Category Archives: Relationships

Summertime

Scarlett is staying home from camp today. When I asked her to get dressed, she ran to her bedroom and got back under the covers. She was wearing my nephew’s underpants, and two of his T-shirts, and seemed far too comfy to get moving. I mostly understood. It’s been a busy summer, and not at all the kind I used to have when I was a kid growing up in Oak Park, Illinois.

In those days, we didn’t do camp. We played outside, often right in the middle of the street or the alley, we went to the pool or danced in the sprinkler. Basically we entertained ourselves along with the other neighborhood children for three months, and sometimes we went on vacation to a Holiday Inn in Indiana or Ohio, or to my uncle’s cabin in Wisconsin where we swam in the lake and hooked wiggling minnows and leeches onto fishing rods that we cast out into the shining water over and over.

Scarlett’s summers are different. Read More>

|Categories: Cure, Drugs, Life, Parenting, Relationships, Research | Tags: , , | Permalink

Not My Finest Moment

It’s been a frustrating few days. My wheelchair footrest has been broken, and I’ve been trying to get the company, California Home Medical Equipment, to fix it since May. I won’t even go into all of the mishaps between then and now, except to say that they finally picked up my chair on Wednesday, and left me with a loaner that makes the electric chair seem like a lounge seat on Air Force One.

The loaner chair was rock hard, and too big for me, and I couldn’t reach the button I needed to push in order to switch the chair from driving mode to seat adjusting mode. It was a very uncomfortable two days, and I called the company right away to tell them I needed my chair back. They were supposed to make many changes to it, switch out the battery, revamp the armrests and the controls which are becoming harder for me to use, and do a general maintenance check since the chair is now two years old. But I couldn’t stand one more day in the loaner from hell, so all they fixed was the foot rest, and now I’m getting my still-flawed-but-sorely-missed wheelchair back. Read More>

|Categories: Life, Parenting, Relationships | Tags: | Permalink

The Human Condition

I’ve been trying to write a blog post for the past week, but all that comes out are the ramblings of a crazy person. It’s been so hard to collect my thoughts, and I’m not sure I’ve done it here successfully at all.

Case in point, I’d like to start with a completely random digression. I’ve known a few crazy people in my life. The woman in my college town who yelled at canned goods in a bus stop alcove. The guy in the same town who used to stand outside the bagel store in his Delta Gamma sweatshirt (according to him, he was a member of the sorority), hassling frat guys and flirting with girls. When I went in to grab a cup of coffee and a bagel, he would sit with me and talk about his upcoming wedding, which was probably imaginary. But it was a welcome break from studying. Everyone called him Scanner Dan, I guess because he used to count things. Dan was short, bearded and far older than the average person that I encountered on State Street. He would sit across from me at a round table, his grubby fingers and greasy hair setting him well apart from the rest of us. Still, he was a part of the college experience. The word at UW Madison was that there was a psychiatric hospital across the lake and that when people got out and went to halfway houses, some of them just started hanging out on campus. It makes sense, I suppose, and is probably something I could confirm with a quick Internet search. But there are crazy people everywhere. Anyway, I don’t think I’m one of them, I just think my latest unposted blog efforts have seemed a little… unhinged. Read More>

|Categories: Faces, Life, Relationships | Tags: , , , , | Permalink