Welcome to Latvia!

I was in the airport last week for six hours. And while I was there, I had a moment of pure ______________. It occurred to me that I had my passport and enough funds on my person to get out of the country. Options: Casablanca, Lima, Sydney, Riga, Hong Kong, Ulan Bator.

Seriously. I could have been gone. Just gone. Deferring problems so great and terrible that the very wizard himself would have fled the curtain and run screaming from the set. I could have been drinking fermented horse milk (and stuff like that). In Ulan Bator. (Latvia, I hear, is also an excellent option. Someday I will go).

I did not board a flight for some foreign land. I exited the airport and took my passport and my small accumulation of cash (some of which isn't even mine) and went... home.

Instead I am going to try to make my life work. Fix up the broken pieces and toss out that which cannot be fixed. All from right here: New York City.

Latvia will have to wait, but when I do make it there, I sincerely hope that I am wearing a set of raggedy overalls.

And how are you?

Love,

Nina

PS Photo from some recent decade when overalls were fashionable (at least among us Target dwellers). I still wear those sometimes...)

Time again

What happens next?

Seven months after moving into Bob and Kate's Asylum, I have been thinking a lot - probably more than is healthy for a girl like me.

Everything I assumed would happen in my life did not happen, and a whole lot of other things happened instead. Let me assure you that this is not whining; it is a simple statement of facts.

I wanted to graduate from college without having learned anything temporally relevant, and for the most part, I succeeded. Byron, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath - cool. I even composed a performance art piece during which I extinguished candles on various parts of my body. (I got an A on in that class).

I am not constituted to solve world famine, genocide, dirty terrible people of other cultures were the jurisdiction of other young idealists. I just wanted peace. Green grass. Leafy trees, waterfalls, smiling babies. This makes me a lightweight. Morally speaking, of course.

And of course, because on the very best of days, God thinks I am fit for... what? a spittoon? I find that I am the person my family and my therapist believe is responsible for confronting the evil of Erika. Why? Because of everyone in my family, I was the one most injured. Also, because no one else in my family wants to explain it to her because it's all so very untidy and Gosh, what to say? So Nina should just do it.

Normally I am up for a writing project, especially if I can be vituperative and profane.

But this time? This time... internet, I confess that I simply would not know where to start. I just want her to die. But before she does, I want her to know perhaps for the first time, what she did to me, my family, and my father, the love of my life.

Crazy train? I'll be at the bar.

Love,
Nina

Attendance

If you are still reading (bless you), please comment so I know who you are.  Include also any recommendations regarding content, style, design, polish color - whatever.   Rethinking things and I need some ideas.   Help Nina out, por favor.  

I love you more than ever.  

.... in Translation

I had a post almost ready to go about how happy I am that things are settling down and how glad I am that I can live my life free from all interference from the recent abhorrent and improbable events characterizing the last three years of my life. The first three sentences feature the word "happy" in multiple usages.

Too bad I am not going to publish that one.

Herewith, an email received from Erika, the woman I introduced to my father, the woman my father married, the woman my father lost all interest in his children over, the woman who gained power of attorney over my father, transferred all of his assets into her own name, and finally, drafted a will (she got the template from http://www.wills.com/!) calling herself sole beneficiary and executor of this will. (The part where she took control of his assets beforehand was just good planning).

Was I about to show you an email? Oh yeah. Here it is along with my translations in the interleaves:

Hello,

As we hurtle toward "the" are the quotation marks supposed to denote the date of my father's death as superlative? Because guess what? In terms of the agony his death caused my family, the actual dying part ranks pretty low. The death march out onto the deck to have our "last" ever conversation with him probably wins the prize)  anniversary, things here are pretty raw are you fucking kidding me? It's raw sitting on your ass in the million dollar house that you did nothing to earn -- in your windsock of nightgown, all day -- because you don't need a job because you are literally drowning in cash - ie, all the money my father made while he was married to my mother? THAT is raw? You want to know what's raw, sister? Raw is living in someone else's attic because you can't afford to support yourself.... because your credit card bills for all those visits to the ICU were stratospheric. Raw??? here. THERE??? You mean out on the deck overlooking the lake, shoveling food into your mouth that you didn't pay for? Maybe it's the same where you are. I wish. I would vastly prefer to lay on my ass and do nothing -- except for the really challenging part of the week when I had to go visit my grief counsellor. Must be nice. There's a really bad stretch up ahead, but some of those memories are of us sticking together and helping each other. You want to know what I remember about that "stretch"? I remember paying $1200 for a plane ticket, $400 for a rental car, and $120 for a hotel room in order to see my dad, and I remember, as I walked into my father's house, you, Erika, putting your arms around my father and saying, "You never have to talk to her again" before you pushed him, against his will into the bedroom for a "nap." A superlative one, you betcha. Was that the "sticking together" you were thinking of? Or was it the part where you fled my father's funeral because one person from my mother's family dared to show up and wreck your delusion that my father actually loved someone, ever, other than you? As hard as this anniversary is, maybe we can bring something good out of it, something that Harry would want. OMG I can hardly wait. How many buckets of blood do you want to bet that the really special and virtuous and right thing my father would supposedly want is actually something YOU want for yourself? So I will say to you all please forgive me for anything you feel I did or did not do. Never, ever, ever. Now go put a bag over your head and drown yourself. If you look into your heart and can't quite find that forgiveness, I looked. Nope! then look inside Harry's heart and things may look different to you. Well, well, well. There it is. My father would want us to forgive you... for alienating him from us, appropriating all of his assets, and making us strangers in our own house. Except to be technical, it wasn't our house anymore anyway. Bitch, for you to invoke the love and respect we have for our father and then endeavor to manipulate us into forgiving you for dismantling my family, taking what you wanted, and going out for a latte, illustrates in hi-def that you know nothing about forgiveness. You don't know what it is, what it is for, or what it means. My father was a man - not Jesus Christ himself. And you, dirty pirate whore, don't get to drop a bomb on someone else's life and then say "if you could only see this from your father's perspective, you would see that he really did want to destroy you. And who are we to question his will? Or is it His? I get so confused between Jesus and my husband. But I know they both wanted you to get fucked over, so none of this is my fault." He was the most forgiving person anyone of us will ever know, As far as I know, the only crime I committed against my father in the last years of his life was loving him so much my hair fell out - that and "bothering him" by visiting him while he had cancer. But whatever, dad. Since forgiveness is such a strong attribute of yours, sorry. I really regret having that much faith in you. If Erika got you a little confused with God, I got you a lot confused with God. 100%, actually, which is why a nine months later, I still can't believe you abandoned me, all for a piece of ass. So yeah, I am sorry. A lot. I should never have made that mistake and we all learned more about God from watching him the last couple years of his life than we'll ever learn anywhere else. If that was supposed to teach us about God, no thanks. I think I'll just be secular humanist or something. I hear those people are at least nice to each other and believe in justice. I could use a little of both of those, or a lot. Whatever is available.

We can't fix the world, but we can fix our little part of it. Solve my problem for me by saying you are cool with with what I did to you. Then we'll go to work on what? Gaza?

I love you all.

(... translation: I love that you were all foolish enough to trust me. That makes you good people.)


Yeah, I know. I know. I know. But if I can't do this here, where can I do it?

Thank you for reading.

Explanations

Hi!

I have complained a lot lately, and I should (perhaps) explain myself. Or at least elaborate on certain circumstances that (sometimes, but not always) threaten my equanimity.


Issue the first: Living situation.

