nakedjen

Death Lived There

With Monday morning came my attempt to go back to work.  I had not been there in over a week and I not only did not have medical insurance with this particular job, I had no real sick or vacation leave, either.  In exchange for being allowed to go on tour with the Grateful Dead whenever the mood (and my wily ways with manifestation) struck, I wasn’t technically a true employee.  However, I had obligations and deadlines to meet just like everyone else who worked there and I had already been missing for over a week with any real explanation for my absence.

The actual getting to the office was an exercise in complete folly.  I couldn’t really see.  I needed to wear sunglasses because the light of day (even in always overcast San Francisco) felt as if it was sizzling tiny brain bits on the back of my skull.  I politely brought an empty grocery bag with me and vomited into it (my own bus sick bag!) but knew by the looks of my fellow passengers that they would have much preferred that I not join them for this journey across town at all.

Somehow, some way, I got there.  I stumbled up the steps, walked into the front reception room and promptly collapsed into a heap on the floor.  I honestly do not remember much more after that with the exception that my boss insisted that I was not well enough to be there, wanted to know what kinds of drugs I had been taking for the last week, and insisted upon taking me home. 

Instead of taking me home, though, she took me back to the Emergency Room.  Again.  She decided she was going to be my advocate and get them to actually figure out what was wrong with me and do something!  That was very kind of her, I will admit, but I will also share that the moment we arrived and she got a gander at the clientele who occupied the waiting room and also learned that the wait, alone, could be hours and hours, she promptly left me there.  I found a place on the floor, again, under some chairs and settled in for what I knew would be a very long wait.

When I was finally seen it was by a very matter of fact doctor who decided that what I needed first and foremost was an IV.  He determined that my week of vomiting had left me so dehydrated that it was no wonder that I had a headache.  Plus, he deduced, my electrolytes were completely screwed up.  Oh, and had I been tested for AIDS?  Because, you know, with my hippie dippy free love lifestyle it could be AIDS.

It’s still amazing to me the various diagnosis that those who truly work in Public Health will pull out of the air in their attempt to help the patient presented to them.  Five days and I had a bad headache, a hysterical pregnancy, meningitis and now AIDS. 

Finally, I sighed the heaviest sigh, looked at him and said, “Don’t you think we might want to, you know, maybe do at CT Scan of my head?”  He couldn’t believe that I was asking.  But I insisted.  I told him that this was, again, like no other headache I had ever experienced in my life, that my brain felt like it was too large for my skull, that I was certain that Baby Jesus had taken up residence in there thinking it was a cozy manger full of straw and if we didn’t at least do a CT Scan to confirm the presence of the baby, I was going to just walk out.

I believe what he heard was, “I’m going to just walk out” because he just replied, “That would be against medical advice and then you’re really on your own!”

I felt as if I was speaking in tongues and no one, not a single person, could understand me.  My head hurt.   I had lost my vision.  I was vomiting non-stop from the pain and my new strange world view.  Yet I could not convince any of these doctors to actually listen to me.

Dr. Convinced It Might Be AIDS came back and started the IV.  The only decent vein was in the top of my hand so that’s where it went.  Then he just disappeared.  I was left there, in the dark, on the table, IV slowly dripping into my hand and not given any more information.

The bag finally emptied, I needed to pee, and I wanted to remove the wastebasket-now-vomitbasket from the room.  So I got up and wandered into the hall.  Again, I had trouble navigating because of my missing vision, but eventually found my way down to a desk that was buzzing with activity.

They were all startled to see me.  I asked about the removal of the IV from my hand and was told that no one could do that, I had to wait for Dr. Convinced It Might Be AIDS.  I then asked about my CT Scan and when they couldn’t find anything about a requested CT Scan in my chart I told them that Dr. Convinced It Might Be AIDS must have forgotten to write it down, but that I KNEW that he most certainly wanted me to have one because we’re concerned there might be a tumor in my head.
I’m uncertain why on earth anyone standing there believed me, but a few minutes after being escorted to my room, someone came for me and plopped me in a wheelchair and wheeled me straight to radiology. 

In order to have a CT Scan of your head, they put your head in a vice like brace on a table.  It’s important that you stay very still so that the CT can scan your head and brain.  The problem was I was still really really sick.  And I kept vomiting.  The technician got so frustrated with me that he used duct tape across my chin to tape my head in place.  It did not allow me to move up, down, or side to side. 
When I vomited?  I started to choke and aspirate.  I ripped the duct tape off, sat up, and spewed all over the technician. Who in turn spewed a litany of obscenities at me.

