The thing is that both names are both sort of dreadful, but they're very intentionally dreadful. I went out and searched for names with really jaw-cracking syllable combinations. And now I don't like either.

Suggest me some names. Bonus points if they're Greek and have more than three syllables. No names directly from mythology, please.

It was fascinating. Maybe not a page-and-a-half worth of fascinating, but you do what you can to amuse yourself in these situations.

This is how I roll: when pressed for material, I produce either reams of quasi-historical backstory or porn.

Um. Do you?

Poll #1228921
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Drama?

I've been trying to work on some art that I promised people ages ago, struggling against a massive migraine all the while. Either the migraine's making me suck, or else I feel so lousy that I just think everything sucks. Either way, I'm a total waste of paper and graphite this morning. Q: How do you fit a rainforest into a basket? A: Let me have a crack at it.

And again, part of the trouble may be that it's so damn hot outside that our AC can't quite struggle hard enough to shrug it off. I've set the thermostat to 69 and the house is, currently, 80.

All in all, a most unproductive Sunday. I'm tempted to pack it all in and go hide somewhere with my library books.

WHY IN GOD'S NAME DO YOU WANT TO STEER RIGHT BETWEEN the two gianormous rocks when you could, I don't know, go around them?

Hell, I don't know. I'm not a sixteenth century Spanish navigator, am I? Maybe you get bonus points if you survive.

I'm going to be watching this all damn day, aren't I? Seas of Erin peeps: if we're suddenly attacked by a highly advanced civilization of Olmecs, you know what to blame.

ETA again: Seriously, Mendoza. It's like a hundred degrees on the open deck. You do not need the big swirly cape.

ETA 2: Episode 3. Mendoza finally ditches the cape.

ETA WTF: What? He wears the cape from Barcelona to Lima but when it actually starts snowing, he ditches it? Somebody requisition that man a jacket.

Why do people always wait to tell the poor damn orphan the "miraculous circumstances of your birth/discovery" story until the only person who knows is on his deathbed? Does it never occur that the kid might have a few follow-up questions?

ETA: DOES MENDOZA HAFTA CAPE A BITCH?!

I forgot how awesome this show was.

Now that Mum is home from the hospital and well enough to employ all her usual tactics, I can't get rid of her. Now that she's had her brush with death, which really wasn't so much a brush as it realising she was on the same city block as death and calling a cab back to a better side of town, she is insistent that now everyone has to be nice to her. Her quote, not mine. "You have to be nice to me; I'm sick." This does not imply that she in any way has to be nice to anyone else, mind. Normally, when I'm sick and being a bitch to someone, there will be a certain awareness after a time; I'm not myself, I don't feel well, it's the medication talking, it's not you, it's me, I don't know why I'm being a bitch but I will try to pull it back from an eight to a merely grumpy three.

She never tries. Instead of realisation, being actually, seriously, gravely ill has given her the luxury of a complete lack of restraint. It's given her an excuse. My mother never needed an excuse before, but now that she has one? Oh, God. I sort of miss the days when she was a pain in the ass sober.

I keep asking myself why I do this. I have nothing to prove here. Nothing. I have already seen this as a rehearsal for her death-bed. There will be no magical moment where she suddenly has a change of heart and realises all her wrongs and begs forgiveness. Nor will there be any final confrontation. It will simply go on as it's gone for the past ten years or so: bland indifference punctuated by tiny spats of confrontation and subsequent denial. And then one day she'll be dead. And then I'll get to decide if I want to resent things forever or if this, then, is the moment where the windows snap open and all the carbon monoxide flies out while the good air rushes in.

Needless to say, it's a weird film to watch in front of my mother. I'd sooner watch out-and-out pornography in front of her.

I landed about thirty minutes into the film, during the scene where Matilda and her teacher sneak into the evil Miss Trunchbull's house. When my mother asked what the movie was about, I tried to provide a summary: "It's about this incredibly brilliant little girl, who teaches herself how to read, but her parents are terrible and pretty much ignore her all the time. But then she makes friends with her teacher--"

And at this point, Mum interrupted me: "I want to know just what was so bad about your childhood that you've always got to throw it back in my face."

Um . . . what? It honestly hadn't occurred to me, even with all the warm-fuzzies I feel toward this film, that my mother would even be perceptive enough to catch on to the undercurrent. The accusation stung more because my mother seemed to feel that I had deliberately chosen to watch this movie as a commentary against her. I was just, y'know, flipping channels. I was surprised enough that I couldn't even feel gleefully smug that even a short description of children's fantasy movie was clearly enough to produce a niggle of bad-parent guilt.