After my dad died and the final round of bills associated with his illness and death hit my mailbox, I realized there was about 25 cents worth of financial cushion between me and total ruin. Many people, including you, helped me avoid actually presenting myself at the courthouse for judgment with my remaining one (or two) quarters. Instead, I moved in with a couple in their 70s who needed help cleaning out their house so they could move to a smaller one. Result: Nina starts getting financially better off, and the couple has someone around to do basically whatever they can dream up for her to do. Go ahead and notice that "help cleaning out their house" was about the last thing they actually wanted Nina to do, and forgive Nina for not elaborating on what they really wanted. Use your imagination. (Stop that! Don't be so gross). Result: frustration. But also a fair amount of comedy, because whenever you move in with new people who are absolutely nothing like you, funny things happen. Like the day when I brought Liam over and Bob refused to believe Liam was boy because Liam is so pretty. And so for the entirety of the visit, Bob called Liam "girlfriend" - which offended Liam so much he just sat down and cried. Awesome.

Issue the second: Bob's untimely exit.

Death finds me. Bob and Kate were on vacation in Montenegro, Bob came down with a little itty bitty infection and as sometimes happens when people are 76, the infection got really big, and Bob died. If you read the preceding paragraph, you know that "cleaning out the house" was low on Bob and Kate's list of things for me to do for them. In fact, it never made the list. So you can infer that a good portion of the preparations for getting Bob properly memorialized and publicly adored were left to me. Now, to be fair, I didn't do that much because there was a mountain of things to do. I only did what a person could do in twelve hours a day for the 10 days leading up to the funeral. Did my job get done? Oh, sure. But only because I skipped the heavenly sleep inducing medicine and crammed it all in - or because I snuck upstairs for 10 minutes here or there to grade a test or a paper. In the end, we buried Bob a month after he was repatriated - an event that turned out to be just about as dramatic and emotionally wrenching as the funeral. Here's another picture for you:



Issue the third: My sister.

Since my father died, I have removed my step mother and every other person associated with her from my life with surgical finality and precision. My sister called me last week, and she was hysterical because she had just found out that my dad stopped contributing money to her IRA when he got married. When she told me this, I said, "Duh. You didn't know that?" And then I carefully and tactfully explained to her that our dad really did disinherit us and that I thought she might really might be able to get her brain around it if she simply read the will, of which I have a copy. Then suddenly she said, "I am less and less ok with the will." To which I said "Then perhaps you should remove your nose from that bitch's ass crack and join the rest of your family -- you know, the other forty or so odd people who are united in their hatred of the bitch dad married. And then my sister said, without a trace of irony "If I do that she won't leave me any of dad's money when she dies."

DUH. SHE IS NOT GOING TO LEAVE YOU ANY MONEY, NO MATTER HOW DEEP YOUR BURY YOU NOSE IN HER ASS CRACK. GROW UP.

And then I had to carefully and tactfully explain to my sister why I can have no further contact with her as long as she continues to betray her entire family all for a chance at getting dad's money. Her response was "Well, you and I have never had much in common anyway. Bye."


Issue the fourth: my job.

I had a great meeting with my boss this week. Awesomely good. It turns out that despite all my fears to the contrary, I am not on the short list to be laid off. And they are not even that annoyed with me because I live in New York. Whee! Except not. For those of you unaware of the history, my dad met the woman he eventually chucked us in the wood chipper for because I introduced him to her. She was my boss at the job I still have. Think about that for a minute. Ok that is enough; you can stop now. After my current boss gave me all this good news about my job security, she told me that I have a new supervisor (which in this case is a mini-boss). And guess who it is? It is the only person at Sweet Little College who still keeps in touch with my step mother. So it's clear: I have surgically removed everyone connected to that bitch from my life - even my sister. And now, because God is apparently not done shredding me yet, I am FORCED to have professional contact with one of my step mother's best friends. And I can't do anything about it. Not one thing.


And so that is why lately I am dramatic and self pitying. I guess you didn't need all this explanation and I suppose I could have written more stuff about being attracted to inappropriate people, but hey, at least now you know why I still require big piles of sedating drugs to sleep at night. The fun just keeps on coming.


Oh but in case it is not clear: I am fine. Those meds really work.

Love,

Nina

So much to not say

This has never been a blog about politics, and I have never pretended to endorse a politician or even to have feelings about anything related to local, or regional, or national politics. (I am against feelings. If you read my blog, you know why).

