Before I decide to watch the news, I have to decide whether or not I am emotionally ready. Years ago while watching news coverage of the Tiananmen Square Massacre I began to cry. Alex was seated on the couch next to me, and he asked me why I was crying. “You don’t know any of those people”, he said. I was shocked and at that time wondered if perhaps I feel things more than most people, or if he feels less.

When I started to read about Asa Coon and the Ohio school shootings I sadly wasn’t surprised to see that they listed the fact that he was a “Goth” who wore a trench coat and liked Marilyn Manson’s music before they listed his previous suicide attempt while in a mental health care facility, the fact that students had tried to speak with the principal about threats he had made but she was always too busy, or the mental health facility’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder and their suggestion of further evaluation.

At times like this it’s not hard to think of Columbine. “See”, people can say now, “all of the boys listened to Marilyn Manson and wore trench coats.” If a violent video game connection can be made it too will be used. Some might check if Asa came from a broken home, if he suffered abuse, if he was breastfed. There has to be more to it than that. Andrew Kehoe killed 45 people in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927.This would obviously have taken place before the advent of violence in the media. I can remember after the shooting in Columbine someone asking Marilyn Manson what he would say if he could talk to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. “I wouldn’t say anything. I would listen”, was his reply. I think the same holds true here.

While it’s easy to make this a case of violence in the media, or mental illness left untreated, that’s too easy. I honestly don’t think that you can blame one solitary factor or combinations thereof to explain why some people snap and kill others and/or themselves and others do not. Yes, there were warnings signs. Yes, obviously something should have been done to help Asa Coon before this event. But I don’t think you’ll find the answer to his troubled mind in his favorite musician. Does anyone even know that Seung-Hui Cho listened to Collective Soul?

Recently, I have found myself gripped by a story The Oregonian has been covering about a woman named Lovelle Svart; a woman who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer five years ago. I am usually not a big reader of the local newspaper, but for some reason we have been getting one delivered to our house every morning for free. My mornings start out even earlier than they used to now that I have Maggie. When she wakes up she has to pee immediately; that means there’s no time for me to use the toilet or to (oh how I miss it) linger over a nice cup of coffee while the whole house is still asleep.

Having a puppy means that I also have to be careful about the clothes I wear to bed, or the lack thereof, because I may have to run out at an ungodly hour in a see through nightgown because I’ve misplaced my robe and it’s awkward enough that I met my new next door neighbor when I flew out the door with a puppy on a leash as I was pulling on jeans that I’d yet to button or zip. He smiled and nodded in hello, and I nodded, no smile.

Now I have come to expect my free paper every morning. My mom guessed that they might be doing a free trial and soon they will contact me and say, “Hey didn’t you like that. Don’t you want to sign up?”

Here in Oregon we have legal doctor assisted suicide. I have voted many times on many different issues. I take the matter seriously, doing research if necessary, and thinking carefully before I cast my vote. I have even called my sister Monica over ballot measures; asking her advice about one or two that I’ve read over and over again and I still can’t figure out, only to hear her flipping through her voter’s manual and saying , “Yeah, I don’t get that one either.” My mom usually offers the helpful “If it raises taxes, vote against it.” As far as the matter of doctor assisted suicide I didn’t have to think about it long before deciding that I agreed that it was not my place to tell terminally ill people they should have to go on suffering if it is their wish to end their lives. I have seen people who were dying from cancer and it is a horrible thing to witness.

I have thought about my vote off and on over the years. I have wondered about the people who filled the prescription and actually used it. Through Lovelle’s account, I was able to hear the story of a dying woman who decided to fill her prescription for the medication that would end her life. She made a statement, “I am not brave.” I think that judging the suicide, assisted or otherwise, of someone who is dying isn’t a place I would even dare to tread. Nor do I care to. I do believe, however, that by letting us into her life as she neared the end of it, Lovelle was undeniably brave. Whether people agreed with her or not, she brought death and dying right to the front page and opened up communication about a subject that remains largely taboo to many people. She sparked controversy and debate and for that I thank her. I highly recommend checking out the link to the story, no matter which side you’re on in this controversial issue.

