Nearest Distant Shore

Radio Free TL

Internet radio is the bomb.  The station I'm listening to this morning bills itself as The Ultimate Oldies Channel and the last five songs I've heard are Beth by KISS, The Times They are A'Changin' by Dylan, I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones , Street Fightin' Man by the Stones and I Can't Stop Lovin' You by Ray Charles.

Now if they'd just play some Delfonics or Stylistics, my morning would be complete. I do loves me some Philly soul.

Thursday Thirteen: Recent Reads

1. The King of Lies, about which I already raved.
2. All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming.  There are only a few books in this series, but each one is better than the last, and this one is stunning in every sense of the word.
3. Counterplay, the latest installment in the Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series by Robert K. Tanenbaum.  It's not up to his usual standard, but does have a helluva twist at the end.
4. One Mississippi by Mark Childress is beautful and heartbreaking, with a dead-on sense of time and place.  I especially love the way he wove music into the book, as the music he used was the soundtrack of my high-school days.
5. I Gave You My Heart But You Sold it Online by Dixie Cash is every bit as fun as the name implies.  I'd go on a road trip with Debbie Sue and Edwina (or Dixie) any day of the week!
6. The last installment in Gillian Roberts' Amanda Pepper series, All's Well That Ends.  Amanda is a very witty wise-ass, and I'm sad to see her go.
7. Hundred Dollar Baby by Robert B. Parker.  The Spenser books are like candy to me; I don't even know if they're any good, just that I love them.  This one resurrects a character from two earlier books, but with a much less happy resolution.
8. Short Straw by Stuart Woods.  More candy!  Woods has several series but the main character in this one has only appeared in one other book.
9. The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult was not my favorite of her books.  I didn't really care about any of the characters and I wondered why I was continuing to read it.  Or maybe I just haven't forgiven her for My Sister's Keeper yet.
10. Rage by Jonathan Kellerman.  His Alex Delaware series is a long-time favorite, though I am about at the point where they are  just too depressing.  This one was, too.
11. The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights by Faye Kellerman, a nice mixture of short fiction and essays.  Don't tell Jonathan, but I like Faye better (at least this week).
12. The Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair, with some great articles and a fabulous photo spread by Annie Liebovitz that's shot in classic film noir style.
13. I'm still working on The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  I usually love memoirs, and this one is very well-written, but I'm struggling to finish it.  I'm thinking it's not her, though; maybe right now I just need light and frothy.

Wednesday Weirdness

Okay, you'll have to scroll down a bit for the link, but this video has completely made my morning.  Ricky Skaggs, who is country as cornbread and who heads one of the best bluegrass bands in the world is joined by Bruce Hornsby on another installment of the most excellent CMT Crossroads series.  I can't wait to see what else they do, but they're going to have a hard time topping their rendition of Superfreak (yes, that Superfreak). 

Look for a cameo by John Anderson, too, slipping in a bit of one of his biggest hits.

Rejuvenation

When I was a very new mother who worried about every little thing (as opposed to now, when I'm a more experienced mother who does the same damn thing), one of the most often-heard pieces of advice I received on a variety of worrisome things was "tincture of time."  It was good advice then and it's still good advice, and it works on lots of levels.  Last week I was so evil I couldn't even stand myself, but today, a week out from my chemo and after three days of blessed aloneness, I am back to feeling pretty good.

Friday afternoon when Mama and Liam left I was so relieved that I burst into tears.  I had been holding in all my stress, trying not to take it out on anyone else, and I was just so relieved to be alone to wallow in my anger and sadness and everything else.  And by then, I really didn't need to wallow anymore; the peaceful calm quiet of my empty house was an immediate relief.  I watched hours of DVRed shows from the past week and went to bed late and didn't talk to another living soul and it was bliss.

