Category: Deep and meaningful

It’s only fitting

It’s only fitting that I find myself at Concord hospital getting some pretty intense medical tests done.  Concord hospital for the most part, represents so much to me. It’s the place my mother first underwent the first of many operations for cancer, and ultimately it’s the place she took her last breath.

I think the enormity of the occasion together with the time I had to waste between x-rays and blood tests, gave me much to reflect on – my life and ultimate death.  Yes folks, I’m in a sombre mood and you gonna have to suck it up or leave now.

It’s not so much my death I dwell on but where I’m at in life right now and where I’ll be before I die – which will be many many years down the track I hope.

Seeing so many old people just hanging around wards in wheelchairs, runnaway hospital beds, all looking like they want an answer to their ailment, a fix or a miracle.  I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be that person just hanging by a thread.  Surely life isn’t that enjoyable they’d do anything and endure anything to stay alive:  Will I?

After I drove away I felt miserable with life and what it can dish out.  Come to think of it, it doesn’t dish out much.  You’re born, you go to school, maybe do more school, then you work maybe have kids, grow old, maybe even old and lonely and then you wait for death  – the ultimate frontier.  And for me, death is nothing, it’s eternal nothingness.

I saw an old lady waiting at the traffic lights. She seemed loney, going through her boring mundane daily routine:  get up, have breakfast, potter around the house, walk to the nearby chemist to get her prescription filled for whatever ailment she has.  She probably doesn’t see her kids much anymore and the grandkids are probably too hip to waste time with their old boring grandmother. I could see this story in her eyes and the way she carried herself.  Will this be me someday?

Is it that I’m so unhappy with my life that I find I dwell on these things.  Surely not?  I have a great family and great friends.  I live comfortably.  So what’s missing, what’s the one thing that’s missing that I can’t put my finger on?

Well you don’t think I know the answer do you?  I hope you didn’t expect a good ending to this story.  I could write about happy mundane shit everyday if that’s what you want, but somedays you just have to endure the sombre me.

It’s kind’a funny

It’s kind’a  funny that I’ve started writing after all these years of threatening to do so but thought that I’m too damn lazy to start.  But I have to thank two of my bestest friends: Bel and Gee and of course my father who was a journo. 

As a child I was rather oblivious to his work.  To me it was a man’s job and I know he would be rather surprised by my sudden interest.  And come to think of it, I’ve done a fews things that I’m sure my father would be surprised at such as:

  • going to uni and getting, not one, but two degrees
  • visiting his father’s birth place in Scotland.  Although my father was very proud of his Scottish heritage, he never went
  • and of course writing, he would never have thought for a moment that I would write anything other than a to-do lists – not that I was a list person back when he was alive.

It wasn’t until long after Dad died that I ran into an old friend of his, who at the time was the headmaster of the high school I attended a few years earlier. When I told him I was studying he said that Dad would have thought that rather amusing. Turns out my dear ole dad was a bit of a macho man with very old fashioned values such as a women belonging in the home.  Sorry Dad!   I say that with tongue in cheek as I’m sure he would be thrilled.

He may have been a little old fashioned, so it seems, but he was also a fair man and I miss him dearly.

It’s been a while

There is something significant about today’s blog.  The significance being that it’s related to that terrible day, see my last post –  ‘A job to be had’.  Anyway, this blog and ‘that’ blog are very much related.

You see, this morning I got up and went for a jog – this is the first jog since that terrible day.

Why?  It’s very apparent that on that terrible day I was clearly out of sorts because of several factors:  adoption and medical test results.  Since then I’ve done nothing other than eat, drink and worry about the worst case scenarios such as suffering, deformities (go figure) and of course my impending death (which BTW isn’t going to happen that’s just my overactive mind).

My worries were at their worst in the first week when I just sat on the lounge like a beached whale,  watched telly and drank oodles of wine (good stuff mind you).  Second week I was away with my daughter and grand kids which cheered my up somewhat.  The third week I attended a wedding in Coffs Harbour which turned out to be the medicine I needed to get over myself.  It’s taken a few days to actually get going since returning from Coffs but I started a new job this week,  so give me a break.

Regarding my medical issues, which are still ongoing and inconclusive:  anyway it seems Kristy is more concerned about  it. However, I’m not too concerned at the moment but watch this space things can easily take a turn for the worse.

A job to be had

I’ve taken to waking up day after day at 4am, and today is no different. I was going to go for a run but woke up in a funny mood. I seem to recall a dream about bio dad.  Very odd given the day ahead.

Today my schedule includs an appointment with the Dr about a lump on my little finger and to get the results of a routine blood test I’d taken last week. I also had a 12.30pm lunch date with Belinda.