Back and forth we went with my head in the vice while he tried his best to get scans of my brain.  I just could not stay still.  It was a choice between getting the scan or choking and dying.  I just couldn’t die.
I think the technician finally just gave up because I do not remember a moment when things actually went well while I was strapped to that contraption.  They wheeled me back to the room upstairs, reattached a new IV drip, and left me covered in my own vomit.

It was at this point that I started to cry.  I am unsure how long I sat there in the dark crying and crying.  It hurt to cry, each sob was like a big bad gong going off inside my head, but I just did not care.  I knew I was going to die and I knew that no one, not a single person in that hospital, in that city, in the world could save me.

Dr. Convinced It Must Be AIDS never did come back.  Another doctor waltzed in after about an hour to tell me that my CT Scan was inconclusive.  Did I know I had lots of head trauma?  Scarring?  It was difficult to assess what might be new or different since this was his first time looking at my scans.  The IV should help me to stop vomiting and if I’m not feeling better tomorrow I really should go see my own neurologist.   The ER is for emergency, didn't I know?  I should get a regular doctor to take care of these problems.

Then he turned on his heels and waltzed out.

I waited in that room for two more hours.  No one ever came.  Not a nurse, not a doctor, not even a candy striper.  No one.  I grabbed the IV in my hand, ripped it out, used a paper towel to stop the bleeding, stood up and slid and slithered, leaning against the walls, out of that hospital.  I was convinced that Death lived there and I never wanted to go back there again.

Just Probably Might Be

Sunshine came too early the next day despite my slumber at the bottom of the stairs.  Again the gaggle of musical hippie boys was in my room asking if I was joining them in the parking lot before the show?  And if I was not, could they have my ticket for their girlfriend?  Please? 

Yes, take the ticket, I told them.  I couldn’t even lift my head.  It now felt as if my brain had grown three times its original size and that if I did not obtain a new skull for it, it was going to come seeping right out my ears and nostrils.  An ice pick carefully placed between my own two eyes seemed like the only answer at this point, as I knew that my chances with another visit to the UCSF emergency room could result in giving birth.  However, it perhaps meant giving birth to my brain, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing? 

Also, knowing that the gaggle of musical hippie boys were once again off to the concert, I didn’t want to be left alone in the flat all day with no one at all available to attend to me should I actually, you know, die.  This, truthfully, was my current thought process.  I lay there, that morning, thinking that if I was going to actually die that day I didn’t want to do it alone.  I’d rather die in whilst lying on the floor of the waiting room at the ER surrounded by familiar if utter and complete strangers.

So I had the gaggle of musical hippie boys once again deposit me at the front door of the ER.  This time more than one of them really did make sure that I was going to be okay, but I kept insisting that the ER was filled with doctors!  What was the worst that could happen?  It was the safest place I could possibly be in all of San Francisco!

Again, I waited.   Long hours passed while I slept on the floor under a spread of three chairs.  Finally, they called my name.  This time it was a male intern.  He read over my chart from the previous day’s visit.  I was uncertain at the time exactly what the previous doctor had written in there, but I reiterated to this doctor that I was most definitely not pregnant and that my brain felt three sizes too large for my skull and that I couldn’t stop vomiting and all of this had been going on for a week and could he please do something other than just shrug his shoulders and pat me on the back and tell me that it was a migraine because I know migraines and this is not a mother-fucking migraine.

Or something like that.

After asking me lots and lots more questions and after nicely holding a trashcan for me while I vomited, this intern decided that it just probably might be meningitis.   He wasn’t quite certain how I might have contracted meningitis, but he was certain that was what it was and he was also certain that in order to properly diagnosis this he needed to give me a spinal tap right away.

Have you ever had a spinal tap?  If you’ve never been so lucky, let me tell you right now that if someone, anyone, but especially an over-eager young intern in an emergency room who believes he’s just diagnosed his first case of meningitis offers to give you one, promise me that you’ll get up off the table (even if all you’re wearing is a silly hospital gown and everyone and her mother is going to see what all that God gave you) and march right out the front door.  Do not stop to explain.  Do not even turn around to make eye contact.  Just blurt out your own most authoritative no and go.  Fast.
Do not do what I did.  Which was to get naked, face the wall, occasionally throw up bile bits into a bed bowl and because I was so grateful that he didn’t think I was pregnant insist that it didn’t hurt not even a teeny tiny bit.

Didn’t hurt, my ass!

It still hurts.  Twenty years later and I’m still unable to talk about it without having serious traumatic spasms in my back. 

