NINA FARINA

Back to Surreality

1. I am at school today. Completely unprepared. Doh!

2. I have THE GREATEST friends in the whole wide world. Just thought you should know I appreciate all of you.

3. My sister is stepping up to the plate in amazing ways. I am so proud of her. My mother started calling us the bopsie twins. It is strange how we are 11 years apart and yet so close. We are not strangely similar but we do compliment each other.

4. You know your Latino if....you do manage to own a four bedroom (two living room) home and yet three people still sleep in the same bedroom (two on one twin bed) just because you want to.

5. My tattoo artist is one of the greatest guys in the world. If you want some ink please contact me so I can pass along his info.

"I have the love that hate wishes it could be." R. Villar :-)

okay

mom is home
she is good
i am seriously behind on my work
life is good
my credit card got rejected
broke is no joke

update

mom is good. off the morphine. they expect her home by thursday and she is up and moving around....

interesting problem is that the dog stopped eatting the morning she left for the hospital. our dog is normally a vacumn so i was really worried. fortunately dianna came up with a genius solution. she went up to the dogs bowl, started playing with his food and then took some handfuls away so it looked like she had eatten some. the dog promptly ran up to the bowl and ate the rest.

little man got himself up and ready for school today with no prompting for me.

now i have to come up with a chore list for everyone

woohoo!!

The times in your life where the roles are reversed and you are taking care of your caretaker should be few and far between. The kids had a two hour delay for school so I couldn't get to the hospital till around ten'o'clock. When I got here the desk worker told me my mother was admitted but couldn't tell me which surgery she had. If she had had the simple surgery she shouldn't have been admitted but I thought maybe they just wanted to observe her for 24 hours.

Unfortunately I couldn't find that out. The couldn't get a hold of the doctors and nobody I could get a hold of knew which surgery was performed on my mother. Worse yet, I wasn't allowed to go into the recovery room to see her (once, at another hospital I was allowed to visit a friend in recovery because his mom lied and said I was his sister). So I sit in the waiting room waiting for someone to tell me what happened during my mom's surgery and anxiety mounts with no information.

Finally they put my mom in a room where I can see her but still no one knows which surgery was done. And my mom can't tell me as she was a) asleep during the procedure so how would she know b) she is floating in an out of consciousness and c) she is high as a kite on morphine. Eventually I get a hold of a nurse who puts me in contact with a doctor who tells me that they did have to do the more complicated procedure and my mother will be in the hospital until Thursday, at least.

Currently I am sitting her in her room and she is sleeping. Her face is grimaced with the wrinkles on her forehead all crinkled up and she is pale (which makes her freckles stand out even more). Every time she winces I want to cry and my mother, who hates pain medication is clicking on that morphine about every half hour.

My father is being as helpful as he can be but he has to work until eight o clock tonight. Funny thing about cabs in Middletown,, you never get to ride in them alone. The cabbie pulls up to your house and he may have another passenger with him. People get picked up and dropped off all along the way. You normally get where you want to go quicky enough. The fare is always the exact same price and tips are not expected (I tip when I have luggage they need to help me with). Unfortunately, I will be spending too much on cabs if I visit my mom as much as I want to so I have to figure out what friends can give me rides.

I really don't want to leave here. I watch the nurses and I watch my mom and I want to stay here and take care of her, make sure she is hydrated and such. The nurses at the hospital are attentive and they have done a good job with family members in the past. The only worry now is that she will get an infection or fever but I know she wants to get home so she won't let that happen.

I have to figure out how to tell my fourteen year old sister and eleven year old brother that mom will be in the hospital till at least Thursday without freaking them out. I'm gonna try to make this fun for them, as fun as can be.

I don't know when I am going to be able to make it back to work which is rather shitty as I am already behind on my rent and have bills to pay. Mom should be out of work for six weeks and until she is moving around I will just be in the city from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I would commute in and out on those days if I could but that would cost me about $50 each day (not including metrocards). And now I am kicking myself for not having my fucking license. Grrr grrr grrr

Sigh--Parental Role reversal

My mother left for her surgery about an hour ago. Please pray for her. They are hoping they can do a "simple" operation but if they encounter too much scar tissue from her hysterectomy they will have to do a more complicated operation. I am a wee bit nervous because she was a wee bit nervous.

As she left for the hospital she had to give me the run down on getting the kids ready for school. This is funny because I have done it about a billion times. I know she was telling me because she was nervous though.

She then told me the list of numbers she was giving the doctors and I had to stop and remind her that she couldn't put my father down as her primary contact. They legally completed their divorce a few months ago and so he can't make emergency medical decisions for her. That terrible privilege goes to me and my older brother and seeing as he is in California it goes to me :-/ blech I doubt I will have to make any decisions but I don't like it anyway

Speaking of my brother I really hope that he calls today. He tends to go days without calling and I am afraid he forgot her surgery is scheduled for today.

On a cute note, my father was rather upset when he realized, a few days ago, that the doctors would not be calling him with medical updates (again, the divorce). He asked my mom if she could please have the doctors call him and she then asked him if he could drive her too the hospital. He said of course he would, so at 5:45 a.m. my dad was at my mom's door.

If you're reading this, Call your mom (or your parent whatever gender or relation they are).

