Sick, Sicker, Dying, Dead

Damn it all to hell, I'm sick again. Or perhaps should I say, I'm still sick. I knew it was coming on yesterday, when I spent most of the day sweating my way through the Flatiron district. I had a client meeting that went really well, but I just couldn't find any energy to enjoy it. It was just hot, and sticky and uncomfortable, and my nose is stuffy so I can't breathe, and my chest hurts from coughing, and I'm dizzy from being congested, and generally miserable.

So I stayed home from work today and slept til 11AM. I thought about going in, but there wasn't anything I couldn't handle on email, so I worked from home.

Unfortunately, I had made a commitment to help out some friends at their Shabbat service tonight - and unable to find a sub, I went, sat in the back row, and was alternately chilled and sweating and coughing and sniffling, mostly unable to follow along and not really aware of my surroundings. Thankfully, it was a short service, so I got the song sung and got the hell out of Dodge. I'm sure I sounded like a wino attempting the Springsteen catalog after a tough night, but it's over, and now I can sleep.

Since I'm not sure I am going to do any posting this weekend - seriously! I need to rest! - I leave you with this troubling exchange over the subject of POTATO SALAD between a food blogger and the "publicity manager" for America's Test Kitchen, which was, up until I read this blog post, one of my favorite cooking shows. Being in the PR biz, I can't comprehend even participating in an email exchange like this, telling people that they can't post a recipe with their own modifications because theirs is Just So Perfect. I don't think you can legally copyright a list of ingredients, either. My agent, the master of all food-related/recipe knowledge, would know. I will ask her next time we chat.

Besides, is there any such thing as a "perfect" recipe? Generations of cooks in my own family, all of whom have modified our classic Sunday gravy over the years (my own addition is grated carrot, sauteed in butter to caramelize the sugars) would beg to differ.

Shabbat shalom, mes chers amis.

Laughter at Sinai

At my workplace, summer is a time for relaxation. This is not to say that we're not busy; considering how lousy the economy is, business here is surprisingly booming. My company (or I should say the company for which I have oversight) is doing especially well. Westchester is just beginning to catch on to the importance of brand management and website marketing, and as a result, I suddenly have more work than I can handle. Nonetheless, as a team we are encouraged to make the most of the "slow" months because the fall and winter tend to be insane. And they are. For about three weeks in October, we are slammed with events and conferences every day. And that's in addition to the regular workload.

But today was a good day, the perfect day to get away for a couple of hours. I had lunch with a dear friend who is a terrific Jewish leader in her own right - an inspiration on so many levels - and it's great to catch up with her and hear all about what it's like to lead a congregation in real life. From what I can gather, considering the many, many friends that I am so fortunate to have in my life, who have transitioned from secular life into seminary and then into congregational life, it's a lot closer to Moses' struggle to lead B'nai Yisrael through the wilderness than they would have imagined.

Catching up today really helped to put things in perspective. There are some days that I see or speak with old friends, or reconnect on Facebook, and sometimes when people ask how I've been, I wonder how much I can really tell them. The last thing I want to do is sound like a downer, but it's harder than you might expect to focus on the good (novel, school, landing on my feet in a sane job) when the bad has so much more power over me, still. More times than I can count, I have watched as horrified eyes look back at me as I describe my life over the last three years. More than once I've been asked how it is that I'm even able to talk about it.

Last night, as I was driving up to Connecticut to spend the night at my sister's, my best friend called and out of nowhere, I confessed that I had spent a good part of the day in tears. In fact, even as I was driving up I684, I was still crying. I knew what it was about. I've been thinking a lot about my dad, thinking a lot about the sheer ridiculous injustice of being sick, and knowing that I am still sick because a certain person took it upon herself to do what she could to ruin my health. What makes me even angrier is that two years after the fact, I am still dealing with the consequences. I felt like I was crying out of sheer frustration that I had made the mistake of allowing it to happen in the first place, because at some level, I feel like I must have chosen this. And if I did, then how stupid am I?

My friend understood and made the point that I was probably crying now because I couldn't cry then. Because I was too busy fighting for my sanity to actually take the time to be sad about what I was trying to survive.