Time will come that I will talk about what it is like to live here (ie, the place I am living) and what it is like to be a New Yorker, probably for the first time, and to witness this election... from here, where people are delighted and dancing in the streets and setting off fireworks and chanting "Yes we can".

But not today. If you are among the 4 people who still stop by here, bless you. If you stumbled in here by accident, I hope you return.

Thank you for reading.

TBA

Hi!

If I neglect my blog for even one more day, I will be charged with TBA: Total Blog Abandonment (not to be confused with To Be Announced, which might fit the bill as well since I am going through a transitional thing that has me befuddled).

What is this transitional thing?

1) I moved to a new pace.

2) I cut off all contact with my step mother.

3) I found out (yesterday) that my current full time job (the one that includes benefits) might evaporate due to state budget cuts. This might happen in January. Or May. Or if things go better than forecasted, not at all. That news is TBA, too.

Items one and two - the moving and the surgical removal of my step mother from my life - have had a powerful stress lowering effect on me. This is excellent. However, the powerful stress lowering effect has produced a trancelike indifference to the news that I might be losing my job. The scariness of that (it should be scary, correct?) is not registering. I find myself unable to respond with the appropriate levels of panic and terror. An alternative explanation for my inappropriate emotional response to this news is that because the cause is budget cuts, it's not my fault, so I don't care. Wait, that makes no sense. Maybe it is because the last two years have provided me with excellent training with regard to being warned that something terrible is going to happen that I can't control. I might have learned not to work problems that I don't have the means to solve.

I'll write more when I can find a clean sheet of unlined paper. When I find one of those, I will diagram my new place and post the drawings in lieu of pictures. In the meantime, if you don't hear from me for a few days, it's only because I am re-calibrating my brain in response to dramatically lowered stress levels and dramatically unwelcome news that I can't seem to muster the gumption to freak out about.

Thank you for reading.

Whatever, already

After hauling boxes and enduring the sneers of the entire staff of my building, I decided that I am going to take another week to move my remaining possessions over to the new house. I have to work and it's unavoidable, as is the chagrin of my building's entire staff if I don't sneak my remaining possessions out in back packs and duffle bags. I can only do so much in a day, and after the unbelievable stress of the last two weeks, I just can't deal with any more - any more sneers, any more boxes, any more nasty cab drivers and certainly not any more work terrorism.

I don't know what has happened to me - I used to be able to just roll with whatever came my way. The person I have become has a brain like a chicken wing and the nervous system of a rabid monkey. I have to slow down, or I will be left with nothing but the paper slippers at Belleview and a handful of medicine that no longer works unless I take three times the maximum daily dose.

Having said all that, let me apologize to all the people I have let down in the last few weeks. My blog has not been fun to read and I owe other obligations to people I shall not name - you know who you are... and I have no excuse for myself except the above chicken-wing-monkey situation. I'll be my old self again someday. Try November, maybe.

Love,
Nina

The general unpleasantness

I got to the airport at 10:30 for a 12:00 flight. Upon arriving, I was alerted by the kiosk that the flight I needed to board to have any hope of attending my meeting on time was canceled due to lightning. Up in the sky. Like up where you can't see it because it is so high up there. The problem, of course, is that the lightning is banging around in the general area we prefer to fly our airplanes. So I called my boss and had the same conversation we had two weeks ago when this happened - meaning when I was supposed to be at my job and wasn't because of a canceled flight. It went ok, I guess. Considering how very inaccessible I now look to my students - all because I live in NY. (This is not good). I find that I will have to wait here, in LGA, until 7:34pm. when the flight is supposedly going to go up in the sky. If it doesn't, Jesus, Mary and the carpenter help me. (Side note: do NOT - while in an airport - unexpectedly have issues related to the lower region of your person unexpectedly needing to do what it does once a month. I DARE you to find a merchant who sells any remedy for your parts and situation. You will fail and you will be grateful indeed that you are not visibly compromised. The end).

