The blahs?

I'm not accustomed to feeling crappy for a sustained period of time. The great pontificators of brain science call this depression, eh? Well, I'm not that happiest guy ALL of the time, but I'm far from being a terminal mope, so take your depression DSMIV, and stuff if. I've got the blahs.

I can't believe it's already Saturday, which means Sunday is tomorrow and Monday lurks around the bend. Next week, I get to spend two days in Roseland, NJ (where the fuck is that?) getting training for our new payroll/hr system. About as exciting as it sounds, I suspect.

It's been a long time!

Indeed. Not much in the way of newsworthy events have occurred in my life since I last posted an entry (way back in August). The evil auditors have returned to my job and will end up causing me much anxiety for the duration of their stay. I'm told that they will only be here for a week, but last time they stayed for over a month. I won't hold my breath, but I hope they do. Hold their breaths, that is. And pass out. And leave me alone.

Finances have been tight here in the Connor/Powell household. We took a huge hit in the wallet two months ago when our dog, Fox, decided that he would begin chewing his ass. He was so unrelenting with his grotesque hobby that he successfully managed to chew a hole in his ass, thereby causing an anal pocket to rupture. Yum. We ended up taking the poor baby to an emergency animal hospital in Forest Hills. Peace of mind and a healthy doggy are priceless, but anesthesia, flushing, antibiotics and pain killers are, sadly, not.

Approximately $700 dollars :(

Thank god Haley has something "like" overdraft fee protection with her Chase debit card. We did NOT have anything close to $700 in checking, but were able to overdraw. It cost us a $4o fee, but it was better than walking out of the animal hospital with a wounded pup.

I guess I do have something newsworthy to share: I finally took the CPE (CUNY Proficiency Exam) and I'm pretty sure I passed! I won't know for sure for about 10 weeks, but the test was relatively easy and as much of a slam dunk that a test designed to test basic reading and writing skills could be.

Speaking of barbecues

Kristen...weren't we supposed to get together at some point during this summer? Our plans kept getting derailed and now the summer is almost over :(

Summer is over?

Seriously. The Mets are only slightly better than the Washington Nationals. I have not attended a single Mets game or barbecue. Therefore, the summer of 2009 sucks.

The best of times

I've decided that I need lazier weekends spent at home. Haley and I have been awfully busy the last few weeks. She with her schoolwork and with work work. The crazy weather we've had in New York City hasn't contributed anything meaningful to my precious downtime, either.

Seriously.

What the fuck is up with thunder and lightning storms every week. After 30 years of living in NYC, I feel like we are experiencing late April/early May weather. Doesn't make much sense.

It's audit season again at my job and accordingly, I can expect to be working later than usual and harder than normal. I don't like these audits. They don't seem to serve a practical purpose other than to enforce a hastily passed reform law, aka SOX. The whole SOX act created a lot of jobs and a bureaucratic beast. Thank you, Ken Lay. Thank you so very much for all of this.

I'm at a stage where I have begun re-evaluating my goals and career wants. I've been at my company for almost 3 years. I began as a temporary receptionist----->full time receptionist----> human resources coordinator. There is little doubt in my mind that I could achieve a higher position in my company, especially within HR. Recruiting doesn't particularly appeal to me anymore. It sounded like an awesome position a year ago, an opportunity to hone one's people skills. After studying the logistics of recruiting, I've concluded that it's really a sales position with bottom lines, quotas and other things I do not enjoy. HR generalist is an interesting discipline. You need to be very knowledgeable of labor and INS laws. From what I've gathered, the generalist is also a gatekeeper of personnel data, so there's a huge trend tracking component to the job. You also have to fire people. I would not enjoy that.

What do I like? I enjoy communicating with people. To do so in an academic setting would be ideal. One of my friends starting tutoring at a community college in Brooklyn about 2 years ago. He is now an adjunct lecturer. It's worth exploring this a bit more, but my goals are more in site than they have ever been.

Now back to the regular scheduled program, Ryan sits on his ass and does nothing.

You are out there

Who among us can lay claim to a truly purposeful existence? I know "purpose" is subjective and some may argue that the pauper who sleeps on the concrete in tattered clothes, stewing in his own excrement has great purpose: depending on our reaction, he can cause us to identify with our fear of poverty, confirm our ignorance of Reis' other half or pay him to assuage our guilt.

