Oh, to sleep-- perchance to dream, please?

For just about half my life, my synapses have been ordered to sleep by my pharma-copia of drugs. They have taken their marching orders grandly, but recently, it seems some synaptic connection has frayed.

Meaning, I'm NOT sleeping through the night. No, it's more akin to sleeping like a baby: I wake up every hour and a half for no discernible reason. Seven nights running on interrupted sleep, and my days become as hideous as my nights have been.

It's as if I've been in a clinic for the sleep-deprived. Oh, wait: my health insurance would never pay for something that useful. My sleep clinic is my very own bedroom, without the hospital equipment to monitor my REM cycles. Obviously, affording personal medical staff is out of the question and out of my insurance company's interest.

Odd, that -- one would think that it would be beneficial to stop a sleep problem before it started affecting the rest of your life -- but the insurance fools seem to think that it has to start affecting the rest of your life and your day-to-day capabilities, and then insurance will step in.

Reminds me of the time I needed a PET scan to prove I had cancer, but insurance wasn't convinced of the fact that the only way to prove or disprove those overactive dancing cells is with, ta-da, a PET scan.

This week, it's time to schedule another scan, so I can be the radioactive lady on the sidewalk, not caring if pregnant women or young children are in my way -- we live in Wonderland: do you think anything here is solidly clean and PC?

Groupon, groupoff: so much for that eyelash perm

In this day and age, well past the dawning of Web 2.0 and nearly, I suspect, near its sunset, many, many entities want to sign me up to spend more money. Their premise? Since we have such a large buying group, it's a bargain.

Oh, really?

Explain to me, please, why on earth I would purchase a Japanese eyelash perm, at any price, for any reason. I understand the Japanese are known for straight hair. I get it: I sent hair straightener for black woman to Dona, the year she lived in Japan. Not a lot of African-American or Caribbean-American women in Tokyo circa 1985, before the multi-culti globalization of our little world.

If Japanese women were curling their eyelashes, they probably did it the old-fashioned way: with the type of metal eyelash crimper last seen by me circa 1970, when my bunk counselor -- at an all-girls' camp -- persisted in doing full makeup every morning.

In retrospect, who was the counselor primping for? Not the other female counselors, not circa 1970, when bras were flung with abandon, underarm hair and unshaven legs were a political statement, and the word "femme" had yet to come into popular usage. (Even now, it's only used in certain circles, and I'm not quite sure I understand the complete definition, or if it varies, city by city, urban by rural.) I'll never know, except to chalk it up to pre-feminist cultural conditioning.

But I digress: before chemo, I might not have realized that the everything-must-go sale my hair follicles staged was complete, and I would not have grasped the full extent of the loss-of-hair. It never would have occurred to me that my eye lashes were lacking.

(Yea, you -- tell me my hair will grow back and I will ask you if you've ever seen your pubic hair on a wad of toilet paper.) It does grow -- but not back -- it grows in textures and levels of curliness not found on any head of mine I ever brushed. My eyelashes hold mascara now just as well as years ago.

When my hair, now 3 inches in length, started its regrowth, it was not the hair I had cut off in the ponytail to donate to other women with cancer. That hair was thick, and long. I don't recognize myself as the woman in the mirror with short, curly, hair. She looks too old to be me.

That may be the woman I have become, but I've yet to adapt to her, the one with a scar down her chest where the surgeon opened her sternum, and the one whose other incision, now healing, came from inserting and removing the quarter-size port under her skin, at a level just above where my cleavage, such as it remains, happens to be. That, and having been a Superfund site for several months. Do the poisons ever leave?

Here is where I step sharply on "groupoff." I missed the day when my email bargain-getter sent trampoline lessons on sale. Groupon? Middle-aged women in circus school? In Brooklyn, on a street name I recognize from my childhood in the 'burbs, but not directly over the East River? Not part of any group that I can imagine, not without an ambulance and an orthopedist nearby.

If you're of an age to try the tramp or flying on wires, perhaps you have not reached the age where you understand the repercussions of signing a waiver of responsibility. Or, no one has texted the legality (or lack) of the form to you. Or you are one of the various lemmings comprising the group for which these "bargains" are targeted.

In high school, I loved the tramp (not the dirty little man outside the gym). But not now, in what I assume to be the midpoint of my life. No sane person wants me, veering on osteoporosis, to hop up on that tramp to jump and fly. My bones might not make it through intact, for one reason; another, bigger question: could I ever feel as free jumping now as I did at 14, when fear was not a part of my physical makeup? I'm guessing, not so much.

"Freedom's just another word for, nothing left to lose," or so sang Janis Joplin, at the ripe old age of 25 or so. Apparently it look me longer to lose my water-wings and training wheels. Twice as long, to be precise.

Having stepped over the medical threshold into the land of illness, of temporary disability, some of my fears have grown, but others? Not so much. Sure, there's the State Department. I hear it has issued a warning on travel to Mexico.

I'm sure there was one on Haiti, at least part of the time I was there. It didn't occur to me to be afraid. And Mexico? Border drug trafficking is not happening 1000 miles from the California state line. Where I stay in Baja, the only drugs on special are Viagra, anti-depressants, and Retin A. Each is freely available in pharmacies. I'm not even fearful of germs -- 20 years of visiting Haiti, and I know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. (Cf. Superfund site).

My friends confuse the border with Cabos, 1000 miles down the peninsula. In timeshare-ville, guards blend in with the scenery, but I know they are there, just as I knew the staff paced the grounds in the Haitian beach where I went from girl child to grown woman.

Americans, except in war zones and potential political hotbeds (find me a dictator the U.S. didn't fly out of his country in the past 25 years, and I'll show you a dead man), didn't used to need private security protection. Now that we've globalized, U.S. citizens are easy targets.

Especially targeted are those those who give rise to the ugly American stereotype, one I've discovered is not without those secured to it, the ones who don't give a damn that, hey, no one speaks English here and speaking louder is not going to change that.

Volume is not the key to language comprehension, much to the chagrin of many. (Take that, groupon, and go global.) Hand signals are much more effective. In moments of desperation, you will get your point across -- perhaps not in a grammatical sentence, but in the way you most need at that very second.

Or so I continue to trust, as my attempts to learn Spanish (where is that group discount when you need it?) regress, and fluent French dating back 30+ years spews forth in in its place.

Why such an emphasis on group discounts in the cyber age? Because no one would ever leave the keyboard, the cell phone, the "smart" phone, or the PDA? Makes me think the Internet is not where we find each other; it's where our connections fray, and, if you're not careful, lose all meaning.

Groupon? Is this for 21st century groupies? If you're offering discounts, perhaps you or your oh-so-clever computer, could devise a few not designed to add to a woman's insecurities. Don't try to make me think my eyelashes are doomed, the way the teeth-whitening crowd has tried to convince me to add that task to daily maintenance. It's not working.

If that's groupon, stop the world -- I want to groupoff.

Minus my thymus; au revoir Haiti

To recap: the thymus gland lies beneath the breastbone in the middle of one's chest. It is considered a lymph gland, not an endocrine one. Meaning, that, for a child and a teenager, this is the go-to spot for generating immune cells.

For the average adult, this gland is vestigial, about as useful as an appendix or tonsils. For me, however, the smoker's lung scan I had in Jan. 2007 -- which insurance/"medical benefits" didn't pay for -- gave a point of comparison with the CAT scan I had in September. Net result? Gland had doubled in size.

Getting to the CAT scan was easy: I went to Dr. Training Bra, aka Baby Doc, my 12-year-old insurance doctor ("in network") for a smoker's cough late last August. She took a chest X-ray and sent me for the CAT scan. And that was as far as she went.

Baby Doc, as you may have recently heard, since the Haiti I know and love was turned on its side last week, was a not-very-bright dictator who ruled that country during many of my years there. Like Training Bra, he was totally incompetent.

But Haiti was relatively calm, and open for business. Given the political structure, as long as you knew who to pay off, you were good to go. Since Baby Doc's forced (U.S. aided) departure in 1986, no one has known who is in charge for more than half a minute or so.

I'm afraid all the well-meaning aid in the world can't fix Haiti's problems. Rebuild? That would assume infrastructure that never existed in the first place.

Forget democracy: start with potable water, food, and shelter. I don't care who is running the show; I just care that the show runner is consistent. Although I'm hoping for a step up from Training Bra, whose consistent mien was inattentive, bordering on awful, and who demonstrated a less than active interest in me, the patient.

