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Insomnia. Again.

Sometimes when you can’t sleep, your mind wanders to some interesting places…

A Christmas Fantasy

We first saw him one afternoon as he was leaving Starbucks: an otherwise unremarkable older man in tweed coat, a button-down shirt, black trousers, black lace-up boots and a red bow tie.

I pointed out to Ben the man’s resemblance to the fabled Doctor Who of BBC fame (albeit much older) and added that with the Universe being as unfathomably huge as it is, the possibility of a character like The Doctor actually existing (if not in our unfathomably huge universe, then perhaps in one or more of the the innumerable parallel ones) was undoubtedly quite high.

I didn’t think anything more of it until this man reappeared at Starbucks several days later, quietly sitting in one of the padded chairs by the window. Neither Ben or I had noticed him sitting there when we arrived, or had we noticed when he’d come in. He was sipping some hot beverage, and I could tell from his expression he wasn’t quite sure if it suited him or not.  He’d take a sip, make a face as if trying to decide whether or not he liked it, and then put the cup back down on the low table in front of him, studying it intently. He repeated this several times until our eyes met.

There was a twinkle in them, something that said he was either much younger than he looked—or much older, having lived through enough that he now found wonder in the most common of occurrences.

I went back to my reading, but from that point forward, every time I looked up our eyes immediately met. He wasn’t flirting; I know what flirting looks like. No, it was almost as if he was studying me.

I got caught up in reading some article online, and the next thing I knew, this very odd gentleman was standing beside our table.

“Excuse me,” he began in a decidedly British accent, “but this beverage…what do you think of it?” And he held out the steaming cup.

I took a cautious sniff and said, “Peppermint mocha. It’s a seasonal thing they brew up. Not my personal favorite, but not bad overall.”

He looked at Ben and then back to me. “Forgive me for saying this, but you two are a very unusual couple.”

Ben looked up. “How do you know we’re a couple?”

“Oh it’s obvious,” he said. “The way you look at each other, your body language. How long have you been together?”

“A little over three years,” I said, wondering why I was even having a conversation with this stranger.

“Ah, newlyweds!”

“Not exactly,” Ben said. “We can’t get married in Colorado.”

“That’s rubbish!” he exclaimed. After a brief pause: “What brought you here?”

“Ben is in the Denver Teacher Residency Program,” I said.

“Brilliant!” he said. “This world needs more teachers!”

“Yes it does!”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, looking directly at me, “your voice…?”

“Cancer,” I said. “Nine year survivor and counting.”

At that point he pulled up a chair and sat down, and stared at me intently. I glanced at Ben, who had a frozen, puzzled look on his face, and then the rest of the world ceased to exist. It seemed as if a cone of silence had descended around the stranger and I.

He reached toward my neck and uttered those infamous words, “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.” He palpitated my neck and gently drew back my collar. “A tracheostomy?”

“In the beginning it kept me alive, and my doctor said I would probably have it the rest of my life.”

“Barbaric!”

At that point I knew I’d slipped into an alternate universe, because from his jacket pocket he withdrew something that could only be a sonic screwdriver. It gave it a quick twist, the end lit up green, it emitted that distinctive sound, and he pressed it to my neck.

I blinked. He was gone. And the rest of the world had returned to normal.

I reached up and felt my neck. The trach tube was gone.

“OH MY GOD!” I said, shocked by the return of my old voice.

Ben looked up. “What?”

I pulled down my collar.

His mouth dropped. “Wha…? When…? Your voice!”

“Do you remember the old guy in the tweed coat?”

“Yeah, he came up to the table and commented how we were such an unusual couple and then wandered off.”

“No! He did more than that!  He’s fucking Doctor Who! We have to find him!”

We packed up our backpacks and rushed out onto the snowy street.  Looking back and forth he was nowhere to be found.

“It’s a Christmas miracle!” Ben said.

After a few minutes we gave up looking for him and started walking back home. As we passed the parking lot north of Starbucks I happened to glance left and saw it: the big blue British Police Box, sitting right in the middle of the lot. People were getting out of their cars and walking right past it, as if it was the most common sight in all of creation.

The door opened, and the bow-tied stranger stepped out.

