Journal

"How did you manage to gain 13 pounds since your last visit in January?" asked my Doc.

"Well, um, I, uh, I’m not, uh, smoking crack."

"Yeah, that stuff would sort of kill your appetite," he replied looking over the rims of his glasses with that "you know what I’m going to say, so I don’t have to say it" look.

Otherwise, my BP was 100/70, and the results of the last blood test say cholesterol and triglycerides are okay, liver function fine, thyroid a little high, blood sugar a little low, no change in the rheumatoid group, iron on the low side, and vitamin B12 way too low.

"Sleeping okay?"

"Yeah, " I lied. Well, a little white lie. Without Danger-Boy running in and out of the place at all hours of the night, I can finally sleep straight through the night. Now that I’m getting back into practice anyway.

"How about the depression?"

"I’ve been fine, but I anticipate a little trouble when I have to move at the end on the month."

"Okay, then stay on the 600mg of Wellbutrin, but that’s the maximum dose. We want to get you down to 300 or 400 in time. How about the joint pain?"

I was thinking, "Yeah, my joint could use a workout," but I replied "Well the upper spine is still troublesome."

"Are you taking anything for the pain?"

"No, it’s not that bad yet. Just annoying."

"Are you doing your stretches and exercises?"

"Not as often as I should." Actually, not at all in the past several months.

"Well your rheumatoid group is still level, so doing your stretches and exercises should bring that back under control.  Need any scrips?"

"Nope, plenty of refills left."

"Okay, I want you to take 250mcg of vitamin B12 once a day. In eight to twelve weeks have your blood work done again. If the B12 isn’t up by then, we’ll have to do injections. Come back in four months."

So I guess I’ll live to tell. To celebrate my low cholesterol, Jim and I went to Schaller’s for dinner and had more of the best greasy burgers on the North Coast. My turn to buy.

Even though it was only 6:30, I asked Jim to drop me home after our repast. I’m still not getting enough sleep. I need nine to ten hours a night. Given the alarm is set for 5:30, that makes my bedtime 7:30, and I don’t think I’ve hit that in well over a year.

On top of that, it’s been a bitch of a week at work so far. Monday morning between the four of us here on the Help Desk, we logged over 200 calls BEFORE LUNCH. My Monday afternoon was consumed by a department that moved from the hospital to a satellite office without making the proper arrangements for network connections. We would have made them suffer, but they had patients coming in on Tuesday.

Monday night was an incredibly frustrating session with my psychologist. At one point I even resorted to the "… and I’m paying the bills for this anyway …" line. I very rarely get angry with her. I was keyed-up from work, I frustrated that she was basing her questioning on journals that were three and four weeks old respectively. I think I did a lot of good work this past week, and to a certain extent a week before. I had those journals with me, I wanted to cover new ground, not rehash what happened a month ago and I’ve resolved in the past two weeks.

Jim had given me a ride to and fro’, and decided we needed dinner out. Given the state of my kitchen, it’s probably the most prudent choice. We both had the tortollini on the sidewalk at The Big Apple Café. During dinner Elaine and Gary, two of my former flea market vendors strolled by on the way to Tivoli for dessert. I stopped them and we had a nice little chat.

It was a zoo Tuesday at work as well. I spent almost an hour on a single call in the morning, and that departmental move chewed up my entire afternoon. What a mess. You don’t just get the space, get it decorated, order network connections and move in. The department head actually ordered his new PCs and printers last Wednesday for delivery on Friday. Then he wants us to drop everything and rush right over to install software, configure the network settings for everything, hook it all up, test and fix the inevitable problems.

Then he assigns his most junior staffer to coordinate everything with us. She had no idea how many computers they had, let alone what software was required on each, or whether the printers were to be connected to the PCs directly, or to the network. By 4:00 I had the closest thing to a project plan as we were ever going to get. I wrote it up, e-mailed it to everyone and headed off to the doctor’s. You know, I’m supposed to do phone support, not bail out errant department heads.

So after the visit to my doc and the aforementioned burgers, Jim asked what I wanted to do. My answer was "Go home and get to bed." I no sooner got in bed and the Ice Queen calls. I’d forgotten to call her from work. Anyway, she’s home from the hospital after staying two nights for kidney stones. A half-hour later, time to try again. Phone rings again. Surprise, surprise. It’s Jeffrey. I’d mailed him last Thursday’s entry and he’d gotten it Tuesday morning.

I guess I was a little vague with regard to how things ended up last Wednesday. He was all pissed off that I was dumping on him. I was. Only because when he was out he wouldn’t listen to me. (Note: I don’t use the word listen when I mean obey. He wouldn’t obey me either, but that’s a separate issue.) If you care about someone you need to know how they’re feeling. The only way that happens is if you listen to them. He never did.

Well the whole thing turned into another hurtful argument, he blew me off, and I hadn’t heard from him since. He even returned the letter I had mailed. He enclosed a note with it. It read, "Didn’t read it à Sorry Charlie! Thanx for the ride of hurt & lies. See ya, JB"

When I got it, I thought, "Uh huh." Well if what he sees in me is hurt and lies, what does he see when he looks into the mirror? And I just kinda figured, "Well, that’s that."

But he did read the letter that arrived Tuesday. I’d been expecting that one back too, so it really was a surprise when he called. As usual, he yammered on about himself and I barely got a word in edgewise. But he had begun digesting that entry. He apologized for saying he saw me as a father figure, but that he hadn’t known how I felt and why. (Listen to me!)

The most amazing thing he said was "With a family like that, no wonder you’re so fucked-up." Gee, I spent tens of thousands of dollars on drugs over twenty years to make it go away. Then when I finally saw the futility of it all, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on drug programs and psychotherapy for the past seven years. But maybe I’ll finally get a bit of latitude and understanding out of him now.

