Unexpected trip

My dad is in town(ish), having a procedure done on his heart. It is non-invasive and, I thought, posed no serious risks.

Right before he and my mom made the trip up here, they found out that my maternal grandma, who has pretty severe Alzheimer’s, was in the hospital in New York (where she lives) with a touch of pneumonia. My grandma has no family near her who could take care of her, and my mom decided to leave Denver Thursday morning and fly out to see her. So they took two cars.

On the drive up, my mom spoke with her mom on the phone and learned that my grandma didn’t know where she was or what she was being treated for, and that the nurses in the hospital wouldn’t help her to the bathroom—they just brought her a bedpan, which they then left her painfully laying on top of for hours.

Of course, this totally freaked my mom out.

She got her flight switched to Tuesday morning and is now in New York. No real updates on my grandma’s status, which I assume means my mom has everything under control. But it left things in a weird limbo with my dad.

I was supposed to go down to Colorado Springs last night and stay the night in the hospital guest house, which is where he went after being discharged from the hospital. We (Branden and I) were going to get dinner with my dad, then Branden was driving our car back home and leaving me there to drive Dad to Durango today in his car, then I’d fly home. Last night, he sounded great and healthy and, while not 100%, probably about 45% of his usual awesome self. The plan was a go.

I picked Branden up from work at six and we started driving down to the Springs. Google Maps reported three accidents between us and the Springs on I-25, and the usually-seventy-five-minute drive was going to be an hour and forty-one minutes. That put dinner at almost eight, which is really late for my hummingbird-like husband.

We’d been driving for about thirty minutes (and still hadn’t gotten out of Denver) when I realized that I had left my pills at home.

I will clarify: my pills include my MS medication and my Adderall, both of which are daily pills and neither of which I can afford to do without.

So... the only option was to turn around and go home. And with the traffic the way it was, that meant staying home and coming back the next day.

At that time, I was under the mistaken impression that I was driving Dad home on Thursday, and that our plan for that night could be easily transplanted to the next night. Of course, that wasn’t the case and I’d need to be in Colorado Springs between ten and eleven a.m. the next day to drive to Durango.

Ugh.

But not impossible.

I asked for (and received) a favor from my good friend Fletch, who agreed to drive me down the next morning. I’d go into work with Branden, he’d drop me off at a light rail station and I’d take the light rail to Fletch’s, then off we’d go. Easy cheesy.

But this morning, I got a call from my dad at seven a.m. He said he didn’t want me to come down. There had been freezing fog overnight: the visibility was terrible and the roads were worse.

But more importantly: he was going back into the hospital. He’d had a bad night and felt short of breath.

So I’m home now, blogging and trying to work up the motivation to work more on my book and trying to put out of my mind that I haven’t heard from him since then, and I haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m worried and scared. I tried to look at it as a relief. I can’t.

But worrying doesn’t do any good either. So I’m going to keep trying.

Wish me luck.

Enthusiasm wanes as capability increases

I received my corkboard and my index cards! I also started reading another mystery novel within the set of books that I would call my inspiration for my story. This one, Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem is entirely different from Dennis Lehane in terms of... well, everything. Gun, With Occasional Music is a satirical science fiction detective novel that adheres faithfully to the more cliché tropes of the noir genre. While it is telling a story, it seems to me that the focus is more on the tone and the world that it builds than the story itself. I say this in part because I’ve read the book at least twice now, and I still can’t remember what the story was at all. But I can remember that I loved it, and that the world that it built was engrossing and entertaining, and the tone was engaging and usually hilarious.

In Gun, the protagonist is a disillusioned, mostly broken PI in a world where no one but private inquisitors and the police are even legally allowed to ask questions, not even the most basic ones like “what’s your name?” (I assume this gave Lethem fits trying to write.) I think this adheres more to the literary ‘definition’ of the noir trope in that we see the PI go from a state of jaded apathy about the client who walks through his door—knowing there’s little he can do to help and sending him on his way—to a grudging, ungenerous refusal to accept that anyone is beyond hope in a just world; refusing to let go of the idea that maybe, just maybe, the world is still just.

My favorite definition of a noir protagonist, and the one I’m calling the ‘literary definition,’ is this:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

I’m trying to keep that definition in mind while writing my main character, Cassidy. I think much of my difficulty comes from the fact that I want her to be so much braver than I am.

