Insomnia and no heat

It's 4 a.m.  What am I doing awake?  I got up at two, half asleep, to pee.  I crawled back into bed all warm and cozy and became progressively more and more awake.  The Bumble Bean came to snuggle and sleeping Bean snuggles usually have a hugely somnolent effect.  Not this morning!  Bing!  I am not only wide awake but thinking about work.  What a waste this insomnia is. 

Also, I am cold.  Our heat is not working again.  This time it is not because I blew up the boiler in a pregnancy induced haze of bad judgement.  This time it because of something called a Limit Control Switch which may be a valve rather than a switch and which needs a plumber to do something about.  We finally discovered this after having the heating guy come (who by the way should have been a plumber) and giving the Big Bad Bean a ridiculous song and dance about the boiler being fine (I'll accept that) but the problem with system actually being the air pressure release valve on one radiator in the kitchen.  Pshaw!  However, radiators are not the province of the Big Bad Bean (who is actually in charge of Zombie Destruction) and he dutifully recorded this and told me later.

So, if the radiator is fine, it must be the thermostat.  I don't know much about thermostats.  Quick, look it up.  Hmm.  Electrical.  Not good.  Electrical in our house is a disaster.  Big Bad and I changed a light fixture when we first moved in and found that the old one was attached to 7 wires, all of them brown.  We did actually manage to figure out which ones were supposed to do what and dutifully re-wired the new fixture.  Turned on the breaker, threw the switch, started a fire, blew the switch out of the wall, turned off the breaker, called electrician. 

Since we fired that electrician, I wandered through the Yelp reviews and called a new one.  He came out and said the thermostat was fine but that the Limit Control Switch needs to be replaced.  Apparently this switch, or valve, translates the thermostat setting in conjunction with the thermostat's temperature reading and tells the boiler when to fire.  I had never realized there was an intermediate step that did that.  I assumed it was the job of the thermostat itself.  Middle management is really getting out of control when it invades your heating system.

No help for 5 more hours until the plumber comes.  I love this plumber.  He replaced our hot water heater in August because it stopped working.  Hot water heaters are also in my responsibility range rather than the Big Bad Bean's.  I traced the water line from the street to make sure I had the right one, entirely missing the giant number 2 written on the side which told me I had the wrong one.  I couldn't trouble shoot the problem (because I had  the wrong the bloody water heater) so Yelped a plumber. 

He was also confused, but given the age of the water heater we decided between us that it should be replaced.  Fortunately, when he came with the replacement, he noticed that the one we were talking about replacing had hot water in it, became more confused, traced the water line more accurately than I did, and discovered that I had been trouble shooting the wrong one.  He was very gracious about it and replaced the actually broken one (ooh nice hot water) and fixed my water pressure problem that I hadn't even told him about.

The Big Bad Bean was home when the electrician came and wrote down what the thing was called and that we needed a plumber.  On Wednesday evening when the heat stopped working again, I asked him if he had called the plumber and before he could answer, the Bumble Bean said, "of course not."  Hilarity ensued.  Anyway, I wasn't going to call the plumber on Thanksgiving when it was our own damn fault we hadn't called him more proactively.  So I called the day after Thanksgiving.  When I gave him the address, he said, "Oh, I remember you." 

I wonder what that means.  Does he remember the idiocy of my wrong hot water heater diagnosis?  The side saddle next the hot water heaters?  The basement full of miscellaneous weaponry?  Is he going to be laughing at me when he comes tomorrow?  Oh well.  As long I get heat again, I think I can stand to be laughed at a little.  It's not like it doesn't happen all the time as it is.

Loving life, loving the holidays...why am I not in Bermuda?

I think my sense of humor has been ruined by too much time spent with college children.  Yes, children.  They are shallow and self absorbed and don't know anything and haven't done anything and think they are interesting enough to be tracking their every move on social networks and insecure about everything.  Mind you, I'm talking about college kids I actually like.  Smart humor is lost on them.  Puns are unintelligible.  The games they play are mind numbing and they don't think about anything at all.  Except of course how insecure they are and how they can't ever let anyone know that they are not exactly as good and smart and secure as they perceive everyone else to be.  It's exhausting.