“All right, you lot. Don’t just stand there! We have places to go!”

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GPOY

Baby it’s cold outside…

To clarify my earlier post, I don’t mind the cold, or even the snow. It’s driving in the damn stuff that I loathe. To that end, I’m going to start taking public transit to work on snow days, even if it takes me twice as long to get there. (One bus to the train, and then one train to work.) It just isn’t worth the stress to drive. (I almost didn’t get back into my apartment building this afternoon.) Since I brown bag it already, I don’t need the car to run out at lunch, and as long as I don’t have to go to our Colorado Springs office, this will work out just fine. (I’m reasonably certain that if an emergency arose there on a snow day that required my physical presence, my boss and I would drive down together in his car.)

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Over It

There are snow people and there are non-snow people. Despite my initial optimism, I am discovering I definitely fall into the latter category. (And to my friend Mark in Duluth, you are more than welcome to go ahead and say, “I told you so!”)

That’s it. I’m over this shit. Unless things change drastically over the next five years (Ben’s obligation to his teaching program) it is very unlikely that Denver is going to be a long-term home. In the meantime I’m either going to have to start taking public transit to work when it snows like this or I trade Anderson in on the four-wheel drive model. Considering the MINI will be paid off in about six months, that isn’t going to happen.

The state of Colorado and the City and County of Denver had 24—if not 48—hours notice of the impending “snowpocalypse.” The white stuff started falling at 6 pm last night.  So why was I greeted by unplowed roads (including the I-25 freeway) this morning? I almost didn’t even make it off our side street onto Colorado Blvd. this morning…

The only reason I actually came into the office instead of attempting to work from home was because my boss was planning on being out today and someone had to set up for a video conference…that was, of course, cancelled.

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Insomnia and Some Reflections On Mom

Insomnia: just one of several unpleasant symptoms associated with the declining levels of a specific hormone in men of a certain age. Yeah, that hormone.

Being able to sleep in on the weekends is one of the things I miss most about not being 25 (or 35, for that matter) any more. These days I’m lucky if I can pull off anything over 8 hours on a good night.

And those times when insomnia strikes at 3:30 or 4 am, I often find my thoughts drifting back to the last few weeks of my mom’s life. Prior to the fall that led to her eventual passing, she had told me on several occasions she had been ready to go.  She wasn’t happy.  She had always been a very independent, active, self-sufficient woman, and the fact that Alzheimer’s had robbed her of all that and forced her into assisted living with a set routine had no doubt made life unbearable.

Mom adored Dennis, my first partner. She was heartbroken when we split up, and after he passed from AIDS in the early 90s, she refused to remove his photo from her nightstand, always referring to him as her second son.

The same could not be said of my second partner, Bernie. They were at odds almost from the moment they met. I think that was because Bernie was as independent as she was, and  she knew our relationship would end in heartbreak. She didn’t hate him, but she also didn’t shed a tear when we eventually went our separate ways.

On the other hand, although she was outwardly pleasant toward him on her visits to San Francisco, Mom loathed Rory. Moms know; that’s all I have to say regarding number three.

But with Ben it was different.  She loved him from the moment they met and I think that despite her diminished mental acuity at the time, she sensed that he was the man in whom she could finally entrust her son to happily live out his life.

And that is why I still find the timing of her fall—for lack of a better word—suspicious. It happened very shortly she and Ben met, and at the risk of making this all about me, I now believe that since she felt I was safe and she was ready to go, she set the wheels of her departure in motion—if perhaps only unconsciously.

The fall in assisted living (which led to an initially undiscovered fracture in one of the vertebrae in her spine—thank you very much Abrazo Fucking Healthcare—and forced her into a nursing home and a wheelchair) was only the first. I mean, how many times can you “accidentally” fall out of bed or from a parked wheelchair?

(My brother-in-law immediately suspected negligence on the part of the nursing home which may in fact have a ring of truth to it, but I think the repeated falls were far more likely her desperate attempt to get the hell out of this life.)

I feel no guilt about any of  the decisions my sister and I made during her final weeks on this earth, but I regret that she went through so much suffering—both physical and emotional—during that time. I also regret that I didn’t spend more time with her during her final weeks—even if, for all intents after the final fall she wasn’t really here any more.

