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March 30, 2005
Buh-Bye Smokey-Treats
Posted by SparklesMpls at 11:23 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
Mah birthday
My birthday was very nice. Friends put a lot of effort into it and it turned out to be a gay 'ol time. I got some gag gifts - "Gliding Jesus" action figure, an entire bottle of "Rimming Syrup" and a kitty-launching gun. The food was fantastic, and the cake was quite endearing:
I also got some fun hair product, relaxing music (much needed), and Jim gave me a membership to the Walker. It all made me feel like I am somebody.
I'm so blessed to have such great friends. Thanks all.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 12:14 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
Past the quarter century mark
Good lord, yes, I've turned 26 today. Thanks, Jim, for announcing that to the world. I am at work today. Saw my shrink this morning. AA meeting this evening and then gathering with friends afterwards.
I don't feel that much older, but the thought of turning 30 at this point is a little disheartening ;-) Just kidding, really!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:40 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
March 27, 2005
I'm coming out
... as a former bed-wetter. Yep, you read that right. I wet the bed every night until I was 8 years old.
For as far back as I can remember there was a plastic sheet that wrapped around my twin mattress. Laying down on my bed or turning from side to side would create a crinkling noise that still haunts me until this day.
When I was six and still wetting the bed, my parents got me a cotton-covered rubber sheet as a way to make me feel more like a grown-up because it didn't make any noises.
My mom tried to console me by telling me that her brother also wet the bed when he was young, but I still felt like something was wrong with me.
We went to the doctor who told us not to let me drink anything a few hours before going to bed. It didn't help.
Then we got some contraption, seemingly from a TV infomercial gone bad. The contraption consisted of a sheet of plastic with metal wires running over the surface - imagine the lines of the rear-window defroster in your car. This plastic sheet was then connected by wire to a plastic box housing an on/off switch and 4 "D" batteries. It would sense when you began wetting the bed and would set off a ear-piercing shrill. As you can imagine, this didn't work either as it would only go off after you had pissed all over yourself.
When I was in the first grade a classmate invited me to his house for a slumber party to celebrate his birthday. We slept in an authentic Native American teepee his parents had on their property. There were probably 12 of us seven year-olds. I was too nervous to fall asleep fearing an embarassing morning soaked in urine. So nervous I never went to sleep. Thanksfully Michael S didn't want to fall asleep either, so we plucked grass from the ground and placed it in our sleeping friends' open mouths.
Can you imagine waking up with a mouthfull of freshly-picked grass?
Shortly after I turned 8 I woke up with a dry bed. It was the most amazing feeling in the world to me at that point in my history. I never wet the bed again.
My brother wet the bed until he was 12.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 02:05 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
March 26, 2005
Life is F.I.N.E.
I'm fine lately.
Fucked up
Insecure
Neurotic
Emotional
Hah! No seriously, things are okay. Nothing really new going on. Just the usual work, the program, and still working on getting the website back up to par after the incident.
Actually, I take that back. There is something new. I started my ninth step. I was about to begin it when my server got hacked, and then I was in a rush to get things back online, so on Wednesday I got back to the steps.
I did something that's not recommended - I started my ninth step with my parents. I did it because I wanted to get it over with. I have an enormous amount of shame over the way I've abused my relationship with them. Basically, they'd do anything for me, and I've always known that. When I was using I would spend all of my money on booze and never had money left over to pay my bills, so I'd go calling them looking for a handout. I'd always make up some excuse about why I was broke, and they'd always write me a check. I don't think I would have felt as bad if my parents actually had some money, but they don't. They're on a fixed income and they were writing checks against their house so that I could continue my insanity.
What have I done about it now? Well, I've apologized, fessed up to my wrong-doings, and I'm paying them back now. It feels so nice to actually write them checks instead of cashing theirs. I also bought them a new computer - something they've needed for a while now, but in my selfishness, never realized.
The jist of all of this - I feel better about our relationship now. Granted, since I've been sober, they've been nothing but supportive and proud of me, but now I feel like we're on the same level again - a level where we can each respect each other.