I think everyone gets something like this in their life, something or someone who is just simply so unbelievably sad and sick and destructive that it takes a long time to heal from the damage, and an even longer time to let go of the anger. But eventually you have to let go or you are in danger of becoming obsessed to the point of losing yourself because you might actually succumb to the power of the thing you hate. Eventually, you have to move on.

Today I heard some really good advice about how to interpret the unexpected symbols and signs that get sent to you, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments. It reminded me of the first festival service I attended after losing my dad, which was Shavuot, commemorating the giving of the Torah at Sinai. I remember showing up for services that evening, knowing that it would also be the first Yizkor service that I would officially be a mourner.

Needless to say, I was dreading it. I'd seen enough friends - not to mention leaders and congregants that I liked and respected -- fall so completely to pieces during Yizkor that I knew I was in trouble. And at that time, the grief was so real and raw that I was positive I would pretty much lose it. Which wasn't a good thing: I was sitting up front in the sanctuary, with the choir, and the last thing I wanted to do was make a spectacle of myself.

That night, the service dragged on - all I could do was wait for the moment. I remember the tension in my body, literally feeling as if I was trying to hold myself together. I was so full of darkness, trying so hard to prepare for the emotional storm to come. And finally it did. The memorial service began with these sad, graceful meditations all about loss, the mournful melodies started up, and finally, the cantor sang the memorial prayer - El Maleh Rachamim - with such emotion that I felt my eyes start to hurt from the effort of holding back my tears.

We paused for a moment of silent reflection. I bit my lip, felt a trembling in my throat, was about to reach for a Kleenex, when suddenly, someone totally cut one. Not a hugely loud one, but as they say: out of the silence, a still, small voice.

The next thing I knew was that there I was, half a second ago trying not to cry, and now I was desperately trying not to laugh. And all I could think about was yeah, dairy's a tradition for this festival...but now I'd never be able to get through another Shavuot without being reminded of how someone cut the cheese.

So what did I learn today? In sharing that story, I realized that maybe it's been a bad time, and maybe I do have things to cry about. On the other hand, telling myself to be sad, and that I have many things to be miserable about, etc. may not be the answer either. Seriously. Because you never know when - or how - the message that changes your perspective will reach you.

On some days, wisdom emerges from the voices of the people who love you. At Sinai, it was a voice that spoke in thunder and the blare of the shofar that delivered wisdom to a people in need of direction. And even as I am still learning from the moment, on that Shavuot, it was a different trumpet blast, entirely.

Home, Not Home

This morning I had a great view of my apartment building from the coffee place across the street. The lush, leafy treetops looked so pretty against the red brick and white trim. Even the shape of the building looked lovely, the way the sun and shadow played off one another and the angles of the structure. Then the question occurred to me: why do I hate living there?

So far, of all the places I've lived - and it's not that many - this is the one that feels the least like home. It's not that I don't like it, it's that there's so little to like about it. There's a lot of room, almost 800 square feet - but it feels like a big box. It's got some nice architectural details, like an arched doorway and a black and white checkered kitchen floor, but there's no real charm. It's on the sixth floor, but it gets ridiculously hot. And overall, I just don't feel at home there. I don't know if I ever did.

I think it's got something to do with the fact that so much bad stuff has happened since I moved there in 2004. Of course, I was pretty much driven out of my old apartment (see photo above) - which was small and charming and funky - and overrun with mice as the result of a new construction going up next door. Bad me: I took the first apartment I found, because I was tired of seeing Mickey and Jerry and Minute and all those other rodents brazenly occupying my living space. And of course, I thought I'd only be there for a year at the most. At the time, I was supposed to get married and move the hell out of New York.

But things didn't exactly turn out that way. From the beginning, a lot went wrong. When my boyfriend at the time was supposed to help me organize the painting before I moved in, he managed to screw up the job in about seventeen places before giving up entirely and decamping to his mother's house. In rapid succession, I picked out the wrong drapes, the wrong rug, and the wrong color for the living room. It wasn't pretty - I could even say I hated it - but having signed the lease, I put up a mezuzah and hoped for the best.

