There is no particular topic to this. It will just be me, rambling on, as I sometimes like to do. Maybe I can work out a few kinks that I am suffering from.
Lately I have no memory. I never had much of one, true, but it seems like I do things or say things and then someone will tell me I told them that yesterday. I did? Really? I guess it has been going on for a while... but of late, since being sick, I'm really, really brainless. I'm forgetting things a lot. And it is not just forgetting things but forgetting to write them down to make sure that they get done. Forgetting to notify someone of something that needs work. I don't know. Is it me? If it is me (and I can't see why it wouldn't be me) then is it physically me or mentally me or what? Should I worry?
I highly doubt that I have Alzheimer's disease, which can start to affect the debilitated party in their 50s or 60s... I'm not yet 40. (I'm not far from it but I am not there yet.) Anyway, there is no history of it in my family (big sigh of relief), and no reason to think I am that much of a space cadet yet.
The only workable theory I have right now is the Ambien I am taking... I originally began using it back in 2003 to aid in getting sleep. Luis' snoring was so bad, so loud, so out of hand that I was unable to get any sleep at all. I had to do something and after years of being tired to the point of exhaustion and trying everything under the sun - we tried anything we could on him - Breathe-Rite strips, sprays and devices; and I tried ear plugs, wax, putting music on... finally my mother gave me a couple of her Ambien to try to see if it worked and oh! it was a miracle - the best night's sleep ever! So I went to my doctor and got a prescription for it. I have been using it since (far beyond what is recommended).
I do not use it every night. I use it for nights that I have work the next day and it is excellent for ensuring that I do get a full night's sleep. It is not something I can ever take on Thursday night (my riding night) and I avoid taking it over the weekend. I try to not get into the habit of taking it daily.
Consequently there are issues... side effects. Thursday night I never sleep well. This is likely due to the Ambien - sleeping like a normal person on my own is difficult. Friday I always have a terrible headache from the lack of sleep that no aspirin in the world can cure. My weekend schedule tends to be really bizarre - last night, for example, I was up until 04h15. I finally gave in and took an Ambien around 03h00, realising that I could not get my brain to shut down or at least slow down to the point of getting to sleep. Not good. I slept until just before noon.
Car 65 is busy tonight. Lots of calls.
I'm feeling better for having slept well last-- well, this morning. But I don't like keeping those hours. At all.
Someone at work tried to psychoanalyze me... it was not a very good attempt. I love cops and have flexible morality issues because my father (the biological idiot) left my mother and I when I was young and blah, blah, blah. Hmmm.
In the first place, my mother left my biological father. He certainly did not want a divorce. But he was a falling-down, stupendous drunk and my mother reached her limit. Also, by the time it reached this point, she had met Ray (who has cast in his lot to be my father, with no biological contribution), and had come to the conclusion that she was crazy about Ray, loved the sex, and had no more use for Harry, and so one night when he showed up at the house and in a drunken state told her he was suing her for adulterous behaviour she smiled at him and said, "Go ahead."
I don't have abandonment issues with Harry Trebilcox. I have issues with him, yes, but my mother went out of her way to encourage my relationship with him and his mother (my paternal grandmother) and they really did it - she (my grandmother/Harry's mother) must have found some ways to put the screws to him to get him to come over and see me. I looked forward to it as a kid, but the older I got the more clear it became that he did not care to spend his time with me. Lots of theories abound here... I'm not sure if he saw me as an extension of my mother, felt that he was pissed at Wendy (my mother) and took it out on me, felt that I wasn't his, did not have an interest in parenting... who knows? I don't and seriously doubt that Harry has the necessary perspicacity to really look at himself and know the answer. And he is the only one who can answer it.
My grandmother actually caused many more issues with me than Harry did. She was my best friend (in a weird sort of way) up until I reached 12 or 13 and became moody and obsessed with clothing over toys and ceased to be her easily controlled granddaughter. She resented me when I started menstruating... something that to this day just confuses me. Our relationship deteriorated very quickly after that. That is an unsolved mystery that will crop up and does adversely affect me. It likely always will.