And perhaps selfishly, I find myself missing her even more these days, not being able to pass on all my adventures and tribulations in Denver…

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American Horror Story

Try as I might, when American Horror Story debuted, I just could not get into it. I saw the premier and maybe one or two additional episodes before abandoning it. Shows with as much graphic violence as this show possesses aren’t my thing, and the storyline wasn’t really engaging—or coherent—enough at the time for me to justify sitting through the blood splatter.

Several weeks later, out of curiosity and because I am a fan of Zachary Quinto, I returned to AHS and unexpectedly found myself completely caught up in the story. It’s dark, twisted, and things are finally beginning to make some sense. (Although it seems that just when I think I’ve got it all figured out, the writers come out of left field and whup me up the side of the head as if so say, “Nope. Try again. That’s not it at all.”)

I now consider it an excellent reboot of a genre that had all but become a caricature of itself. Bravo, FX!

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Quote of the Day

“The radical religionists have confused ‘freedom of religion’ with the notion that means they can force everybody else to comply with their own religious tenets and rules.

The Christianists don’t just want prayer in schools. They want teachers to lead the kids only in prayers to Jesus the Lord God and Savior and his angry vengeful sky-daddy.

They don’t just want their Christmas crèches and Ten Commandments plaques in public spaces. They want those to be the only things allowed.

They don’t just want their particular definitions of what is and is not a valid government-recognized marriage or child adoption to be codified into law. They want all other faiths’ definitions—including non-religious secularism—to be outlawed.

Once again, it’s projection. What they accuse others of advocating—special rights and all that twaddle—is what they themselves want. In short, to make everybody—including those who do not belong to, adhere to, or believe in their religion to have to follow their rules anyway.“ — Becca Morn, commenting on this post at AMERICAblog.

BRA-VO!

 

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Quirks

Having a background in architecture and being more than just a little anal-retentive, I tend to notice things in buildings that others might miss, often prompting a well-deserved, “WTF?”

Our apartment—and the complex of which it is a part—is undeniably full of these…quirks.

Admittedly some of these oddities might be regional, sort of like coin-op car washes in Denver not having a place to actually dry your car after you’ve washed it. But others are more like “Was the architect on crack?”

Don’t get me wrong: I really do like our apartment, but the longer we live here, the more convinced I am that (a) the place was designed by someone fresh out of architectural school, (b) one company built the apartments and a different company built the parking structure, and (c) there was either damn little communication between those two companies, or precious little attention was actually paid to the blueprints during construction.

While our community ostensibly looks like a single structure from the outside, it’s actually an amalgamation of six different buildings linked by enclosed catwalks that surround an open-air pool area and  free-standing garage. I realized this multi-building reality one day while trying to figure out the bizarre apartment numbering scheme that on the surface made absolutely no sense.  However, when viewed from an architectural drawing perspective, the numbering did actually make some sense (first number is building, second number is floor, and third/fourth is apartment).

In any case, this “logic” doesn’t translate into the real world because the building numbers themselves aren’t posted anywhere on the property and there’s no directional signage whatsoever. Once inside the property, it feels like one big building, so it’s no wonder delivery people are always getting lost. (I submitted a suggestion to the property manager that some signage be installed in the hallways, but considering the place has been around for five plus years already and this has probably been suggested before, I doubt anything will come of it.)

What I don’t understand even more than the numbering system is why the supposedly straight-line common hallways have all sorts of weird jogs in them, sometimes of only a few inches.  Some of this can be attributed to structural support columns, but in other cases it looks like someone was asleep at the wheel and realized that things weren’t lining up during construction and had to make some last minute design changes.

This propensity for things not lining up is no more apparent than in the parking garage itself. At the top of every ramp, there’s a height difference of about three inches where the ramp meets the level area. It’s like the beam that spans the width of the ramp from shear wall to outside column was either poured too high or floors on either side were poured too low.  They’ve gone back and smoothed out the edges with cement, and in all fairness these might be nothing more than really poorly-designed intentional speed bumps, but if they are, they suck.