And yes, it's so frick'n sunny out right now I could just die!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:39 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
It's for a good cause...
Please tell ten friends to tell ten today! The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "donating A mammogram" for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn't cost you A thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily Visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.
Here's the web site! Pass it along to people you know.
www.thebreastcancersite.com
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Rural Minnesota school shooting
Wow. It's a sad day. Some kid, 17 years old, shot and killed his grandparents, then went to school in his grandfather's police squad car, opened fire, killed 7 others (teacher, security guard and students), then killed himself after injuring more than 10 others. Per capita, his rampage was more damaging than the Columbine incident a few years back.
From what I know, Red Lake is an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota. It's a very poor community, and relatively a large populous for a reservation - 4,900 of the roughly 10,000 members live on the reservation. In comparison, the Shakopee Midewakton Sioux community that owns Mystic Lake Casino has roughly 200 members. The demand for a casino just isn't big enough there, where the Shakopee tribe is raking in the money.
Which brings me rambling onto another topic ... legalized gambling. What's with all of the Minnesota proposals for state-opperated casinos? Expansion of the current gambling. New lottery rules - I was told today that they're going to make the Powerball HARDER to win, presumably to bring in more revenues. Is this really how we want our society to move forward?
I've pasted in the article from the StarTribune below.
Red Lake rampage: 10 dead, 12 wounded
Richard Meryhew, Chuck Haga, Howie Padilla and Larry Oakes, Star Tribune
March 22, 2005 RED LAKE, MINN. -- A teenage boy opened fire inside the local high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation on Monday, killing seven people before turning the gun on himself.
The boy, identified by a law enforcement official, a school employee and two students as Jeff Weise, 17, apparently shot and killed his grandfather -- a Red Lake police officer -- and his grandfather's girlfriend before heading to the school in his grandfather's Red Lake squad car, sources said Monday night.
Floyd Jourdain Jr., Red Lake tribal chairman, said Monday was "without doubt, the darkest day in the history of our tribe."
Twelve other people at the Red Lake High School were wounded, said Paul McCabe, a special agent for the FBI in Minneapolis.
The killing spree was the deadliest at a school in the United States since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in which 15 people died and 23 were wounded.
"Our community is in shock," Jourdain said. "Our thoughts and prayers go to the victims' families. We're a small town, and everybody is stunned."
Only Weise and three of his victims have been identified. They were Weise's grandfather, Daryl Lussier, 58; Neva Rogers, 62, a teacher at the school, and Derrick Brun, 28, a school security officer.
Three other victims remained at North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji. One of them is in the intensive care unit, KSTP-TV reported this morning.
Brun was reportedly the first one killed when Weise entered the building carrying a shotgun and at least one handgun.
The three victims were identified by family members and a law enforcement official.
McCabe shared few details of the shooting during a news briefing in Minneapolis on Monday night. He said he could not speculate on a motive.
The Red Lake Indian Reservation is in northern Minnesota, about 260 miles from the Twin Cities. The city of Red Lake, where the shootings took place, is the most populated area of the remote reservation. The tribe has an enrollment of 10,000, with roughly 4,700 members living on the reservation. Many other members live in the Twin Cities area.
"We know one another," Jourdain said. "We live and work and play with one another."
McCabe said he was unwilling to provide additional detail until agents were able to interview witnesses and complete their investigation.
"We believe the shooter is among the dead," he said.
Added Pat Mills, director of Red Lake's Public Safety Department: "We're not looking for any other suspects."
'It was chaos'
The school shootings are by far the deadliest in Minnesota's history, coming about 1½ years after two classmates were fatally shot in a hall at Rocori High School in Cold Spring.
Because Red Lake High School is on an Indian reservation, it falls under federal jurisdiction. Nevertheless, officials from the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension crime lab will meet with FBI agents, said Kevin Smith, spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
Authorities and witnesses said the shootings occurred shortly before 3 p.m. at the high school.
Mills said there were several 911 calls to the public safety department about 2:55 p.m. reporting shooting at the high school. He said officers arrived within two minutes.
