Michele and I went to see the new Batman movie (“Batman Begins”) yesterday afternoon. We noticed that our favorite multiplex now sports an IMAX theater, complete with a huge screen and over amped speakers. So we decided to see it there.
The matinée price was $9 each. Rather steep, but acceptable - after all we were going to see the movie in a special way. Right? Riiiight.
Arriving 15 minutes before show time we discovered that the theater was nearly full. Only single seats here and there between groups of people were available, and the only seats together were in the second row. Learn from my experience, do not, EVER, sit in the second row of an IMAX style movie. Particularly if you wear bifocals. The screen was so big and so close that I was unable to see all of the picture in focus at once.
Since the edges of the screen were beyond the range of my vision the action sequences were painfully disorienting to watch. I was unable to keep my focus on anything faster than a pan across the scene, so the fight scenes were lost in a multi-colored blur. Or would have been had the picture been bright enough to have color.
You see, viewing it from the extreme angle we had, the top third of the screen and outer quarter on each side of the screen, were dim, almost unlit. IMAX uses a curved screen, and is best viewed from some distance away. The local theater chain, in an effort to make money, gives up any shot at customer satisfaction, but putting seats so close that you can’t really view the movie.
Having seen many IMAX productions in the past from a proper seating perspective I know that it provides an unparalleled visual and auditory experience. However, the greed of the Hollywood movie industry was evident since the seating in this theater was designed for maximum sales and not viewer satisfaction.
We won’t be watching a Hollywood release in IMAX again any time soon.
A year ago this weekend (June 26th, to be exact) Michele and I abandoned our house in Illinois to move to Overland Park. On Friday afternoon we rented a 14 foot U-Haul truck for the one-way trip to Kansas. Friday evening was spent gathering those items we wanted for the two weeks before the movers would arrive with the rest of our belongings. I was up until well past midnight tearing down our computers and packing them for the journey.
Saturday was in a word brutal. Emotionally we were spent from our months long fight to stay in Springfield, to keep our house and pool, to not have to move again. Last minute phone calls to two separate consulting firms that had potential area jobs failed to rescue us from our fate. In order to ensure we had an apartment to move into Michele had to leave several hours before me - the apartment office closed at 5:00 and she had to make the 375 mile drive before then. Taz, our youngest cat, rode with her in the car. We were both bawling by the time she left.
I spent the final hours in my house furiously packing the items I knew we would want and need in the apartment. Nekko, the older cat, mewed constantly from the confines of her carrier. In the past she has not traveled well and I was worried about needing to get her a shot to ease her through the trip. By noon I was on the way to the dump with the last of the garbage, and to the cable company to turn in their equipment. Before I had traveled two miles Nekko was producing mucus and retching. After dropping off the cable boxes I went to the vet and they gave her a couple of pills that calmed my poor upset kitty.
With only one cell phone there was no way I could contact Michele or know what she was experiencing. I set off for Kansas almost three hours after she had left in a truck that whistled loudly above 45 mph. By six that evening I had made it to Overland Park, only to be halted by construction delays on the interstate bypass. I had called the rental office and left a message for Michele to let her know approximately when I would arrive.
I was never so happy as when I saw her again and knew she was okay, that the separate part of our ordeal was over. We spent the evening putting together our bed and setting up our computers. Sunday morning we ventured out for our first breakfast as Kansas residents. The rest of that day was spent in an exhausted haze putting the kitchen together, and emptying the truck for its return to U-Haul.
Thanks to “state trait” memory I have managed to forget much of the pain, emotional and physical, of that weekend. It is almost as if those two and a half days happened to someone else, not me. Ten days later our movers arrived with the remaining four tons (yes 8,000 pounds) of our stuff. The apartment was filled to the brim with furniture and boxes, our tiny garage stall was stuffed, and our storage locker was full. By August we had rented a second locker and filled it to capacity as well.
Over the past year we had adapted to apartment living again. It is tolerable if not livable. Over Christmas, when we returned to central Illinois to see my family, we drove within three miles of the Pawnee house; we didn’t stop to look. Even today, a year after I last saw it I have no desire to see it again. Especially now that it has been sold. That house was our first true home together, a place where we felt comfortable, a place where we felt belonging.
Today I find my belonging with Michele. The physical place we inhabit isn’t nearly as important has sharing that space with her, and with my two cats. I know that we will own a house again. I just hope that we can move in a far less stressful way to that place.
Go. Participate. Be the curve.
