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?

The girl in a bubble: white blood cells needed

Today my white blood count reached a new nadir: I have 400, practically few enough that someone could count them, and someone else could start singing 400 white blood cells in her bod, 400 white blood cells; take any down and pass them around, 399 white blood cells in her bod....

A normal reading is 4,800 to 10,000. So I don't exactly have any to spare. This week? Like the others, but more so. Every day, visit the doctor. Get blood pressure taken, temperature taken, finger pricked to put blood on a slide; get weighed; see blood test results before doctor hits the exam room and know: today, another 480cc shot of drug to hasten white blood cell formation.

Why so important? Chemo nukes out all the cells, the good and the bad. Then you have a hiatus, 2 weeks when the blood is supposed to regenerate. Thing is, every cycle of chemo makes it more difficult for the bone marrow to make the cells. But if I don't have a high enough count a week from now, then I can't get the chemo to nuke the cells that may exist.

Makes that much sense to me, too.

Then there are the red blood cells -- too few and you have no energy, not to mention having no immune system since the white cells are so few and far between. And let us not forget the platelet count. Normal? 130-400 of whatever unit is being counted. Me? Down to 55. You could definitely sing the bottles of beer song to that.

Platelets at this stage equal very limited blood clotting ability. A paper cut could send me to the hospital. This thought is not cheering. Neither is the idea that I have to be incredibly careful not to walk into anything, because I'd have a bruise for months.

People tell me, at least you still have your sense of humor. What else am I going to have? Shall we all start to sing the platelet count song? I don't have much in the way of intellectual thought processes to get in the way of a good old-fashioned sing-along.

Lymphoma? Not pretty. Can't dress it up and take it anywhere, not without sterile precautions. Time for another round of Purell, what I'm wearing instead of perfume this winter. I used to wear Joy. Even if I couldn't feel it, I could smell it. Now, it doesn't make a difference, except in the irony department -- but you knew I was good for that.

Has it been five years? Compare...

October 14, 2004

My blog and welcome to it

Why through a looking glass? Most people see the place I call home, the place I was born, the city where my great, great, great grandmother is buried, as one unlike any other. Many can't understand why I stay. I can't see that there is anywhere else to go.

Perhaps we do look at life differently here, or I do, which explains the looking glass: life mirrored, slightly askew. It's not how you might assume from TV, whether "reality based," i.e., news, or fictitious.

Today? It's the second anniversary of my having quit smoking, and of one of my closest college friends, then age 41, e-mailing to announce she had stage 4 breast cancer. It's the day after my mom's birthday; a week after my own.

Twenty-two years since I have moved to this block, twenty-two years with the same phone number, in the so-called real world, where my mind is prone to wander, and my synapses misfire with some consistency.

It is a strange world, when life's most intimate details are proclaimed in cyberspace -- but since I gave up cigarettes (without becoming an irritating "reformed smoker"), I need a hobby. More precisely, a place to talk to myself, and, I hope, to you, whomever you may be.

It is a challenge, to understand why smoking indoors has been outlawed here, when the average person who stands on the street will breathe in more carbon monoxide in 20 minutes than I would exhale in 200.

I get it -- that I am smaller than the average car, much less bus or truck, so it's easier to try to make me conform to a new social norm than to force the average driver to make an effort. (Car does beat pedestrian; bus beats car, and so on in the run-me-over sweepstakes.)

One caveat: despite or because of all the techno-changes since my brain was young enough to absorb them without forgetting what to eat for dinner, I remain technologically challenged. It wasn't my intention, but there's just TMI out there.

I realize I'm adding more, but no one ever said irony wasn't my strong suit -- it's one I wear well, one that escapes many people in many places, but its absence would be stranger here, particularly at this time in our political landscape, to put it politely.

October 14, 2009

Today? Life is different: I'm smoking again, despite or to spite local ordinances; my friend with breast cancer died on Halloween two years ago; and now the count is up to 27 years on the same block in Wonderland, with my synapses misfiring completely inconsistently.

The world has mostly gotten stranger. For example, we've endured The Big Awful, when the economy cratered, and we all said, "disposable income? It was nice knowing you." Welcome to Brave New World. And, "good-bye, privacy. Hello, Facebook."

