an edited repost for OzDoc, Jaci, Knotty, Becca, Donna, Marianne, various anons, and for anyone else who reads senseless drivel on occasion; this one's still not for the judge, as I'm still working on his

This is a rather avante garde picture someone came up with of former St. Lous Carnials' pitcher Joaquin Andujar.

Note: This is a reprint  to kill time as I'm working on my dad's family's genalogy. I did really well with the sibs, their spouses, and their children. It's the next generation that is throwing me for a bit of a loop. i'm having trouble locating all the children's names.  I'm not sure where they dreamed up some of their kids' names, unless they used the Scrabble letter method, whereby they plucked out x number of Scrabble tiles without peeeking and forced themselves to combine the letters in the best way they could to form a name.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my  brother was in a hip hop group whose number one local hit was "People Who Throw Glass Houses Shouldn't Get Stoned." I didn't mention the name of the group, They called themselves Feverish Pitch and the Useless Dominican Infield.  (None were actually of Dominican descent, which is unfortunate. A bit of Dominican blood might possibly have added a bit of rhythm and musicality to a group otherwise largely devoid of both.)  

The band, and I use the term band loosely in this case,  wore various part of baseball uniforms as their band costumes. One guy just wore a  jersey with sliding pants under it. One guy wore  a specially made "Shoeless Joe Jackson" uniform. My brother wore baseball pants but was shirtless, with cleats tied together and hanging around his neck.  Another guy wore an over-sized jersey with the neck buttoned  around his waist and a "wife-beater" type T-shirt. I hope he was wearing at least boxers under the jersey, but I could not say for certain that such was the case.The last  guy wore a custom- made "Joaquin Andujar" uniform.

The sad thing was that their name and their uniforms were the best thing about them as a band. My brother's not a bad singer , and he has some guitar skills as well, but he couldn't play and sing everyone else's part at the same time as his own. Shoeless Joe Jackson played a recorder when he wasn't singing, but he was not terribly talented at either. The bass player (the sliding pants guy) played only in the key of A, which made things a bit dissonant when the song was in a different key. (Matthew said it was their "trademark sound." I would've looked for a new trademark had it been up to me.) The keyboard player --the guy who wore wife-beaters, played keyboards decently, but could not have sung on key had his very life depended on it. This did not stop him from singing -- quite loudly and into the microphone. "Joaquin Andujar" banged irrhythmically on a drum set as he loudly blurted out near-obscenities (he couldn't use bona fide obscenities because school events were their primary venues) in what sounded like  an exceedingly poor stereotypical imitation of a person with Tourette syndrome.

These guys made quite a lot of money playing for various school-related dances primarily because they were cute. Had they not had such an odd name, however -- Feverish Pitch and the Useless Dominican Infield -- no one would have remembered them when the time came for the hiring of a band. They were all baseball players. My brother was the starting rotation pitcher who played shortstop when he wasn't pitching. The rest were infielders. My brother supposedly once pitched a complete game with a 103-degree fever.  That's where the "Feverish Pitch" came from. I think I actually coined the"Useless Dominican Infield" part of the name, though I haven't a clue as to what I was thinking of when I called them that. They were too stupid to know when they were being insulted, and voila!; a name for their "band" was born.

I heard that Feverish Pitch and the Useless Dominican Infield is planning a reuinion gig for sometime during Christmas vacation of this year. I plan to have other plans for whenever this reunion gig is scheduled, and I highly recommend that any readers with any sense of musical discernment whatsoever do the same. I've recommended to my brother than he hold this reunion concert nowhere near our medical school. It doesn't say anywhere in the handbook both of us were given that a student can be thrown out of medical school for being a member of a really pathetic band, but if I were he, I would not take the risk.

Speaking of family and rather odd names, you may remember that my Aunt Cristelle, my father's youngest sister, and her her husband Mendel had a baby last year, whom they named Blitzen Manx. My dad just calls the child Mutt.  One of the more memorable things about the whole fiasco was that Cristelle had planned to give birth in an ash grove on a bed of rose petals. My dad said it was not happening if he had to fly himself (he has no pilot training) in a twin-engine Cessna to the Isle of Man to drop-kick Cristelle's butt in the direction of the nearest maternity ward on the Isle of Man, where they lived and still live. My Uncle Michael, who grew up more closely with Cristelle because they were only a year and change apart in age, said not to worry, because he knew all about Cristelle's tolerance, or lack thereof, for pain. He said that the "bed of roses" delivery would last about as long as the first real contraction, at which time Cristelle would be screaming for an epidural or a Caesarean or whatever it took to put her out of her misery. Uncle Michael was absolutely right. Blitzen Manx was born by Caesarean delivery after short and epidural-controlled labor. He was, after all, born on a bed of roses, as my mom had purchased a bedsheet printed with roses. She had it sterilized and sealed, and sent it Special Delivery to the Isle of Man in time for Blitzen Manx's birth.

Yesterday Cristelle, with Mendel by her side, gave birth to their second child -- this one a girl. She was born by planned Caesarean delivery on a similar "bed of roses" sheet that my mom had purchased, and had  sterilized, essentially hermetically sealed, and sent via express delivery to the Isle of Man. My new little cousin weighed in at eight pounds, twelve ounces and measured twenty-one-and-one-half inches in length, though I tend to agree with my mom that a baby's precise  length is pretty arbitrary and that it all depends upon just how far a nurse feels like stretching a baby on a given day. Still, that's a decent-sized baby that didn't have a donkey's chances in the Kentucky Derby  of being delivered vaginally. Rousseau woman tend to have babies with rather large heads. My mom is not a Rousseau, so Matthew and I had normal-sized heads.

Anyway, what you have been waiting for with bated breath is this baby's name. How does a set of parents go about topping Blitzen Manx as a name?  They'd clearly set the bar precariously high for themselves this time, though I think they cleared it with inches to spare. This baby is named Antarctica Meringue.  They have no explanation as to the significance of the name or how they arrived at it. My dad said such is typical, as there's seldom any logic to anything they do.  My dad refuses to call this baby by either of her given names. He was going to call her Cindy, Jan,or Marcia, he said, because of the hours the baby's mom used to sit in front of a TV  watching The Brady Bunch reruns, until I reminded him of the "Cindy" character's doll's name --  Kitty Carry-all. He said that's the baby's new name as far as he's concerned.

Both mother and baby, in addition to father and eighteen-month-old  brother, who must be treated with care to avoid having his pushed nose severely out of joint, are so far thriving. My Uncle Michael's wife, Aunt Joanne, has a little time off, and has caught a plane over to London and then on to the Isle of Man to help with the chores and logistical realities of caring for two babies at once after the mother has just undergone major surgery.  She'll be there for about three weeks, after which my Uncle Steve and Aunt Heather will show up for a week. Following that, my  parents will arrive for another ten days or so. By that time, Cristelle and Mendel will be so sick of relatives that they will be thrilled to be on their own even if it means both babies scream their heads off non-stop.

