disappointment

Bad on so many levels, being disappointed. Something didn't happen, someone wasn't heard from, something good was given and received without comment. There should have been a surprise but there wasn't. Someone didn't accept, didn't answer, didn't thank you. Someone didn't do what they usually do, or what they might be expected to do. Something wasn't where you expected it to be. Something did not arrive on time. Something wasn't as enjoyable as it should have been. You didn't sleep well after a long, tiring day. A mystery went unexplained. A secret was not revealed. A film, a show, a song did not live up to expectations. A distraction did not distract. Good news did not arrive; bad news did not fade away.

It throws such a gloom over what could have been good times. And yes, I know that my disappointments are mostly my fault, the result of that pesky habit of expecting something. Mea culpa.

And apart from suffering over various disappointments, things move along. Wendy from The Village Scandal was not as unconditionally thrilled with my work as I'd hoped, though she did take 2/3 necklaces and both pair of earrings. Robin is in the middle of something...I can't even begin to talk about it, but it's distracting her from everything. When I saw that she spent a good time of our evening together texting someone else, there you go. But she did take a moment away from texting on her phone to take a picture of me:

Probably one of the better ones taken in a while.

We also went into an Indian store on Second Avenue, and I bought some pink print silk "harem" pants and eight glass bangles. And then ate on Sixth Street, as we have for so many years, this time at Taj: lamb madras, garlic kulcha, and two guys playing sarangi and tabla.

I did not feel right on Friday and I don't know why. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of dizzy and exhausted, for no good reason, and I called in sick. Barry went out and got me a handful of tulips, late valentine's. And then we wrapped up valentine's by going for dim sum yesterday. There are several excellent places not far away, and we ate like crazy.Sticky rice, pork siu mai, shrimp dumplings. beef rice rolls, lion's head meatballs, shrimp in bean curd skin, and so on. I drank a lot of jasmine tea. Felt a little food-drunk after, but that's dim sum.

Made a necklace and two pairs of earrings yesterday, which is  a big chunk of work for one day. I'll try to do more earrings today - I want a bunch to bring to Jannah on Friday.

Last piece: Ranban. This is the first Tamil movie I've seen, and I have to say, I like it better than I liked a lot of Hindi movies. It was not very glossy and very unpretentious. The characters and relationships were novel, and I was very taken in by the character of Pari; I felt he was someone I'd like to know. Sathyaraj was impressive as the school principal "Virus"; he was silly but also substantive. Vijay as Pari was a casual, charming star. It was pretty much a buddy movie, and the obligatory female character didn't jar the script off track. Apparently this is a remake of the Hindi film 3 Idiots, although my understanding is that those remakes mostly go the other way, Tamil or Telagu to Hindi.

Something else I have to mention: the movie was meticulously subtitled. I felt at if they were trying to make the English understandable, but also get across the various nuances of the Tamil. For instance, there was a sequence in which the protagonists substitute different words into a speech to be delivered by an annoying fellow student, and it was all made perfectly clear by the subtitles. I mentioned recently that I missed a lot in ZNMD because the subtitling was so poor, and had to stop watching Rockstar for the same reason. It's a little weird that some Hindi movies, the big commercial mainstream in India, are so poorly titled, and that a Tamil film (I assume it's a smaller industry) did it exactly right.

Anyway, the film was delightful, and I would consider forgoing 3 Idiots entirely if Aamir Khan weren't in it. I've gotten to be something of a fan.

last day of the year

Nice party at Robin's last night.  Re-met some of her friends, and a couple of new ones.  She served some nibbles and then some more substantial food; I could live forever on tostones with a dab of dill sour cream and a piece of nova (lox) on top.  (Non-Americans:  tostones are plantains, a banana-like fruit but less sweet -- the slices are fried, smashed to discs and then fried again.  Lox is smoked salmon.

I enjoyed the folks there, although there was one woman who seemed a touch obsessed with her ex-dog -- that is, the dog her ex-boyfriend got when they still lived together.  I love my cats, but I don't think I ever talk more than a few minutes about them.  I swear I heard  20 minutes+ about Buford the French bulldog.

I love where they're living now, in Crown Heights.  It's a typical changing neighborhood these days, bodegas and organic health food stores.  It's another one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that's cycled around: a Jewish neighborhood where my mother and Robin's were both born; an uneasy mix of Orthodox Jews and and African-Americans (occasionally causing riots and big crime stories when one group came into conflict with the other); and now, gentrifying.  Any neighborhood with beautiful old building stock will eventually be reclaimed; if the neighborhood has become run-down, it will be cleaned up, and soon enough...unaffordable.

