I care very much about a woman’s right to chose.  I care even more that a beloved friend is stuck with a $400,000 hospital bill his insurance company refuses to pay because he went out of network in order to save his brain.  The local hospital sent him to the best brain trauma center.  He was given care he probably couldn’t have gotten other places and is fine–well crazy but he always was.

Rafe as I call him was a legal immigrant who came here with less than nothing.  He owns a successful hair salon in Manhattan and a condo. He paid for his daughter’s law school tuition and expenses. He didn’t want her to start off life with massive debt.  That’s a parent’s dream for their child, and not a crime.  Yet now people will say he shouldn’t have paid so he could have had the money.  But he had investments and savings also.  Then 07,08 happened and along with most Americans he lost some of his money but didn’t need it and wasn’t planning on using it for many years.  Save for a rainy day in America is really save for any medical condition.

Is it a crime to have saved money?  Should it  go to an insurance company?  Is he supposed to begin again at 55?  He owns the business yes and probably can sell it but can no longer cut hair.  He is, I admit, lucky that he has a business to sell but why should he be forced to?

In the midst of the turmoil, was his wife, who forced him into the car to go to the hospital after he had a blinding headache and threw up, supposed to remember to call the insurance company?  If it’s that important shouldn’t the original hospital’s social worker have reminded her?  Made the call for her?

We take people at their most vulnerable moments and make them responsible for decisions that will impact the rest of their lives.  Oh Pia, keep spouting cliches.  Real original writing here.

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OK I put the rest in draft.  Basically like everybody I need encouragement and validation.

I know I accomplished a lot in the past couple of years but I wanted to accomplish so much more.  Maybe I will.  But I have to stay away from anything NLD because it hurts and makes me feel like an idiot.

I will never accept “disabled” as “differently abled,” nor will I ever allow myself to be thought of as disabled.  Social Security doesn’t.  People thought I had strange problems, was dramatic and exaggerating  my balance, coordination and other problems until I found out about NLD.  Maybe that was better.

Maybe that was way better as I thought I was a person with much to offer.  I hope to think that way again.

A really good article on Kathryn Bigelow, a woman worth emulating

I feel old. Not old in years though….but old as a blogger.  It amazes me how psyched so many people are about it.  I would rather train for a marathon than become active in the myriad of organizations that have sprung up.

I tell myself that I have totally shook my life up in the past two years and building a new one is exhausting.  I tell myself I have accomplished so much.  Then I tell myself that anybody with some money could buy, renovate and decorate a house.  Finding a good Eldon, the house husband, was a stroke of luck.

OK, it was and it wasn’t.  I asked everybody I met, and used the man who did exceptional work at a reasonable price.  That we became friendly and he feels responsible, for my house and I, is an added bonus.  I’m not ashamed to say that second to last phrase.

I have made more friends than I expected to here.  And have found that people genuinely care about one another.  Yes I know that whole “Southerners are nice on the outside but will talk behind your back,” bit but what do New Yorkers do?  Are we so great that we never talk about each other?  We talk about our best friend to our other best friend in the name of helping.

Here I find people more honest as I’m a curiosity and they ask questions. Not all, and not all overtly but despite my disability I can read people.  Why did I even say that last part?  Get me away from Facebook groups for my own sanity.  Please!

It’s not just them.  I do exercise boot camp.  Greg shows me something.  I think how simple it is, understand it, and then promptly forget it.  A metaphor for life.  It’s much simpler than I make it to be and probably easily remembered.  Oh God I hope this isn’t a metaphor for dementia.

It is overwhelming to learn the name of the disability I have had all my life and not be able to find professional help.  Though I’m so much better than I tell myself and the world I am and really should remember that.

I wish I could be psyched as a blogger but all I think is that I turn people off.  I no longer do politics, family stories, stories about the longest youth in America, and stories about New York.

There aren’t many fish out of water stories because I don’t feel like one which I suppose is a good thing.

I’m jaded.  Yes I look as if I’m from a different generation than many women my age but when we talk we all have the battle wounds and scars.

I’m going to New York a week from Wednesday for the holidays. While I’m excited to see people and am praying for good weather for many reasons, I’m not excited about going to the city itself.  Yet one of the reasons I’m praying for good weather is so I can walk the best museum in the world, the streets of Manhattan. Oh maybe the streets of London and Venice are better but New York’s home.

It feels very strange not to be a New Yorker anymore.  How could that be?  Though all the above is true, my identity is as a New Yorker.  It’s hard for me to immerse myself in blogging groups as I not shed an identity but add a top layer of skin.

The past month I have been decorating.  I didn’t want to buy things for the walls until I had been living here for at least ten months.  I kept only the art that’s most personally meaningful to me.  I did something really cool and unexpected with the bedroom and won’t say what until people come from Atlanta and New York.