On the other hand, five years ago, when I traveled, I pretended to be Canadian, and now I don't have to explain that I didn't vote for the idiot who has belatedly returned to his ranch with My Little Pony.

Back then I wasn't preparing to do battle with Cambridge health plans, my so-called insurance. Now, not only do I need surgery to remove a gland most associated with pubescent growth, I also need a D&C for post-menopausal bleeding (TMI? You bet. But I am still talking to myself here, and so it goes.)

It seems it is better to go under general anesthesia once than twice, and it only gets more complicated from there. One doctor -- the gland guy -- has privileges at hospital A; my other doctor, one of 25 years standing, has privileges at hospital B, 90 blocks south and right around the corner from my apartment.

Chances of their meeting in pre-op? Zero.

Chances of my finding two surgeons from two different hospital departments at the same institution who both take my crappy insurance AND want to tag-team each other in the OR? I don't think MasterCard makes a commercial for this one.

I may have stumbled upon an occasion for which even the most comprehensive electronic Hallmark equivalent doesn't make a greeting card. If anyone did, it would say,

"Sorry you need two surgeries to make sure you don't have cancer."

Inside it would read,

"But congratulations on growing your hair for the past 22 months so now it's long enough to donate to those who do."

Irony: it's not just a concept -- it's a way of life.

Ask Alice? She doesn't know...

It has been a couple of weeks, and Alice is increasingly befuddled by the world. She was, after all, brought up not to discuss politics, religion or sex. Her mother has never revealed her personal voting record to anyone. Secret ballot and Alice's mother are one and the same.

In Haiti, under Baby Doc, Alice's father said: "You don't discuss politics in a dictatorship." While Alice was young, she got the message.

So Alice as political creature has come late to the dance.

Sure, she knew Nixon was a Bad Guy from the ever-so-seditious My Weekly Reader that informed her that Nixon was a Quaker, and Quakers did not believe in wars. This led to great confusion in Alice's pre-pubescent mind when Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia, cognitive dissonance that enrolled her as a Democrat long before she could reach the levers in the voting booth.

And given the civil liberties lost to us courtesy of the current administration, as Alice has mourned previously in The Party's Over and Follow the Money, among other rants, Alice has become convinced that you don't have to be paranoid to think Big Brother is watching you.

Last night, Alice was part of the audience for the filming of a Very Well-Known Feminist's talk on fascism in 10 easy steps, the how-to explained in VWKF's most recent book. She left with an acute case of paranoia, and a reminder that free speech is very expensive, a fact not lost on her friend The Misanthrope, who has had part of his blogging experience bite him on the ass.

Alice's take on VWKF is in part personal: they met at a writers' colony many years ago, and she critiqued the manuscript of VWKF's second book; VWKF said Kaddish at Alice's father's grave; Alice danced at VWKF's wedding, and their connection, ironically, was lost after VWKF became part of the asylum-running crowd of married couples, while Alice remained a solo act.

Alice concluded years ago VWKF's most important contribution to the social fabric is how well she popularizes and makes palatable ideas and ideals that most Americans would fail to comprehend in more intellectual terms. She is also not surprised that part of the VWKF's impetus for her latest book was a woman who is the daughter of Holocaust survivers who kept saying as we lost one right to privacy, one civil liberty, after another, "they did this in Germany." Alice had made a similar link years ago.

Remembering a family friend who fled Germany in 1937 and, who, when asked in the 1980s what she did for fun, said sadly "I had all my fun before Hitler," Alice wondered whether the same would be true for her and the Bush administration, or whether Alice was exaggerating. As time has gone by, Alice has come to think she was spot-on. And now she is terrified and not at all convinced that the next election will solve anything.

At the same time, she wonders why her tax dollars are going to monitor citizens' once-Constitutional, political expression at the expense of, say, universal health care or ending hunger and homelessness, in our so-called "first world" country.

If someone on the Fed's dime is reading Alice's blog, he/she might have noticed that Alice doesn't attract much attention, no matter how many times she thinks the so-called War on Terror is as ludicrous as was Nixon's War on Drugs with Elvis Presley its model citizen.