Needless to say, I didn't end up moving. In some ways it was for the best, but it left me stuck in this space that I never really loved in the first place, surrounded by stuff that made me feel as if I was stuck in time. This was not without a certain logic. The rug - oy, that rug - was a black and gray and gold monstrosity that would have looked better in some stoner's basement rec room than underneath my new dining room set from Fortunoff. The evening it arrived, my dad came over to help me put it down. I could tell he was a little annoyed at coming over so late, but he did nonetheless. My sister's father in law had just died of cancer a couple of weeks earlier, and I could tell that it had really freaked my dad out. We sat on my new sofa and chatted for a while after arranging the rug under the table and chairs. "You know, Ann," he said, "it's a little scary when suddenly it's your peers you see going. It makes you feel that you don't have much time left." I remember trying to reassure him that he was absolutely healthy, and that he had all the time in the world. But he was right; he didn't. That was the last time he ever was in my apartment. He died less than a month later.

For years, I kept that rug. I just couldn't find the courage or the strength to get rid of it. Even though it was ugly as sin, and dark, and sucked all the light out of the room. It was the last thing that tied him to my life there. I knew he would never see the next home I moved into.

Finally, my best friend Meg, who is an interior designer, came over one afternoon a couple of months ago and just started getting rid of stuff. Fortunately, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and the rug went down to the basement, where someone in the building promptly dumpster dived it. Upstairs, the room was suddenly that much bigger, filled with that much more light.

In the intervening years, that apartment has borne witness to a lot of tough days. Three nights of shivah. Endless evenings spent editing my manuscript. The end of an engagement; the continuation of the relationship that ended the engagement; friends with benefits; breakups and heartbreaks and outright lies. Too many holidays spent slaving over marketing plans while the rest of the world celebrated with fireworks and cookouts and family time. Hours on the phone with friends talking about the outright betrayal and ingrained cultural malice of a former workplace. And then the three months it stood empty while I moved back home to take twice daily IV treatments, because I wasn't able to take care of myself.

Even now, I don't love being home. I can always find something to distress me about being there. I've got persistent moths that come to visit every so often (the fact that they destroy the carbs in my cupboard is now not the worst thing in the world); a squirrel that likes to break in via the air conditioner, and just a general feeling of unease, waiting for another shoe to drop. Or even another pair of shoes, at the rate things have gone.

This November will mark four years, with one year left on my latest lease. I'm hoping by the time '09 rolls around, that maybe I'll have the energy to move. Or at the very least, that somehow, I'll have found a way to make my house a home sweet home - even if it is, like everything else these days, artificially sweetened.

A Hard Yom's Laila

In the spirit of trying to do things that I really enjoy on Shabbat - other than studying in the morning, napping in the afternoon, and treating myself to the occasional Treif McMuffin every once in a while, yesterday I had the great pleasure of seeing A Hard Day's Night on the big screen at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, one of my favorite destinations in beautiful Westchester County, NY.

It amazes me; after 44 years, the film was as fresh and vibrant as it must have seemed in 1964. Not that I would know, considering that I was born two weeks after the Beatles broke up. But The Long and Winding Road was number one on the Billboard charts, so I like to think that maybe that means I didn't miss the era entirely.

I do have to say that as much as I like the digital remastering of the songs, I really miss the old imperfections that I remember hearing on my old records (anyone here remember records?) and on AM radio during the 70s. For instance, on the original track of If I Fell, Paul McCartney totally chokes on the high note of the bridge (and I/would be sad if our new love/was in vain). Now that the digital recordings have replaced the old soundtrack, all of the old edges have been smoothed over; the clarity is as pristine and professional as if it had been recorded a year ago, instead of nearly fifty.

Which is kind of sad in a way. True, everyone indulges in their own revisionist history - heaven knows the Beatles are as guilty of that as any rock group that has survived into the digital age; since we have the technology to cover it up, smooth it out, hide it from view, so many people want their legend to be without blemish. But very often, it's our mistakes that give us character, and bring a sense of the unique to an otherwise bland vanilla treadmill of a song, or even a life.

I once knew someone who was so terrified of anyone seeing her mistakes that it cost her everything - her marriage, her relationships with her kids (whom she bullied to the point where they clearly couldn't make any decisions for themselves); her social life (of which she had none because she was always too busy staying late at work to cover her ass and give people the impression that she was working, when she wasn't, not in real life), and even her sense of personal security - so much so that the only delight left in her life was making sure other people took the fall for all the things she did wrong. And that person did a lot of wrong - not just in terms of making bad professional decisions, but just not being able to focus long enough to learn new skills or technologies. This, in essence, led to the fact that most of the time, she had no idea what the heck she was doing - which in turn led her to falsify documents and cheat her staffers and spin every mistake she made into either someone else's fault, or into an outright lie.