Several years ago I was depressed enough that I sought medical help in the form of Paxil. I was only on the drug for maybe 35 or 40 days. At the time it was enough of a boost to bring me back to a normal sinus rhythm of ups and downs. Since then I haven’t felt like I needed any assistance. The strength and depth of my relationship with Michele has given me a powerful tool to combat what I feel is my tendency towards melancholy. The past 15 months have beaten me down to the point were the joy and peace I find in my relationship with Michele is no longer strong enough to lift me out of depression.
In the past few weeks I have lost my appetite, and I am having increasing difficulty sleeping. My mood is foul all the time, and I am openly thinking about suicide again. I know that many people consider thought of suicide dangerous and an indication of mental instability. I believe that suppressing thoughts of ending your life ultimately cause more pain, perhaps even bringing on that finality. Open expression of all your feelings is the only way to remove their immediate hold over you. The trick is to express in a constructive, healthy way, and not in a manner that only adds to the pain.
Usually I turn to Michele and lean on her wisdom, love, and belief in me to get me past these moods. However, she is struggling with her own depression. With the recent death of her mother she is facing some incredibly difficult emotions herself. Coming at the end of a very long and difficult year that only gets us half way to daylight again, losing her sole remaining parent has had a huge impact on her. My fear is that together we may feed off each other’s pain and depression rather than providing the safe place to fall we are used to sharing.
I do not appreciate or believe in medical (i.e., drug) solutions to my problems. The drug-based medical model we have today supports the idea that issues should be reduced to something you live with rather than actually solved. Managed health care has reduced doctors to seeing patients for bare minutes at a time. Personal understanding of the entire history of a situation never happens. If a drug can reduce my dependency on seeing the doctor, then that solution is enough. I think this is wrong and I do not support this approach to managing my physical, mental, or emotional health.
Having said that, I do think that medicine provides some valuable tools, which, when used properly, can and do improve a persons quality of life. The trick is being an active participant in the process of selecting a treatment and following through on its delivery. In the fall of 2000 when I had an umbilical hernia I sought out a surgeon only after I knew what the recommended treatment options were. I controlled the treatment as much as he did. This partnership resulted in a very successful procedure that eliminated my problem.
Throughout the 1990s I tried to deal with difficulty swallowing. In this case I was not an equal partner in selecting a treatment or in following through on its execution. Ultimately the treatments (six out-patient surgeries) failed to improve my quality of life. In fact the idea of facing out-patient surgery every 5 months for the rest of my life was intolerable. With the support and assistance of my wife I have learned how to alter my eating habits, and how to address the causes of emotional stress in my life, so as to reduce my throat incidents in severity and frequency. Yes I still have to live with this condition, but now that I am actively participating in a course of action to deal with it I feel better all the time.
Recognizing that depression is a default emotional position for me is hard. It feels dirty and bad. My fears of losing my mind in the folds of the depression are heightened. Not acknowledging this truth is worse as I can then turn a blind eye to my situation, which allows it to grow unabated and unchecked. Taking an active participation role is hard as the very depression I am trying to overcome saps my will to change and overcome. I feel that this is a case where I need medical assistance in the form of a mood elevator. A month or two of elevation to a “normal” emotional sinus rhythm will give me enough extra energy to begin to address the unexpressed emotions that are currently cluttering up my life. Without some kind of active intervention I fear that I will continue to spiral down from my current dysthymic level to true clinical depression. Having fought my way up from dysthymia once before I have no desire to discover how tough it is to defeat clinical depression.
So I am off to find a pill pusher who will provide the mood elevator I need with the least level of invasion into my life.
How ironically depressing.
Michele is teaching an on-the-ground (as opposed to online) class Wednesday evenings this summer. The facility is a rural elementary school, complete with pint sized chairs and desks. Some of the taller students literally have the desk between their knees when they sit down.
As I thought about this I realized that my college experience was vastly different than the one people looking for a second career have. I went to a medium sized midwestern university complete with varied building architectures and a quadrangle. A significant part of my university experience was the setting; for the students hunched over tiny desks in a refurbished Quonset hut the focus is truly on the education.
My wife went back to school after working for ten years to get her degrees and a second career. Now many of her students are having a similar experience; an experience that I can only imagine. Having contemplated changing my career on more than one occasion I can and do respect the courage it takes to dedicate yourself to night school.
Having visited her classroom and seeing the challenges people will endure to gain an education, I have a new hope for the future of our society. Real change always happens from the bottom up and these students are making a difference by changing themselves.
I recently learned that my parents, who have lived in the same house since 1962, are considering the possibility of selling it. Without having talked to them in any detail about the reasons, I suspect that it is starting to become problematic for them.
The house itself was built in the early 1950s, so it is fast approaching 60 years of age. They have lovingly maintained it and updated it over the years, but as with all structures there is always one more thing that needs doing. As is typical in the midwest the house sits on a full basement, and in typical “man” design, the laundry is downstairs. Eventually having 13 steps between them and clean clothes will become an issue.
