Tuesday, June 28, 2011

I think my bus driver is trying to kill me

First of all, I'm drinking a caramel macchiato right now (which sits by the sink so when I want to take a sip I have to walk over there and then walk back to the computer) and it's pretty strong, which feels amazing. It's like I can feel the caffeine being absorbed into the individual cells of my body, which probably speaks to a) my increasingly serious psychological/physical dependence on caffeine and thus need for a detox sometime soon, and b) the fact that I really, really need to devote the time between my leaving work today and coming to work tomorrow to catching up on sleep.

But to the main point: public transportation.

I'm a fairly vocal supporter of using public transportation, particularly because the more people use it, the better-funded (and therefore cleaner and more efficiently run) it is. I take the bus at least twice a day, from home to school and back again, and for the most part, I'm very impressed with Seattle's Metro bus system. However. However! Once in a while the stars align in a particular way and I wind up on the bus to Crazytown.

This morning, for example, I was waiting for the 8:36 headed to the University District, and, from a distance, saw the bus approaching. I wait for the bus, it should be mentioned, like a sailor's wife waiting at the docks to see her husband's ship come over the horizon. It's all very exciting and full of breathless anticipation--the little things, really, are what break up the drudgery of the day. So, after two or three buses that were not mine had passed, I saw it headed down the street . . . and then I watched as it drove past me, screeching to a halt about halfway down the block. In retrospect, this should have been my first clue that I was about to step onto the Nightmare Bus. One other woman and I took off jogging as the doors opened. She stepped on, and the driver began to close the doors as I reached the front entrance.

"Wait, what?!" I exclaimed. I'm sure I looked terribly indignant. He let me on. I had, I guess, delayed the driver enough to allow another rider on the bus, which I am counting as my Good Deed of the Day (I will spend the rest of the day sleeping and watching baseball). We drove off. For the rest of the commute, the driver operated the bus as if he had just been exposed to the concept of a brake pedal for the first time. It was not unlike being in the car with a really terrible fourteen-year-old Drivers' Ed student behind the wheel--he would accelerate steadily as he left one stop and drove to another, slamming on the brakes at the last second. A few times, he did this behind a row of cars as a traffic light changed colors. I was pretty sure I was going to die, or, worse, be late to work.

Typically, I would excuse this sort of thing as being due to a recent adjustment from operating a car to a giant bendy bus (note: I hate bendy buses). Here's the thing, though--I've seen this driver before. Was he drunk? Had he, like me, taken one antihistamine pill too many this morning? Was he just not paying attention? I don't know, but I am a firm believer in public transportation vehicle operators being on top of their shit (sorry, Mom), and this fellow was just not.

There are all sorts driving buses in Seattle, and most of them are perfectly capable drivers, as well as very nice people. However (the second "however" of this post, if I'm keeping track, which is fairly low where I'm concerned), some of them are very possibly insane. I have had drivers who lay on the horn when a car in front of them actually stops at a four-way stop (imagine the nerve! scandalous!) or a pedestrian crosses at a walk, drivers who stomp on the gas pedal the moment the doors are shut (I have been sent flying down the center aisle a number of times since moving to Seattle), and drivers who try to get their passengers to answer trivia questions during the commute--no, really. That happened last month. One driver who operates a route that runs between my neighborhood and the University District scolds passengers--particularly college-age ones--for not adhering to his unwritten Code Of Riding The Bus ("Excuse me. Excuse me. You need to be standing right next to the sign on the curb and facing the street and make eye contact with me as I approach the stop."), and who takes up to five-minute gas-station stops to buy a large soda midway through his route. I got him twice in one night last week, and again yesterday.

I'm not sure how much of this is due to the elevated level of crazy on which Seattle drivers already operate anyway. There really are more reasons why I don't drive in Seattle other than that my car is still in Michigan. I have navigated the Dan Ryan Expressway in rush-hour traffic with minimal psychological Sturm und Drang, but when I'm behind the wheel in Seattle, I frequently fear for my life. If the drivers were consistently either aggressive or overly passive, I would know what to expect, but when driving down I-5 there is no telling whether the person behind me will tailgate me while leaning into their car horn or the person beside me will change lanes in front of me with no signal. On numerous occasions, I have come about eight inches from being mowed down by a sedan while using a marked pedestrian crosswalk and making eye contact with the driver. After the first couple of times that happened, I started to stare down the driver as he approached the walk, alpha wolf style--That's right, [expletive deleted], take me down and then try to pretend later that you didn't see me. I'll take a broken leg if it means you get to pay off my grad school loans.

So far, it's worked.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Back on the bean; or, BS still substitutes coffee for sleep


Had a bit of a crisis late last night; major life changes are never easy or fun, and the next five or so weeks of my life are no exception. Consequently, I got about four hours of sleep and am planning on staying awake until midnight or so tonight, so this bout of insomnia will probably work itself out. Or not? Either way, anxiety disorder, let's do this thing.