At home, I couldn't figure out what movie I wanted to watch, so I watched snips of a few.  Saw a bit of Don 2.  Shah Rukh Khan seems to be encroaching on Tom Cruise/Jean-Claude Van Damme territory, and I predict we will end up being Bruce Willis.  I don't feel bad about making these American comparisons because someone is trying to internationalize him and turn him into a worldwide action star.  Ra.One didn't quite manage it.

Then I moved on to what I hope is the worst movie Amitabh ever made:  Shahenshah.  It's an unbelievably cheesy masked-avenger sort of movie, a superhero without powers.  He does have a lock of silver hair and a leather jacket with a bulletproof metal arm.  His daytime identity is as a goofy, corrupt cop (these sort of characters are often identified by their chewing paan, a mild stimulant made of betel leaf and a few other substances.  This was Amit-ji's return to films after his 1984-87 political career, and he looks a little puffy, and the movie is very old-fashioned for 1984,  Behold, Shahenshah:

Then I abandoned this movie and rewatched some of Buddah Hoga Tera Baap.  It put Go Meera Go into a little more perspective, as the character of Vijuu is supposed to be something of a dandy.  Hence, the clothes.  This time, he seemed to me to look a little better in the video, as it sat within the movie.  I want to rewatch the rest and see Hema Malini again.  She's probably my favorite of his leading ladies.

In 2012:  kinder to myself and my body (diet and exercise).  Less quick to judge people, especially negative judgment.  Kinder to others.  Learn and grow.  Happy new year to all of you.

things that dance on my head

Money (lack thereof) is dancing on my head, and depression is dancing on my head, and I'm sure they're in some way related.  I keep ending up in these situations a week or a week and a half before payday where I have $100 to last 10 days, or $45 to last a week, and none of it is due to carelessness.  We just don't have enough coming in.  So the least little pressure in any part of my life makes me cry -- or sometimes it doesn't have to be pressure.  I cry when I leave home in the morning, and I cry when I get home at night.  I cry at work.

Work is fine but crazy-busy coming up to the first day of class (Monday), and my fall intern punked out on me, isn't coming.  But I'm also worrying about what kind of health insurance they'll be able to provide, since the clock is ticking on our Medicaid (we only have it until September 30).  Any kind of co-pay is simply going to murder us.  Barry is already going to food pantries a few times a month.

Then again, I sometimes stop eating almost entirely when things get like this.  My appetite just vanishes, although I do eat well maybe once every couple of days.

I saw the GYN last night (boys, you may want to stop reading here), hoping to finally get hormone replacement therapy to help my lichen schlerosis, among other things.  Girls who have joined since I last wrote about this (boys, I repeat:  you really don't want to read this) is a condition frequently found in post-menopausal women when the vaginal skin gets dry and thin, there is often pain and bleeding, and the skin turns whitish (the "lichen" part).  This is now the fourth GYN I've seen in this practice (mostly because of scheduling, not because any of them was bad).  I've had one cream that didn't do anything, another that helped symptoms, and the last doctor recommended hormone replacement therapy.  HRT appealed to me a lot because I figured it would either help or slow things like dry skin and thinning hair.  But my regular doctor said that my liver enzyme counts were high and he didn't want me to start the drug.  So I lost ten pounds, took another blood test, and was pronounced good to go.  (My liver enzymes tend to go up when my weight is high.)  So the doctor last night gave me a prescription for the HRT -- YAY!  He did, however, say, "They told you that you shouldn't be eating tomatoes or spicy foods, right?"  no, none of the other three doctors had told me that.  Suck-o.  Just when the good tomatoes are out, too.  There's another fine excuse to cry.  And believe me, I'll be crying a lot of Medicaid won't cover the HRT.

I'm having dinner with Robin tomorrow night -- I tried to cancel earlier in the week because I didn't have the money, but she said she'd pick up the tab.  I don't have money to eat out.  I don't have money to buy The Herbal Remedy, which I think I'm giving up anyway -- or at least cutting down to weekends only.

