30
April

So Simple, Yet So Complex

It’s weird. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought that I would be writing this. Two weeks ago, Tad was still alive, and illegal immigration was just a theoretical issue to some of the people around here. (They claim it’s epidemic, but if you watch our local news, the only reports of illegal immigrant related “crimes” are related to the accident lately. Before that, it was mainly illegal on illegal stuff.)

When Tad died, I decided to start looking up what people were saying on blogs and stuff. I knew that there had to be people around here who knew him or something who were saying stuff. Apparently, there were a lot of people saying stuff, but very few actually had a clue about Tad or Leigh Anna. Very few even cared.

At first, they were somewhat sympathetic to the families. Then, when a story broke about how Leigh Anna’s mom had solicited the help of the man who ended up driving the other car that ran into Tad’s Supra, everyone decided to jump on Leigh Anna’s mom for causing the accident. I thought this was selfish and cruel of them to claim, but they did not listen.

Meanwhile, they were posting about other local political news. I, being the always political girl, decided to get involved in these issues and respond. I felt it was only fair if they were putting their opinions out there, I should have a right to put mine out there. One issue was about state funding for affordable housing. I think that sounds good. People deserve to have a decent place to live.

Well, suddenly, they were telling me that I didn’t know what it was like to own a house. Um, I do. Then, a trailer doesn’t count as a house. Well, that’s nice, I live in a house with a nice firm foundation. Now, I see this stunner:

Don’t sit in judgement of what we do for society since it is a damn sight more than what you do. If you’re getting SSA disability then we’re funding your disability payments.

I have to ask, because the situation you describe makes absolutely no sense – if you have no job then how in the world did you buy your own house at the ripe old age of 21? How do you keep paying for it? Do your parents live with you or do you live with them?

Followed by:

Actually, when you say she gives “nothing in return” you show why this system sucks. She is not the least bit appreciative of us funding her existance. She doesn’t even give us the courtesy of a heart felt “thank you.” If she had to rely on charitable giving instead of government confiscated and distributed money she probably wouldn’t have such a sour, spiteful disposition towards those who put food on her table.

Ooh, he sounds like he’s pissed off because he thinks I’m cheating him out of his money. Yeah, I bet when he learned at a very young age that he has a chronic debilitating illness, he was dead set on working the rest of his life. Oh wait, I was the one diagnosed and I was planning on working until the age of retirement. That was when I was just “crazy” and had arthritis. Then came Fibromyalgia, followed by over a half a dozen other physical ailments, two possible autoimmune disorders, and finding out that I have scoliosis and will possibly be in pain every day for the rest of my life because the school system couldn’t get a nurse to check me as a child…yeah, when you count up the number of conditions I have been diagnosed with that qualify for disability, it’s around 12 or 13. If there was a bad gene in my family for something, it got passed to me. Forgive me if I’m not in a hurry to get up and go to work every day, especially when I struggle to get out of bed some mornings because of all the crap that’s wrong with me.

People assume that if you’re on any kind of government assistance that you don’t need help. Well, people are wrong. Most people don’t want a handout from the government. It’s a very painful process. You feel so degraded by the end of it, and then your status is left up to people who have never even met you. It’s not something that I enjoyed going through, but it is something I had to do.

And as a member of this society, he is expected to pay Social Security taxes. He may hate that he gets to help me be all enabled or whatever he’ll want to call it, but it’s his responsibility. Besides, I don’t see him or his friends being big humanitarians, so I doubt they would actually donate anything if they weren’t forced to by the government.

Not really sure that these people have hearts.

(Oh, and you all should know that the English major in me really wanted to point out the idiocy that is someone who cannot spell judgmental and existence, yet drones on about issues like some great intellectual.)

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24
April

There’s something wrong

Remember, I have a consistently low body temperature of 97.0? Right now, after a 32 oz. cup of icy cold water, my temperature is a nice cool 99.8. Water knocks the temperature down a bit and then my normal temp is almost 2 degrees lower than the average, so…this is apparently one hell of an infection. At least my immune system has finally kicked in. I was afraid it had forgotten how to work.

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24
April

Some people disgust me

Last night, as I stayed up reading the online condolence books for Tad and Leigh Anna, I began to feel this knot in my stomach. Something I didn’t want to feel. I felt anger and hatred. I hate feeling hatred towards people, but I wasn’t feeling it at the person who took away someone who had touched my life. I was angry at the people who were vilifying the man who killed him.