I question my own purpose and place on this earth. A lot. I have a great job, wonderful co-workers, a good boss who tries very hard to make my position a meaningful one. Sometimes it's just not enough. Is my purpose in life to guide volumes of paperwork into a filing cabinet and await a stipend with gleeful anticipation? Ask yourself this question, because I do all the time:

Are you out there?

Flea market circus

This weekend went by super quick.  I'm spoiled by working in an industry which allows its employees to take off every other Monday or Friday in the summer.  Paid in full.  Of course, the surefire torment provided by a weekend commute to Long Island makes the whole "summer Fridays" thing a little less rewarding.

Haley and her mom had a garage sale this weekend and garnered some well-earned coin.  $2,270 to be exact.  Apparently, this annual garage sale has taken on mythic dimensions since so many of the buyers remarked that they came because of last year's great sale.  I still can't get over that figure.  $2,270!  I never made anything close to that at my own sales, (stoop sales in Brooklyn, since garages are a rarity where I grew up) perhaps because I never had quality merchandise to pawn off on deep pocketed individuals.  Still, some of the stuff at Haley's sale was SHIT and yet, it sold.  

I was somewhat raised in the sad circus that is the flea market business.  When I was around 8 years old, my mother became to general manager of the P.S. 321 flea market.  I think she only held that title for 1 year, but for 365 days, my mother showed up at my elementary school every weekend, ready to shuffle vendors around, listening to them complain and always making sure they weren't selling porn.  I think she got paid $100 a weekend to do that.  

I'm not really resentful that my mother kind of raised my brother and I at the flea market.  I abhorred the walk from our apartment to the market, which was always prolonged by my mother ogling stoop sale advertisements posted to lampposts.  Some of the regular vendors at the flea market were nice people, but most were creepy flea market lifers.  Like Terry, the strange woman who always wore straw hats and insisted on kissing me and my brother.  Gross.  I wonder if my mother let her do that because she assumed those slimy, old lady kisses would result in a bargained down price on an antique clock.  

There was also Minet, the 70+ year old drag queen who wore women's clothes and a fake orange wig underneath a cabby hat.  For no prejudicial reasons whatsoever, Minet creeped me out much like clowns with shaved heads, little hats and macabre makeup give some people the willies.  Minet called everyone "darling" and "honey" and walked with the urgency of a dehydrated turtle.  I remember when Minet died (long after my Mom gave up her GM duties) and the flea market created a pictorial tribute to him in the schoolyard.   Worst schoolyard poster ever.

Freed from her responsibilities as flea market GM, my mother began dragging me and my brother to stoop sales.  Given the fact that my mother had a bad leg, we were sent ahead to stoop sales as advance scouts.  "Go!  Grab anything you think I would like.  You know my style."  With our directives clear, me and brother would dart up the block and grab items that looked as old as my mother.  Uh huh.  Who wouldn't forfeit an entire morning of watching Saturday cartoons for THAT kind of fun?

When I hit 12 years of age, my mother made a last ditch attempt to keep us going to the sales with her.  She proclaimed my brother and I unfit to be alone with one another in the apartment.  She seemed to believe we were violent towards one another and that we could not be trusted to conduct ourselves in a mature manner in absence of her superior guidance.  Since she occasionally tape recorded us with a mico-cassette recorder hidden in a shoe, our efforts to portray ourselves as saintly practitioners of virtue were generally disregarded as lies.  Because my brother was older, I got stuck going to the sales with my mother for one more year.

The flea market circus taught me a lot.  With few job prospects in my early teens, I started selling my own personal items at illegal stoop sales (can't have an actual stoop sale with no stoop) in front of my apartment.  Never made more than $200, but that's striking oil at age 15.  The sales were a necessity since my parents rarely forked over cash to me.  The experience of my dad being on strike from the airlines for 3 years made my folks fiercely protective of cash.  They always tried to instill a sense of responsibility in me.  It worked all the way until college when I signed up for a gasoline card in exchange for a "free" bag of M&Ms and ended up $20,000 in debt 10 years later.  

I miss the circus sometimes.  It was the one thing my mother, with no reservations, looked forward to each and every week.  I'm sure to some degree, she appreciated my companionship at those sales.  It's awfully strange when you get nostalgic about things you used to hate.  I'll try and imagine Minet so I can make the feeling go away.  

