I need a place to live. The community should be near the ocean, warm, intellectually stimulating, and have a town center. I must have a duplex and it can’t be over a certain price. Very picky for a beggar.
Then I might stay here. Walking everywhere is good for me, but does limit where I can go. There are many cab companies and they do lower the price once they know you’re not going to puke all over the cab, and will tip-probably too much. New York mentality.
There is actually public transportation, not that I or anybody I know has actually seen any of the buses. And it only operates until 8 PM but somehow I feel that it can lead to more public transportation.
I have always had a noir fantasy about traveling on long distance buses being a passenger in a car, train or plane person
I have been feeling sort of “what have I been doing?” “What was I thinking?” I have only talked about moving in this blog for its existence and thought about much longer. After last week and probably this coming week I really won’t be able to afford Manhattan. I hope my apartment sells. Damn I wanted it on the market by January but due to my own idiocy and need to “help” certain people that became but a dream.
I know I will get over it soon. I understand this feeling of being disconnected, of the anxiety I’m moving to get over, has more to do with external forces that combine to make me feel poor and scared of my apartment languishing And a fear that I will be back in New York bitching and complaining as I waited just a mite too long.
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Pia is exhausted. She does have the whitest bathtub in town–just reglazed–and can show the prospective buyers the three year guarantee. The Bank of Pia is back in operation as her “contractor” is sick. He kept saying that he would pay out of the money she gave him She wants the supplies out by tomorrow and for the contractor to pay for a cleaning service so the cleaning woman doesn’t have to do anything “dirty.”
Pia thinks her apartment might be ready by next week but damned if she can tell. It’s been so long she can’t tell up from down. Continue Reading »
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I updated my other blog. I’m doing all apartment stories, past and present, in it.
Somebody close to me believes I have no patience and expect people to do things when I snap my fingers. Most other people, close to me, think I’m a total jerk for having so much patience.
I should be submitting. I’m not for many reasons including paralysis, and fear, not of being rejected but of life itself. It seems as if it’s an endless to do list that I never come close to completing. The new sub contractor is supposed to be here at noon. “Do you have a point list?” my best friend asked. “Uh, if a point list is what’s to be done than I have it.” Continue Reading »
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Read my new blog. It’s funny and nothing like this. Ask for the URL. I just got a dotcom. Knowing me I will figure it out by 09.
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I don’t really care about offending other people. I do care that my life has been made unnecessarily difficult as I’m held to the same or higher standards than most people. Higher as my intelligence has always shined through. Yet just changing a server from one to another is a major technical issue for me.
Life’s not fair and nothing will ever change that. The blogosphere’s a compassionate place. I have seen that often. My problems are more spatially oriented than anything else. They led to high anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias. I have never been eligible for any services or disability.
My parents would have sued even then had I told them I was kicked out of Driver’s Ed for coming to school stoned. I never did and was too ashamed to tell them for twenty years.
I shouldn’t have had to live much of life in shame for things that weren’t my fault but were my problems. Now I’m coming to that final third of life. Though I have saved more than most people I have every reason to fear old age. I refuse to be a person society forgets or casts off with a “her, she’s different. Doesn’t count.” Nobody has said that iat least so I can hear in many decades. But I heard that too often when I was young.
I don’t like to post on this subject for two reason. It makes me depressed, and I guess I get depressed as the reaction is you’re not an autistic bi-polar transsexual with amputated legs so why are you complaining? I mean nothing against anybody with any or all of those conditions. Nor should I have to say that, but the blogosphere like popular culture reacts to sexy conditions. Preparing Brittney Spear’s obit is sexy–forget what paper or magazine is doing that. We’re such a frigging sick society.
Now that I’m in recovery mode, from the flu, I guess I’m angry. There are so many books about disabilities. So many blogs about problems. But the one I have NLD–non verbal learning disorders gets no publicity. There aren’t many blogs about. My new blog has nothing to do with it.
I don’t want this blog to be about it.