So where am I at right now? Well there’s so much confusion and so many unknowns that I don’t even know where to start. And I’m tired as all get-up. Sleep disorder and all, I nod off at the drop of a hat. I could barely stay awake waiting for the bus tonight.

I don’t know where I stand with Jeffrey, or how I feel about it. I don’t know where I stand with Jim or how I feel about it. I don’t know where or how to start breaking all the old patterns of behavior my psych keeps pointing out. I don’t know where I’m going to live in less than a month, or how I’m going to get there from here, or how I’m going to pay for it all. I don’t know if I want to give up drugging, or say fuck it and go whole hog back into it again.

And the "S" word keeps rearing it’s ugly head. My psych asked me Monday night, "Why do you let Jeffrey do all those things to you?" My answer was, "Because I’m so god damned lonely. It seems no one even remotely normal will have me, so anyone and anything is preferable to the loneliness. Even the "S" word." Of course that perked her ears up quite a bit.

This morning on the bus, which was 20 minutes late again, I was thinking that the word that best describes my life right now, is "entropy". And I don’t know how to stop it.

The most visible manifestation is the difference between these four places is at lunch time. It seems the entire hospital and the whole medical school is outside at lunch. You can’t find a step, bench or table outside that’s unused in the whole of the medical center. Even the lawn is packed with people. Contrast this with those other three places where it was unusual for anyone other than me to take their lunch outside.

Even before meeting Jeffrey, I could spot a patrol car, marked or unmarked, quite a ways away. So imagine my surprise the other day when I saw one of the University wannabe cops putting a University parking ticket on an unmarked County Sheriff’s car! If he didn’t see the spotlights in the windshield pillars, then he should have noticed all the antennas sticking out of the roof. Naturally I said nothing. Perhaps this lesson will cause him to be more observant in the future.

The reason I mention this here is because several of my co-workers are regular readers, if fact, the domain "rochester.edu" is consistently in the top ten on my site access logs. So I wanted to let everyone know, the answers to the questions about me aren’t in these pages.

They say, that in life, timing is everything. And to deny that several messages have come in from the Universe on the same subject at the same time would be foolish. I’m not always able to see the connections between these things, but I’m getting better at it.

Apparently the Universe felt I wasn’t quite getting it, and threw another lesson my way in the form of an e-mail from another online journaller. An anonymous writer had left a nastygram in his guestbook, and it’s been bothering him for nearly a week now. His note read in part, "Pretty much writing 'cos I need your input."

This, BTW, is one of the reasons I don’t have a guestbook. I don’t want to provide the means by which to receive anonymous nastygrams. If you want to send me a nastygram, then by all means so. Just have the cajones to do so under your own name. If you were writing nice things you’d sign your name. Does a nastygram invalidate your identity? And if so, why should I take it seriously if you don't?

As is frequently the case with me, things don’t really click into place unless I write about them. I never seem able to understand my own thoughts until I have to communicate them coherently to someone else. It’s part of the reason I do this, and part of the benefit I derive from it. Things went "click" as I wrote my reply. Here’s part of what I wrote:

My best friend and I have, at best, a volatile relationship. I am at a loss for the superlatives to describe the deep and profound love we have for each other. And yet, we seem in eternal conflict over surface stuff. His weapon of choice in these conflicts is the cut and run.

It's a truly effective weapon since, because there is nowhere else to turn to respond or otherwise dissipate the feelings, the victim himself digs and claws at the wound eviscerating himself in the process. This is the weapon the guestbook writer employed against you.

While there is no defense against the initial wound, one can learn to mediate one's response to it. Only by limiting and eventually eliminating one's own response to the bombshell, can you reduce and eliminate the efficacy of this weapon. It's a long and arduous task, but it can be done.

I can’t count the number of times Jeffrey’s dropped his bombs on me and then has run. He uses several methodologies when employing this tactic. There are notes left or mailed, voice-mail or hang-ups in phone calls, it can even be done in the flesh by refusing to address an issue after it’s been raised, or by the classic parting shot. It’s been such an effective weapon against me, that I’ve used it on him, with equally effective results.

What I’ve only just learned in the past week or so, is that the efficacy of the weapon is determined by the victim. It only works if I let it. If I let the verbal assault roll off me like water off a duck’s back, it doesn’t work. And interestingly enough, I learned it from the master of this tactic himself, Jeffrey.

The co-worker trivia contest was a hoot. We were allowed to ask each person one question about themselves to determine who belonged to each question. And who knew I worked with such a colorful bunch? Here are some of the questions:

Who has given enemas to over 2,000 sharks?
Who got locked out of their car while it was stuck in a snowbank with the engine running and in reverse?
Who was paid $15 to do an imitation Chippendales dance at a friend’s wedding?
Who traveled across the state as a band’s roadie at the age of 14?
As a practical joke, who dressed up in a space suit and surprised a friend at 3:00AM, only to be shot at out of fear?
Who was literally hit head-on by a Blazer while standing in the middle of the road?
Who, while rather intoxicated, mistook his roommate’s dresser for the toilet?

More than one person asked me if my question was, "Who was arrested in high school and charged with seven felonies?"

For the record, it was a misdemeanor drug possession charge (imagine that!) and the school district later dropped it. And also for the record, it’s Jeffrey who’s the felon around here. Which only means he’s better at getting caught. J

My trivia question was, "Whose entire family was struck by lightening while camping in a tent at a water-access only campsite?" One person of the 22 guessed correctly. It’s a long story, but except for our dog, we all lived, and there were no serious injuries.