This isn't much of a blog.....all I did was just copy the list of "top stories" from CNN's main page. Is it just me, or does at least 2/3 of this list read as some sort of April Fool's joke? Can our news really be getting this insane? Just read it through and tell me if I'm wrong.
The lovely "upper midwest" is all set for its second major snowstorm of the season - within a week of each other. Seriously, we got through most of the winter with about 4 inches total of snow. And NOW, when it's time to think sun and green grass, we are getting shit on. Over a foot of snow this past weekend here - and now we have a winter storm warning that lasts until - get this - FRIDAY NIGHT. Seldom do we get a "warning" for 2 whole days. The prediction is for up to 20 inches of wet snow. I am scared to look out the windows - of course they might be buried by the end of this. Seriously, does anyone else who lives up here feel my pain and anger when we get these late-season blizzards? Or am I just a big whiney ass who should be thrown in a snow bank? For those of you who say things such as "oh, it's so pretty when it snows" or who wish that they had snow in their area - you are welcome to come over and take nice hefty samples from my front drive and walkways.
I was in Marquette yesterday, on a last-second emergency trip which turned out well (I won't go into it - let's just say it was an "intervention.") Before my disastrous move to Iowa and then my return to what I consider a much more dismal part of the UP, I lived in Marquette for almost ten years. Since leaving shortly after the new year in 2001, I think I have probably been up there a total of 4 times.
When I left, I had mixed feelings - I loved the town in many ways, hated it in others, and had a love/hate relationship with the weather. Plus I was technically living in Negaunee, which is 8 miles from Marquette and, to put it bluntly, is NOTHING like Marquette. When the Iowa experience turned sour, my first instinct was that I would return to Marquette, having so much familiarity with it and also a few friends still hiding here and there. But due to monetary reasons, I ended up shacking up here, in a part of the UP that I can only describe as "midieival" (my apologies to some of you, who should agree with me anyway) and have since not left.
It is a funny place to live, the Upper Peninsula. I have been up here so long now that, when I venture into any city larger than a football field, I feel like I've wandered into the future, and that everyone is staring at my ignorance. Even Green Bay, which is 90 miles to the south, overwhelms me - I get overstimulated by the fact that there are more car dealerships than cars on the road. There are more restaurants on a single block than in the entire town of Iron Mountain. Seriously, Green Bay would seem small to any real city-dweller, yet there is enough shopping to supply every person in Africa with a pair of muffin-top jeans and a complete media center, with plenty of Starbucks coffee and Krispy Kremes to keep them chipper and non-starving.
You can imagine how I feel in Chicago. There are two things in Chicago that interest me - Ikea and Whole Foods - and nothing else. Seriously, it's mesmerizing and awe-inspiring to drive into the city, or any city like that, but by the time I leave I basically have post-traumatic stress disorder.
I didn't used to be that way - I've been to many cities, on two continents, and have had great times. But when you spend a little too long in Dickinson County, Michigan, with its total population of 27,000, and Walmart as its largest employer, you get, well, sheltered.
Anyway, my point. Marquette is sheltered too; in fact, it is a half-day's journey just to get to Green Bay. But for some reason, it thrives in a way that no other town in the entire UP does. It is bustling with little wisps of progress in every corner, all arriving in a more tasteful manner than in most large cities, where they just erect another mile of concrete on the outskirts for the newest menagerie of sub shops and megastores. And Marquette exists in a natural setting that is just so incredibly beautiful, it makes you forget that you are almost 200 miles from the closest interstate highway.
When I drive into Marquette, I feel like I never left, and yet there are always surprises - Marquette has now gone through the Starbucks Revolution, and is starting to realise its tourist potential. Driving through the perfectly preserved downtown area on a saturday evening, I saw people out everywhere, walking back and forth to real bars that have real music and live performers. In this area where I live, the bars have names like "the Whuh Bar" and "Who's Next" and the choice of live music is limited to about a total of 5 bands, their music stylings being a choice between eighties-hair or country. There is karaoke, but nobody that can sing, and the smell of urine is hard to distinguish from the smell of the cheap beer.
Anyway, every time I visit Marquette I remember it fondly for a few days after. If I really sat back and thought about all the miserable times I had there; or about the winter that I shovelled a total of 300 inches of snow that fell nonstop, just so I could park my car in the front yard; I would probably remind myself why I somehow haven't ended back up there. While it's beautiful in the summer and always enjoyable for a visit, Marquette has the same problems as the whole UP - horrible winters, seasonal affective disorder, and isolation. I remember meeting people in Marquette who had never left the UP - one lady was in her 20s and had never seen a real escalator before.