Alice is convinced that the road to ending terrorism has nothing to do with T.S.A. screenings and banning shampoo bottles larger than three ounces on airplanes. All of the hyped security she encounters seems like a full employment act for those who can participate early and often in charades. None of it is real; it is all window dressing.

As the Mexicans have pointed out, while the Feds want to build a wall to keep them out of the U.S. and are funding this absurdity under the guise of border security, no terrorists have entered through the Mexican border, only the Canadian one.

And while Alice is not thrilled about illegal immigration, she can't take seriously the argument that immigrants are depriving Americans of jobs. No, in real life Alice knows these immigrants take the jobs native-born Americans, regardless of aptitude or intelligence levels, will not dream of signing onto.

So Alice doesn't know what the hell is going on, who to believe and who to ignore. Her critical faculties are suffering from synaptic lapses of a monumental proportion, and all that it adds up to is, Alice is tired. She is suffering from TMI overload, and cannot cope with "the news" in any form. Immediate rest is her self-issued prescription.

If you don't hear from Alice for a while, this is why. She welcomes you to Go Ask Alice at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com, where she can be found, but she cannot promise more than intermittent blogging until she catches up with herself in the world.

Here and there...

The day after I returned from Mexico, The Misanthrope from Toner Mishap was in Wonderland, and we had a lovely dinner together -- six hours worth of talking, and plenty more to say. He is the first blogger I've met in real life who wasn't someone I knew prior to my blogging days. I hope he's not the last.

We seemed to share the same outlook on life, politics, sex, relationships, the media, and so on. The story of his day in court hit new highs in accounts of absurdity in government. He served as a juror, and wrote about it afterward. He was the foreperson of the jury, a job I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Although in Law & Order and all the other court TV shows, the foreperson is not addressed by name when issuing the verdict, he was. So the defendant, found guilty of a major felony, knows by name one of the people who judged him a criminal.

It hardly seems fair that The Misanthrope was subsequently called into court for writing in his blog about the way the justice system seems to have derailed. (Translation: expediency is not government's middle name, since it's civil service, you would have to go postal to get fired.) Apparently one of the alternate jurors found his blog and duly reported it to some official who had too much time on his hands.

Seems to me the judge owed him an apology and perhaps protection for having used The Misanthrope's name aloud in the courtroom while the defendant was present. Instead, he got a lecture.

The right to free speech doesn't apply when you're a juror. Thanks a lot, Big Brother. Ironic, isn't it? Reminds me of the husband of a former friend. He served in the Navy and was fighting for a Constitution that didn't apply to him. (Then there was the mug he gave me: "Navy: Earth Friendly." Sure, as friendly as a nuclear submarine could get.)

There's a reason why I blog as alice, uptown, and the players in my blog go by the noms-de-blog nicknames I've given them. That reason is privacy. Inasmuch as it is possible to separate the public from the private (okay, the right to privacy died at the end of the 20th century), I would never name online my lovers, my friends, the people I love and cherish.

Kayanna, my niece, is one exception. Since she just turned one year old, and her parents don't read my blog, and you don't know who alice is (don't try the phone book: alice, uptown has an unlisted number), there's enough distance that I can tell you who she is. Perhaps when she's older, I will give her a nom-de-blog for her privacy.

Migraine days, migraine nights

Over at The Daily Headache the question has been posed: is there a migraine personality per se? Offhand, I would disagree. I’ve known too many people with migraines and incredibly disparate personalities to agree with that. What we do share is a genetic predisposition to migraine, which, like depression, is related to how we process serotonin, a neurotransmitter.

Serotonin processing is also related to depression, another disease I no longer question. I’ve stopped asking “why,” and, when I have a major depressive episode, I just want it to go away, and I don’t care how, just don’t make me talk about it again. I have a chemical imbalance, period.

Joan Didion wrote an essay in The White Album called “In Bed,” about her migraine experiences c. 1968. I read it years ago, and it still resonates for me, particularly the part about major stress not correlating with her headaches. For me, it is relaxing that brings on those particular synaptic lapses.

