tipsy rant
(Alt text: A painting of a schoolgirl in midcentury eyeglasses, by Paul Morin)
Hello hello, hi, this is the first time I am writing this thing while drunk (so excuse all of the following), but it's not entirely my fault, because it turns out the bartender/manager at Canela in the Castro, near where I have a motel room for the night (solitude and silence hooray!), is from Bethesda, MD, and kept pouring me more ro-zay as he told me about his high school and college football career before he turned foodie/wine expert. He went to Walter Johnson and when I told him where my brother went to high school he damn near shouted "GOD IS NOT PURPLE" and I kind of love him for that.
If you're not from the DC area, that doesn't matter and you can ignore it completely.
Anyway. Today is December 1, a marker for a bunch of things. First, it's World AIDS Day. In the Castro (SF's Dupont Circle), people were memorializing family and friends they lost to AIDS with chalk messages on the sidewalk outside Cliff's Variety Store. It felt important and emotional until some deranged man started knocking people over and getting into fistfights with the staff. Sigh.
Today also marks one year since my grandmother had her stroke. And one whole day since she got home from the hospital, where she spent three nights because she was vomiting blood, because her approach to her health has always been “ignore it until you go to the emergency room,” when and where it becomes someone else’s problem.
When you see your 100-pound, 99-year-old grandmother projectile vomit blood in the ER (before they can remove her mask, so it gets all over her face, hair, and clothes), well, that’s nothing compared to witnessing the naso-gastric intubation (“stomach pumping”) where they jam a tube up her nose, through her sinuses, and down into her stomach – while she is fully conscious and she sounds like she is fucking drowning. Twice, because the first attempt fails.
Three nights in the hospital and one transfusion later, she’s home, on meds, no endoscopy because it’s too risky and they couldn’t operate on whatever the underlying issue is anyway, and I’m finally, finally done.
Oh today my apartment is officially for sale too. I can’t bring myself to look at the listing.
There are entire podcasts that talk about self-care in terms of shallow things, like what to buy at annual Sephora sales and how you should avoid bringing your phone into the bedroom.
No.
Self-care is DOING SOMETHING about your medical problems when you have the means, recognizing that your heath is YOUR responsibility. This includes replacing your hip when the doctor says you need to, instead of limping around in pain for 20 years because you are too cheap to pay some five-dollar Medicare co-pay. It means telling your doctor about your stomach pain instead of just “living with it” for 60-odd years and popping handfuls of Tums like candy. It means caring more about how your insides feel than how your goddamn hair looks.
Self-care is also setting boundaries. Recognizing that you have postponed/rearranged your life to be there for a woman who has always stubbornly refused to take care of herself, and whose family, for the most part, is totally fucking AWOL. It’s realizing that you can’t change her, or her circumstances, and that the longer you stay, the more frustrated and bitter you will become.
It’s also looking forward to my last two weeks in San Francisco – museums! restaurants! beach outings with the neighbors’ dogs! – before I get on a plane and start life over, again, on the opposite coast.
Links
LEGO does home accessories now. (House Beautiful)
Wedding band asked to move merch table from dance floor. (Hard Times)
Funny Christmas cards. (Sad and Useless)
Family members at Thanksgiving, ranked. (New Yorker)