My Reference teacher in Library School told us that everyone gets only 3 exclamation points at birth, so use them wisely.  I wonder if the excessive use of exclamation points to soften the essential flatness of electronic communication has dulled the excitement sensors of our current time and it is more noticeable in the young either because they have used email and texting for a greater percentage of their lives or because they have had fewer actual experiences to offset the hectic happy-face-ness of it or if those are the same thing.

Poor Bumble Bean.  On the one hand he has a speech delay compared to normal children his age in this country.  On the other hand his parents actively reject most of the normal experiences that define other normal children.  There really never was any chance that he was going to be normal. 

He taught himself to read when he was three.  That's not normal.  But not something that needs intervention.

He is over four feet tall and not yet five years old.  That's not normal.  Also something that requires no intervention.  (If this changes, I wonder if we would be encouraged to starve him or shave off his toes or make him sleep in a box?  For his own good you understand.  He needs to be average.)

He is happy and a boy and four years old.  That's not normal.  Interesting and should only be tampered with to make him like other children.  Not really intervention, just pruning.

He enjoys himself and does not show any signs of experiencing himself as flawed.  That's not normal.  Every kid needs to experience himself as flawed.  How else will he develop the really acute crisis of self assurance when he gets to college?  How will he ever learn the crucial skill of sitting through boring lectures at school?  He needs that skill to endure a life of meaningless and self-unfulling work so he can have whatever the fashionable mid-life crisis is.

See what I mean about my sense of humor?

Holidays are coming up and that means family.  Not so much that family will be around as that family will intrude and tetchiness will ensue.  There's the whole question of gifts and travel.  There's the whole question of getting together and enduring each other's company.  The early part of this month marks the beginning of the 3rd year of family rupture.  First there was the hugely hubristic, overbearing and frankly not very intelligent husband of the cousin who started a fiasco based upon his credentials as an Occupational Therapist.  Occupational Therapists are not qualified to hold opinions about diagnosis.  No therapist ever is allowed to treat someone without consent.  He did.  See the not-very-intelligent bit above. 

Close on the heels of that, the Big Bad Bean, the Bumble Bean and I went to spend the first ever holiday with my siblings and their families.  Hmm.  Not so bad for me or the Bumble, but excruciating for Big Bad.  Then Christmas with recriminations and the Big Bad Bean expected to be the grown-up and make everything right with the cousin's husband (even though no part of it was Big Bad's doing) since no one had high expectations of the cousin's husband: his intelligence, his ability to be decent human being, his ability to be rational, his ability to shut the f__k up to protect life and limb.

Ringing in the new year with the aunts nagging and worrying and giving advice.  Summer came and went, no family.  Another holiday season, gifts exchanged, no attendance necessary.  More lines drawn in the sand.  Family members taking sides without talking.  It turns out the sand was wet concrete.  The lines are now step-on-a-crack, break-your-mother's-back.

My brother's 40th birthday.  The Big Bad Bean stays away.  After that party a family meeting is convened without me.  Concerns are aired.  A memo is drafted.  I get a letter.  I assume they are concerned about the Bumble Bean's other-than-normal development.  Not true.  It turns out they think he's fine.  They think we are lousy parents.  My sister asks if this offends me.  As I write this, I think "strange but true, it doesn't." 

As a life-long holder of less-than-flattering opinions of most of the people in the world and judging them for those same opinions, I am relieved.  If I give myself leave to behave this way in my head, then I can be generous and permit them the same privilege.  In return, I think "Duh.  Obviously our goals for the Bumble don't include him sleeping with us in diapers when he gets to college age." 

Though if he does that may catch him up with his normal peers in terms of crippling self doubt and anxiety.

How Artemis Winter learned to teach

This was more red wine than martini, but the concept is still there.

Artemis Winter was a flexible little fellow.  He was flexible physically and flexible in his pursuits.  He was endlessly curious, and since he rarely encountered opposition to his exploration, he was very confident in his abilities.