Even though Barry does quite a lot around the house, I'd gladly take on half of those chores if he got a job.  I'm really sick of him not bringing any money in.  It puts a huge burden on me, and I always have to be the bad guy, saying he can't buy soda, or chips, or ice cream.  He still doesn't get the food-isn't-entertainment thing.  Food is to sustain you, if you can get it.  We can get enough food to live, but not for fun.

sucks to be me today

I got laid off.  Business was bad.  I heard eight of the factory staff were also losing their jobs.  There were a handful of people I felt really close to, and it was sad to say goodbye to them.  As much as I enjoyed the three women with whom I worked closely, there were also a few in the design rooms and the factory who were lovely and a great help to me.  The design and factory women were all native Spanish speakers, and spoke English in varying degrees (like me with Spanish, they understood more than we spoke).  When in doubt, we smiled a lot.  I hope to stay in touch with Marisa, who was probably my best friend there.  She works with off-price designs and knows her rocks.  She's closer to my age than any of the women in administration (I think the next oldest woman in admin is 34), speaks good English, is from Argentina, and has a very lovely personality.  I stopped by almost every time I was in the factory, but since her station was right there, I usually couldn't hang out too long.  Ana and Soledad in the production design room and Monica in the one-of-a-kind design room were great, and Marisol and Margarita in the factory.  And Lupe in QC.  Lupe was the only person there who ever asked me to make her a piece of jewelry -- I think Marisa must have told her that I made jewelry, because I didn't talk about it that much.  Lupe said that she loved purple and had no purple earrings -- could I make some for her?  Lupe wears big earrings, often wide, so I did a kind of clustery thing with a lot of wire-wraps around a chain, amethyst chips and oval beads, and then I threw in some tiny Swarovskis, 4mm smoked topaz AB2X, which for some reason threw off purples and worked beautifully.  I just gave them to her this week but never got to see her wear them.

I e-mailed my favorite local vendors to tell them I was leaving and to let me know if any jobs ever opened up.  Ironically, I saw four of my vendors this morning, when I went into Manhattan to source some beads.  I would love to work for any of them, especially Wonder, whose store (wholesale only) is very beautiful and classy, a lot of glass and very tidy displays, and a tank with two decorative goldfish.  It's kind of like a temple of beads, and the guy I worked with there, Tenpa, was lovely.

(Of course, I'll be putting in a lot of job-hunting work:  Craigslist, employers' websites, employment agencies and temp agencies, and I've heard that Linked-In is useful.)

Also, I have to say that Edmond handled letting me go in a classy manner.  I've been fired mean and fired nice, and he was very kind.  He made a point of saying that they loved my work and that I was well-liked and had caught on fast, and would give me a glowing recommendation.  Stephen also said some very nice things to me.  Stephen was not always the easiest guy to work with, but he was basically very nice and we shared a lot of tastes and got on pretty well, for the most part.  It wasn't fun when he was unhappy, but we did like each other.

So I had just a few hours to show Heidi, for the most part, how to do the bead end of my job (Jess will probably take the in-house computer program stuff), and updated her on everything that was outstanding or in process.  Heidi already handles all the stones, but she's going to be seriously overloaded.  She generally works with three or four vendors, but the bead vendors will add about ten more.

Of course, the biggest problems are mine.  Barry's unemployment benefits run out in a month, and I don't qualify for any (I have to work six months within a year to get benefits again).  I have this week's paycheck and next week's paycheck and about 5K in my 401(k), and that's it.  We have no health insurance.  In December, unemployment benefits were stopped for a couple of weeks while congress considered the tax bill.  We considered that our finances would be much better off without the $500 insurance bill.  The plan was for me to be on company insurance as of February 1, and we would buy inexpensive insurance for Barry which we would pay in January, to start in February.  I never officially learned what my health insurance plan would be (my 90 days would have been this coming Saturday).  Someone told me that she got individual health coverage for free, but couldn't add anyone else to the plan.  But she also said she wasn't sure that this was still the deal, and she was higher up in admin than me.  I was counting on it being free or cheap, only for me, and that I would be able to get on February 1.

We kept the pharmacy portion of our insurance plan (which was a crappy plan that basically pulled together a medical plan, pharmacy plan, and I'm not sure what else, a crappy vision plan and/or a crappy dental plan).  We were figuring/hoping that our prescriptions would be the bulk of our January medical expenses.  $50 a month means we can keep getting most of our generics under ten bucks, and most of what we use is generic.

Speaking of health, I had my periodic bloodwork done at my doctor's request, and he found my liver enzymes alarmingly high.  I know that they go up when I gain weight, but I hadn't gained any weight for about a year, and he said he'd never seen those readings so high.  I do have a fatty liver (grosses me out just to think about it), but again, that wouldn't have raised the levels.  The doctor thinks it's probably one of my medications, maybe the metformin (which is for the diabetes).  Anyway, he wanted to do the test again, which we tried to schedule before the end of December, but a blizzard intervened.  (We had, I dunno, a few feet of snow.  My office was closed last week on Monday and Tuesday -- I showed up on Tuesday, along with four others, and even though we all turned around and went home, the five of us got paid for the day, no one else.  And no one got paid for Monday.  But we were asked to come in on Friday because we were behind on inventory, so I actually got paid for the usual five days.