But hey, she was the one who brought it up, and she never brings anything up. "Because you never stood up for me. You never defended me against anything."

"I gave you everything you ever wanted," she said. "You just don't know. You've always liked your father better than you did me, and he never kept a job, he never send child support. Even with all that other business your stepfather did, at least he supported you."

( And it should say something that I'm cutting this part of the conversation and putting up a trigger warning. Y'all know how I feel about trigger warnings. )

I had to leave. I was so hurt, so horrified, so shocked, that I wasn't even sure I was dealing with a human being, much less my own mother. Who says these things? Really? How completely bereft of discretion and delicacy do is it possible to be? WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MORON IS SHE, ANYWAY?

The kind of moron that just came out of the hospital for a double-bypass, sadly enough. I had to leave. A shouting match would not have been good for her health. Even as I was leaving, I realised that I was not leaving because I feared for my mother's health; I was leaving because if the bitch keeled over while we were fighting, I would never live down my relatives saying that I had killed her.

So I went home. Had a smoke, had a cry. Par for the course. I feel like a damn Lady Day song.

After last night's entry--which I actually remember writing--I ended up waking again at around four in the morning, clawing at myself. It itched! I was up until about six, until Grendel had woken and gone to work, because I couldn't stand to lie still in bed. I broke out into pink welts, and God help us, my nipples are now permanently and painfully erect, and I'm sure we all needed to know that.

A quick check of the ever-handy Internets reveals that this is, in fact, a symptom of an allergic reaction to Lortab. I didn't take enough last with the last tooth to notice it, apparently, and . . . well, when you take twelve Lortab all together in a half-assed suicide attempt, you're not really paying much attention to that little wriggle between your shoulderblades.

Now is decision time. Which is worse: the jaw, or the rash?

Right now it's the jaw. Great.

Although this nipple thing is a close runner-up.

And it still doesn't work. Face still hurts. I just don't care as much about it.

And here we have put our finger upon the possible reason why Lynette never indulged in recreational pharmaceuticals: I can't deal with the side-effects. Maybe if, like Huey Lewis and the News, I could find something that was a pure high-end slab of fucked-up without making me feel like shit, I could deal with it, but please do not take that as a reason to suggest recreational drugs to me. I've heard Ecstasy is nice.

This is kind of compounded by the fact that I've spent most of the past week in and out of a CVICU ward, where people are dealing with having their ribs split open and their insides tinkered with, and I feel like a wimpy whiny drama-whore bitching about a single lousy tooth. But dammit, tell that to my face.

Already I have the strange feeling that I'm going to wake up in the morning and wonder when the hell I wrote this entry.

Pain abating. Back to bed with me.

She is at the hospital from which I live only five minutes away, and I'm too tired to decode that sentence into proper English so I'm afraid you'll all just have to grit your teeth in frustration and will it to change. Surgery was, to quote the doctor, "textbook"; she had two bypasses and some work done on a not-quite-up-to-snuff ventricle. Thursday evening through late Friday afternoon, she was in sort of a twilight haze where, while she appeared to be conscious, she had absolutely no short-term memory: when I asked her at five if she remembered me coming to visit that morning at nine, she was convinced that that had been yesterday and no power on earth would dissuade her. Frankly, it was hard enough for me to tell her drugged-up behaviour from her usual stubbornness.

Saturday was much, much better: she was still in ICU, still a little dopey, but able to sit up and feed herself and remember at five that I'd been there at one--although she was still convinced that this was my first visit since she had come to the hospital, because she had no memory of anything from being wheeled into surgery until roughly wake-up Saturday morning. Again, the nurses assured me that this was the usual thing with the medications they had given her, and again, I really couldn't tell any difference. My mother has been refuting perfectly obvious facts to me for years. I hardly bother to correct her anymore.

Sunday evening after visiting hours were done, I called around to all the relatives to explain: I had to go get a wisdom tooth extracted on Monday morning, so I would likely be in not such good shape for the rest of the day, and would everyone please go out and visit in my stead? And try to explain to Mum the situation? I had explained about dentist to her myself, but I had no idea how long she might retain that info this time around.

Monday morning I had the tooth pulled. The extraction itself went cleanly, but for some reason, after the anaesthesia wore off, my face began to swell up painfully--much worse than the last wisdom tooth, which fought like the devil against coming out and felt so much better that I was eating solid food for dinner that night. Last tooth, I got a bottle of twenty Lortabs and took three in three days. This one, I got a bottle of twenty Lortabs and have taken three in a day and a half. According to husband, I am quite hilarious on Lortab. At around seven in the evening, Mum calls to report that she has finally been moved off ICU and into a proper room. She gave me the room and telephone number, which I wrote down in what proved later to be gianormous kindergarten letters with what later proved to be a red lipliner that had sneaked into my pen-cup. Lynette stoned is fun.

