Hope

I still think the concept of hope is bullshit. In case you were wondering. We get through on luck, anger, tenacity, and a lot of other more tangible ideas. Hope? Spare me.

Blow the whistle, drop the gates

May Voirrey is on the mood train, has just cleared the switching yard, and is headed for a tunnel. Clear the tracks and have your tickets ready.

My husband really doesn't listen

In 2000, I had surgery. Apart from my wisdom teeth, it was the only surgery I had ever had. It wasn't complicated, but the recovery was slow, painful, and with physical therapy, the whole process was incredibly expensive. The stress of figuring out bills that always seemed to be wrong and fighting with the medical provider made me swear I'd never pay to be sick again.

Of course, I later went on to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on my defective brain, which left me deeply in debt and struggling to hold onto everything in my life.

Along the way, I read that medical expenses are the number one reason people claim personal bankruptcy. I remember reading a story about people who had had to sell their homes after going through critical care. That's when I decided I would never do that.

I've always told Frank this. I've said it for years. I said, "What's the point of surviving cancer if it means coming out bankrupt, homeless, weak, and likely unemployed?"

This came up in conversation today when Frank said his sister refuses to have a colonoscopy. I told him that my 75-year-old mother has never had one and I don't plan to have one, either. Cancer doesn't run in my family. Frank was appalled. "So, what, you're never going to get a mammogram or go to the gynecologist, either?"

"That's right. No need."

Frank looked stunned. "You know, plenty of people get sick when there's no family history."

"I know that," I said, "but even if I were diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn't pursue treatment. We couldn't afford it."

"What? We have insurance."

I'm not sure Frank fully comprehends the cost of being sick. "Frank, we have a $1500 per-person deductible and after that we pay 20 percent of the billed costs, but not everything is covered. Twenty percent of hundreds of thousands of dollars is still more money than we have. I have $600 in savings. How much treatment do you think that would buy? That's not even a month's worth of prescription medication."

Frank raised his eyebrows. "That's ridiculous. So you would just walk away from treatment?"

"I wouldn't even pursue treatment to begin with. We would have to sell the house. So, great. Homeless and sick. Yeah, no, I wouldn't do that to you. And what if I didn't survive anyway? You'd be alone, homeless and in horrendous debt for a decision I made."

Frank tried to belabor the point, but that wasn't what annoyed me. It was that he reacted as though this were the first time I had ever voiced my opinion on this subject. Not even close. This was something I had said dozens of times over the last six years or so. Frank claims I've never mentioned it. I am convinced my words evaporate in the ether.

And this is my life. A person who speaks, who says things with conviction and careful consideration, but it doesn't matter.

Nobody is listening. I am white noise in the background, dismissed, discounted, and ignored.

This really bothers me, not because it's something that happens at home, but because in every facet of my life, it is the usual way of things and not the exception.

It's hard to know that I'm so irrelevant and my thoughts are so disregarded. Perhaps, though, I just don't have anything worthwhile to say, after all.

Nobody listens to me

Blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all that comes out of my mouth, I'm convinced of it. Nobody listens to me. Nobody retains anything I say. I can only conclude that nothing I say is worth remembering.

I continue to be irrelevant in the part of the world I occupy. It's a disturbing reality.

Dear Google,

Whoever writes the algorithm for your "next blog" feature in Blogger is pushing a very, very hard-core, Christian agenda. I assure you, as an atheist, there is nothing in my writings that would indicate I have any interest in any god at all, yet whenever I hit the "next blog" tab up top, I am immediately taken to ultra-Christian bloggers' rantings and rapturings about Christ and other nonsense.

Either the code is very defective, or Google is pushing a very specific agenda. It's annoying. All of the blogs this "next blog" takes me to are either intensely Christian or all about Christian families and their miracle, (always white) toddlers.

I have tried logging in under my business accounts. I have tried clearing all my cookies. I have tried this while working from different  ISPs and unrelated IP addresses. It doesn't matter. It all comes back to Christ.

This feature really sucks. Please fix it.

It's not that intuitive

For the past six months, I've barely mentioned a thing about my weight or eating. Back when I was trying out acupuncture for pain the practitioner recommended that I look into something called "Intuitive Eating."

