Writerly Road Rage

I’m not by nature an aggressive person, but every now and then my writerly road rage comes out in imprecatory fantasies. Especially when I have a migraine and I’m stuck in the car.

To the city I live in that thinks it’s okay to patch a hole in the road with a steel plate whose ends don’t exactly match up with the asphalt, so that when the car’s tires hit the blunt edge of the plate, my aching brain actually bounces against my skull (okay, that might be an exaggeration)…to you, planners of road repair, I hope that you have nightmares where rusty steel plates pursue you across pot-hole covered roads.

To the fifty year old man wearing leather and spikes and some kind of World War I helmet while riding a mid-life crisis motorcycle that apparently came WITHOUT a muffler, I hope your motorcycle falls apart like Cinderella’s carriage at the stroke of midnight. And your bike/hog/chopper becomes a horse. Or, wait, a boar. An angry boar with tusks.

To the twenty year old man in the car behind us with his windows rolled down, wearing dark sunglasses even though it’s overcast, and whose car has subwoofers cranked so loud the fillings in my teeth are rattling…wait, I can’t even come up with an imprecation. Instead, I tell Cal to turn right. He says, “But we’re not going that way.”  I say, “Please turn. If that noise does not kill me, I will kill myself.” He turns right. Sadly, lunatic driver who’s trying to share his hateful music with me also turns right. (Why did he not use turn signals, so I’d know we could go straight?!?!) I feel like I’m going to cry/vomit except my head hurts too much.

By this point, it’s clear to me that I-don’t-care-about-my-fellow-man, woofer driver is really possessed by a demon…although it could be that he’s a super-secret CIA courier (which explains the sunglasses) and the noise is so he can keep his package safe because no one can get close enough to steal it without having their eardrums bleed. Nah. Demon-possessed. And I’ll send Buffy after him. I know she does vampires. But a silver stake through the heart will probably put this guy out of commission too. 

This helmet is actually from Madagascar. But you get the picture.
This image is by Rama courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hoarding

I’m not a hoarder. My husband and I belong to the if-you-haven’t-used-it-in-six-months-give-it-to-Goodwill club. But I’m seriously considering setting aside an area in the basement for incandescent bulbs, which are being phased out by the government. I know compact fluorescent bulbs save lots of energy. But, setting aside the fact that I have mercury concerns, and that CF bulbs are really ugly, I don’t want them because they flicker and flickering lights give me migraines. Even watching a movie on the new TV with their LEDs, which have much less flicker, can give me migraines.

So I investigated CFBs. I’ve read reputable reports—not just scare websites. Some say “Technology has improved. The new CFBs won’t cause migraines.” Though I can’t find any research that supports this claim. But other websites, also reputable, say “danger: CFB may cause migraines.” A WebMD website recommends that people with flicker-induced migraines wear blue-green tinted glasses when they’re around CFB. Right. I can just see myself wearing Jackie O-type glasses with blue-green lenses. Everyone will look like Martians. On the other hand, they might give me the eccentric-writer look. And everyone knows that makes you more successful. And I could write by candlelight. Except...candles flicker too. Time to buy up those incandescent bulbs.

Walter Update

Today my chances of coming up with a creative post on something new and delightful are almost nil because I have post-migraine brain. Late Saturday night (i.e., early Sunday morning) a sort of neighbor called. She was upset about something. She didn’t want comfort or encouragement. She wanted to whine. Now if she were a friend, I’d have listened semi-patiently to her whine (even though it was the middle of the night). But I barely know this woman. If that wasn’t bad enough, she called back a second time to whine. It was the second call that gave me the prickle in my brain, which said, “Migraine.”

Anyway all that to say that today is a Walter update. (Click here if you don’t know/remember who Walter is.)  In the last Walter post, Cal had gotten a humane trap to put up in the attic for Walter. Ariel was very concerned because the trap had been in the attic for several days and she was worried that Walter was starving to death in the trap. Cal reminded her that we could still hear Walter playing in the attic so he wasn’t “caught.” But he went to check.

Getting into our attic is an athletic acheievment. There is no pull down ladder. Instead a wall in the pantry has a small “door in the wall.” You open the door, hoist yourself into opening, which doesn’t have a flat bottom but slopes toward the ceiling. Then you grab the ceiling rafters and pull yourself up. (This becomes important later on.)

So Cal went to check the trap. When we’d tried the humand trap the first time, we discovered that Walter had bumped the trap enough that the bait dish moved and he could pick it clean from outside the trap. This time, Cal wedged the trap so that Walter couldn’t bump it. (Yes, Walter has a very high IQ. We grow smart squirrels in Tennesssee.) Since Walter couldn’t bump the trap, he ignored it. The trap bait was untouched. So Cal moved the trap closer to Walter’s nest. Maybe the smell would overwhelm his squirrely wisdom.