The north side of the property is about five feet lower than the south.  In order to keep the first floor at “ground level” across the full length of the property, stairs had to be put in the hall somewhere. That’s understandable. But wouldn’t common sense dictate that you might want the stairs in the apartment building to line up with the stairs in the parking garage?

Ha! Remember, this is Denver, where apparently you aren’t supposed to dry your cars after washing them.

Instead of placing the stairs where the higher part of the apartment building floor would line up with the higher part of the parking structure so you could walk directly from the upper part of the garage to the upper part of the apartments, they placed them fifty—that’s FIVE ZERO—feet apart, forcing you to first go down a flight of stairs in the garage, and then back up the same distance in the apartment building to get to the same level.  But even that doesn’t line up properly, because once you enter the vestibule linking the garage and apartments, there’s a ridiculous 6-inch step that shouldn’t even be there if everything was designed and built properly. And this is present on every damned floor in the building!

And while we’re on the subject of the garage, I have to ask why the entrance to the garage was not put on the main street the complex abuts (that’s plowed during snowstorms) instead of on a side street that’s never plowed and turns into a solid sheet of ice.

These little WTFs continue inside our apartment. There’s the closet in the hallway that’s only 6-inches deep (in spite of the flimsy plastic-coated wire shelving that’s everywhere in this place, we tend to think of it as a very large medicine cabinet because—surprise, surprise—there isn’t one in the bathroom). While at first glance it would appear we had a lot more storage in the kitchen than we had at our place in Phoenix, that’s not the case. For some reason (known only to the architect and his god) the shelves on all the lower cabinets are only half the depth of the cabinets. Seriously?

And then there’s the electrical stuff.  The bathroom light and fan are on the same circuit. It wouldn’t be an issue if the fan didn’t sound like a jet taking off.  Yeah, I understand why forcing ventilation to come on whenever the light is turned on will cut down on moisture buildup and mold growth, but I’d still rather have an option to turn it off.  (I’m actually thinking this may be a difference in the electrical code between Arizona and Colorado, so I’m not going to bitch about this too much.)

There’s a six-foot long hall that connects the bedroom, bath, and living room/kitchen area that has a ceiling mounted light wired to a 3-way switch on either end of the hall. A 3-way switch for an 6-foot hall. Really? I can literally stretch out my arms (not even all the way) and touch both switches simultaneously. The kitchen however, which could really do with a 3-way switch (one by the entry and one on the other side of the room that connects to the living area) doesn’t have one.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly what type of heat we have in the apartment and I keep forgetting to ask the leasing agent.  I don’t think it’s electric because there hasn’t been a huge increase in our electric bill since it’s gotten cold, whereas our gas bill has been steadily climbing.  But is it direct gas heat or something else?  After taking a good long look in the utility closet, I’m wondering now if it might be some kind of hot water system. While I’m not aware of any heating system that would utilize a domestic water heater as a heat source (I have been out of the architectural business for quite some time), there are a lot of extra pipes coming and going from that tank that I’ve never seen before.

The general build quality of the place is what you’d expect for an apartment built in 2005. Not horrible, but then again, not great. (Blame Mike Holmes for my critical eye.) With the exception of the walk-in closet in the bedroom (which you can hang meat in if the door’s closed and there’s no air circulation) the walls are well insulated and we have double-paned windows. The carpet however, is cheap. It should’ve been replaced before we moved in, but I guess the management figured they could stretch one more lease out of it before having to spend another $500. Thankfully it’s only in the living/dining area and bedroom. We’re going to cover the filthy mess in the living room with a nice rug as soon as funds allow.

The plus side to all this is that the place is starting to finally feel like home. Despite my commute (I’m simply starting to refer to Colorado Boulevard between the I-25 interchange and our apartment—not bad in the morning but horrific in the afternoon—as “four miles of st00pid”), Ben and I both like the location.  Starbucks, Einstein’s, and Heidi’s Deli are within a block, there’s a Conoco (yeah, yeah, I know, but there are very few options in Denver) station on the corner, Cherry Creek Mall is about ten minutes away, there’s an excellent Chinese Delivery nearby and some exciting plans are in place to raze the abandoned University of Colorado medical center campus across the street from us and turn it into an urban shopping/dining district over the next couple years. So yeah, in spite of the quirks we’re starting to really like it here.

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