Cross-Mojination

It has been a weak week since I got home from whatever that was I went to in South Carolina. That craziness. I have been... what do they call it? gentle with my psychological outfit and I have tried not to overtax myself for fear I would have some kind of episode.

There comes a time, however, when it is time to get off the couch and stop fantasizing about living in a trailer and spending my days in lawn chair denuding dandelions. Today is going to be the day.

I will:

1) Go see my brother
2) Return those ugly pants that don't even fit me...
3) Stop by the post office
4) Go by my friend's parents' house and see where I will be living. Make sure I can see myself there, etc.
5) Stop by my church and place my hand on the door and look through the window. Rome. Day. You know what I am saying.

Your turn. What do you all need to be doing that you are putting off? Everybody pick something and tell me about it. Then, so we all have cross-mojination, go do it.

I love you.*


* Still appreciating you, too.

And it gets worse

Advised by excellent blogger and good guy Avitable, I have added a donation button. It turns out I can't make rent this month - my brother can afford to give me some, but not enough. I am kind of, how they call it, screwed?

The history: my dad got leukemia, and at the time, I had no debt and $20,000 saved. Two years later, after last minute plane tickets and rental cars, hotel rooms and phone bills, I am not only out of that money, but up to my ears in debt, too. This last week - $1000 in plane tickets for a funeral after which I was run out of the house after, I find out that my dad disinherited all his kids. Let me be clear: my dad's illness bankrupted us, or near it, and we inherited nothing of his - not kidding - many millions. My step mother got it all and she is not speaking to us. Meanwhile, I can't even make rent this month because even though my brother can lend me some money, it won't be enough to cover it. So I am looking at bouncing a rent check and not being able to make the minimum payments on the debt I incurred, all because I was trying to see my dad while he was in and out of ICUs and CCUs and having surgeries and what all else. Check the archive. It's all there.

I am screwed and all pride must now be squelched in the face of pure desperation.

Give me $5 if you can.

I love you either way.

Good enough

You might have inferred that I am neither quitting nor leaving the blog world. Oh, sigh of relief!

(Hear me now applauding myself for relieving you of my narcissistic belief that you couldn't live without me).

If I can pull a post about the awesomeness of the Jews out of nowhere, I imagine I can think of other things to say.

What's to say today? Not much else.

I just felt the need to hit that orange button, and tell you I feel that even though all has gone wrong with the world, all feels right with me.

I hope you all are doing ok, too.

And so

Thank you to everyone who once again guest posted. Thank you for all the kind and supportive emails that I never returned. Thank you for showing up and reading even though you knew every time you did, it would lower your general happiness level a full notch (sometimes two). (I have taken back the reigns of my internet diary, so if the posts of the last few weeks have provided any exceptions to the depressive, psychotic, bitter, wrathful standards I have built and upheld for over a year, you can exhale. If you're into that my brand of _____________, here's your home plate. Virtually speaking, anyway).

Geographically speaking, we are at the airport waiting for a flight that takes off in three hours. You might remember that I was supposed to stay here until Wednesday and you might guess that it's odd for three people to sit around in an airport for three hours if they don't have to.

(Work on it for a minute. Have a inference or two and meet me a sentence later).

It has been almost twenty-four hours, actually, since we left. We spent the night at a hotel an hour away.

(Keep inferring. It was so much worse than you can possibly imagine. Imagine the epic worst way and then triple it or even quadruple it).

Having an internet diary that is run by your evil twin has a lot of drawbacks, but it has one indispensable advantage: because you don't know my name or theirs, I can describe everything that happened in the last 48 hours secure in the knowledge that I am slandering no one (because every word I say will be true) and also secure in the knowledge that I am exposing no one's identity. I'll be exposing you all to a complete guarantee that you'll be much less happy than you were before you started reading, but I leave it to your good judgment to decide whether to come back and find out why my dad's children are all refugees in airports for the better part of a weekend.