Yet it would mean so much to me if people began to discuss it. Honestly it hurts to go around the blogosphere and see every problem but this one discussed.
I know that people don’t like me to write about this. But few people are. Sometimes I have to. I do get many hits on my posts about it and sometimes even get wonderful emails. Continue Reading »
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We took down the post we wrote on Barack Obama as we don’t want to add fuel to…in any way. We hope that people have the sense to realize that pride in ones racial or ethnic background is a good thing as long as it isn’t used the way Hitler or white supremacists used it. We know that any group Obama is part of would use pride for the good.
That directly leads to how we cut our blogging teeth. We were innocent in the ways of blogging back in 04 and part of 05. We didn’t realize that the radical right wanted to rule the blogosphere and found ourselves in too many fights with them
When we were asked to defend our moral relativist stance we could only say that our parents teachings, our education, our experiences, and most of all something inside ourselves knew right from wrong. Now our favorite and most hated newspaper The New York Times has a cover magazine story on moral instincts. I said “favorite” and “most hated” as it is both, and this article would agree with me.
I have never seen life in black and white but many shades of gray. This article shows why. I say, jokingly some of the time, that I have a built in guilt meter–again just read this article.
Morality is much more complicated than biblical teachings. Our brains are hard wired, usually, to do the right thing. Now that much is being learned about how the brain operates we’re learning about how morality takes place in it, and our morality is fashioned by our brains, our experiences, the communities we’re part of.
The article is much more complicated than that and very worth reading. But yes I was right all along. Our inbred guilt meter–we’re half Russian Jewish/half Irish Catholic, and were raised in our family of choice, a wonderful, funny, smart and oh so anxious family. Our guilt stood no chance. We have been learning to feel less guilty and less anxious as we want to ive a long and healthy life. We know that anxiety played a role in both our parents deaths/ They covered in public so well, nobody but me really knew the extent of their anxiety. Our sister was too learn more about our mother in later years but we were the older daughter.
We knew the first question was a trick one as we have long not thought Mother Teresa to be the saint people thought she was. She healed people but did nothing to better their life conditions.
We here at Courting are unapologetic about the people we have angered. We do wish we had spent less time trying to be rational when we were dealing with irrational people and just said what we think.
For a whole other side of me read my new blog. If you want the url please ask. As this blog is very new and we haven’t been pimping it much, we’re amazed by the number of hits it’s been getting. It’s about a single subject and can be funny. It’s fun to write and is very cathartic. It’s not political or issued based. We might actually include a link to the URL in a few weeks.
It got an incredible comment from the matriarch of a royal blogging family. TLP or Tan Lucy Pez We’re not usually pithy or clever enough for her. It’s OK. We have dreamed of this day
Reason number nine for not voting for Hillary: She speaks out of both sides of her mouth. She claimed much experience as practically being a member of a cabinet during Bill’s presidency. Now she says the opposite.
We speak in the royal we in this post as today we feel like royalty. The things we intuitively thought about morality arre being given a true scientific basis.Sometimes we slip into the first person. What can we say? We’re human.
We probably won’t be leaving for South Carolina until 2/6 so we can vote on 2/5. We will be a legal resident of New York until the apartment sale closes and that might be sometime in 2010. We say sort of jokingly and hope we’re not jinxing ourselves.
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Here’s a page to my novel being written online 
When I write about this disability I represent not just me but other people who have it. We have no spokesperson. The other day The New York Times wrote about disorganized boys as most people who are, are boys. Great I would be in school and have the same problems I had 40 years ago. Mostly it’s boys who are disorganized with bad handwriting, messy notebooks etc. Therefore I’m lazy and don’t try hard enough. Or the problem would be diagnosed but there would be no real help for me. There isn’t much help available for people with non verbal learning disorder. No role models of people who have made it. I have made it–with a lot of backsliding. Continue Reading »
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The one and only Cooper added my name to a list of personal development blogs. Cooper I can’t thank you enough. Really.