The living room looks great.  I have been adding touches of the  paint Eldon and Jimbo call shower brush pink as I had it made from one. I should add the Lancome ice blue lip gloss to the master bedroom wall as I had the paint made from that.  The living room is a Lancome soft pink.

The one wall that had nothing now has just enough on it. I never want my walls to look cluttered. I couldn’t stay in a neighbor’s house as every space had something on it.  I lost all ability to think.

As it is I think I really need to structure my closets this week and unpack the last boxes though I have no room for five hundred CD’s unless I get plastic envelope books.  I also have to get a safety deposit box and organizing supplies for the office.  I think that will seriously help my mojo.

Give me the Internet, a category of things to buy and a budget, and I’m in heaven.  Though all those hours scrolling seem grating while doing.

I have a perfectly great couch but really wanted slipcovers for  retro and shabby chic looks.  I was going to have them made but why spend the money and the time if you can find them on the Internet?  I have never had slip covers before; I had couches reupholstered.  But machine washable slipcovers?

I guess I could have a blogging niche on houses and decorating.  I’ve never been a blogging niche person and I don’t want to feel that I must blog.   Blogging only when I want to feels like a vacation.

The weather’s becoming nice.  I’m expanding my downstairs deck.  The only way I can–sideways, to keep my chaises out of the way.  I have almost the same amount of furniture outside my house that I have in it.  I love living outside from mid spring through the end of fall.  Well I don’t know about mid-spring because this is my first complete one in the house, and I thought spring here was from the beginning of March….My bad….Or the weather’s been bad.

I guess I need a couple of weeks of late afternoon to night walks on the beach and around town. Boot camp’s at 8AM.  Not my finest hour to be out and about yet I’m very social then so I want to talk to people which isn’t quite the purpose.  Come five PM, I want solitude.

This is a period of adjustment and I shouldn’t feel melancholy or defensive about it.  I have to buy a new doorbell and I keep thinking I want one that plays, “show me the way home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed.” But it sounds so welcoming, not.

Then I begin to think about every song about home with “stairway to heaven,” the obvious stupid choice.  And then every Doors song.

My mind is still a very strange thing.  Yes to those who asked it can be donated to science.

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My niece participated in National History Day. She and her Jericho team came in second, out of 23, for “best senior presentation,” for both Nassau and Suffolk. Next is the state finals in Cooperstown. She’s a sophomore so she has two more years to compete uh learn perfect research. Go girl!!!!!!!

I wrote a long and whiny post that if anybody has any desire to read, and you shouldn’t, ask me as I put it into draft.

People can be so cruel without meaning to be.

It’s a beautiful day and the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade was crowded.  But I have hopes for musical groups this afternoon.

First my niece who doesn’t read my blog mentioned to her mother that I should be famous for certain things rather than most celebrities so maybe there’s hope for my legacy.

On March 5. 2008 I took a Spirit airplane down here and began my unofficial residency.  On March 31st last year I moved into this house!

My taxes were driving me crazy.  Certain items wouldn’t fit into any part of any program I tried.  I refused to send my taxes to my New York CPA on the grounds that I’m pretty sure his mistake got me audited.  The audit sat on his desk for two months because “you sent it to me during tax season,” and he made some mistakes in my tax return.

I couldn’t deal with looking at my taxes anymore and didn’t want to go to a CPA.  So I took them to Wal Mart. Yes Wal Mart.  Where I had to explain what “cost basis” was, among other things, but five hours later between the very nice woman, the district manager who used a remote computer and me we got them done.  It turned out I couldn’t find the places because there weren’t any places in regular programs for them, and the district manager did somethings she explained to me.  I just had some weird stuff.  Not much money but a lot of very weird items.

I can’t explain how happy this made me.  Not only were my taxes done but I was finished with New York, except for the dentist, family and friends.  My dentist(s) and I have gone through so much together I can’t give them up.

I was so excited after finishing at Wal Mart I called my sister who got out of her sick bed to be very excited also.  Maybe when she comes to North Myrtle this summer, she’ll actually go into Wal Mart.  Last year all she did was say “that’s so pretty.  Where’s it from?”  “Wal Mart.”  “What a gorgeous street.  Where does it go?”  “Wal Mart.”

I didn’t mean this to sound so sad.  I’m attempting to do my taxes for the first time totally by myself.  They’re complicated.  My damn accountant was angry at me last year for sending him my audit during tax season.  Well duh that’s when I got it and it was due 30 days later.  He let it sit for months.  The tax thing is complicating everything in my life right now.  My Dad was a CPA who would have never been angry at a client for….My dad died suddenly at the end of this month 19 years ago.  These couple of weeks always make me sad and trying to do taxes, uh!!!!!