Around ten in the evening, when my abilities to RP were noticeably deteriorating and I was on the verge of excusing myself before I said something both I and my character would regret, I took another half-tab and started dressing for bed. Phone rings. It's one of the Aunts. Frantic. My mother has had some sort of episode and she--my aunt, not my mother--wants me down there right away.

"Oh God," I told her, "I just had that tooth extracted today. I don't know if I'm in any shape to drive on these meds." At that point, actually, I think I had just observed to Grendel that it was kinda cool the way he could still walk straight, what with the room tipping at a forty-five degree angle and all.

Called Mum at hospital. Got a nurse who explained that my mother was having not a mere "episode", but a psychotic episode. My mother believed that she had been secretly switched, like coffee beans, to a fake hospital. She refused to believe that the RN was real, and she was convinced that the medication said RN was trying to give her were knock-out drops so that they could amputate her leg (which, being the leg from which they removed veins for the surgery, is currently blue-black and swollen). And again: this is only a short step removed from the sort of thing I get from my mother all the time.

When I arrived, I talked Mum down enough to get the meds in her. The RN was a bit openly hostile at my seeming lack of concern. I pulled the woman off into the hallway for a proper update. Meanwhile, Mum, still in her bed, shouted out at us, "I know you're talking about me! You're going to tell that woman lies about me, to make them all think I'm crazy when I'm not!"

That send a sick, dark chill straight down my neck into the bit of my stomach, like a swordswallowing trick. For those of you who have been following the Story So Far, my mother has been making that very same accusation for years--even when she was supposedly "normal" and not when she had diagnosed by a medical professional as having a psychotic episode.

Am I ashamed to feel the tiniest bit vindicated? She has been doing this for as long as I can remember . . . but only to me, never in public, never where anyone could see her, always when it must be her word against mine. Whenever I have tried to explain to anyone what she is really like--her sisters, anyone--she denies it and clams up. I was starting to feel like that poor little man on the cartoons, when the frog only sings and dances in front of him.

I explained this, as best I could, to the nurse. She believed me. It was so massively good to be believed, you just don't know: it felt like I had been smothering in a close room filling slowly with carbon monoxide and that, all at once, someone had snapped up the windows and flung the doors open. I could breathe non-crazy air again. Nurse agreed that if my mother had a psychiatric history, then this episode might not have been so unprecedented as they had first assumed: the trauma of surgery might have snapped her back into it. Only, this being my mother, she might have snapped a little less farther back than anyone previously assumed.

Long and short of it is that the hospital is going to give her twenty-four hours to fully recover from the psychotic episode, then give her a full psych-comp while they've got her there.

Hallelujah!

I went to sit with Mum a couple of hours ago. While she still believes that this is not a "real" hospital, she has not balked at taking her meds since last night, so she's sort of in a happy druggie stupor right now. When I first came in, she knew who I was, but, about the time the nurse started puttering around, she began to slip and call me "Joyce" and "Darlene"--the names of her two youngest sisters, one of whom is deceased. The nurse gave me an odd look, but I explained that Mum had been slipping up and calling me by those names for years. Both my aunts Joyce and Darlene had dark brown hair, which they wore long, the way I wear mine, hence the mistake. I have been living with it for so long, I just find it irritating, but other than the names, she has never actually mistaken me for her sisters, and she usually corrects herself immediately after.

The nurse still gave me an odd look after I had made this explanation. "But this isn't unusual?" she asked, with the real question clear in her tone: she's been doing this for how long and nobody even considered it might be a sign of anything?

How to explain it to an outsider? How to make sense of it? It doesn't do Alice any good to complain to the looking-glass people about how crazy their world is. It's the only one they know.

CANNOT MAKE JOKE. JOKE TOO EASY.

I don't think I slept long enough to have proper dreams. But dreams I did have. Only once I woke up, it gradually came to me: these weren't dreams at all. They were memories. Probably they are of absolutely no significance to anyone except me, but I'm going to write them out anyway for my own records.

( All I can remember. )

My mother's going in for bypasses on Thursday, and I find myself wondering why I care. If I care. If I'm caring at all out of affection or just to prove I'm a better person than she is. It doesn't matter what I do. Nothing will prove that. Ever.

ETA: On a much, much happier note . . . LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND. LOOK LOOK LOOK. IS MY SNOWMAN! IS FOR REAL!

Oh, Internet.