"It was chaos," Mills said.
Jourdain said the high school "probably was one of the first in the nation to do screening and have security officers." He said the security was implemented "before Columbine, but this just could not be prevented."
According to the FBI's McCabe, the gunman shot two Red Lake residents before heading to the school. Roman Stately, the tribe's fire marshal, said the boy may have gotten the guns from his grandfather, a veteran police officer on the reservation.
Once at the school, McCabe said, the first person shot was Brun, the security officer.
The boy then "walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately said.
Later, when police arrived, they exchanged shots with the gunman, who retreated to a classroom.
Nevertheless, McCabe said, "preliminary investigation leads us to believe the shooter's cause of death was a self-inflicted gun shot wound."
Said Jourdain, "It was a normal school day and all of a sudden it went bad. That's the question: Why? There are a lot of unanswered questions. We don't know what the motivations were. And we are afraid the death toll will rise."
A student's account
After the boy shot himself, Stately said, scores of students were moved to a nearby building that is part of the tribal government complex. The school has an enrollment of about 250 students in grades nine through 12.
Justin Jourdain, a student, said Monday night that when he heard booming sounds in the high school, he thought something had fallen in the hall.
Then a panicked janitor came in, telling the students to stay in the classroom.
"Someone's shooting," the janitor said.
The booms grew louder as they closed in on the room. Jourdain and about 25 classmates took refuge in a small adjacent office.
Jourdain and school Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait held the door shut as the gunman entered the room the students had just fled.
"I was holding the door and he fired one shot at the door, but it didn't go through," Jourdain said. "I just heard this loud thud. It was a wooden door and it didn't go through."
Desjarlait called police on Jourdain's cell phone while he held the door. The students were left screaming as the gunman fired shots in the other room, Jourdain said. It wasn't until 25 minutes later that they felt safe enough to leave their refuge.
Sondra Hegstrom, 17, said she heard "a big bang" and then another before a fellow student came into her classroom yelling: "He has a gun, he has a gun!"
A hall monitor locked the classroom door, a fire alarm went off and nine terrified students and a teacher huddled in the darkened classroom, she said.
They heard gunshots, "bang, bang, bang," from the classroom next door, Hegstrom said, along with screams of students and someone yelling, "No, Jeff, no!"
Hegstrom thought of death, she said, and worried about who would care for her five-month-old baby. She had a couple of classes with Weise, and "I don't know if he liked me," she said. "He was quiet, never said anything."
Weise was into goth culture, she said, wore "a big old black trench coat," drew pictures of skeletons, listened to heavy metal music and "talked about death all the time."
A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal, she said, and Hegstrom quoted his friends as saying they were watching a movie once when he said, "That would be cool if I shot up the school."
"They didn't think anything of it," Hegstrom said, but "he got terrorized a lot." He was called names and people thought he was weird. "I'm still trembling," she said late last night. "I just can't believe this stuff is happening."
As the students left the school, Jourdain said he peeked inside a classroom where Ojibwe cultural studies are taught. The blood and broken glass throughout the room told the tale of the afternoon's tragedy.
"It's an awful situation," said tribal treasurer Darrell Seki. "We see things like this happen outside the reservation, but now it's happened here in our home."
Confusion, concern
Audrey Thayer, who lives in Bemidji and works as a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union's Minnesota chapter, said the reservation was locked down by police with roadblocks after the shootings.
Monday night, reporters were being allowed onto the reservation with escorts from law enforcement agencies in the area. Otherwise, the main highways were shut down to traffic by the FBI and Red Lake tribal police.
A news briefing has been scheduled for 2 p.m. today at the Red Lake Detention Center.
As word of the shootings spread across the region Monday, friends and relatives of those living on the reservation frantically began working cell phones hoping to find out more.
In a hallway at the State Capitol, two women from the reservation town of Ponemah -- LuAnn Crowe, an election judge on the reservation, and Donna Whitefeather -- had just finished testifying on behalf of a bill that would make it harder for partisan poll watchers to challenge voters and intimidate them or prevent them from voting.