It's strange, living in these in-between places (finished with graduate school, still not working in my chosen field, sort-of-but-not-really employed, working hard on jobs whose only compensation is in experience), and I feel as if I should be making a home in this one, just to have something to call my constant. I won't, though--there's too much to do right now, between rehearsal and learning music and making photocopies and packing up the apartment and trying to sell the furniture I don't want to drive back across the country. The grief over Opa has, for the most part, worked its course through my body, but the empty space it leaves behind has left a vacuum into which all my other concerns and anxieties are rushing. I need a job. I need a job. This is my primary worry right now, finding a way to pay bills in Chicago, and this worry just barely edges out the terror resulting from the possibility of becoming isolated and antisocial once I move.

My coping mechanism is escape fantasies. Lately, I've been missing Florence, even though I know that it's obscenely hot there right now, and humid, that I'd think I was dying and be covered head-to-toe in Florentine mosquito bites. It certainly isn't the weather that I miss, or the crowd of tourists pushing through every single too-narrow street and gawking at cafe signs filled with unfamiliar words ("What's a pera? Does anybody know what a pera is?" "It's a pear."). My connection to Florence was, I think, the fact that I had the most basic of cell-phone service and limited access to the internet, and that forced me to leave the apartment in the morning and find real-life adventures in a city that felt like a painting. When I think of Florence, I think of blistered, black-with-dirt feet and prosecco in the middle of the day, flowing skirts and scarves and fruit stands and orange sunlight. It was easy there for me to be on my own, and to be left alone. The tourists, after all, were more concerned with the sensory overload caused by their surroundings, and the locals had their own lives to concern themselves with, rather than mine. I wrote a handful of blog entries while I was living there last summer, located here, and maybe the next time I travel for an extended period of time I'll revisit that blog--but then again, maybe I won't. I'm more comfortable on the Blogger platform, I think. Not that anyone cares.

(I'm still exhausted, but this is probably due less to continued grief than to the fact that I barely slept last night.)

Saturday afternoon, for the first time, I visited a locally-owned Van Gogh-themed coffeehouse in Wedgewood. Sunday morning, I went back. If I lived in Wedgewood instead of the next neighborhood over, this would become a problem (not unlike the three-times-in-three-days San Crispino stunt Stefanie and I pulled in Rome last summer), because I might be in love. The interior is decorated in colors I associate with Tuscany and Provence (for obvious reasons, I'm sure), and the walls are lined with reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings. The coffee is incredible; initially, I was skeptical of drinking something called a "Mayan Mocha" at a coffeehouse whose theme was a Dutch painter who lived in France, but, really, it was delicious, even iced--I drink iced drinks now, by the way. Iced drinks are cool. Sunday Nicole and I had sandwiches (my forgetfulness, which resulted in my leaving a gallon of milk at the house where she and Steve are dog-sitting, necessitated the second visit, of course), and the Van Gogh Coffeehouse's tuna melt is, as it turns out, pretty fantastic, as well.


The caffeine I've had this morning isn't working too well, just now, though. When I get a moment to breathe--if I do, as I really don't anticipate that happening anytime soon--I'll have to do a one-week detox or something, just so it has something vaguely resembling an impact on my body and brain again, because right now, it's about as effective as drinking orange juice--maybe less. Right now, though, I'm overwhelmed by all the things I have to do, which is ridiculous: it's summer! I should be having fun and sleeping all the time! But between work, rehearsal, and trying to organize my life for the upcoming move, my brain is full. Absurd.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Stop all the clocks

This isn't going to be a terribly happy post. I feel I should warn you of that now, before we go any further, because the things I have been going through lately--that my family has been going through--have been very, very difficult, and it's hard to keep a positive outlook on life when everything starts to feel like some kind of horrible, horrible fiction.

My grandfather died last Thursday of complications from Alzheimer's Disease. He was 81 years old.

I saw him one last time, toward the very end. On Saturday 11 June, I went with my parents and grandmother to visit him at the nursing home. He was in the end stages of the disease at that point, not even opening his eyes and barely waking up enough to eat dinner. I couldn't handle it, seeing him like that, only technically alive when everything that had made him my Opa had disappeared such a long time ago. It seemed cruel of the doctors to force him to wake up to eat, to keep him alive when he was clearly suffering and so close to the end. He was really brilliant once, you know--a professor of Botany--and loved gardening, and JS Bach's organ music, and spending time with his grandchildren. To see him broken down and empty and waiting to die was the worst thing.

On Tuesday night Oma called to tell my mother that Opa had an infection, and that it would be the end soon. I had to fly back to Seattle the next day, and I didn't want to leave, and face having to deal with his death on my own. I cried in the car on the way to the airport, and on the airplane, in another airport, on another airplane, and all night in my apartment. Dad called me early the morning after I got back to Seattle to tell me that Opa had died. I cried all that day, too.