Melt

I've eaten way too much over the last 2 years. Not too long ago (approx. 1 month) I began a high protein, lower carbohydrate diet. It's nothing suspiciously restrictive like Mr. Atkins. Instead, this diet I'm on encourages one to eat 6 times a day so the body does not go into starvation mode and begin storing calories. I love eating, so 6 meals a day is very appealing.

At least 2 of the meals are these high protein Myoplex shakes. My other meals are "raw" protein (low fat chicken, turkey, etc.) and veggies. In one month, I've lost about 23 lbs. Getting a reaction out of co-workers, who remember me just a couple of months ago when I was using my rotund frame to gain leverage against the evil vending machine that was trapping my Pop Tarts, is nice. Fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for years is a huge plus.

I'll let my true intentions for writing this entry be known: I need healthy recipes.

Anyone gots?

Fear

The subject of fear came up in therapy the other day. It was the first time in nearly 2 years of being in therapy that it was ever mentioned. The focus of much of my therapy has been on recovery & sobriety, but the topic of fear finally surfaced. I can't recall exactly how it came up, but it got me thinking about my fears - some irrational, some funny, some paralyzing- and how it can take over one's life. That said, I will address several of my fears at this time for no other reason than documenting them:
Home Invasion: When I was a kid, there was this one ADT home security system commercial that scared the fucking shit out of me. It featured three criminals; a menacing black burglar ("I know when you're home and when you're not!"), a junkie cat burglar ("I can pick most locks with a credit card.") and finally, the Latino lurker (It was easy. They didn't even know we was in the house.") I'm least scared by junkie cat burglar. He's not a physically imposing figure and his claim of being able to pick most locks with a credit card is absurd. Motherfucker, if you can pick a deadbolt with a Visa card, I will gladly give you my shit. The black burglar looked like he could bend Bo Jackson into a pretzel and he knows my schedule. Scary. Latino burglar frightened me more than the other two combined. He's just walking behind my house while I'm watching TV, filling up a sack with electronics and other valuables. Years of watching Rescue 911, America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries did not help me overcome this fear.

This is a semi-rational fear that loses validity when I tell you that I include cockroaches in the "home invader" category. The roaches and I have an understanding that they can have any other apartment in the building if they leave mine alone. Sometimes they break this sacred contract and I freak out when I see one. Not because I fear their strange, alien little bodies. I just know there are many more where that one crawled out from.


Balloons Popping: The fear of balloons is known as globophobia. Fear of loud sounds is called ligyrophobia. I'm not afraid of balloons and I'm not afraid of all loud sounds. I'm terrified of balloons popping. I can never have children because they will expect parties with balloons and I can never accommodate them. I'm a bad, balloon-fearing daddy. This fear may be rooted in an early childhood incident when Andrew Montemorano, a kindergarten bully, purposefully missed a swing at a donkey pinata and struck me in the head with a souvenir size wooden bat. All I remember was a flash of light and the sound of the pinata exploding a few seconds later. Maybe Andrew thought I had better candy encased in my skull. Or maybe he was just a sociopath. Wondering what the connection is here? That pinata was once a balloon. True story.

Lightning: Professional golfer Lee Trevino was twice struck by lightning on the golf course. There is nothing scarier than a random bolt of electricity landing a few feet from the place in which you stand. Actually, being Lee Trevino is scarier.


Leaving New York City: I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. However, the day may come when opportunities abound elsewhere and I will set sail for fonder pastures. That scares me. I have a big time comfort zone in New York. I attribute all of my success to living in and making it in New York City. Even in the most punishing economic climates, I've forgiven New York for not providing me with work and ample shelter. I'm a sucker for this city, but I know I can make it outside its boundaries.

Breaking My Beak: That would fucking hurt. I'm a bleeder.


Being Alone: Other people, places and things do not define me. But my quality of life would be severely diminished without my girlfriend, cats and dog. I enjoy occasional solitude but loneliness with no end in sight scares me. I'm mindful of how lucky I am and the thought of losing that is, at times, too much to bear.

Well, there are just a few things that scare the bajeezus out of me. There are more, but these will do for now. What scares you?