Granted, I was the girl without medical insurance.  I was the not quite so patient patient at their mercy.  I was more than desperate to make the pain that was inside my head go away or to have them just remove the top of my skull all-together.  Seven days I had been suffering with increasing pain and pounding and sensitivities and now I was certain I was also going blind as I could not see anything that was not absolutely directly in front of my face.  I had no peripheral vision at all.

Still, while eager young Intern doctor dude told me that the stuff he was applying to my back would numb it and I really would just feel a pinch and then wouldn’t feel a thing, let me just tell you what I really did feel.

Every fucking thing.

Plus, as he drained the fluid from my spine?  The pain in my head jumped on the amp from 3 to 33.  Yes, I realize guitar amps only go to 10.  I’m not joking about that 33.  If I thought I had pain before?  Now, well, now I was ready to give birth to that phantom baby out of the top of my skull because it certainly wasn’t going to be any more painful shooting a brand new Baby Jesus for this generation out of my cranium than the pain I already was experiencing.

After he was done, he just left me there.  Naked.  On my side.  Staring at a wall that was festooned, oddly enough, with posters of San Francisco in the 1960’s.  He told me when I felt up to it, I could get dressed and go home.  That he would call me when he had the results, but since he was certain it was meningitis he was calling in a prescription for me at the pharmacy and I should pick it up on my way home.

Brilliant. 

At that point, I couldn’t even imagine ever standing up on my own two feet again.  How he expected me to negotiate the redressing of myself in all my hippie flowing attire, the three buses it would take me to get to the pharmacy, the waiting for the prescription, the return trip from the pharmacy and the dreaded climb up all the stairs to my flat whilst giving birth to the brand new Baby Jesus out of the top of my head was a complete and utter mystery to me. 

But I was too busy vomiting bile bits to even ask him this question.  So I lay there, naked, vomiting, and shivered.  Thinking to myself that death by spinal tap, naked and alone, was going to be a very tragic way to die.

I don’t know how long I had been there like that when a cleaning person finally came in and found me.  He was just as startled at his discovery of naked me as I was happy to see him, and he asked me if I was supposed to be in there or if I had just wandered in?  I explained that I had seen a doctor, the doctor had left, he told me to rest, that Baby Jesus was trying to escape from my head, and would he mind helping me get dressed so I could leave and not actually die there?

The poor cleaning man most certainly thought I was on the wrong floor.  I know he believed that I had wandered down from Psych and I could see him trying to figure out how to call security without alarming me.  He did help me get dressed.  He also told me I couldn’t leave the room once I was dressed.  However, after he left, I left and by keeping one hand on the wall at all times so as not to lose my way since I could no longer see anything other than what was absolutely right in front of me, I eventually wound my way down and around the hallways until I found myself at the front desk.  

I begged them to please pay for a taxi to my house.  Again, I had no money.  Why I had not actually learned the lesson about having enough money for transportation from the hospital after the gaggle of musical hippies leaves you at the front door probably has something to do with Baby Jesus taking up so much room in my cranium. 

There was a very nice woman at that front desk that took pity on me and paid for my taxi home.  God bless that woman, whomever she is.  If I had tried to make it home that day, I am certain a bus would have hit me.  Or worse.  Well never know because of that Front Desk saint.

The good news is that the taxi driver also took me to the pharmacy.  Where I got the medicine for my meningitis.  The meningitis that, of course, I did not have.  When I finally did get home there was a message from the eager, young Intern who said he just didn't know what was wrong with me but it really was not meningitis.  So if I’m not feeling better in a few days, I should go see a doctor. 

I had seen four doctors in four days.  Not a single one could figure out what was wrong with me, but they were all very good at deducing what was NOT wrong with me.  I was slowly dying, even I knew that much.  What I did not know was how much longer I could actually live to get well?

Jesus Is Coming!

The Grateful Dead was playing that weekend at the Frost Amphitheatre on the campus of Stanford University.  Some of the Dead’s best shows have been played at the Frost Amphitheatre.  Much like the Greek at Berkeley, it’s the nature of the venue that allows them to play such great shows.  They were in their own backyard, the crowd is small and intimate and, well, they just play better to the home team.

I had tickets for both shows at the Frost and was determined to go.  But that morning when the throngs of folks who were crashing at our flat (the circus had come to town!) came into my room to ask me if I was ready to go I had no idea that it was even Saturday and barely had recognition of the people swirling about me.

My brain was in no condition to go to a show.  My heart wanted to go so very much, but my brain, my brain was now singing its own songs to a totally different piper and I realized that I was in even bigger trouble than first surmised.