When Cal was finished, he decided to leave the attic. Except there was a problem. Even though Cal told me that he was going into the attic, I forgot. In the meanwhile, I saw the open “door in the wall,” decided that one of the kids must have left it open (shame on them), and I shut it. And locked it. Fifteen minutes later, Cal was stuck in the netherworld of the attic chute. Eventually, I heard him kicking the door—he couldn’t reach it with his hands. He was very nice about it. He even smiled. But the smile was one of you-see-I’m-right-about-you and added weight to his You-clean-up-before-I-even-start complaint—I’ve been known to put his tools away before he starts a project. I’m very blessed in my choice of spouse. He even talked to crazed, whiney woman the second time she called. He was very nice, but I don’t think she’ll be calling to whine during the middle of the night any time soon.

The Migraine Experience

Some people have never had a migraine. I started getting them around age thirty. Migraines are weird headaches that can vary in intensity from nasty to I’m-afraid-I’m-going-to-die to I’m-afraid-I’m-not-going-to-die. I suppose the pain could be equated to an elephant sitting on your brain.

A lot of migrainers have an aura. (Yes, migrainer is a made up word. But it should be a real word.) An aura is a weird pre-cursor that your body sends and basically says, “Um, hello, we’re just notifying you that severe pain lies in your immediate future. Have a nice day.” Classic migrainers (like Ariel) have stroke like symptoms—a side of their body goes funky. Numbness, blind spots, tingly, etc.,. I have a non-classic aura. I get “brain drop-cloth.” It’s as if a migraine is a re-decorating session, and my body prepares by draping my brain with cheesecloth. It’s a bit odd as auras go, but much preferable to numbness, partial blindness, and body parts falling off (oops, that’s a different disorder).

We migrainers also have triggers. Individual oddities that bring on the full-orbed migraine experience. A sure-thing, slam-dunk trigger for me is flashing lights. That doesn’t sound too hard to avoid until you consider that televisions are boxes of blinky lights. I strictly limit my tv/movie watching. My other triggers are sleep issues (not enough, at the wrong time, or waking up during the wrong phase), barometric pressure changes, getting overheated, and stress. If I get a trifecta of any of these, then near instant migraine. But I don’t feel sorry for myself—some people actually get migraines from red wine or chocolate. That would be awful. I can do without tv, but chocolate...

Medical marvels do abound, even for migrainers. And they really do work. Ariel does very well on them. They work for me too—I take the lowest dosage, least problematic medication. But I still get the post-migraine, post-medicine experience. My whole body feels like it ran the Boston marathon backwards, I fall asleep, my jaw aches so much it’s hard to eat, and that drop cloth on my brain prevents me from putting two thoughts together in a coherent manner. (Cal will notice that I’m not functioning at full capacity and will ask, “Did you have to take migraine meds today? Two minutes later when I've finished processing his question, I’ll say, “Uh, yep.”) But at least I don’t get the hiccups any more. When I first started taking the medicine, it made me hiccup for hours. You really don’t want to hear about a meeting I went to and hiccupped through the whole thing. It’s an incident best forgotten. Yesterday, I worked on my novel revisions with post-migraine brain. Tomorrow I need to re-read that section. I’m a bit anxious, who knows what I could have done... Gulp.

Communication Problems

Years ago a British show called Fawlty Towers ran an episode called “Communication Problems.” In the episode, the owner of a hotel (Basil Fawlty, aka John Cleese) had an elderly female guest who refused to turn on her hearing aid because it “wore the batteries down.” And since this was British farce, all kinds of hilarity ensued given the fact that the woman always misunderstood what was being said.

Well, you know the old cliché, “Truth is Stranger than fiction”? Welcome to “Communication Problems” Keller style.

Yesterday at church, Ariel leans over to me during a hymn and whispers, “I can’t see.” Given the fact that she’s not stumbling around blind and that she wears glasses, I think, “Right. Time to make an appointment with the optometrist again.”

As the service goes on, I notice that she’s beginning to look a little “wilted” around the edges. I think, “Ariel’s re-caught that nasty cold that we’ve been sharing.” After the service, Ariel says, “I need to go home—my head hurts.” I find Luke and give him the job of driving his sister home and then coming back. I tell Ariel. She holds out her hand to me and whines, “My hand is numb.” I think, “My goodness, girl, don’t be so overwrought.” But I say, “Yes, yes, Luke is going to take you home. Don’t worry, you’re not having a stroke.”

