Still under the weather, feeling like a useless blob.  BLAHB, I should say.  While in one of my zombie states, I dreamt that a bunch of old computer geniuses were herded into an old-age facility under aliases, and kept there secretly and mistreated, but I caught on to the conspiracy, a la X-Files, and then it’s all a blur.  I don’t know where my head comes up with this stuff.

Some days, I really care about what’s happening to our politics and country, and other days, like now, I just don’t care anymore.  It’s all too absurd.  But I will always care enough to vote.  It’s the little I can do.

I hear it’s like spring outside.  And as usual the sewer is backing up into our basement, thanks to idiot Ohio and their indifference to crumbling infrastructure in poorer neighborhoods.  It may take an irate Uncle Bernie to come scold them, like in Flint, not that anyone would listen.

On that pleasant note, I’m going back into my fog.  Imagine a gray square, that’s the illustration.

Not much to say, being sick—I caught E’s evil bug, imagine that.  Being sick is the most boring, tedious topic there is.  Sleep, sneeze, slouch… not much content there.  To sum up, I feel like crap.

Too crappy to pontificate or drone on, you’ll be relieved to know.  My mind’s a blank.  Zombified.  I can’t even think of a topic.  Blah.

So there you have it, the daily writing attempt.  Thank whatever I’m not an actual writer.

No illustrations come to mind.  No mind comes to mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/health/caregiving-alzheimers.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

The only real difference between Ms. Wolf’s experience and mine is the much younger age at which she was torn from her life to caregive.  Mostly, the parallels are eerily similar.

She was living a normal life out-of-state from her childhood home of NJ, when she was called back by her parents’ advancing dementia.  They were both diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by their neurologist, and needed her help.

She thought she’d only be there briefly or intermittently, and set them up with care.  FIVE YEARS LATER…she was still there, probably for the long haul.  (Life span between diagnosis and death averages 5-7 years.

It started with incidents like extreme bathroom accidents that must be addressed frequently.

She had to manage their many meds for all their conditions, for them–and all the specialists, assistance, etc.

They tend to just sit, stare, and wander. Sometimes they get very agitated and paranoid delusional.  But putting them in a facility would lead to panic attacks.  They wanted to be in their own familiar home of many decades, but couldn’t manage safely on their own.

Dementia patients can be worse than infants.  It’s a weird role-reversal, parenting your parents.  It’s a full-time job; sometimes you’re up all night.  Plus there are all the other household tasks to manage.  And so-called in-home “help”, if affordable, is not always very helpful or competent.

There is no such thing as “me” time or personal health.  You live in a constant state of anxiety, anger, exhaustion, frustration.  You feel isolated from the world of your peers, and like you just can’t go on.

And those are just some of the highlights.  It’s a growing problem, with no easy, affordable solutions.  I was not surprised to see in the comments the topic of legalizing euthanasia.  It’s not that anyone wants to kill their loved ones; it just needs to be an option available to anyone who wants and needs it, whose quality of life is horrible.  When we caregivers bring it up, it’s often in the context of ourselves, when our turn comes.  We’d rather put everyone out of our misery.

These days I try to avoid belaboring this old refrain of mine, but this article was just too uncannily familiar not to comment on it.  It’s no longer about isolated situations in a closet; it’s growing much more close to home for many people.  It will affect most of us, sooner than expected.  There is no effective social safety net in place, and if the current line-up of political candidates is any indication of the near future, the zombie apocalypse is not so far-fetched.

Our Ohio primary is coming up on March 15, so as usual I did some research on the candidates and issues.  Not being from here, and still suffering from some culture shock at being catapulted back in time to the 1950s, it takes some digging to get some sense of what people and issues are about here.

So-called progressives are more like conservative moderates, and local referenda are all about things like the big local cement plant getting rezoned for yet more mining land on which to blast the hell out of the environment.  Some citizens (a minority) were not amused, and signed a petition for a referendum on this ballot to oppose the rezoning and blasting, but apparently they got overruled by the big industry corporate powers around here, based on a minor technicality (apparently someone mistakenly signed the petition for an elderly parent who couldn’t, or some such thing.)  Industry and toxic waste usually win out around here.

The other local proposals have to do with levy renewals for police, fire, EMS, and schools, which naturally the conservative locals will vote against.  I know, snore.   On the Dem ballot, apparently very few Dems even bothered to oppose all the Repub incumbents and candidates for state and local offices, so even if you want to vote the straight ticket just to balance the scales a little, there are few choices.  Of the ones that do care enough to run, their self-written profiles are barely literate and don’t give you much to go on.  You just choose the lesser of two amateurs.