It was decided that I would go to the Emergency Room while everyone else went to the shows.  The University of California-San Francisco ER was actually not far from our flat and my friends literally dumped me at the entrance on their way to the show. 

That sounds awful.  It wasn’t that they dumped me.  I insisted that they all go and enjoy the show.  That I would be fine.  That there was no need for anyone to miss the concert on my account.  That I would get fixed up, straightened out, ask for the good drugs and be able to go with all of them to the show the next day.  That was the plan.

Much like the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, the ER at UCSF is packed with a variety of San Francisco’s best assortment of vagrants and those living closest to the edge.  That was twenty years ago.  I cannot believe that it has gotten any better. The wait time can be just as long as those at the Free Medical Clinic, as well.

In a testament to just how awful public health medicine can be for those of us living on the margins of society (and yes, I realize I was choosing to live on the margins of society) that day after sitting, then lying down, then actually sleeping on the floor of the ER waiting room nursing my aching head, I was seen by a female intern who actually diagnosed me as a hysterical pregnancy.

Without doing a pregnancy test.

When she told me that I was experiencing these intense and painful headaches because I was pregnant and that I was refusing to accept it and if I just would joyfully accept this pregnancy my head would feel much better, I told her that she must be very, very excited.

“Why?” she asked without even turning around from her paperwork to look at me.

“Because Jesus is on his way!”

The only possible way I could have even been remotely pregnant would have been because of divine intervention and given the details of my current lifestyle, somehow I just didn’t quite imagine that God or Jesus or Buddha or whomever we all want to call the Great One was going to be blessing me with a pregnancy.

The doctor was not at all amused with me.  I suppose given that I was there without medical insurance and was lucky to be seeing a doctor at all I should have just accepted her diagnosis.   However, come on?!  She divined that I was pregnant just by asking me questions.  Certainly, as a patient I had a right to question her diagnosis?

She, quite literally, escorted me not only from the ER, but also from the entire hospital.  She did not take the time to make sure that I could safely make it home.  She just wanted to be sure I was no longer on hospital property and no longer their responsibility.

I was still very, very, very sick, however.

Getting home was more of a challenge than anticipated when I had allowed the bus full of my hippie friends to drop me at the entrance to the Emergency Room.

I tried to find the bus that would take me back to my house (as bus fare was all I had) but I was terribly and awfully confused.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was beginning to lose my peripheral vision.  Then there was the vomiting.  It.would.not.stop.

I’d hop on a bus, only to find myself completely overwhelmed with nausea and having to leap immediately off at the next stop.  I did this from bus to bus to bus to bus until I finally found myself standing on the sidewalk in front of the very long and insurmountable staircase leading up up up to my flat.

The thought of climbing all those stairs was just too overwhelming.  So I laid down for a nap on the bottom step. 

It was there that the busload of hippies found me when they came rolling home at two in the morning.  I had not moved, but had vomited and pissed all over myself.  I was the perfect picture of San Francisco stoop loveliness.

a chain of deeds begins finely wrought

There’s a 27-year-old man who needs a heart.  He does not have medical insurance.  Harnessing the power of the Internet and social media, his family and his friends and the large and amazing and generous hearts of complete strangers have come together to raise over $700,000 to help him get the heart transplant that this young man so desperately needs. 

Life should not be a privilege in this the greatest nation on Earth.  Life should be a right.  However, what Eric’s story tells us, as so many others who have similar stories tell us, is that life is really very precious and in this country can be held in the hands of decision makers who manage large corporate balances instead of beating hearts.

Twenty years ago, exactly, this month I was a twenty-five year old Deadhead living in a shared flat in Haight Ashbury.  To say I was living my dream would be a bit of an understatement.   The job I had allowed me to tour with the Grateful Dead whenever and where ever they toured, so it didn’t much matter to me that I didn’t have medical insurance.  Who needed medical insurance when you had access to the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, anyway?

I woke up one morning with a headache unlike any headache I had ever experienced in my life before.  I am a headache patient.  A lifetime of head injuries beginning with a bouncy fall down the stairs when I was just six weeks old had left me with a very sensitive brain.  Headaches were something I knew and understood.  I usually treated them with biofeedback because I am so sensitive to pharmaceuticals. 
The headache that morning was different, though.  The pain was sharp and searing and located in the exact center of my head.  It literally felt like my brain was trying to explode its way outside of my head and that what would help most would be to drill a hole in my head to let it out!

