Anniversary Life

Last night was my 21st wedding anniversary. Yes, we've been making the joke that our marriage can now legally drink so it no longer sees the fun in it. While out to drink after a lovely dinner, I got a text from Be the Match. A whole different set of life changing match making was in the works on our wedding anniversary. I appear to be a good match for a 66 year old man with a condition I couldn't spell yet alone recall.

I immediately agreed to do whatever was necessary - after initially considering that I may save the life of a Trump supporting bigot - but I don't ever have to know so I can pretend he works for the Southern Poverty Law Center instead.

Anyway, I was shocked by how emotional I was reacting. I have tears just thinking about this. I can imagine the hope that this man and his family must have with a match a possibility./ Be the Match details the commitment of time, travel and discomfort that will be likely. I don't just go down the road to the hospital and donate some blood like I initially thought. Yes, I get now that the non-surgical donation option involves several days of treatments in advance of several hours of fluid draw. I weigh my discomfort and the annoyance/inconvenience of this again someone else's dying and it seems a pretty clear trade off.

I have just sent in my consent papers to have my initial sample tested further to see if we are indeed a good match for one another and to ensure that the sample provided at the time is not indicative of any health risks. I will keep you posted.....

Thoughts on Marriage

What is the key to staying married? Staying married. Realize that shit is going to crop up and you either deal with it together or you'll deal with it separately. Therapy has a better return on investment than divorce. Realize that there will be days when your spouse gets on your last nerve; when his breathing bugs the shit out of you. 9 times out of 10 - it isn't actually him. It isn't even you. It is stress from work, from bills, your hormones or exhaustion that is being incorrectly but oh so conveniently directed at your spouse. Ignore it and hope that you both don't feel this way at the exact same time.

People claim that marriage is about compromise and sacrifice. I call bullshit on that. Marriage is inherently a selfish act. It is a relationship whereby you are a better you because of your spouse. Together you are the best individuals you can be. A healthy marriage isn't full of sacrifices; it is full of opportunities for growth. Over the last decade or so, we've known you as individuals and as parts of a pair. We can safely say that you've grown well together and that together you are better yous than you are apart.

May your married life be drama free. May your marriage be punctuated by laughter, peppered by doggie kisses, strengthened by your individuality, underpinned by friendship, and reinforced by your love for one another, May you giggle twenty years from now when you look at each other and realize, "we're married."

Songs for Animals

Our animals have their own theme songs. I have a hard time keeping them straight so I am making a list.. I can't recall a few so they will be blank until I recall

Cats:
Popo: Macho Man by The Village People
Orsino: Love Fool by The Cardigans
Alistair: I'm Afraid of Americans by David Bowie
Callisto: Polyester Bride by Liz Phair
Rocco: something by System of a Down?
Basho: Glamorous by Fergie
Mineaux: Help I'm Alive by Metro
Juno: Dog Days Are Over by Florence & The Machine
Harpo: Fancy by Iggy Azalea
Van Gogh:




Dogs:
Lily: Brown Eyed Girl by every cover band ever; I Feel it All by Feist
Cixous: Scooby Doo Where Are You? theme song
Austin: Tub-thumping by Chumba Wamba or whatever; Breezeblocks by alt-J; Home by Dotan (He was also a big Dave Matthews fan)
Stella: Stellar by Incubus
Kurzweil: Bicycle Race by Queen (you know, because he really gets excited by bicycles)
Dacia:  I Love It by Icona Pop

Spring time was always my favorite time of year....

Yesterday Prince died.......

I have seen a number of artists pass over the years, Kurt Cobain was the voice of my generation. Favorite punk rockers went to sleep and never awoke. Earlier this year the great David Bowie passed. Death and music go hand in hand. None of these deaths hit me quite like Prince's.

Let me be clear. I am not some great Prince fan. I never owned an album. I admire his work and his artistry. It is only with his passing that I realize the tremendous role he played in my life as I grew up.
My first memory of Prince was secretly listening to Darling Nikki on a school bus as we headed out to a field trip. Purple Rain was an album I wanted to own, but there was no way my parents would allow it in the house at the time.

I am the MTV generation. I grew up with videos playing every day. It was the only thing we watched in our household. Prince was always there. He was the background. I could sing along to Little Red Corvette. Knew all the words to Raspberry Beret. Diamonds and Peals seemed to always be playing somewhere in the background of high school.

As a young child, my first inkling of domestic violence came from the song When Doves Cry. I knew relationships could be complicated. Prince taught me that. I learned that masturbation existed. I had never heard the word before Darling Nikki and her magazine. I began to understand that sexuality should be expressed and discussed - not just puritanically hidden thanks to songs like Cream.


From Prince himself, I learned that gender identity could be fluid. A guy could wear heels and a blouse and rock it. I learned that my binary world view was limiting and not the way I wanted to go forward. I learned that life could be complicated and that it was okay.


Thank you, Prince for making me a better person. Always cry for love; never cry for pain.....

Daddy Issues

So I love and adore my father, but since his remarriage and retirement, he is becoming a person I have less and less in common with. He resides in an insular, Fox News watching, Christian Identity-based community in West Virginia. The toxins of his environment seem to be reshaping his identity and his values in ways I find frustrating and sad.

The person I always thought of as reasonable, is now reactionary. I am having a hard time dealing with this. He is not going to leave his new home. I don't want or expect him to. He is loved and supported there. I just wish the values he had imparted on his family of origin were also loved and supported. It is like the infrastructure that he once helped to build, is being forgotten and left to decay. His reality no longer resembles my own.