As I do most mornings when I wake up too early to go for a run, I log into Facebook.  I had a message waiting for me from a friend.  Her message indicated that she had revisited her search for her birth mother with some success, she then did a name search on FB and came up with a possible match for relatives of her mother. I’m genuinly happy for her. However, when I hear these positive adoption stories what follows is a journey down the slippery slope of depression hell. And today is no different.  My mood is made all the worse by a visit to the Dr with the news of a slightly high calcium reading followed by buzz words such as ‘tumor’. Everything else the Dr said, whether it be positive or not, paled into insignificance, for as far as I was concerned I had little or no time to live.

Anyway, no time now to grieve I had a 12.30 appointment with Belinda which didn’t eventuate, long story short with no mobile receptionI had no way of telling Belinda I had arrived at the destination.  After a 30 minute wait just in case she turned up, I headed home knowing full well the afternoon will consist of a lounge, alcohol, food and hopefully some uplifting TV to get my mind of the mornings events and news.

All turned out true except for the uplifting TV.  Firstly I had recorded three out of four of Oprahs visit to Australia. I gotta say it did make me proud to be Australian but also made me fell like a failure. Here was a overweight, not overly attractive yank trying to inspire people to follow their dreams.  After all, she was born into a very poor family and here she is 50 years later with a friggin ‘O’ on the harbour bridge. Good ona!

My delima in all this is that I don’t have a friggin realistic dream.  Don’t get me wrong, I do have dreams.  I would love to be an artist, only issue is –  I can’t draw. Or the dream about the one where “I want to write a book’ . What story do I have to tell?  The adoption story’s been done to death and there is nothing else I can think of except maybe the one about the women meets man and falls in love, but family and distance keeps them apart forever. However, I’m sure Mills and Boon have also covered that story too.

To add to my dreary day, there is a movie on foxtel called ‘Mother and Child’. It’s about adoption and the effect of it on 3 women: The adoptee, the adopter and the adopted.  ‘Oh great’, I can turture myself more today – and that I did.  I closed the curtains, turned on the air conditioning, poured some wine and watched the movie.

If I’m going to do a job on myself today – it may as well be a good one.

Tolerance – or lack there of

I’m not sure if I’ve ever been a tolerant person because it’s never something that I’ve thought about.  However, over the past couple of years I have noticed that certain things or events affect me in such a way that I want to explode.  Things like:

  • Kids (excluding my grand kids).  It’s not really the kids that give me the absolute shits, but the parents.   kids are not given the tools to cope with life and the ups and downs incurred as a result.  Kids aren’t able to do simple things like walk to the local shop,  go to the park or even meet up with friends at the local cafe.  They’re not allowed to interact with anyone not known to their parents and on the most part they can’t even get themselves to the school bus stop without being dropped off by Mum or Dad.

“Kids aren’t kids anymore. They’re pampered little bastards. “

  • Really stupid people.  Ok, so maybe I have fallen into this category over the years.  But at least I know when, where and how I’ve been stupid.  Really stupid people don’t know they’re stupid.  To combat and control really stupid people would require new new type of police force  – The Stupid People’s Detection Force SPDF.
    The SPDF will be given the authority to tell and charge ‘stupid people’ accordingly.  Now what constitutes a really stupid person is subject to variation and change and judged on a case to case basis.  To get around the issue of recognising the different between a person who has done ‘a’ stupid thing and a really stupid person.  The really stupid person does this said ‘stupid thing’ no less than 3 times.  This follows the American criminal law system of “3 strikes you’re out” which makes perfect sense to me.

Punishment for stupid people is obvious – death by stoning!

Too passionate for my own good

I’m aware that  some of my friends, and definitely my family, think I’m a little direct, often blunt, maybe a little opinionated and possibly condescending at times. But the fact of the matter is:  I’m too passionate for my own good!

Don’t snigger, it’s true.  If something is bothering me or pisses me off,  I’ll dwell on it until my head hurts.  My mind churns the problem over and over like a milkmaid churning milk into butter. However, my problem churning doesn’t produce butter.

What I’m left with after all the churning is milk.

The problems that cause me the greatest of grief are the ones I can’t control or fix.

My neurosis doesn’t end at butter churning.  You see, I’m a fortune teller.  I take a worry and build a whole life around it. A futuristic life consisting of pain, anguish, poverty, and of course in some extreme cases; death.

It’s times like these I wish I was a man!

Men lack passion, unless the passion’s driven by a sport involving a ball and lots of sweat.  I know that might be a generalisation but I haven’t met a man that breaks the stereotype I’ve come to expect.

What to do about my neurosis?  Nothing I guess, because as I said in the beginning:

I’m too passionate for my own good!