Newscoma

Thanksgiving was different this year for me. I’d been in sort of a funk over some situational things and had to gear myself back a bit. I’m usually pretty cheerful, but holidays are wickedly weird or in my cranium, I make them weird.

Yeah, that’s about right.

I’ve been thinking about expectations that we put on ourselves. We spend a day with our families, taking several days to prepare for the day ahead of time. We rush to get to different places, we set the expectations of what we are supposed to do and how to do it. Then we get to our location only to find that we might, and probably should, let these people in our lives know the other 364 days of the year how we feel about them. Yet, we live in a society that sometimes frowns, or at least emasculates and mocks, the showing of affection.

Got deep on you there, didn’t I.

So, let me tell you about things that make me thankful on the day after Thanksgiving.

• I’m thankful for my friends. The close ones and the acquaintances that put up with me, that I live being with and who act like they like being with me.
• I uploaded pictures from my Blackberry onto Flickr yesterday that I liked and SQ’s mom was complimenting some of them, which made me feel good. I like it when someone is kind to me about my silly distractions. My goal is to continue this action with someone else because it feels nice. Nice isn’t bad, campers.
  

  You are beautiful. Remember That When You Want Out

• I got all wiggy yesterday in my head. You see, in the morning I accompanied the boss to an event in Bradford where 400 meals were prepared for shut-ins and people who were alone on Thanksgiving. It was quite wonderful as a bunch of people showed up to help from politicians to bikers (who delivered the plates) to little old ladies. One of the little old ladies was enamored with the bikers’ leather chaps, which was charming and we met a soldier who was heading to the Middle East next week who just wanted to help out.  But later in the day, I became somewhat obsessed about people spending the holidays alone. It bothered me. I talked to the boss who called late in the afternoon to thank Squirrel Queen and I for going to the event that morning and talked to him about the morning.  He said, “Maybe you need to talk to folks who are doing this in Hoots. Find out if someone is doing it, and if they aren’t, then you help make the change.” For the record, I don’t think I’ve ever had a boss call me on a holiday to say Thanks. You know, that meant a lot to me. And it was good advice. So thanks back at you, Bossman.
• Because I am a day late and a dollar short, I just saw my first James Bond movie with Daniel Craig. He is badass.
• I have reconnected with some friends and members of my family on Facebook. That’s pretty cool. Pretend for a moment that you aren’t snarky about social media programs like Facebook and how that really makes a difference when you’ve lost touch. Especially on a holiday when your traditional family is visiting other family members that don’t get to see a lot. You do feel connected.
• Beer. Just cause I like it.
• This list from Big Stupid Tommy which is very similar to my own.

So we live, we learn, we find out new things.

I realize that there is always a story underneath what appears on the surface. Maybe I should go find Mr. Jimmy and see what he has to say about life. He tends to enlighten me when I can’t find the way even though he doesn’t know he does.

That’s why things work. We don’t know when we make a difference with other people.

And maybe that’s the point.

Okay boys, go here and look at this while I talk with the women.

You gone? Don’t want to freak you out.

As you guys who have read me for awhile, the Ednaectomy is about to celebrate it’s second year. And although Daisy Fae is talking about her girl stuff, I get where she’s coming from.

As a woman in her mid-forties, ineligible for hormone therapy once menopause strikes*, i’m acutely aware of my aging ovaries.  They are my friends.  i try to take good care of them.  Although the eggs nestled within are dwindling in number, and are desiccating and shriveling on a daily basis, the hormones they send surging through my body represent the receding tide of my sexuality…

In other, far less poetic, words: i’m terrified of drying up like so much fem-dust.

Now for those of you who aren’t in your forties, you might not get the whole fem-dust thing, but there is this thang. That thang is that as we get older, there is some odd things going on that can only be compared to being 12 again but not having the stamina to do what I used to do.

The good stuff is my sense of humor is usually in tact. The bad stuff is I get tired, cranky and I have started picking up sticks out of the yard because I might just have to bop someone on the head.

But, you know, the good stuff outweighs the downtimes where you feel like some thing, some larger invisible entity, is throwing monkey poo at you.  The good does outweigh the bad.