ETA2: While it would be a very sweet gesture, please, I beg of you, do not attempt to buy me a snowman necklace. I do not want a snowman necklace anymore. Let me keep my memories.

mood: woozy

I also talked to Old Boss, who, along with his boss, is still putting up a good fight to get me rehired. He totally believed me about the vodka cotton ball.

Sadly, I cannot get a dentist appointment until the seventh of July, because my regular dentist is in Nicaragua performing charity dental work on Amerindian children. I think I'm going to need more vodka.

"No-o-o-o-o," I sort of slathered, "ish my toof."

"Ah," he said, and came back a minute later with a Lortab. "Here. Take this. You will feel nothing."

"Nosshing?"

"Nothing," he assured me. "Take it whenever you're ready not to do anything for a while."

So I took it before bed-time and went to sleep and OH MY GOD. I feel nothing. I do not know how I'm awake right now. I probably should not be operating heavy machinery. The Internet, for example, counts as heavy machinery. If any of you have found some weird-ass comments on your journal in the past hour or so, I apologise regardless of their content. It seems that Lortab acts on me like Ecstasy: right now, I love you all, each in a very deep and personal way. I know now why they call it "rolling". I am walking like a sailor.

Oh, you tooth. You fucking bastard's bitch of a tooth. You are the one thing on this earth right now that I do not love. Tomorrow, you go, even if I have to call every dentist in the county to make it happen.

mood: enraged

Around six-thirty, I woke up, had a cup of tea and tried to realign my Manipura chakra while chatting with rainy_day on AIM. The phone rang. It was my aunt--my mother's sister. My mother's octogenarian sister. You know, the one who lives thirty miles away from me and who has been confined to a wheelchair for the past five years or so? The one who doesn't drive? Surely, I've told you about her. My aunt calls to inform me that my mother has just called her and instructed her to tell me that my father is in the ER--something about his heart. No further details forthcoming, save that he is in the hospital that is less than five miles away from my house. The last time I was there, I observed that I could see my own street from the tenth storey window.

OH IT GETS BETTER.

I excuse myself with rainy_day in the most curt, terrifying manner possible--"My dad's in ER, I have to run"--and dash off an equally panicky note to the husband--"Dad's in ER at [hospital's name here], back soon"--and scrape up the nose of my car trying to get out of my front yard and oh! did I mention the Vicodin?

IT GETS BETTER.

I hop a curb going into the ER car park five minutes later. As I'm wheeling around like a madwoman searching for a parking spot, I spy two people who look irresistibly like my mother and father getting into what appears from a distance to be my father's van. I jerk to a halt beside them and, lo and behold, who should it be but my mother.

Mum explains the whole matter quite calmly: while at the hospital for a routine check-up, the doctor suspected my father had a heart murmur. They kept him for a few hours for observation, then made an appointment for him to see another doc on Monday and sent them along their merry way.

I am too doped up to mention any of my own pressing concerns, such as why did you call your sister when I live five minutes away? and why didn't I get any of this information three hours ago? and how fucking tightly wrapped are you, Mum? Seriously? Were you dropped on your head as a child? Will you just admit that you stole me from my real parents so I lay off all these fucking DNA tests?

WAIT, WAIT, IT GETS BETTER.

I drive home, furious. Fortunately, Grendel isn't home and my note is still propped where I left it. I toss the note, tell rainy_day that my mother's a retard, and go to get my shower.

Just as I'm stepping out of the shower and reaching for my towel, I hear a pounding at the bathroom door: "Lynette! Lynette! What's wrong? Where's your father?"

In the ten minutes it took me to go to the hospital and drive home, the husband had found my note and immediately dashed off to the hospital himself, just missing me and my father leaving. He spent fifteen minutes shaking down security guards before finally coming home in a panic to wait for me. In the meanwhile he is incredibly upset and having flashbacks to his own father's death a few years ago. When I finally tell him all of the above, he goes into several minutes' worth of outraged jibberish, a few minutes' worth of crying, and then finally calms down.

"I don't know why I'm surprised," he says. "Your mother did something stupid. This is not news."

mood: surprised

Husband just woke me up, after I'd had a hectic night of sleep--dragging around with a sore throat and a slight fever from toothache--to stunning news: husband stopped by my old shop on his way to a day-shift at work. My old boss asked after me. HE BEGGED ME TO COME BACK. According to husband, boss says I have had a huge crowd of people asking after me and my former boss just can't keep help after I left. So they're making an exception to let me back in.

AND YOU ALL THOUGHT THIS NEW ZEALANDER THING WAS KIND OF CREEPY ON THE POLL.

I am going to get dressed and very gingerly brush my teeth and go try to score my job back.

Yay!