So I understand the reasoning behind thoughts of selling and moving into a maintenance free dwelling that is all on one level. But another part of me cries out at the thought of the only childhood home I’ve ever known being sold to someone else. I’d never be able to go back there again.
Michele has lived in 13 states, and perhaps three times that many locations within those states. Her childhood home is an idea that lives in her heart not a physical place she can return to and touch. The house I grew up in has always been there. I’ve never not had that as my childhood home. It seems odd that as a middle aged man I have to face for the first time losing my first home.
Ultimately it’s just a building. And I’ll learn to fill in whatever gap it may leave behind as it moves out of my life permanently. But the initial shock of no longer have that house to go to will be an interesting growth experience for me.
Yesterday Michele and I traveled home from Norfolk. On Friday evening, after the funeral was completed we decided to return to Norfolk and spend the night in a motel with shuttle service to the airport. Our flight was at 9:10 am, and we didn’t want to be up at 4:00 to make the long drive from Currituck County to the airport.
Michele’s aunts Betty, Sandra, and Peggy came with us and dropped us off at the hotel. We availed ourselves of a surprisingly good room service menu and watched some mindless television in the room. The hotel was attached to a large indoor mall, and the mall parking lot turned out to be the place for crusin’ with the stereo blasting. Our room, on the fifth floor, reverberated to each and every thump from the lot it faced below. Finally, about 9:40 we called the desk to complain. While mall security was called, and the noise abated for a few minutes, the incessant thump returned by 10:00. The second call to the desk got us a new room, higher in the building and facing away from the lot.
With a 6:30 am shuttle we decided to get up at 5:30. Michele, who was by this time running on only a few hours of sleep for the past three nights, was once again plagued by sleeplessness. She was awake by 2:30.
By 7:00 or shortly before we were in line at the Northwest checkin counter. Imagine our dismay to learn that the helpful reservations clerk I’d spoken to two days prior had moved our flight to Friday morning and not Saturday morning like I had requested. The 9:10 flight was full. They were able to get us on the 12:30 flight leaving us with over 5 hours to waste in the airport. We had some breakfast and then, since we were both exhausted beyond words by this point, we found a couple of chairs off to the side of the terminal and collapsed.
Midway through our flight to Detroit, where we were due to change planes, I noticed that we were spending a lot of time turning to the right. We were circling - never a good sign. Eventually the captain came on the intercom and told us that severe weather had closed the Detroit airport and that we were diverting to Cleveland for more gas. Then he came on and said we were going to Toledo. Then he came on and said that, nope, we were going to Cleveland as the weather that had closed Detroit was headed towards Toledo. Our frayed nerves were growing even more tense with all the added drama of the flight.
Luckily our connection was still several hours away, so we had time for all the hurry up and wait activities that ensued. We spent perhaps two hours total on the ground in Cleveland taxing, waiting, getting increasingly hot and humid as the plane’s reduced power on the ground failed to keep the A/C running at full capacity.
We made the twenty minute flight to Detroit just in time for us to have 40 minutes to change gates. Naturally we landed at gate 72 with our connection at gate 11. And with the weather delays the terminal was jammed with other weary and irritable travelers. Fortunately the Detroit airport sports an indoor elevated electric tram that whisks you to your gate. We made our connection with 5 minutes to spare.
The last flight into Kansas City was largely uneventful, but the plane was full of 20 or so high school choir members and their chaperons returning from Jamaica and a cruise. Their boisterousness was hard to take on 3 hours of sleep, after 12 hours of travel. We finally reached our car about 7:00, after more than 15 hours of constant travel for 1200 miles of distance.
Increased wait times as bags are inspected and tagged, being physically searched, the lack of food during the flight, cramped and loud seating on board, coupled with delays and needless drama have all combined to make flying just about impossible to enjoy anymore. Granted this trip was difficult for numerous reasons, but having the actual travel itself be so stressful was really difficult. I think it will be a long time before we fly anywhere again. For any reason.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night Tuesday morning, at about 2:40 the phone rang walking us both up. By the time I reached it in the living room the voice mail system had already grabbed it. While I was waiting for the message waiting light to flash I checked in the incoming call log to see who had called. The number started with the (252) area code for eastern North Carolina where Michele’s mom lived.
I knew that the call was not a wrong number, and that it was bad news.
The message was that Michele’s mom, Virginia, was in the hospital and was not doing well. Over the next hour or two we had a series of phone conversations with the medical staff, and Michele’s Aunt Betty about the situation. Virginia’s condition was severe and her prognosis was bleak. She was not expected to live the day.