So I didn't get the blood test before the end of the year, and I asked Barry (who has been unbelievably great with errands and phone calls since I've been working) to call the doctor and find out the name of the test, then call the lab to see what it would cost to pay for that test out of pocket.  But the doctor said he could take the blood at his office, and get the test done at a very low price.  He even put the fee for the visit on a tab (though he only charges $40 for non-insured patients), plus he's been giving Barry heaps of Crestor samples, since that's one of our few non-generic drugs.

Here's what else can cause high liver enzymes besides overweight or medication:  jaundice, Hep A, B and C; cirrhosis (sp?) of the liver.  Cancer.  Guess which one I'm afraid of, since I don't have any of the Heps, I'm not turning yellow, and I haven't had a drink since 1986?  The truth is that my body doesn't feel quite right, I'm forgetting a lot of stuff, my hand was trembling when I was working on some jewelry the other day, and I've been unusually clumsy (knocking things over and bumping into things).  I'm hoping these are maybe just signs of the liver enzymes.  But I'm basically not feeling too optimistic about my health.  (P.S.  I checked dictionary.com, and I actually did spell "cirrhosis" correctly.  I guess I haven't lost my spelling skills.)

OK, let's perk things up just a tad with a really cool klezmer/hip-hop video.  The David Krakauer, the klez guy (playing clarinet), is the brother of an old and dear friend of Robin's.  This is a very different sound and somehow it works.



Tweet, tweet, gang.

hey, someone's actually reading this!

I installed a counter several days ago because this blog has not yet had one comment, and I was beginning to wonder, though I know one person who is "following" me on Blogger. Maybe there's some way to do this other than installing a counter, I mean to track visitors, but I'm a little behind the curve in certain things. I could only find one counter, and it's really ugly. Sorry about that.

But -- in the past few days, the counter went from 200-something to 400-something, so thanks for stopping in.

My best friend turned fifty on Friday, and her husband threw a surprise party (this all happened to me last year -- I'm a year older). My husband wasn't feeling well, but he didn't feel right about my taking that long trip alone on the subway. (It's a haul from north-of-Coney: three trains there, two home, due to a peculiarity of our beloved subway system. Door-to-door, about an hour and a half.) He said I should take a car service both ways, and I said no, and he said then just take one home, and I said no. Getting out the door is always the hardest part, and this was something I had to get out the door for. I'm very sentimental, I guess, about birthdays and special occasions and being with my besties. I've had three friendships temporarily break, and maybe permanently diminish, when I wasn't invited to weddings. I couldn't imagine getting married without certain of my friends there, and one couple came from Puerto Rico to be with us. And some people really dragged ass to be with me on my 50th last year, and some couldn't seem to get on a subway from Manhattan.

Anyway, it was very few people, maybe 10, as their apartment is not huge, and Robin was totally surprised, and Ernie did a totally awesome job of putting it all together and cooking his specialties with his friend Cynthia. (Spanish language lesson coming.) There was pernil (roast pork) and pasteles (mashed yuca, a root vegetable, or plantain, studded with pork and vegetables and steamed in paper or a corn husk), and yellow rice and beans. And a heap of appetizers. My husband and I went there for Christmas last year, even if Ernie (and half of their son Evan) is the only one of the Christmas persuasion, and this is exactly what he made. Much more interesting than a turkey. A lot of the people there were Robin's past and present co-workers (she's a book graphics person, I don't really know what you call it, and they all know each other), a couple of old friends of Ernie's, and Naomi and Shimon. Naomi was Robin's sort-of stepmother for many years; that is, she was Robin's father's girlfriend for quite a while. So Naomi stayed close with everyone, even after she and Jerry broke up. She married Shimon about five years ago.

Now, I met her in summer camp in 1971, though we did spend some time out of touch, and it's one of those miracles that we're still so close. Just about a year ago, my father-in-law and her father died in the same week, and I was at both funerals. I mean, I *knew* her father, for a lot of years, and I couldn't not be there. She has one other friend as close who lives in California and I have one who is glued to way-out-in-New-Jersey with two smallish kids (I think she did something wild like gave birth at 47 and 51). But, you know, it's me and her, for the most part.

Also: I got my amazing wonderful birthday present yesterday, a few days early. It's something I've been wanting for a while: a ukulele, tenor, definitely beginner level but a pretty one. In fact, cute as all get-out. But I'm getting tiredish now and will tell more later.