My first draft came out very tame. While I believe that the mystery was interesting, no character was pushed to the point of desperation, and no real danger was ever encountered—because I have a hard time imagining a person actually taking the actions of a desperate man and sincerely intending to do bodily harm to another person.

When I read it in my mystery novels, it’s shocking because it’s not an action genre with bullets flying and punches punctuating every paragraph; it’s gritty and ugly and real and when someone gets shot, they don’t get back up and keep running. So while I don’t think I’d have a hard time writing the more exaggerated, unrealistic combat scenes that you might see in a Marvel movie or an episode of Buffy, I hesitate to broach the kind of violence that belongs in a noir book, because it needs to be grave, not glorified. It needs to be tense and terrifying, not inconvenient or irritating. In a noir book, the violence should be the thing that ends the book, because it ends either the good guy or the bad guy. It’s not an obstacle.

And then, when the protagonist does struggle to his or her feet, it seems all the more triumphant.

Anyway.

Now that I have my tools in hand, I am predictably hesitant to begin the process of rewriting. After all, I messed it up so bad the first time... of course, without my first try, this story wouldn’t exist at all. I need to start thinking of the words of my first draft as being the shell around the nut of the story. Crack it off and throw it away, and you’ve still got more than you had before. Sure it’s incorporeal, and the second draft may not be much better than the first... but it’s a lot more likely to be closer to the truth of the story than the first was.

So, I am now picking up my index cards and my sharpies and I’m writing things on them. For example:

Cassidy Byrne

Lonely. Brave. Realistic. Observant. Intuitive. Driven. Disadvantaged. Aloof. Curious. Honest. Snarky. Educated. Blunt. Careful. Self-assured. Self-alienated.

Puts ‘morally right’ in front of ‘legal’ in the alphabet, but operates within the confines of the law as often as possible. Desperately wants to know who she was before she ‘woke up,’ but not to the detriment of her clients. When presented with leads on her own case, has a hesitancy to follow them that she doesn’t understand.

Anyone out there struggling with their own re-writes, or first drafts, or inspirations?

What's the opposite of procrastination?

On Monday the 29th of December, I ordered a large corkboard and a pack of multicolored index cards. It’d been about a month since NaNoWriMo and I was itching to start revising my story. Of course, I didn’t really know where to start and I was super nervous. I’ve never revised anything before—in fact, I’ve rarely finished anything before. The sum total of my experience with revision is advice on NaNo boards and the show Stark Raving Mad, which had a gag in its first episode about multicolored index cards and a corkboard just to show how anal the editor was... so I figured that was probably a good place to start.

So I hemmed and hawed and discussed it with Branden (my inspiration and my support) and I wondered what I was going to write on my index cards, and once stuff was written on them, how I would stick them to the board. It was quite literally like owning paper and pencils and a ruler, but no textbooks. I was understandably confused and more than a little scared.

As part of my preparation I decided to reread some of my favorite books within my genre. As I progress (present tense!) through Darkness, Take My Hand, I can plainly see some places where I went very, very wrong. It is humbling but enlightening, and the things I believe I’ve learned through reading the book are extremely exciting to think about implementing. Of course, trying to do so will probably end up looking like a kid trying to fence based on watching a video of fencing... but I will give it my best effort, and practice will eventually make perfect. One hopes.

My goods were supposed to arrive on December 31st, fresh and waiting for me to begin work the next day—but they didn’t arrive. I was full of woe! How would I start revising if my revision materials weren’t here yet? I didn’t want to start anything on the computer, because it would lock me into a certain way of thinking and that way surely lies madness. As usual, I was allowing my black-and-white evaluations of things to block the creative process. Of course, it wasn’t even New Year’s Day yet, so my anxiety was premature.

New Year’s Day came and I discovered I was in no shape to begin revision anyway. I hadn’t had anything to drink the night before but I did stay up till after 3am, and woke up much too early. I was a zombie with a head full of sand, and was actually mostly relieved that my materials hadn’t arrived. Branden and I mercifully spent much of the day watching Supernatural with our friends, allowing someone else’s creativity wash over and inspire us.