I wish I could  visit the babies.

Post-script: Cristelle hears her own drummer, and she doesn't even march all that steadily to the beat her personal drummer pounds out. BYU wasn't right for her, so she moved in with an aunt and uncle in Massachusetts and enrolled in a college there, where she became a practicing Wiccan.  She met Mendel through her college's Wiccan society. They married about ten years ago and have been happily living the non-Mormon life since then.

Short-term Paternal Genealogy of Alexis

/Borrowing lines from a Mormon children's song, I have a family tree with branches by the almost-dozens, My dad's family's tree has eleven branches with the requisite uncles, aunts, and cousins.

       

1. Grandpa
2. Grandma
         1. John Pierre (married Erin)
               1. Alexis        Note: Alexis and Matthew are twins. Alexis was removed first, but Matthew followed within less

               2  Matthew    than a minute, so the birth times of record are the same for both twins

        2. Marthalene (married Mahonri)
               1. Marthalette
               2. Rilene
               3. Bradford
               4. Moriancumer
               5. Reed
               6  Lyman
               7, Hyrum
               8. Boyd
               9. Kinnard
              10.Kimball
              11.Orson
              12.Parley
              13. Joseph
       3. Angelie (married to James)
                1. Joshua
                2. Todd
                3 . Laura
                4.  Dianne
                5.  Caleb
                6. Abraham
                7. Spencer
                8. Nathan
                9. Chelsea
              10. Gregory.
       4. Elyse  (married to Lee)
                1. Franklin
                2. Bryce
                3. Gina
                4. Natalie
                5. Emma
                6. Scott
                7  Hannah
                8. Damon (note: Damon and Dallin are fraternal twins)
                9. Dallin
        5. Celine (married to Elon)
                1. Penny
                2. Christine
                3. David
                4, Randall
                5. Nicolle
                6. Elizabeth
                7. William
                8. Kensington
        6. Marie-Therese (married to Virl)
                1, Dilene
                2  Deanna
                3  Dennis
                4  Douglas
                5. Denise
                6. Dawnae
                7  Devin
                8. Daniel
                9  Dixie
               10.Dora
               11.Dmitri
               12 TBA
        7. Claudine (married to Corbin)
                1. Alexander
                2. Russell
                3. Clark
                4. Trent
                5. Rhett
                6. Blake
                7. Leticia
                8. Brock
        8. Francoise (twin to Marie-Therese; died at 3 months of age)
         9, Steven (married to Heather)
                .1. John-Michael
                 2. Caroline
       10. Michael (married to Joanne)
                 1. Ryan
                 2. Ariel
       11. Cristelle (married to Mendel)
                 1. Blitzen Manx  (My dad's nickname for him is "Mutt," It's probably no worse than his given name.)
                 2. Antarctica Meringue   (otherwise known, courtesy of my dad, as Kitty Carry-all)
 

`

More Family Dirt

This is NOT Mahonri, though the resemblance is uncanny. I believe this guy purchases his own household goods, for the record.

Now that it's time for me to do what I must do and no longer procrastinate,  I have a slew of topics  to address -- I have a request about to write more about my looney Mormon relatives,  someone in  the Duggar family is always doing stupid,  one of the extended Kardashain/faux Kardashians  has dropped the last name of Jenner in favor of no last name at all, and Joan Rivers is in grave condition but possibly improving,  I'll address the other topics at a later date. but tonight I will talk about family since there is actual family news.

My cousin Marthalette, daughter of Mahonri the kleptomaniac/common thief, and dad's sister Marthalene, known more for her general idiocy and singing voice that sounds more like a garbage truck when it's compressing the trash than like an actual singing voice, is pregnant with what I believe is her seventh child. It's tough to keep track, as she has at least two sets of twins, and furthermore, all Mahonri's and Marthalene's children and grandchildren look so freakingly similar that it's a virtual impossibility to know which Mahonri/Marthalene  spawn from which any of them sprung.  Their offspring all have big faces, humongous teeth, and dark hair, which is unusual in my dad's family, where dishwater blonde to dusty brown is the reigning shade for anyone (myself in this group, I readily admit; my lighter shade of blondeness is courtesy of chemicals)  who doesn't rely on Lady Clairol or her counterparts to brighten things up  a bit.

As I said once before about Mahonri, and it pertains to his entire clan, including his wife (?!?!?!?), they all look amazingly like Osmonds, except like the least attractive Osmonds imaginable. Take maybe a young Jimmy Osmond, darken his hair, uglify him by a few hundred degrees, and you have a member of the Mahonnri/Marthalene clan.

The look seems if anything to be getting stronger into the next generation. I don't really want to live forever, but if I did, the reason would be to see just how strong is what I refer to as the Mahonrilene gene that produces their trademark look.  I'd love to see how many generations it might continue if allowed to follow its natural course, or I'd even like to practice a bit of eugenics, as in perhaps mating a few Mahonrilenes with actual Osmond decendants to see what the outcome might be. Alas, I'm not going to live forever, but if I record it in my will, perhaps my descendants and their descendants will follow the familial line so someone will be kept apprised in the interest of science.

One of the objects that most frequently disappears from relatives' homes when Mahonri visits is toothpaste. I'd never given this matter much thought except to hide my personal stash of toothpaste after every single tube in the house was once stolen and I was forced to brush my teeth with baking soda the next morning because my dad refused to make an emergency trip to a store just for toothpaste. Now that I think of it, though, it makes sense. The collective family has roughly four times the tooth surface per person to cover as compared to the average person in the average family. The money to pay for the extra toothpaste, were the toothpaste to be obtained in the manner most of us procure our toothpaste, which is to purchase it in a store, would make a serious dent in the family budget. Mahonri works for the Church Educational System, which would indicate to anyone who knows such things that, unless he's in the upper echelons of leadership, which he decidedly is not, he's no Bill Gates.. Hell, he's lucky to even have his job teaching high school seminary after he was caught stealing a crate of disposable douches behind a big box store somewhere in either Sandy or Draper -- I always get those two cities confused.  I think the church used mental illness as a justification for not giving Mahonri the axe. They weren't far off on the mental illness diagnosis, though the verdict is not yet in as to whether his stealing is related to said mental illness or to a disinclination either to use effective birth control  or to find a second job or a higher-paying first job.