I think about that flubbed note in If I Fell and I can't help but be reminded of the time I spent observing this person and her fear; the insecurity that governed everything she did, said and acted on, no matter who it hurt and no matter what the consequences. As if the worst thing that would happen is that she would be wrong. Instead of doing wrong - which was undoubtedly the greater of two evils.

So I was sitting in the theater, thinking about how grateful I felt to simply have the free time to sit in a theater and see a movie instead of constantly having to answer a cell phone or an email and react and respond to the crisis situations that her insecurity always created, no matter whether it was Shabbat, or midnight, or even during my vacation time. Then something happened just before the film started: a group of about eight people rushed into the theater and took up the seats all around me. As it turned out, they were Israeli, so I had the great pleasure of listening to commentary about the movie and about the Beatles, all in Hebrew. Which was strange, and cool, and sad and beautiful all at the same time. It was the coming together of two lives - the life I had before and the one I live now. Because I think of the Beatles, very often, as something that belongs to a past life, the one before lots of bad things started happening. After 9/11, I couldn't listen to their music for months - none of it made sense to me anymore. And after my dad died, the only song I could bear to hear was The Ballad of John and Yoko. Why? Because only two Beatles (John and Paul) recorded it. To me it represented something that appeared to be whole on the surface, but once you looked really close (or listened), you knew that something that was once whole was broken, and somehow incomplete.

Watching my heroes - two of them now gone - and hearing the modern and ancient music of my heart's language at the same time was a transforming experience. Not only because of the music, and the imperfections that my own ear still hears intact, but also thanks to the experience of knowing that my own hard yom's laila is over. Because unlike others who still live in a world of fear and lies and covering things up, who persist in creating a culture of conflict and elaborate deception in order to hide their mistakes, I'm home, and everything seems to be right.

Summer Plague, Popsicle Follies and Opera Death

I can't even begin to tell you how much better I'm feeling this week. No RA symptoms, fevers have been down in the mornings (unfortunately, up in the evenings), and overall, I'm feeling much more human - especially after the earlier bout with this summer plague earlier in the week. I have to say that in spite of "being sick," this is probably the best I've felt since the summer of 2006. Having lost almost 20 lbs ain't so bad, either.

The cough, sadly, is hanging on. And it's not attractive. It tends to get worse at night, so I try to stay hydrated, keeping the iced glass of eight parts water to one part cranberry juice, limeade, orange juice, or whatever I've got in the fridge, close by. The evening ritual has also come to include a sugar-free Popsicle. This week I bought a 24-pack of "tropical fruit" flavors - which were probably developed in some kind of lab versus them actually containing any pineapple, orange, or something called Hawaiian Berry. The pops themselves are neon in hue and absolutely yummy, although I think the health benefit to be derived from it is pretty much zero.

Unfortunately, last night the Hawaiian Berry gave me a little scare. At around 11PM, I was in bed watching Family Guy when I got seized with a bad coughing fit. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom for some tissues. The coughing got out of control. I couldn't get my breath, and before I knew it - yeah, you guessed it - things got a little messy. Fortunately, I didn't Jimi Hendrix myself - but I ended up hurling all over the bathroom sink.

Here's the weird part. Upon recovery I noticed that the resulting yak was bright red in hue. For a horrible moment I was certain I had thrown up blood and that I was about to cough up a vital organ or two - that this was the end - I had finally discovered exactly what my Opera Death would look like.

To explain the concept of Opera Death: this is something my friends and I came up with while working for the Metropolitan Opera, way back in the nineties before the place was post-retro cool. Opera Death consists of falling prey to one of two scenarios: dying either of unrequited love or tuberculosis. Contrary to popular opinion, Opera Death can take place anywhere, not just in the nineteenth century. So long as it has some kind of Puccini-esque element of tragedy; you could off yourself in the middle of Giants Stadium, or cough yourself to pieces on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; Tosca and Boheme ain't got nothing on some of the ideas we came up with - perishing from unrequited love for Richie Sambora at a Bon Jovi show at the Garden; hocking up a lung on the F train without even being noticed by the MTA. You get the idea.