Kyona Beach, Haiti: the last place I saw my father alive, some 19 years and 14 days ago. Four days from now will mark 19 full years since my father died.

CAT scan results, September 8: lungs are clear, but thymus growth indicates I may have lymphoma. The word is on the table then, although no one allowed me to ask questions about it -- or, at least, no one would listen and answer me. What I picked up on is, the radiologists' report says, send her for a PET scan.

Thus Catch 22 begins: Insurance won't pay for PET scan unless I have a cancer diagnosis; PET scan is the test that shows the abnormal cell activity indicating cancer is present. Logic here? Not so much. And Training Bra did not, as I explicitly asked her to to, advocate for me to get the insurance company on board with the test.

So I exit the mismanaged nightmare system to return to The Good Doctor, the internist who won't take my insurance but who actually gives a shit about me and my health. TGD sends me to a pulmonologist.

Lung man compares the CAT scan film/disk with the previous smoker's scan. While he does think the gland has to be removed, lymphoma doesn't make it onto his list of concerns.

A few weeks later, I meet the surgeon. He's got the social skills of an 8th grade boy. I'm hoping that his handiwork is on a much higher level. His office, at least, gets the PET scan approved while I am waiting to schedule thymus removal surgery. Like the docs before him, he thinks this thymus thing will be nothing.

I wait seven weeks for the PET scan. December 2, Surgeon removes thymus -- not laparoscopically as advertised, but through a five-inch incision in the middle of my chest. It will be six to eight weeks before the bone knits back together. Meanwhile, I also have small slashes across the edge of one breast: the failed attempt at laparoscopy.

Surgeon thinks thymus will be nothing all the way until the pathology report comes back from the lab December 11. When I go for the post-op checkup, finally someone voices what amplifies the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling I've been experiencing for two-plus months.

Yes, it's lymphoma, Surgeon says, not in the least bit concerned as to what that will mean to me. Oh, and here's an oncologist in the next office. My work is done. Surgeon appears to have no emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. He doesn't even say, I'm sorry.

Nor does he concede in the office that he thought the growth was benign, which is what he told my mom and one of The Three Sisters after finishing my surgery. Post-op, Surgeon doesn't seem the least bit empathic or sympathetic or to have any emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. As my mom would say, "fuck him. Or rather, don't."

Surgeon has no answer for why the water in one of New York's better hospitals is not potable. Nor has he an answer for why the hospital was unable to supply one of my medications and I needed to bring it from home.

Nor does he check to see that the resident who let me go knew how to write a prescription: she wrote for ZERO pills. Were I not astute at proofreading, that would have been an ugly drugstore showdown.

Possibly the worse part of the do-it-yourself hospital experience was that if I hadn't learned to disconnect the monitor that measured the oxygen in my blood, I would have gotten even less sleep than I did. (The monitor, it seems, was not hooked up to the nursing station.)

In Haiti, I grew up brushing my teeth with an inch of bottled water in a glass. In what used to be called the Third World, that is par for the course. To find out that the hospital in upper Manhattan required the same course of action was a surprise. To me, if you can't drink the water, you damn well better have palm trees and a beach.

I return to TGD, diagnosis in hand. Within an hour she has found an oncologist who is well respected as a hematologist and he can see me the next day at 9:20 am. Not my time of day, she knows, but at this point, who cares.

Enter Dr. W., the recommended oncologist I like, in as much as I'm going to like one. I can't bear to go for another opinion; I have had doctors and tests filling my weeks since September.

So: I have non-Hodgkin's large diffuse B cell lymphoma. As cancers go, it is common as dirt, and it is one of the "good" cancers. Sure, like second place in the beauty contest in the yellow Community Chest cards.

What's good is, I'm at stage 2: very curable, with standard chemo protocol. I don't need the specialization of the cancer factory at Sloan Kettering. I can stay with Dr. W. and have my treatments in his office. I don't have to go to a hospital just to get the poisons that will save me "infused" into my body. Infused. One hell of a word choice, one of many in the new lexicon.

I feel like a Vietnamese town during the war: we must destroy the village in order to save it. Didn't make sense when I was 10; doesn't make any more sense now. But there's the metaphor and that is how it applies.

Thus far, I've had round one of chemo. So far, no major nausea or other side effects. However, the toxins have just started to work. I'm told by day 10 or 12, my hair will start to go. That hair I spent two years tending like the back 40.

Sure, it grows back: but still, the idea of lifting my hand to my head and hair just flying through my fingers is an experience I dread. And yes, I bought a wig -- from the store that refers to these items as "she" and "her."

Not having received the memo telling me that English has gendered nouns, I want to say, "IT. IT. IT. It is an object." But wigville is another stop I never anticipated. I am learning a new language every day, one that I hope you, any and all, will never need to learn.

It may help you to know that my mother, after hearing my diagnosis, brought over a box of chicken soup mix for me. She and kitchens are not on good terms, and the last time, probably the only time, she made chicken soup from scratch was the night my father had a fatal heart attack in 1991. Culinary expertise and my mom don't go hand in hand. For us, soup is black comedy, not cure-all.

Discussions in the chemo lounge are fragmented, scary: some tell their entire stories, from diagnosis into X number of rounds of treatment. Exact diagnoses are volunteered; it is rude to ask. Some in the room have no hair. Some may have wigs, though I am not yet expert at distinguishing them.

I know one thing: if you lose (not that misplaced is exactly the proper term here) your hair and get a wig, it must have bangs, because you no longer have a nature hairline. I have not had bangs since I was 6. Right now, I'm just hoping I won't look like a Hasidic woman who has shaved her hair for her husband.

My mom offered to shave her head in solidarity with me, and then to wear a wig. If she cannot go though treatments in my stead, she wants me to know how much she would if she could. I tear up every time I consider the offer, but I have pointed out, Mom, we're not those kind of Jews.

People say, at least you have your sense of humor. I wonder: without it, how would I survive? My illness is drenched in irony, and that is the costume in which I suspect I will navigate the next several months. It is the only one I know. Here's hoping it helps.

Out of work in America?

Statistics aren't what they seem: for example, Alice has no employer save herself. For a long time, she had a tidy little business as a financial planner. The hours were minimal; neither early rising nor heavy lifting were involved; smoking in the office was a matter of desire, not law; all her colleagues were virtual. It was a good life.

Then came The Big Awful, with the economy blown to smithereens, and financial planning clients in increasingly short supply, and Alice's interest in the subject, at least as a career, waning considerably. Once again comes the question: what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

See, Alice and some of her friends, those who play psychopharm roulette along with her, never expected to age beyond, say, 30 or 35. However we have, which leaves us with far more time in our lives than we had anticipated. What to do, what to do? The answers are not coming fast and furious.

Alice would like to be an unemployment statistic, but she has failed to consider one critical connection: first, Alice would have to be working, doing the 9 to 5 and receiving a weekly paycheck. You can't collect unemployment without having put in 20 weeks working for someone else.

Last time Alice was eligible for unemployment was 1990, after her last staff magazine gig collapsed. Since then, as a so-called sole proprietor, she hasn't paid a dime into NYS's unemployment coffers. Hence, she is not eligible to receive, though she is working just as little as those who are collecting.

In truth, Alice's vocational calling is sleep, a minimum of 10 hours a night, every night. Without slumber, she is not-ready-for-prime-time functioning. It's been close to 20 years since Alice commuted to an office, and all she really knows about workplaces is that overhead fluorescent lighting, sealed windows, and recirculating air would be major contributors to an increase in migraine headaches.

Thus, Alice would prefer the office come to her, not that she go to an office any more substantial than the one that doubles as her dining room. Comfort first is her rallying cry. Alas, to answer FB's eternal what's-on-your-mind question, by saying will work for food, health benefits, and a really nifty retirement plan does not, in this po-mo world, constitute an active job search.

Is it time for another career? Alice exited magazine editing shortly before the demise of the printed page; she is looking to exit careers that require her to dress in heels, a good dress, a blazer and pearls in order to have her body language say, trust me. I am a good planner; it's just that our Brave New World requires too many economic projections that may well not hold.

So, now what? Alice's skill sets are mostly 20th century. She is a creative thinker whose techno-knowledge acquisition seems to be on overload. It is all she can do to burp out 10 words in a single sentence to communicate on FB, where Alice has been summering. (She is betting FB will kill whatever remaining productivity U.S. workers have pretended to retain.)

What Alice would like to do, thankyouverymuch, is retire. More specifically, she would be just as happy not to work another day in her life if not for the financial fallout. Give her a free day, and she will fill it, or not, depending on her mood.