As mentioned before, Artemis Winter lived with two cats, a ferret, a cockatiel and a fish (in addition to all of the people he lived with) and these animals gave him lots of insight into other ways of being and other ways of exploring.

From the cats, he learned to stand in the way of anyone sweeping, to take the vacuum cleaner as a personal affront, to hate having water flicked at his face, to crawl between people and their reading, and to sit in the midst of puzzles and other piece-work .

From the ferret, he learned to pounce on people from unexpected quarters, to lie flat on the floor and pretend that he was invisible, and to hide in the back of the sofa, poking people in the butt when they sat there.

From the cockatiel, he didn’t learn much except that he couldn’t fly.  He did pick up the habit of pecking other people’s noses with his nose and a sort of shuffling sideways head-butt.

From the fish, he got nothing.

Artemis Winter was really quite fond of fish in many forms: he had stuffed fabric fish, he had small plastic fish, he had squirty fish for bathtime, he had magnetic fish for catching with a magnetic pole.  He even had fish sticks for dinner sometimes.

The fish, named Ubiquitum, puzzled him for a long time.  He was fascinated with its swimming.  He liked to watch its water being changed.  But he didn’t really see anything to learn from it.  He seemed disturbed by the inequality of this pet experience. 

Then one day, while Artemis Winter was in the Dragon Park, he saw someone teaching their dog to do tricks.  Right then it came to him!  If he could not learn from the fish, the fish could learn from him.  He, Artemis Winter, would teach the fish to do tricks: to swim in circles horizontally, to swim in circles vertically, to do flips out of the water, maybe even to dance.

Artemis Winter had been learning Capoiera with his father and swimming with his mother, so he felt fully confident that he could accomplish the task he set himself.

He convinced his mother to build a shelf over the couch for Ubiquitum’s bowl, then convinced her to getter a larger, more shallow dish for the fish.  In the new dish they replaced the green gravel with blue and red gravel to match the fish, replaced the plastic plants with living bamboo, replaced the fake coral with a little carved gingerbread cottage.

Then Artemis started his training routine.  In the morning he would do 100 front flips off of the left arm of the couch.  Then he would do 100 back flips off of the right arm of the couch.  Then he would push the coffee table flush against the edge of the couch and run in 100 circles to the left.  When asked why he ran in circles only to the left, he would reply with "left is ubiquitous, hook off the jab."   Since no one was entirely certain what this meant and Artemis Winter was unwilling to elaborate it was allowed to stand as the reason.  Then he would do a tap/hip-hop dance routine with wild abandon (sometimes he fell off the coffee table) on the coffee table and be done for the morning.  He would repeat this each afternoon and often in the evening as well. 

On the 22nd morning of this, Artemis Winter gave up in defeat.  Ubiquitum showed no interest in doing flips, circles or dancing at all.  He would usually come to the front of his bowl to watch, but he was not learning at all.  Artemis Winter did not despair for long however.  He thought long and hard.  He stared long and hard at the fish bowl.  He looked through glasses from the inside to see what the view might look from there.  He dragged his blackboard in front of the couch and drew diagrams and plans. 

The next morning, he decided he had a new training regimen for the fish.  He never started it though.  The ferret intervened.  It seems that after all, Artemis Winter had taught someone to do front flips and back flips, run in circles to the left and dance with wild abandon.  At the time Artemis Winter usually began his flips, nothing much was going on so the ferret (named The Midget) crawled onto the left arm of the couch.  She did 100 front flips off of the left arm of the couch.  She did 100 back flips off of the right arm of the couch.  She looked at Artemis Winter until he pushed  the coffee table flush with the edge of the couch.  Then she ran in 100 circles to the left.  Then she did the most spectacular dance anyone in that house had ever seen.  She tapped all four feet at once, she writhed, she squirmed, she flipped and flopped and then she stopped.