As the women emerged from the hearing, they were informed of the killings and immediately began making calls, trying to put together a list of the dead and injured.
Crowe has a daughter and nephew at the school.
Suddenly, Whitefeather announced with panic, that Lance Crowe, the ninth-grade nephew, was dead.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" Crowe wailed.
Minutes later, however, the news was better.
The boy had been shot, but he wasn't dead.
Lance Crowe underwent surgery Monday night at North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji for a serious gunshot wound to his hand: He raised an arm to block a shot aimed at his head.
The bullet wounds to his chest may have been shrapnel from that one shot, but that was still undetermined Monday night.
"If he didn't have his hand up there he would have gotten shot in the head," said LuAnn Crowe.
Lance Crowe recently lost a much-loved elder, a man he called Bubba who was like a grandfather to him, said his aunt, LuAnn. The man died in a car crash on the reservation earlier this year.
Lance told his mother that as he lay on the floor of the school, bleeding from his wounds, he thought to himself: "I don't want to die." He told his mom that he could sense Bubba nearby, protecting him.
And then Lance Crowe, who turned 15 last Thursday, said he witnessed the shooter's final shot. Suicide.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:01 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
Pat O'Brien enters rehab
You're probably asking yourself, "Who is Pat O'Brien?" He's one of the stars of Entertainment Tonight and an anchor on The Insider.
I wish him well. I'm glad that he came out publicly about it and issued a statement instead of trying to hide it. But who knows - he may have had his hand forced... somebody was bound to find out about it sooner or later. Perhaps it's no accident that the shows he works on usually publicizes this sort of thing :-)
Quoted from the USAToday.com article:
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Television host Pat O'Brien, anchor of The Insider news magazine show, has entered an alcohol rehabilitation program, he said in a written statement Sunday to The Associated Press.
"I have had a problem with alcohol. I have decided to take action by checking myself into an intensive recovery program," the 57-year-old broadcast journalist said.
"Overcoming this problem is a top priority in my life and I am excited to return to work as soon as I am able," he continued.
There were no details about the recovery facility or when O'Brien entered the program.
O'Brien, who covered the Summer Olympics in Greece for MSNBC and NBC late-night programming, was a TV news reporter in Los Angeles and Chicago before joining CBS Sports.
He occasionally hosted Entertainment Tonight and in 1997 became the full-time host of Access Hollywood. That contract expired last year and he began hosting The Insider.
"We support Pat's decision to seek treatment and look forward to welcoming him back on the air at the appropriate time," said Manfred Westphal, a spokesman for Paramount Domestic Television, which syndicates The Insider.
Westphal said the show's New York host, Lara Spencer, will take over during O'Brien's absence.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 09:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 20, 2005
Back online
The blog is back online again, as is Jim's.
Here's a brief synopsis of the stages I've gone through since discovering my site was offline:
1. Panic
2. Double-panic - it wasn't just my blog that was down - other sites were down, too.
3. Triple-panic - the entire contents of my server had been deleted, and I don't have an automated backup process in place.
4. Anger - I was on the phone with my hosting company, screaming at the poor souls on the other end. They just couldn't do much to help me, as some hacker from France had assumed control of my server and was now hosting a website for a fake bank to phish for credit card numbers.
5. Surrender and acceptance - I started putting the pieces back together again. Got to work putting sites back online, and notifying clients of the circumstances with their websites. Nobody was too upset.
6. Workaholic - kept working on the server and sites.
7. Serenity - I'm happy everything is put back together now. Upside to the situation is that my server got whiped clean and everything's running a little bit smoother now.
Major bummers:
- all of the images from my blogposts are gone forever
- all of the comments from prior to the takeover are gone forever
Still on the to do list:
- automate FTP backups from my box in the closet
- get the gallery up and running again
Thanks for the nice emails and comments.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 03:05 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Rosie's got a blog
Rosie has a blog. I thought it was a hoax, too, but apparenlty it's true - she claims it's her's as stated in this NYT article.
