A Spork in the Road

Chemo #3 went well yesterday, although I’ve been having gastrointestinal issues during the night which kept me up since all hours. Same net effect as being wired from the steroids, although not as fun.

Good news: my Mom’s here and enjoying the lovely November weather. We get to meet with the wonderful guys of Florida Cracker Land today to pick out the plants for our landscaping. All Florida natives, of course. Local, sustainable, and hopefully something that not even I can manage to kill. If I’m very sweet, perhaps they will also help us put in a veggie garden in the back yard.

Also good news: the inimitable Kathy Gabriel sent me a cheerful cap (which I’m wearing right this moment) to cover my bald little head. Pictures to follow, some day. The West Coast is now officially kicking the East Coast’s ass in the cancer swag department. Ahem.

I get Neulasta shot #2 today. So far so good with the Neulasta: fewer effects than with the Neupogen, and no bone pain to speak of. Blood counts are holding steady, although I’m keeping an eye on my hemoglobin. No anemia, please! I need to eat more protein and iron. We have LOTS of spinach in the house.

Right now I’m going to squeeze as much work out of my underslept brain as possible before crashing for an hour or so.

I am working lots of overtime the past few days, running on this lovely energy I seem to have pulled up from the Earth, and motivated by the imminence of three events: chemo #3 (Tuesday), my mother’s arrival for a week-long visit (also Tuesday), and Thanksgiving (American, Thursday).

So I’ve not been blogging. Also, not a lot of status updates because I’m feeling well and there’s not much to report on the health front.

Instead of a real blog entry, here are some Rules of Conduct as specified by a Veer promo I received some time ago (Veer has THE coolest swag ever, plus great photos and fonts and such):

1. If you jam it, clear it. If you empty it, you refill it.

2. Your chair is the only chair you may adjust. Or move. Or sell to strangers. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a new thing this week: I’m waking up at 6:00am feeling perky. This may win Weirdest Chemo Side Effect Ever. And this isn’t because I’m going to bed crazy early. I go to bed at the same time as ever. Also, I don’t feel tired during the day, as I would expect. I mean, I’m the person who dragged my ass around all day if I got 7.8 hours of sleep instead of 8 or more, and that was BEFORE I started pumping toxic chemicals through my body. It’s certainly a welcome side effect, but how unexpected, and how weird!

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Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality; this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I’m rereading The Writing Life, which profoundly affected me when I first read it almost a decade ago, and which is affecting me even more profoundly this time around.

I have a motto: “To go faster, slow down.” This applies in coding software, and in typing, and in making sandwiches, and in learning a language. And in writing.

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It was a busy weekend. In addition to starring in “Italian American Reconciliation” (okay, so I had the smallest part, but I was STILL a star) for our second weekend of performances, I also auditioned for an independent film.

This was really the first time I’ve seriously auditioned for anything since “Bye Bye Birdie” in junior high. (I’ve either been precast or stepped in to replace someone in all the plays I’ve been in this past year.) My auditioning skills have not much improved in the past twenty years. I got up in front of the director and swear. To. God. My brain emptied. The sheet of dialog they handed me? The single sheet with, like, two lines for me to hit? In 12-point Courier and margins the size of Oklahoma? Yeah, I could barely read it. Totally blew my lines every single time.

I’m not sure what I said during the bit they wanted me to improv, but it could not possibly have been intelligible. I was supposed to be an angry wife yelling at her good-for-nothing husband in the morning, but I think I said something like “Banana forest? Banana forest? Emerging fossils slather up purple bubblers! How can tentacled brain wraps scare jittery keyboards?! You epicenter! You, you, you prostrate penguin muff!”

I did manage to stay between the green tape for the screen test, though.

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