Paging David Byrne?

My God.

How did I get here?

I haven't written anything to show for myself in two years. Everything keeps changing, and I'm struggling to find a foothold somewhere in the gray. At the same time, I'm not panicking. It seems that all the elements of my life (The universe? Everything?) have kind of aligned to get me here. I've experienced loss across the entire spectrum, but for the first time, I actually feel fortified by it. I'm standing, alone, with nothing to prop me up but my own sheer will.

And it's awesome.

I'm doing better than I ever thought possible. I haven't shattered into a thousand pieces, not when my brother died, not when my family fell apart, not when I left a relationship that wasn't making either of us happy and moved to a new apartment. I'm now in a (metaphysical) place that feels entirely foreign to me - and as an Earth sign, this is inherently something I don't do well with - but, I haven't completely lost my shit.

I turn 29 tomorrow. I'm so ready to be done with my 20's, but I'm going to make this last year really count. I'm going to do better than I ever have before. I'm going to trust myself, listen to the voices that encourage rather than discourage. I'm not going to be scared of uncertainty anymore, because what has my life been like these past few years? Everything has been uncertain, and continues to be. I have no idea what's coming, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to control the outcome, except adjust how I respond to it.

So, life...

Sick days, sad dreams.

I am just coming down off a two-day cold medicine bender. You see, January has delivered not only almost a Shaq of snow (reference here) but a personal gift to me: my very own Hellvirus - one of those nasty cold-flu hybrids that plants roots in your sinuses and doesn't get better, but rather waxes and wanes from a slight sniffle to an outright tornado that rips up the foundation of almost all of your bodily systems.

For the past couple days, I have been in a Hellvirus wax, and have therefore have been taking Ny-Quil (a substance I usually abhor), so that I might actually sleep at night, rather than thrash around, coughing, snotting, and kicking off covers, creating an utter nighttime hell for both The Ginger and for me. As a result, both my waking and dreaming life have been a little surreal.

The other night, I dreamed of my brother. Well, not him so much as his bedroom.

When Michael was alive, like most teenage boys are wont to do, he spent most of his time holed up there. We affectionately called it "The Cave" and him "The Cave-Dweller", something that may or may not have made him hate us all a little. He would emerge every so often, usually for meals, and stay for the roughly 15 minutes it took him to inhale his food and grunt a few words conversationally. Then he would disappear back into his comfy little hole, amongst the company of the computer, video games, music and art that he loved so.

After the funeral, during the first few nightmarish weeks, the sweet woman from the funeral home came by to deliver a plastic bag of Michael's things that he had the night they found him. My dad took the bag from her, and in a choked-up voice, said "I'll just go put it in his room." I followed him up the stairs, where I watched him crack open the door, lay the bag on the floor, and close the door behind him. That was the last time any of us have been able to even come close to going in there.

My parents have to pass by his door every single day. I don't know how they do it. When I go home to visit, just the sight of the now-bare wooden door, stripped of all his signage ("Do Not Disturb Before Noon on Weekends" and other teenage sentiments) reduces me to tears. It doesn't seem right that the door be sealed shut without him hiding out behind it. I almost imagine that he's still there, and has been since April, and that any minute the door will open, with him poking his sleepy head out to say hello.


Anyway. Michael's room is hugely symbolic. And in my dream, my mom came to me, a complete crying wreck, but with strength and determination in her voice, and said, "It's time to go into Michael's room, and I need you with me." With heavy hearts, we opened the door and crossed the threshold. It looked the way I remembered it - walls sponge-painted dark blue, toys and games and clothes everywhere. My mom went to retrieve the bag from the funeral home and pulled out items one by one: a house key, his wallet, a journal. I, on the other hand, stared at the walls with a combination of sadness and surprised joy.

See, his bedroom used to be mine when I was his age and we first moved into the Harrison Ave house. When   I went off to college, my parents unceremoniously moved Michael into my room and me into the spare room (which was the size of a closet), something that I resented for a while. I eventually realized that I was glad Michael had the bigger room.

