Witnessing

I took Sophie to her quarterly visit with Nice Neurologist yesterday afternoon. Here's a caregiver tip: take someone with you when you visit a doctor, and you won't be reduced to your usual Psychotic Visiting The Doctor PTSD Self. Saint Mirtha came with me yesterday, and aside from the tremendous help she provides lifting the 4,000 pound wheelchair into and out of the back of my car and ministering to Sophie in the back-seat, her presence just calms me. I felt less chaotic, less alone, less like the person careening into space on my old copy of Sartre's La Nausée. I'm perfectly capable of doing these things by myself and have done so, but it's gotten very, very old in this the two thousandth and eighteenth year of our lord. During the visit with Nice Neurologist, I did my usual and asked him to reverse places so that I was sitting at his desk on the swivel chair and he sat next to Sophie on a folding chair. So I can better explain to you what's going on with Sophie, I said, and use the time to tell you about CBDA, about how I've been weaning the benzo and what dose you'll need to write a prescription for her at this point. Just kidding with the switching chairs. I used to call these visits with All the Neurologists The $475 Reflex Check, but these days I've noticed that All the Neurologists barely touch their patients, much less check their reflexes. Nice Neurologist is so open, though, and he generally has some interesting information about something or other related to immunology or studies being done on mice or genetics -- information that he doles out in a hopeful tone as it might distantly relate to Sophie in between the schooling that I'm doing. He writes down everything I say about CBD and now CBDA, and when I encouraged him to watch Sanjay Gupta's latest show on opioids and cannabis medicine, we had a healthy discussion about the fuckery of the Sackler family and Big Pharma pushing them on the country back in the day. I think I inserted somewhere in this discussion that I'd die happy if The Neurology Community recanted their stance on benzos, particularly with epilepsy patients, and I remember him looking a bit sheepish (was it the eyebrows or the mouth?) and not acknowledging it. He was, in fact, there to write that scrip for the benzo that Sophie's been on for eleven years and not much else. Sigh. Nice Neurologist is awesome, actually, in the long line of Neurologists Sophie and I have encountered during the last twenty-three years. I'm grateful for his attention even as I'm painfully aware that I'm sort of running the show. I made an appointment to bring Sophie back in mid-July and then wheeled her out to the waiting room to join Saint Mirtha who, when we left the office and went down into the parking garage, helped me put Sophie into the car and lift the 4,000 pound wheelchair into the back, even as the four Grown Ass Male Valets stood watching us, gawking. On another day I might have made some caustic remark to one of the men or even shoved them in my mind into one of the luxury cars out-sexing my Sexy Mazda and locked all the doors. Here's a caregiver tip: take someone with you when you visit a doctor, and you won't be reduced to your usual Psychotic Visiting the Doctor PTSD Self. You'll have a witness to all of it.

French intellectuals, lesbians, red vines and me

So, I don't think I'm ready for a lesbian relationship, yet, but the movie was pretty decent for a French intellectual one. Just in case you've forgotten, I was a French major in college and while I found myself ever deeper into the commitment of it -- advanced linguistics! idiomatic expressions! medieval poetry! the existentialists! Pascal! Baudelaire! -- I was unable to extricate myself even as I found all the reading and the writing miserable. French literature never did get me, or pull me in or dig down deep into my soul, with the possible exception of Sartre's Nausee that I read while swinging in a hammock on the front porch of the shack I lived in at the time in North Carolina. That book actually made me feel nauseous which I guess is as good a reaction as any to a piece of literature. As for French movies, with the possible exception of Jules et Jim and those Manon des Sources ones, as well as an early infatuation with Gerard Depardieu (who's gone utterly bonkers, evidently, but when he was young -- oh, when he was young!), I'm hard put to remember a single one that didn't make me squirm uncomfortably. Maybe it's the peasant Italian in me or something, but the intellectual pretensions of the French irritate the hell out of me, and and even sexual couplings, in French, leave me cold because they seem so conscious and studied. Even Last Tango in Paris appealed to me because I adore Marlon Brando and there's no real talking in it other than get the butter. Does that make sense? In any case, Blue is the Warmest Color has some of the most graphic sex scenes that I've ever seen in a movie theater (I won't tell you about the time I went to a porn drive-in with a boyfriend and batted away mosquitoes that kept flying through the car window that we had to leave open to hear the moaning of the actors on the big screen), and it was weird to sit and watch them, alone, with a big bucket of popcorn and some Red Vines. The two stars were beautiful and really good actors, the story was intensely romantic (the French did invent the expression coup de foudre), but there was an air-brushed quality to it, too, and I was aware the entire time that a man filmed it. Because one of the women characters was an Artist, there was some requisite art criticism which I find unbearably painful in any language, but there was some great smart talk about literature, too. But those sex scenes -- whew! Long and -- well -- long. There were many lesbians in the movie theater, and I felt like a big dork, to tell you the truth, but it would have been worse if the theater were filled with a bunch of heterosexual males.

Anyhoo. That's the extent of my review of Blue is the Warmest Color, and I think I'll stick with the Javier Bardem fantasies.

As an aside, the photo above is Oliver and Henry who took a Metrolink train down to Orange County to visit some friends yesterday while their mother went to the French intellectual lesbian movie and ate a bucket of popcorn and a package of Red Vines.

Monday Whatevers

I wrote a post last night that was supposed to go up this morning, but I woke up with a start and realized that it might be a teensy-tinesy bit offensive, so in a sleepy daze I opened my computer and cancelled it. Here's an excerpt of an article titled Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus by Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.


The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx) reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

You can read this article and get an idea on what my post might have been about. Think family and differences in opinion. Think about discussing religion and politics to someone on the opposite side of the spectrum who is also your relative.

Ouch.


I did find this beautiful painting that I posted at the top, because Jacob wrestling with the angel is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I've written about it here.

Vision After the Sermon: Jakob Wrestling with the Angel
Paul Gauguin 1888

In other news, I'm still collecting comments for a chance to win a $100 gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods. Don't you want to read or re-read about my efforts to be a good sports mom to my boys? Go HERE.

In yet more news, I have not ONE but TWO IEPs this week. My youngest son has some reading difficulties, and his IEP is actually a piece of cake, but I anticipate some fireworks at Sophie's. Not to mention the yearly bout of butterflies, depression and despair that the IEP generally brings, no matter how many times one has done it.

La Nausee. (that's French for nausea with an accent aigu). I read Sartre's book of the same title while studying French in college. I lay in a tire swing on the front porch of the house I lived in which we had christened The Shanty and parsed out the novel's spare French angst. Here's a picture of my copy which I still have:

Creepy, right? There appear to be dead trees and plants still growing out of the guy's head. I think that's symbolic, and perhaps I had a presentiment twenty-five years ago of my future with the Los Angeles Unified School District. I hated Sartre just about as much as I hate IEPs, even though I did love lying on that paint chippee porch with my best girl friends.

On the plus side, I'm grateful that the Individualized Education Plan actually exists and that my children's needs are accommodated, however haphazardly. When I dropped Sophie off at school this morning, I realized that I actually love her aide. I realized that I needed to write an entire post about Renita. I'm going to do that one of these days.