Category Archives: Personal

I Just Got Some Sad News

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I just found out, through our alumni email, that one of my favorite High School teachers just died. He must have been early 70s or late 80s, as he was late 50s early 60s when he taught me 25 years ago.

Jack Betterly was a real hippie. He taught sitting cross legged on his desk, his Native American beaded wrist bands glistening in the florescent lights. He wore turquoise earrings and a beaded neck band as well. He taught History and inspired me to write the best research paper of my life (which I think I still have some where) on Leonardo Da Vinci and his Inventions. I got an A on that paper.

RIP Mr Betterly. Thanks for teaching me and generations of other young women at Emma Willard School. You will be missed.

For The Most Part, I Love my Job

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I have a lot of autonomy, I do a variety of things all day long, I get along well with my co-workers, I adore my bosses.

And then there are days like today.  I think the whole office had PMS.  And I found out no one told me they had taken the last C5 envelope (business no. 10 to you US readers) or the last sheet of invoice paper.  I apologized to my boss, who said it wasn’t my fault if no one told me, but I still felt like I hadn’t done my job.

Luckily I have a great relationship with my supplier and he ran me over a box of invoice paper.  I’ll have the envelopes tomorrow.

And I am still writing the minutes from our Board meetings last week.  Which would go a lot faster if certain members of our staff didn’t keep interrupting me to tell me stupid things.  Like that his envelope won’t seal.  Use a piece of tape, for freakin’ sake.

The good thing I found out today is that most likely I won’t be running our PO system any more.  Its being handed over to another person, I hope.  It doesn’t take much time, but it does take some time, and everyone wants their POs NOW NOW NOW.  Um, sorry, I have 24 hours to issue it, and I’m doing something else right now.  Not to forget that THERE’S NO ONE HERE TO SIGN IT, WANKER!

Oh, and that you didn’t follow procedures and if you want a PO for over £500, I need some quotes.  Duh, RTFM.

Oh, how I don’t miss my tech/customer support days!

Another Thing I Don’t Get About the UK

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There are no electric outlets in the bathrooms.

There is no way to plug in a hairdryer or an electric toothbrush.  Or a night light.

I guess I get the logic of it. No electricity around water.  But if that is truly the logic, then why are there outlets in kitchens?  And why can’t they do what they do in the US and put trips into them, so if water and electricity mix, the outlet turns off.

I don’t use a hairdryer or an electric toothbrush (well, I do, but it takes batteries), but a night light would be helpful.

Especially since when you turn on the overhead light in every bathroom I’ve been in the UK the extractor fan turns on also.  Which is very loud in the middle of the night and wakes up the world.

I just don’t get it.

I finished Folly

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Laurie R King is my god.

The book is incredibly good. Kept me guessing all the way through.

And the greatest mystery? Will Rae find her way? Is very satisfactorily resolved.

Most mysteries, even ones that aren’t, quite, I can figure out by the end. This one? Not so much. I had no idea what was actually going to happen until it happened. Which is true of all of Ms King’s work.

Read this book.

Rain, Always Rain

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Yup, raining again here in Belfast.  And cold.  Seems like spring is *never* going to come.

People ask me how I could possibly have moved from “sunny!” California to rainy Belfast.  Well, San Francisco isn’t exactly “sunny!” California.

Most people, when you say California, assume you mean Southern.  LA, in other words.  But I am not from LA.  I hate LA.  And, yes, I have been there.

In truth, the weather in Belfast isn’t all that different from Northern California.  Its colder, but both places are very very wet.  So I feel right at home.

Of course, in Northern California, it only rains in the winter.  In Belfast, it rains year round.

But its not really the rain that bothers me.  Its the cold.  I like rain.  I just don’t like cold rain.

Of course, if I could stay home while it rains, I’d like it just fine.  But no, I have to go to work.  In the rain.  And the cold. In the cold rain.

On Mental Illness and Reading About Mental Illness

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I am currently reading Folly by Laurie R King. It is about a mentally ill woman going to live on a private island, all by herself, to rebuild the house her great-uncle built years before.

I should note here the I adore Ms King’s writing.  I am a rabid fan of both her Beekeeper’s Apprentice series (a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes where he has retired to Sussex to raise bees and meets a young woman, Mary Russell, who becomes his apprentice) and her Kate Martinelli series (a series about a lesbian cop in San Francisco).  I have actually read the opening bits of Folly several times, as there have been excerpts of it at the end of other’s of Ms King’s work.  I have always avoided it, however.  I wasn’t ready to read about a mentally ill woman.  I guess now I was.  Also, I received $150 in Amazon.com vouchers between Christmas and my Birthday, and Ms King is hard to find here, as she is an American author, so I had a bit of a Laurie R King and Rita Mae Browne orgy with my vouchers!

Now, for the record, Rae, the protagonist, and I do not have exactly the same mental illness. She has hallucinations, which I never have had, and she’s tried to kill herself several times, which I have never done. But there are some similarities that make this a bit of a hard read for me.

Ms King’s descriptions of the way Rae feels, and thinks, could have been written by me. Descriptions of fog on the brain, of blackness surrounding everything.

There are two scenes so far, and I am about half way through the book, that hit me so hard I had to walk away from the book and read something stupid instead.

The first was when Rae was found, after her most recent mental break, curled up against a wall, shivering. Her daughter and grand-daughter walk into this, while Rae is surrounded by police officers. Rae sees her grand-daughter and starts whispering “I’m sorry.” over and over again.