This list was begun by Priscilla Palmer and is I think something worthy. I am away and won’t be really blogging until October. Sometimes other things have to take precedence over blogging. This would have been impossible for me to believe a year ago.
I want to think about who I add to the list rather than link for the sake of linking. I also have to add the complete list to my post and can’t do that right now. I did find a personal friend. Only her blog doesn’t appear to be working. CS call home 
Many bloggers have inspired me in different ways but who has helped me grow? Many I believe. So I have to find some measure or scale to do this properly.
I am big on personal development, and I would love to someday not feel guilt if I don’t do blog things. Blogging has helped me grow so much that the guilt meter is working overtime with this one.
I do feel proud that Cooper included this blog as she is one blogger I have watched grow into an amazing woman.
Tune in later to find out. By later I mean anytime from tomorrow to sometime in October
I do ask that bloggers try to understand that sometimes a blogger has to disappear both to be a better blogger, and because sometimes blogging is a luxury we can’t afford at the time.
I do return comments and put work into my posts. The bloggers I admire are bloggers who comment on other blogs and don’t think that their posts are so important they don’t need to. I don’t understand why some bloggers send the comments back with one line acknowledging they received the comment–obvious, I think–yet comment on other blogs. That’s part of why I’m a bit down on blogging now.
More importantly I have other priorities at this moment in time. It’s nice to see “newer” bloggers so psyched about blogging. Please understand I love it also. Love it so much I can forget I have a whole other life.
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I realize my reaction to the article I quote is a direct reaction to experiences that I had as a child, and to the “adoptees movement” of the 70’s and 80’s who never met an adoptive parent they liked, and felt that all adoptees were hurt by the mere act of being. But if a celeb dies and their children or one child was adopted, the obit still mentions that. If an adoptee kills or rapes, it’s always mentioned. By that thinking if an adoptee accomplishes anything it should be mentioned. But why would adoptees bring it up? I wouldn’t if I didn’t have a blog. My ex-husband found it much more fascinating than I did. He found my matter of factness about it intriguing. The constant use of the word “adoptee” might by itself bring its own set of problems.
I was going to write a warm and fuzzy post about David Berkowitz’s capture on August 10, 1977 as he had held the city hostage, and now it was no longer in fear. Then I read this:
Scott Weinberger, a WCBS-TV reporter, interviewed Mr. Berkowitz recently to make the 30-year anniversary of the killings. Mr. Berkowitz, who was adopted as an infant, said that as a young man, he felt guilty after he was told by his adoptive parents, incorrectly, that his birth mother died while he was born.
David Berkowitz was a sick person. His adoptive parents sound like idiots but that’s not the point. He and he alone was responsible for his actions. He might have inherited “bad” genes; he might not have been nurtured properly.
I feel oh so earnest and stupid when I get into one of these things but I remember going to “adoptee rights” meetings where people would totally negate their adoptive families.
“I met my birth mother. She’s in a mental hospital for life and I have seven half-siblings all with different fathers but now my life is complete.”
Yes that’s simplistic thinking. I had to listen to it without throwing up. I did walk out. I went to a meeting when thinking was supposed to be a bit less simplistic. A woman asked a panel what to do as she had found her birth mother but her adoptive mother was old and sick and she didn’t know whether to tell her or not.
A valid question? Not to that panel who went on and on about how they never had liked their adoptive families and how wonderful their birth families were. I’m not going to go into my reaction. It’s in the archives.
I wrote published article on meeting my birth mother that I should scan in. It wasn’t a great meeting.
But neither she nor my parents are responsible for any problems that I might have. They’re mine and mine alone. Yes my Dad was hard on me. But we always loved each other immensely and I was a rather wild teenager.
Not because I was adopted but because of the times I grew up in, and because maybe I did have my birth mother’s rebel streak. My parents weren’t exactly conformists and at times encouraged my rebellion.
Fortunately life isn’t in black and white but many shades of gray–and pink, blue, green….
This was the day from hell. I reached a place in my book where I’m revising, taking out, editing and adding. Today I added a story about my nine year old self fighting with my 45 year old father.