In my dream, the pictures of my friends and I that had adorned the walls when it was my room were still there. With tears in her eyes, my mom said, "He left them up there. He looked up to you so much." I realized that Michael really did love me a lot, and that I was a good sister to him after all. And I was still really happy that he had gotten to make the big bedroom his very own for the time he was alive.


Before the other night, I hadn't dreamed about Michael in a long time. So in some sick, twisted universe-logic kind of way, the Hellvirus has been kind of a blessing. I'm even thinking maybe I should trip balls on cold medicine more often, if it means I get another chance to reconnect with my brother.

Childhood anxieties

Okay, that last post was, perhaps, a little too honest for you and I at this stage in our relationship, so I'm going to lighten the mood a little with an amusing walk down memory lane. I call this one "Clues from Amy's childhood that indicated quite strongly that she was going to be a neurotic spaz in adulthood."

Around the age of, let's say, 7 or 8 or so, I developed this sense that inanimate objects had feelings. Now, I realize that most kids develop attachments to their toys, stuffed animals, what have you. Little Amy, however, took this a few steps beyond what is healthy.

I think it began with Spyri.

Perhaps it was because I was an only child with few companions, and had learned to create imaginary friends very early on in childhood. At any rate, there was a period of time that I always needed to carry a little "friend" around with me, most everywhere I went.

Spyri was just one of my many "friends": a little spiral seashell that I had glued little googly eyes to, and to which I had developed a preternatural attachment. One day, choked with the gut-wrenching loneliness that can only be felt by dorky children, I decided that Spyri was going to accompany me to school.

That day, the inevitable happened: I lost Spyri. I realized it in the cafeteria, just as lunch period was ending. Believing Spyri to actually be a living friend, one who I loved dearly, I pitched a complete hissy fit in front of everyone (why the other kids didn't like me was completely unfathomable), leading to the school janitor digging through both giant trash cans filled with milk and government-issued cheese and such.

Spyri was not found.

I was so distraught that my mom had to come pick me up from school early. We went grocery shopping. I remember very distinctly that when Pearl Jam's "Daughter" came on the radio, I had to fight the tears back. The line, "the picture kept will remind me" made me remember that Spyri was gone, and all I had left was this shitty little picture I drew of her in art class. (THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED)

From that point on, I was extra special careful never to let my extra special friends out of my sight. Including the time I took a dorky Mario doll to an all-girl sleepover, but that's neither here nor there.

And then there was the Frosted Flakes incident.

My mom and I were in Market Basket one Saturday morning, doing the week's grocery shopping. We always drove either 20-30 minutes out of our way, to Haverhill or Rowley, to go to the Market Basket for groceries. The joys of growing up poor!

Right. So there we were, in the cereal aisle, at my favorite part of the trip: getting to pick out a delicious breakfast treat. I had my heart set on Fruity Pebbles. Goddammit, I loved Fruity Fucking Pebbles. Didn't matter that they got all soggy and gross after about 20 seconds in milk, but even that artificially-colored sugar slime was like taking a bite out of heaven itself.

My mom was also looking at cereals. "Hey, how about some Frosted Flakes?" she suggested to me.

"Frosted Flakes??!!" I replied. No fucking way I was going to eat Frosted Fucks. It was a one-way train to Pebble-Town that day. I grabbed the box and threw it into the cart with glee.

Later on in the shopping adventure, however, I started to think about that incident. And, honest to fucking god, I thought that I had hurt the Frosted Flakes' feelings by rebuffing them the way I did. So what did I do? I took my coveted Fruity Pebbles back to the cereal aisle, put them on the shelf, and grabbed a big-ass box of Frosted Flakes.

Seeing Tony The Tiger's face still kind of fills me with guilt. No wonder I'm such a mess.

Why I am opting out of the holidays this year.

I know that there doesn't need to be a lengthy, verbose Statement of Purpose made on this subject. I know that those of you who know what's happened can most likely understand why I would be making this decision, and those of you who don't could easily be soothed with the old "I'm broke as shit this year, here's your dollar store Holiday Card and a bag of festively colored Hershey's Kisses", but this year, here is my gift to you:

The God-Honest, Gut-Wrenching Truth.