Migraines are part and parcel of my life: after 30 years, I don’t care “why.” Instead, I look to my meds to see how fast I can staunch the pain. Those Imitrex commercials are full of shit. Give me those old-time opiates any day, thankyouverymuch. Some are available over-the-counter in Mexico.

(Alice knows where to obtain different drugs in many parts of the world. She could give you the Cook's tour of where to find relief from pain, infection, stomach upset, cough, allergies, etc., on five continents.) This would be one reason why people ask alice about all things pharmaceutical.

I was diagnosed with migraine at age 18 or so, and can recite chapter and verse all the so-called medical breakthroughs in the past 30 years. I’ve tried the latest and greatest, and not only are the newer drugs expensive, they don’t work at all for me. When I have a migraine, I want the old-fashioned tried and true, what's proven to work for me, regardless of any potentially addictive effects. It’s far too late in the game for me to care.

Cure my pain, and let’s be done with it. Forget about my personality: my head hurts; I can’t move; I get sensitive to light, sound, and scents; and the little man with the big hammer behind my right eye is having way too much fun. If I can’t kill him, at least I can knock him out long enough to make it through the night.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Instability

Like my nervous system, with its perpetual synaptic lapses, my thumb joints have been determined to be unstable. They had a few years, a hiatus, when both were operating on as close to full power as they had in 15 years. I could cook; carry groceries, mail and packages; wear clothes that buttoned and shoes that laced, and even change a light bulb or two. I could even hold your hand, or any part of my anatomy or yours I desired, depending on the occasion.

The skills that remain semi-intact are typing, telephoning, and channel-changing. Others I have misplaced are the ability to pour a pitcher of water, cut food with a knife or properly use a fork, wrestle lobster out of its shell, pick up a suitcase, hold onto a hand bar on a bus or subway, navigate car doors (forget driving), pick up a pen, shuffle papers, or use the computer mouse.

Say good-bye to 21st- century living. On a good day, I can punch the start button on the microwave. Sometimes I can wash my hair. Being left-handed (and left-thumb dominant), I have been challenged by the electric toothbrush, its control and my coordination.

So, off to a new orthopedist: he wanted to know what had befallen his colleagues in the hand trade. A misdiagnosis, a badly run office, a doctor who stopped taking my insurance: with that I stopped. Newsflash and note to self: never tell doctors -- except perhaps shrinks -- how his/her predecessors have failed you. They will mark you down as a difficult patient, never mind that you have been dealing with your body and its foibles low these 45 years, and the doctor has met you perhaps for five minutes.

There is no scheduled date for the reuse of my hands. I did not need the orthopedist to say "I don't know"; I could have told him that. All I wanted were new custom-made splints to immobilize my thumbs -- black is the latest color plastic to come down the designer splint turnpike. Its ever so chic and, more to the point, doesn't show the that dirt my several previous incarnations of the white knuckle-halfway-to-elbow or the beige pin-pricked (for air circulation) wrist-length plastic of earlier entries in the immobilization sweepstakes.

I realize this plaint of unusability has nothing on the situation in which my eldest cousin and her family found themselves a year ago. Apparently the proper term for the destination for those who made it out of New Orleans just ahead of Katrina -- for government purposes is an "evacuation center." Refugee camp is more like it. I doubt they ate Army surplus MREs; the military can't fill the beds it has available, so MRE shipments are not what the government would have had at the ready.

My cousin and her family had barely deposited her daughter at her dorm at Tulane when word of the storm's impending arrival made the news (at least locally; I don't know when Bush's official messenger sent him the word), and the entire family evacuated. Fortunately, they are a family of campers, accustomed to going without electricity and making do with the most rudimentary of lavatory facilities. Otherwise, it would have been rougher going in Jackson, Mississippi than it was.

It was a 21st-century involuntary migration: when the electric power went out, the family could have had a full tank of gas, and they could charge their cell phones in the car's cigarette outlet (and to think, no one wants me to smoke), get some semblance of news from the car radio, and press the four-way red blinker button to indicate a crisis.