But there was I was, faced with tubercular reality. Not Juliet but Mimi. Tiny hands frozen, standing over a white porcelain sink with the life-force spewed out before me. Not sure if I should call 911, my doctor or my mom. Or, in the typical way I handle illness, if I should just clean up and go back to bed and pretend it hadn't happened.

And then I realized that the so-called blood in the sink had the distinct appearance and characteristics of tropical fruit - some sort of cherry-berry neon effluvial quality that was nonetheless, the key to its identification. Insert jackass moment here.

Having eluded Opera Death for the time being, I pulled myself together, did what I had to do with the Basin Tub and Tile cleaner, changed into a clean t-shirt and went back to bed. Which was only fitting. One should probably go to their Opera Death in a long white ruffled nightgown, not so much a two year old t-shirt advertising a Hanukkah festival.

I've still got the cough, so just in case, I'll be sticking to pineapple flavor tonight.

Shabbat shalom, amigos.

Sweetmeats

This evening, it occurred to me that if I were to lay out the names of my different medications - plaquenil, naproxen, methylprednisolone, xanax, hydrocodone, methotrexate, zithromax - on the Scrabulous board, I would end up with one hell of a word score.

I can't wait to be off this stuff. Well, except for the vicodin and the xanax. I'll keep those in my bag, just in case.

After almost a week down with a terribly nasty summer flu, I'm finally feeling a little better. And I have to say that it was awfully nice to be just sick, like a normal person, instead of feeling chronically crappy. The new diet is really working some miracles and marvels - and I feel like I am finally emerging from the mitzrayim (no, that's not another medication!) - the narrow place - of pain and emerging into a much healthier way of life - one where I am not in constant, agonizing pain every single day.

But here's something strange: since I eliminated two foods from my diet, I have almost no RA symptoms. Since I gave up sugar (in all its evil forms and with all its empty promises) and red meat, I no longer have any inflammation in my joints, my ankles have been restored to their natural state of girlish slender boniness (yay for pretty ankles!) and a heck of a lot of bloat is gone from my knees, elbows, and face.

I didn't give up red meat on purpose. I just stopped eating it because it's high in points, and why bother when you can have a turkey burger? Sugar, of course, was told to hit the trail about six weeks ago. I'm not really missing it anymore. I've got sugar-free Popsicles (dee-lish and points-free) and sugar-free Jello, so when the sugarbeast hits, I've got the weaponry at hand. But meat - well, that's kind of weird. I always figured it was benign, and since I am kind of anemic, a dietary necessity. Then again, there are leafy greens and peanut butter and spanakopita, if I really need to boot up the iron. (Why do I always hear echoes of those old Geritol commericals when I think about iron? Know what would be interesting? A Viagra-Geritol combination drug. Throw in some Lipitor and you'd be all set. Pfizer, are you listening?)

So, being sick this time around was interesting, if for no other reason that it gave me the chance to be...sick...? And actually, it also made me see how well I reallly am doing.

Thanks to Tom Selleck, I May Never Consume Sugar Ever Again:

This has officially turned me off cake, probably forever. Now all I need to do is keep it in my fridge. It's the chest hair. Chest hair and cake. I get the heaves just thinking about it.



Shabbat shalom, y'all.

The Food Police

There's a wonderful article in the Times today about a doctor who blogs about his life as a medical professional. They reported on his recent take on helping overweight patients - not by lecturing or shaming them, but instead helping them feel more positive about themselves: leading them to understand that they are worth the effort of being healthy and taking care of themselves. No one, he reasons, wants to take care of a body they feel guilty about or are ashamed of.

I think he's right. It's only through the maintenance of a healthy ego that one can be successful at anything they set out to do. For example, I had a bastard of a choir director in college who convinced me that my voice sucked and that Music and I would never be friends, much less buddies on a first-name basis. He was wrong: my voice doesn't suck, but it was years before I was comfortable singing again. Empirically, I realize that I do not have the makings of a Renee Fleming nor will I ever even be a competent music professional. But I enjoyed music and singing, until I ran into him, and sadly, I let his negative influence, shame and judgement take that enjoyment away from me. Authority, as they say, is powerful.