It’s a shot in the dark sometimes, but the world isn’t bad. Oh yeah, I get frustrated. I know more than I did even 15 years ago but I’m still learning.

I’ve learned I bend but I do not break.

And being 40ish is pretty much fabulous.

It really is.

Katie Allison Granju at Knoxville Talks pointed to an article about depression in people in their forties.

As I’m in my forties, I wish to opine.

I think everyone goes through depression from childhood on. Of course there are severe and debilitating mental health issues that are factor for many such as bipolar disorder or just good old fashioned clinical depression but sometimes folks just get a good old case of the blues. I’ve often wondered about the difference between a physical depression and situational ones.

With that said, the article she refers to makes a fine point regarding that there is a sense of not meeting goals that seemed so accessible when, let’s say, I was in my late teens. The shoulda-woulda-coulda syndrome does set in. It did for me to a large degree. I’ve often said I’m too poor for a red sports car and too tired to have an illicit affair so during the mid-life crisis that hit me, I started blogging and I threw myself into learning things that scared me.

Then something wonderful happened.

I really got to a point for the first time in my life that other people’s impressions of me did not make as much of an impact as it did when I was younger. And I started to speak my mind a bit more but learned to be diplomatic about it. I also learned that sometimes people are not acting out of character. They are what they are. And I am what I am. And sometimes those things just don’t mesh.

Middle-age is an odd thing. The article talks about that people in their forties get “down” because they see people they know and love get ill or die. I do have a sense of mortality that I didn’t have even 15 years ago. But, with that said, the 10 year anniversary of my mother’s death is coming up next month and that’s when those feelings started to become more prevalent. If she could die so horribly, then so could I.

You think about these things.

But I want to also say that the year I turned 40 was one of the most liberating times of my life. I shed some emotional skin that had created roadblocks for my personal development. I appreciated patience a bit more.

I believe that sometimes if you realize that you are in a depression and you can recognize that “HEY, I’m depressed over a situation” or “Whoa, I’m not feeling so well and I don’t know why” then you have a better understanding of being part of the solution instead of feeding into the problem. It’s not easy to get there, but it works for me. And there is nothing wrong with asking for help from your friends, your family and, if necessary, a professional. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you smart because the only person who is going to take care of you is you. There is nothing wrong with saying “Help.”

People who say they never get depressed used to irritate me. Now I realize that we channel our own emotions into what is comfortable. Let’s say anger is comfortable for some people but I’ve always believed that anger is just bubbling repression of loss of identity or control over a situation which of course, are things that can make you depressed.
If you aren’t in your forties and this makes no sense whatsoever, I get that as well. But we are all the same when it comes to our feelings to a large degree.

And one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that feelings change, and with that knowledge, I know there is hope of a bit of sunshine at the end of a dark tunnel.

From my friend, Bucy, who is the biggest Parrothead I know.

In four hundred words or less, this is what happened form early
adolescence until now: I broke out of the grip of Catholicism and
made it through adolescence without killing myself in a car. I
flunked out of college. I learned to play the guitar, lived on the
beach, lived in the French Quarter, finally got laid, and didn’t go
to Viet Nam. I got back into school, started a band, got a job on
Bourbon Street, graduated from college, flunked my draft physical,
broke up my band, and went out on the road solo. I signed a record
deal, got married, moved to Nashville, had my guitars stolen, bought
a Mercedes, worked at Billboard Magazine, put out my first album,
went broke, wrecked the Mercedes, got divorced, and moved to Key
West. I sang and worked on a fishing boat, went totally crazy, did a
lot of dope, met the right girl, made another record, had a hit,
bought a boat, and sailed away to the Carribean. I started another
band, worked the road, had my second and last hit, bought a house in
Aspen, started spending summers in New England, got married, broke my leg three times in one year, had a baby girl, made more records,
bought a bigger boat, and sailed away to St. Barts. I got seperated
from the right girl, sold the boat, sold the house in Aspen, moved
back to Key West, worked the road, and made more records. I rented an apartment in Paris, went to Brazil for Carnival, learned to fly, went
into therapy, quit doing dope, bought my first seaplane, flew all
over the Carribean, almost got a second divorce, moved to Malibu for
more therapy, and got back with the right girl. I worked the road,
moved back to Nashville, took off in an F-14 from an aircraft
carrier, bought a summer home on Long Island, had another baby girl.
I found the perfect seaplane and moved back to Florida. Cameron
Marley joined me in the house of women. I built a home on Long
Island, crashed the perfect seaplane, lived through it thanks to Navy
training, tried to slow down a little, woke up one morning and I was
looking at fifty, trying to figure what comes next. You have to take
the best from whatever the situation is and go on. That’s the whole
point of the music to me. All through American history populist
singers and humorists have served as the nation’s tickle spot, people
like Will Rogers and Mark Twain. I see myself in that vein and
fulfilling that sort of responsibility. I give people a few shots.
It’s as much a satirical pinprick as anything else. You just have to
remind people of the day-to-day funny things. When I write songs, I
look for interesting little innuendoes or pieces of situations
everybody has experienced.

