Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Week In Review

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1. About a month or so ago, my husband came across some site on the Internet that offers free magazine subscriptions. He signed up for a number of publications that interested him, and they have slowly been making their way into our mailbox.

Every time another one arrives he shows it to me and says, “Yeah, I got this from that same site; you know, the one that offered me Wood.”

2. Somehow during the last week or two my husband sprained his pinky finger, so he’s been taping it up to help with the pain.

Last week he had to go on a business trip to Mexico, and when he arrived there and they saw his taped-up finger, all his Mexican colleagues were quite concerned.

“How did you do that?” they asked.

“I don’t know-why?” he responded.

“Because if you have that kind of injury down here, it means that you recently made a very, very bad gesture.”

(Unfortunately, no further information was forthcoming on this subject.)

3. I was recently made aware of a new Rooster-themed restaurant that recently opened up back in Charlotte (NC) where I went to high school.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and no, it’s not the kind of Rooster-Restaurant you might expect to find in the more rural parts of the state, the parts where the residents actually consider road-kill to be a form of haute cuisine.

No, it’s (apparently) trying to be all trendy and avant-garde, which I have to imagine is hard to do, given that it apparently features an entire wall dedicated to just about every kind of taxidermied rooster in existence.

It was hard enough to wrap my brain around that concept, but then I found out that all it serves is tapas.

“So”, I asked the person telling me this story, ” it is a tapas-serving, taxidermied-Rooster-themed restaurant?”

“Yes it is,” they replied.

And then my head exploded.

The End.

Seriously?

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You know those weeks where every single medical problem you have attacks you all at once? Yeah, me too. That pretty much sums up what the last 10 days or so have been like for me.

I’ll spare you a litany of my ills, except, have I mentioned here before that, because the Universe is apparently exploring the concept of irony with my own personal life as its classroom, the medicine I take to manage my fibro pain causes severe swelling, which in turn causes severe pain? (Oh, and Universe? SO NOT AMUSING.)

So I went to see my fibro doctor and begged him to please, please, OH PLEASE do something to relieve the ping pong sized edema in my ankles. I was thinking of something along the lines of possibly draining something out, or injecting some kind of pain medicine in, but do you know what he said?

“Well, some support hose would probably help you with that.”

And then he Kept. On. Saying. It.

Until finally I said, “Look-every time you say that, I just get this image of a 98-year-old grandma, hunched over, hobbling along with a cane.” Which was my polite way of saying, “Hell no! That will not be happening in this lifetime!”

And then, in what I can only assume was his genuine desire to help me find some relief, he said, “Well you know, they can measure you now so that you can get an exact, customized fit.”

And I thought, “Um, what?!”

Was that supposed to be some kind of selling point for me?

Because I’m sorry to report that, if it was, it failed. Miserably.

Stealing Hope And Crushing Dreams-All In A Day’s Work For Me

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A few years ago when I began to conceive of the idea for world domination, I decided that the first thing I needed was a business license. Because you want to be “official” and orderly as  your takeover progresses, not like those slapdash, haphazard rulers who just throw things together at the last minute and make it all up as they go along.

Of course this meant I had to come up with a name for my business, which completely stressed me out. I mean, I was years away from achieving the title of Her Highness, Supreme Empress Of The Universe-so how could I possibly know what name I would need for my supporting infrastructure this far in advance? It’s like when you go to college, and just at the moment you realize how much there is in the world that you don’t know, they want you to pick a major and decide what you are going to do with the rest of your life.

So I did what any focused, competent leader would do: I picked the first name I thought of, and figured that I could work out all of the pesky details later.

So I received my business license, and then I went back to my day job of subverting brainwashing tutoring the up-and-coming generation of soon-to-be adults. And I never gave my business license another thought, until I started receiving lots of phone calls from people who wanted to discuss my business with me. Which normally would be a good thing, but not here.

Because these people didn’t want to talk to me about Spanish tutoring (i.e., the actual service provided by my business).

No, they wanted to sell me leads for my business that would enable me to sell more life insurance. In my life insurance business. Which offered life insurance. For you to insure your life.