I didn’t go to work that day.  I didn’t walk my dog.  I never really left the confines of my room.  I remember just keeping a pillow pressed against the top of my head trying to relieve the pressure.  It was impossible, but I was trying. 

The next morning when it was no better at all, I decided I needed to see a doctor.  So I traipsed over to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and sat in their waiting room with the conglomeration of homeless, young mothers, their younger children and hippie wannabes like myself waiting for my turn.  This waiting business could be an all-day affair and there were times when you were never seen at all because they saw folks at that clinic based upon the doctors own determination of urgency and not when you had actually come in.  There were no appointments.  There was no rhyme or reason.  There was just waiting.  And more waiting.  And then waiting some more.

I waited.  That day I never saw a doctor. 

The next day, my head in even more pain than the day before, I went back.  I had now missed three days of work, but my head was in no shape for work.  It was barely in shape for navigating the short distance between my own flat on Felt Street and the clinic on the corner of Haight and Cole.  Yes, it was that bad.  I stopped in the panhandle and threw up on some bushes.  Lovely!

Again in the waiting room with the homeless women and men, the young mothers and younger children and the runaway hippie wannabe kids.  I knew that some of them were actually there hoping to score some sort of narcotic to hold them over until they scored something even better on the streets.  It was common knowledge that on certain days at the clinic there were certain doctors that were more liberal with the prescription pad and I think this day must have been one of those days because I found the only place to sit was out on the steps and not even in the clinic waiting area.

Grace or God or Whomever must have been with me on that particular day because I was finally seen by one of the clinic doctors late that afternoon.  A doctor that decided it was nothing more than a bad migraine (despite my insistence that this was not a migraine at all, but that my brain was trying to climb out of my skull) and who gave me a prescription for Tylenol with codeine and sent me on my way.  Look this way, look that way, step inside, how many fingers am I holding up?, and, oh yes, please leave a donation on your way out the door.

I was glad for the diagnosis, but unsure what to do next? I knew that the prescription was going to be useless, but at the same time I was determined to get rid of this headache.  So I made my way to Walgreen’s in the Castro and had them fill it.  The problem was I couldn’t stop throwing up.  I remember taking the pills inside of Walgreens, walking outside to the corner to wait for the bus and promptly vomiting the entire contents of my stomach into the middle of the sidewalk.

The more flamboyant of a gay couple who was standing nearby said, “Honey, sweetheart, you really should learn to hold your drinkies!” and then they both swished off giggling. 

The bus finally came.  I made it home and flung myself back into my bed.  I’m unsure how many days I was there, but I know more than a few days passed.  I was not well. My head was literally exploding off the top of my shoulders and no one seemed to care if I lived or if I died. 

Searching for Jeffrey Rosenberg

Yesterday, I decided that perhaps I should open up some of the boxes that have been following me around for twenty years.  I honestly was uncertain of the contents of these boxes and am surprised that I still have them.  For ages and ages they lived in the attic of my Aunt Sally and Uncle Paul's house.  I am actually not certain how the boxes ended up in their attic, but that's where they landed.  Then a few years ago they sold that house and the boxes needed to be "moved".  They were shipped to me in California. 

One might surmise that when I received them in California I might actually be interested in their contents?  I might open them?  But I was not.  Not even in the slightest.  In fact, I was a bit horrified that the boxes had been "saved" at all.  I had not looked in them for twenty years, I obviously did not need whatever they contained, it seemed silly that they were shipped from Maryland all the way to California because they might be "important".

What's even a bit more nuts is that I moved the boxes from California to Utah.  Again, without even checking the contents.  We all know the emotional state I was in when I was moving from California to Utah, so I guess it isn't too much of a surprise that the boxes just got thrown on the moving truck with everything else. 

The boxes landed in the attic of the first house I rented here and I did not feel the tiniest bit of interest to look in them or figure out what secrets they might reveal about my younger self.  They were left in the attic to continue holding whatever secrets they held.

Then I moved to this new house in September.  Again, the boxes.  I camethisclose to depositing them at Deseret Industries.  However, my sister, knowing that they were THE BOXES from Sally and Paul's attic would not allow me to do that.  She carried them herself from the attic to my studio.  Where they have been sitting, once again, holding the secrets and not uttering a single word.

Until yesterday. 

Yesterday I was out in the studio organizing things so that they would be more streamlined for my tea business and realized that the boxes were in the way.  I picked one up to move it to another location and it fell apart.  The contents fell all over the floor displaying a historical picture of one era of my life.