Particularly difficult is the segue between vacation proper and back-to-some-facsimile-of-work.

A week away with a friend's family on the north shore of Massachusetts makes Alice realize how much better off we were without cell phones, computers, PDAs and the like. We could actually get away, and, unless we are filled with an unhealthy sense of self-importance -- narcissism run wild -- we need some time untethered.

Ma Bell used to say "reach out and touch someone." She meant, pick up the telephone. Alice is all in favor of the telephone (never text Alice; while she can receive messages, she can't send them and doesn't want to learn how. Texting strikes Alice as the best way to ruin her thumb joints, already fussy, forever. Not going to happen.)

She also likes to receive letters via snail mail -- just something personal from time to time. A postcard or two would be nice. Even a personal email -- coming back from vacation, Alice was greeted with 250+ emails, most of which are deletable without thinking.

Yesterday's cyber headlines are like yesterday's newspapers of old: we used to say that yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping. Difference is, now the fish wrapping is words on a screen.

And stopping the email flood would mean trying to remember what is important to bring back into the inbox. This in itself would be more work than Alice deems necessary. She gets emails she never meant to sign up for, and can't figure out how to disengage.

If you want to go ask Alice, please keep the correspondence lively. If you have a job for Alice, please send particulars. Meanwhile, in Alice's mind, she is on vacation until after Labor Day. Not only does she want no heavy lifting in a job, she doesn't want her synapses to struggle either.

Alt 6 4

That's the magic combination, south of the border or on any keyboard without an "at" sign, to address an email. At the public Internet lounge, I am quite in demand for this minor triumph over technology.

It's been quite some time, again, since I have written here. No sooner did I unpack from Argentina then I went off to spend my annual two weeks in Mexico, at the end of the world in Cabos San Lucas.

I invite friends, and together we dwell in Mexican version of the U.S. that is the land of the time share. This season, the other dwellers are few and we seem to have one of the lagoon-like pools to ourselves. Business is bad, down in Mexico, but for those who have escaped here, the population density feels just wonderful.

From the front page of Yahoo (Alice's sole source for news of the outside world), it appears drug trafficking has run amok in a part of Mexico far, far from Alice. No, we have plenty of security here, on foot and by camera. I send emails reminding everyone I am 1,000 miles from the border.

The main drug activity in Cabos is the purchase of medications that can only be obtained by prescription in the U.S. The pharmacies downtown do a very active trade in pills ranging from Viagra to Premarin, with all stops on the antibiotic train and several on the pain-killing one also accounted for. Antidepressants also populate the menu, for reasons Alice is looking into.

With mismanaged nightmare (that would be the pricey health insurance Alice is grateful to have) she has never needed to price-shop, say, Prozac. With insurance, Alice's drug regimen comes in at a semi-reasonable price. Without it, apparently her meds start at about $60 to $90 a month each, and some cost considerably more.

Let us all give thanks to New York State for the blessing of what is called, in insurance lingo, community rating. If you can afford insurance, full coverage is one price for all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, or whether you, statistically, are more or less likely to need care. New York may be expensive, but at least we're not exclusionary.

Only four other states have the same idea, which means Alice will remain in Wonderland throughout her days. She is tethered not only by emotional geography but by practical considerations: no state outside of the Northeast would have the least interest in making sure Alice's health care needs were even remotely provided before, and Alice can't see getting healthier as something that comes up in the aging department.

But I digress: in the land of Alt 6 4, I check in with the world once every couple of days. It is enough. These days I quite agree with William Wordsworth, whose poetry I do not completely comprehend, but whose 1806 title "The World Is Too Much With Us" contains sentiments with which I am in full agreement.

And that was long before the term telecommunications fell into the vernacular. Right now I check in with my world mostly to hear from the Artist, who makes me laugh and feel good about myself and feel like there is someone in the world who actually gets me, whom I get. We shall see as time proceeds how well these feelings hold, but for now, they are blissful.

As for Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The printer ate my telephone cord...

...and other tales of urban life.

The weirdness began before Mexico. The No Exit personae were just one stop in the strange confluence of events that has been my life of late. (Hell is other people.)

It may have started the day the telephone cord inadvertently fell into the ink-jet printer, swallowed whole permanently. Bye-bye phone cord. Bye-bye printer. Hello Staples? What do you have in the way of new all-in-one-machines?

Print color documents, fax, scan, copy, enlarge, reduce, read memory cards, tap-dance, what have you. All the machine fails to do is Windows.

It does VISTA. I do not. Note to self: get XP drivers. Download from Web site?

When I packed for Mexico, I could not find my suntan lotion. I had the car service driver stop at the local 24-hour chain drug store at 5 am so I could pick some up en route to the airport. You don't want to know who else shops at that hour. I didn't.

What else? In my absence during the No Exit experience, I have a house guest arrive. My best friend from grad school is in town from Switzerland, where she has emigrated with her second husband.

America is on sale, and she has the empty suitcases to prove it. She is awake when my housekeeper, who is from Poland, enters. While I am sleeping, they discuss their respective situations as immigrants.

It is not, I admit, a coincidence that occurred to me, that they share emigree status.

Later in the day, after my guest leaves, the infant downstairs starts crying. I put on the Rolling Stones to muffle the noise. I dance to Satisfaction. CC, my best friend, is chez moi, her dog in tow. Shamrock barks to show her annoyance at the baby. The Visiting Dog Service of New York has arrived.

My one-bedroom apartment has no place for a baby except a walk-in closet. The couple downstairs, whose layout is identical to mine, failed to receive the memo informing them that the time to move out is between the conception and the delivery.

They complained once of noise from my apartment. I suggested the doorman read them the riot act, and they take it up with their landlord. They aren't supposed to be able to rent in this building anyway.

The Visiting Dog Service will return as needed. CC will teach Shamrock to stop barking when downstairs teaches their child to stop crying. Or when they move the the kid into their bedroom. It (gender undetermined) lives in the dining area, where I have my office. The wailing makes it hard to concentrate.

I am unreasonable, but not completely so: dining areas are for meals and entertainment, not for infants' slumber. Bedrooms have windows and closets, neither of which is included in the layout for this apartment's dining area.

By Wonderland city code definition, a "room" has windows; an "area" that contains them is rare. The floor plans don't call the dining area a slumber nook.

Just as I never enjoyed my upstairs neighbors' domestic disputes, I do not enjoy the downstairs child. Had I wanted to marry or reproduce, I would have. Neither experience is one I need to have vicariously. Years ago, had there been one more thud from upstairs, I was ready to call 911, fearing spousal abuse.

I set up the new all-in-one and realize the sole purpose of the fax machine. It's is for CC to send prescriptions to her pharmacy in Paris and me to do the same with mine a block from here. Without our meds, we wouldn't need it.

Then came the bizarre phone message: in my line of work, I have had clients ask me to be their executor, or a trustee in their wills. Depending on the circumstances, I may agree. Today, a stranger from upstate left a message: would I consider being a trustee if he and his wife died? I am not sure what to say when I return the call.

Do I start with, are you out of your mind? Or, are you terminal? I have no idea who this person is, much less whether I will still be working when his need for a trustee arises. Or why he would want to entrust his finances to a stranger. This is not where I would begin the conversation.

Where would I begin? With the digested cord? VISTA? The 5 am lotion stop? No Exit? The emigrees? The Visiting Dog Service? The dining room child? The fax discovery? The trustee request?

This week an expose of my prep school has made the cover story of Wonderland magazine, much to my amusement, following the Spitzer denouement on its cover two weeks ago.

One class ahead of me, like most of my fellow graduates, he was filled with the arrogance and hubris imparted with the diploma. I suspect, too, that he never got laid during his days there. That strikes me as a reasonable explanation for his choice of paid companionship.

Where will it stop? Please: someone, anyone, a clue?

La vida loca

I have come, again, to Mexico.

This time, I am sharing a hillside villa overlooking the Pacific.

My fellow travelers are a retired professor and his French wife, newlyweds en route to a stint as house guests in the U.S.; a retired artist, who lives downtown in Soho, age 80; a 70-ish Englishwoman with U.S. citizenship who is a legal assistant in the Connecticut countryside; and a whiz-bang management consultant in her 40s who thinks traveling for a four-month stint to work in Atlanta is a good time.

What we have in common is our absent hostess: my travel companion from Africa and Eastern Europe, who was felled by arythemia last week and forced to stay near her doctor in New York. If she were here, the villa might take on another, friendlier tone.