My cousin's 13-year-old had, at that point in her life, experienced not one but two parents surviving cancer, on top of the Katrina evacuation, and I give her prize for surviving more instability than any other relative at that age. When I saw her last week, the Mississippi story bored her; to me, it would have been a life-changing event. In an instant, powerlessness and instability can overwhelm.

Had I been there, a medication crisis might have been imminent. Today, if I were not already prone to depression, my inability to do for myself would certainly have helped shove me over the edge.

Then, too, there is this past month's familial instability: some of you may remember I thought last October I should have gotten my brother a box of condoms for Christmas. Who knew how prescient that was?

For he has interjected into our tiny family the 21-year-old mother-to-be of his child (I thought, but did not ask, are you sure it's yours?), whose pregnancy (and his impending fatherhood) crushes any thought of stability, in my eyes, in his life. Couldn't he at least have waited until, say, Thanksgiving, to announce this girlfriend was pregnant? Given me a week or two to adjust to his most recent divorce status? Given him, maybe, a week on his own?

I have spoken to the girlfriend. In the Southern state in which they resided, Medicaid was taking on her prenatal care. In the state to which they moved less than a week after announcing the pregnancy, matters are not so clear cut. All I can think is, if we had national health insurance, my mother and I would not be singing my brother's wedding bell blues nearly so frequently. (The third time was not a charm.)

The girlfriend's mother is one year older than me. She works at the equivalent of an International House of Pancakes, in what capacity I did not ask. My mother once made pancakes, in the days when Aunt Jemima wasn't considered politically incorrect. Her mother married at 16, had a child at 17. At 17, I was a virgin. My mother married at 22. Given this disparity in generational ages, my mother is old enough to be this forthcoming infant's great-grandmother. As it stands, she can't muster the excitement for the assigned role of grandmother (my own chronological generational peg).

As for me, I am wondering: do I set up a college fund for this child, after she -- it's a girl -- is born and in possession of a Social Security number? Neither of her parents finished college. I am grateful that the mother to be (status as brother's wife or ultimately sister-in-law to be determined) speaks grammatical English, something wife #3 could not manage. Yet I can't help wondering: what are the chances brother and mother-of-his-child will be together in five years? What will it be like, to be Aunt Alice?

I may well be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. However, when my mind veers ahead of itself, it doesn't twist in any prettier a direction than my unstable thumb joints. It hurts.

Darkest when?

Not before the dawn. I've been awake 24 hours, and I assure you, in this hemisphere, in Wonderland, it is much darker at midnight....just in case you were curious. I wasn't, particularly, but independent (i.e., of my will to sleep) tests conducted last night prove otherwise.

Pitch black? Street lamps shine in my window, so that concept is shot, too. Do I mind? I would if I were trying to function today. I've given that up as a bad joke. Apparently the "darkness before the dawn" dates to Biblical days. Either I hallucinated last night, or it is a truism no one has bothered to confirm.

Or phone in. These days I figure if some news flash is that important, someone will telephone to let me know. This has been proven, on 9/11, as it happens. Someone could have carpet-bombed Manhattan, and I doubt I would have awakened to hear the impact.

Add sleep disorder to my list of complaints, if the page has any lines remaining. PMS is occupying a large slot as a deterrent to my competence and coherency. That is, assuming it's not menopause. Or would that be mental-pause?

Pardon me, I'm a bit punchy. Lack of sleep combined with pain combined with tranquilizing meds throws me sideways. At least that's the position I assume I'm in. Either that, or I've defied gravity, and no one's called in to report a shortage thereof.

In "The Dead," Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "Ilena thought it wisest to avoid complete mental alertness. That is was an overrated American virtue." Granted, no one would consider these political times a demonstration of such overrated virtue. Yet I must agree, mental alertness? Overrated is an understatement. I suspect I am lucky it is one from which I am not suffering.

I'm regressing quickly to the "ignorance is bliss" stage of life. If you have to phone it in, chances are, I don't want to take the call. In the words of Pink Floyd, "I have become comfortably numb." Or I'm headed straight there.

Where is the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa?