I fear that someday, not soon I hope, I will die and not leave a legacy; no permanent marker, except for a headstone in Mount Hebron Cemetery that reminds the world I was here once.

People will argue that is selfish to want to be remembered.  That if I wanted to be remembered I should have had children for parents did something important.  But not all children are worthy of being remembered by their parents and parents, sometimes, very sadly, outlive children.

Then of course there’s the career legacy.  As somebody who has had three and a half careers, a bunch of newspaper articles published and a five and a half year old blog, I can be remembered for knowing that one career wasn’t enough for a lifetime long before that was fashionable to think.  But many other people can lay claim to that thought also.

They can’t all lay claim to saying some of the things I have said in this blog at the time I did, and I made sure to put in original thoughts. In the 70′s and 80′s before the era of instant communication and social networking,  my sister claimed a New York Times reporter was following me around recording my every thought.  For I would say something and a month or three later an article would be in The Times with the very same thought and/or lines.

I had no faith in myself then.  No belief that I could write for such a newspaper or write an entire book.

Now I’m not sure I can market myself properly.  Just writing this seems so egotistical.  Yet what are most bloggers, Facebookers, and Twitterers doing but trying to make a mark on the world so that they will leave a legacy?  A lot of money is good too.

I have friends who will be remembered for their careers.  Their writing. Their wit.  Their skill and talents in other areas.  And their spouses, kids, grandkids and I’m beginning to feel very small in statute.  I want what they have.  I can’t have the kids and grandkids, that’s impossible and probably not the adoring spouse, but the career….Of course I’m convinced I’m becoming demented so I probably have about two good writing months left…..

For awhile I think I thought I could leave a legacy as a blogger.  It was different three, four years ago.  When you were known, many bloggers knew you.  There weren’t thousands of different groups all competing for bloggers and fame.  There was competitiveness, of course, everything is.  But we knew we were in the earlier days of something bigger then ourselves something that could change communication.  Then came Twitter.   It’s all too much for me.

Friends are having grandchildren.  I’m glad for them, so excited sometimes you have no idea, but a bit sad for me as I will never know that feeling.

My book is that most egotistical of genres, a memoir, but I do think I have a more interesting than most story to tell. One I won’t go into here as everybody who reads this blog knows it.  If you know me through Facebook you don’t really know it.

You don’t know that I’m much more than a collection of symptoms.  Hey, I met John Gotti and lived to talk about it.  That will always be one of my favorite stories sick as it is and it’s very sick.  It’s me, girl who couldn’t keep her Marilyn dress from doing a Marilyn.  In my memories I have short blond hair, and big red lips.  In reality I had long red hair done 40′s style or maybe I had cut it recently to just shoulder length with volume but not big–it was the last year of the 80′s.  My lips might have been red but they were never big.

That’s not one of my best stories just one of my favorites.  I don’t know what my best stories are.  I have no way of judging my own work.  I no longer have any semblance of a site meter so I have no way of gauging what pages are peoples favorites.

I did that on purpose.  The whole get-to-love-me-through-social-media frenzy sickened me.  I had come early to the party.  Too early as I didn’t realize I was supposed to have a plan, enough energy to spend the hours I wasn’t exercising or writing on social media activities.  I had done that with blogging solely because I’m obsessive and I was burnt out as I burn out of everything.

I’m vain.  Oh so vain I think the story of not knowing I had non verbal learning disorder and living anyway is a good story.  I spent my late teen, 20′s and 30′s being adorable, looking like a generic soap star, and I worked hard.  I confused my bosses who couldn’t understand that the spacey klutzy but adorable girl did such complex excellent work.

Then I broke down.  Though I did brilliantly in social work school I don’t think my work ever equaled the work I did in my 20′s to 37.  Maybe it was the medication.  More likely it was still not knowing what was wrong with me and being more aware since I broke down, had the testing, and found out I was supposed to be incapable of just about everything.  I had always believed in myself before underneath it all.  Always believed that tomorrow I would understand more.  Tomorrow there would be magical answers.

The answers weren’t magical.  There was some relief in knowing at first but then there was anger.  I’m still working it out.  And that’s the problem.  A book needs a happy or tragic ending and I don’t plan on giving it a tragic ending.  I want the happy one.

My life is good.  Very good.  But is buying, all on my own without help from one person, a house, and almost gut renovating it a good enough ending?  Even if girl has problems that should preclude her from being proud of this?

Is girl coming to a city where she knew almost anybody at a stage in life when almot nobody moves except unhappily for a job or for grandchildren, and forging a life for herself, a happy ending?

Actually now that I read the above two paragraphs I realize that it’s just as happy an ending as girl meets boy.  This hasn’t been Ozzie & Harriet’s world for sometime.

Or maybe I’m being defensive.  And what I think are accomplishments are nothing important really.