So while I've been pondering getting out of this town and finding somewhere else to settle and attempt to thrive, Marquette has popped to mind on occasion. But as much as I love it, it's just not a total change, which is what I need. And there's always a funny feeling when leaving a place behind and then returning months or years later - you feel like while you were gone, life went on and you were sort of replaced, and there's no niche for you anymore.
Anyway, when I was returning home and stopped in Iron Mountain at the only gas station open at 3am for a much-needed pee break, I noticed the clerk was having some sort of interesting conversation with a lingering customer. When I went to the counter to pay for a pop, the clerk interrupted their conversation and said to me,
"We were debating where a good place to live would be - basically any place but here we decided!" and then he laughed. And I laughed, said nothing, and left.
I was chastised by someone today for not writing any blogs recently. After much thought, consisting of at least 3 minute of pondering what even to write about, I though....what the hell.
The problem with writing a blog in the middle of February in the middle of the Upper Peninsula in the middle of winter, is that there is not much to write about. The thing on most people's minds around here always seems to be something dependent on the weather, which is rotten.
I have friends who live outside of the midwest, and many friends who lived in this crook of the north and moved on to other places; so they experienced the weather but remember it only in visuals of snow-laden trees and frozen lakes. Pretty, hey? But as I was discussing with my friend Will the other day, who lives in Ontario, there is a very large part of north america that is less-sparsely populated than most, and is, to be blunt, fucking cold in the winter. Granted we have nice warm summers; but for some reason we get punished for them for the other 2/3 of the year.
For the last 2 weeks, it has been colder here than what most of the people of the world ever experience - we have a continental climate that really only exists here and in Canada; and in Siberia. That's no joke. The temperature has not been above the freezing point here for at least a month now, and often dips way below the 0 mark at night (for those of you who use celsius - that is -18.) And it doesn't stop there - temperatures of -15 and lower aren't unusual, and daytime highs hovering around the zero point (fahrenheit) are pretty commonplace.
I speak to many people who say things such as "you are so lucky - I wish we had snow" or "I just love snow" or some dipshit thing like that. Most of those people live somewhere where there IS snow, but in fleeting periods of the season. Snow one day, gone the next. An occasional large storm, then a week later it's gone. It doesn't work that way here. Once we get snow, we have snow for a LONG time. This year was freakish in that it didn't snow until after the first of the year; and that is freakish in a most freakish way, because usually we have a permanent snow cover by December; earlier at times even. When most people in the world are starting to clean their flower beds and plant bulbs, we are still shovelling off the ends of our driveways after the plows go past and block our cars in. Occasionally a nice warm March will melt most of our snowcover, but then Karl Bohnak, the regional TV-6 monarch of all things meteorology and a walking Skeltor, decides that we need a foot of snow on the 15th of April. I truly think he is the devil and has magical powers over the well-being of his U.P. subjects. Because no matter what, his forecasts are always more grim than any other weather report I look at.
So to sum that up, winter here just sucks. Say what you want - "oh I just love to ski" or "I like the snow because it's so pretty." There are people here that say such things. They are idiots. And sometimes days after they say such heretic remarks, they are commited with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
If you live here, and you hold a job, there is no relief. Either you must brave the frigid temperatures at daybreak, or you leave work in their grip at night. Believe me, when you walk outside and it's -10 degrees farenheit, or roughly -23c, it fucking HURTS. The cold instantly runs up your pant legs, bites at your face like a rabid cat, and blows up under your coat. Unless you bundle in NASA-made spacesuits, there is really no way to completely escape the hurtful terror of a cold UP morning or evening.
Aside from the crazy jaunts out into the winter fauna, there is also such wondrous things as cars that don't start; draftiness in the house (and this house is like living inside a box fan); shoveling snow, and driving on "winter death roads." And those roads are riddled with deer who are just happy as sugar beets to be out in the frigid temperatures, so they decide to take lovely evening walks on the highways. Makes for a lovely ride home.