And it wasn’t just one person calling me about this, which could’ve been chalked up to making an honest mistake; no, it’s been a steady stream of people calling me with this same kind of offer.

Apparently, by including the word “life”  in the name of my business, I accidentally triggered some sort of secret business alarm that connects to every single human being who has anything at all to do with the selling of life insurance.

I don’t know why this offends me so much, but it does. I mean, it’s not like I lack for things that actually do call for a healthy dose of righteous indignation. Like the fact that, although his name does not appear anywhere, on any official documentation for my business, all my business-related mail for some reason now comes addressed to my husband. Even though, could he handle an emergency involving the need to construct a sentence using the imperfect Spanish subjunctive, making sure to apply the correct sequence of tenses? I THINK NOT!

So of course, the only option that now remains is for me to mock these callers in my own special way. Sure, I could be polite to them, but then I would have nothing entertaining to write about here, so, pshaw, whatever, politeness.

I attended a college that prided itself on turning out great masses of white-collar professionals, so as soon as I receive one of these calls I can immediately picture the caller, clad in their crisp shirts and ties (or blouses and skirts, as the case may be), sitting up straight on the edge of their chair, earnest and driven in their quest to, um, do whatever it is that these kind of people do. (I was an artsy-fartsy language major, remember.) And then we have a conversation that goes something like this:

Perky, professional insurance industry worker: “Hello, is this [name of my “company”]

Me: (Ugh-here we go again.)

Me: (In my perky, professional voice, just to string them along for a few moments) “Yes it is.”

PPIIW: “Great. May I plese speak with the president of such and such/the director of so-and-so/Jennifer Ryan?”

Me: (Switching over to my exhausted, world-weary voice) “This is she.”

PPIIW: “And so, your company sells life insurance, correct? ”

Me: (perkily, knowing that this will totally throw them off their game) “Nope!”

PPIIW: (pauses, trying to regroup and figure out what to do next, not quite resigned yet to losing this sale) “So this is not an insurance company?”

Me: (enjoying the sound of their hopes deflating, because I’m kind of bitchy like that) “Nope. I’m a Spanish tutor. And the company is just me-I’m the owner and sole employee.” (Or sometimes, if I’m wanting to sound more “official”, I refer to myself as an Educational Consultant, or an Academic Coach.)

Now I can actually hear the sound of their crisp business attire wilting, which makes me feel even more smug, as I am most often clad in my frumpy, shapeless, but oh-so-comfy pajamas, neiner, neiner, my life is so much better than you-ours.

PPIIW: (mentally releasing the amount of money they’d hoped to make from this phone call) “Well, I’m sorry to bother you.”

Me: (growing increasingly perky, the more they become depressed)  “Oh, no problem. Thanks so much for calling.” (Which, as everyone knows, in The South is a polite way of saying, “Ha, ha, @#$! you.”Among other things.)

Of course, when I finally achieve the position of Supreme Empress, I will hire people to be sarcastic for me, thereby freeing me to focus on more pressing issues, such as ridding the world of such abominations as “diet, caffeine-free soda”. Because then you’re just basically drinking brown water. And seriously, what is the point of that?

So if you’re interested in filling one of the positions of Official Snarker Of The Universe, start polishing up your resume. I’ll let you know when we here at World Domination Headquarters are accepting applications.

Yet Another Reason We Have Cats, And Not Children

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So yesterday I had to run to the drugstore really quickly, to pick up a few office supplies.

Behind me in line stood a woman a few years older than me, and her son, who was somewhere around 11 or 12 years old.

“What’s that?” I heard him ask as I handed over my cash to the clerk, and looked up to see him pointing at a display of various KY products that had made their way into the “impulse buy” part of the check-out line.

Time seemed to stop in that moment as I saw his mother realize what he was pointing to, attempt to come up with a response that would satisfy his curiosity without having to have “The Talk” right there in the middle of Walgreens, and then stop, defeated.

She couldn’t do it.

And he kept asking questions.

And I felt for that woman, and what a difficult job she had as a parent, a job that can apparently just rise up and bite you on the ass when you’re innocently attempting to do nothing more than buy a gift card at the drug store.

