my aunt in the hospital

I wanted to take a few minutes to make note of this story so that someday, when scotch has killed all my brain cells, my kid will remember that his dad wasn't always an invalid who peed himself and did, at least on some days, have a good sense of humor.

Back, not this past Saturday but the Saturday before, my dad was in town for a baby party, a funeral for an uncle I didn't know I had (long story) and to visit my aunty Toyo (my grandmother's sister) who fell, broke her back and was in the hospital. As I write this, I think she's still in the hospital.

Now for this story to make sense, you have to understand that my aunty Toyo is incredibly hard of hearing. Even with the hearing aids your normal talking is like whispering. And unfortunately at this occasion she broke her hearing aid. Actually she shoved a battery into the hearing aid casing and long story...well, long story long because it's my goddamn story and you're not reading it anyway so I'll make it as long as a want...she wasn't hearing.

So on this occasion where nothing short of an M80 blast would be audible, we had a notepad and a pen so that we could at least communicate with her. I make it a habit to always carry a notepad and pen. Something that Di got me into doing. She uses a voice recorder but I don't like it because it runs out of batteries. But I digress. We had a notepad and pen and would write stuff to her, ask if she wanted anything, let her know that the hearing aids would be fixed on Monday because nobody was open Saturday evening, etc.

And at first things were okay. Not ideal but okay. We'd jot something, she'd put on her reading glasses and respond back. It wasn't quick but it worked. I mean I work in a world of T1's and DS3's and 40 Mbps DSL service and SONET based fiber networks so 'fast' is a relative term and this wasn't thrilling, but it worked.

And at some point in this conversation I guess she just decided that fair is fair. And even though all of us could hear just fine and we were writing so that SHE could RECEIVE messages. She grabbed the pen and started writing down her responses instead.

Keep in mind that this woman is hard of hearing and when she talks it's pretty loud. I'm frankly surprised she doesn't lose her voice often, but I guess it's like singing practice for vocalists. So when instead of actually saying her responses, which the rest of us were perfectly capable of hearing, she starts jotting down her responses on the same notepad, I was dumbfounded. It was a 19'th century AIM session complete with chat history logs. And I found it utterly hilarious.

Was there a valid reason for me to find it so funny? probably not. But then again, she couldn't hear me laugh my ass off about it so, what's the harm? I wasn't laughing at her directly, just the situation. And I just couldn't stop laughing.

Now this may not seem like such a funny thing to you. And it's not super funny. But at the time, in the context of the situation, it was goddamn hilarious. To be sitting in a room with a lady who effectively broke her back but so badly did NOT want to be in a hospital that the nurses wouldn't leave the walker in her room for fear that she would try to escape; to be sitting in a room with three other people perfectly capable of hearing just fine...Well okay so my dad is going deaf but still...and to have this old lady writing responses back to us on a notepad. It was enough to make me laugh to the point of coughing. And even if you weren't there, you've got to admit it's still funnier than Dane Cook.

So that's the story. The short story that could have been told in a paragraph, now dragged on to a page because I can't tell a short story. The story of having a nearly deaf woman write back to me when I asked if she needed anything because...well just because she could write back to me I suppose. And the story of how even a hospitalized woman who can't hear and can't read without her glasses, still has better handwriting than me.

Lucid Dreaming

Everyone dreams. I am, however not prone to remembering my dreams very well or to what they call “lucid dreaming.” Lucid dreaming is a dream in which the person is aware that they are dreaming and can often control some aspects of the dream itself. It’s also known as conscious dreaming. It is not something I have any memory of, at least not in the recent past. However I think my being sick, perhaps the combination of drugs (DXM maybe?) I’m taking has, for the past couple of nights, allowed me a state of lucid dreaming and a memory of those dreams after I wake up. For example tonight I know of at least two dreams.