I looked into it and it sounded like "just eating" to me. Still, the idea is to not obsess over food and to listen to your body. Mine said, "Please, May, eat a lot more cheese and dessert." So, I listened and complied and gained ten pounds in six months.

And then something interesting happened. I felt physically uncomfortable with the weight. It wasn't a psychological thing--I actually felt blobby and slow and uncomfortable in my clothes. Begin part 2 of intuitive eating: Getting over whatever it was you felt you were being deprived of.

The idea is to not have a sense of deprivation and to not have a sense of guilt when you're not depriving yourself of what you want. You get to have it, and then you get over it.

I can't say I'm "over" cheese" or Tostitos black bean chips or ranch dressing, but I don't feel like I have to have any of those things.

Today, maybe with a lack of thoughtful planning or regard for possible consequences, I packed a healthy lunch: Lentil soup, whole grain crackers, an apple, and for an afternoon snack, prunes (yes, I actually like them, especially the lemon or orange infused type). I finished the soup and apple and was craving dessert, when I sat back and asked myself if I was actually hungry. Hadn't the apple given my brain the "sweet" signal indicated lunch was over?

The truth was, I wasn't actually hungry; I just wanted something fun to eat. I had one of the prunes and chewed it mindfully. Mindfulness is an important part of intuitive eating. It is not emotionally satisfying. Then again, neither is having to wear only clothes with an elastic waist.

Being fat makes me sad, and that's an inescapable fact that I'm quite mindful of. I'm trying to ease myself into normal eating patterns. I need to cut back from two glasses of red wine a day to one. One slice of low-fat Alpine Lace Swiss cheese with crackers daily instead of two. No more lunch dessert, but maybe a more substantial healthy lunch.

I can do this. Maybe. I really don't like to be sad. I think being really, really skinny will make me a much happier person.

Conjecture

Rumor has it that Kristen Wiig might be leaving Saturday Night Live. Oh, please, let it be true. I'd like a reason to stop going to bed early on Saturdays.

Boredom buster

Sometimes when I'm bored, I like to click on the "Next blog" button at the top of the page. I get really annoyed by people who remove this feature from their Blogger setup. Really annoyed. The workaround is to just go back two pages and start over from there.

Here is what I have learned from this activity. There are a lot--and I mean a lot--of people blogging about their supposedly adorable and more-interesting-than-any-other children. Yawn. Save it for grandma. Your kids aren't all that.

The second top topic that comes up in the algorithm for me is Jesus, God, Lord and Savior. I find this exceptionally ironic. Not only am I childless by choice, but I'm an avowed atheist. I simply have no interest in anything related to The Lord. Religion is all about social control and money. Why Blogger thinks these are the blogs I want to see just escapes me.

Jesus people do like to write about their Jesus-lovingness an awful lot, though. Even more than the people who write copious posts about their not-that-interesting toddlers.

Home again, home again, jiggety jog. Philadelphia was busy. I saw my brothers. It all turned out OK. Being home is good. The weather is better, and the west is cleaner and less congested. I needed a reminder of that.

I'm heading out of town tomorrow. I'll be back East, in Philadelphia, on business, Wednesday through Friday. I booked an extra day (Saturday) and worked in some blocks of free time between meetings to spend time with my brothers and their families, but so far, only a cousin and a friend from here (who just moved there) have asked to spend time with me. My deal was that I would make it the first few thousand miles if they would close the gap and come the last 40.

If they blow me off, I guess I'll go to the art museum on Saturday. Not sure what I'll do Saturday night. Ah, dysfunctional families. I never feel so unloved and unwanted as I do in the presence of my disdainful family.

The Brainucopia is far from empty

It's possible that the Brainucopia has never been so copiously full of thoughts. Between having a new computer along with a Nook, I've been spending a lot of time reading. Reading, reading, reading. I've read a few books, as I posted recently, but I've been reading magazines, blogs, new sites, and lots of Twitter posts. Twitter is oddly addicting for me.

My new favorite blog is Jezebel. It's what I long wished this blog would be, but I"m not that clever, witty, informed, or angry. Great stuff over there.

