Rainbow’s Point

econ 2306, microeconomics — complete three weeks early, and i got a b. i’m … flabbergasted, cuz i understand less about economics now than i did when i started.

people wonder why i think my dad is an asshole. it’s shit like this.

(12:54:47 PM) him: u there!
(12:54:53 PM) me: what.
(12:55:04 PM) him: need a call. office
(12:55:13 PM) me: i’m at the uta library.
(12:55:48 PM) me: your choices are instant message, email, or wait.

[pause]
[he calls my cell]

(1:12:40 PM) me: i told you i’m at the fucking library.

[pause]

(1:15:33 PM) him: I wasn’t at my computer.
(1:15:51 PM) him: I have a couple of computer questions.
(1:16:00 PM) him: I’ll try to remember them.
(1:16:06 PM) him: TTFN

—

first: call habib, not me, because i don’t know shit about your motherfucking telephone system.

second: when you send me an im, don’t demand that i call you and then walk away, because within the next ten motherfucking seconds i might respond.

third: i don’t give a shit if it was your orgasm that created me. it was long ago and i’ve paid for your indiscretion with my mother many times over.

fourth: i have other shit to do than be disturbed by you while i’m at school, or at work, or asleep.

he’s starting to act like doglady again.

my step-mom says, “that’s a horrible thing to say,” but she doesn’t live with him and doesn’t need the defense of gallows humor. we’ve decided to rename our oldest son tommy.

watching him is frustrating at times. to say “he’s off in his own little world” is an understatement. at four, he ought to know things like how to tell us his name, and when he needs to go to the bathroom, even if he doesn’t always make it. he ought to be able to tell us that he wants something to drink, or that he’s hungry. he ought to be interested in interacting with the other kids. he ought to, you know, talk.

he doesn’t. and it’s frustrating to watch. he sometimes seems like he knows when he needs to go to the bathroom, like, for example, when he urgently wants to go outside so he can drop his pants and take a dump on the patio.

and he doesn’t talk. he’ll respond to prompts sometimes, and he can identify some colors, but most of the time he’ll just ignore us and go on either watching tv or playing with his crayons and fuzz.

i talked a little about his fuzz habit. he does the same thing with crayons too: he will run the fuzz or crayons through his fingers, to the exclusion of all else, for hours at a time. he ignores us. he ignores the twins. he ignores his need to pee and so he wets himself and the floor without a second thought. like all children he hates to go to bed, so he takes his fuzz with him.

he doesn’t actually do anything with the fuzz. he doesn’t color with the crayons. he just picks them up and lets them slip through his fingers, like you might with sand on the beach once or twice.

the school people tell us that he’s making progress (except of course he’s not because it’s summer and they wouldn’t let him into the summer program). the doctor tells us to take him to the place with the year wait to even get an appointment six months later.

so how can we not be frustrated? especially with people like my mother, who is rapidly descending into the realms of respect equal to my father, calling my children feral.

it is true that we don’t take them out much. it is also true that taking out three children four and younger, none of whom are potty trained, and none of whom really have this sharing thing down yet, is, shall we say, a major pain in the ass. they actually do eat at the table and use utensils (usually), and for the most part they are obedient. but they are also toddlers, and there are three of them.

so if you want to take them out, come and get ‘em. we’ll even let you take the minivan.

i’ve taken to using a speech recognition package to do data entry. I use it to do e-mail and now blog entries, and it works pretty well most of the time. Except, of course, when I mumble. That makes it difficult to use when I do not want other people to overhear what I had to say. So, like, when sue is in the other room am I and sexually harassing my replacement wife. That’s the kind of thing you don’t really want to talk about out loud very much.

In other useless nerd news, I have upgraded my server and will be migrating all of the blogs and e-mail over to the new one within the next few days. I have to figure out what will be the first things to move. How fun.

I suppose, of course, this means that I should get off my ass and go to school, even if the speech recognition package will not recognize “ass.” (i’ve gotten “aunts,” “ask,” and “ash.”)

why can’t i write funny shit like julie?

[edited: as a stylistic decision i generally do not edit posts, and i don't comment on my own posts. but i've fixed the link tertia complained about. dragon naturally speaking.]

one wonders why i’m getting ads for an ocd treatment facility. what keyword is it thinking of?

two of them. yesterday. the twins are 3.

it doesn’t seem that long, really. a lot has happened, and not all of it has been fun, but there we go. they’re learning to talk, and benjamin, as always, remains made of rubber. ben is also getting the pee pee in the potty thing down, though we haven’t started that with samantha.

ian isn’t getting anywhere on that, really, mostly because he just doesn’t care. he doesn’t want to stop laying on the floor and playing with his fuzz. he will spend hours on the living room floor playing with stuffing pulled from a pillow — pillow fuzz. hours. just running it through his fingers.

his mother is getting more and more frustrated with his behavior, and i can’t really say i blame her. he doesn’t talk much, and he doesn’t talk spontaneously at all. he doesn’t indicate what he wants — if he gets hungry and we don’t realize it’s lunch time, he’ll just starve.

other.

the server will be moving again in a few days, so you can expect some downtime. not like anybody really depends on my silly little blog being up, but whatever. i’m moving the server off my boss’s pipe and back onto my own.

and i’ve added a little advertising over there on the right. maybe it’ll help financially. but that sort of depends on actually having people read the site. considering how much traffic the place gets, you know.

school continues. today’s project is catching up on the economics, which tertia promised she’d do for me but she seems to be in about the same place with my economics exam as she is with those cooter pics she promised me. somehow i’m not surprised, tertia is v coy about that stuff.

my wife keeps putting pictures of her cooter on her blog. see?

i think cecily and tertia should follow suit.

really.

love em both.

well, i guess cecily can wait until she stops hurting. but tertia has no excuse.