The blog is made up entirely of lyric-like poems about her life. Very odd - almost seems a bit disturbing.
Her latest entry is below, dated March 17th. At the moment, 397 people have left comments.
3.17.05
listening to mo
today being
surviving daughter day
the end and beginning
of everything 4 me
no blog today
i thought
this am
mourning still
the phone
kirstie w/ hurt feelings
i am sorry
4 that
but not the joke
the comment
the truth
about myself
at 220 - now
stand up
that feeling
like rap i imagine
spittin it - yellow
only the truth is funny
never been joan
kickin people when they are down
too ez - not me
u r not the target
once skinny u
cannot imagine fat sex
ouch - that hurts
even with the giggle
feels like u r visiting
planet fattie
temporary visa
pointing at us
we are very sensitive
it's not about u
kirstie -
u r a funny beauty
still - always
and on a side note
the best thing about blogging
is not having to call your publicist
to talk to people
no interpreters
direct me
out it flows
on dead mommy day
quicker then a ray of light
And here's the NYT article:
Need Some New Luster? Try Rosie O'Donnell's Method: Create It by the Blogful
By DAVID CARR
Published: March 10, 2005
Correction Appended
Rosie O'Donnell, who spent most of the last five years extricating herself from public life, is back, though in a post-celebrity sort of way. Ms. O'Donnell, former K Mart spokeswoman, former talk show host, former magazine editor and publisher, and former Broadway producer, has a new title: blogger.
Ms. O'Donnell's Web log, "formerlyrosie," began appearing late last month and is described as at the top of the page as "The unedited rantings of a fat 42-year-old menopausal ex-talk show host married mother of four." Ms. O'Donnell apparently got the hang of the Web's approach to discourse fairly quickly. She once had a cuddly relationship with millions as the warm and hilarious television personality with a visible crush on Tom Cruise, but she complicated her public image by quitting her show, announcing she was a lesbian, starting and then quitting her eponymous magazine before producing a Broadway musical starring Boy George. In the end, Ms. O'Donnell ended up with a measure of privacy, but she began to drive her friends crazy with all of her opinions.
"One of them finally said that I should start a blog," Ms. O'Donnell said in a telephone interview from her home in upstate New York. "I have had offers to do books, but what I do is too rough and raw for them. They always want it to be more linear than I think. This way I can just put it out there."
The blog - which can be read at the slightly bereft address onceadored.blogspot.com - is part journal and part political rant. It offers a plain view of some rococo mental architecture. Written in a style that eschews trifles like punctuation and narrative, Ms. O'Donnell has used her unlimited space to riff on Howard Stern, Boy George, the television show "Fat Actress" and the serial killer David Berkowitz. A dispatch posted on Tuesday veered quickly and precipitously from "The Nanny" to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Scooby-Doo:
she should go to washington next
put condie rice in the naughty chair
she scares me condi
i expect her to unzip her skin
and have dick cheneys twin brother step out laughing -
like on scooby doo
Jessica Coen, the editor of Gawker, a media-centric blog that is based in Manhattan, said Ms. O'Donnell's version of blogging is distinguished by voice if nothing else.
"I don't know if she is doing some form of haiku or a terrible Faulkner imitation, but I'm not surprised she is doing it," Ms. Coen said, noting that celebrities as diverse as the rocker Fred Durst and the occasional actress Barbra Streisand have penned blogs. She added, "It is really kind of cool that she and others want to speak to the public without the precautions of their publicists."
Not everyone has been thrilled to see Ms. O'Donnell back in the public eye, even though she is hidden behind a keyboard. Soon after she began blogging, her site's comments section began filling up with the kind of hate mail Ms. O'Donnell has been subjected to ever since she came out as a lesbian and began addressing political issues. Ms. O'Donnell switched off the invitation to reply for a time, but has again reopened the two-way feature.
"I know I am a big, fat, lesbian short-hair," she said in the interview. "I plead guilty."