Mourning frustrates me. It is my tendency to try to rationalize everything, to make it fit logic, and when someone has died, that doesn't work. It doesn't matter how many times I tell myself that he had been, for all intents and purposes, gone for at least a year before his body finally let go, or that I can understand the stages of and neurological changes that come with Alzheimer's. I know the Kübler-Ross Model of grief, and that I tend to deal with loss on my own, but there is no logic to this process. I cried for about two days straight and then I was exhausted and numb--I told my mother, "I think I'm cried out. There's nothing left." But then I slept for a couple of days, had a bout of insomnia last night, and now I've started crying again, so apparently I was wrong. My sleep schedule is all thrown off--this seems to be another symptom of grief this time around. I stay up late because I can't bring myself to go to bed, knowing that, more likely than not, I'll just lie there staring at the ceiling and remembering.

I'm trying to keep my hands busy, which is the best I can do. I cut out the pattern pieces and interfacing for a new purse, with fabric that reminds me of Vincent Van Gogh--sunflowers, you know. I have two more to cut out, although I'll probably wait on the second of those, since I'm not content with the lining fabric. I did start a new knitting project, a pair of Doctor Who/Amelia Pond-inspired fingerless mittens whose pattern is entitled "Does it ever bother you that your life doesn't make any sense?" Yes, Doctor. Yes, it does. I was through with one repetition of the "TARDIS lace" chart when I realized that I had misread the (arguably somewhat confusingly-written) pattern, and so had to frog the entire thing and start again. In the past 24 hours, I have actually made negative progress on this project. The upside: I have insomnia, and will probably make up that last time quickly--the lace pattern is easy enough, and I made at least one mistake the first time round, anyway.

The worst part of mourning is this: the people. I love my friends, really, but it's going to be a while before I can get up the energy to go out and have fun again. Honestly, I'm pleased that during the worst of this, two of my closest friends are across the country and another is working full-time. When I grieve, I don't want to be smothered with affection, or distracted, or have someone offer to help me "drown my sorrows." I just want to sleep, and work, and remember. I don't want to feel pushed into some sort of "recovery," as if grief is some kind of disease that must be cured. Right now, I can't handle stressful situations, I can't handle questions or peer-pressure, or expectations that I should be feeling more positive about this situation or getting over it more quickly. Let me be. Please. I don't know how long it will take before I feel "normal" again, but I need to allow myself time to grieve.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The end of all things; or, BS becomes an MM

It's been ages since I've written here. I honestly just had to reread the most recent entry to see when I had posted last. As it turns out, it's been a while. As I've said.

I had my wisdom teeth extracted (all four!) on Tuesday morning. This was the source of much stress and consternation over the past few weeks. At the library, I had been looking up descriptions of possible complications and an answer to the question, "How long will it be before I can eat Real Food again?" The internet is clearly not the place to search for answers, since message boards are full of whiners who tell the most horrifying stories. Recovery has, on the whole, been fairly uneventful. I learned that Vicodin is underwhelming (I get tired, then a tiny bit dizzy if I haven't eaten), dry-socket is something I probably won't have to deal with, and the pain associated with the healing is more of a mild irritant (constant, dull) than THE WORST PAIN EVER OMG.

(Watching the Doctor Who mid-season finale and this line just made my life: "We're the Thin-Fat-Gay-Married-Anglican-Marines." Steven Moffatt, you have my heart. I hope you don't mind sharing it with Vincent Van Gogh.)

(Two commercial breaks later, I still have no idea what on earth is going on in this episode.)

So, recovery. I had considered live-blogging while under the influence of morphine and Vicodin, but, as my sister pointed out, I'm not that exciting while medicated. This is a shame. She is hilarious. I just sleep a lot and have some trouble walking. My teeth feel--I don't know--crowded? Especially the ones on the bottom, in front. I hope this is just a temporary thing. I never knew that teeth could feel claustrophobic, but mine do, so there you have it. I live in constant fear of ripping my stitches--are they dissolving? If they do, will they leave giant holes where things can get stuck? Did they run the stitches through the side of my cheek? So I have been taking my pills at the appropriate times and napping with  my parents' cats, who are ridiculous.

Oh, and somewhere in there I found time to graduate.

Well. Sort of. Had I been in Seattle, I would have walked in my graduation ceremony today. I won't actually have a degree, though, until the end of the summer, since I didn't pass my piano proficiency exam last Friday. I will be retaking it in July, and I fully intend to pass (for realsies) then. My coursework is finished. I don't ever have to go to school again, so I'm pretty excited about that. I have been in school for 21 years. It's time for this to be over.

(I don't know how, but Arthur Darvill has suddenly, suddenly won me over this season. I wasn't sure about Rory even when he was all Badass-Roman-Centurion-Dude at the end of last series, but he's pretty awesome now)

About half this entry isn't going to make any sense to someone who doesn't watch Doctor Who. I don't care. Blogs are, by nature, awfully self-indulgent, aren't they? Well, then. I indulge myself in my fangirlitude.

I do think, though, that part of one of my stitches just came out. Horrifying. I hate this.