… as cecily commented once, in one i think i accidentally erased … is this thing on?

so an update.

—

first, in the “calls you do not want to receive at 9:15am when you’ve been asleep for an hour and was up all night” department.

“i wanted to let you know that your mother checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.”

so i have schlepped to san antonio to see what the hell is going on. and what the hell is going on is … not a great deal.

i can not say too much because i do not want to discuss secrets that are not mine, but it would be appropriate to say that a large part of my mother’s social life is based on a past that did not actually happen. she has been found out, and the results remain to be seen. some significant relationships in her life were based on this fabricated past. i, of course, have known for something like 15 years that it was all bullshit, but i said nothing because i saw nothing but pain to be gained by my doing so. her husband especially would have been devastated if he’d known.

her motivations can be described as unclear at best. she claims a disassociative disorder led her to flashbacks and dreams of the events that she didn’t participated in, and after she got involved in the associated community of people, she realized that it hadn’t happened, but by then she was in too deep.

the smarter thing to do might have been, perhaps, to pull away without discussing the real reasons. we’ve all lost touch with someone for any of a number of reasons, and doing so could have been done, i think. but whatever.

now someone has asked for proof of her participation, and of course it does not exist. this led to an episode of extreme depression and suicidal ideation, and so here we are.

—

my next task is to get her out of the hospital before they carry her out feet first with a sheet over her head. she is actually pretty lucid although hasn’t discussed much about motivation and what-nows and so on.

the point of these hospitals is to get you off the ceiling and get you back into society after 3-5 days. but while you are there, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be an effective patient advocate for yourself. many of these people do not know up from down; one of them shits on her bedsheets and then pushes her soiled linen across the floor in huge piles, also stealing linens from other patients when she can. when i was in one of these places, there was one guy who was stark raving nuts; his only reason for staying was so that his insurance would maybe approve covering shock therapy. when he got it, he was a new man.

anyway, this place has some serious problems, aside from the woman pushing her shit-covered sheets around. (she also serinades the assembeled patients, staff, and visitors with horrendous renditions of “amazing grace,” and her own tune, the words to which go something like, “racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist.”)

first, let’s talk about diet.

now, everybody complains about hospital food, and everybody has a right to. even so, a diabetic meal does not mean sending a breakfast danish and fruit cup to the ward with a “diabetic” sticker on it. the first day she was there she couldn’t get anything at all to eat. the second day she got a hamburger patty and that was it. today, the third day, they let her out to go with the assembled crew to the cafeteria, where they were serving breaded fried chicken (had to pick the breading off, starch), rice (starch), mashed potatos (starch), and corn on the cob (starch).

okay, so if they don’t starve her to death, they’ll kill her with medication.

it is the responsbility of the nursing staff to follow the orders. so when the orders say you get one pill of blood pressure meds, you get one.

except the pharmacy didn’t have one. call. they’ll send. three hours later. call again. they’re out, they’ll get some from the grocery store down the street. never comes. next day, they send double the dose, plus double the dose of the other blood pressure med, plus a third blood pressure med she’s not supposed to be on.

now remember that most people here don’t know up from down. the night before the doctor had said to my mother that hers was the third complaint that day he’d gotten of a medication error. most of these people will swallow rat posion if you put it in front of them.

if she’d taken the bp meds like they handed them to her, it could very well have killed her.

christ. isn’t america’s profit-driven health care wonderful?

—

okay, other news.

—

i’ve recently taken to reading the adventures of dr. diana. diana york blaine phd is an instructor at the university of southern california. her aredently-feminist viewpoint is eloquently expressed on her blog. i, of course, am an evil misogynist, especially considering my work. just ask my wife. she’ll tell you. so will tertia.

i originally found her blog after some news stories about some usc students going wacko over some nude pictures she’s posted of herself. (i’ll save you the work. i think she’s a hottie.)

in time i may slap her with some trackbacks. what she says has merit and is worthy of discussion, but is not the be-all and end-all of what gender relations ought to be.

—

work.

work is on an upward slope. we’ve addressed some communications issues and i’m feeling better about my progress there. i’m still not billing the hours i want, but i don’t feel like i’m operating in quite the same vacuum.

we may be doing a booth at the big convention in vegas. the one i went to last year. oh joy.

—

sex.

i want some. may have found myself a girlfriend, too.

—

sleep.

time for that.