Felix Ortega was immediately suspected of being an illegal immigrant. People saw him, and they would readily admit that they thought that he MUST be illegal. After all, we look at Hispanics in this country as being criminals. (Similar to how our ancestors looked at Blacks and Jews.) Because they KNEW, without any evidence, that he was illegal, they knew what to do to him. Some said deport him. Others argue he’ll come back. Some suggested execution…no one was telling them that this was extreme.

This was an accident. The only thing that we should be focusing on is the NATURE of the accident. It is not automatically an accident that was caused by an illegal immigrant. It is an accident that was caused by drunk driving. Focus on trying to get drunk driving laws stricter. Don’t focus on executing a man because he got drunk and did something stupid.

I wouldn’t favor execution even if he had murdered them with his bare hands. I wouldn’t want to know that three lives were lost because one man got drunk and did something stupid. I know, that means that I actually count the man who killed Tad as a human being, but you know what? He is, and I feel sorry for him. I really do. And hearing tonight on the news that he worked with Leigh Anna’s mother on her documentary? That was heartbreaking. Knowing that not only does this man know that he took a life, but he took the life of someone who touched his own life…it’s tragic to think of, and then when I read on some callous right-wing blogger’s statement of what happened the night of the accident and what he saw as someone from my church die (he described what it was like to watch him die), I just want to scream. I want to scream until I have no sound left. Not at Ortega. I want to scream at this blogger. The internet is big and wide. We can find things that touch our lives in many ways on it, but no one deserves to read the agony that their friend went though. To me, his posting a statement like that was insensitive. I understand he was trying to emote what it was like, but there are some details that even I, the Queen of oversharing, believe should be left off the internet. Talking about someone’s reaction to being burned alive is not something that I want to read when I get online and am looking at information about this tragic night.

I’m trying to make sense of it. We all are. We are all trying to see this world we live in, but some of us are not ready to hear about every little detail about that night.

Don’t politicize Tad’s death. I know that it is easy to do it. I know that it is so easy to say that this proves that all illegal immigrants are evil and that they deserve the needle or something, but it is not right to take our tragedy and turn it into your political mission. If the Mattles or the Jimmersons want to pursue laws to change illegal immigration, then let them. If the city wants the state to change laws, then let them. But don’t take our issue to your blogs and act like you speak for us.

Oh, and if you are in a condolence book, don’t say you hate a race of people because of what one man does. Racism is vile. We don’t need to be angry with people right now. We need to be living and loving and grieving.

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23
April

I would joke that I’m not dead…

I would joke that I’m not dead, but it just doesn’t seem like a good thing to say right now. Over the past few weeks, people have been dying quite a bit in my life. First, there was a classmate at UAH who took his own life, leaving behind a little girl and a lot of people wondering why. Then, last Friday, a fellow YSA, Tad, died in a car crash along with his girlfriend, Leigh Anna. Tad was 19, Leigh Anna was 16, and the driver of the other car had been drinking. A couple of days ago, a man that was like a second father to my mother and was a major fixture in my whole family’s life died. I think his may have actually been one of those happier to hear about “died in his sleep” kind of things.

I have to pull off the impossible in a few hours. I have to get ink for my printer, print out a paper for my Honors class to turn in for my final, and then I have to make sure I get to Tad’s funeral on time. I’ve emailed a copy of the paper to my teacher, but I would really like her to have a hard copy in case she couldn’t open the file. I haven’t gone to bed yet because I’m watching a special documentary thing on Beslan, and I may watch a rerun of Hack at 5 with my mom. Then, I’ll grab about four hours of sleep and wake up at 10 feeling refreshed because that’s how I roll.

I’ve been very sick recently. Remember in November when I got that sinus infection, and then it repeated itself a few months later? Remember how I was cursing the makers of Biaxin because it didn’t work and it made me sick? Well, the sinus infection had gone into hibernation after that last time. When my back pain finally got to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore, I called my doctor and asked him if he could see me. He did, giving me a prescription for a muscle relaxer and steroids. Now, if you’ve ever watched House, you know that if you give someone who has a compromised immune system and has a resilient infection, then that infection will grow RAPIDLY. The quick pack of pills was over in 6 days, and by the second day, my ear was hurting a little. My sinuses began to flare up quickly after that, and by the end of that sick day pack, I was sick. Well, that was Friday night. You can’t go to the doctor (usually, unless another doctor has office hours on the weekend and is seeing my doctor’s patients that day) on Saturdays or Sundays. I waited it out to Monday. This was not good. As it was clearly bacterial, it grew and intensified. I was coughing, I could barely hear, and my head felt really heavy. The good news was, I felt no more back pain, even though the pain had not really left…I was just so sick that the pain did not register as important enough to be noticed.

