The Dysfunctional Family

One day I hit the review button on my brain and out came an episode from high school that by all means should bolster my confidence (at least in hindsight), but still hasn't. It's called Driver's #Education, and at my suburban high school you fought for the privilege of being squashed into an ugly #Chevy Something with two other students and a teacher. So here I am in the last semester of my senior year worrying about getting into the college I thought I wanted to enroll in AND competing with the driving skills of Nancy and Bob. I'd known Nancy since Girl Scouts, and not only was she a goody-two-shoes, but she was a pleasant, WASPY one at that. That made her all the more irritating. Now Bob you could out and out dislike. He was a wise ass, smart, and knew the guy I'd had a crush on since 7th grade (P.S. I still do, but in my day dreams, he never ages and stays 17 forever). I'm sure Bob knows too much about me even before I start the car.

Yeah, I was riding high for a little while, but now the glooms have returned. For me, this means I wake up with the fervent desire to go straight back to #bed. It takes all the will power and the realization that six #dogs and two #cats are depending on me for food, water, and cleanup duty to get up and get dressed.I feel like a mummy who just got rejected from an Ivy League college. Maybe a slow-moving turtle with a hard shell that works like a large screen TV, alternating between scenes of #anxiety and #depression. These scenes jet by my grey matter and remind me that nothing has gone the way I wanted it to go. I never became the master teacher or librarian, and the writing job--freelance, which means, dive at your own risk--is yet undecided. I can give you at least five editors who were not happy with the jobs I turned in and five more who thought I did a credible job. That kinda cancels out to a big fat zero. Zero is my number of Doubt. I doubt that I'm pretty enough, I do...

Toothaches are a cliche in that they happen frequently and to many people. But they still can inflict pain, right? If you feel a throbbing pain in your tooth, your body is telling you that something is wrong, says Dr. Stone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla, and it needs to be fixed. After a weekend of just-shoot-me-so-the-pain-will-end, I hauled myself to my #dentist. "What did you do now?" was his first remark. You'd think I had broken off a $1500 crown on some gummy bears (which I do love). But that wasn't the case. I did virtually nothing and yet The #Pain came. Obviously #pain has a life of its own, at least for me. It was probably getting bored taking up space in my ass hole next to my on-again-off-again hemorrhoid and decided it needed more of a challenge. So it got up its courage and made a drastic move into my head, which some people have actually likened to an ass hole (I do not officially recognize these peoples' comments as valid or applicable to my corpus, bu...

This time it was a toothache, but other times, it's been a sick pet, sick spouse, rainy days on the Jersey seashore, studying for exams (that never did me any good), or taking a vacation with someone you thought was sane but turned out to be as wacky as a three-dollar bill. Like most ugly wastes of time, this tooth thing snuck up on me with a little subtle gnawing that gathered steam and morphed into a grinding, throbbing burst of pain that continued over two days. You know, Saturday and Sunday, when you're supposed to be enjoying other stuff, like Netflix, watching your cat play with a fake banana, or dreaming of sex. All the ibuprofen and cold packs in the world couldn't break the chain of pain. And I'm a whiner. When I hurt, everyone knows it. I was terrible with menstrual cramps. Every month like clockwork, the cramps conspired to gang up on me (Hey, what do you want to do with her this time? Make her cry? Immobilize her in bed with a hot water bottle?). Didn...

This may be unique in that few chickens get an obit written about them, but I bet you a free order of spicy hot chicken wings that you have honored a person or an animal and given them a second chance at life. I know I have. If you've adopted a pet from a shelter, you qualify, or if you discovered a pet wandering around your neighborhood and returned him to his owner, you also qualify. If you've ever forgiven someone, you have given them a second chance. Here are more ways to qualify: 1. Tried a new restaurant, but hated the fries? Go back and give them a second chance. 2. Feel like screaming at your next-door neighbor whose wild and crazy parties are getting to you? Bring over a six-pack and talk it out. 3. Got a narcissist for a friend? Beat her at her own game and talk about yourself. That'll give your relationship a second chance. 4. Didn't get a thank you note or call for a gift in the three figures? Call up and ask her how the (gift) is working out? Now give he...

Have you ever done something that's counter intuitive like straighten up the house before the cleaning service comes so you won't be ashamed. I've done that, and I guess the trigger is shame because I know I don't have an obsession with cleanliness. I've also bought a few new clothes like tops and shorts for the long hot Arizona summer and put off wearing them until the season is almost over. Why do I do this? I haven't the foggiest notion. Another of my counter intuitive behaviors is not returning phone calls from friends. How do I expect to keep them as friends if I don't find out if they're alive, suffering from any serious disease, or achieving wonderful goals. Why do I do these things? Why do you do similar things? Please play Dr. Freud and tell me why you do what you do. Below is my linen "closet." I'm really not a slob, but this area of the house looks like a typhoon swept in and decided to stay a while and continue its work. Am I ...