The French woman has taken charge of the kitchen and is starving us to death under the guise of feeding us healthy food: she is the kind of French housewife who can look in a bare cupboard and a refrigerator containing leftovers I would have thrown out, then produce what she calls a meal.

Last night she used carrots, ginger, and potatoes to make a soup, which she deemed "dinner." Personally, I go for more calories and a protein, a starch, a vegetable, perhaps something chocolate for dessert.

Nutritionally, we don't see eye to eye. She was miffed when I made grilled cheese for lunch in lieu of her salade Nicoise, made of leftover mahi-mahi added to tomatoes, peppers, hard boiled egg, and brown rice. That was her idea of a big, "heavy" meal. Another main meal consisted of two mangy pieces of cooked chicken with reheated spaghetti.

Neither combination fits my definition of a snack, let alone a meal, much less something to replicate an American dinner.

The management consultant and the Englishwoman spent an hour yesterday walking the beach, picking up five bags of trash. I suppose it gives them a goal, a plan. Today, they went to a time-share presentation. (Having already bought a time-share in a fit of middle-aged, menopausal impulse, I didn't care to join them on their excursion.)

Besides, the consultant was here last year: she and I inhabit different worlds, and without our hostess, she barely makes an effort to speak to me. Hey, I'm trying, but our first point of departure is that she wears two- to- three-inch heels as a matter of preference, and I am a flat-shoe person. This in itself separates us in a way I hadn't anticipated.

The whiz-bang consultant has glommed onto the Englishwoman and instead of going out to dinner in town at the two restaurants where she had originally invited us to join her, she has lunched at both with the Englishwoman, leaving me here with French soup. I am growing increasingly less enamored of her presence. Passive-aggressive for $100, anyone?

The entire crew think it odd that I don't drink, even with the explanation that I am on a new medication, and I don't care to experiment. (Finally, tremor-stopping pills that work!) They think it odder, and more ominous, that I smoke cigarettes, no matter how few, and that I am happy to do so.

They get up at 6 am, where as I am content to start the day at 9:30 or so. The only reason I don't consider 9:30 the middle of the night is that we are on Pacific time, 3 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight. (In my real world, this 9:30 would be 12:30.)

Am I stranded on a Mexican version of Gilligan's Island? If so, I am either the ingenue or the movie star. I don't have a WASPy husband at hand, but I do have a different life than the rest of this entourage. I make different demands.

I do not care if we waste electricity my friend the villa owner has already paid for, not when our landscape would be pure desert were it not for an overabundance of water desalination plants to keep terra firma green. Why should we try to save water ore electricity when they are used in such grand excess all about the grounds?

Call me semi-retired, and I see what I have in common with the elders of this tribe. Call me a working woman, and I have a few traits in common with the younger members. Still, I am neither one nor the other.

I am sure they find me as peculiar as I find them. Sarcasm is not appreciated here, which limits my conversational forays, even as commentary to the evening news we view on CNN International.

Irony is another area in which I find this crew deficient. Too, I am puzzled why one would want to see what's on HBO each evening. The conversation lags. Time-share life grows in surreality.

Next year, regardless of my friend's health and love for this mountainside villa, I shall decline her invitation. She has hundreds of friends, gathered over the years, and I don't think it occurred to her how this particular mix would play out, what alliances would form, what would leave me by the wayside.

Again, we are part of an English-speaking compound. Without our town trips, we could be in Any Resort, USA, while we struggle to deal with a staff that speaks a language not our own. I did finally get to use more of my limited Spanish vocabulary while I held up the bed linens to demonstrate. Limpea means "to clean." I do not know the words for "change the sheets."

I managed to convey to the maid which beds needed to be changed, not without feeling victorious that the communication succeeded. Si necessito, por favor, and quisiera (I would like) constitute the other relevant phrases I know. My French is coming back to me in leaps and bounds, not that it is any help aqui.

While I am happy to be away from Wonderland for 10 days, I cannot help thinking that the next time I depart, I want to arrive in a location that is what it is, not an American enclave outside of the U.S.

If Alice leaves Wonderland, she wants to be damn sure she has left the building.

Tremble and blur

My hands have been stuttering wildly these past few days. Sure, I was used to the occasional med-related hand tremor, but waking up in a full-body tremor that won't go away....not so much. If I had a hard time focusing before, not being able to hold a pen and read my own writing hasn't helped.

The neurologist today said, since my meds haven't changed in at least 6 months, that the tremor was "idiopathic." That's doctor-ese for, "fucked-if-we-know." At least he was impressed by my vast pharmaceutical knowledge. (Hmmm: I take the meds; I'm going to be damn sure someone does her homework about them, since I've had to explain one combination twice in one week.)

My corneas are irritated, so everything I see is through a haze. At first, I was scared I was going blind, for no conceivable reason. Then I went to the opthamologist, got a diagnosis, and eye drops. Why did this happen? Once again, fucked if we know.

Makes me wonder what the hell they do teach in med school. Why is it considered so challenging to be admitted? After four years of school, plus years of residency, you're not going to ever diagnose any ailment I have and be able to determine its origin. I can play doctor without having had to stay awake in a hospital helping sick people for a 36-hour shift. Pass me the prescription pad, please.

You haven't lived until you've tried to put drops in your eyes when your hands won't stay still.

It has been one hell of a week chez Alice.

At the end of the world

Baja California has thousands of unspoiled, undeveloped, straight-from-heaven miles of land, acres of untouched beaches and shorelines. Timeshare territory, however, doesn't fit into that category. At the tip of the peninsula, 1000+ miles south of the U.S. border, Alice has stumbled upon – and bought into – a peculiar American enclave.

It's an odd bit of the U.S. imported into Mexico You are a visitor to a country within a country. No getting around it, timeshare owners are turistas. Any place that the tap water has been purified, rendering bottled water unnecessary, is a spot for capital-A Americans.

Cabos San Lucas may call itself “the end of the world,” where desert meets mountain and El Arco marks the end of the landmass, but in Alice’s immediate vicinity, it is hard to tell, difficult to feel the implications of geography and language, nearly impossible to sense she is abroad. She gets the U.S. primary results from CNN.

It is a long way from her telephone-less, kerosene-lit childhood in Haiti, an island with no tourist infrastructure -- where few Americans ventured, where Alice spent 20+ years with no TV and limited electricity.

The "owners' party" feels like a freshman-year college mixer. The opening questions differ slightly. What's your name? your hometown? How many weeks a year do you come here; how many years have you had this unit? What restaurants do you like in town? Done any whale watching?

A mariachi band plays Mexican songs recognizable to the American ear. There are contests for owners to humiliate themselves dancing or imitating a Mexican yell in exchange for a bottle of tequila or a Mexican wool blanket.

No one asks what you plan to major in, and most owners have reached the place in the workforce to which Alice aspires: retired.

Some cultural differences are noticeable: the resort is run Mexican-style, despite the players speaking English. The P.R. person, the sales people, the concierge, the hospitality department, and the front desk are all separate fiefdoms. The idea of an American-style meeting or memo explaining how the departments and the whole enterprise could be coordinated would never be issued.

It is one way to know Alice has left Wonderland. Another is the pelican landing in the swimming pool, something that would never occur in over-chlorinated America. The pelican swam around, took his time before taking flight and seemed no worse for the wear. The third is that the timeshare’s English-speaking doctor makes the equivalent of house calls for $100 U.S. This is startling and useful for Alice’s friend.

For Alice, not so much: the doctor wouldn’t write her a prescription for her U.S. migraine meds, and instead offered something Alice had never heard of, at $4 a pill. Alice sticks to over-the-counter muscle relaxants for which she would need a script at home. She prefers to know precisely what drugs she’s taking.

Alice knows of less touristy locales to explore: San Jose del Cabos, Todos Santos, La Paz. To see those as a traveler, she has belatedly discovered, you need some rudimentary Spanish, a map, perhaps a guidebook and, most definitely, the guts to drive a rental car on bumpy Mexican highways. Perhaps next year, if Alice’s driving skills improve, or if she brings friends better equipped to get behind the wheel.

Mexican roads are better than those in Haiti, home of Alice’s beloved palapas-like chacoons. They are closer to first world streets than those in undeveloped countries. Yet the asphalt is not nearly as smooth as one might expect, given the general emphasis on keeping los turistas americanos from realizing they are not in Kansas.