Last night, as I settled into bed, I continued reading my book. I read late into the night, hoping that reading before bed would help me sleep better (as I’ve been getting extremely poor sleep of late), but woe, it was not to be. When I finally forced myself to put down the book, my brain was afire with tightly furled buds of ideas, and I couldn’t help myself but try to force them to bloom.

And bloom they did.

Sometime after 3am, I finally fell asleep, but every time Branden or I shifted in bed, or a cat stepped near me, or a fly sneezed somewhere in the house, I woke up again and my buzzing brain picked back up where it had left off, seemingly moments before.

In this fashion, I slept until about 7:15.

So I am here before you now with less than four hours of sleep, eagerly awaiting my corkboard and index cards, and I literally can’t wait to start. When I’m finished with my second draft, it will bear only a passing resemblance to my first, and I think that’s both amazing and wonderful, and slightly embarrassing.

Anyway, here is a line I thought up last night. In hopes to get you hooked:

A dog, fitted with electrodes behind his ears and a talk collar around his neck, shouted “hi” at me halfheartedly as I walked by.

“Hi,” I replied automatically, and immediately felt embarrassed and impotently resentful, as if I’d accidentally waved back at a pickle-costumed human advertisement.

Feels a bit tortured. Any suggestions for making it more streamlined?

Finding my voice!

I return to the world of blogging full of motivation and enthusiasm. Sadly, I’m a tad light on content right at the moment. However, I will find some, and all my readers will be full of milk and honey and other forms of happiness!

On this, the last day of 2014, I’m thinking about Christmas with my family over the years and how our traditions have grown and changed, as our family has grown and changed.

For as long as I can remember—possibly for as long as I’ve been alive—my whole family has had Christmas stockings that were hand-knitted by my dad’s mom. (I suspect my dad and his brother had theirs before they can remember.) They were decorated with reindeer, Santas, trees, snowflakes—many Christmas/winter images. They also had each of our names knitted along the top rim of the stocking. Allow me to emphasize that: every bit of the ornamentation was knitted. Nothing was glued, nothing was stitched, nothing was painted. It must have been an incredible amount of work.

They were such an institution in our household that I remember being baffled at other kids not having elaborate, handmade, personalized stockings.

Christmas in my house has always been so full of love and acceptance and warmth. My older brother could rarely visit home (starving college student followed by starving actor), but he would always make it home for Christmas. And yes, we gave presents and we’d usually all “get a haul,” but especially once we became adults, that wasn’t the point. We loved being together.

Sitcoms and movies make family holidays look like a chore full of drama and no small amount of racism. That humor has always been lost on me. There may be stress related to Christmas shopping or Christmas travel, but come Christmas day, no one ever got out of their pajamas, metaphorically speaking. And usually, we never got out of our physical pajamas, either.

Our family has grown in the intervening years: All three of us kids are married and my younger brother now has a son of his own. Our Christmases include spouses and, very occasionally, in-laws. And the spouses and grub, who are just as much family as the native Lymans (obviously), are nonetheless lacking in handmade personalized Santa/tree/reindeer/snowflake stockings. My grandma just turned 90 this last Christmas, and her days of knitting have passed, unfortunately.

This is a true sadness.

So, one of my goals for 2015 is to start (and hopefully complete?) knitting stockings for the three spouses plus baby.

Our mantel is getting crowded.

The more, the merrier.

Do any of you have Christmas traditions you want to share? Comment below!

Paralyzing Fear

It's been a while, I'd say... I just need to get some thoughts out of my system, and maybe that'll help conquer them. Who knows, though...

So, when last we saw our heroes (me), I was embarking on a 90-day short-term disability leave from my work. Immediately following this term, I filed a long-term disability claim, which was (hooray!) accepted, and now for the next 2 years I am receiving ~$1,500 per month, to be continued until 2049 if they decide that my disability extends to "any occupation" rather than "own occupation." That is certainly good news and I'm not complaining about that.

However, mandated unemployment has its drawbacks. Although I do my best to get out of the house to work out and do errands, and thusly have maintained a good physical lifestyle, I find myself nearly unable to do anything that expands my mind or life. I clean the house, I cook, I shop, I feed myself and Branden, but when all of those things are done, I just... do nothing.