Yesterday our local news said that the federal government was planning to hire a company based in the United Arab Emirates to take charge of the ports of New York, New Jersey and various other cities.

Apparently the U.A.E. is the only country in the Middle East (apart from Israel) that is our friend. So, doesn't it make sense to have our one Arab friend guarding our henhouses/ports?

Did I miss something? Here I am, fewer than five miles from Ground Zero, still on terra Manhattan, and some governmental authority thinks it wise to outsource, as they say, what is one of the biggest loopholes in our so-called homeland security. Most containers already arrive without any formal inspection from the U.S. Do I feel protected now?

Call me crazy, call me xenophobic, but I thought it was a good option to employ American dock workers over foreign nationals. Either that, or there's something screwy about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

My take on foreign policy is that our friends are the people we pay to act as such. When they misbehave, we take away their allowance (just as my mother disciplined me, and we know how well that turned out).

The U.A.E. isn't beholden to us or any of its neighbors financially: does that mean we should hire them instead of the folks in the tristate area to guard us? This decision makes the T.S.A. look like a first-rate government agency.

Part of the T.S.A.'s job is to make sure that people don't board planes carrying cigarette lighters. Another is to make sure we have practically stripped down to our underwear (and if that happens to include an underwire bra, say good-bye to that particular piece of lingerie) to pass through our airport metal detectors.

Those folks at homeland security -- you'll notice they are based in Washington, D.C., a city not known for its water ports. And American jobs? How can we say, they count for nothing?

I am not what you would call a flag-waving patriot by any means. When I travel, I say I am Canadian, because it is too damn embarrassing and potentially dangerous in many circles to be an American abroad.

However, the only conclusion I can reach here is, the Gods must be crazy.

And Jimmy Hoffa must be spinning in his grave, wherever that may be.

Snow Daze

Where was Alice during the famous blizzard of 2006? Observing it from the global village, 2,000 miles away, via cable/satellite TV in a sitting room in her friend's borrowed house on Carriacou. (It is one of a trinity of islands comprising the country of Grenada.)

The Caribbean island where Alice took her winter sun came late to the global buffet: TV reception was negligible until the mid-1990s. With it, as she has previously noted, has come an increase in crime, urban fashion statements in small tropical villages, and, dare we say, the American dream? Or is it the American nightmare?

Before the first snowflake hit the island on which Alice usually resides, she had postponed her trip home. She then found it disturbing that an appellate court judge (another guest of Alice's friend, one who will not receive further invitations) thought it wise to try to battle the storm and leave the Caribbean on the day that Central Park boasted 29.6 inches of snow.

(You know that who's counting the snowfall in inches has to be a man.)

That judge is at the second-highest level of the New York State judiciary. This is a man who spent five days on the island without sitting in the sun at the beach or less sticking his toes in the water, a man who watches Fox News as if it were gospel. Alice considers this a frightening demonstration of judgment -- or a demonstration of frightening judgment. You decide.

Alice prefers to consider Fox interactive television: she can't watch for more than 45 seconds before talking back to the screen. She considers it a relative of Comedy Central, because it is hard to imagine these people are serious. To her, they are ludicrous.

As she saw last weekend, having friends in high places is no guarantee of being safe on the range. With friends like Cheney, who needs enemies? In the global village, it has become more and more embarrassing to be an American.

Some (Alice included) would say she is not American; she is a New Yorker, part of a different breed. Most of what happens west of the Hudson or south of the Mason-Dixon line requires translation.

For example, while the house call may be history, Alice can't grasp the idea that a drugstore wouldn't deliver. If she is sick, should she spread her germs around at retail? Bad enough to be in the petrie dish that is the doctor's waiting room.

The more purchases that can be made without leaving the keyboard or telephone, the better, in Alice's book, particularly in winter. The blizzard aside, this has been a relatively mild winter; however, Alice's synapses have had a lengthy meltdown, and some odd kind of agoraphobia has settled in.

You don't need snow to declare a snow day -- Alice's brain has taken nearly a month of snow days this year, and she's not sure how many more she's in for.