Last week she and her friend mistakenly took an English-speaking tour of San Jose. The guide glossed over the art galleries, churches, and historic sites they wanted to see, in favor of attempting to make los Americanos do their part to enrich the local economy (and probably his relatives in particular). The guide took them to the Mexican fire opal store, where he hoped his group would drop muchos, muchos pesos.

With Alice, he didn’t stand a chance. She has had guided “tours” of pearl, enamelware, and rug “factories” in places like China, and not only did the fire-opal merchant’s shop tour seem identical to the pearl and other factory “tours” she had experienced, but the sales methods were dead ringers for ones she has previously ignored.

Alice wasn’t buying, not in San Jose del Cabo, not anywhere. Alice has sojourned in and traveled to too many continents to consider herself an ordinary turista. No “bargaining” for her, thankyouverymuch.

Alice practices her minimal Spanish with the housekeeper, and in exchange, teaches her new words in English. It is frustrating: while Alice can converse almost fluently in French, it is a distant enough relation of Spanish that it doesn’t translate. Her Spanish-English dictionary doesn't contain the words she needs.

For the party, Alice dresses the part of an owner, runs through the standard questions, and realizes what she forgot when purchasing her two weeks at the end of the world: that is, she is not an American. Alice lives in Wonderland; she is a native New Yorker. What’s more, she is a yellow-dog Democrat.

Her birthright imprinted on her the sense to consider everything but the coasts is fly-over country, filled with towns she will visit on business or to see friends, but otherwise avoid. The only time Alice has passed through Texas has been to change planes. Given the Texan owners she met, she plans to keep it that way.

Mainstream American culture is too bizarre to contemplate: Alice is single, childless, and lives in a city most owners will never visit. The owners’ party has too damn many gun-toting, anti-abortion, warmongering Republicans present for her comfort. Thankfully, the next day she meets some New Yorkers, upstaters though they may be; some Democrats from California, and liberals from Minnesota.

It occurs to Alice that in her adult life, she has knowingly had only two Republican friends, and she no longer speaks to either of them. After the Shrub slid into office, neither was sufficiently embarrassed to admit what an imbecile occupied the White House. Both former friends have a considerably more mainstream take on what life “should” be than what Alice’s life was or would become. Both are car-dependent suburbanites.

Save for large cities on both coasts plus Chicago, Alice sees the U.S. as a place with favorable currency exchange rates and peculiar customs, all of which involve driving to the mall and countless visits to Wal-Mart. Some involve parties at which Velveeta is the cheese product of choice, and "fine wine" has a screw-off cap, vs. cheap wine from a box.

It is places like Tiny Town, Sleepy Southern state, where the brother and family live. He telephones from the car, the supermarket, or Wal-Mart, never from his home. The South has manners that scare Alice almost to death.

In Wonderland, Alice uses public transportation, and the only call she makes from a supermarket is to ask whether more purchases are requested. Wonderland is blessedly Mart-Mart-less, in Alice's neighborhood where real estate prices make the cost of entry prohibitive to Major Marts, and the zoning laws have been created to keep Mart-Marts, though not 40-story condos, at bay.

It is bad enough that Wonderland has been deluged by local chains, like Duane Reade, a ubiquitous lousy drugstore, and national ones -- high-end cosmetic and mid-range chain clothing and lingerie stores like Origins, Banana Republic, and Victoria’s Secret. The independent bookstores have been eaten by Barnes & Noble; the local leather goods stores pounced on by Coach; the candy stores by Godiva.

There is scarcely a movie theater left that is not a conglomerate-owned multiplex. Individual hardware stores in Alice's neighborhood have been replaced by a monolith known as (Un)Gracious Homes, now competing with Home Depot. Home Depot is situated in the Bloomberg building, which holds the eponymous mayor's business. One of his goals seems to be making Wonderland less so.

Back at the end of the world, Alice tried to make conversation at the owners' party and realizes the fatal flaw in her attempt to amortize trips to warmer climes: in a hotel, guests have varied nationalities, interests, and stories. On timeshare turf, everyone is American, and most, it seems, are conservative.

Too late: Alice should have realized the basic timeshare owner requires no surprises in vacation destinations, whereas Alice is accustomed to and has spent years seeking them. It is only in the communal hot tub that Alice meets Democrats, people with whom Alice shares some basic social values and with whom she can keep up her end of the conversation without apoplexy.

She even gets to play Scrabble and meet people to join on a sunset cruise. The sunsets, too, remind Alice of her younger days in Haiti, albeit without the rum. Tequila is its Mexican equivalent.

A Brit Alice knows refers to Wonderland as "an island off the coast of the U.S." He is correct, and, common language aside, at the timeshare owners' party, Alice was in the country of Americans completely alien to her: Republicans.

Subsequently she has met people who did not come out for the free margaritas and guacamole, those who were on Alice's team on Super Tuesday. She suspects they are a minority.

It is strange to contemplate how many winter weeks Alice has purchased in pseudo-Mexico. All she can tell you is, the welcome mat is open. Any winter you choose, Alice's casa es su casa.

The Human Condition

I haven't gone philosophical and read Hannah Arendt's book, just the reviews on Amazon, which tell me that my version is much simpler and easier to apply to every day life.

On an individual level, there are two states of being: better and worse.

If you happen to find yourself in neither category but instead would describe your condition as "okay to good" on one hand or "heinous or despairing" on the other hand, then I'm interested in hearing from anyone who knows what meds will induce the "okay to good" reaction for me and for my friends' lives. Great would be pushing it. Say "fabulous," and I will think you are full of shit.

Despair, I know well, up close and personal. It's when my psychopharm cocktail acts like expired vitamins, for one thing. I suspect it's also the state of many people living under truly hideous conditions, but that definition has outward measures, whereas inner despair flies into situations that would look marvelous to someone who is not "worse."

Heinous describes conditions at Guantanamo Bay or Iraq or any other war-torn, poverty-stricken, fascist-controlled (that includes the U.S., where Big Brother made sure privacy was dead and buried prior to the end of the 20th century) country that springs to mind.

When you're better or worse as a general condition, you're more likely to get to heinous or despairing than to great or fabulous.

Perhaps this doesn't make sense to you. If so, I suspect your are a psychopharmacological virgin, that is to say, one to whom no psychiatric drugs have ever been prescribed. Yes, for some, recreational drugs are the limit. I would have put myself in this category when I was 18 and my Quaalude dealer took checks.

But then the migraines began in earnest and the blackening depression was finally recognized. Voila: Sansert, your link to migraine free days and to LCD, from which it differs by one molecule. In some Swiss lab, LCD was synthesized just prior to Sansert.

The original thought was that LCD would cure migraines. Evidently, not so much -- though the drug's ability as a hallucinogenic trigger is not to be disputed. Then again, Sansert gets high marks as a hallucinogen as well. At 19, no one thought to issue that warning to me.

Eventually, neurologists stopped prescribing Sansert, the one antimigraine drug that worked, due to the severe, extensive and permanent nature of its side effects. It's also not the drug for the serotonin impaired, which covers most of us whose neurotransmitters need to take their orders from the better-living-through-chemistry folks.

For that, welcome to the world of antidepressants. Prior to the Prozac revolution in 1987, the AD drugs all had serious cautionary warnings (one type were the MAOIs: many food did not mix with this drug compound, i.e., aged cheese, beer, bacon and red wine. Ingest any of these or related foods, those magical nutrients would bring on a stroke or death).

The other type were the tricyclic ADs. Gain 7% of your body weight in a month, become incessantly dehydrated and continue to cry daily as before. Not highly recommended, but some folks still take them for nerve pain. Personally, my nervous system's full-body issues didn't respond. My leg, for example, wasn't depressed; it just hurt.

Living with depression is like living behind a mirror: you see all the people in the world, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrifying. However, you don't react at all -- a condition known as "lack of affect," or you react badly.

I'm not going to list the 7 or 10 or how many signs Big Pharma asks one to count to determine whether you are officially "depressed." Let's just leave it as for me, January is a month that consistently falls on the "worse" end of the spectrum, and I find there is no such thing as too much sleep, nor is there much in the way of food that interests me, and my concentration is shot.

I have had a few great afternoons recently: a friend took me through acres of Central Park I'd never seen, and the air smelled of spring, a quality it never possesses four blocks away. Another friend made dinner for me and played backgammon for hours. I am cramming in lessons in Spanish, for the two weeks in February that I will be in Mexico and need to order food, find the bathroom, and ask directions.

Still and all, this month is the anniversary of my father's death, and for that reason alone, despite the joy of my niece's first birthday next week, when Aunt Alice heads to Alabama, I can't imagine a January that will find me in the "better" state of the human condition.