Marthalette believes two things about birth control of which I'm aware. Number one --and I'm not sure if she clings to this belief any longer -- is that douching oneself with Coca-Cola (not Pepsi, not Shasta, not store-brand soda, not RC cola, which is still sold, oddly enough, in some parts of Utah. (I suspect Royal Crown, Inc. just took the stock that was bottled in 1983 and didn't sell elsewhere and brough it to central and rural Utah to pawn off on the indiscriminating population) but Coca-Cola immediately after the wild thing has been done. There are certain details to which I was not privy; I don't know whether Marthalette took her douche bag with her on her date, either pre-filled with Coca cola, or  filled it with a freshly opened can immediately after coitus, or if she simply riushed home after her date to take care of business. Either way, her earliest stabs at the Coke douche method of birth control were unsuccessful. She conceived child number one around her sixteenth birthday, long before any wedding vows or even marriage proposals were exchanged.

I'm not sure marriage proposals were ever exchanged. I think it was more of a matter of  Mahonri kidnapping the prospective father at shotgunpoint at six a.m. the day after the home pregnancy test came out screaming positive. You know how those things usually tell you to wait either two or three to five minutes before checking the indicator? (I know none of this from personal experience, but I always kept my ears open when classmates were discussing their pregnancy scares in the minutes before the professors showed up.) The very second a drop of  fluid hit the dipstick, a plus sign appeared. Marthalette was probably out of her first trimester by the time it occurred to her that her clothing was getting a bit tight, that she hadn't been paid any recent visits by the hemoglobin fairy, and that  her method of birth control perhaps needed, at the very least, a little tweaking. And, as I was saying before I digressed, the closest thing to a proposal was when Delbert chose not to  jump out of Mahonri's 4-door pickup as it traveled 70 mph down the highway to the courthouse to pick up the marriage license, and then on to the bishop's living room for the 9:15 a.m wedding. I'm told the ceremony was quaint to say the least.

Mahonri boldly walked in and emptied the little dishes of after-dinner mints from the counter by the register of every Golden Corral and Chuck-a-Rama in the county  to serve at the reception that evening, along with the wedding cake Aunt Elyse threw together using borrowed cake mixes and cans of frosting from everyone on her block. It gave a whole new meaning to the term "dump cake."

The invitations were xeroxed "Come as you are. No gift registration. Please bring cash as your gift. Bills only" on duplicator paper stolen from the church. My younger male cousins ran all over their little town and the groom's equally un-gated community of residence ringing doors and handing the flyers out to the unsuspecting residents.

To make a too long story not too much longer (sorry Jaci; even when I think I have a short topic, it burgeons out of control if it pertains to the family), six babies later, Marthalette is once again enceinte.(I love dragging obscure words from the cobwebs of my mind.)  For all we know, it could be twins again. For that matter, triplets is far from an impossibility.

I've already purchased my shower gift. I wouldn't be invited if the Mahonrilenes thought there was the slightest chance I might show up, but they know I can't travel to Utah in October. For that matter, why would one hold a baby shower in October for an expectant mother due in February? My guess is that they'll hope we all forget about the October shower, and they'll throw another one in January and expect us all to spring for another truckload of gifts. But back to the shower gift I've already purchased.  I went to Costco and got a carton with ten tubes of toothpaste. The kid  or kids probably will not be born with teeth, though  I wouldn't bet the mortgage on it, but the teeth'll come in with a vengeance before we know it. (Did I mention that the Mahonrilenes were also the biggest biters in the family?) I also got a thirty-two pack of toilet paper, not because the baby needs it, but because  it's  gift for a member of his immediate family of another item Mahonri could just as easily steal, and it will make him angry. Making Mahonri angry makes my day, week, month, and year. . perhaps even decade.

Disposable douches were on sale. I seriously considered buying a bulk package, but anyway one views it, a box of disposable douches is a rude gift - wedding shower, baby shower, Christmas, birthday, Groundhog Day, or otherwise. Few things are beneath my dignity, but giving someone a gift of disposable douches is where i draw the line. 

Drinks, Alcoholic and Otherwise

You may be able to rid your first aid kit of Syrup of Ipecac if you keep Mountain Dew on hand.

I realized last night as I was writing about drinking Grape Crush from the stash that my mom bought in mass quantity that I'm giving others the opinion that I drink sugary drinks the way my dog drinks water.  I don't. No one in my family does. We tend to have large quantitites of the stuff oin hand, particularly in the summer, for entertainment purposes, but I don't drink it on a regular basis. I drink water when I'm thirsty. I drink real lemonade for a few extra calories and also because it's good for slowing kidney stone formation. I drink soda when I go out for a meal if I don't feel like having water. I drink seven up or ginger ale sometimes if my stomach is upset. I otherwise drink maybe one or two sodas a week at home.

When my brother and I were really little, we only got soda when we went out to dinner or when we had road trips, and it could not be caffeinated soda. Once in awhile my parents would mistakenly buy fruit-flavored soda that had caffeine in it, but such such screw-ups were rare. They didn't worry about what we ate or drank at birthday parties or in general at other people's  homes, but if they happened to find out that any friend's parent offered unlimited access to sugar, we rarely got to go to that friend's house.

Once we turned twelve, they ceased to worry about whether or not the soda that we ordered had caffeine in it. Once we got into high school, they  actually bought soda that was kept at our house, which we were allowed to have on Saturday nights as long as we had milk for dinner. By the time we were fifteen or so, we were allowed to offer soda to our friends and have some ourselves when we were entertaining.

Now, if a person looked inside our garage, that person would conclude that we probably brush our teeth with carbonated beverages, possibly bathe or shower with the stuff, pour it in the dog's water dish, use it as an all-purpose cleaner, and possibly even pour it in our swimming pool. Last night when my uncle was here, I counted 214 bottles of the various Crushes, root beer, Coke,  Pepsi, and Mountain Dew, about which I will say more momentarily. That didn't take into account the six-packs of regular-sized and mini-sized cans of Seven-up, Pepsi,  Coke, Dr, Pepper, and a few miscellaneous diet drinks. My uncle says we're good Mormons in one regard: we have at least a two-year supply of carbonated soft drinks for our family. (There's even more in the refigerators and the bar.)  Mormons are supposed to maintain a two-year-supply of food, water, other drinks, and any necessary supplies. We're compliant on the soft drink front even though we're not  Mormons. We have that covered.

We have a little more of everything than we did in northern California, both because our house is bigger and we have more storage space and because we are, as far as anyone knows, a little closer to the worst of earthquake country, so it's not a bad idea to have a couple months of life's basic necessities on hand. We don't have a  two year supply  of anything other than sodas and maybe toothpaste, which we seem to accumulate at a ridiculous rate.  Otherwise, we could probably eat for a few months on what we have in the house. We wouldn't necessarily be eating all that well, but we could sustain ourselves for two to three months.