Ariel and Luke trundle off home. Then we all come home. Ariel is curled up in a sitting fetal position with a deer-in-headlights look on her face. “My head hurts really bad—I took two Aleve, but they aren’t helping.” I assume she has a nasty sinus headache and shift into mother-of-sick-child mode. Within five minutes, I’ve given Ariel decongestant, a vaporizer is spewing out steam, her chest is slathered in Vick’s vaporub, and she has a cold compress.

Now that she has everything she could possibly need, including a bowl of macaroni and cheese made from scratch, I sit with her. And she begins to tell me, “You know when I said I couldn’t see, I really couldn’t see.” “What do you mean?” I ask. It turns out that she had blind spots and flashing lights in her right eye. And then, that numbness in her hand, it actually started in her foot went to her hand and finally ended up making the right side of her face numb.

The proverbial light dawns in my head. “Ariel, did the weird things go away after the pain started?” She looked at me nonplussed. “Yeah, actually.” I sigh heavily, “My dear, welcome to the world of migraines with aura. It’s not a nice place, but there you are.”

After I called our friend who is a neurologist and got Ariel treated (thank you, thank you—she’d have been miserable at ER waiting for hours to be seen), I ask, “Sweetheart, what did you think was happening to you?” She thought that she was going blind in one eye, or getting glaucoma, or some other horror. “And what about the numbness in your face?” Ariel: “That was very scary.” I say, “Why didn’t you tell me your right side was going numb?” “It was only my hand and foot at first, and I thought they were asleep. It wasn’t until I was on the way home that my face went numb.”

This, of course, is why parents carry cellphones. “Why didn’t you call me?” Ariel explains, “I knew you were busy and I didn’t want to bother you.” Children don’t seem to realize that a parent will sprout eagle’s wings and fly home if their children are hurt or in danger. And as Ariel reminds me, “I did tell you.” Yep, communication problems. Watch out Basil Fawlty, you’ve got nothing on me.

Thanks, Neighbor!

This morning while I was drinking coffee and forcing my bleary eyes open, I heard yelps of irritation and mutterings of frustration. Then one by one my breakfast companions stumbled to the table, guzzled their coffee, and announced “I can’t get my email.” Of course, I wasn’t surprised because I couldn’t get mine either. I promised all my mignons and the head honcho that I would ferret out the cause of this internet scourge whilst the mignons (French for "little ones"--I try not to name my children after various cuts of beef) did housework and the head honcho attended a meeting.

I’m sure you all know what this means. First, I unplugged and replugged the router. No change. Then I held the reset button for 15 seconds. Still, the internet flatlined. Next step, unplug, replug, and reset the modem. During this I had to wait for various lights to blink, sparkle and reset themselves. And I explained to Mignon #3 that Mom and Dad’s shower still has mildew and soap scum in the crevices and must be recleaned. Mignon #3 was unhappy.

Now that all the lights had a chance to do their thing, I tried connecting. No dice. So, I rebooted all four computers. Still nada. The frustration level has reached Techno-meltdown levels. I decided it must be time to go the store and buy my Honey a Valentine’s Day gift. So, I unplugged everything in hopes that depriving the electronic boxes of electricity would make them want to behave when I got back—it’s sort of like a “spanking” for computers.

After finding a very cool gift for my sweetheart, I returned home to my cyber-mess. I plugged in the modem. No blinky lights. Not a one. I plugged the modem into different sockets. Still, no green light of life. Time to call tech support. There was an eight minutes wait. At the end of seven, they disconnected me. Oops. I called again. In the middle of the eight minutes wait I told Mignon #3 that he could not play Wii, even with the sound turned off. After eight minutes, I talked to a guy in India who asked me if it was okay if he called me “Miss Keller.” I said, “Yes,” but I thought “you can call me Bob the builder if you can make my modem work.”

I ran through the litany of problems. After which, he said, imagine a heavy Indian/Pakistani accent, “Miss Keller, logic would dictate that you try plugging it into different outlets.” I opened my mouth to say, “As I explained, that was amongst the first things I did.” But before I did, he said, “But since you already did that, I think what you have is a complete modem hardward failure.”

Two minutes later, I found out that my modem was not under warranty. No duh—when is anything under warranty any more? After some wheeling and dealing, he promised me a free modem, which he was overnighting to me and would arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday (today’s Saturday, so over-night is clearly a euphemism).

We politely said good-bye, happy to be done with each other. Most likely, he went to help another customer, and I went and took some Aleve to deal with my techno-headache cum migraine. I told myself that at least this could be turned into a blog post, assuming I can hijack (though I prefer to think of it as “piggybacking”) a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection. So if you’re reading this, thank my neighbor.