The weeks that got away

Difficulty with memory, yes, that was on the list. Dry mouth? Yup. Tremor? Got that. Fatigue? Sure. Lack of appetite? Food, oh, I forgot about it.

I seem to have hit the side-effects jackpot with the neurologist's most recent medication substitution. How else explain, this fog in which I have been immersed and from which I am slowly emerging, now that I've stopped those little white pills at bedtime. After 20 years on one drug, we thought to give the latest, greatest migraine preventive a try.

Wrong move. The effects of this particular molecular combination didn't do anything for me, and seem to have done their share of things against me. It's hard to write when your brain is so slick with drugs, everything you know slides away. That's where the weeks went -- far, far away. I've been so far under the influence, I couldn't see over it.

Note to self: any drug that doesn't have a generic equivalent is overpriced and undertested. FDA approval equals better than a sugar pill, safer than arsenic. That's all. Nothing to do with actual success rate or whether drug works better than its predecessor, against which it will never compete side-by-side in a laboratory. The FDA's main conclusion seems to be, well, we don't think it will hurt you.

Help you? That's not on the FDA menu. Help you is a happy accident, completely unforeseen in any stage of clinical trials, at least where I am concerned. The last great leap forward in pharmaceuticals that are designed to fix what ails me came about 20 years ago, when Prozac rolled off the assembly line and into solid brown bottles by the 100. Penicillin was a wonder drug in its day, too.

How many years will I wait for the next one?

Feeling Jamesian...

My mind seems stuck on tunes that made me sad 30 years ago, and once again they are exerting a pull toward tears. Responsibility overload, stemming from a myriad of sources, mostly family related and to which I am inextricably tied. Top on my mind's hit parade is Billy Joel's James:

James...we were always friends.
From our childhood days
And we made our plans,
And we had to go our separate ways.
I went on the road --
You pursued an education.
James...do you like your life
Can you find release,
And will you ever change --
Will you ever write your masterpiece?
Are you still in school --
Living up to expectations...James...
You were so relied upon, everybody knows
how hard you tried --
Hey...just look at what a job you've done,
Carrying the weight of family pride.
James....you've been well behaved.
You've been working hard
But will you always stay --
Someone else's dream of who you are.
Do what's good for you, or you're not good for
anybody....James
I went on the road --
You pursued an education...James...
How you gonna know for sure -- everything was
so well organized.
Hey...now everything is so secure,
And everybody else is satisfied.
James...do you like your life,
Can you find release
And will you ever change,
When will you write your masterpiece?

When will I write my masterpiece? That is, as they say, the $64-thousand-dollar question. My friends from college are surprised I haven't managed at least one published volume 25 years out. I start projects -- the most recent being a memoir of my father, Haiti, and our family's careless self-destructiveness -- but it's difficult to maintain my concentration. Life intervenes, day after fucking day.

If you had asked me in 1982, I could not have imagined myself in the position in which I find myself today: putting out all of my family's financial fires, to name one thing that occupies more of my time than I could have guessed. Never seeing my father or Haiti again. Having synaptic lapses made more pronounced by medication I can't change. Knowing my aunt and uncle's hotel in Lake Placid burned to the ground.

They say you can't go home again: between Haitian politics and the demise of where I spend my Adirondack summers, I honestly don't have a childhood place that I could happily call home. My mother sold the house where I grew up 15 years ago, and I was never attached to that house, where I spent a tortured adolescence, then escaped to college, so it hasn't possessed the allure of home that Haiti and Lake Placid have.

My college went on a building spree after I left, so now the campus is strewn with what I presume are considered post-modern architectural gems but which remind me that my architectural aesthetic stops somewhere short of women's suffrage. Any building that has all the charm of an airport lounge and the same amount of character is not one I think of as home.

What no one told me was that as I grew, my brother would grow away from me, from the city where we were both born, that he would marry four times, and with each wife, I would feel he was less and less a part of my life. He has a daughter now, my niece Kayanna, whom I would like to see and get to know. I'm not likely to have another. But this marriage of his is still in its infancy; he lives in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, and I am old enough to be the mother of his child-bride.

I seem to be more active as Aunt Alice to Clover, my best friend's shitzu puppy. Those of us who don't have children do take out pets rather seriously. Last year, it broke my heart when I had to put the off-White Rabbit to sleep. Clover comforts and entertains even more so than the White Rabbit did, and both pets are considerably more reliable than either of our siblings.

I'm in melancholy mood at the moment. What I have to keep in mind is a lyric from another Billy Joel song, also from the Turnstiles album: "They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known."

I spy, trouble from the sky

As if Big Brother's newly "legalized" upgraded ability to wiretap any international conversation wasn't enough now the eye in the sky is on you. Or me.

As The Wall Street Journal would have it, in a Page One story on Wednesday: U.S. to Expand Domestic Use of Spy Satellites. So, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. Seems to me, no matter how many toys Big Brother steamrolls over Congress, results are not forthcoming. The terrorist-catch success rate isn't even on a par with major league baseball batting averages.

(Do not ask how pathetic I find the idea that Big Brother would employ someone, with my tax dollars, to listen to my friend Maura and I, baby boomers both, whine about our aging bodies, her father's wretched wife, or my mother's latest inanity, or chat about where can we go within 2 hours of Zurich so she can get stoned and I can find a great spa the next time I cross the pond.)

What to do? Throw more money away! Add more toys! Play to the adage, "boys will be boys; all that changes is the size of their toys." Because if there is anyone in government displaying the least sense of logic or maturity, I am missing the point. That great sucking sound is my tax dollars, down the rabbit hole.

And what is down that particular rabbit hole is nothing that interests Alice. She would rather stay above ground, adjusting to her new migraine meds, hoping that the one pill that makes her larger will be counteracted by the one pill that is said to make her small. Side effects R us in Wonderland. Sometimes Alice gets the good ones.

Go ask Alice...

for, indeed, she'll know. She has neither medical nor pharmacological degree, but she seems to be the go-to person recently for dispensing information and advice about pain relief and psychoactive drugs on a regular basis.

My next-door neighbor inquired about the antidepressants her friend was taking. How long until they would show effectiveness or lack thereof? I'd taken them both, so that was easily answered.

A blogging friend was diagnosed with kidney stones, which did not "pass" in a timely manner, leaving her doped up on percoset, a pain reliever second only to demerol or morphine, for weeks. She finally had surgery, followed by another percoset script. After five weeks, she ended up going through minor-league withdrawal.

My concern for her wasn't the narcotic (because when you live with migraine, 30 years of taking narcotics as needed aren't much of an issue, and by the time anyone expressed a concern, it was 15 years ago, 15 years past Alice's due date for caring) but the Tylenol with which every painkiller is compounded.

That Tylenol is serious business. (Hospitals use it only because it isn't a blood thinner like aspirin or ibuprophen. It's not because it's great against pain.)

The warning on my current migraine drug isn't against addiction; it is against ODing on Tylenol, which, in relatively large amounts, can cause permanent liver damage. Or worse: a lethal dose of Tylenol is 2g to 4g. So 500 mg here, 500 mg there can really add up. Do the math.

Next up, my mom, who never feels pain -- she could have given birth in a field. She came down with shingles, which, in her percoset haze, she referred to as "roof tiles" one night. This disease is one where long-dormant chicken pox virus (assuming you had chicken pox) re-emerges and plays painful hell on your skin for a good three to four weeks, minimum.

Note to self: shingles vaccine just invented. Put on calendar for age 60, the age after which most people develop shingles. Do not want roof tiles redux -- there's already been enough pain in my life.

Then a call from mom's best friend: she has retired, with her boyfriend, to a small coastal town in Florida, where she believes available medical care is akin to voodoo, and her shrink wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground even with an anatomy chart. She can't sleep, and wants to know why her so-called sleeping pill isn't working for her.

Once again, Alice pulls out her handbook of psychiatric drugs, reads off dosages, and, playing cautious, counsels mom's friend to confirm with doctor or pharmacy.

In Alice's life, it's the pharmacy that has her back. She fills every prescription at the same independent store. Forget meds by mail, or meds from a 1,000-store chain. Alice would bet she has more pharmacy experience than some of the chain-store pill-bottle fillers. She certainly can recite all the side effect labels from memory. Her pharmacy telephones her any time there is a chance of an interaction.