My daily routine involves checking the weather online at least five times, because I always hope for the miraculous chance that the winds have shifted, and instead of getting the frigid beastly winds that Alberta and Sasketchewan like to waft upon us (and those winds should have to get passports, same as everyone else does now) we get a nice fresh breeze of mild warmth from the south, which usually means a balmy day of temperatures hovering around the freezing point. It you think I'm kidding when I use the word "balmy" to describe a day like that, you are wrong - because after dealing with days on end of temperatures that could cause instant skin-freeze, 32 degrees is like hopping naked from the freezer into a warm house.
So yeah, I hate the weather. Does that make me horrid? Does the fact that I am not a native mean that I shouldn't have an opinion on this matter? If so, then please let me know. If you live up here and find what I have written morbidly disgusting, then please tell me how I'm wrong.
Aside from that, let's get happy for a while! Yay for happy stories!
Anna Nicole Smith is dead. No, wait a minute, that's not happy! For anyone that thought of her as nothing but trash who lived off the fortunes and misfortunes of others, I totally agree. But her only child died days after she gave birth to her second child. And apparently, she was so sluttish that she had multiple men claiming fatherhood to her son. AND, she had to deal with the fact that she was so dopey acting! But as annoying as these sort of celebrities are to me, it still makes me sad to see them die, especially in such tragic circumstances. Foes fight over Anna Nicole Smith body What? Is she Eva Peron now? She died, tragic. But she sold trimspa and made a horrible tv show.
Homeless woman set ablaze, killed Apparently two guys decided that she didn't deserve to live, after she reported one of them for robbing her. It makes sense - I mean, who likes to be narked on? And maybe they were cold. No wait - that's California. Okay, I have to stop reading because it makes me ill to think of such cruelty.
Britney needs intervention, industry folk say It's a video link, so don't bother, because CNN is still in the stone ages with their video feeds, so unless you want to spend fifteen minutes watching a 3-minute video...anyway, who just decided this? I think they should have intervened when Britney took the mouse ears off. Her first album probably tops the list of albums that were scorned by nearly every critic, and yet people used the heretic expression "the next Madonna" to describe her. Seriously, have you ever analysed her singing voice? To me, it sounds like a cross between Thelma Harper on "Mama's Family" and Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan in "Annie." Except they didn't do anything more offensive than mistreat little orphan girls or make fun of Naomi.
Kenny Chesney: I'm not gay That should be the least of his concerns. I hope he is seeing a psychiatrist who is helping him to try taking the hat off. Come on Kenny - I don't like going bald either. But let it breathe for christ's sake!
Kansas changes course on evolution Apparently they have changed course 5 times in the last few years. What bothers me most is that the decisions are all made by a 10 member "State Board of Education." Ten people decide the curriculum for an entire state? Does that qualify as democratic?
By the way, that's not really John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia. That would cost too much of Queen Elizabeth's money, production-wise.......
My favourite answer is when the guy is asked if he boycotts French products, and he gives the bullshit line "Actually not boycotting them, but not going out of our way to look for them." As if he used to run around Texas looking for Frenchy-stuff.
Yeah, I haven't really written one in a while. I have had plenty of time but just have had things on my mind, and so much crazy shit going on, kind of like stones being flung during a good Iranian stoning (which wouldn't be good at all - ick - the image of that just makes me nauseated...)
Anyway, I can can officially say I have a disease - yay for disease!
First of all, I was sick for a couple days last week - gastrointestinal issues. I went to the doctor, who actually wasn't a doctor but a nurse practitioner, and I don't like her. But my doctor was too booked and I needed to get in because I was getting close to explosion. She just sort of blew it off as irritable bowel, and gave me some miralax (which isn't really what you think, but the name sure sounds like it) which I took the next day. I felt fine all evening, until a wave of just horrible pain overtook me so fast that I thought the miralax had been replaced with mirror shards.
Anyway, went to the Emergency Department (which I was hesitant about, during massive pain, just because I knew I would be examined by people I work with!) and had all the tests, got an iv and some drugs, and was put through a ct scan. That's quite an interesting piece of science-fictional machinery - and there's a lovely drink that you ingest first that is like a koolaid tonic - but you have to drink two giant cups of it and when your stomach is already about to burst.....ouch. Then just prior to being slowly missiled into this revolving tunnel of magnets, the technician injects you with the "contrast dye" which is the oddest sensation ever. You feel this coldness going in and then in an instant your whole body is hot, and your mouth feels like you just swallowed fire. But it only lasts an instant.
