuine, and not similar to. And no animal print, please. That’s just tacky.

I admit I never liked William Shatner. Maybe not until the last five or seven years. Part of my dislike of him was linked to my mother. I used to egg her on, because she was such a Star Trek: TOS fan, and I was a hardboiled young TNG fan — about the same age as Wil Wheaton when he started the show — with no patience for bad acting and bad sets. Though inexplicably, I was and still am a huge fan of original Doctor Who. I remember irritating my mom to no end when we went to see the last Star Trek movie she would ever see: Generations. James T. Kirk died and I laughed and laughed. Maybe if I’d known that my mother was going to just a couple of months after that movie came out, I wouldn’t have been as mean.

Back to Shatner: he just grew on me. I can’t explain why. Falling in love with Has Been might have had something to do with it. I don’t know. But I love him a little more each time I see him in something. Each time he pokes fun at himself. Each time he says Denny Crane.

I love this man, many warts and all.

So I’m really entertained to see what appears to be a continuing, sporadic segment on Conan, Shatner doing poetry readings of Twitter entries, most recently of Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy.

I want to thank William Shatner for the decades of entertainment, and for making my entire week. Thanks also to Conan.

That is all.

What am I learning with my fancy, expensive edumacashion?

Lots of things, it turns out.

• I don’t know anything.
• Statistics will be very helpful to me, no matter how much I complain. All I can hope is that I will have someone else to do the dirty work.
• I can write a paper to save my life.
• I can control my temper and keep from silencing people, permanently.
• I am naive. I didn’t know libraries stocked Playboys. Some of them, anyway. For the articles, you know. Everyone had a good laugh as they pretended that was why. Please.
• Google is your friend, but it’s not everything. There are more powerful, specific tools out there. And that’s why you still need librarians. Or at least that’s what people teaching library school say. Let’s hope they’re right.

As an example, I was just googling something in rather informal language, and this is what I got.

I love Google, and I love whatever weird things people search for. That’s why we still need librarians and why I hopefully am not going into another dying field.

You don’t realize how much you rely on technology, even something as basic as having electricity, until you don’t have it.

Yesterday, there was a huge storm here and elsewhere. Wind and rain battered the house for much of the day. Drains clogged. Trees fell. It looked more like a storm from the midwest. We got about 3 inches of rain — which is a huge amount for a place like this — and at one point, there were 100,000 people without power. Including me.

We went without power for at least 24 hours. I’m not sure when it came back on, because this afternoon, my laptop was running out of juice and I needed my internet fix, anyway.

For a while, not having power is fun. You dig out the candles and the flashlights. Even though it wasn’t night when the power went out, it was pretty dark because of the storm.

I shooed cats away from the candles and settled down to read a bit. It was a reprieve from studying, I admit. I could’ve turned on the laptop, but I wanted to save it for more crucial stuff. Besides, surely the power will be on in a little while.

I read and read. I took a nap. I went to class, which was let out a good hour early because of the weather and road debris. Came back, still no power.

The irritating thing was that the school across the way had power. The streetlights had power. But the houses didn’t.

I finally got a chance to dig into And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer. I shall reserve my judgments for later, after I’ve finished the book, but I already know it isn’t the same thing as a new Douglas Adams book, so I’ll leave it at that.

Still, no power. No power. Nope, still no power. A neighbor came over to see if we had power. We didn’t. I spent the next 45 minutes in the cold, windy doorway in stocking feet, talking to the neighbor, who apparently is having relationship problems. Which appears to be at the expense of a somewhat neglected kitten I haven’t see in several days.

Gave the neighbor something for the kitten. Read more by candlelight and flashlight. Went to bed. Woke up in the middle of the night. Nope, still no power.

I made sure to get up at a reasonable time this morning and started on my homework, which could mostly be done without wifi. When my battery finally ran low, we went to Panera to finish out the last of the powerlessness.

Luckily throughout all this, the water was running. I don’t think I would’ve survived without a shower this morning. As it was, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed for the rest of the day and wait out the rest of the gloom.

By the time we went to Panera, I heard that only about 1,000 people were left without power, and we were one of them. Great. Any other time, I said again, I wouldn’t mind. But I just have too much to do.

Then there’s the matter of the fridge and freezer. I’m kind of scared to evaluate what is edible and what is not. I’m not going to deal with it right now. I’m about 3/4 of the way through my homework and I’m tired of numbers.

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