(Alice is on intimate terms with the entire staff at her drug store. She knows the pharmacist and everyone else, save the delivery boy, by name, and she recognizes their voices, as they do hers, on the phone. She has the number memorized and has her own charge account. They get a fruit basket every Thanksgiving.)

Useful things to know: barbiturates of any sort will make birth control pills less effective. This information wasn't given to one of Alice's friends, whose unplanned child will be 9 next year. Antibiotics also don't mix well with many pharmaceuticals -- Alice's pharmacy told her that, although it was so many years ago that she can't remember what doesn't go with what.

For Alice's mom, a stern warning from Alice: I told you not to drink with Xanax on the airplane, and you finally admitted you did anyway. Alice is sure it made for a pleasant (and fast) flight, but her mom didn't have Alice's doctor's blessing on the mix-and-match front, and mom could have woken up way farther across the pond than she intended.

Revised warning, emphasis added: Please don't drink on percoset. It's a much stronger drug and will knock you flat on your ass for days even without a Dewars chaser. Alice knows how much she can drink (two glasses of wine, max, per the shrink) on her psychopharm cocktail, but her mother -- who equates sleeping pills with arsenic, according to mom's friend who dared to make the suggestion -- has neither Alice's metabolism nor knowledge of how you can make drugs your friends -- in judicious quantity.

So, Google may be your pal, but if you really need to know your pain relievers or your psychopharms, Alice recommends a drugstore where they know your name, and she is here if you need her.

Primped and polished, partially panicked

Today is the day my reunion begins. In three more days, I will be finished with this event. Meanwhile, I am packed, (do I have the right clothes?), primped (two trips to dermatologist, one haircut), polished (manicure, pedicure, recent dental visit) prematurely pampered (one deep-tissue and one Swedish massage, plus reflexology), and yet, panicked.

This is a far cry from my my basic fluff-and-fold attitude toward my looks. Then again, I'm trying to focus other people's attention on what hasn't changed, in lieu of, say, the 20 pounds I've gained, or the smile/frown lines (as they are politely called) etched into my face. I will encounter people I've seen in the past year, and people I haven't seen or spoken to in the past 25 years.

I am one of the three alumna who is running this show. Most of the preparation is out of my hands now, but the curtain has yet to rise. The next 72 hours is the payoff -- already I can see errors I've not corrected in the reunion book (once printed, further proofreading is beside the point, not that that stopped me), so it's not so perfect as I would have preferred -- but whether everyone has a good time remains unknown.

I don't know what will be expected of me on-site. I'm hoping it won't be much. Next time someone asks me to help plan a weekend for 150 people, I know what my answer will be. Perhaps if I weren't attending, I wouldn't feel so anxious: logistics without presence would have taken a lot of pressure off of me. Or vice versa. Anti-anxiety meds, here I come.

I do know that the next time I sign up for volunteer work, it will be for a three-hour slot, not a year-long, 100-plus hours time frame (including the two solid months it took to produce the reunion book).

However, we only have one 25th reunion, off the isle of Wonderland, and, ready or not, here I come.

If 40 is the new 20, we're screwed

Clearly I've seen too many commercials and watched too much retro navel-gazing TV: the ads say 40 is the new 20, and I say, I wouldn't want to be 20 again for all the proverbial tea in China. Were I to rerun the movie of my life, I would scratch 1980, for numerous reasons. The most obvious is political: the first presidential election in which I voted got us Reagan. And that was a highlight.

Sure, I had a great, no-maintenance-necessary body. More brain cells than I could addle despite drugs. But the strum und drag? The illicit rendez-vous, the intrigues, the betrayals, even my first love -- all that energy expended, only to wind up lovesick and on antidepressants. No, not my year. 40 as the new 20? What that says about our collective emotional maturity, I hate to imagine.

I wouldn't mind having the body, still, but the rest of it? Thank you, I've handed in my homework, have a couple of degrees behind me, and already recovered from a run-in or two with the age of grief. In the 25th reunion book I edited, one of my friends answered the question, what would your 1982 self be most surprised about about your current self? She said, "menopause and retirement -- looking forward to both."

The PBS two-hour celebratory "documentary" called The Baby Boomer Century made me want to hurl sharp inanimate objects at its host, narrators, writers, editors, and producers. Do we still believe we're going to change the world? Yeah, we're going to outlive our resources, drain Social Security, and live in a anti-smoking, anti-drinking, follow-your-bliss-off-a-cliff society. Sounds like a plan to me.

Women, incidentally, aren't necessarily in the work force by choice. Since 1973, it has been considered impossible to support a middle-class household on one salary. According to the documentary, we have had a "civilizing effect," on the work place. Seems a dose of Emily Post followed by a chaser of Miss Manners could have done the job for us.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote of a character in a short story, "The Dead," in 1980: "...Ilena thought it wisest to avoid complete mental alertness. That it was an overrated American virtue." I couldn't agree more. That baby boomer in the White House, lousy poster boy for cocaine rehab and a highly suspicious return to God, has demonstrated that this is not the time to pay attention. What we see, we would prefer not to. What we know, he refuses to admit. Iraq is this century's Vietnam, but no one is talking. If we were really the 20 of the baby boom years as portrayed on TV, we'd be shouting.

Or so I'd like to think. The much-touted longevity we can apparently anticipate is not something I'm looking forward to. 25 years out of college, the physical damage is done. I've already buried several of my friends, and at least one is terminal, another so close to a psych ward it terrifies me. I think it's the Gen Xers who took to the gym with a vengeance.

My generation (or at least I) went kicking and screaming. (That's about as much exercise as seems dignified.) My mother walks to keep her bones from crumbling, bored by every minute of it. I take calcium and Fosomex. The part of my generation that isn't "in recovery" does, after all, believe in "better living through chemistry."

Telling us smoking is bad is not new information. It may have been new to our parents in 1964, but now? Not so much. Yet now, in Wonderland, cigarettes must be fireproof, meaning if you don't puff in a timely fashion, the cigarette will extinguish itself. Evidently we are too old or stupid to remember Smoky the Bear's warning: "Only you can prevent forest fires." In Wonderland, I can scarcely see a tree for the 30-story condo. I wouldn't worry about the forest and me. Nature and I simply are not on such close terms.

Give me the tropics in winter, the mountains in summer, but give me the hotel, not the canvas tent; maid service, not roll-your-own-sleeping-bag; room service, not freeze-dried ice cream to be reconstituted over the campfire -- if indeed campfires are acceptable and not considered eco-terrorism.

I haven't been camping since I was old enough for "no, thanks," to become a complete sentence. (Besides, as last reported, I talk in my sleep, loud enough for an entire campground to hear me yell "fuck!") Three years ago our tents in Africa had carpets on the floor, 24-hour electricity, full mosquito netting, and complete indoor plumbing. That's as much of the outdoors as I have grown to prefer without a guide taking me to tour the wide open spaces.

Don't get me wrong: I loved our safari, adored swimming with sea lions in the Galapagos Islands. My safari companion was 80; my Galapagos companion, 70; both are healthier than I ever will be.

However, I want to leave wild life in the wild. Wonderland's idea of wildlife is cockroaches, the invincible creatures of our era who dwell in our walls. Thank you, I'll take an exterminator's visit over scurrying roaches or the mouse who has taken up residence in my apartment. This would be Minnie, who searches here in vain for food. She (or he, could be transgendered) doesn't know where to find the menu drawer, my primary source for nutrition.

I'm hoping that Hannah Arendt's observation is correct: "Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come to those who, when young, were never wise."

I have it on good authority that I was never wise.

Four things about me...

(a) Four jobs I've had in my life:
freelance editor/writer
financial planner
wine glass washer at Adirondack hotel
real estate agent

(b) Four movies I could watch over and over again:
almost anything with Katherine Hepburn or William Powell/Myrna Loy
The Big Chill
Boys on the Side
Rocky Horror Picture Show

(c) Four places you have lived:
In an apartment in Manhattan
In people's homes in Paris
In a dorm in Bennington, VT
In my parents' house in Westchester County, NY

(d) Four TV shows I watch:
Brothers & Sisters
House
Grey's Anatomy
C.S.I. (the original)

(e) Four places I have visited:
Rotorua, New Zealand
Capetown, South Africa
Xian, China
Galapagos Islands, Equador

(f) Four places I visit daily:
My email
The menu drawer
My pill box
My apartment building's lobby

(g) Four of my favorite foods, not in order:
Chocolate souffle
Roast filet mignon with roasted new potatoes
Asparagus with Hollandaise
Wild raspberries

(h) Four places I would rather be right now:
In bed with a lover
In Europe at a great hotel with room service and a spa
On the beach in Haiti, if the political climate weren't an issue
With my niece, Kayanna

(i) Four favorite songs
Mexico -- James Taylor
White Rabbit -- Grace Slick
Summer, Highland Falls -- Billy Joel
Twisted -- sung by Joni Mitchell

A quarter century in the "real world"

In three months, I go to my college class's 25th reunion. Since I am one of the co-chairs, it fell to me to create a reunion book. Herewith, the Q&A I (as editor of said book) helped create.