My parents are the coolest and sure it wasn't always all roses and song but there is very little that I can honestly blame them for and say that this or that action has scarred me for life.
What did scar me for life, and this is hard to look at and recall and deal with, is starting school in Wayne. Sure, it is never easy to be the new kid. It really stinks to be the new kid. But this was something that followed me from the 8th grade in the George Washington Middle School in Wayne, right through all of High School.
And in all honesty I can't explain it - what happened, what went so horribly wrong, where I did or said something that guaranteed that the next year of my life would be hell beyond hell and that the four following would be the loneliest ever. Something happened on that first day of school that made me the butt of every evil comment a kid could make and just got worse. Physical abuse, verbal abuse and any other kind of abuse that kids can visit on other kids followed daily. I hated school in a way that transcended anything. I never ever went on to the playground at lunch time. Every single day I sat on the round grass section and read or studied (unlikely but possible) or drew on paper or searched for four-leaf clovers in the grass there. Every day. No one invited me onto the playground and it took no time to learn the kind of abuse that would surely await me if I did dare to chance it. The teachers at first took great pains to get me to go there (I sat in place where normally misbehaving kids were put) but they gave up - I wasn't moving. Not for any reason. That was an entire year of that.
I had no friends there at all. No one would dare to socialise with me - being the totally banned person that I was, and when I did try to find out what was so wrong with me, it was always the same answer - I'm ugly. Five years of peers telling me I'm ugly is more than enough to know that there is something really wrong with my appearance - how can they all be wrong? It follows me to this day. Luis sees beauty in me, but I don't - and really can't.
I was the loneliest person throughout that year and being a freshman was not too much better. Especially with all the potential crushes running around and half the compliment of GW went with me to Wayne Valley HS. It wasn't as awful as the eighth grade was - nothing ever could be - but it was not a good time, and I was pretty much still ostracised by most. I had one or two acquaintances. No close friends.
I had a crush on Dennis Miezys (I'm not sure if that is spelled right or not. Been a REALLY long time...) then. He was OK with me - not super nice but not cruel either. After he got wind of my crush, things went downhill fast.
Sophomore year was better. I met Andreann Oster and we became really close friends. It was a strange thing... we got on very well but were total opposites. Andreann was a tiny, petite, naive Greek girl with an unbelievably religious and misguided upbringing (I won't tell you how she thought women got babies - it is embarrassing). She could be smart but most of the time, was dumb as a post. But she looked up to me and I needed the friendship, so we in turn became quite close. And she did a lot for me. But it was Beauty and the Beast. The boys were all over her and viewed me as the hulking lug she hung out with. I wasn't overweight in High School. (In fact, I wasn't overweight until I reached my 20s and it went up over the course of years. I was a beanpole kid and a well-proportioned teenager (oh, if I'd only known and held on to that!). But she was a model and cute and had super long honey blonde hair that after the summers in Greece turned to a naturally sun bleached bright gold. What was not to chase after? So being with her was enough to give me a bigger complex about being ugly.
Being 5'4" is not bad. But the only time in my life I felt too tall was when I was with her. But I also had a much stronger personality than she did. I stood up to her mother (no mean feat, let me tell you) and constantly got into it with her father. We never had any real difficulties because of it but men were already always interested in her and her more compliant attitude was doubtlessly more appealing than my difficult prickly one.
When I was a junior and she a sophomore, it was still good. I had a crush on Kevin Fengya (again, the spelling may not be perfect), a senior with an adorable face and curly red hair (I can sympathise - I had curly hair all my life and was never happy with it. It was not really vogue to have it throughout most of my childhood). I thought he was cute and really had the worst angst for him. I did not go to work in the library (a job that my then friend Holly Self got me) three times (without calling in) to stay in detention that I did not have to be in to be near Kevin. Typical kid stuff, really. Ironic that I am in Human Resources now, isn't it? I could not understand that they were right to fire me at the time!