I just wanted to say Fuck You. And thanks, by the way, for giving me even more ways to answer the inevitable question I get, “Why did you leave the Catholic church?”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094/?GT1=10150

Tuesday my Mom and I went to pick up my daughter from school. She rushed out of the doors all excited about free cone day at Ben and Jerry’s. Seeing how important it was to her I did what any good Mom would do, I offered to take her for ice cream at Coldstone or Baskin and Robbins or anywhere but Ben and Jerry’s. You see, we have done the free cone thing twice before, and waiting in a line that wraps all the way around the block for over an hour for a free cone just isn’t worth it to me. I would rather pay for a cone and get in and out quickly. She of course started whining, and all of her friends were going and my mom did the whole, “Oh Tammy, you have to let her go.” I caved. We ended up sitting in my mom’s car parked where I could keep an eye on her in line.

My Mom and I started talking and she brought up the shootings at Virginia Tech. I didn’t really want to talk about it. These events don’t seem to shock me; they just sadden and sicken me now. Plus, it seems that the media turns the killer(s) into some sort of celebrity every time something like this happens and I try not to get caught up in the frenzy.

“He was from Korea” my Mom said. “Uh, huh”, I replied. “North or South?” my Mom asked. “I don’t know!” and at this point I shot her a look. “I guess he was a loner and nobody really liked him”, she continued.

“And they certainly don’t like him now!” I exploded. I mean what the fuck?

Yes, he sounds as if he was a mentally ill man who had been suffering for quite some time. Yes, possibly he could have/should have been helped, but where can you really lay the blame for that? He obviously had it together enough to plan out the massacre, film his videos, and mail them and to go forward with the shooting.

I think it was Dennis Miller who said, “When someone gets to the point where they get off by offing others it’s time for them to do the world a favor and just off themselves” and I agree.

My heart goes out to everyone who is suffering as a result of one man’s sick actions.

When Polly was little she went through this stage where we couldn’t get her to stay in her bed at night because she was afraid of monsters. I used to sit by her bedside and try to calm her down by softly whispering, “There are no monsters.”

“Do you promise?” she would whisper back and when I did promise I would think of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, kidnappers and the lot and wonder how on earth I was ever going to be able to feel safe letting my children out into this world alone. I still wonder.

Or was a brilliant conversationalist.

I hate it when people define beauty.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/02/14/cleopatra.coin/index.html

There was no way to escape this news, but I personally didn’t want to see photos showing his last moments or videos of his death. Some might say that this is because it brings up emotions about my father’s suicide, and the fact that he used a jump rope to make a noose and end his life, but I think there’s more to it than that. For many years now I have tried to be selective about the images I allow into my brain. I wonder about people who like to watch such things, or to view such photos. I understand that he brought a great amount of pain to an unimaginably large amount of people. For many his death brings joy and relief and maybe even a certain amount of healing. I choose not to look.

When it was time for me to attend high school my Mom thought that of course I would attend the one my three older siblings had gone to. I wanted a fresh start. My sister Monica got pregnant her junior year and stayed in school, despite the controversy surrounding an unmarried teenage girl in a Catholic school. She was treated horribly by many members of the staff and the students at that school. She stayed on and made the honor roll and even performed in many plays for her drama class. I can remember being worried for her. She seemed so tiny at 5 feet tall a little over 100 lbs. but she remained strong and raised her son with pride. Her picture was mysteriously missing from the yearbooks. Her son was born when I was 12; he is now a handsome, smart, funny 21 year old man. I begged my Mom to allow me to go to a different school and she finally relented. I picked an all girl Catholic school as my Mom was still a practicing Catholic at that time and she insisted on private education for us. I thought naively that no one would know a thing about me but it was in my records that my father had committed suicide.

I made one friend at that school, a junior who was the only openly lesbian student, and she ruffled a lot of feathers for not backing down from her belief that some people were born gay, and that it was okay. At that time I told those who asked that my father had died of a heart attack. I didn’t realize that my friend, who had a sister who was my health teacher, knew the truth the whole time. Her sister had read my records and told her. She never confronted me about my lie.