Name in college: alice, uptown
Current name: same
Address: Wonderland

Home phone: yes, several -- in New York City
Email: alice DOT uptown AT gmail DOT com
Family details: I am a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend.

How do you occupy your days?
I sleep late, work as an independent financial planner, read, nap, blog, email, travel, and, occasionally, cook dinner from scratch.

What would your classmates find immediately recognizable about you since graduation?
My height, hair color, and penchant for sarcasm.

What would your classmates find the most surprising thing about you since graduation?
That I ended up in a profession so far removed from what I allegedly studied and what I wanted to be (a novelist).

What would your 1982 self find most shocking about your current life/self? Why?
That I have retained the same phone number for 25 years, and moved only once, to an apartment building adjacent to the original one. And the two people I cared for most in 1982 remain in the category of people for whom my door is always open.

What was a typical Friday night for you in college What about now?
Then? Always the Pub. (On campus.) Closing the Pub. Closing the off-campus bar. Thursday nights, when the weekend started, we’d head across the river to dance at the county's only disco, or our other favorite club where we wouldn't see everyone we knew. Now? Dinner at home and reading, watching DVDs or staying up talking. Or traveling. Spare me the plane, but give me a great hotel any night.

What are your favorite memories of your time at in college?
Cartwheeling on the Pub dance floor; tea in the Rose Parlor; Halloween costumes; late night tête-à-têtes. Doing my homework in the “work corner” of the Pub. Hours of pinball and dancing. Writing essays for the college newspaper. Liquid lunches with faculty at a campus-related hotel. The surprise party for my 20th birthday. Off-campus dinners with friends. Convincingly participating in class when I hadn’t read the first page of the book under discussion.

What are your three favorite inventions/innovations over the past 25 years?
Prozac.
Caller ID.
Private email discussion lists.

Where do you imagine yourself to be in 25 years?
Retired, content, (I hope) healthy, with a place in the mountains and a place in the Caribbean, with my friends around me.

If you live by someone else’s words of wisdom, what are they?
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love, and to remain indifferent.” – Joan Didion

"To be content with what one has is to be rich." -- Tao Te Ching

Sig: T tab po prn

If you were to be next year’s graduation speaker, what would you say in light of your college experience and subsequent life choices?
Life is more maintenance than you could have guessed. Be prepared. Sleep when you have the chance. You’re capable of more than you can imagine, and, if you must start again or choose to, don’t be afraid of yourself in the dark. One of our school's gifts is permission to be a nonconformist, to question authority. Hold onto that perspective – you’ll need it.

Put a little more mascara on....

Yesterday the synapses went completely askew, a combination of PMS and the impending anniversary of my father's death, a death that still remains a mystery: for public consumption, a heart attack; within the family, other theories (with evidence) have been advanced. The upshot is, we'll never know. Sixteen years ago, and it feels like yesterday.

No one in my family has brought up the questions, barely have they mentioned losing my dad, in years. To me it's hard, when you miss someone from your life so much, to look at anything from a pragmatic point of view. Particularly given how soon my brother will be a father, and how much I know how excited my dad would have been to be a grandpa, a title I would never have afforded him.

This morning I woke up with tunes from La Cage aux Folle in my head. I suspect at a loud enough volume, they could see my through the day without tears. At first I was particularly struck by the drag queen's view:

When my little road has a few bumps again,
And I need something level to lean upon,
I put on my sling pumps again,
And wham! This ugly duckling is a swan!
So when my spirit starts to sag,
I hustle out my highest drag,
And put a little more mascara on.

Perhaps that is the true purpose of the cosmetics industry: just to add a little cheer, to make us all think we can be, as it were, Queen for a Day, or a reasonable fascimile thereof.

Farther into Jerry Herman's lyrics comes the bittersweet "The Best of Times is Now":

The best of times is now.
What's left of Summer
But a faded rose?
The best of times is now.
As for tomorrow,
Well, who knows? Who knows? Who knows?
So hold this moment fast,
And live and love
As hard as you know how.
And make this moment last
Because the best of times is now,
Is now, is now.

Lyrics to live by. Or at least give me a different perspective to look through my solopsistic, drug-added lenses.

As Anne Sexton wrote:

"I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift."

I don't know if these quotations will stop my tears completely, but it can't hurt to try to focus on their meaning.

Incommunicado

In case you were wondering, that's my state of being. I haven't felt like talking to anyone of late. I suspect it's called depression. No, I know it is. The symptoms are all too familiar: not eating, barely washing my hair much less getting dressed, leaving the house only under duress, sleeping oddly, crying out of the blue -- I've been here before, and will probably return to this state again, no matter what psychoactive cocktail the shrink can devise.

Problem with the cocktails is, it's all a matter of guesswork. I am a perpetual guinea pig. If one drug doesn't work, we try another. And another. Then another. But we don't make changes very quickly: first, we'll try one for three weeks, and not until it's had a chance to take effect (or not) will we move on to the next.

At the moment, the drug added to my previous cocktail helps me feel, if not better, than simply less. Less is better than sad. Less means there is a stronger film between me and the world, so I don't take in anymore than I can process. This does not leave me with much to say; hence, my lack of posting. Less circumvents my cognitive abilities.

Less doesn't seem like a great loss, not now, in the middle of the holiday trifecta. Train of thought? Derailed quite a ways back, stranded without a cell phone. In my mind, the pony express is more than a fast enough way for my synapses to travel.

This week was the saga of the tea-soaked keyboard: when typing while hands are splinted, it is probably wise not to leave a large mug of tea nearby. Once sweet tea hits the keyboard, the keyboard is doomed. Since this is only the second keyboard I've assassinated in 21 years, I don't think my record is that bad. Many have killed far more electronics than I.

I killed my first modem, but that was 300 baud, very much pre-cell phone, pre-Web, pre-ubiquitous email, and the software that accompanied it suitable only for the technologically inclined, which I was and am not. No one has mentioned baud rates since the early 1990s.

The first keyboard I killed was in an office: that time, I spilled coffee, with cream and sugar. I called the tech support department, and was amazed at how grateful they were that I inquired about a new keyboard. What difference did it make to me? It wasn't my keyboard; it belonged to the company.

The fact that the tech people had to cannibalize another machine, instead of having a spare keyboard or two on hand, astounded me. It should also give you a good idea of why I don't work in publishing any longer. If I had asked for pen and paper, I the office supplies department probably would have had to run across the street to the five and dime to procure them for me.

Sugar in hot liquid remains the keyboard's nemesis; it makes the keys stick in one position, refusing to rise to type another letter. While waiting for a new keyboard (and the folks at Dell, who keep track of your purchasing history, try to sell you on a whole new machine when all you want is a $50 means of communicating with the machine you have), I pulled out a former keyboard, only to discover that the letter "d" likes to go on strike.

It annoys the hell out of me when my electronics have a mind of their own, one that is not in accord with mine. I don't like it when they pull tricks out of the ether that I have no way of comprehending. It makes me feel stupid. Woman vs. machine: why can't the woman win more often? Just curious.

The first holiday of the trifecta is down: Thanksgiving at my house, where my mother came to help and managed to take over the entire cooking process, not to mention critique my ability to arrange fruit in a bowl. I also was not the hostess she thought I should be. My conclusion? Next year I won't invite such a critical guest.

My brother's wife -- dare I saw sister-in-law? -- is counting down the weeks until she is officially a mother and I, an aunt. Pregnancy in the eighth month is apparently dull as dishwater, and it is all she can do not to jump up and down and shake my niece-to-be out of the womb.

I am trying to work up the energy for Christmas, preparations for which are helped greatly by the vast arena of on-line shopping venues and my part-time assistant, who has been with me for the past six weeks.

Essentially, I am renting her hands, to write since I can't hold a pen, enter data for which I have no patience, wrap and ship presents, shred papers, write checks, send out correspondence, balance checkbooks, file paperwork, and, when I am tired of all that, follow my instructions to bake brownies.

This week we're making a double batch, with chocolate chips.