Regarding Mountain Dew, I don't quite know where to begin.  My mom saw a large stack of bottles of Mountain Dew in the grocery store being sold for a rather inexpensive price. There's a reeason for that. If  a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.Neither Matthew nor I had ever tasted Mountain Dew, so we put a few bottles in the fridge and had some one Saturday night. (Old traditions die hard.) Matthew ran to the sink and spit his mouthful of Mountain Dew out. I'm not quite so crass; I swallowed mine, but it gave me a headache for the rest of the night because it was so vile.  My mother started to complain because no one was drinking the Mountain Dew. My dad reminded her that no one in the family had asked for it, but that didn't shut her up. I tried bringing a couple of bottles in at a time, opening them, and pouring them down the kitchen  drain, but once I did not exercise sufficient caution.  Just as I was rinsing the second bottle, I noticed my mom standing inside the pantry watching my every move. She went ballistic.

I eventually learned that while my friends didn't actually like the stuff, Meredith, Jared, and Alyssa could be bribed to drink it at a rate of $1 per bottle. That was probably the single saddest thing about my breakup with Jared. He's still around occasionally, but for awhile he was at our house every day, and he was good for two bottles of the stuff a day at a bare minimum. He's  6'6" and not necessarily finished growing, and has to find calories anywhere he can in order to avoid looking like a skeleton. Anyway, the vile fluid that my mom got at such a bargain rate has ended up costing me six bucks per six-pack in order  to make it disappear. Great deal you got there, Mom. I think we're down to about three six-packs. I cannot  for the life of  me figure out how the company stays in business by producing a beverage that tastes like . . . I will not even say what it tastes like. Ask my brother. He'll gladly tell you.

No one in my house drinks diet sodas because we're mostly a little thinner than we'd like to be. If weight isn't an issue, the stuff put into diet sodas is probably worse for a person than the high fructose corn syrup, although that can exacerbate symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, both of which I have, . Most of the Pepsi that I drink has real sugar as its sweetening ingredient. I tend to drink that when I'm not drinking Grape Crush.  If  I heard from a reliable source that Grape Criush was sweetened with heroin, I'd probably drink it anyway. Besides, my mom bought the last five known six-packs of it in the county. We consumed almost two six-packs yesterday. We sent an additional six-pack with my delightful Uncle Lee. I counted fourteen bottles of it tonight.

I took two of the fourteen bottles to hide in the refrigerator in my room. I'll probably try to save them and take them with me to medical school. If I ever have a truly rough day there, a bottle of Grape Crush might make things better. If I were more like most people my age, I'd squirrel away some alcohol for such days, but I don't honestly like the stuff.  I'm sure Matthew will take enough booze to make it look like both of us are bona fide alcoholics, but he's not necessarily a problem drinker, either. He likes to get a good buzz once in awhile, but he never gets behind the wheel of a car after consuming even one drink, because the legal limit is .0000 for anyone under twenty-one.

I will take Guinness, because I still consume two half-bottles a week for weight gain or at least maintenance purposes. . I was mildly concerned about the local authorities busting our house and arresting me for possession of Guinness and Matthew for possession of the entire liquor store's worth of alcoholic beverages that Matthew will probably have. My dad said that as long as our condo doesn't become the party headquarters of the region for underage drinkers, and as long as neighbors have no reason to complain to authorities, my Guinness should fly under the radar easily enough. Almost everyone in medical school will be over twenty-one, so there will be no incentive to hang out with a couple of nineteen-year-olds just to gain access to our booze when nearly everyone else can walk into a store and buy whatever they want to drink.

Furthermore, he said, he and my mom are the legal owners of the condo. They have a right to keep alcohol there. If Matthew starts to show up for classes and labs hung over every morning, someone might have reason to complain, but otherwise no one should  care. We're surrounded by mostly young families and married or cohabitating couples who don't care what we do as long as we don't bother them.

We're not exactly going to be the "in crowd"' in our medical school class. I can't speak for Matthew, but I'll be happy even to be ignored by the others as long as I'm not picked on or excluded for study groups. I have no intention of using alcohol to be popular. That wasn't even done when I attended university; that was a high school sort of thing to do, except I wasn't given that much freedom in high school.

Right now I'm going on and on about soda and booze for no good reason except that I'm procrastinating because I don't want to blog about the end of "Judge Alex" the TV show. Judge Alex the person still lives and thrives..

Uncle Lee, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bigotry, Unresolved Grief Pertaining to Judge Alex, and Catholic Doctrine

Add a few wrinkles, take away a bit of hair and the booking number, and you have my Uncle Lee, not to be confused with Lee harvey Oswald, though the resemblance is remarkable.

Note: Sometimes my blogs run too long because they're my real life that I wish to get on paper. If this is too lengthy, you don't have to read it.

I really need to deal with the cancellation of "Judge Alex" the TV show, but I'm not yet ready to blog about it , so I'll let you in on the latest happenings in my boring life so that you don't think I died and went to purgatory or worse. By the way, according to the priest who taught my Roman Catholic confirmation class, purgatory is not now, nor was it ever, an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.  He's no longer a priest. If purgatory is not an official teaching of the church, what the former priest taught us probably wasn't, either. Does that mean I'm not a confirmed Catholic? I suppose I'll find that out if I end up in purgatory or worse. My situation is no worse than that of my pseudoaunt and uncle, who were married by a priest who is no longer a priest, and chances are wasn't being all that priestly when he performed their ceremony. Google Albert Cutie (pronounced /cyu/tee/AY/ ) for more information.

My uncle by marriage on my dad's side (there are seven of them; I can hardly keep them straight, so I would never expect readers to be able to do so) made an impromptu visit to our home today.  He didn't come right out and ask for money, which is the usual reason for any of their visits, except for Mendel. Mendel is the one of my dad's sister's husbands whom I like. When he visits, it is never to hit us up for money. He was a trust fund baby and has never touched the principal of his trust; he probably has more money than everyone else in the family combined, including my grandfather, who is himself no pauper.  

I probably shouldn't have included knowledge of Mendel's financial information in my blog, because I don't think the other sisters and their husbands knew that Mendel and Cristelle are wealthy. C'est la vie; now Cristelle and Mendel will probably be hit up. It is lucky for Cristelle and Mendel that they live on the Isle of Man. They'll only be bombarded for cash by text, email, phone call, or snail mail. Who has the money to fly to the Isle of Man to ask for money?

Anyway, the uncle who visited today was traveling from the San Francisco bay area to the LA area by rental car, and decided to stop and visit us, of all people. He has two other brothers-in-law in the immediate area. Why us?  We telephoned my dad's two brothers who live nearby. One had to assist with an emergency c-section, or so he said. Actually, he put his eight-year-old daughter on the phone, who said he had to perform an emergency ski session. The moral of that story is to do your own lying instead of relying upon your eight-year-old child, who doesn't even freaking know what a c-section is when she was delivered by one. I would love to check the hospital records to see if he was within a mile of the place at any time today. 

The other uncle I called  came over with his family to dilute the misery. He brought his wife and kids. We mostly stared at each other and ate cookies and drank bottled Grape Crush. That stuff is hard to get around here now. My mother heard it was at KMART, and she bought the last five six-packs. She ended up giving an entire six pack to my uncle just to get him out of our house and on his merry way.