One day a man came to the school and there was a mandatory assembly. He was there to talk with us about teen suicide and throughout his speech he warned us repeatedly that he was going to be showing us graphic slides on a large screen of teens who had ended their lives by various methods of suicide. My heart was racing; my body broke out in a cold sweat. I realize now that I was having a panic attack but at that time I didn’t know the name of the feelings I experienced. I was sitting next to my friend and when the time neared for the photos to be shown I felt myself get up and start walking with trembling legs towards the door. I didn’t realize that my friend was following me. When we got to the exit door we found it blocked by some of the nuns who taught there. I opened my mouth but no words came out. I heard my friend say, “She doesn’t need to see this” and she took my arm and pushed me past the nuns, out the doors and led me down the hall. We left the school. I felt the air hit my face and I began to calm down. We went across the street to sit on a bench and smoke. Even though I knew at that moment they were calling my Mom at work and reporting my behavior I was no longer afraid. My friend sat beside me silently.

The panic left my body and I knew that when I got home I wouldn’t be in trouble. I knew that I only had to explain what the pictures were and my Mom would understand why I fled. I lost contact with that friend after she went to NYU, but I’ve never forgotten the comfort I derived from being with her. I hope she is happy, wherever she is.

Everything went well at my last doctor’s appointment. I did tell her about what the other doctor said to me when I went in before with an infection. She was very apologetic and spent a good half hour talking with me. I like her. She treats me like a person. I switched my prescriptions over to her as I am no longer seeing a psychiatrist. She reminded me how well Effexor worked for me back in 2004 and so I decided to give it another try. I am currently taking 150 mg. per day. I long for the day when depression, panic and anxiety are just memories of my past instead of realities of my present. I hope to one day be able to help others who are struggling to function due to mental illness.

I start college soon and I am nervous and excited about it. I spoke with my Mom last night and she said that she believes 2007 will be the best year ever for me. I want to believe and then breathe it into life. Happy New Year to all.

A lot of people are without power here and further up North after a wind storm but we were lucky. Alex is off work for a few days and so I don’t have to worry about him getting to and from.

I find myself just wanting to stay inside until Christmas, ordering all of my Christmas presents online and having my groceries delivered. I am tired of being cold and wet. I am tired of the crowds. If I win lotto I am going to hire a car and driver. I don’t even care what kind of car it is, I just don’t want to have to drive. All of the cars seem to be going so fast to me. I feel better when my feet are on the ground. I don’t understand all of the celebrities getting DUIs. They can’t call a cab?

It is almost Christmas and it feels all wrong. It doesn’t seem real.

My camera is still broken. I have the money to have it fixed; it’s just such a long bus ride. I already spend hours on public transportation each week. People of the world, bathing and deodorant are good things. Putting on so much cologne or perfume that you almost kill your fellow passengers, as if you are wielding a large atomizer of Human Raid, isn’t kind to fellow humans. People of the world, do not put on “extra” because you think it will fade on your way to work/school/your probation officer. What is fading is the person sitting beside you. I want to open a window but if I do there is always at least one person who bitches about being cold and letting the heat blow out the window. Cool, fresh(er) smelling air is better than warm foul smelling air. Is anyone with me on this?

I wish you all well, and may you enjoy quiet moments with your loved ones during the holidays. I am trying to see how many months I can go without stepping foot in a mall. I’

I’ve made it almost 12 so far. My hell will be a mall where I’ll have one panic attack for all eternity, a constant case of diarrhea, and the only music will be bad country and Jazz muzak. Actually my version of what my own personal hell would be like varies depending on my situation. What would your idea of hell be?

Yesterday while standing outside of my daughter’s school I saw a women walking out of the school with a small boy. She looked down at him and asked,” So how many candles do Jews light?” I had this funny feeling that I was about to witness an anti-Semitic joke, but the boy looked up at her and explained the menorah.