And then there are things that I really want to do, activities I'd like to get involved in, things that I've basically "decided" to do—like Boulder Community Choir—but when I go back and think about them, my thoughts go something like, "I can't commit to that, that's too much, I don't know if I'll want to keep doing that." I haven't looked into a Tae Kwon Do dojo or ceramics classes, I haven't even finished reading my book about producing webcomics. I don't finish my sketches, I don't finish my stories; I was in the middle of a Shadowrun plot that I was very excited about running, but the idea of continuing to write my ideas down is terrible because I'm sure that my ideas are terrible and the longer I spend wasting my time on recording them, the worse I'm making the world.

I feel like I can run the lives of others to their betterment; I have lost 30 pounds since Christmas by the power of my will alone, and as per usual it's easy to tell other people what to do and even be right. But my own life is unapproachable.

Maybe it's the Tylenol PM talking. I hope so. Right now it's looking pretty bad.

10 years later

News flash, internet: Jar Jar Binks is no longer funny. If he ever was.

Long coupla weeks.

Many of you who read my blog know about a lot of the things that have been going on in my life, but I feel that for posterity's sake I should sorta list it out and sort it out and see what form it takes. The whole story is long and seems unrelated, but it's all connected, so I'm going to start with the storms first, then whip them to perfection.

Storm #1
Branden's work gave him stock options as a perk, like workplaces do. Up until this point, these were just that—options. He couldn't buy them because they're not a publicly traded company, nor sell them because he can't own them because he can't buy them because they're not a publicly traded company. However, recently, his employer opened up an employee stock incentive program under which employees could trade up to 50% of their salary for stock in the company, at a 15% discount off the most recently evaluated board member purchase price. This program would be available for as long as there were stocks left (the pool is shared between all employees). Because we're concerned for our future and we have been saving and sticking to budgets, etc, we decided to go all in—50% salary for as much stock as possible. We are now completing month 1 of half-salary living.

Storm #2
Branden and I did not go on a honeymoon when we were married. We didn't have the money to even consider such a thing. Now that we're 3 years out of school, Branden's got a good job, I've got a good job, and we've started saving money, we thought it'd be the perfect time to have a honeymoon—concurrent with our 3-year anniversary. We batted it around, made sure that we really believed it was a good idea, put in our PTO requests to our works, and finally, once all the formalities were handled, we purchased plane tickets to Italy. We applied for (or renewed, as appropriate) our passports, we've started booking hotels and hostels. The honeymoon is a go and I certainly can't imagine a better place, time, or person to go with!

Storm #3
Considering the treatment of my MS and what implications it has regarding reproduction, the idea of having kids has been something that Branden and I have had to consider with the calculating eye of a chef in a kitchen. The question regarding whether we should have kids isn't even what's at stake here, but more if we want to have kids, what does that entail? How early do we need to start making preparations (getting off medications, etc)? What sorts of things should we expect? We're approaching "having kids" in a very roundabout way—we're trying to figure out if it's feasible or possible before we approach the decision of whether to actually do it or not. In preparation for the approaching of this decision, I have been in close concert with Planned Parenthood and my team of crack neurologists regarding timing, health, medication, and etc. Directly because of this plan, I have gone off of Tysabri, and if all had gone well, I could be trying to get pregnant right about now.

Storm #4
When I was hired at my job, it was through my good friend and former boss Vinnie, who wedged me into the company he worked for as soon as they had any openings. This was great and excellent; the health benefits were good, the other bennies were good, the pay was good, it was challenging and rewarding and overall a very good job for me to have. In addition, I got to work with my friend Vinnie and I made a bunch of new friends. However, over the course of the year + that I've been there, Vinnie and his boss, Shelly, had more and more friction between them. Vinnie felt that he understood their relationship to allow for some flexing of his own muscles, judgement-wise, and apparently this was not the case. Shelly expected Vinnie to shout "how high" when she screamed "jump," and no less so just because a split second before that she was telling him to get on the ground... However, the point of this particular storm is that, after months of conflict, Shelly finally fired Vinnie. Because I was Vinnie's "favorite" and Shelly didn't want to hire me to begin with, I immediately began feeling like a bug in a jar. Going in to work was like running a gauntlet, and I knew that something had to happen—not least because Vinnie told me that Shelly was planning on writing me up. However, the days passed fairly innocuously, if tensely.