But online yesterday, she reminded readers who has the keys to the kingdom at formerlyrosie, explaining that she had hit the delete key on a few of her respondents' messages of hate.
i clicked and poof -
you are gone but not forgotten
your words resonated and were felt
you hate me
stranger
In an era of celebrity in which all incoming invective has generally been treated as spitballs against a battleship, it is worth recalling that Ms. O'Donnell has always taken abuse personally. There is no veneer to her, no stage-smile, just-meat-and-potatoes amazement about how angry she makes people.
This may not be a great fit with the flame-throwing culture of the Web, but it served her well in her recent legal proceedings, when she was sued by Gruner & Jahr USA for walking away from the magazine called Rosie. Ms. O'Donnell tore into her former partners for what she saw as a kidnapping of her magazine, and by extension, of her identity.
And though the judge found that the company - which sued Ms. O'Donnell for $100 million- did not deserve a dime, her feelings are still very close to the surface, as they have always been. Much of the important evidence in the trial came in the form of Ms. O'Donnell's prolix, idiosyncratic e-mail messages, a modality of communication that may have foretold her step into the blogosphere.
Things have not been easy for Ms. O'Donnell since. "Taboo," the Broadway musical she sank nearly $10 million into last year, closed after three months, a near-total loss. Ms. O'Donnell said that the diversion was worth the price. "It was worth every penny," she said. "I am very proud of that play."
Ms. O'Donnell, who will be appearing on a Hallmark Hall of Fame drama on CBS in May titled "Riding the Bus With My Sister," said that the blog is, "just another totally artistic thing." One of many, she hastened to add. Since retiring from her talk show and leaving the magazine, Ms. O'Donnell has created hundreds of paintings, some of which she has sold, with the proceeds going to charity. And she has founded a cruise company to serve what she calls nontraditional families, with last year's cruise pulling in 1,600 people.
None of which will preclude this former talk show host from thinking about dropping the former from her identity.
"I watch Jon Stewart every night and I am proud of what he is doing, and it has me thinking about what might be possible," she said in the interview.
On her blog, Ms. O'Donnell addressed the same issue less directly, but more vividly:
i am thinking about going back on tv
how when with who
details....
Correction: March 11, 2005, Friday:
An article in The Arts yesterday about Rosie O'Donnell's Web log misidentified the television show to which she alluded in a posting that mentioned "the naughty chair." It is "Supernanny," not "The Nanny."
Posted by SparklesMpls at 02:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 19, 2005
My site was hacked
... still trying to get things back online.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 12:35 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
March 15, 2005
How fast can you type?
I tried it once and got 113 wpm.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Hall of Fame
I am due to have my photo taken on Thursday for work. It'll be hung in the entry hallway to the agency, commonly referred to as the "Hall of Fame." People pose with their favorite stuffed animal, sports paraphenalia, instruments they play, or anything that conveys a little bit about their personality.
I'm at a loss as to what to pose with, and Jim's suggestion of using a bunch of dildos probably won't make it past HR.
I was thinking perhaps a laptop, or the AA big book, or a maybe just my rhinestone tiara with it's built-in dangly.
Help me! I need some ideas here (and a hair cut).
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 13, 2005
Dinner with the fam
Had an action packed day today ...
1. Coffee and crosswords in the morning @ Spyhouse
2. Minnesober planning meeting
3. Dinner with the fam at Axel Bonfire
4. Sunday night meeting at the sober home
Dinner with my parents and brother was really nice. Prior to entering the program over a year ago, my relationship with all of them was quite poor. I was continually asking my Dad for money in shame, avoiding my mother, and competing with my brother. Today I'm paying my dad back, enjoy talking to him and my mother, and actually wish my brother the best.
The meeting tonight was really nice as well. We had a good converation about the meaning of spirituality and the different forms in manifests itself in different people. We've got an eclectric group of people who all have a slightly different take on things. What's so beautiful is that people are able to change their lives based on many different belief systems and yet take their differing views and help others with their problems.