AND I also thought, “YES! Having to explain the concept of “personal lubricants” to my offspring-let’s add that to the list of things I will never have to figure out how to do.”

SCORE!

Twitter And June: Sometimes It’s All About The Cats. And Pain. (Which Are Frequently The Same Thing)

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Am now on 3 painkillers for 3 different kinds of pain, but *absolutely sure* I can participate in a 1.5 hr teleclass. Hello again, delusion.2:57 PM Jun 16th

And lo, on the seventh day, the migraine ended. And God didst speak down a most special blessing upon all the chiropractors in the land.8:06 PM Jun 17th

Today has consisted entirely of declaring things like, “Nope, sorry, no face-loving after you’ve just barfed all over my office floor.”3:48 PM Jun 22nd

It’s days like this that make me feel really bad that my parents spent so much on my college education.3:49 PM Jun 22nd

Cats are attempting to trap me w/in a perimeter of their own disgusting excretions. Believe attack is imminent. Send help!11:48 AM Jun 23rd

Pip, I promise-I haven’t hidden any treasures at the bottom of my garbage can. You can let the trash go. 2:08 PM June 24tt

Finding nothing to her taste in my trash can, Pip is now perusing the feline shopping mall, or, “the kitchen table” as we like to call it.2:09 PM Jun 24th

“Turbines for your meat jet” #mostdisturbingspamheadlinesever 2:09 PM June 27

I Bet They Had These Exact Same Kind Of Conversations Up On Walton’s Mountain

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Back about eleven years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Spain. On our last day we took the overnight train from Granada to Madrid, where we were catching our flight home the following morning.

My husband and I were in our mid-twenties back then, just a couple of years out of grad school, so we were pretty much still in the “poor college student” mode when we took this trip, which meant that we booked ourselves into what I’m pretty sure was the eighty-seventh class compartment, which meant that we each had a bunk in a room that slept six people-and we were in the middle two bunks-which meant that we spent those eight hours in a space not unlike those prison cells they build where you can neither sit, stand, nor lie down.

But, I digress.

The two travellers sleeping above us were a guy and a girl from Ireland, and the two below us were from Columbia, and after I was able to calm down a little bit, because, OMG, CLAUSTROPHOBIA! AND STRANGERS! SLEEPING WITH ME! IN PRISON!, we all had a good time getting to know each other.

At what was apparently our officially designated bedtime, a railroad employee came by to turn out the lights in our cell compartment. And then, in one of those totally spontaneous, yet perfectly scripted moments, from the Europeans above us, and the Latin Americans below us came a chorus of, “Goodnight, John Boy.”

I bring this episode up now because I was reminded of it the other day by a conversation I overheard my husband having.

His cell phone rang, and when he answered it I heard a woman’s voice respond to his, “Hello?”

“Oh, hey,” he said, in the relaxed tone of someone speaking with a friend or a family member. “How are you doing?”

There was silence as he listened for a moment, and then I heard him retort, “Well, f*%# you!”

“Oh,” I said, as the light of realization dawned upon me. “It must be your sister.”

And it was. Just like it was up on Walton’s Mountain.

Doing My Part To Contribute To Global Warming

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So this morning my husband volunteered to go to the grocery store for us, and as I was going over the list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, I noticed that I had written down “spiral notebook”. I am starting a new project, and I always like to celebrate these beginnings with the purchase of a brand-new notebook.

“Oh,” I thought. “Since I’m not going to the store with him, I’ll need to find a notebook so that I can show him which size I want him to buy me.”

And then I realized that, if I already have one around here to use as an example, then maybe I don’t actually need a new one.

So then I did a little searching, and here is what I came up with, WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO LEAVE MY CHAIR.

The first step is admitting that you have a problem, right?