Religion

I must confess that I am not at all comfortable with people who claim to be religious, who have personal and meaningful relationships with their Lord. For those few people who have this and yet don't seem self-righteous or judgmental, I simply admire them. It is the other folks - the ones that want to discriminate against gays, remove evolution from school texts, rewrite history so that we are a Christian country, boycott a company for not affirming their religious values, and ship all Muslims off to the Middle East - that I have real issues with. The bible does NOT define marriage as "one man and one woman." At no time in the New Testament did Jesus say that homosexuality is wrong. Only the woman-hating, slavery is okay writings of Paul make these claims.

I come from a family where religion was used as the impetus for neglect, abuse and finally the dismantling of the family itself. My mother valued her time at her church over being a mother and housewife; valued her religious leader over the safety and well-being of her children; enabled her commitment to religion to justify her disowning her children and finally ending her marriage. Thankfully her religion provided the opportunity to annul the whole thing so she did not have to think about it any more. Now my father, who used to be the sane one, is allowing his religious beliefs or "values" as he calls them to alienate his daughter and her wife. I think all of this would be sufficient to from a psychological point of view explain my preference for logic and reason over emotions and beliefs.

I know people who do not let religion be used in this unhealthy way. I know people who are able to successfully balance their beliefs with healthy homes and families. They amaze me. It is like watching a complex magic trick and not understanding how they do that.

My issues with religion appeared before I understood the negative impact religion was having on my family. I remember my first major "logical awakening" very clearly. I think my experience actually mirrors the experience of those who find God or have a spiritual awakening, only mine was juxtaposed I suppose. I was sitting in church on Good Friday, attending mass as was required. We were at the point in the service whereby we were called to enact the trial of Jesus and yell, "Crucify Him." I had a slight out of body moment and was slammed to the ground with the realization that this particular exercise seemed wrong and sick. I was not personally to blame for Christ's execution. Spending time and energy on crowd-think was uncomfortable. Then I looked at the giant crucifix at the head of the alter. It seemed that this church did want to emphasize the suffering and man's inhumanity to man in a way that I at that moment thought was wrong. Week after week, I would go to church and stare at the dead Jesus on the cross that was the point of focus. I would listen to the mass which included the miraculous trick of turning bread into flesh and wine into blood. I got sicker and more uncomfortable. I felt like I was surrounded by crazy or had woken up in an episode of Twilight Zone. Bear in mind, I was in high school and still had to continue attending mass every Sunday feeling increasingly uncomfortable and disenfranchised from this reality.

Once I was out of the house and answerable to myself for my time, I tried out a few of the other Christian churches, but at this point it was too late. I looked into Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism. I could not make sense out of these beliefs or their applicability to my life. I tried being agnostic, imagining a God that served as creator but little else. I couldn't get there.

I am left with atheism. I am good with that. I don't want to imagine a God that either doesn't care about the world's suffering, is powerless to do anything, or has some great plan that really sucks for most. A belief in no god gives me comfort. I know that I am responsible for my own actions. I am responsible for the choices I make and the consequences I endure. I have control over what I can control. I am empowered to the degree I can be. I work to be a good person, because I know that goodness is the better choice. It is logical. It is safe. It is comforting.

Dorothy Jean

For many years growing up, I thought my grandmother was the most glamorous woman ever. She had an old Hollywood grace about her. I thought she looked like Ginger Rogers. A stunner as a young woman, my Grammy was born into poverty. Her parents were Polish immigrants that either met on the boat or had an arranged marriage (or both) depending on who was telling the story when. Her father was a very handsome man who worked as a coal miner in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He had quite the temper and once killed a man in a bar fight. Strict Catholics, Dorothy lost her older sister to a botched abortion in her youth so she knew the perils of illegal and unsafe abortions quite personally. She would be quite vocal on that one subject. In the 1940s, she became a pen pal like many other young girls to GIs off at war. My grandfather intercepted her letters to another soldier who was either already married or just a player and unworthy of Dorothy's attentions. My grandparents fell in love over the course of their correspondence. When Grandpa returned from the war, they met for the first time to get their blood tests, meet family and then were soon married. My grandmother was not yet 18. It was clear to me that she wanted out of her town, and was ready to find a new adventure. In 1948 she lost her first child and nearly lost her life. Despite being told to avoid pregnancy for a while, she successfully gave birth to two more sons (including my father in 1951), a daughter and then they adopted their next child from Korea. The family was living in Boston. My grandfather worked for an engineering firm. My grandmother went to work once the kids were in school as a psychiatric nurse so she would have something to do and so my grandfather could go to school and earn his BS in Engineering from Northeastern. As a couple, they were inseparable and liked to keep busy. Grammy had her first hear attack at 50 and they both slowed down some. During their early retirement years, they had moved into a retirement community in NH. Grandpa would do general maintenance and Grammy would monitor blood pressures and blood sugars for the old folks. They drove the bus every morning for the special needs students in the area. Grandpa would drive and Grammy would monitor the kids. Parents had the relief of having a qualified nurse to supervise their morning rides to school. Things slowed down considerably in 1996 when Grandpa was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. They moved to another retirement community outside of Sarasota, FL. Grammy nursed him through his treatments. Grandpa was on the mend but Grammy's health issues began to hinder them both. She suffered from Reynaud's syndrome, lymphoma, heart disease, broken bones, repeated blood infections. It was a slow, unpleasant drop in her quality of life. She had always told me that she believed in the power of one's own brain. If she wanted to lose weight, she would self-hypnotize as she called it. She would talk herself into being less hungry. I think she talked herself out of living in the end. She was done. She had a good run.