Artemis Winter made no comment at all.  He put away his black board.  He moved the coffee table back.  He left the room quite stoically.  But then he broke down in a storm of giggles that wouldn't stop until he had eaten three bananas and a peanut butter sandwich.  The fish stayed where it was in its new and improved home.  But, sometimes Artemis Winter and The Midget would put on a show for it.

Morning conversation

This morning the issue was raised that my recent Facebook status about unasked-for cleavage viewing was confusing or vague or something.  Not being someone who takes criticism without a fight I responded that it was my day for excessive boob-age.  The same afternoon, while swimming with the Bumble Bean, a woman who was close to 80 got in the pool and at first I thought "good for her" then I looked down from the pool deck into the deeper end and there she was floating and there were her enormous bosooms floating free in front of her: each one larger than her head and covered with sun-spots and freckles so they looked like a pair of friendly octopi swimming along with her.

After firing off that reply, and utterly defeating both the Big Bad Bean and the String Bean, I commented that today is the 24th anniversary of my dad's death and I feel absolutely nothing about it.  We (really I) went on to discuss that the previous day was a doozy in terms of bad things: a co-worker's partner going to a funeral for her aunt, the same co-worker finding a message from her brother's social worker that he was being evicted from public housing, just released from the hospital for an alcoholic withdrawal induced seizure and schizophrenia, the same co-worker with flash-backs to her sister's suicide coinciding with her own eviction, the insanity of my boss, the shallowness of several of my other co-workers, the potential horror of the annual conference we are hosting tomorrow, etc...

Then I left for work.  That will teach them to say anything, ever, about my Facebook status.

Still trying to define the question

Still working on ways to be independently wealthy.  Still trying to arrange the Bumble Bean's social life.  Still running into my own inertia.  Why?  I know what I want.  I know why I want it.  It's unbelievably valuable to me.  Is it hibernation kicking in? Is it some deep-seated depression?  Tomorrow is the 24th anniversary of my Dad's death.  Last month was the 16th anniversary of my Mom's.  I don't seem to feel sad about that.  The more I hear about the difficulties my peers are having with their parents, the more I feel it was a blessing (disguised at the time).  On the other hand, January 10th marks the 10th anniversary of the Horrible Bitch Woman's death and I may actually celebrate.  Actually, it's a Monday so I probably won't.  Just a glass of wine or two.

So what's my question?  What's my problem?  Why am I antsy and irritable and cranky?  Why do I feel like my skin is too small?  Am I just impatient?  Then why is that not motivating me do something about it?  When I talk to people about this, about this apparent hard-wired or conditioned malaise of the middle-class mind, they tend to become immediately defensive.  And not just people I consider moon-fodder or small-minded or Taoistically asleep.  My sentence structure is going to hell but I'm not going to fix it.

Why can't I finish the Artemis Winter Story?  I went to the beach with the Magical Starfish on Sunday and she said it was just getting harder with age and I countered with "no, there's just more baggage we're dragging around," but I wonder if she wasn't right.  Is it getting harder?  Or are we just more tired so it seems harder?  Is that the same thing?  The octopus is done.  Why can't I use 5 minutes to finish the fish?  Or 10 minutes to finish the frog?  Is it because everything is so disorganized and crazy that I can't be sure anything will work or be findable once I do take the time to start it?  Do I just have a bad attitude?

Oh well.  A great deal of complaining without accomplishing much.  Perhaps it will clear space to do some non-circular work now.

Ecstasy in Boots

I checked my email for the first time yesterday very late at night.  I was very tired and still had a pair of pants to hem before morning.  There was a subject line in my inbox that said Entrance Ecstasy and I wondered why my spam filter hadn't got it.  Then I noticed it actually came from someone I knew and that I wouldn't put it past him to send me an email with Entrance Ecstasy as the subject.  So I opened it and he was asking me to review an essay for his application to law school.  I didn't notice until I closed it that the subject line was actually Entrance Essay.  Bummer.  I really was interested in what Entrance Ecstasy might consist of.

On another note, the Bumble Bean's winter rain boots arrived today.  He tried them on because the last pair didn't fit.  Now he won't take them off.