Me, Twitter, And The Week That Was

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Sunday

There’s nothing like watching a bird try desperately 2 quench its thirst in my bone-dry birdbath 2 make me feel like reporting myself 2 PETA 6:14PM

Tuesday

Hey, you know who really needs some customer service representatives that I can call up and yell at?9:55 PM

Whoever thought it would be a good idea for me to suffer from both fibromyalgia AND a mood disorder in this lifetime.9:57 PM

Yeah, that’s right: I’m looking at you, Universe. You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.9:59 PM

Wednesday

Now here’s a phrase I’ve never had to utter before today: “Hey-no licking the computer!”7:32 AM Jun 10th

Received letter *purporting* 2B invitation 2 15-yr college reunion. Actual purpose: Letter Of Shame 4 we who haven’t ponied up “donation”.4:29 PM

Thursday

After rigorous scientific testing, I’ve discovered that in addition to fibromyalgia, magical thinking is *also* unable to cure migraines.12:50 PM

SO SICK of people who “follow” me just to hawk their stupid “magical” cures for all of my medical maladies.3:44 PM

Since I can’t *actually* punch them via Twitter, as I block them, I hit the enter key REALLY hard.3:44 PM

Friday

7:22 am: barf count-2, burning fibro trigger points-6. Today is not looking good.6:25 AM

That rip in the space-time continuum you experienced earlier? That was McDonalds FORGETTING TO PUT THE FRENCH FRIES IN MY BAG. **sob** 1:45PM

Saturday

Am currently only able to type at 50%, as the big cat has taken my left hand hostage. 10:28AM

Just successfully answered a technology question; it’s only a matter of time now, before the world ends in a fiery collision with the sun. 11:02AM

Your Jedi mind tricks do not work on me, Pip. 4:24PM

Unless you WANTED me to lie on the couch and watch TV instead of feeding you. Cuz then they TOTALLY did. 4:25PM



Murder, Mayhem, And Hot Gay Pool Boys

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So the other weekend my husband and I were up visiting my parents. As it happened, my grandparents were there at the same time, so in honor of the mini-family reunion, we decided to grill hamburgers and hot dogs out on the porch.

As we were waiting for the food to finish cooking, we chatted about various bits of neighborhood gossip, and then talked turned towards the past, and how our memories of the past tend to be more idealized than realistic.

“I guess we all think there’s a time in our past that’s better than where we are today, and that we’d rather be living then than now,” said my dad.

“No, not me,” my husband disagreed. “There’s no time in the past that is better than right now.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” interjected my grandmother. “There are a lot of times in the past that I’d like to go back to.”

“Yes,” agreed my grandfather. “For one thing, there was a lot less crime back then, and the world was a much safer place.”

“Excuse me,” my mom interrupted, “but I think you’re forgetting about The Shooting.”

“Oh yeah, ” I said. I forgot about that.”

“Yes,” she continued, “there was a murder. In your very own home.”

(Very Important Side Note, So As To Prevent A Deluge Of Phone Calls By Angry Family Members: this did not involve my grandparents in any way, and was many years before they even lived there)

“Well, now” replied my grandfather, straightening up in his chair and pointing his finger at us, “there was a good reason for that.” (I don’t actually remember what that reason was, because by this time I was convulsing on the floor with laughter, but I think it had something to do with a love triangle.)

“The bad thing was,” he continued, “that he only had the one bullet. So he had to walk all the way down to the next town to get another bullet so that he could shoot himself.”

“Hm,” said my grandmother, still lost in thoughts of the past and determined to prove her point. (And, incidentally, the only one of us who still retained the power of speech.) “Yes,” she announced, visibly brightening. “At least the air was much fresher back then!”

After the rest of us had picked ourselves up off of the floor the conversation turned to other things, including a local man who lives on a nearby golf course and who is apparently worth, conservatively speaking, infinity billion dollars. So now, no longer bothered by the pesky worry of having to earn a living, he is free to turn his attention toward other, more important matters, like wading around in his swimming pool, fishing out all of the errant golf balls that end up in there.

“I guess he’s got so  much money now that he just does whatever he wants and doesn’t care what other people think,” commented my grandfather.

“Oh,” I replied. “Well, I’ve just gone ahead and jumped straight to the ‘doing whatever I want’ part, without worrying about all that money stuff. It’s much more efficient that way.”

“So what you’re saying is that, even if you had all that money, you’d still fish the golf balls out of the pool yourself?” asked my husband.

“Heck no!” I snorted. “I’d hire someone for that and then watch them do it.”