Historically, I have had a love-hate relationship with this time of year. You see, my Day of Birth just so happens to fall on Christmas Day, and if you can't see how that would make me Fucking Hate Christmas time, picture this: EVERYBODY gets presents on YOUR birthday. If you still can't see it, congratulations, you are not a self-absorbed egomaniac.

However, in the past few years (read: since I left college and moved out of my parents' house), the holidays began to form a new, special significance for me. Now, truth be told, I did always enjoy the giving gifts/listening to holiday music/specific seasonal cheer aspects of Christmastime, however trite and put-upon they began to seem as I went kicking and screaming into adulthood. But once I began to really emerge into adulthood, holiday time became something more - one of the few times a year I got to see my family, and just be with them. Corny as it may seem, the past few Christmases have left me with this overwhelming sense of happiness and gratitude for my family.

Now. Imagine that feeling. Imagine the love you have for your own family. Imagine them, however large or small, as you've always known them - together, for better or worse, gathering and celebrating (or drinking heavily in order to tolerate, potato po-tah-toe) whatever holiday that is yours to celebrate.

Imagine all of a sudden that one of them is missing. Suddenly, without warning, a member of your family is gone. Imagine that your family is a small one, like mine. Imagine what it would be like to have one person no longer be a part of your family; their presence has vanished.

Imagine what the holidays would be like then. Without that one person that has always been there, as far back as you can remember, acting as the glue that holds your whole family together.

Would you want to celebrate?

No, dear friends, this year I don't even want to see the colors red and green. I feel like setting fire to every Christmas Fucking Tree I see, want to push over all the Salvation Army bell-ringers, steal their bells and run screaming into the crowd. Just hearing the opening notes of "Silent Night" makes me want to burst into hysterical sobs. If I run into Santa, God help him, I'm going to blacken both of his eyes, break his legs, free the reindeer, and expose the whole damn thing as the scam that it is.

Hyperbole, okay, maybe a bit. I'd only blacken ONE of Santa's eyes, and maybe just twist his ankle a little.

But in all seriousness, this year, Scrooge though I may seem, I just can't get into the spirit. So please, dear friends, understand why I don't want to come to your parties, why I don't want you to give me any gifts, why I can't muster any cheer. When my brother died, so did a part of me, and it's going to take me some time to make peace with that, and find a way to experience and enjoy life's simplicities again.


My birthday, on the other hand, is going to come whether I like it or not. (Not.) So if you want to do your bit of Holiday Charity, come sit by me...and please bring booze.

"Okay Amy, I'm going to need you to take some deep breaths now."

Greetings, interweb! Well, this officially marks my first blog post since The Awful Thing(s) happened to me back in April, causing my entire life to be flipped upside down and leaving me to try setting it right-side up again, armed with nothing but a rusty shovel and a thimble (metaphors!). But, more about that in another post, for another day. Today I'm going to try to get the writing ball rolling again with some rambling about interesting (I think), slightly less tragic things that have happened to me lately.

Yesterday, for example, I had to go to the hospital for surgery. Some back story: I have had, um, lady problems, for what seems like a few years now. After going from doctor to doctor and being told "oh, no, all of your excessive bleeding is perfectly normal for a young, childless woman," I finally went to a doctor who said "well, let's just check and see, just in case." Several specialty visits and mild-to-moderately-invasive procedures later, it was determined the cause of all my suffering was due to uterine polyps. Delightful!

At any rate, my GYN scheduled a trip to the OR to scrape the little jerks out of me. It just so happens that the procedure for removing polyps is the same procedure for removing, uh, other unwanted tissue out of one's womb. (At one point during pre-op, the Ginger leaned over and commented, "Do you think everyone thinks you're here for an abortion?" to which I punched him in the arm, and then thought about it for a second. They probably did, and were probably disturbed by how much we were laughing.)

