Stuff I’m not dealing with

There are various things going on in my life that I am ‘not dealing with’ these days. This is easily done since having a 23 month old kid around tends to eat up most of my free time. In an effort to possibly motivate me to deal with them I’m going to post them here. Note this is one of those ‘notes to myself’ type posts and it contains pretty boring menial crap that you might not really want to waste your time reading. Having provided that disclaimer, here we go. Stream of consciousness core dump activating…

1) Vincent Lumalcuri off to Iraq – I heard a few weeks ago that ‘Vinny’, my best friend growing up, (age 3 – 18 approx) on Pinecrest Parkway in Hastings-On-Hudson, NY, is going off to Iraq soon (or is perhaps already there, I’m not sure). We pretty much lost touch when we both went off to college in fall 1987. He to a college in NY where he could do an ROTC program and eventually become a Marine officer, me to Antioch College and well.. a pretty left wing nut, but regardless, hearing that he is heading off there is kinda eating at me on the inside. I actually got his e-mail address this past December but haven’t written him yet since just a quick ‘hey how ya doin’ wouldn’t suffice. But everytime I hear the news now.. damn.. now it’s personal, now I actually know someone who might have been in that car bombing etc. Actually for years it’s both kind of bugged me that he was in the military since he doesn’t fit my ‘stereotype’ of who would join but then at the same time reassured me that at least there are some sane, smart & reasonable people in there (just not in the White House apparently), but having him heading ‘over there’ is just eating at me and I’m not really sure what to do about it.

Mom Moving – Also related to the town/street I grew up on is the fact that my mother is selling ‘our house’. Of course, it’s her house, and she wants to move into a retirement home with my step-father who needs a more accesable living space etc. so I cant blame her, and actually this house was just ‘my house’ from when i was 14 – 18, though we lived just down the street before that. All my dreams of home still take place at 76 Pinecrest Parkway where I lived from 1972(?) – 1983, but they occasionally morph into this house.. and now it’s only going to be accessable in my dreams too. When I mention that she is selling this house to people and they ask ‘are you ok with that?’ Well no, of course not, but it needs to happen. I need to let it go, and the last thing my mother needs at this point is any guilt from me about it. It makes sense she’s selling it, it needs to happen, I certainly cant buy it and don’t want to / plan to live down there. So I’ve been putting on my best face and doing what I can to help her unload stuff. I taught her how to sell stuff on ebay 16 months ago and she already has a 250+ rating now, and she has also discovered freecycle so she’s basically been jettisoning anything that’s not nailed down.

A follow up to the above post relates to the current drama my mother is dealing with in selling this house, but since search engines are pretty smart and lawyers are involved I’m not going to post much about this for fear of making a mess. Suffice to say that if a fence that belongs to your neighbors and was put up in 1955, long before you bought a house in 1983, but is over on your property… deal with getting this resolved ASAP as opposed to assuming the nice 94 year old neighbor, who has many times in the past verbally acknowledged that this is the case, wont sign the appropriate papers when you are about to sell your house because they have a daughter who is a lawyer and sees this as an opportunity to either make a grab for more land or blackmail you for cash. ’nuff said. Names withheld to protect the … So it’s possible that my mother wont be able to sell her house if this gets held up in court for several years. This is BAD BAD BAD since my step-father’s health pretty much requires he be in a single level home, not to mention the fact that having nearby assistive care on call would be good too. So my mom is having a nervous breakdown right now, and there’s nothing I can do to help. So.. i’m digesting this too. All part of ‘growing up’ I guess. Boo

Other stuff I’m not dealing with &/or To Do Items that seem permanently put off:

My health – I’m 36 now.. ‘spose I should start seeing a doctor regularly. I went once when I was 33. Before that..er.. high school, 1986 or so probably. So not only should I go just because, but I also have some health issues I should deal with. I’m overweight, and alot more than most people think at first glance. I can always win at the ‘guess your weight’ games at carnivales since I usually exceed their guess by 40 – 50 lbs. Go me. I also get really tired at times, and not just from lack of sleep from dealing with Owen, this was happening before he came along. Blood sugar perhaps? Dunno. I also found out like 2 years ago that my blood pressure had crept up over the Red Cross limit so I can’t give blood. (and I’m O negative, universal donor, so the Red Cross sends me all sorts of love letters asking me to give more.

Dentist – Pretty much the same scenario as the doctor above. I blame the dentist I grew up going to, David Krashaar, for this though. Here’s why, and I kid you not, whenever I got a cavity filled he would say ‘You’re a big boy, you don’t need novicaine, just raise your arm if it hurts and I’ll stop for a few seconds’. Seriously, I got like 10 cavities filled using this method. The last time I was there, like 1986, I refused to raise my hand since I had learned over the years this would just make the pain last longer. After he was done he looked down at my arms clenched to the chair and said ‘umm.. guess that hurt eh? Why didn’t you raise your hand?’. Turns out that in my clenching I had bent the arm of his chair (my memory tells me I bent the metal though maybe I just had pulled off the padding or something, but suffice to say I had inadverantly damaged his chair.) A few years ago I mentioned this to my father who wouldn’t believe me about the novicaine issue. “No.. really dad.. never.. not once” “Well why didn’t you ask for it?” “um.. I was a kid, I had never had it and the big official authority figure dentist was telling me I didn’t need it and I wasn’t my argumentative opinionated self back then” “If this is true how come you never mentioned it then?” “Um.. cause he was the only dentist I ever went to and I didn’t know other dentists did anything different”. When my brother corraborated this story my father finally accepted it as truth but continued to argue with us that we should have dealt with it when it was happening. Sigh. So I pretty much enjoy AVOIDING the dentist and since 1986 I’ve been to the dentist once, in Ohio in August 1997, when a tooth bothered me so much I finally found the name of a “gentle dentist” others recommended (I got a root canal.. ooh fun). So I know I should a) Find a dentist that folks recommend up here (and is on the Jax Lab dental plan, which btw I’ve been paying for full coverage under for 7+ years now), b) At least get my teeth cleaned and xray’d, and I am pretty sure I must have some (hopefully minor) cavities in there that I should deal with before I need more root canals.

Anyways.. that’s my list of stuff I would rather just forget. Fun entry eh?

-Matt