My book isn’t really, Pia, the very early years but sometimes explanation in dialogue is needed. It wasn’t fun to write and I probably shouldn’t have on a day I had no AC, it was in the 90’s and the city was at a standstill.
I probably should have gone to bed and read magazines, but uh, I would have felt guilty
While I don’t think fighting with my father was the most fun I had, I knew even then how much he loved me and cared about me.
All families are screwed up. It’s the families that work out their differences that produce functional members of society.
Being adopted doesn’t make a killer. Genes, nurture, and ones self do. With the emphasis being on the last.
I shouldn’t personalize. I know that. But I am a staunch believer in a woman’s right to choose and one of those choices is adoption. I don’t understand people who are so vain they have to have their own egg or sperm. Yet when they read things like the above quote it gives validity to reasons not to adopt.
Most “satisfied” adoptees never talk about being adopted. I find that sad also. Maybe if more people talked about their “happy” home life, statistics about too many adoptees being in mental hospitals wouldn’t be bandied about so much.
David Berkowitz wasn’t the only adopted serial killer. So were Ted Bundy and Joel Rifkin for two that come to mind quickly. Maybe they had horrible upbringings that fostered their “bad” genes.
Maybe Berkowitz’s parents should have told him he was adopted when he was an infant or small child and not lied about his mother. Maybe he would have been a serial killer had he remained with his birth mother and she was in that most perfect of all situations, married.
Maybe there wouldn’t be a stigma to adoption if records were open and families made every effort to talk to their children about their roots.
Maybe if the word “adult” didn’t have to be put in front of “adoptee,” things would be different.
I am an adoptee. I am an adult. I would rather die myself than kill another human being unless they were physically attacking somebody that I love. Most adoptees feel as I do. We are a true silent majority. That’s sad.
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If you’ want to read the post above, email me for the password. It’s about freezing while writing a book and things like that. Just feels so personal. Maybe it’s not.
I was looking for the scene where James Cagney dances onto walls in Yankee Doodle Dandy, my all time favorite movie, in second grade, when I faked a flu so I could stay home and watch it all day and night.
Yankee Doodle Dandy is the story of George M Cohan who wrote very patriotic songs that I loved when I was a child. Also I think both he and James Cagney were born on July 4, and I thought that the utmost in patriotism. I wanted my birthday moved forward a few weeks.
Million Dollar Movie on New York’s old, I think, Channel 11, the station that brought you the wonderful Yuletide Log for those of us without fireplaces, or, uh, who had a father that was scared to light a fire. We didn’t celebrate Christmas but it was our annual night of the fireplace.
My sister and I both moved into apartments with wonderful wood burning fireplaces. Our father tried to ban us from using them, but he didn’t live with us, much as he wanted to.
Every time he would call, he expected the fireplace to have killed me. He would quiz me on my fireplace procedures. Like he knew? I think we had two fires in our fireplace and my sister, mother and I made them. My sister and I went to a camp where we made camp out sites at least two nights a week for years and camped to Grand Canyon and back with our camp. Got over any love of staying in nature itself.
My family excels at useless fears. We’re the Savage Anxiety/Guilt/if you can think of something to fear, we will fear it for you/Society, INC.
I was having nice family memories. Really you begin to cherish these memories as you work very very hard to rid yourself of the neuroses.
Then I came across an article where, surprise, Bush, yeah that’s his name commuted Libby’s sentence so that he can celebrate the red, white and blue in style.
I’m beginning to feel for Paris Hilton.* God help me.
I try to stay away from politics here. This got to me. It’s a bit more important than Clinton pardoning Denise Rich’s ex-husband.
How the Democratic candidates react to this might determine who I vote for in the next election.
I want to write beautiful words like these
I want to feel like the seven year old who was so in love with her country and a movie embodying the best about it that she could think of nothing else.
I don’t want to care about this crazy out of control government. I don’t want to give a damn.