I can dig that. From his MySpace page.

As I woke up at 2:45 this morning, as I sometimes do, realizing that I thought I had beat my cold back down into the trenches and then waking up in a puddle of snot, I did what any person would do when they are drowning.

I just got up.

The dogs (all three of them) decided they were hungry and needed to eat something because God forbid they hadn’t eaten in about, oh I don’t know, three hours so off I went in search of kibble.

Why am I telling you this at (let me check the clock) 4:30 a.m?

Because sometimes, in the middle of the night when all that remains in the darkness is a lit laptop screen and a befuddled mind, you find wonderful things on the innertubes.

I’m not a baby boomer. I’m that lost generation that doesn’t really have a name that came after the boomers and before Generation X, Y and Z (that’s next, I’m assuming.)  So sometimes I just haunt the internet looking for things to amuse me in the middle of the night until Star Trek comes on at 5 a.m.

Yeah, I got a schedule. You got a problem with that?

So, I go over to Ken Levine’s blog because I like it and he linked to a blog that has entertained me all throughout these early morning hours.

Lloyd Thaxton’s blog rocks. If you don’t know who Lloyd Thaxton is, you whippersnappers, then go here and it will be explained. Or at least alluded to as I am linking to Wikipedia. Thaxton reminisces about television in the ’60’s (and man, does he have some tales to tell), comments on why Britney Spears is a “bad-mouther” because there is beauty in lip-synching and some political stuff but mainly it’s about the celebrities of the past.

When I was growing up, we had four television channels (of course, my father, Big Daddy, would say “We didn’t have a TV and I walked 35 miles in the snow so shut your trap, kid.” Not really, but sorta).

After school, Homer (the sis) and I had a schedule of watching Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillibillies, I recall Hogans Heroes coming on for awhile before I learned about the sordid past of Bob Crane and then our version of “Dance Party” (actually, I can’t remember the exact name other than it was filmed in Paducah). And, by God, we were to watch Days of Our Lives if we were at my grandmother’s house.

Ahh, Macdonald Carey’s voice at the beginning of each show became a staple in our lives. I also recall watching some soap called “The Doctors” as well. And Barnabas on Dark Shadows.

I haven’t seen a soap in years, but Barnabas was bad ass.

When we got cable, man, the world changed. I go back to not being an official “boomer” and not being part of any of the other generations with cool names because I was at the end of one phase and then in the beginning of new ones but not quite IN either one.

So, yeah, television for me is nostalgic. And reading Thaxton’s blog (just a little free one like mine is which also makes me smile that he’s giving these memories and recollections away for nothing) I remembered those afternoons when I was a kid. When I would dance to the television set, when I thought working at a television station like Mary Tyler Moore did would be the grooviest thing ever and how I wanted to do the weather like Ted Baxter and that I did, indeed, want to marry Steve McQueen.

I guess I need to go yell at some kids to get off my lawn now. (Hint: Getting older can be more than alright. You just have to get the hang of it, that’s all.)

Me: “So, you were born under Reagan.”
Her: “Yep.”
Me: “Have you ever heard of Kennedy?”
Her: “I think I read about him in an Ancient History book.”

Ouch!

From Jim Reams over at FBI Memos