Another example: when I was a graduate student in the Poetry program at Temple University, I had a crackpot professor who thought she was seventeen different kinds of brilliant and clever because she published a couple of books (that no one outside of the walled garden of academe had ever heard of), she didn't own a television and had never even seen an episode of Happy Days. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with the television piece of this equation, but not understanding the post-apocalyptic modernist influence of the Tuscaderos on the fin de siecle works of Fonzarelli - that just ain't cool.

Luckily, by that point, I knew how to spot an insecure loser. All semester, we clashed over the fact that I didn't want to write just like her. I wanted to write like me, and apparently, that didn't really work for her so much. When she told me that I needed to go by my given name, because no one would ever accept Andi as anything more than "a perky little sorority girl name," I knew it was over. Leaving her book-lined, ego-hatchery of an office, I went straight to the authorities and defected into the Fiction program, where I lived happily ever after.

I'm not saying that everyone and anyone with a criticism is necessarily a bad person, or driven by their own insecurity to remark hurtfully on someone else's vulnerability. But I know that there have been many times when I could personally do without the comments, especially when they relate to food/eating habits/diets, etc. Yes, I'm glad that this or that diet worked for your sister or colleague or spouse. Or, it's nice that you paid enough attention to our relationship that you recognize a closet eater when you see one - and that you think it would benefit me greatly if I only eat when someone else is in the room. And it's interesting that you care oh-so-much about what I got from the deli today that you have to ask me about it - how many points are in it, whether or not I should really be eating it, etc.

Within the last three weeks, I've heard all of these comments. And in my head, even as well-meaning as they may be, they don't translate as being love or concern or advice. I hear them as blaming statements, as questioning my self-control, as another authority that tells me that I suck at this being healthy thing, and maybe I should just forget about it entirely.

Just imagine it: you're trying to strengthen your ego, find your soul in all of this struggle, making an attempt to unlisten to all the voices who have told you that you can't do it: telling you you're not competent to achieve this goal or accomplish this task. Then try telling yourself that you can achieve it, accomplish it, deal with it, get to a new place with it. By the time you're through listening to other peoples' voices, you're too tired to hear your own.

But there is one voice I keep trying to listen to: Torah tells us this - wisdom I keep going back to, over and over: it is not up in the heavens that someone else will have to reach up to get it and teach it to you; it is not across the sea that someone else will have to cross the sea to retrieve it and teach it to you - no, it is in your mouth, and in your heart, and you can do it.

Listening to it, reading it, and learning it, is one thing. Believing it: entirely another.

Rotation News

For the moment, I am banning myself from writing about not feeling well. Even though I actually don't feel so hot today. Partly due to the weather, partly due to stress, partly due to the methotrexate - the Yellow Menace - having been injected somewhere along the port side yesterday morning at 8AM.

In today's email I received a document I look forward to every few months - the rotation news from my friend Esther, who is one of the curators at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, of which I am a proud alumnae. MJH-ALMttH (as my dear, lovely former boss and friend Abby and I like to refer to it) was where I developed my chops as a marketer. My job at the Museum was the prototypical job that didn't feel like a job; it meant more to me than someplace where I sat at a desk and put in my hours. This was for both good and bad reasons: the good ones had a lot to do with our staff, a dynamic, passionate group of scholars and teachers and fundraisers and communications folk, most of whom possessed a vision about our work that went far beyond the day to day conflicts and stupidities that are part of every workplace.

What was tough about working at the Museum, however, was that everywhere you turned, there were stories of sadness. For every miraculous, tenacious, emotionally devastating story of survival, there were hundreds, even millions more of loss. For me, this was personified by the hallways that lined our office suite when we were located at 1 Battery Park Plaza. The walls were lined with portraits of children from before World War II. Some of them survived. Most of them didn't.

After 9/11, as you could imagine, it only got worse.

I hung on for three more years after that, but in the end, the neighborhood really got to me. The worst part was the immediate aftermath; I was literally terrified of being at work, scared to get on the subways in the morning, even, for a while, taking the bus from 42nd and 2nd all the way down to the Battery. I remember reading the first Harry Potter book during those bus rides, covering a lot of pages because it took so damn long. But it was better than being underground, disoriented, and utterly positive that the bomb would explode on the train that I was riding.