Being a junior got me out into the world a bit more so to speak and I had some friends. Holly Self was a great friend although her mother and I hated each other. As far as her mother (a major control freak) was concerned I was the anti-Christ. She did, though, but despite that the friendship lasted. Andreann and I were still close, but our relationship suffered some when she became sexually active WAAAAY ahead of me and was sleeping around (something I was a little envious of but not against as long as she was careful - and she was) and doing drugs (something to which I objected to vehemently). And she immediately gravitated to the scum of the earth. She really had abysmal taste in men. And she began seeing Rick, this young (but to us at the time, old) guy with whom I did not get along at all. She might have been a little challenged in the intellect but he was absolutely an idiot and I never let him forget that I was hell and gone much more intelligent than he could ever hope to be. It was all about jealousy - we were both vying for supremacy for Andreann's time.
But my friendship with Holly gave me new acquaintances. I met Kip Heeren, Brian Maglio (who did not go to the HS but knew Kip, with whom I spent a lot of time), Andy ummm... ummm... oh, boy, my memory IS bad! And Harry Smith. (I just tried a people search through Yahoo! Do you know how many Harry Smiths came up? Staggering...!) Harry is someone I will never, ever forget. Him and Rose... long split up but I still remember them so well!
As a senior life improved tenfold. I broadened my friendships to include Sean Dwyer and Holly Foster. Through Holly I met Peter Feld. Oh, I miss Peter! I've gotten distracted now trying to find him and well, it seems to have been fruitless... Sigh!
Well, anyway... what a hideous topic... my childhood, so to speak! Yuck.
In other news, we were not very busy on the town on Thursday night. Some times you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you. We had one CO alarm call at around 1915, and that was nothing, and the firemen finally released us so we could leave. That was the only call of the night. Works for me. Sometimes you want to go out and get calls but when it has been snowing/raining/sleeting all day and the roads are all mucked up with slush, I don't care how big that rig is and what its weight, I am not feeling the love to go out and wipe people up off the highway! It is not fun in weather like that!
The Olympics are still on for me. Thanks to the ReplayTV, I can watch this any time and can have the 2006 Winter Olympics for a very, very long time! I don't need that - not really. Once I have seen them, I have seen them, and I delete them. I've just finished the womens' short program ice skating and will be moving on to the womens' freestyle (long program) skating soon. There are still speed skating events as well and you know how much I love those! I do want to see the closing ceremonies as well. Very important. I figure in another week or so I will have gotten through the last of the Olympics. Then two and a half years of downtime until the Summer Olympics in August (I think) of 2008.
Something happened to our beloved ReplayTV that had me so livid I almost could not speak last night. It was all set up to record CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and something happened. I don't know why, but when 21h00 came the Cable would not switch from Channel 9 (I get WB and UPN mixed up all the time) to Channel 2 (CBS) to record CSI. Instead, the display showed the Channel thing come up, show ???? under the CH 9, and not switch. What taped instead, you ask? Good question - hold on...
I don't know. The ReplayTV won't go back past 24 hours and the next Thursday listings show baseball - YAWN... And the Thursday after that is only showing up to 18h30 programming. Sigh. At any rate, it was two sitcoms, something I consider a dirty word. Snob that I am, very few half-hour shows make it into allowable viewing for me. I watch "COPS" and "Everybody Hates Chris" and all other viewing choices of mine are an hour or more. Oh, that reminds me...
THE SOPRANOS returns in just a WEEK! The new season premiers on Sunday, 12 March at 21h00! YAHOO!
That is a great weekend coming up! I have my 2006 Rockaway Neck First Aid Squad installation dinner on Saturday and then the Sopranos on Sunday! VERY COOL!
And now, dear reader, it is time for bed! It is late, now 22h57. Time to finish some laundry and get to bed. And watch more COPS!
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