My father, once and again

No one in my immediate family recognized the anniversary of my dad's death, save me. So many years on, I have done what I think my father would have, what made his friends see him as generous and well as nurturing: I take one or two close friends out for dinner in a nice restaurant, a place my father might have gone.

This year, I took CC and her husband. CC remembers my father well, from when we were in our early 20s. I didn't know until this past week that my dad used to call CC, to make sure she was being good to me....he knew what was going on between CC and me, and while we never acknowledged my sexual preference at the time, it was evident to him how important she was, and has again come to be, to me.

I doubt my father ever had a conversation with The Croquet Player -- the only time I think their paths may have remotely crossed was in 1980, the first time TCP and I slept together, a night followed by my returning back to my dorm with my parents there, early for once in their lives, to meet me for lunch. My father asked: "so, what time did you get to bed last night? Get any sleep?"

This was how we communicated: much was alluded to and otherwise acknowledged, but rarely, if ever, did my father directly say what he was thinking regarding what he knew (and what he, sometimes incorrectly assumed) about my romantic life.

Actually, the indirect, the unsaid, formed a great deal of my time with TCP: for reasons that escape me, he usually knew what I was thinking, and I knew, without asking, what was on his mind.

The other day, CC said how glad she was that I had never married TCP. I reiterated the line I came up with 25 years ago: "it would be the only shotgun wedding on record where the gun was aimed at the bride to put her out of her misery beforehand."

CC expects he'll reappear in my life, on my doorstep, as had been his wont for 22+ years, when I least expect to see him. I dreamt about him the other night, an unusual character in my dreams. I left a message on his machine, then I searched the Web for his activities: he is alive and well and playing croquet, approaching his busy season, and that is all I need to know. I fear that I will dream and awaken one morning knowing he has died. I've had those premonitions before, twice, and have been correct on both occasions.

What TCP, CC and I have in common is that none of us anticipated living as long as we have: TCP didn't think he would see 30; CC's number was 36 (Marilyn Monroe's age), and mine was 35. Ten years later, we are all still here, equally puzzled by our lack of plans for this point in our lives.

I imagined by now I would have published a book or two; instead I have a 17-year-old novel in manuscript tucked away in a closet, and every time I have an idea for a new novel, depression overtakes me, reducing any impulse I may have had to do anything that requires more than getting out of bed and feeding the off-White Rabbit.

What I could not have foreseen, in my early 20s, was how debilitating the depression would continue to be, nor could I have foreseen my father's sudden death. The signs may have been there, but I wasn't reading them: I was Daddy's little princess until he died, and that's a hard place to move on from, even in the Wonderland I appear to inhabit. My dad, TCP, CC and I have all worked at being self-destructive, or perhaps that was in our genetic codes.

In the end, my dad may have died an untimely (when is it ever timely?) death, but the lesson there was not simply "take better care," but, perhaps more importantly, "life is short. Try to make sure you enjoy the ride." As far as I know, my father had a damn good ride, inner demons not withstanding.

I hope to do the same.

Next up, Groundhog's Day

Alice doesn't have much to say in favor of January, except that it marks the end of the holiday trifecta. Other than that, it is a cold, dark month, and all Alice and the off-White Rabbit can do is wait for Groundhog's Day.

This January will mark 15 years since Alice's father died. There are no words for what she feels. He has been gone 1/3 of Alice's life, a fraction that astounds her. How to explain, that the world moves on, and part of Alice will never be able to accept the whys and wherefores about her father that led to his early demise.

There are some conversations Alice has tried to have with her family, and they aren't interested. Isn't insanity doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results? If so, Alice has a place to go, to hide within herself, where she knows what to expect and hopes that some day, it will provide comfort.

Meanwhile, Alice is on hiatus. Her brain is frozen. She will, however, defrost -- preferably sooner rather than later -- but she's not sure her opinion counts for very much when brain freezes hit. Perhaps after the meltdown is complete, she will reassemble the pieces, and imitate the person she once was, the person she can be when her synapses are not short-circuiting.

For now, Alice is off to warmer climates. The tropics are very compelling in winter. Perhaps the change of venue will help the brain reassemble itself into something usable and witty. One day, Alice believes it will. When it does, she will be the first to let you know.