For the record, this was not the uncle, who shall remain nameless,  whose wife nearly killed me via smoke inhalation by leaving me in a seriously injured and immobilized state by myself in the unfinished attic of her house while she left a casserole not even fit for consumption by members of the Donner Party burning in the oven at 425 degrees, as the fire department later reported. This uncle is not the thief or kleptomaniac. We're all still arguing over which diagnosis is the accurate one concerning Mahonri. All we know is that he steals others' belongings almost on par with the way Rickey Henderson stole bases back in the day.  

So if it wasn't Mendel, it wasn't Mahonri, it wasn't the one who shall remain nameless here whose wife tried, intentionally or otherwise, to kill me, that leaves four other of my dad's sisters' husbands. This one is most notable for his uncanny resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, or at least to what L. H. Oswald might have looked like had Jack Ruby not thrown a hatchet directly into his plan to live to the ripe old age of forty-six, which is Uncle Lee's current  age. (I had to look that up in a family genealogy record. I don't walk around with that sort of useless knowledge in my head.) Furthering the confusion is the fact that this uncle's actual first name is Lee.

Once my mom had asked how Uncle Lee's wife and nine children were and he had answered, there wasn't a hell of a lot left about which to converse. Uncle Lee asked Matthew about his future plans. Matthew told him he had been accepted to ********  Medical School. Uncle Lee reacted enthusiastically, jumping up to shake Matthew's hand and pat him on the back.

Then he asked me if I was in high school yet. My Uncle Michael started laughing hysterically, because it's no secret in the family that Matthew and I are twins. I quietly said that I had finished high school. "You're going to college?" he asked somewhat incredulously.

"I finished that, too," I told him. "Triple major."

"So what can you possibly do now now?" Uncle Lee asked me. "Teach preschool?"  I share this with my deepest apologies to preschool teachers everywhere. Teaching preschool is a noble calling in the minds of everyone more intelligent than a single-cell organism, which my Uncle Lee apparently is not.

Lee looked at my dad. "John, I just don't get why you pushed this child so hard to get through high school and college when she's obviously not qualified to do anything. She probably can't even cook."

"She baked the cookies you've eaten at least a dozen of," my Uncle Michael commented. 

Uncle Lee chuckled. (I hate that word chuckled, but it best fits Uncle Lee's inane laugh.) "Have I eaten that many?" 

My eleven-year-old cousin Ariel shook her head affirmatively. "I've been counting," she chimed in.

Meanwhile, my dad had run up the first staircase to try to find my university paperwork. "Alexis, where's your stuff?" he hollered from the balcony.

"What stuff?" I answered his question with a question. I didn't know if he thought I had a private drug stash and needed to raid it to get through the remainder of Uncle Lee's visit.

"Your university and med school information," he answered.

"Black file  cabinet, second drawer," I answered his answer.

A moment later he came down with a folder containing everything pertinent I had done to get into college or medical school. Uncle Lee smiled at my first mediocre stab at the SAT, which was 2240. "Not a lot higher than Gina's (his kid number three) third try," he commented.

"That was Alexis' first try," my dad explained. He placed another paper in front of Lee's face. "This was her second and final try." Lee looked down to see a perfect score of 2,400.The grin turned to a grimace.

My dad showed transcripts, my valedictory certificate, framed scholarships and grants, and the grand finale, which was my MCAT score. I don't think I've shared it here before, and I don't like to share it, but in this case I forgive my dad for showing it to Uncle Lee. It's higher than one would expect.

"So she's trying to get into to medical school, too?" Lee asked with, for some reason, dread in his voice.

Uncle Michael entered the conversation. "She's going, Lee. With grades and scores like hers, she had her pick of programs."

"She's a legacy," Lee scoffed.

"No, I'm a legacy," Matthew said proudly, pointing at himself. Who else would be proud of admission to a program based on nepotism? Sometimes Matthew acts like he's so dumb that he can't even blow his own nose, but in this case, I think he knew exactly what he was saying. "Alexis got in on a blind application. It wasn't early admisssion because ********  doesn't do early admission, but she's known since late fall. I needed dad's name to as much as get an interview even though my grades and scores weren't bad. Alexis had her choice of everywhere she applied. She didn't need any help."

"Affirmative action," Lee pretend-coughed.

"Look at her, Lee" my Uncle Michael again joined the conversation. "She's as 'white and delightsome' [a formerly popular Mormon phrase] as anyone in this room. And ******** doesn't care about that anyway. They take whomever they want."

"It couldn't possibly have anything to do with her gender, then, could it?" he asked/whined even more quietly.

My Aunt Joanne, a graduate of an Ivy league medical school, bristled at this. "Do you want to compare MCATs and grades with me, Lee?" she asked.

"You're all taking this so personally," Uncle Lee complained. "All I'm suggesting is that this . . . this little girl might not be ready for the rigors of medical school."

"If she isn't," my mom responded, "she still has a home and plenty of other options. This is what she wants, not what we want."

"But is she old enough to know what she wants or what's best for her?" he asked.

"Is her brother?" my mom asked him. "He's the same age."

Uncle Lee made a few comments about freeway traffic that were likely veiled attempts for an invitation to use either our guest room or Uncle Michael's. An offer for neither was forthcoming, so my mom packed and sent a sandwich, some cookies, and a six pack of the precious Grape Crush (gawd, the stuff is amazing) with  Uncle Lee, and he left to accept Tom Bodette's hospitality somewhere along the way to Los Angeles. I do not think I would have slept soundly with such a bigoted person under the same roof, or even in the same zip code.  I'll probably have Oswald dreams tonight even with Uncle Lee well on his way into the next county by now.

Postscript: In a phone call with Judge Alex, he asked me if I knew my parents were proud of me. I didn't really know how to answer because it's not something we talk much about. All it took was a visit from Uncle Lee for me to be able to answer the judge's question with a yes.

Ain't and the Grammar Police

I grew up in a home where use of standard English was not a mere suggestion. My parents gritted their teeth through our very early years of learning the language and  seemed to have a basic understanding that it takes most children at the very least two to two-and-a -half years to get verb conjugations straight, particularly with irregular verbs. They were patient as we mastered the art of using adverbs. I don't think they ever thought our miscues were cute, though. It surprised me, then, when looking at  Matthew's baby book, to read my mother's annotation that at the age of two, he substituted the word  Thursday for thirsty, as in, "I'm Thursday; I need a drink of water."  It would have seemed to me that my mother would have been embarrassed to admit that either of us mangled the English language to such a degree.   One thing I found in my own  baby book was, inside a plastic sleeve,  a crumpled paper than had been flattened for many years, but still retained lines from its original crumpling. On the page -- just a piece of computer paper -- was scrawled the word ain't  over and over, probably twenty or so times on each side,  in my five-year-old printing. I  had been sent to time out in my parents' library for some offense I don't even remember, and apparently didn't think it was fair, so I expressed my outrage by writing the contraband word as many times as I could fit on the single sheet of paper. I crumpled the paper, put it in the wastebasket, and thought that was the end of the matter. It certainly didn't occur to me that either of my parents would think it was funny or would bother saving it.