Storm #5
Because of the tenseness I was feeling at work, I decided that it would be a good idea for Branden and I to start looking into buying a home. We live on property at my work, and get a 20% discount off rent & don't have to pay any deposits—if I were to get fired, our rent would go up $300/month and we'd immediately have to fork out $1,100 for security deposit, pet deposit and garage door opener deposit. I was trying to figure out a good way to buy a place and keep our monthly payment to about what it is right now, or less. We looked at some listings online and got back in touch with some realtors we had been in touch with years before (when we had naïvely considered buying a house while in college), and have been diligently pursuing this possibility. If we manage to close by the end of June, we can get the $8,000 tax credit for new home-buyers; however, we're not going to rush it.

• A side note to this storm is this: the first day we went out looking at properties, we went to look at one particular one that we both immediately fell in love with. It had these beautiful dark hardwood floors, wood-burning fireplace, lots of nice cabinetry and counter space, and 3 bedrooms—just gorgeous. No yard or lawn though... However, by the time we told the realtors later that day that we were interested in pursuing it, the house was already under contract. I cry now.

Storm #6
My MS treatment... ah.... that loops back around to the "having kids" idea, but it is unrelated enough to be a different issue. I had gotten off Tysabri in anticipation of possibly getting pregnant. Our plan was to do the following: in December, right as I was getting off Tysabri, I got an MRI to see where I was as a "baseline". That MRI came back pretty much normal—no active lesions, no current activity. Then, I was to get another MRI in March to see how I was handling the new medication. Well, I started feeling some very minor symptoms on March 12th, so I called my nurse. She decided to wait on steroid treatment through the weekend, then see how I was doing. The following Monday I wasn't doing significantly better, but neither was I doing significantly worse, so we decided to wait on steroids until after my MRI, which I would schedule for as soon as possible. The unfortunate thing was that I couldn't schedule an MRI until the following Monday. Well, by that Thursday I was not okay with waiting anymore, so I left work at 3pm and a home nurse came out to try to get an IV in me. Anyone who's familiar with my MS drama knows the song and dance so I won't belabor the tragic point: she couldn't get a line. Then we couldn't call it in to Boulder Community Hospital, so I was going to have to go in to my hospital the following day (making me miss work). Well, because that's what I had to do, I did it. Then, I had the MRI Monday, and went back to work Tuesday. I was feeling very discombobulated, irrational, out-of-sorts and obsessive and was just about freaking out when I got a call from my nurse saying that I needed to come in to the ER as soon as possible to try to get looked at, because my MRI results were very worrying.

So... I went to the ER. 4+ hours later they sent me home with instructions to come back the next day for another steroid infusion—4 days this time. (All to be done at home, except for the installation, of course.) They also told me that I should be out of work until at least the following Tuesday. Then, the next Monday, the 22nd, I had an appointment with my neurologist himself.

Storm #7
Back to work issues—because of my time out of the office, I was terrified that Shelly would fire me for performance if I did come back on Tuesday the 23rd. The way I figured it, it would be good for the company if she did—I'm sure they would love to not have to pay my insurance premiums. So I was trying to decide whether I should take short term disability leave even if I didn't "need" it so that I could have 90 days guaranteed insurance & partial pay, or if I should do the "honest" thing and go to work and risk the "punishment" that Shelly might dole out; losing my job, which would include all income (rather than partial), any form of insurance coverage, and my home. (Of course, on the other hand, she may not fire me, in which case, I'd be making my full income, which would have been a good thing considering, well, all of the other pending issues. But even if she hadn't fired me right away, she could fire me at any time...)

</Storms>

You see how A Perfect Storm has nothing on me?

The resolution of this story is predictably tame: Everything's working out for the best. Dr. Vollmer said that I'm suffering from steroid withdrawl and Tysabri rebound, and that I won't be back to "baseline" for around 90 days anyway, so I'm taking all the STD that I need, and if everything works out well, I'll go back to work at the end and maybe Shelly won't hate me then. But even if she does, a lot of the pressure will be off me for being employed anyway. I will keep everyone up to date with the house hunt. ^_^ Also, I want to shout out to Hanna, Lilly, Fletch and Christina, who were all in town for some of this drama and were patient and loved me anyway. Particularly Fletch, the immortal chauffeur. *hugs* What would I do without my friends? I love all of you... A domani, tutti.