Michele said that she wanted to go there to be with her mom. Calling the airlines I was able to reserve two seats on a 1:30 flight out of KCI that would put us into Norfolk VA by 7:00 pm Eastern time. Her mom had been transferred to a hospital there, as the smaller region hospital in her Outer Banks home was not equipped to provide the care she needed.
While we waited for more details and packed our bags the day nurse, named Heather, at in the Critical Care Unit where Virginia was, called; she had Virginia on the line. Michele was able to talk to her mom briefly. She was able to tell her that she loved her, that she was on her way to see her, and to hear her mom say she loved her back.
Thank you Heather, you provided Michele with the last chance she had to talk to her mom.
By 10 am we had borrowed funds from my family to help us cover the travel expenses, talked to the apartment management about watching our cats, called both our employers, and were on our way to the airport.
On Flying the Same Day You Buy Tickets Flying in this country since 9/11 has been a miserable experience. While I appreciate the need to take steps following the horrific hijackings four years ago, the systems in place are often frustrating for travelers. Take us for example. We were traveling on “medical emergency” tickets to reach a dying family member before they died. But since we purchased our tickets at the counter mere minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave we were “selected” for additional screening. Every item in our checked baggage was taken out and inspected. Every item in our carry on luggage was similarly handled. We were both extensively scanned with a handheld wand before being lightly patted down. You see, by not having the grace to schedule this bereavement flight in advance, we matched a profile the air traffic security people feel is dangerous.
Everyone was incredible polite and gentle throughout this process, but it was hard given the stress of the moment and the purpose of our trip not to give into indignation over our treatment.
Saying Goodbye We arrived safely in Norfolk on time, and were met by Michele’s brother, Lee. By 8:00 we had arrived at the hospital and were in Virginia’s room in the CCU. Her mom had been admitted to the hospital in incredible pain from an untreated blood disease that was causing her body to die. Virginia had refused all medical treatment of her disease for almost three years and her internal organs were dying. Before we left Kansas Michele had talked to her brother and to the attending doctor about providing her mom comfort care only. As a result Virginia was on a morphine drip, but no other measures were being taken. Before we arrived they had even stopped measuring her vital signs, as they were no longer detectable. Only the strength of her heart was keeping her alive.
Michele was able to sit at her mother’s bedside and hold her hand and tell her goodbye in person. I know that walking into that room and seeing her mom’s frail and withered body was the hardest thing Michele has ever had to do in her life.
We spent a couple of hours with Virginia that evening; sometimes talking to her, some times talking to each other, always accompanied by the slow labored sound of her breathing. A gasp followed by a long gurgling exhale before a long pause, and then over again.
About 10 that evening we decided that we would go get a room nearby and try to get some rest. Three of Virginia’s six sisters were present, as well as Michele and her brother; they were getting ready to return to the Outer Banks. Everyone leaned over and said goodbye to Virginia with a soft caress, gentle words, and love.
We had not been in our room for more than 5 minutes when my cell phone rang with a call from Lisa, the night nurse, informing us of Virginia’s death. She died peacefully in her sleep shortly after 11:00 pm that evening.
Over the months leading up to her mother’s death, Michele had known it was approaching, and had talked to her mom about her wanting to die, and about saying goodbye. Michele was able to reach a place of peace with her mom; being able to say good-bye in person one more time was just the final measure of peace.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “vpm.jpg” }} Virginia Parker McAvoy (born March 12, 1923 - died June 7, 2005)
I’ve been using email in one form or another since the early 1980s. Then I worked for a midwestern utility company that had a mainframe based email package that, while cumbersome by today’s standards, worked and was my introduction to the wide-world of electronic communication.
Since leaving that company in the mid 1990s I’ve worked as a consultant for a variety of companies, using a variety of email packages. Eight of the past ten years have been for government agencies which seem to be wed to GroupWise as an email platform. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with GroupWise. It works well enough, but the interface is clunky by 2005 standards. One major factor in its favor is that it isn’t as prone to viruses, worms, and mail script problems like, say, Outlook.
For about two weeks in the late spring of 2000 I worked on an assignment at a software development company, where Outlook was used. It took about three days to get my id setup and established through their technical center. On my fourth day there the “I Love You” virus was introduced to the company, and the 2000 or so email addresses in the company-wide address book spammed each other until the whole system ground to a halt. I left that assignment before Outlook was really back on its feet again.
My current client is in the later stages of rolling out Outlook in place of GroupWise. As a consultant I’m in the last group to be transitioned to the new platform. A part of me is looking forward to finally getting to use Outlook in a work setting, and another part is curious to see how long before some virus/worm/script brings the whole outfit to its knees.