When we were in real school, we were expected to speak the language properly. The nuns at our Catholic school we attended for kindergarten weren't all that patient with poor grammar and incorrect syntax, either, but Matthew and I were the least of their problems in that regard. We had barbarian Nazis at home correcting our spoken English. We would have know for years by that time not to say, "I seen him" or "She don't know how to tie her shoes."  The cardinal sin in our home, however, was the use of the word   ain't. Matthew and I certainly knew by kindergarten age that if we were going to say ain't, we might just as well drop an f bomb with it. the penalty probably wouldn't have been any worse.


To the best of my knowledge, neither Matthew nor I was ever caught saying ain't  audibly at home.  It's not that there was no temptation.  If a parent says enough times not to say something, it must be a really fun thing to say, right? I  can remember when we'd be in our car seats or boosters on a road trip, if we didn't have to go to the bathroom, we might not get out on a really quick gas pit stop. As soon as both parents were out of the car and the doors closed, we'd start saying "the A word": "You ain't gettin' any of my Skittles, Matthew," I'd say to him even though I new I'd get tired of them before I'd finished half the bag.

"No, you ain't gonna be able to finish 'em. And if you ain't gonna eat 'em all and they don't get et by you,  they ain't gonna go to waste," he would respond.

We seemed to get that certain other syntactical  errors flowed naturally with the use of ain't.  "She ain't  bringin'  us no Dr. Pepper, Matthew, because she don't like us consumin' caffeine," I would tell my brother as our mother approached the car with two styrofoam cupped-drinks, likely bearing root beer or orange soda.

"She ain't really got no idea iffen caffeine don't be good for us or not,"  was his reply.We had the dialect down every bit as well as if we had been brought up by parents who spoke it fluently as a first dialect. The second either parent opened the car door, we reverted to standard English.

Once I didn't want to invite a particular classmate to a birthday party, so I told my mom the girl frequently said ain't. My mother  said that the little girl did not have parents who spoke English at home, and it was not her fault that she used the word  ain't;  she refused to remove the girl's name from the list of invitees.  Years later, I am so incredibly grateful to my mother for taking the stance that she did. I would have trouble living with myself even fourteen years later if the little immigrant child had been excluded from my birthday party primarily on the basis of my snobbishness attempting to masquerade itself as a member of the grammar police. 

 Another time, when I was in second grade,  I had a playmate over -- the child of  English-only speaking parents: a dentist dad   and stay-at-home mom who was a credentialed teacher. The little girl said  "ain't"  loudly in our family room as we were playing. I braced myself for the worst. My mom came into the room where we were playing and explained, using a much softer and kinder voice than she would have used had I been the one to utter what was considered  an epithet in our home, that ain't was not a proper English word, and it was not good for the child to be in the habit of saying it. The little girl responded with, "Lady, how I talk English ain't none of your damn business." The play date ended abruptly as my mother drove the child home. The child never came to our house again, nor I to hers. We moved about five months later so it didn't have to turn into some sort of  family feud in the tiny rural Catholic community.

Now that we are older, my brother and I have seen my dad's true colors. We know that he swears with greater fluency than does the average sailor or truck driver.  Yet still he does not use the word ain't, nor does he commit other errors in English language usage. For example, the pundit on Fox and friends isn't "fucking  stupid;" he or she is "fuckingly stupid."  My father's philosophy is that if one must curse, one should do so using the most standard English possible.

My brother and  I, over the past few weeks, have picked up on a few questionable pronunciations and clearly slang terms that seem to make my dad's skin crawl. My mom doesn't appear to care so much, as she believes  that she did her job in teaching us to speak standard English, and if we're stupid enough to forget it now that it matters, it's our problem. I do think she finds my dad's reaction funny, though.

One of my dad's pet peeves is the pronunciation of the silent t in the word often.  It's become standard though not preferred usage through repeated misuse. If you take any word in the English language and get enough people to pronounce it incorrectly, the incorrect pronunciation will eventually make it into one or more dictionaries as an acceptable if secondary pronunciation.  I've taken up saying often as often as possible, and to articulate the t each time I say it.  It drives my dad bonkers, though, as I've told you all before, it's the shortest trip he's ever taken.

My brother has picked up the slang term iffen. I think it just means if, but it sounds so much more like a drunken Isla Vista resident trying to sound like a cool college kid. My brother also mispronounces the word mischievous.  He's taken to pronouncing it mis CHEE vious. You have to add that i to create an extra  syllable to make your mispronunciation really stand out.  My brother finds more ways of working it into a conversation than I ever could.

As much as I'd love to throw a couple of A-bombs into casual discourse, I do worry about my parents' blood  pressure. I do not wish to be responsible for the untimely death  or incapacitation of either of them.

So iffen you ain't too busy and gots some time on yours hands, read my's blog and respond in you's own best standard English. I does reply to most of my comments. My brother, I wish I could say he do, but he don't often [the t is pronounced] do that sorts of things.

Dreams, Osmonds and Their Impersonators, and Glow-in-the-Dark Teeth

This guy isn't a bona fide Osmond, but he has some serious Osmond teeth going in his favor.

   

                                                                         

pretty cool representation of a kaleidoscope eye, or else a bad case of conjunctivitis: you make the call

the singing portion of the tooth-blinding clan

I went to sleep at midnight because most normal people who don't work odd shifts do that sort of thing. I was awakened a moment ago in the midst of a bizarre dream in which I had somehow joined forces with a band of Osmond impersonators who actually looked like the real thing and performed concerts to packed houses. It was unclear as to whether or not these Osmond impersonators were owning up to being mere impersonators or were pretending to be George and Olive's actual spawn. I wasn't one of the Osmond impersonators for  variety of reasons, one of which would be that I have braces on my teeth. I don't recall ever seeing an Osmond with braces on his or her teeth, although maybe I just missed it and it really did happen. Even when my braces come off,  my teeth may look nice enough, but they will not have that Osmond quality about them. Furthermore, braces or no braces, I don't bear the slightest resemblance to any known member of the Osmond family.