On Monday afternoon, I went to the doctor, and I knew he would say Biaxin again. I wasn’t going to have it. I told him my symptoms and I told him that I did not want Biaxin. (I’m allergic to four major antibiotics, so it’s generally going to be between Levaquin and Biaxin. He hates to use Levaquin on me because he knows it works well and doesn’t want me to become allergic to it.) He almost said Biaxin until I told him about the ears. He looked in my right one, and said it was pretty good. He looked in my left for a split second and nearly jumped back. Apparently, the infection was SEVERE in there. He said Biaxin wouldn’t have cut it with that one.

I’m starting to do better now. It’s a little hard to breathe sometimes. My throat gets irritated quickly and I have to drink constantly to keep from coughing. My mom thinks the infection was either a staph or strep infection that got caught in my sinuses and, eventually, my ear, because the pain was so severe in my ear and my throat, and because of the difficulty that we’ve had in treating this thing.

I would have probably gotten better more quickly if my immune system could handle the job a little better. If my core body temperature wasn’t 97.0 normally, then I could probably fight off infections a little easier. When my temperature was checked at the doctor it was 98.3. The nurse was about to discount this as a low temp. It may seem low, since normal is 98.6. But if my temperature is normally 1.6 degrees cooler than a normal person, then 98.3 is like if I had a temperature of 99.9 if I had a regular body that worked properly.

Oh, I found out officially in the X Rays from my back that I have scoliosis. They have never officially told me that. I’ve had spinal films done before, but they typically thought it was out of alignment because I would have back spasms. Apparently, now they think I have a curvy spine. If I remember correctly from the films when I was 10, it curves to the left in the lumbar region. When the techs were doing the films that day, they were only supposed to be doing the thoracic region, but they seemed to get intrigued by something they noticed on it and decided to also do my lumbar area. It was probably the scoliosis.

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10
April

Live Your Life

Do you ever think you attract a certain type of person? My one and only boyfriend was the emotionally abusive type who told me how to live my life and what to do. He had no clue about the reality of what I was like, and instead tried to mold me into the perfect version of what his ex-wife had been for him. I don’t really consider him to be a boyfriend, because he never officially asked me on a date. He, instead, hung out with me at a couple of restaurants with groups of friends. He would call me incessantly. Then, he called to let me know that we had to break up when he had to move across country for school.

He’s not the only creepy one to be in my life.

I had a stalker…a real life stalker. He worked at A&M and he knew all kinds of crap about me that no one should have known. (Stuff he could have only known by watching me.) He would go into my dorm room and mess with my stuff. He wasn’t really dangerous, I guess, but he scared me a lot. I hated him knowing where I would be and when I would be there.

Then, of course, there are the cyber-stalkers. I’ve had a few of those. One threatened people I know. It’s creepy that someone can try to hold so much power over you when they don’t even know you personally.

I think it’s so weird that people talk about there being something demented about me when it seems like sometimes I’m more normal than the kind of people who are drawn to me.

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4
April

Nameless

A certain Canadian who shall, for all intents and purposes, remain nameless in this post, but we all really know who I’m talking about (think stealing) has decided to stir stuff up with me. What has she done? She decided to post pictures of me on LiveJournal to get people to bash me. Really sweet, huh? Why? Well, apparently, it has to do with me continuously blocking her on Twitter and not really wanting anything to do with her. Since when does not wanting to have anything to do with someone constitute something worthy of this childish behavior?

I changed my privacy settings on Flickr, because I know that’s where she got the pictures from this time. Now I don’t think that she can get back to them, in case she decides to create some other account and do this again. (She was banned on LiveJournal yet again.)

What’s weird is that I was perhaps one of the nicest people to her, because I felt a little sorry for her. She was always one of those people that you kind of hear about and wonder what (and I’m taking these words from Buffy’s Cordelia, who was much better than Angel’s Cordelia) was her childhood trauma. I mean, to go about stealing and acting like she does, it seems a little unusual for someone who is supposedly an adult. It was one thing to do it for a little while when she was younger, but at a certain point we have to grow up and take responsibility for our actions.

It’s funny how she used pictures of me from when I was goofing off to make me look really bad, then when someone decided to post pictures of her she got all defensive.

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