I will never graduate

Kristen can testify that I have awful blog color schemes. I'm in need of compassionate intervention when I choose the layouts for my blogs. Way back in 1999-2000, when I first started a blog on Diaryland, Kristen gently told me that my purple colors hurt her eyes. Since she was my only reader, I felt obliged to change it to something less...purpley.

No one told me that my current blog colors sucked fucking ass. Not even Kristen. Boo. Not even Haley, who up until last week, had paint samples taped to our living room wall to aid her in her plight to make our apartment look less like a granny flat. Thanks ladies.

In college news, Brooklyn College is royally fucking me over YET AGAIN. After finally finishing up my last class and going through an arduous and time consuming process to reclaim one of my grades, I thought I was at the finish line. I didn't care much about walking in the graduation ceremony. The last time I walked, I needed 4 Meridia diet pills smuggled in an inhaler to get me through that mess. I'm not sure if they would have let me walk since BC has crazy rules about people never participating in a graduation ceremony twice.

But hey, BC has different standards when it comes to fucking people over again and again and again with their grades. This time, I must prove to the registrar that each of the four film genre courses I took covered a different genre. Why is it incumbent upon me to provide THEM with this evidence? Can't they look in a fucking bulletin and find the classes that they programmed?

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I spent the better part of the last two years getting myself out of debt. I could not have achieved this feat without three things:

1) My girlfriend

2) GreenPath

3) Job

I'm glad that my nightmare is somewhat over. I get a full paycheck now and even though my credit score is an absolute mess, it's steadily improving with time. One detour I recently encountered on the road to credit recovery was a delinquent payment for a hospital visit. What really bothers me is that I had been in the emergency room of this hospital (Long Island College Hospital) two months prior to the visit in question and paid my bill on time.

I had absolutely no intention of not paying my hospital bill. Rather, I moved shortly after this visit and started getting my mail forwarded to my new apartment. I never received a final notice for my hospital bill; just a cheap looking collections notice from some rinky dink collection agency that looks like it was typed using Jessica Fletcher's typewriter.

Did I fuck up? Sure I did. I didn't perform diligence and follow up on my bill. Still, the fact that LICH put my bill into collections so soon after my stay will make me think twice before considering going there again.

Pussy

Uh huh. Haley and I purchased this fine little piece of retro craftsmanship from Amazon.com. We figured that while universe is content to provide us with 48 degree weather and May, we'll forgo an air conditioner until exactly what fucking season we are in gets sorted out. I found a nice little spot for the fan (made by Hunter) right next to my window. Imagine my surprise when I woke up later that night to a strange sound and a rather disturbing sight: blue sparks shooting out from the back of the fan.

What made this even scarier was that the fan was placed in front of the window that leads to the fire escape. I know it's just a little fan and I'm blowing this somewhat out of proportion, but you never know. The fuckers at Hunter are going to get a letter or something to that effect.

Since Haley is away for the first time in ages this weekend, I decided to reacquaint myself with shitty horror movies on In Demand. Quarantine is fitting the bill quite nicely.

Around an hour ago, I heard some glass shatter and immediately, a chorus of windows in the courtyard opened up and all eyes were upon a drunken Irishman. One tenant began to chastise the man, to which drunken Irishman responded in a whiskey affected brogue, "I live here, ye pussy!" Nice!!! Let's call the people who are trying to sleep and aren't drunk "pussies" and mimic your neighborly invectives. You give Lucky Charms a bad name, sir.

When the cops showed up, they launched into a comical Keystone routine, investigating the ground in the courtyard adjacent to ours. "Pussy" yelled out to the cops from his apartment, directing them to the location of the shattered glass. There must have been 12 cops in the courtyard. I heard one of the cops say that a tenant told him that the drunken Irishman was actually our super.

Getting up there

There's a big silver lining to turning 30. Once I get there (it's a month away) it will be done. I fretted and frowned about that less than magical number since turning 25. The day after that birthday, I found something terrifying about being closer to 30 than 20. My fear has waned significantly over the years, mostly because I really don't care. The aesthetic-conscious narcissist in me doesn't give a shit. I look okay for my age. It's not as if I'm supposed to look a certain way at 29, but most of my friends who are the same age have grays, are going bald and look like 30 came 5 years too early.

That the narcissist, by the way.