A blog post on blogging

I have been happy of late to see that blogs are being mentioned often in the mainstream media. My favorite is when a main stream source will blame a blog for an inaccuracy. Really this makes me laugh because who knows who is really writing a blog. As to accuracy and integrity I think blogs probably rank higher than most news sources because at least bloggers are either a) honest about their political stance or b) so poor at pretending to be that which they are not it is fairly easy to read through the lines.

I've also realized that I have become too dependent on blogs when it comes to keeping track of my friends. If someone goes to long without posting I assume that they are sick or going through some life crisis or away. I rarely consider that maybe they just aren't posting.

Either way, this medium that people thought would be a fad is truly changing the world and I love it love it love it. From the stupidest depressed teenager blog to the most unoriginal "I write shit everyone else writes about blog" I love more information being out there.

I really need to get an I Love Blogs T-shirt

Hormones or Hormones, I hate you you stink

Okay the title is a play on a poem I recited in the second grade about homework but the sentiment is the same.

Hormones are annoying. Out of nowhere I will be swept with a bevy of emotion and I won't no why. It will become all consuming and it will bother me immensely. Then inevitably I realize I am about to menstraute, or in today's case about to ovulate.

This is all made even more fun and new as I have been off the pill for a year now and my body is doing exactly what it wants to do.

So I get all insecure and while my feelings do have some rationale root, the height of my feelings do not. And I can't think of the reason why it hit me when it hit me till I look at my calendar and realize my body released an egg yesterday (I am very regular) and it is screaming to me
FERTILIZE ME FERTILIZE ME
which explains my insecurity because my body wants to make sure no one gets fertilized but me to which my body has to shut the fuck up cause i ain't making no babies anytime soon.

Most annoying is that rationalizing your feelings doesn't make them go away :-/ Humpf

Damn It

I pee.
A lot
about once an hour

why is this worthy of a post?
because i am still a student and i have classes and some of them are two hours long
and how many times can I appropriately leave a classroom without pissing the prof off

cause i gotta go :-/

Those were the best days of my life?

Why? Why exactly were those the best days of your life? I have promised myself that the year that I am living in will be the best year of my life and I feel so sorry for people who look back on a certain period of years and think "those were the best years".

So maybe you should think about why those years were the best years and alter your current years. There are always things you can change and sometimes it is the tiniest thing. I will admit, sometimes it is a very big thing. My friend Brooke said it the best "many fear the pursuit of truth because it imparts a responsibility to ensure that the good is nurtered and protected and the bad is rooted out. That's a daunting task for several reasons, the scariest of which might be that trying to build a worthy life means first recognizing that you aren't living one yet."

This year, take on the challange. I mean with all the stupid goals people set for themselves, isn't being happier the best goal. Having trouble being happier?... I'll give you suggestions if you like. My life hasn't always been a bowl of cherries but I am one of the happiest people I know.

Flu York?

Okay
normally preparing myself to head back from New York after life in Tallahassee is a little difficult but this time is worse

Why?

Cause ya'll (yes I said ya'll) have the plague running around up there. Everyone is posting to blogs about either being in New York and getting sick or getting home from New York and getting sick. Fevers, vomiting....I really am not into all that nonsense.

Feel better everyone and don't spread the joy...please

it seems that once i get panicked enough to write a blog post about Kevin he contacts me

Woohoo!

Dreaming

I've been having recurring dreams about my friend Kevin, who is serving in the Middle East. I haven't heard from him in a few weeks. Here are the dreams, cut and pasted from emails that I sent him

Dream 1. (the night before last)

You've been on my mind so much lately that I actually dreamed about
you last night. It was a very nice dream but really it was only
nice because in my dream you came and gave me a hug. You looked
the way you did when we were kids and used to go to that rock and
eat chinese food. And you had a backpack on. I was so happy to
see you.

Note: I am never fully honest with Kevin in emails because he says that knowing we are worried about him makes him feel worse. But in my dream the way he hugged me was so desperate. Like when we were in H.S. and were both mending borken hearts.


You were in my dream again tonight. This time there were no hugs.
:-( I was going to a new school, I knew I was supposed to be a kid
but I looked like my current self. I was on the bus and then I got
off because I wanted to talk to someone I had seen in a newspaper
article. The bus pulled off without me and I had to chase after
it. I had to take off my shoes to chase it because if I lost it I
wouldn't know where the school was (i was in heels and I run
faster barefoot). This woman along the way told me where the
school was and come to think of it she looked a little like your
mom. I found the school but then I had to find my bookbag (which I
left on the bus). In this room were tons of backpacks but none of
them looked like mine and Ms. Gillespie (who worked at the middle
school as an aide when you and I were there, and who still works
there) was supposed to help the kids look for their backpacks but
she went out to lunch. And that's when you came. There was a list
and if you put your name on the list they found your backpack for
you and you wrote out my name and the type of backpack I had (I
know you aren't supposed to be able to read in your dreams but I
can). You looked older than you did the last time I saw you,
tired. Then you asked me if you should put down your backpack
because you weren't sure if you wanted it back. And that was it.

Note 2: He really did look so tired and so awful.

And now I am worried. The dreams were really odd, especially how he looked young two nights ago but so old and tired last night. And I don't get what the backpack symbolism means. Off to find a dream dictionary.