Today they are forecasting high wind warnings and storm warnings, urging people to be prepared for downed trees, power outages, etc.

The news in general freaks me out so I seldom watch it, for good reason. Today if I sat inside staring at the TV I would surely be convinced that our whole house is going to blow away sometime today, maybe starting at 3:00, 8:00 or midnight. My inner panic monster tells me that I shouldn’t have taken the kids to school today and we should all be huddled together surrounded by extra water, toilet paper, flashlights, batteries, canned goods and a rifle.

I am not watching the news anymore today.

“ Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Now I love many types of artists, but my relationship with Johnny goes back to childhood when my Mom ordered some song collection from Reader’s Digest because she’s been trying to win that sweepstakes for decades. She even puts her hair into rollers the night before Ed McMahon is due to deliver her check. Anyway, she got this cassette and I was unimpressed with it except for Johnny Cash singing “ A Boy Named Sue.” I had never heard the song before that moment and I took the family’s cassette recorder into my bed and played it, and played it, over and over, every day. It reconfirmed my desire to be a singer one day and it inspired me to write my own song. Following you will find, for the first time ever in the history of written words, the lyrics to the first (but not the last) song I ever wrote.

“You Didn’t Care For Me”

Well I’ll tell you a story that I happen to know

It’s about you and me and we were walking in the snow,

You fell down and you broke your toe

I carried you back, you never thanked me for that, you didn’t care for me

Dun Da Da Da!

There was a second verse about me and his brother but I think you’ve suffered enough. I practiced singing in my room and finally got up the courage to sing my song to my sister Maria. When I was finished she fell on the floor laughing and looked up at me and said, “I’m laughing so hard I have tears running down my eyeballs.” When I pointed out to her that tears were running down her face, NOT her eyeballs, she laughed even harder. Unfortunately she remembers this story and proudly retells it as the funniest song she ever heard, hands down.

When I was in kindergarten returning from Christmas break we had to draw a picture of what we did over the holiday. I drew a picture of a tall fizzing glass of an amber liquid and a few potato chips floating next to it. The teacher or one of the volunteer Moms would come around, ask us what the picture depicted and then write it across the bottom of the paper for us. I proudly told the Mom helper that for Christmas and New Years we had beer and potato chips in the living room. She laughed and said, “You mean your parents had beer.”

“No, we all had beer.” I assured her.

The teacher was notified and after school when my Mom arrived and the teacher got to her she showed her the “deeply concerning” art I’d drawn. My Mom turned as red as a ruby and told the teacher that our glasses were filled with 7 UP with just a splash of beer on top and that it was a holiday tradition she had brought to this country from Australia.

I thought I was in trouble, but my Mom told the story to all of her friends and family, minus my Dad, and everyone laughed their heads off at my picture. Recently I asked my brother, the oldest of us four and the one with a good memory, if I was just crazy, or did our parents give us beer as small children? He said that they did, but that it was a cultural thing because my Mom had grown up drinking Shandys.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Johnny Cash. My Mom finally took the tape from me because I wouldn’t stop playing it and/or singing it. Now I can listen to it and remember the pure joy of a song I thought was so clever, and still do.

P.S. To Jane Doe #4 , good for you for getting the fuck out of there and not suffering through another minute of that sick bastard forcing sex on you.

And I am totally cool with that because really, who cares? But the timing certainly seems suspect to be running off to rehab and then announcing that you were raped as a teen by a clergyman. Maybe he was raped. Maybe he is an alcoholic. But instead of owning his behavior it seems to me that he is making excuses for it. And I hate that. This is not a partisan issue for me either. When Bill Clinton lied about screwing around with Monica I thought, “You idiot. Why didn’t you just tell them it was none of their God Damn business in the first place, instead of lying?”