Topics filling the Brainucopia:

• Women's reproductive rights and the massive assault from the social conservatives and hypocritical evangelical Christian machine. (Kudos to Gary Trudeau on addressing this so scathingly in the past week's Doonesbury strip.)
•  Women as human beings and the assault on that from Republicans, the social conservatives and the hypocritical evangelical Christian machine.
• Wishing that Rick Perry and Rick Santorum would just evaporate in their own Rapture for two. Hey, it's 2012. Maybe it can be just the end of their world. If I believed in god, I'd pray for them to be swooped off into the afterlife so they could take their sanctimonious, woman-demeaning crap somewhere else.
• Trying not to hyperventilate when I hear Rick Santorum say things like this: "When people read the Constitution and say, 'Oh, we get our rights from the Constitution,' that is wrong. The Constitution does not give us rights. It recognizes rights that are written on our heart because we are a creature of God. That's where we get our rights from." (This one kept me awake almost an entire night).
• The fact that there are people who fervently hope Santorum will become president of the United States. This gives me stomach knots.
• People blowing each other up all over the world. This is still a really hard one for me. I just want it to stop.
• Iran. Anything about Iran.
• Super PACs and how unfairly they're dragging us into a plutocracy.
• Shopping for a modest dress that isn't made of matte jersey and doesn't show any cleavage and has sleeves. Is this really so much to ask?

 I offset the intensity of NPR, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Jezebel, Slate, NBC Nightly News, and The Daily Show (yes, TDS because at its heart, it's dead-on in identifying the bullshit of the political world) by checking in every day with the blog, "Crazy Days and Nights." Celebrity gossip hasn't been my thing for a really long time, but it works for me at the moment, even though I don't know who half of the celebrities are. This is kind of shocking to me, considering how much television I watch. Too much HGTV, not enough scripted dramas.

So many thoughts, so little power to influence the outcomes of the situations that trouble me so deeply.

Dressquest

Usually, my clothes shopping frustration is related to not being able to find pants that fit. I seem to be OK with pants for the moment, although I do resent having to hem anything I buy. Regular length are too long, but the petite (or short) length is always too short.

On my agenda lately: Dress shopping. I have very specific requirements: No matte jersey or other clingy fabric. Knee length. Not form-fitting or sheath-style. Must be machine washable. No cross-over style at the top because then I have to wear a camisole and I don't want another layer. No buttons all the way down the front. Preferably an empire waist. No cleavage showing. Most important of all, though...The dress must have sleeves. Real sleeves. They can be short sleeves, 3/4 sleeves, or long sleeves. No cap sleeves, no fluttery sleeves, no see-through or split sleeves.

I hate my upper arms. Even at my absolute fittest when I worked out every day and did weight training, my upper arms looked big and soft, belying the muscle tone in the biceps and triceps.Not only that, but I get cold easily. As difficult as it is to find a modest but cute dress--not too dressy, not too casual--finding an evening or cocktail dress with sleeves is nearly impossible--even in the dead of winter. Have sleeves suddenly become too expensive to produce?

My wedding dress had sleeves. Short sleeves. It was a long search. Long sleeves would have been OK, too, but I could only find dresses with illusion fabric for sleeves, which was as effective as no sleeves at all. It wasn't at all dowdy, but it had sleeves. I loved my dress.

What is it with fashion designers that has caused this wholesale rejection of sleeves? In a nation where more people are overweight than ever, I would expect that many women feel as I do.

I've noticed that the mini-sweater and the shrug are gaining popularity. You wear it over your sleeveless dress to make up for the fact that the dress doesn't cover your arms. I don't want a shrug. I don't want another layer. I want sleeves.

I want dresses I can dress up or dress down. Criteria: Fashionable, cute, modest neckline, easy to move in, easy to wash, not maxi, not spaghetti strapped, not dressy, not ready for the beach, comfortable, and with sleeves. Here are some dresses that work or almost work. These are from Mikarose, Jen Clothing, and Land's End. I bought the last two from Land's End. They were overpriced for the less-than-impressive quality and the fuchsia one makes me look like I have a bun in the oven, but they're the closest I could get to what I wanted. And no matte jersey in sight!