My college life.  I had no idea that I even had my diploma from college, but there it was.  So were the awards I won for playwrighting which are other things I had no idea anyone had ever bothered to save.  My yearbooks were in there, notebooks from various classes that I had taken, report cards, and reams and reams of plays.  Plays I have written.  Plays that have been performed.  Plays that were published.  My plays.

Also tucked in there was a long and lovely letter from Jeffrey B. Rosenberg.  Five long hand-written pages.  Plus he included ten pages of his poetry.  Which is quite good, actually.  And he was just a teenager. 

I met Jeffrey in New York City the fall of my senior year in college.  I had gone to New York to see a few plays and he happened to be at one of the plays that I was seeing that weekend.  The play was "The Boys of Winter".  It was okay, as far as plays go.  Andrew McCarthy was one of the stars and after the play I stood around the stage door waiting to meet Andrew (and give him a copy of my current play...which I did do) and it was while waiting for Andrew that I met Jeffrey.

That boy had such a joie de vivre he totally captivated me.  I can still see, now, his bright shiney eyes and hear his infectious laugh.  And I know this is a totally impossible hope beyond hope, but the Internet has made the world so much smaller that perhaps just by asking here someone will know someone who knows someone and Jeffrey will hear that I'd love to hear from him.

Because I would.

Just to say thank you.  I realized after reading his sweet letter and poems that I never wrote him back.  And that was just not a kind or generous thing to do.  I'm sure I was thinking he was just a high school boy and why should I bother? Still, for whatever reason I saved his letter and his poems.  Why would I save them?

It should not have mattered how old he was.  He cared.  He wrote me lovely words and even sent me a record album that he thought I might enjoy.

I owe him a letter and perhaps even more.

So, Jeffrey (or anyone who knows Jeffrey) if you're reading, please contact me.  I'd love to get back in touch with you and just find out what happened to you?  I want to know if all your dreams came true.

Here's hoping I can find out.

Jeffrey B. Rosenberg 7802 Mary Cassatt Drive Potomac, Maryland 20854 

Mercury Is Retrograde

So, of course, Nakedjen had to just vanish.  Because if anyone knows anything about me, I'm the girl who is always running around like Chicken Little screaming about how the whole Universe is going to absolutely implode the moment we even get near Metrograde (as dear lovely Shannon calls it). 

It actually wasn't quite Mercury's fault.  Or maybe it is.  Given that my divorce decree was actually signed during Mercury Retrograde last December, is it any wonder that things agreed to and decided then are not quite exactly as they seem?  Or that the communications between the two people who were doing their best to be civil somehow seem to have gotten totally garbled and confused? 

Probably not.  At least not to me who completely and absolutely 110% believes in the powers of Mercury and its backward movement across our skies. 

Trust me, I know it's all rather "imaginary", this backwards movement of a single planet causing everything to just go completely haywire.  But you know what?  I'm an electric wiry Aquarius.  I make things spark and sputter and just plain BLOW UP just by casually glancing in their direction.  Sometimes I just have to think it and there's unexplained spontaneous combustion!  If I can blame Mercury for some of this at least some part of the year, trust me, I'm blaming Mercury.

The other times?  Well, I just allow people to believe that I'm a tad demonic and full of Satan-like witchy powers. Which may also be the case.  I know there are certain people who will surely tell you that is undeniably true.

What I do know is this:  David decided that he was no longer going to host or be responsible for Nakedjen or Dreamsweet anymore.  In all honesty, it does make perfect sense that he not be responsible for those domains or their respective websites as, well, let's face it, they're mine.  And they're all about me.  There's no real reason to have him attached to them in any way.  It just keeps us weirdly connected in ways that we should not be connected.  Period.

However, he's always been the one who understood the hosting, the domain mapping, the "backend" side of things for the websites.  I write interesting words and take pretty pictures and design lovely logos and make delicious teas.  I can host the best dinner parties on the planet, but do not ask me the first thing about hosting a website unless you want to know whether you should serve red or white and perhaps what kind of china would look good on the table while you're surfing?

Until today, that is.  Today all of that changed.  Or at least it is the beginning of change. 

Let's remember that contrary to popular belief, I have not just been sitting in a corner wiping the tears from my sobbing eyes for the last eighteen months.  I actually do have a life here in Utah.  I have friends!  Fabulous, fantastic, super smart genius friends who actually do know a thing or two or seven about hosting websites AND throwing amazing parties.  Even better, these friends genuinely like me.  And when I cried HELP, they said, "Oh just come on over, we'll get it all sorted out!"

Which is exactly what has happened.  It's not completely sorted out, but it is on the way to being all sorted out and I know it will be totally fine.