Monday night’s grand finale was a trip to the ER. My Mom was over at my house freaking out because the buyer whose offer I accepted while she was away had all of the sudden come up with financing and was once again saying that she wanted the house. And my Mom was pissed. I don’t blame her, but it looks as if she legally has no recourse and honestly, I handed the house stuff right over to her as soon as she had slept off her Dublin jet lag hangover. Polly has been sick since last week. She started complaining of a headache that felt as if her head was splitting open and of feeling dizzy every time she stood up. I finally couldn’t take the worry anymore so I just announced, “I am taking her to the ER.” I offered to take the kids in a cab but my Mom said she would drive and we ended up there until 3:30 Tuesday morning. Turns out she was dehydrated. I never would have guessed. No one I know drinks more than Polly. I can often hear her coming before she enters the room I’m in because of the ice clinking against the sides of her glass or the familiar whoosh sound of her sucking on a bottle of water. She always has a drink going. If she’s dehydrated we all are.

She ended up having to have an IV, which was a big deal because she has a big time phobia of needles. While the nurse went to get the bag and supplies I had a little talk with her. I taught her some breathing exercises to calm down. See, having a Mom with chronic panic attacks comes in handy sometimes. I told her not to watch them put the IV in, but to look at me and squeeze my hand. Before my eyes the little girl who once cried for 90 minutes in the waiting room of a lab because she had to have blood drawn and the same little girl who cried for a week over having to have a shot when she was in kindergarten and ended up screaming her head off and thrashing around at the doctor’s office became brave and she looked into my eyes and squeezed my hand and we talked about the circus and camping and coyotes and she didn’t shed a tear. She then demanded I take a photo of her arm with the IV in it and send it to her Dad, who was at work, because she was so proud of herself. I used my phone and did so, although I never did read the book on my phone because it was boring and I don’t really know what all the buttons are for. It magically made it and he was proud of her.

“I guess”, she said, “My phobia of needles is over.” As I sat by her bedside and watched the bag go drip drip into her arm and awaited the results of the blood tests, the urine tests and the chest X-ray she looked at me and said, “This is kind of fun.”

Fun? “Yes, fun. Because everyone is so nice and paying attention to me and it feels good.”

I managed to hold it together but I felt like shit. My poor little girl, so starved for attention that she thinks going to the ER and being poked and prodded is fun. As I looked at her I realized just how much of me is being given to her brother, and how she silently waits for her turn. I need to remedy that.

I can remember when I was hospitalized for a week in 2003 with a staff infection, once I got over the fact that I wasn’t going to be getting out of the bed for some time, I decided to just lay back and enjoy it, like a forced vacation for my body. The nurses kept me doped up on percocet and I didn’t care that my roommate, who was there for constipation, was constantly yelling for more morphine. When the nurses wouldn’t give it to her she would wait for them to leave, get out of bed, go to her purse and get pills from there. I wondered why no one had made the connection between morphine addict and constipation but I said nothing, lying on my side of the curtain, listening to her screams of pain and the unsuccessful enemas, suppositories, laxatives and rectal exams.

Finally I whispered to a particularly cute male nurse, “Where would a patient who wanted to smoke go?”

He looked into my eyes and whispered back, “Oh, you can’t go outside. But when I get a cigarette break I go down the elevator to the main level, outside to that little enclosed area about half a block from the main entrance and smoke. No, I can’t let you leave, but I can get you a pole that we can hook your IV bag to and you could walk the halls a little bit. It would do you good.”

I nodded silently, thinking that there was hidden meaning somewhere in his whisper, that he was telling me something with those oh so blue eyes. I put a gown on backwards over the one I was wearing so my ass wouldn’t be hanging out in the halls and slowly walked down the hall with my pole. When I got down the elevator to the main level I went through the front door and down to the box built to separate those who inhale from those who don’t and sat down. I can remember that cigarette vividly. I saw the ambulances racing in, I saw people coming into the ER, people leaving, family members crying, people rushing all around me and as I felt the warm numb of pain killers mixed with the hit of nicotine juxtaposed with the coolness of the night air I remember what I was thinking as I tipped my head back and inhaled. “This is fun.” Because it was a break from my job. My Mom. My husband. My kids. The dishes. The laundry. The cat box. The grocery store. The stack of bills. What to cook for dinner. My Life.