Saturday morning I woke up early in my quiet house, and spent most of the morning listening to music and surfing the 'net.  My friends had invited me to a party and I decided to go for a little while.  I was glad I went;  although K and I speak on the phone several times a week, we haven't seen each other since I started my treatments.  She was so sweet and kept telling me how great I looked ("Y'all, doesn't she look great?  THIS WOMAN JUST HAD CHEMO ON MONDAY!  Doesn't she look great?"  Yeah, she was about half in the bag).  I stayed about three hours, the perfect amount of sociability for this weekend, and the best thing was that after it was over, I could retreat to my calm quiet house and regroup.

Yesterday I had to work a little, but mostly I read--no, devoured--a new book.  It's called The King of Lies and it is outstanding.  The author is from North Carolina and it is set in Rowan County and I don't write well enough to tell you what I liked about it, but the story was compelling, the characters well-drawn and it was beautifully  literary in the very best sense of that word.  I hope we'll be seeing more from John Hart; he's very talented.

Yesterday was also the beginning of race season, and I watched almost all of the Daytona 500.  My guy Tony Stewart was out fairly early (and didn't even punch anyone), so I was pulling for Mark Martin to win, but Kevin Harvick surprised everyone (including himself, I believe!) and won the race while several more cars behind him wrecked.  It was a good race and despite lots of wrecks, no one got hurt.  It was a great weekend for Harvick; he won the Busch race, too.

Liam will be home in an hour or so.  Today I miss him a little bit, so I'll be happy to see him.  I hope his weekend away was as good for him as it was for me.  My boy is having a hard time these days, and I hope a weekend of just being eight years old and adored by his grandparents has helped to restore some balance.

Tomorrow I have a conference scheduled with his teacher and the guidance counselor, sort of to just touch base on where we are with all this and make sure everyone is on the same page. Later on Liam and I will go for our second visit to the counselor. I hope that he will agree to talk with her alone this week; he didn't the first time we went, but she'll keep trying. He is dealing with a lot of stuff no child should have to, and I want to give him a safe place to talk about it. He is so private, and so protective of my feelings, so he often can't talk to me, but he doesn't need to keep all this in. One of these days (and hopefully soon) our lives will not be All About Cancer, and I need to make sure we both have a good life to come back to when our focus can shift again.

Thursday Thirteen: Oscar Edition

1. Apparently chemo makes me irritable.    Who would have guessed?
2. That Muppet doesn't look nearly as grouchy as I feel.
3. While I realize that I am very lucky to have someone who can be here with me after chemo, if I don't get some time alone soon I'm liable to explode.
4. Thankfully Liam is going home with Mama tomorrow for the long Presidents' Day weekend.
5. When cancer is the most exciting thing going in your life, it's time to make some changes.
6. Unfortunately, the kinds of changes I need to make will have to wait until I'm done with my treatments, I believe.
7. I am invited to a party on Saturday. 
8. It's being given by my most extroverted friend, and involves tamales and lots of beer.
9. Thinking about going makes me want to hide in a cave, especially given that I'm not supposed to drink while receiving chemo.
10. And whose fucked-up idea was that anyway?  "You have cancer; we're filling you with toxic drugs to kill those bad cells, and oh, by the way, no booze for you!"  To quote my son, SHEESH.
11. Liam and I have an appointment today with a counselor for him.  I hope she'll be able to help him process some of the scary stuff that's bothering him.
12. I've got entirely too many balls in the air right now and I feel like I have very limited control over any of them.  But if I drop the ball marked Liam, none of the rest of them will matter very much.
13. My sister took a very brave step this week and gave notice at her toxic job.  I'm so proud of her!

(Thursday Thirteen HQ is here)