In the first one, and this is kinda odd, in the first one, I was living with a bunch of people in a flat. It was myself, my ex, her new husband, one of my friends David and one other girl whose face I never quite saw and whose name I could never quite hear clearly Plot revolves around this. So the ex is recently married, like two days married, and yet she’s so nervous about being married that we have sex. This breaks one of my rules. Never be the other person. Now it just so happens that we nearly get caught, in fact we barely have sex at all, but still I’m guilty, she’s guilty but we don’t get caught and could get away with it. Question is this, knowing it was a violation of my own rules do I go and tell her new husband? Or knowing that it was about 15 seconds of sex and then realizing it was a mistake do I just keep it a secret and not tell the husband because it would ruin a marriage? Yeah, I don’t know why I get the moral questions in my dreams either. So I decide to tell him. Now this may or may not be the right decision. It unburdens me some but totally burdens him and perhaps unnecessarily. In the dream I justified it by saying that it was possible she would cheat on him again with someone else (certainly not me) and he should be aware of it. It was odd to know I was in a dream, even have some degree of control over my actions, and still get myself into a mess like this.

There may have been more than two dreams, I vaguely remember something about living up at Kam again an having people try to take the campus hostage. It was interesting and kinda played out like my own personal Die Hard but I don’t remember enough of it.

So the second dream that I do remember was actually me being sick and while I was sick I was staying with some people, namely my boss and his family. This is again, somewhat odd. The setup resolves around me, kind of in the state I currently am, sick; and revolves around the conversations we have. Most of it is pretty mundane. Two portions I remember vividly. One was making tea. It was night, late, the kids were coming back from some church thing but I’m getting better so moving around some and went to make green tea, only I couldn’t find it. Short version is that the kids come home find me hacking out half a lung in a kitchen that looked surprisingly similar to the kitchen in the house in Kona where I grew up, and helped me make tea but we forgot to take the leaves out so I ended up drinking a bunch of green tea gunk. The second part I can remember vividly was flipping channels on TV, now I don’t actually remember seeing it, but I remember hearing some of the voices of the characters and somehow knew that the TV show Chuck was on. Why Chuck? Not really sure except I know it’s one of the TV shows my boss likes. The other thing that I can remember was that I could hear raining. It wasn’t raining in the dream but I knew I was dreaming and that it WAS raining here in the real world. So that I found kind of interesting.

So dream analysis can go crazy here. I can guess what some of this means and I’m not sure I like any of it, but felt it useful maybe to log the fact that I’ve been having lucid dreams for the past couple of nights while I’ve been on this medication. We’ll see if it sticks

Life Goals

I was told today that I should be more focused on my overall life goals and came to realize I never really wrote them down anywhere except my notebook. So here goes, in no particular order:

1. finish an MBA or JD program
2. speak at the TED conference
3. eat an endangered species, ideally the young of an endangered species. or eggs. I could eat eggs benedict of some endangered bird.
4. punch a dolphin, i don't really know why, i just think I need to kick the ass of an animal that can kill a shark
5. learn a major language from each major continent. Cantonese, Swahili, Portuguese (2 for 1)
6. publish an actual book and not just articles
7. drink an entire gallon of milk in under 30 min. without puking
8. see my son grow up to be more sucessful than his mother
9. never pay alimony
10. retire to a tropical island where i can sit all day, play dominoes, drink red stripe and eat lobsters the size of small children
11. invent a new word
12. learn to cook french food. maybe pastries madelines or those weird little tube ones.
13. go to vegas, waste $10K on nothing, leave with blank spots in my memory.
14. tell the important stories

...that's the start anyway

Life Goals

I was told today that I should be more focused on my overall life goals and came to realize I never really wrote them down anywhere except my notebook. So here goes, in no particular order:

1. finish an MBA or JD program
2. speak at the TED conference
3. eat an endangered species, ideally the young of an endangered species
4. punch a dolphin, i don't really know why, i just think I need to kick the ass of an animal that can kill a shark
5. learn a major language from each major continent. Cantonese, Swahili, Portuguese (2 for 1)
6. publish an actual book and not just articles
7. drink an entire gallon of milk in under 30 min. without puking
8. see my son grow up to be more sucessful than his mother
9. never pay alimony
10. retire to a tropical island where i can sit all day, play dominoes, drink red stripe and eat lobsters the size of small children
11. invent a new word

...that's the start anyway