Anyway, it's late and I don't think I'm making sense anymore :-) Have a great night/morning/week/day!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 12, 2005
The house is clean ... sorta
So my roommate had Friday off and cleaned the house, as we were expecting guests this weekend. He told me he even did all of my laundry, which is a super-special favor, as I had tons of it piled up.
Then I got home and he had framed my one year sobriety medallion, which was really cute and nice.
I went to bed pretty early on Friday night, exhausted from a long couple of weeks at work. Then I got up on Saturday morning and Dustin told me that we weren't going to have guests afterall. I ventured into the living room and found my laundry.
This is my roommate's idea of doing laundry. I suddenly become much less grateful for having such a great roommate.
Funny, I'm watching late night reruns of ER at the moment and they're talking about AA. I never realized that two of the shows main characters are in the program. They're in a diner discussing sponsorship and it's clear they know what they're talking about, even though the program isn't supposed to be made public. I suppose this is somewhat of an exception because these characters are supposedly in the program and they're just talking like I might talk with someone else in the program.
But then that got me thinking about the writers on the show. It's crazy how many people in 'the biz' are in the program. It's like a magnet for alcoholics and drug addicts. Sort of like advertising, but probably worse. :-)
Have a great night.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 08, 2005
Valentine's Day Eve, part trois
... continued from Valentine's Day Eve, part deux.
I chatted with Roots for a few minutes when the stomping upstairs became methodic. They were coming downstairs. I was nervous. Here was the point I was going to meet the crazies, the people I would hereafter be seen as one of. Thoughts went through my head. What would they be like? How many would there be? I really didn't know what to expect.
They came into the common area was I was standing with Roots. They appeared surprisingly normal. A couple of them obviously had poor taste, hygeine habbits and haircuts, but otherwise they seemed almost too normal. Almost too much like me, or older versions of me.
I was introduced to them all and shook each of their hands one by one, forgetting the names as soon as they were uttered.
I was introduced to Bob, who was to become my "buddy." Bob was also an inpatient, but he'd been there for a few days longer than I. In fact, he'd been to treatment before, too - many times.
It was Bob's job to show me around the place, orient me to the rules, and answer any questions I had. He was older than me by at least ten years, had a sweet, endearing nature to him, and alcohol had visibly taken it's toll on him.
Bob showed me the job board where The Queen had delegated chores to each of the inpatients. The Queen got her job from the previous queen - new royalty was picked each week by the previous week's royals.
I had to do chores? What was I paying $11,000 for the first 20 days for here?
Bob and I only had a few minutes to chat before nightly affirmations was to begin. We headed upstairs to the group room and took a seat.
Little did I realize, I was about to witness my first glimpse of the daily rituals the crazies partook in.
The indestructible furniture was arranged in a circle around the room, facing in at a large coffee table in the center of the room. At least the coffee table matched, I thought - same unfinished variety that everything else was made of.
I took a seat on a sofa next to Bob. We waited for everyone to file in and I noticed that Bob was sniffling a lot. I asked him if he had a cold.
"No. I am constantly sniffling. The membranes inside of my nose have deteriorated away."
Boy did I feel stupid. Was this a result of his drinking? I didn't ask.
A particularly queeny crazy entered the room and headed over to the mantle. He removed a crown made of construction paper and pipe cleaners adorned with glitter and cotton balls and placed it snug on his head, careful not to interfere with each of his individually styled hairs.
Somehow I'd missed that little ornament on my way in.
Presumably this was The Queen. The King entered shortly thereafter and similarly donned his own "crown" from the mantle.
Everyone took their seats and the meeting opened with everyone gathering in a circle, hands on each others shoulders, reciting the Serenity Prayer. I didn't know the words, but it sounded familiar - could have been the fact that it was printed and framed on the wall multiple places throughout the building. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Of course Pride had added it's own addition - it ended with, "We are somebody. Peace."
We all took our seats again and The King began reading from a three-ringed binder, and thus the alien proceedings had begun.
Affirmations came first and began with The Queen. Bob whispered in my ear with his coarse smoker's voice that everyone was to say three good things about themselves, after which the room would repeat what had been said. You were to end your affirmations with a fourth, which was always, "And I am somebody."