Totally fine, dude.  (I've been saying dude all the time lately at work and I am unsure that my co-workers quite know what to do with me?!)

They say (whomever THEY is) that the flumoxes of Mercury Retrograde can hide amazing gifts.

I think THEY are absolutely right. ;-)

I Can't Write What I Want To Write

So I'm writing this instead. 

A list of positives:

1.  It's really beautiful here today.
2.  The garden has sprouted.

3.  A woman named Jeni, who has shown me incredible kindness in the past via this blog, sent me seeds.  For my garden.  Heirloom tomato seeds.  Those have been planted, too.  They're Jeni Tomatoes.  And I can't wait to see what they become and share the bounty with all of you.
4.  Your kindness and generosity is keeping a roof over the small, blonde heads of Gwendomama's children.  You Internet People are the very best!!
5.  I had tea orders and tincture orders to fulfill today.  It made me happy to mix herbs and decant tinctures and know that others will feel better.
6.  I baked Clyde's Cookies today.  Because I wanted one.  Not for anyone else.  Just for me.
7.  The dogs and I hiked a massive canyon today, played in a river, and climbed a mountain that gave us a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley.  All off leash.  I am grateful for wide open spaces for our happy recreation.
8.  There's a case of Kombucha in my refrigerator.

 
9.  My migraine went away. Finally.
10.  Remembering all these beautiful things that happened just today?  Reminds me just how very blessed I am.  And allows me to just let go of what it is that I can't write about anyway.

Helping Her Because We Can

Nakedjen readers.  You are kind.  You are generous.  You are the people whom if I was having a party, I'd call you all up and most certainly invite you over and ask you to please bring all your friends.

I know this about all of you because you've showered me with the kind of love that has allowed me to super glue the pieces of a shattered heart back together again, scoop myself up off the sidewalk and stand naked among you, proud to call you my friends.

Gwendomama, one of my dearest friends, who is a kick-ass blogger and even more kick-ass mother and friend, has recently faced some very traumatic life circumstances.  She's a super-mama and of course she's going to be okay.  But that's not the point.  The point is that it happened at all, that the perpetrator is getting off with nothing more than a small slap from the authorities and she's got to hold her small fragile family together while not cracking into a million pieces herself.

The power of the blogosphere to save and change the world is quite awesome.  This time, we're going to save and change one really deserving mama and her superkids' life.

No donation is too small.  You have my eternal gratitude. And of course, you always have my love.

Over A Crate and Barrel

On Monday afternoon, I was in my cubicle at my new job perusing a Crate and Barrel catalog that had come in the mail.  I am still very much living my year of nothing new so I was really just perusing it.  As a person who spends many hours of her day toiling away at marketing campaigns that are geared at convincing people that they might want to actually purchase Product A over Products B through ZZ, even something as simple as a Crate and Barrel catalog can hold clues about the current obsessions of today's consumer.

Or it can hold clues about the demons that are living inside my very own head.  Of course I had no idea that a Crate and Barrel catalog held this power and I'm certain that most of you non-divorced types reading had no idea that it did, either?  I'm guessing that some of you divorced types are yelling at the computer right now, "Oh no, not the Crate and Barrel catalog?!  Step away, Nakedjen.  Put it down and back away carefully!"  Where oh where were you kind already divorced types on Monday afternoon?

The Crate and Barrel catalog.

Did you all know that there lurks inside of me, somewhere in the dark reaches of my grey matter, Married Nakedjen?  She's still in there.  She has not disappeared just because the divorce papers were signed and I told myself that it was all done and I was no longer married.  Married Nakedjen is still here and still cooking enough dinner for two!

This might perhaps explain why my butt seems a tad too large for those pants that I purchased last year when I was still purchasing new things?  Because she's still here and has not vacated the premises.  Squeezing two of us into one pair of pants is not going so well.  I refuse to buy new pants, so she's going to have to sit at home and baby sit Buddha and Stella if she's going to insist on sticking around.  

This might also explain why when I perusing the Crate and Barrel catalog I came upon a sideboard (A FUCKING SIDEBOARD) and started sobbing. 

Sobbing.  Hard.  Can't catch my breath, hard.  Here come the co-workers, hard.  Red rimmed eyes for the rest of the day, hard.

I know, for certain, that it was not Single Nakedjen that started sobbing.  It was most definitely Married Nakedjen.  And why was she sobbing over a black streamlined sideboard in the Crate and Barrel catalog? 