Now, I just so happen to fucking hate fucking hospitals. I've had enough traumatic trips to them for about several lifetimes. But there I am, dressed in a sexy little johnny, wearing those sexy little brown slippers, lying in the bed while they pump fluids into me and drain other fluids out. I now know what a lab rat must feel like - in the weeks leading up to and including my procedure I had been poked and prodded just about everywhere, had given what seems like pints of blood, and had peed in about 15 different sterile cups (seriously, what is it with GYNs and pregnancy testing?). But I just lay there and smiled as nurses smacked at my veins, laughed at their awkward jokes, tried not to shit my pants.

Luckily for me, I was accompanied by my two favorite people - my Mom, and the Ginger, as I mentioned earlier. So, in addition to all of the above stresses, I also had to restrain myself from knocking both of their heads together as they felt the need to join forces and poke fun at me like a super-strength Sarcasm Monster. Sweet fucking support network, but I guess you reap what you sow. So which came first, the jackass seed or the wiseass plant?

Finally, after what seemed like a week - mind you, when you are scheduled for anesthesia, you are not allowed to eat or drink anything until after the procedure, and holy goddamn if the smells drifting up from the hospital cafeteria didn't smell like a delectable feast of the Gods to me - my GYN showed, and it was time to rock and roll.


The anesthesiologist came over to my bed and said "Okay, now I'm going to give you something to help you relax," and injected something into the IV line. "It will start working almost immediately." "That sounds goo...oop," I replied, as he wasn't fucking kidding, that shit hit me like a ton of fuzzy, warm, kitten-bricks. So there I was, floating on a magic glitter-cloud, surrounded by shimmering unicorns, when they wheeled me into the incredibly bright, incredibly cold OR. As the sweet nurses piled blankets on me, other people stuck sensors onto my skin, hooked me up to machines, lay my arms out on little platforms, tugged me this way and that. I felt like ET when he was in that creepy plastic tunnel place.

Then, the Giver of Drugs appeared, and stuck a white, plastic mask over my face and instructed me to take a few deep breaths. But in all honesty, I was too fascinated by all the shit I was being hooked up to. Were they going to transform me into a cyborg? What does THAT machine do? Coooool.


"Okay Amy, I'm going to need you to take some deep breaths now."


Ugh. Okay, fine. In, out. Iiiiin, out. In...


And when I opened my eyes again, I was lying in a completely different part of the hospital, feeling like someone had taken a frying pan to my skull and a serrated-edge ice cream scoop to my abdomen. As I struggled to open my eyes, my struggling alerted the attention of yet another sweet nurse, who delivered more Wonderful Drugs ("But it still huuurrrtts," I insisted after the first injection) and some wonderful ginger ale, and unhooked me from all of the machines and returned my clothes and let me keep the hospital slippers (my Nana used to be a nurse, so she would give new pairs to me all the time as a kid, and those fuckers are comfy).


Once I managed to get out of the bed, ever-so-grudgingly, and managed to get my clothes on, and managed to plop down in a wheelchair, a kind orderly wheeled me down to the hospital lobby, where my Fan Club waited, and both looked so damn happy to see me. (I'm lucky, I know.) Then the Ginger drove me home, where naps and snacks and TV awaited.


So here I am, still loopy from the anesthesia 24 hours later, or is that all the caffeine I mainlined today in order to make up for my deprivation yesterday? At any rate, that's the story of Amy's first Real Surgery.



And here is a shitty MS-Paint version of what used to live inside of me:

Best of Boston!

(thx to Allie for the tip)

remembering forgotten holiday joy.

heading home a little earlier this evening, I was walking up my street, lost in the pleasures of crappy pop tunes via ipoop, when something on the sidewalk made me stop in my tracks. it looked like someone had spilled a bunch of paint, and it was still wet. upon further inspection, I realized what it was.

someone had painted EASTER BUNNY FEET on the sidewalk.

curious, I looked around to see if there were more. sure enough, the next set led up the sidewalk...

up the stairs...

across the street...

...and into the garden.

after photographing this final set, I realized I was across the street, standing in my neighbor's garden like a creep. some kid is going to wake up in the morning and absolutely flip his shit over this. but, I got to discover it first, and probably enjoyed it just as much as he's going to.

happy easter, slutttts.