I will never forget, and probably neither will Simon, the time I called him at oh so early in the morning Belfast time (I was still in California when this happened) and all I could say was “I’m sorry.” Over and over again. Sorry for waking you. Sorry that you have to hear/see this. Sorry that I’m sick. Sorry that I can’t be the way I am ‘suppose’ to be. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Even right now, it brings tears to my eyes. Even now, on occasion, that mantra goes through my head. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

The other scene that Ms King gets right on the money is one where Rae heads to the nearest populated island to do some shopping, make some phone calls and such.  Rae’s voyage from the dock to the newspaper office, where she is looking up the history of her little island and the fire that destroyed her great-uncle’s house, is so very realistic.  She stops in one shop for a bit, then literally forces herself out into the street, making it about half a street more before tucking herself into a coffee shop, near the back, against the wall, buying a sandwich and coffee she doesn’t want so she can stay where she feels safe for the moment.  Her feeling of inner triumph when she goes the rest of the way to the newspaper’s offices without pause after that is so very real.

I do that, when I’m shopping alone.  Stop into shops I have no interest in, if I see they aren’t crowded, to anchor myself for the next bit of crowd.  I also feel a bit of triumph when I make it without doing that.

I do not know if Ms King herself has a mental illness, but she writes it so well, I wouldn’t be surprised.  The book is, of course, about more than Rae’s illness.  It is actually a mystery and an intriguing one a that.  What really happened to her great-uncle?  And the even greater mystery of will Rae make it through without trying to kill herself again, out there on her island where it is a week between visits, so the likelihood of 59th minute of the 11th hour rescue is very slim.

As I said above I haven’t yet finished the book.  Bits of it are very hard going for me.  But I decided to write and post this before the end.  I’ll let you know if I make it through it and if there are any other parts that make me shudder with recognition of myself.

And do read any of Ms King’s work if you can find it.  She’s bloody brilliant.

There Will be a Slight Delay in Posts

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I am trying to write one that is very hard for me, about a book that I am reading where the lead character has a mental illness similar to mine.  Its not something I would normally read, but I really like the author so I am giving it a try.

I will write more about this in a few days.  After tomorrow.  Which is Board Meeting Day.  I’ll be taking minutes from 9:15am to around 5pm.  With two short breaks.

Kill me now.

On Sunday Shopping in a Christian Country

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First of all, stores aren’t allowed, by law, to sell anything until after 1pm. I do not know if this is a UK thing or an NI thing, but I actually like it. It means you can hang out at home on Sunday morning either doing nothing or doing whatever and not feel like you have to be out and doing. Yes, I realize it is this way so people can go to church. I must remind my readers here that I am Jewish. Even if I went to a religious institution on the weekends, it wouldn’t be on Sunday mornings.

However, the shopping tends to suck, as there are no deliveries on Sunday mornings. Why they don’t just get double deliveries on Saturday, I don’t know. But could you imagine half empty shelves in a store in the US? Never gonna happen, not even in the Deep South. Here it is a regular Sunday occurrence.

This, to me, is, once again, bad customer service.  Even people who go to church might go shopping after.  And what do they find? Very little on the shelves.

Northern Ireland really needs to come into the 21st C.  And soon.

A Look at the Past

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So this morning, while looking for scratch paper to write the grocery list, I found an old journal of mine. It only covered about 3 months, but it included my trip across the US from Iowa to California and a few months after that. It was painful to read.

Every page of that journal screams “chronic depression, anxiety disorder, agoraphobia” and yet my diagnosis didn’t occur until 2 years after that journal was written.

All of my old journals read that way, from the earliest one I can find, from when I was 16 and visiting London with my grandmother and cousin. And I certainly was seeing therapists at all of those points in my life.

So why did none of them *ever* say “Hey, there is something more going on here. Something other than a kid having a hard time growing up and being a total brat about it. Maybe its chemical. Maybe her brain is wired wrong.” But not one did until a GP when I was 28 or 29 who gave me prozac and told me to find a psychologist who could refer me to a psychiatrist.

It wasn’t too long after that that I had my first real mental breakdown. I ran away. I got in my car, with my cat, Kali, and started to drive back to Iowa, because I had never felt like that in Iowa. Yeah, right. I called my boss and quit my job (thank god he didn’t accept that), left a message for my brother so he wouldn’t worry if he couldn’t get me and started driving. I made it just past the Nevada border when I called my brother again, hysterical, having no idea what I was doing. He convinced me to come back to California and call my doctors. I was off work about 3 months that time.

The final break came about a year later, when I stopped going to work altogether. Hmm, mighty similar to when I quit going to school my junior year of High School. And no one thought to put me on meds then.

I asked my mother about that once. She said even if they had suggested it back then, she probably wouldn’t have let them medicate me. But no one suggested it.

I have scrolled through several Dxs. Bi-Polar Disorder. Chronic Depression. And, now, as I’ve said before, Anxiety Disorder and Borderline Agoraphobia. The last one seems to be right, although I do still suffer from depression at times. Mostly I am just incredibly anxious. All the time. Well, 80% of the time. The other 20% I’m asleep! (that’s a joke. There are long periods when I am not anxious at all.)

The attitude about medication in the UK is very different than it is in the US. In the US they put you on and you stay on. Probably forever. In the UK they do their damnedest to get you off meds. So I’ve had some very good treatment here in the UK. And I was off all meds for about a year until last November when I had a small bout of anxiety and was back on them for a month. I see my psychiatrist in two weeks and we’ll see if I’ll go back on them.

I fought very hard to go off of them, actually. You see, Simon and I are trying to have a baby. And most of the Mad Meds (TM Trepenny Peck) I was on make bad babies. But, since they can’t exactly get women preganant and feed them Mad Meds, there is really no way to know how bad those babies might be, if bad at all.

So in two weeks we’ll see what my old psych says. And if he thinks I need to go back on meds, back on them I go. And if he says I can’t have a baby while on them? Well, we’ll see. I don’t think I know a single completely sane pregnant woman anyway.