From a maturity perspective, I have grown immeasurably and in a way that I would not want to turn back the clock under any circumstances. Sometimes I miss being unabashedly goofy and writing about stupid shit that I did under the influence of cold medicine. Sometimes? Rarely. I don't miss it at all.

I don't miss being a completely self absorbed little prick and feeling a sense of entitlement to toy with the emotions of others.

I don't miss staying up for 4 straight days because I couldn't keep my promise of "Just one more bottle/line/pill."

I don't miss being a really unreliable fuck who no one could depend on or place an ounce of trust in.

I don't miss any of the elements of my undoing.

Every time I pass by a liquor store, I laugh with a sense of defiance. My days of shrinking in the presence of my former cathedral are gone.

If losing my hair, getting fatter and going gray are requirements for getting older, so be it. I accept those changes. I embraces my 30s with open arms.

The war is over.

Why is it so difficult?

Can't seem to keep up with a blog these days. I look back at my old Diaryland journal and apparently, I derived much joy and happiness from trivial things.

Stale air

Not since 1985, when a fabled Cape Verde type hurricane named Gloria swept through New York, have I been hospitalized with asthma or breathing difficulties. I suppose this past Tuesday was the every 20+ year exception.

I've been sick a lot over the last 4 months. In early November, I woke up one morning with a severe case of diarrhea and nausea. After completely emptying my stomach out and being unable to vomit or shit anything else, Haley got a little tired of my guttural dry heaves and convinced me to visit the emergency room of Long Island College Hospital. Luckily, LICH is right next door to our apartment. Seeing as I was not capable of doing much more than making the "I'm going to puke now" face, the hospital's proximity to my toilet was a good thing.

On account of having thrown up in excess of 4 hours and over ten times, I was fast tracked to the emergency room. Many IVs later and I was replenished and released, probably to the delight of Aetna.

In December, I developed a thrush infection on my tonsils that was so severe, my dentist made me get it checked out by a doctor before doing a procedure on my gums. It finally went away for good a couple of weeks ago.

My breathing problems began last Monday night, right before going to bed. Labored breathing normally doesn't affect me because it's par for the course with asthma. You just take a little puff of an inhaler and you're good as new. On Monday, I must have used my inhaler 10 times and it did little to alleviate my asthma symptoms. How I made it through work and then therapy on Tuesday is a mystery to me. I got home and let Haley know that I needed to go to LICH.

Did I mention that I haven't been to the hospital with asthma in over 20 years? Yeah. The ER nurse hands me some contraption and I just shrug.

"You've never used one of these??"

"No" It's a nebulizer, she tells me, and it's going to help me breathe again. Awesome.

Then she thrusts some kazoo-looking thing at my lips, again, under the assumption that I know what it is. This one is called a peak flow meter and it measures the force of your breath. Normal is 450. I blow 150. She tells me I'm going to need "the pipe." That's the little pet name they give the nebulizer. In a pulmonic sense, I felt ostracized by my meager knowledge of these instruments.

Two and a half hours later, I was discharged with a considerably clearer chest. They put me on Prednisone, a kind of steroid. Now I'm moody, restless and bored.

The medicine can be worse than the disease, can't it?

On November 24th of this year, a high school/college acquaintance shuffled off the mortal coil by way of plummeting from the Brooklyn Bridge into the frigid waters of the East River. I'm so disconnected from actual people who I knew from certain periods of my life, it's only fitting that I found out about Alex' death by reading someone's RIP status on Facebook. What led him to that moment is most certainly a mystery that will not be answered anytime soon. In fact, I may never be privy to those answers, should they be discovered, as I was not a member of his inner circle. Not in 2008, anyway. From what I gather, Alex spent the better part of the final years of his life in a perpetual haze of intoxication, clouded judgement and a blatant disregard for a human being's limitations. He left behind a little daughter and lots of confusion.

They found his body a few days ago, but again, the details have been sparse and slow coming in.

Blahg!

I really hope that this is the last fucking blogging platform I ever need to use. I began blogging back in 1999, before it was even called blogging. The good old days of dial up and Diaryland. You had to wait good and long to produce an utterly trivial piece of crap that 15 people saw fit to comment on. Then, you would read their crap and egos were massaged and all was right with the world.
When people left Diaryland, I followed them to Livejournal. Then Myspace. Facebook. And now Blogger.com. I think James has a blog somewhere. Let me go find it.