I don’t want to press a button on my tool bar and see the headline I did.
My mood ring button has changed from amber–A little Nervous, emotions mixed, unsettled, to black–Stressed, tense or feeling harried.
I’m beginning to believe in mood ring tool buttons. If you don’t have one on your Google tool bar, they’re amazing. All you have to do is put your mouse under the button. Can’t even say you’re wasting time. It just went to blue green: Emotionally charged, somewhat relaxed.
I always relax when I write. That’s why I write so much.
I’m looking forward to moving to South Carolina, yes that red state, where I can hibernate during the winter, take long walks and write without hearing about how I’m lost to blogging. Though now that I’m spending most of my time writing a book and am available at least three four nights a week, or two nights and weekends, I’m being exonerated.
I want that seven year old girl back, and not in dementia. She cared. She loved her country purely. She had an imagination that wasn’t afraid to leap to the moon.
I need her awe. Her belief that grown ups could make things right. Not sure about that one. I need the girl who had to be chased from the ocean to the shore after four hours.
Her faith was unimaginable to me. I remember her so well. I kept that faith despite my hatred of Viet Nam, despite the family wars, despite Watergate, despite a bum in the bed next to me, despite so many things.
I only lost her a decade or so ago, when family members had died or grown old, when the Newt cuts were taking affect and the job offers were rescinded because the experimental mental health clinics were closed.
Everything began to go crazy. Clinton was impeached, the Florida election…and all the stuff after.
This is my country! Land of my birth! That is part of one of the worst written songs ever. kill me.
I like the sentiment. I’m just a good ole girl, at heart, masquerading as a jaded New Yorker all these years.
I was going to put in the rest, of the song. but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I do love it so much. The country, not the song. Just to get that straight.
The only way to support the troops is to bring them home.
This land belongs to all of us.
My mood is now green: steady, stable, no emotional turmoil. Have to see if they change it every half hour or so.
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*If you ever want to get more hits than you deserve mention Paris Hilton’s name as an aside. Weird but true.
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A life long friend told me recently that if I ever learned to drive he wouldn’t just hand in his license, he would do PSC’s warning people that danger is lurking.
Actually it was funny. I have long believed that laughing at or with myself is the best offense. I encourage my friends to laugh with me at my ineptness.
Then there are days like today. It’s the third day of rain. The first two were good. I got a lot of work done. I was forced to dig deep into myself which isn’t my favorite thing, but is necessary if I’m going to write a truthful book.
Yesterday I took a walk as it was just misting. My Cannon is large and bulky. I wanted a small cheap camera I can keep in my pocket, and I did forget the installation disc so that I can put pictures in my laptop.
I bought a cheapish camera. I couldn’t put in the memory disc properly. If that happened to you, you would probably laugh it off, return the camera or have them put it in.
But i didn’t want to walk two miles each way in the rain, today, as it was pouring most of the day. Nor did I want to take a cab though the cab company owner keeps lowering the price. Frequent keep this girl off the street discount as she can cause an accident just attempting to cross a street
I hate feeling the way I do today. I don’t find my ineptness funny. I realize, once again, the Asperger like symptoms stem from a lifetime of not being able to do things correctly.
They stem from people either thinking that I was an idiot or that I just didn’t try hard enough when I tried enough for ten people.
I go into panic attack mode when I’m like this. I lose perspective and think that I’m just not good enough in any sense.
It would be so easy to cast blame. But who? My Dad was hard on me, but he had no understanding of this problem. Though I think he did in the beginning, but so many doctors put the blame back onto me. I can’t blame them. Who knew about spatial retardation?
I have nobody to blame so I blame myself. And that’s the part that I really hate.
The ground’s drying, and I know the sun will be out all day or at least most of the day tomorrow.
Always thought my middle name should have been Annie though that’s not one of my top thousand plays.
Posts like this make me very very nervous as my disability is so hidden most people are never aware of it. Except when I can’t judge which car is coming how fast from what lane and just kinda stand there.
Stumble it!