Love,
Nina

MELP

MELP, or Minimum Expected Level of Performance, is a value based on the number of classes I am teaching, the variety of life-stress I am anticipating, and the number of dollars not in my bank account times my waist measurement (in inches) divided by my hip measurement (in iches), rounded off to the nearest hundredth and scrawled on the back of an envelope and placed under a cookie bag on my desk. I permit myself to have a moderate level of healthy self-esteem if I maintain MELP.

Let me start over.

There are four levels of MELP.

Level One: whatever, whenever, just don't show up for work visibly drunk. (A little bit drunk is fine).

Level Two: whatever, most of the time, just don't show up for work visibly hung over.

Level Three: make it to the gym once a week, no visible holes or stains, grade the papers instead of throwing them directly in the trash.

Level Four: be attractive, polite, virtuous, strong, and competent in every measurable way.

Fall semester was a Level One in every way. It is positively bizarre that I did not get fired and I might have suffered a psychotic break and did so publicly right here on this blog.

I have been functioning somewhere between Level Two and Level Three all semester and I have even, on a few occasions, performed for an entire day or 1.5 days at a shiny, happy, church-going Level Four.

(woohoo).

Today I am formally and officially going to do an unthinkable and unwise thing: I am not only going to GO to a Level Four, but also make it policy and tell the whole world, right here on this blog.

Oh and my dad 's surgery was canceled and he is on his way home because really there is no point in trying to fix the leg of a man who has leukemia.

Have a blessed day. I am going climbing.

Grace

Dear Jesus,

Please do not create any more stupid people. We are full up, here.

Love,

Nina

PS Please please please? I mean, honestly. Why is it that people who spell their own NAMES incorrectly are... never mind. Jesus, please give me the grace not to kill them. Thanks. Sort of.

As requested

So my pal Em dropped by a few minutes ago and expressed an interest in seeing a picture of my Julie, my person that I talk to all day long on instant messenger because, gosh, Julie and I are joined at the back of the mind.

Simpatico. Obviamente.

Take a look how cute she is:



You're welcome. Have a good weekend.

This was Val's idea

Valerie said something about post a picture of yourself. So here's one.

*** picture removed due to my craziness - catch me next time ***

I don't have a favorite, but this one looks like me. Sort of. Anyway it's only staying up for an hour because I am weird like that.

Boring, much?

I wonder if you nice people ever get tired of seeing different versions of the same things:

1) me bitching about anything from noises in my head to faulty electronics to my backside, and

2) me posting pictures I took while leaning out my window.

Today I'll assume that you can stand two more pictures. I took the first yesterday at 5:45 in the morning, after I had given up entirely on going back to sleep:



When I got home at 9pm, I took a picture of this third and rare kind of sparkle hour:




I am trying to construct a narrative of the events of yesterday and still be entertaining.

Preview: an unexpected guest, a lot of limping, one angry oh wait make that two angry letters, a one hour bus ride, a surprising (not in a good way) conversation, two yowling cats, a lot more limping, another bus ride, and a whole lot more money going away capped off by a sad-making email.

But I did sleep last night. Perhaps this is all you ever needed to know about yesterday, anyway.

Sparkly

Yeah so maybe yesterday really sucked and maybe I completely freaked out. I might have thrown things. (OK I totally threw something. But it deserved it).

The last time I wrote about Sparkle Hour, it was too late to take this picture:



Oh and that thing I said about God yesterday? OK, both things? I am not quite ready to unsay them, but I might be later, after I get back from paying another $400 for a phone. (I have bought the same phone over and over and over and over again because of its email push function that makes it possible to do my job even if I am out of the country. It might be approaching not worth it status).

Have a good Monday.

$1000 an hour

If I made that much money, perhaps I would have time to post today in a timely fashion. Alas, I do not, so I have to put off the post you thought you would be reading right now until I finish my extremely rewarding and fullfilling work.

(If only I had never gone to college. If only I had been blessed with a poor upbringing and a great ass. If only I had made better - oh, I am sorry -different choices. If only, if only, if only).

Post will go up around 10pm tonight.