Thursday Thirteen: Boring Edition

1. This morning I had errands to run.  Since I am much less likely to leave the house if I allow myself to sit down at the computer first, we slept late and I drove Liam to school and went from there.
2. Never in my former life would I have imagined a time when sleeping until 6:30 was considered "sleeping late."  Ye gods, so not a morning person.
3. I was the first person in the door at Target.  I always hated it when I used to work retail and people were waiting to get in when we unlocked the door, and now I've become one of those people.  Can going to the K&W for the early-bird special be far behind?
4. Even though the season officially started in November, last night was the REAL start of Tarheel basketball in my book.  It was a good one, too!
5. I've mostly spent this week brooding and being a bitch.  I haven't been this cranky since I was nine months pregnant.
6. Some of the things that are making me cranky I can't change (cancer, ostomy issues), and some have to do with other people who are just plain pissing me off. 
7. I'm hoping Liam will be spending next weekend with his grandparents, since he has Monday the 19th off from school.  I am in dire need of some extended time alone. 
8. While I'm delighted his father finally went back to work, it has meant no more weekends alone for me.  Actually, one of the things that I'm so cranky about is the fact that S's job has not only not benefited me or Liam one iota, it has made my life exponentially more difficult.
9. There are other things that are making me cranky that I could probably do something about, but I'm just too damned cranky to get it done.
10. Yes, I do get in my own way quite frequently.
11. Liam's midterm report showed some slipping grades, as expected.  Nothing very drastic, just something to watch.  I've made a counseling appointment for both of us and I've requested a conference with his teacher.  I hope they will help give me some ideas about how to help him stay focused.
12. Since one of the problems is that he's "worried," we made a deal that he could be worried at home, but not at school.  We'll see how that works.
13. Having an open container of Trader Joe's dark-chocolate-covered cherries on my desk is probably not one of the smartest things I've done today.

Cold Hands, Warm Hearts

I just sent Liam off to school looking like the Michelin man, or the little brother in A Christmas Story.  It is a ridiculous 22 degrees here in the Port City this morning and once let me say that I hate cold weather.  I've passed that along to my son, too, who spent the five minutes we were outside waiting for the bus mostly snuggled up to me, loudly complaining about the cold.  And yes, I realize that it's much colder elsewhere in the country, but dammit, this is the south.  If I wanted to be cold, I'd move to North Dakota (well, really, no, I wouldn't, but you get the message).

I will give a heartfelt shout-out to the New Hanover County Schools transportation department, who kindly agreed that the bus could stop here at our house while I'm undergoing treatments.  It is really helpful not to have to walk the block to the corner and stand there unprotected from the weather while waiting for the bus.  One of the side effects of oxaliplatin is cold sensitivity, and being outside in this weather is a good way to trigger that.  My hands are a little tingly just from the few minutes I was out, and I was both wearing gloves and holding a hot cup of coffee.

This morning I'm enjoying a mix CD sent to me by one of my invisible friends.  I think I'm going to make her my official DJ, because this CD kicks ass.  She and I have very similar musical tastes, but she lives way across the country and so there are some local-to-her musicians that she loves that I'd probably not get the chance to hear otherwise, and some old favorites as well.  I just heard Graham Nash singing Cathedral from the most excellent CD No Nukes, a long-time favorite of mine (I still have it on vinyl!).  Trivia:  One of the artists featured on that disc is now a freshman congressperson representing the state of New York.  By the way, if you've never heard No Nukes you should rectify that situation immediately.

Now to invisible friends, the term used at a couple of forums which I've frequented over the years.  It's become more of a joke term, since I've been posting with most of these women for seven or eight years, sharing stories of our children and exchanging recipes, commiserating over job losses and unreliable spouses, rejoicing in the birth of new loves and new babies and in some unbearably sad cases, weeping over the loss of much-anticipated ones.  Ten years ago I could have never imagined that I would count among my friends so many people I'd never seen, but that's one of the glories of the internet, and my life is so much richer for it.

My local friends have been amazing, taking over childcare when I was in the hospital, bringing food by the house, coming to clean my house, taking me to the doctor and just generally being there in a million ways.  My invisible friends, unable to be here in person, have made sure that I want for nothing.  I've received cards and newsy letters, flowers and chocolate,  girly stuff and night clothes and warm socks, not to mention the surprise iPod that came a couple of weeks ago.  And while I love presents as much as the next gal, it's the very fact that all of these busy women are taking the time out of their very full lives to sit down and write a note, send a card, dash off an e-mail, reach out to me in whatever form, that really matters to me.

Good energy sent out into the universe in someone's name, be it in the form of a prayer or just a simple thought, is a very powerful force.  My friends, visible and invisible, are collectively a force of nature.  I'm incredibly lucky to have such fierce warriors by my side.