Before you call the authorities and ask them to take me away to the loony bin, I'll just share this:

My mixed up brain saw the sideboard and actually thought, "Wow, Dave would really like that and it would go great with our couches and the dining room table.  I should show it to him..."

Dave would really like that?  Really??  Seriously????  Our couches?  Our dining room table?  (I do not even have these items anymore!  They're in Santa Cruz with him?!).

And then, because I'm me, before I could stop myself, Single Nakedjen took over for Married Nakedjen and screamed, "You idiot!  Of course he'd really like that.  He's probably out purchasing it and everything else in this catalog with his new girlfriend for his new house right now!"

Because, you know, salt in the wound and all that.  Can't leave well enough alone.  Can't just laugh at myself for thinking that Dave would really like that sideboard.  Need to drag the new girlfriend in to my misery and remind myself that not only am I Single Nakedjen, but that Dave's shopping at Crate and Barrel and setting up a new family home! 

Now, before you all write to remind me that I need to get over myself, move on, stop belly aching, blah, blah, blah, I'll just remind you (who feel that way) that I was actually shocked by this whole episode. 

They (whomever they are??) say that it takes half as long again to get over a broken marriage or relationship as the marriage lasted.  I was married to Dave for 8 years.  So, according to them, I've still got some time to get over it. 

In the meantime, I think I'll just avoid the personality disorder inducing Crate and Barrel catalogs.   Maybe IKEA for a single girl?

Best Breasts Forward

1.  I spent a lot of this week ranting and raving about Oprah.  Again.  I'm upset about her participation in the KFC free chicken dinner giveaway.  I realize there are some of you out there in the world who missed this news, so I'll fill you in.  Oprah partnered with KFC and put a coupon on her website for two free pieces of KFC chicken and two sides.  "Free Food!," responded America. 

Then things went a tad awry as servers crashed and the coupons were not available to print to thousands of people and the KFC franchises across America ran out of chicken and the promised sides and those of us who are not under Oprah's spell sat and wondered at how a person who truly has such a magnificent influence upon the very behavior of so very many in our society can not comprehend that when she speaks, people act, and that she might want to speak just a tad more responsibly?

It also bothered my vegetarian sometimes vegan heart that it seemed just a tad hypocritical that the woman who just a few months ago was both honored by PETA and also had told all of us she had embraced a RAW macrobiotic diet was sending America to eat at a fast-food restaurant and was saying she just wanted everyone to have some free food.

I do accept that many of us here in America really do consider KFC and other fast-food establishments real food.  I do not. 

What worries me most, though, is that there are so many among us that are teaching our children that KFC is real food, that a coupon from Oprah is the golden-ticket and worthy of celebration and a hot meal for dinner tonight. 

America, this generation of children is the first in our history as a nation that will have a shorter life span than its parents.  We have failed. 

I intend to do something, everything about this.  My dogs (and I do not say this lightly) eat better than a very good many of the children in America.  That should not be the case.  Our children are our future.  Our most precious resource.  It is time we start feeding them healthy, real food.

2.  I accepted a real job this week.  A job with benefits.  A job with vacation pay.  A job that actually expects me to be there for 40 hours a week.  A real bonafide job.

I honestly believed I was okay with all of this.  I've actually been doing this same job that I accepted full-time for quite a few months now.  They like me there, I like them.  It's a good fit.

My official hire date was May 1.  I have been freaking out since that day.  Freaking out because after so very long as a consultant and contractor now?  Now I have to actually really and truly show up.  It's not just an option. 

I know that it is always an option.  I know that at any time I can just "quit" and move on to the next great thing.  But I am the girl that never quits.  I'm the girl that gives 110%.  The word quit really isn't in my vocabulary.

So, yes, I'm now employed.  By someone other than me.   While I am very grateful to be employed, I just have to admit that there's going to be a rather long period of adjustment.  And perhaps it will be best if I just do not adjust. 

3.  This morning I participated in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure with my sister, NeverNakedBeth.  We donned our pink Superhero capes and honored all those in our family who have been touched by this specific cancer.  There were literally tens of thousands of other people who joined us and it was a truly inspiring and beautiful event.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all of you how important monthly self-exams are as well as the other things you can do for your own personal breast health.  Things like eating your greens, being very active, living a healthy life-style and remembering that you love yourself!

As a reminder that I love you, too, a naked picture.  (I know many of you are shouting FINALLY!)  I know there's been not enough nakedness around here lately.  I'm working on fixing that.  Especially now that warm weather is here.  I'm donning my superhero Pink ribbon cape.  Now, go check your breasts, eat your greens, and avoid fast food. 

xoxox