The Osmond impersonators were also secret fighters of crime, and I believe both their musical escapades and their fight for truth, justice, and the American way were being chronicled in a reality series. I somehow got caught in the middle of one of their concerts in which people were seated at round tables of eight or so. "Donny" was strolling between the tables singing a particularly mindless song, which may have been Andrew Gold's "Lonely Boy." At one point he was standing near me as I was crouching near the floor and trying to hide because my medical school supposedly has a clause about not appearing in any reality show without the consent of the medical school administration. I can understand why they woudn't want their students sullying the reputation of the medical school by appearing as fools on reality shows, and it's a private institution, so its administration presumably has greater leeway to set more stringent policies than publicly funded medical schools would have the freedom to establish. Still, I'm not sure if that's really one of the school's rules or if I just dreamed it.  Tomorrow I'll have to look it up in the materials I have been sent.

Anyway, "Donny" was singing what was probably the Andrew Gold song, and he walked very near to where I was crouching. The lights were low, and a spotlight was following "Donny" as he casually wandered between tables, sometimes pausing to put his arm on the shoulder of a particularly goo-goo-eyed female. Dinner had been served at this concert. Dinner was Kentucky Fried Chicken, served in the typical classy buckets with the Colonel's mug boldly emblazoned upon them.  Filming  (or taping; I pay very little attention to which is which, and couldn't tell you whether most shows are filmed or taped, or why, except I think filming is more expensive and perhaps of higher quality) for the reality TV show was going on at that very minute, and the people at the table nearest me were packed in so tightly that I could not have crawled under their table even had I possessed the nerve to do so. The spotlight was nearing me, which would have indicated that I was likely to end up in reality show footage. I crawled away from "Donny," but he seemed to be following me everywhere I went. How's that for a nightmare: being stalked by a "Donny Osmond" impersonator?

Anyway, I scrambled on the floor to escape the spotlight encompassing "Donny."  At one table, I saw an empty KFC bucket, so I grabbed it and put it over my head. This limited the camera's view of my face, but also limited my vision. It didn't matter, as a lady at a nearby table apparently coveted the look I had created, and grabbed the bucket off my head and placed it on her own head. By this time, I had created a little distance between myself and "Donny" and was able to successfully make it out of the dinner theatre or whatever the venue where the performance was being held was called. 

As I went through the door, there was a bar. Only one person was seated at the bar. I seated myself several stools away from her and admitted to the bartender the obvious, which was that I was not of age but just needed to chill for a few minutes. He filled a 7-up for me free of charge.  The other lady seated at the bar moved to a stoool right next to me. "What brings you to these parts?" she asked me.

I told her that I was working with the "Osmond" group and that we were on the cusp of catching up with a major organized crime syndicate. The lady took off her sunglasses, and I saw that she was Leah Remini, who was a major player in the mob we were attempting to bust. She smiled, got up,  and ran out of the building. 

As I was debating whether to go back into the dinner theatre at the risk being of caught in reality show footage so that I could warn "Donny" that I had inadvertantly tipped off Leah Remini,  I woke up.  Even if my dream isn't terribly frightening, I often have trouble going back to sleep, so I started a journal of my dreams a long time ago. Originally it was written out in composition books. I no longer write out anything other than class notes  in longhand if I can avoid it, so using the computer is a logical alternative. My dreams took a turn for the morbid and alarming after a few unfortunate incidents in my life. I still have those sorts of nightmares on occasion, but they're becoming less frequent. A lot of my dreams now are not so much frightening as nonsensical.

I have a history of bizarre dreams. When I was very young, as in roughly two years of age, I didn't quite comprehend the concept of dreams, and thought whatever had happened in my dreams had happened in real life.  It was confusing to my mother when I would bring up things that I or we had supposedly done. She eventually put the puzzle pieces together and realized that I was recounting my dreams. She explained the concept to me, and I grasped it reaonably well for a two-year-old.

Then I got the idea that I needed to tell my parents about my dreams immediately if I awakened in the night after having one. I'd crawl out of my crib (I slept in a crib through my kindergarten year because it fit me more comfortably than did a twin-sized or junior bed. My mom kept the side low so that I could get myself in and out easily] and into my parents' bed, where I would wake up both parents and describe to them my most recent dream in minute detail. They tolerated this for what must have been for a few months. Then I remember my mom telling me, "Alexis, if you have a really bad dream that scares you, it's perfectly OK for you to come wake us and tell us about it, but if it's not a scary dream, you need to just go back to sleep. You can tell us about it in the morning."

I tried this approach, but I found that I often didn't remember the dream the next morning.  so I decided to go back to Plan A, which was to wake my parents again to tell them of my dreams. It was my dad who thought of providing me with composition books so that I could record my dreams. I was an early reader and writer, and had the very basics of phonics down by the time I was three. (Keep using those refrigerator letter and number magnets, parents. It's amazing how much a normally bright child will pick up  from manipulating them on a refrigerator with just a little adult input. It's much better for young children than computer games or playing with parents' phones. My pseudoaunt, who taught kindergarten before practicing law, said she didn't have a single student who came to kindergarten without at least knowing letter names who had the letter magnets on their refrigerators at home.  The concept seems too simple to be effective, but it works.) My spelling tended to be phonetic rather than standard, but I or most adults could make sense of what I had written.  My parents would only interrupt if they noticed my light was on for what they considered to be too long. They were fine with the idea of me taking five to ten minute to record a dream if it meant I would not wake them up.

Every morning after which I had dreamt, I would take my composition book to breakfast with me and would read to my parents what I had written or would use my writings as a guide for retelling the dream in my own words.  We would discuss the dream and why I might have dreamt what I did. It created in me an interest in dreams which I still have. I've read numerous books on the topic. Freud had tons to say on the subject, as did Carl Jung and Frederic Perls.  Much of what Freud had to say seems a bit over the top to me. 

One more recent dream-related publication I enjoyed was Rosalynd Clements' The Analyzing Your Dreams Dictionary. I ordered it as a child and had it sent to my aunt's house because I was concerned that my mother might consider it too New Age for a little Catholic girl to be reading, but my mom heard about it, read it, and said it was fine for me to read. She did put a stop to my original purpose for buying the book., which was to analyze my peers' dreams for profit, but she otherwise had no issue with the book, as she said it was respectful of religion in general. 

Mrs. Clements (I'm not sure if she holds a doctorate or not) bases much of her theory on the works of Jung. While there is a section of term definitions, much of it is written in narrative and is highly readble. As a note of warning, sometimes the author is writing someting that makes perfect sense, then she'll abruptly go off on a tangent about black goo instead of milk  coming from someone's mother's breasts. I assume someone she knows must have had such a dream or it would not have made it into her publication, but still I find it far-fetched. That's one dream I've yet to have. Any psychology-related text must be taken with at least a grain or two of salt, anyway.

I'll do my best to forget about the Osmond impersonators and Leah Remini  and go back to sleep, but it is not going to be an easy task. Whenever I close my eyes, those big white Osmond teeth show up, almost as though they glow in the dark, which begs the question: do the real Osmond teeth glow in the dark?

P.S. Just imagine if the girl with kaleidoscope eyes mated with an Osmond with glow-in-the-dark teeth. Wouldn't the product of that union be a sight to behold?