Yup. Those are shoes that my parents got bronzed when I was just a walking, talking chip off the old dysfunctional block. After I inherited them from my sister--the one affected by Only Child Syndrome--I placed them on my dining room hutch near the pewter candlesticks. Now they collect dust together. Naturally my sister kept her pair of booties and I assume they're catching dust somewhere in her house. I imagine she'll pass them down to one of her lucky kids, who will in turn put them on a shelf to collect dust. The pair are impossible to throw away--there must be some curse that befalls ungrateful children unwilling to properly revere family heirlooms--but no one quite knows what to do with them. Stick them in the bathroom? Maybe. They might pass for Odd Objets d"Art to note while on the Royal Throne. That would be one thought. Or how about pawning them off on my husband. He could decorate his office with them. They would join the approximately 2,000 other tchochkes (Go...

They said it couldn't be done! I've had a few brushes with my orange Saturn Vue, but not because I collided with the two trees in the middle of my driveway. I wasn't feeling so hot when we decided to move to Scottsdale--depression had surfaced, and my concentration rivaled a three-year-old's--so I decided to minimize my losses by going for location, location, location. And Scottsdale is, as any snotty Arizonan can tell you, prime real estate. Yesiree, it is! So I figured I had done my job of selecting a house just by picking out the neighborhood. The rest I left up to my husband and fate. So what if an extra room in one house could only be accessed via a steep 20-step staircase? There was a gorgeous jacaranda tree in front (it blooms for at least 20 minutes every year). That more than made up for any knee or hip injury climbing up and down. Then there was the house that kept getting larger every time you walked through it. Did I really need three spare rooms for the ...

This was yesterday's surprise/mystery: a humongous deposit of dead branches in front of my house. Now that the temp has officially hit 100 degrees, I hid inside the house all day. But look what I found when I ventured outside: Me: WTF is this? Husband (Ray): Looks like our neighbors trimmed a tree. Me: Not just ANY OLD TREE . Clearly these leafy layers have been liposuctioned from one of OUR trees. Ray: Can't be. I compared leaves and they're not ours. Must be our neighbor's. Me: Did you do all the forensics? That bleeding corpse is ours, and I bet DNA would prove it. Why else would the killers put it in front of our house? Obviously the murder took place near us, not on our neighbors' acreage. Ours was both the kill AND the dump site. Ray: You're watching too much "Forensics Files" on Netflix. Me: That's irrelevant and, if I may so, just bad detective work. It Looks like we may have a serial killer on the loose silently hacking up innoce...

Depression is a downer, and I say that with great authority since I believe I've experienced most varieties--from the fear and anxiety version that retards your emotional growth to what I call the one-note "drummer" that beats out a nasty mono-rhythm of negativity. It doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing, that internal voice taps out unhelpful messages like "you could have done a better job," "it's your fault he (the boyfriend) left you," " you'll never be happy." You get the idea. Sometimes my depression was so obvious that my mother picked up on it and called in the troops. The troops usually consisted of my sister, who had to be forced into indentured service in the form of movie dates and meals, and my aunt (let's call her Eve) who had extended her mah jong gambling expertise to poker, gin rummy and tarot. Of course it was the tarot that interested me. I'm not saying that I believed everything she tol...

My backyard is not what you'd call an ecological paradise. First off, we've got fake grass--the kind that looks exactly like the real thing but doesn't grow, doesn't smell and always looks green, green, green. My six schnauzers know it's fake, but they sniff up a storm on it anyway because birds seem to congregate there to munch on seeds and other bird food stuff falling from large nearby trees. And I'm glad the doves, pigeons, and occasional hummingbird or quail still pursue their vegan diet in my yard. I enjoy watching them from my kitchen window that gives me a panoramic view of their birdy behaviors. I'm not keen about the poop they leave behind, but, as they say in Brooklyn, and Woody Allen seconds, pigeons are nothing less than rats with wings. Well, I wouldn't go that far, especially after what happened to me and my menagerie the other day.This is how everything unfolded. The dogs exited into the yard from two doors--a standard wooden kitchen mo...

Okay, so the title is a little misleading.I'm not exactly sure what shrink wrap is, but I know it doesn't have much to do with my psychiatric history unless you equate "wrap" with "rap" and I can tell you that over the years I've sung my heart out to a lot of shrinks. But my most recent doctor--let me call him Dr. No, only because of his ultimate decision on my behalf--will go into my personal record book of shrinks as a unique interaction. For one thing, Dr. No is young, 30ish,good-looking but appearing to be overweight by some 10 or 15 pounds. Actually, all of my shrinks have been men if you don't count one New jersey psychologist who tried to cure me of OCD by joining her weekly group therapy session.That's like trying to cure a cancer patient with castor oil. If it works, it's only by accident. Since I don't actually have any prejudice against female shrinks, I think the reason I favored relationships with men is at the time they we...

I've written about my two ginger-colored cats that we adopted at the same time, but I didn't elaborate on the medical baggage that Tootsie came with. Along with an ID chip in her shoulder and a mandatory spay, she arrived at our house with a health record that rivaled an orca at Sea World. Mind you this little girl was barely 5 months old, and she already had been dosed with a series of antibiotics that were supposed to cure a bout of upper respiratory disease. The shelter caretaker swore that since she's been exposed to this virus, she won't get it again. Once is more than enough, I figure, judging by her med chart. The little boy, Toodles, has had the infection already, according to Madame Caretaker, so he receives the all-clear signal. Later, when I take both the kitties to my vet, Dr. B gives me the bare-bones lowdown on Tootsie.He sends out some blood that the lab tests for about 100 different viruses. The results? Tootsie has not just one but two different viru...