Anyway, it turned out that I had a very distended large intestine. But the doctor very bluntly stated that the pain was coming from the fact that I have polycystic kidneys and liver, and the pressure in my abdomen was pushing on them and causing these intense pains. So right there, I found out what I had been dreading for YEARS.
My mother has polycystic kidney disease, which is an autosomal dominant condition. This means that if you have a parent with the disease, you have a 50/50 chance of having it yourself. My older sister Patti had already been diagnosed - it's one of those diseases that is "discovered" whilst undergoing tests for something else usually, which is how my mother and my sister both found out, just like me. My mother's mother had it, as did her sister, and both of her kids also have it, as well as some of their kids (my cousins, but whether they are first, second, removed, etc., I just don't know.) It is basically a defective gene thing where the kidneys grow all these cysts on themselves, and it can also affect your liver, pancreas, spleen, and rarely the heart and brain. It varies among individuals, but basically it starts developing in your teen years and gets worse as you age, to the point where about half of people with it need some sort of dyalisis or kidney transplant by age 60. The symptoms include high blood pressure, blood in the urine (which I've never had - yuck), pain in the back and sides, and fatigue.
So I pretty much counted on being diagnosed at some point in my life, because I have had all of those symptoms (except the blood/urine combo) since I was in college. But I just held it in the back of my mind and didn't think about it except whenever I felt something odd going on, or went to the doctor, etc. My grandmother had a kidney removed in her 50s; she died of pneumonia years later. My great-aunt died in her 80s, and my mother has never had much problem, other than the symptoms.
I got to see the ct, due to the fact that I work at the hospital, which is an interesting piece of technology, except when it is finding diseases. It basically takes pictures of your body in slices, which you can view progressively on a computer, as if you are travelling up or down through the body. According to the doctor's notes, mine vary and the largest ones are about 4 cm, which seems absurdly large, but my kidneys aren't enlarged, which is a good thing, because they eventually do.
Aside from that bit of wondrous news: I had the worst day possible on sunday at work, due to the fact that everyone decided to crack their skulls or die or fall down stairs or crush their arms or burn their hand, all within about 2 hours' time. And I was still sore from the previous two days of being in gi distress. Then on monday while working I received orders for an admission, which turned out to be my dad, who was admitted for an abcess in his colostomy (he had major surgery 2 weeks ago.) So he's in the hospital but doing fine I guess.
But the main event of the last few days has just been the constant thoughts going through my head about all this new shit that I have to deal with - being scared every time I feel pain now, etc., that it's my kidneys exploding or something. I also need to make some changes, such as quitting smoking and eating better, and cutting out caffeine, which is unimagineable and probably won't happen entirely. But I am going to see the doctor next week and get something for the smoking - as long as I don't gain 200 lbs., I think I can do it.......
AND, it just makes me contemplate life more than I ever had before, and what I want to do with the remains of it. In all honesty nothing has changed - I probably have the same lifespan expectancy of any other normal person, and there's all sorts of treatments in the works for this disease (although not a cure.) But now I realise that I need to start doing something REAL with my life; something I WANT to do, which doesn't include working a shit office job in a field I don't particularly like working in, and living in a shit village in an area that I despise (sorry to those of you from the area - but I have my own reasons.) More than ever, I feel motivated not only to enjoy life more, but to get the hell out of here, away from my loving but overbearing family, and do something completely different, because so far I haven't really found a niche. I like working in the non-profit industry, and my present job has some great benefits over and above the benefit of horrible stress. And I would continue doing it - as long as it were somewhere ELSE. I don't care how far I have to go, but I need a change of scenery and I need to live somewhere with people that are more open minded and have more on their minds than guns and hunting and Packers and LTD catalogs and snow-shovelling, all of which I despise.
So Bush had his State of the Union Address. Where the hell was I? I didn't know about it, which doesn't matter anyway. Because I wouldn't have watched it anyway, although I'm sure the Daily Show will have some good clips.
'Happy' years with abducted boy I still don't get it. Did this pizza guy kidnap these two kids just so he had people to play video games with? It's certainly the most intriguing kidnapping story I've heard of. Except maybe Patricia Hearst - although her abduction I would call "campy" considering the fact that she later appeared in John Water's movies.
'Smoking gun' report to say global warming here Apparently in February there's going to be a report released that proves global warming is going to lead to devastation. All I can say is it's certainly been good to us this winter! Yay for global warming! Or at least, yay for U.P. warming!!!
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