Checked Out the New Residence

This is a view of the piano in our condo. Ha ha ha. That's really funny, isn't it? This is how I wish our condo looked.  

I'm home after traveling north for three days with my brother to the area of my medical school. We were checking out the condo, the neighborhood, and where all the buildings are that we'll need to report to initiallly. My dad was there part of the time, and he was able to show us our locations, because he did his residency there and still does some  research there.

We checked out the convenience markets, the closest grocery store, pizza places, and haircut places, even though I have Alyssa cut mine most of the time. Matthew may need someone to cut his hair because he keeps it relatively short.  I'm doing really well with not pulling my hair out, which is nice. My braces will be adjusted by a relative of the pseudos about eighty minutes away. It's a bit of distance to drive, but he's good and he's taking care of my braces free of charge.

I like the condo, and it's plenty roomy for the two of us. It has a third bedroom, mainly in case my dad decides to make the place his home away from home. I'm trying to talk him into buying a condo in a wooded area not far from Santa Cruz, or perhaps one near Tahoe. That would give my parents a  destination besides Matthew's and my condo. We love them, but we need space.  I may have an entirely different take on  that in about two months.

We had dinner one night with my very brief significant other. We're not really awkward around each other because we've known each other forever. In addition to the five-year age gap, it was probably almost incestuous for us (despite lack of technical consanguinity) to have been together anyway, even though we never got past first base and I'm not even sure he ever really hit even one clean single. He's in his internship there. He's not sure if he'll complete his residency there, but is leaning toward it. He will specialize in emergency medicine. I'm not sure how it works, but his career will be best served by having board certification in general surgery. He may accomplish that with a fellowship and exam, or may just extend his residency.


The piano my uncle ordered arrived. I actually got to pick this one out.  I love my piano at home, and I love both of my mom's pianos, and I'm sure I'll love the next one my mom is buying to put in the third story loft. Still, every piano has its own unique touch and sound, and it's very special to be able to pick  the one that's perfect for you. Matthew doesn't care. He's not that discerning where pianos are concerned. As long as they're more or less in tune and the keys don't stick, he'll play them without complaining. The new piano is close to in tune, but it needs to settle for a couple of weeks, and then be retuned. My dad will probably just do  it himself because it's logistically simpler than opening the place for someone else even though the dealership provides a free tuning. I suppose it could be done right before school starts when Matthew and I go back.

The security system for the condo still needs to be upgraded. The place  came with a basic alarm, but I won't be able to sleep at night without one of those high tech ones such as are advertised on TV. The condo is in a nice complex populated mostly by medical residents and their families. I think my parents bought  there because they knew the neighbors would complain if we turned the place into the local center of debauchery, not that I would have done such a thing, anyway. Even the area surrounding the complex is not unsafe. Still, an ounce of prevention is worth a whole truckload of hindsight. Matthew may end up spending a lot of time elsewhere, as it isn't his job to babysit me, and I'm not sure how well Matthew would fare against thugs with weapons, anyway.  A really good security system, even if it can be annoying at times, will allow me to sleep at night.

Mentally insert the most obscene words you can conjure here.

an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth

I just lost a complete blog to the ether. I saved  a million times, including after the final edit, just before adding photos.   I am easily angry enough to throw my $&(!! laptop through the living room plate glass window. The only thing keeping me from doing so is that my dad has already said that if I do that, he will take my violin out of its case and throw it through the window right after my computer. Such is the height of stupidity. How do two wrongs make a right?. How would ruining an exquisite musical instrument compensate for the very justified action of propelling the piece of junk that has caused me so much heartache and so many headaches through a very easily replaceable window?

I need a Mac in the worst way, but my mom says I can't buy it until September 1 for some arbitrary reason to which only she and God are privy. Perhaps it came to her in a vision.  Maybe either the Angel Moroni or the Blessed Virgin personally visited her and said, "Don't let Alexis buy her Mac until September 1." Or perhaps  the message appeared in an image in her whole wheat toast, which she has for breakfast most mornings. Either way, there's no reasoning with a person devoid of logic.

I am highly tempted to tamper with her laptop.  I'm not particularly techno-savvy, but I could do some damage if I gave it a bit of effort. I'm not sure what I would delete or what virus I would introduce to her system, but my attack would be vicious.

I wonder what she would do if  I took money from my savings account and bought the Mac on my own without her permission. Would she throw me out of the house? Would she refuse to ket me live in the condo she and my dad purchased for my brother and me to use for med school?  I'm not sure it's worth the risk to find out, but I'm sorely tempted.  I could take the attitude that she might not even find out, but she would. She's a personal friend of the owner of the Mac store here, so if I bought it here, the knowledge would be hers within a matter of hours. If I bought it elsewhere, the Mac store owner here would have ways of finding out, and, out of sheer spite, would share the information. I'm screwed either way. I could have someone else make the purchase, but that could feasibly end up in one of those ownership disputes that are seen on "Judge Alex" and the lesser court shows on a regular basis.  I'm not all that eager to pay for a Mac, only to have it belong to someone else.

My mother needs to consider this: is it really worth having one's daughter check into the psych ward over a stupid malfunctioning computer?

My father needs to consider that if he throws my violin through a window, at least one of his guitars is going out with it.

Rest in Peace, Robin Williams

Robin Williams -- July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014

As were many others. I was devastated [as much as one can be devastated by the loss off a person one never met] by yesterday's  announcement of Robin Williams'  untimely death.  He was the ultimate iconic comedic actor of my lifetime. While he participated in the making of  too many brilliant works to list here, my personal favorite was probable Dead Poets Society, although it's hard to argue against either Good Will Hunting or Good Morning, Viet Nam.  My childhood favorite was Mrs. Doubtfire.

The death has yet to officially be ruled a suicide, but it's looking that way. Williams had been treated for depression and for substance abuse related to depression. If his death was, indeed, self-inflicted, we may never know what drove him to such a drastic and final act. All I know is that the world lost a genius far too soon. Rest in peace, Robin Williams.

                                                               

Billy Joel performed "Summer Highland Falls" in a concert that featured questions and answers from the audience. An audience member asked him what inspired the lyrics.  In his answer, which follows his performance of the song,  he alluded to the idea that many artists of one genre or another, or highly creative people in general, often deal with extreme emotional highs and lows.  I don't know if Robin Williams' diagnosis ever included bi-polarism, but it seems to fit.

Eventually effective ways of treating  this very legitimate condition will be found. (It may not yet be able to be spotted on an MRI  as a tumor can be, but it is, nonetheless,  every bit as real.) Progress is being made as I type, but the progress is not happening  fast enough. Until better solutions are found, lives will be affected for the worse or lost because of this very real condition. The world is a poorer place if the Robin Williamses of the world do not live out their natural lives.