“Well, as long as ‘the someone’ isn’t named ‘Paolo’, or, ‘Jose’, or anything like that,” said my husband.

“Oh, so no hot pool boys for me?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

I thought for a moment. “Well, what about hot, gay pool boys?”

I never got to hear my husband’s response to that question, because it was at that moment that the conversation reached my mother, apparently having had to travel across a distortion in the space-time continuum first, because she exclaimed, “Hey, [name of male relative] has a Paolo!”

….

(Silence, as my father, my husband, and I all experience simaltaneous brain aneurysms.)

“Um, WHAT?!” one of us managed to choke out, feebly, knowing that the man in question is a very heterosexual, strait-laced accountant. Who, incidentally, does not own a pool

“Oh, yeah,” she said, happy to be a part of the conversation, and then she, my grandmother, and my grandfather began chatting amongst themselves. And it doesn’t even matter what they were saying, because TRUST ME ON THIS ONE; everything that comes after an exchange like that sounds dirty.

When oxygen began to return to my brain, I managed to pick up a tiny thread of the conversation, which sounded like the person in question was hired to assist with various and sundry accounting duties.

“Um, and does he perform them shirtless, with his rippling muscles glistening with oil?” I asked my mother, still not entirely sure that I understood what was going on.

“No,” she replied, confused as to why I should ask such a question, and apparently not yet noticing the three members of her family who were currently bleeding from the eyes.

And then, slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y, the pieces clicked for me.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean that [our relative] hired someone to help him with his accounting business, and his name really is Paolo.”

“Yes,” replied my mother, not wanting to say anything, but really wondering why the three of us were being so dense on the subject.

I’m sure there’s probably a moral in here somewhere, but honestly, the only one I’ve been able to come up with is, ‘Dammit! Why do I never have my tape recorder when I need it?!”

A Quick Review Of The Past Month Thanks To Twitter

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Just searched for free images of “music”; got back 4 pix of 1/2 naked women listening to their iPods. Do guys really think we do this naked? 3:09 PM May 11th

Am running out of things to do to help me avoid having to investigate why the living room smells like pee. 4:01 PM May 11th

Am currently waiting for an appointment in an office that is so cold, my hair has goosebumps. 9:37 AM May 13th

Dear Nature :Please let cats evolve the ability to speak, so they no longer need communicate by expelling disgusting things from their bodies. 10:36 AM May 22nd

I just declared that, “I really need a FLOW CHART!” The language/literature major in me just died a little . 11:02 AM May 23rd

Me (to a friend who’s becoming a shrink): “I help people feel better by being a smart-ass. There’s much less training involved.” 6:15 PM May 24th

Take Lyrica, manage the fibro pain, but swell up and ache from that; or don’t take it, and have awful fibro pain? Decisions, decisions… 4:57 PM May 25th

My husband (attempting to explain Led Zeppelin’s “film”): You’ve gotta remember, this was the ’70s; people were still taking LOTS of drugs. 7:55 PM May 26th

Dear Life: I would really appreciate it if you could stop punching me in the face. kthxbai 6:09 PM May 27th

Am at the point in my mood swing where exhaustion and overwhelm want me to delete my entire online presence. Back away from the computer. 1:21 PM May 28th

If my thoughts create my reality, then I have apparently become a cranky, cane-wielding senior citizen named Walter. 12:44 PM May 29th

It’s a bad day when the only relief you can find is yelling at the contents of your mailbox in front of all your neighbors. 2:52 PM Jun 4th

Was set to write great post mocking my dentist, then he took all the wind out of my sails by complimenting my teeth. Does that make me easy? 3:00 PM Jun 4th

Finally gave in and fed the cats so as to stop the tag-teaming “Ass To Face” attacks. 4:07 PM Jun 4th

Does anyone know how much cat hair one human being can inhale before it becomes an actual health hazard? 4:23 PM Jun 4th

It would be much more efficient to dump the can of food right onto the carpet, w/o the bother of it having to pass through the cats first. 8:30 AM Jun 5th

Oh, hello again, suffocating anxiety. It must be 3:00. 4:12 PM Jun 5th