When I converted, one year after 9/11, so many of my colleagues came up to Larchmont for the ceremony, and in that hour, I realized that they had, in some sense, become my Jewish family. And what I didn't know about leaving the Museum was that I would never feel that sense of family and community in the workplace in quite the same way ever again; that little rituals like everyone wishing one another a Good Shabbos on a Friday afternoon really meant something. At the Museum, for all of the emotions and talk about budgets and decisions about color palettes and worry about attracting visitors, it was a place where people looked out for one another, where you could really rely on your team to support you, and know that at the end of the day, your work, quite possibly, may have changed someone's life.

So much of workplace life is about going through the motions, empty conversations, tolerating people because you have to; saying that you are part of a team, without ever really feeling it. In the end, I feel fortunate to have had this experience, and even more so when the Rotation News hits my inbox. I scroll through the images of the objects, reading about their history and their small, but key role in the greater story of survival that the Museum tells with such lyricism and poignancy. It may be a simple email, but for me, it is still about belonging to a family. I may not get to visit as much or as often as I would like to, but it is always good to remember that every so often, I can go home again.

And the OneTouch monitor goes to....

The results are in. Blood sugar fasting: 201. A1C: 9.5. For context, normal blood sugar is in the range of 100 - 120. And anything over a 6 on the A1C essentially means, translated: you're screwed.

So, it's time to get those numbers down; time to start taking (yet another) medication. And probably, as well, time to get myself one of those damn sugar meters so I can look forward to bloody fingertips and the end of my guitar-playing days (not that I ever really learned.). Forgive me. I'm basically just whining at this point.

I can't even get an appointment with the diabeasties doctor until September, which may or may not be a bad thing. I am hoping that through Weight Watchers, diligent exercise, and some sort of fracking miracle, I can rid myself of this nonsense and get on with my life.

This is kind of sucky. Traditionally, four days out of the year, on the Andi calendar, are supposed to be somewhat better days because those are the ones on which the four Beatles were born. I gotta say, the fact that it's Ringo's birthday is not really helping me out here. Is it because he wasn't one of the originals? Maybe I should be looking to Pete Best for help here. Or even Andy White, who recorded the single for Love Me Do because George Martin didn't think Ringo had the chops.

Sometimes I can't even figure out why my brain takes these detours. But I would put money on it having something to do with not really wanting to face reality at the moment.

I am, however, digging the Lilias! Yoga and You font of today's image. I guess if I've gotta have some stupid disease, I can still try to be as groovy as possible about it.

A1C, easy as 1-2-3, simple as do-re-mi....

So here I am, awaiting the results of this week's blood sugar test (fasting), and the A1C hemoglobin test which measures the history of sugar in your red blood cells over a three to four month period. Fascinating. It's insane knowing that the oldest blood cells currently represented in this test are probably emblazoned with logos from McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. The newer ones, thankfully, are bearing the blue-green swirl of Weight Watchers. Sadly, however, the well-behaved blood cells are outnumbered three to one.

I shudder to think what the A1C will reveal about my pre-scare eating habits. As if the guilty history of every cheeseburger and french fry will be written for medical professionals to divine in letters of sugar. Compared with my virtuous, self-righteous little month-old red blood cells, the old ones are probably like depraved winos with a criminal record and a chip on their shoulder. Come to think of it, that's pretty much how I was eating.

The test is probably back by now; I had it Monday morning. I'd like to think that if it was really bad, like "you need to go on insulin NOW' bad, I'd have heard from my doctor already. So I'm hoping that no news is good news, that the results will wait until Monday morning. And of course, I really hope that I've made a month-old dent in the last blood sugar number. Which revealed itself in a non-fasting test, after I'd had a Coke.

Carb fact of the day: Something that I thought was healthy apparently isn't: those baked Lay's chips have 44 grams of carbs per serving (compared with, say, Smartfood popcorn at 9 grams of carbs per snack bag). Apparently, I am only supposed to have 30 grams of carbs per meal in order to keep things of a diabetic nature under control. Here's the thing: Smartfood is 3 points on Weight Watchers; baked Lay's are 2. I can't believe this freaking label-reading and carb counting is my life now. And all I really want is a cheeseburger.