"Shit," I thought. I have to say something? What in the hell was I going to say about myself that was good? I have new clothes? Luckily Bob had a sheet handy that had some standard lines on it that I began to skim.
The Queen was finishing her's up with, "And I am somebody" in her lisp-infected voice.
The room repeated back to her, "And you are somebody."
Nothing was really registering as I read the sheet. I was simultaneously trying to do too many things. I was concentrating on everyone else's confirmations, gauging how mine might be responded too, repeating people's affirmations back to them with the rest of the room, and at the same time trying to skim down the sheet and pick three that didn't sound too corny.
There were things like I am loved, I have the power to say yes and I have the power to say no, I am a child of God, I am loved, I am a good person, I am allowed to have emotions, and the list went on.
Bob had picked a seat far to close to The Queen - right next to her! It was now his turn. Crap, my turn was fast approaching. What was I going to say? Didn't he know to anticipate that I'd want some time to prepare and pick a seat farther away? I was having a mild panic-attack.
Bob finished his affirmations and the room's stares shifted to me. I could feel all of their eyes on me, but couldn't bring myself to look up. I was staring at the sheet and began reading off the sheet. I quickly settled on, "I am loved."
The room repeated back to me, "You are loved."
Phew, that seemed to go off without too much trouble. I picked another, "I am living in the here and now."
Again, the room repeated back to me, "You are living in the here and now."
The pressure was slowly subsiding. I picked the third, "I am living on God's time."
And again the room responded with, "You are living on God's time."
I finished it up with, "And I am somebody."
"And you are somebody," the crazies repeated.
My anxiety subsided as the next person began their affirmations. I realized my hands were clenched together and clammy, my jaw was tight, and I was sweating. These things were my body telling me it wanted a drink - and a stiff one at that.
The affirmations finished up with The King's. A daily thought and daily prayer were read, we went around to room sharing what we were grateful for that day, and then came the evening's excitement - Fuzzy Wuzzy.
Fuzzy Wuzzy was an ancient stuffed teddy bear that had been ripped, sewn back together, adorned with 50 cent sunglasses and Mardi Gras beads, and stunk by it's slutty nature of sleeping with everyone in the building.
When it was announced that it was time for Fuzzy Wuzzy everyone got excited and in a Happy Birthday song-like manner began singing in unison, "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear ... Fuzzy Wuzzy doesn't care ... if you've had a good day, or a bad day, but just because you are somebody. And tonight ... Fuzzy Wuzzy goes to ..." at which point the holder of Fuzzy would pick another crazy to give Fuzzy to for the night and following day when the ritual would occur again during the following evening's affirmations.
Next up on the agenda were the consequences. Every time somebody came into a group session late, didn't do their assigned job, or were otherwise deemed deserving of a consequence, their name was written in a tablet on the center coffee table.
It was the queens job to dole out individual consequences in front of the group at the end of the meeting. Consequences ranged from cleaning the kitchen to writing a one page paper on why they're grateful for their sobriety. The consequences were group-enforced; if you didn't do your consequence you were given another, and so on.
The queen gave out a couple of consequences and I vowed I would never be late to a group.
The meeting was closed with the serenity prayer and everyone filed downstairs to the common area. The evening was ours to do with as we pleased until lights out at eleven.
To be continued ...
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 06, 2005
Coffee shop (non)serenity
So I'm sitting in a coffee shop trying to get some work done and stay awake and there is a table of 3 giggling girls next to me. I'm not talking the teenage girls who who are giggling about the cute new guy on The OC, I'm talking about college-aged girls playing a dice-trivia game about the history of the Shakesperian era. Every time one of them says something the other two will start giggling like somebody's tickling their feet with a feather tip.
I know, I know ... you're thinking, "why doesn't that moron Sparkles get up and move or leave?"
Because. I was here first, damnit.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 05, 2005
My roommate got a new piece of furniture. Can you guess what it is?
My roommate got a new piece of furniture. Can you guess what it is?
We tend to think he's a bit of a princess.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