Addendum

I got a very nice email today pointing me to an article in Wrightsville Beach Magazine about the artist I mentioned in yesterday's post, and there's a web-only extra about her, as well.  I'm glad to see her getting this recognition; she's very talented and I always rejoice to see talent rewarded.

I love the sound of worlds colliding.

Weekend

The only thing better than a quiet Sunday morning with coffee and the newspaper is one where I also have a new Oxford American to read at my leisure.  I have been reading and singing its praises for years; hopefully y'all have been paying attention.  Somehow I let my subscription lapse (an oversight I will have to correct this week), and it was just luck that made me find the current issue when I was in the local Big Bookstore yesterday, since they had it shelved among the movie magazines (WTF?).  I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with Jill McCorkle, Jack Pendarvis, Barry Hannah and a bunch of other great writers on subjects ranging from crime fiction to the loss of a beloved dog. 

I'm also enjoying the joys of internet radio.  When I loaded my new iPod a couple of weeks ago in preparation for my next chemo treatment, I noticed that it only held about 150 songs, far fewer than the advertised 1000 for this size iPod.  I finally figured out that I when I had imported my CDs that I had not compressed them and they were taking up a huge amount of room on both the iPod and my hard drive, so I deleted most of the music files and have just been adding back selected CDs gradually, this time really thinking about what gets imported, rather than doing whole CDs all at once. 

Meanwhile, I have to have music, so I just selected a random radio station (radioio) from iTunes' list, and it turned out to be a good choice.  I'm listening to old favorites like JD Crowe and the New South and John Hiatt and finding new favorites Old Crow Medicine Show (Deb's new favorite) and Randy Rogers Band, whose single "Kiss Me in the Dark" sent me straight to iTunes to download it.  They remind me of bands I used to go listen to in my club days, and I mean that in the very best sense, because I saw some really terrific bands.  I really like this station--where else can you hear Tom Waits back-to-back with Emmylou?

I'm mostly talking about chemo, etc. at Chrysalis, but let me just say that this week kicked my ass a little harder than I expected.  I'm very glad that I scheduled my treatments for Monday, because it took me the whole rest of the week to feel remotely myself.  I've been lucky enough not to get sick, but the fatigue is damned near overwhelming, and long-lasting.  It doesn't help that my sleep has been fragmented at best, and I finally called Chapel Hill to get a script for something to help me sleep (which of course I promptly forgot to pick up; duh). 

By yesterday, though, I was feeling right much better and having serious cabin fever, so I took myself downtown and went to the Cotton Exchange for a little retail therapy.  I still had a gift card from Christmas, and I spent part of it at the Golden Gallery on a photograph by John W. Golden and a beaded eyeglasses lanyard thingy (aka "Peeper Keeper") for which I paid too much money, but I love it anyway.  An artist named Melissa Manley was working in the store and the case on which the Peeper Keeper display rested was full of her work.  She's very talented, and as soon as I kick this cancer's ass I'm going to celebrate by buying a piece of her jewelry, or maybe this tidepool chalice, which I find so gorgeous I can hardly stand not to have it. 

I find lately that I'm filled with some sort of weird need to create something; a collage, a quilt, a bracelet.  Of course, the fact that I don't have any beads or fabric or any of the other cool stuff I'd need plus no discernible talent for doing any of those things is a bit of a deterrent, but I see a visit to Michael's and A Place to Bead in my immediate future.  And maybe I'll get around to ordering that fabric I found on Etsy and bookmarked months ago.  I'm not sure what the hell I'd do with it if I had it, which is why I haven't ordered it before now, but maybe creative spirit comes woven into beautiful fabric, and I'll be inspired just by having it in my house. I know that reading magazines like Cloth Paper Scissors fills me with a combination of gleeful possibility and unbearable envy; maybe the secret of creativity is to put aside the envy and just embrace the glee.

Right now the sun is shining and Emmylou and Mark Knopfler are singing Red Staggerwing and I hear there's a football game on later.  The world feels like a pretty good place.