Being a newish voter in Ohio, each election seems like an exercise in futility, with obscure, mediocre choices.  But I feel it’s never been more essential than now to use my one small vote and voice to try to even the odds.  So I dutifully do my tedious voter homework, and try to do my little part.  I feel like we’re in the minority here, surrounded by a Fox network mentality.  All one can hope, sadly, is that some of those zombies will succumb to apathy and stay home.

E is sick with a flu-like thing, I’m doing our erev cooking routine, and lots of indoor sprouts are coming up.  That’s about as domestic as it gets.  Dinner is: roasted organic free-range chicken; baked sweet potatoes with molasses, maple, and spices;  basmati rice with carrots; and roasted Mediterranean-style brussels sprouts.  Pretty unambitious menu.  If I tell you what’s for dessert, you’ll have to kill me.  (OK, I give in, it’s—donut holes!  To feed my craving!  So kill me.)  Shabbat shalom and to our health!  We need it.

Today I took one of those silly quizzes, this one on which gender you subconsciously identify with.  I expected  “cat” or “soufflé”, the usual stupid answer, but the results were interesting—I’m supposedly equally divided three ways,  between queer, female, and male, in that order!  I’m equally comfortable relating with all the above, and think outside the gender box (STS).  Or something.  Who knew?

It kind of makes a strange sense, though.  I’m obviously supportive of the whole spectrum, no longer subscribe exclusively to the whole gender binary stereotypes, and ironically, tend toward wearing the pants in the family–STS.

I wasn’t always like that.  I was brought up as a typical old-fashioned female, with the whole sexist inequality mindset, but I turned rebel and nonconformist early on.  Much later came a stage I’m not proud to even speak of, involving more sexist religious indoctrination, only of a more repressive sort, but eventually I escaped from that narrow world view, and rejected it completely.  But the biggest revelation came much later still.

Through a strange set of circumstances I never could have imagined, I find myself where I am today.  If you know me, or have followed my adventures, you know what I mean.  (It’s not what you think!  It’s much more subtle and nuanced.)  I’ll just say, growing up as I did, and looking back at my life, no one could have predicted I’d end up here, with the POV I have now, least of all myself.  I was as surprised as anyone.  But maybe it makes sense, after all.

I never liked being told how to think or behave or view others.  I was raised and trained to be critical and judgmental, just like my so-called role models, but underneath, I rejected the whole “we’re morally superior and our way is the only way” mentality.  I was always experimenting and fascinated by other lifestyles, cultures, and world views.  I had a strong sense of social justice and the lack thereof.  A part of me likes to play devil’s advocate, try to put myself in other situations.  I’m not always good at it, because of my privileged background, but it’s what I strive for.  I tend to feel for and advocate for minorities and underdogs.  So I guess it wasn’t so strange to take this progression to its logical conclusion.

Although I’m an ally and advocate of this particular community, I’m not technically a member.  We’re talking gender identity here, not sexual orientation.  It’s the way you think of yourself from an early age, based on genetic, physiological, and neurological events outside of your control.  It’s separate and apart from your sexual orientation later in life.  It’s like apples and rutabagas.  And none of the above ever applied to me, a cisgender person with hetero  orientation.  And yet, here I am.  Go figure.  ’nuff said.

Short story long, I guess by some weird robotic algorithm I turn up “gender queer”.  It’s just a silly quiz on FB, after all.  Still, it made me think.  Maybe it explains some things.  Maybe not.  You decide.  😉

Some of us older voters feel like lately we can’t seem to wake up from the nightmare that is now the normal political landscape.  How is this happening?  It’s like an insane circus with evil clowns has taken over what used to be at least a recognizable, reasonable discourse.

Even Canadians–CANADIANS!– are doing parodies of us!  But in reality, they’re getting nervous up there.  OK, the funny joke is over, get back to being grownups, Americans!  Is a Canadian Berlin wall next up after Mexico’s?  Seriously, many of us are eyeing saner places to escape to, should this all play out as dreaded.

No, I’m not going to simplify this into a Hitler analogy, although there are certain similar ingredients coming into play.  Hard not to be a little apprehensive, being from the generation who had parents and grandparents who managed to survive concentration camps, and mostly who didn’t.  I’ve seen the tattoos and the traumatized victims and peers.

I’d like to believe that Americans aren’t all a bunch of dumb apathetic sheep, ignorant of history, passively allowing a violent dictatorship to materialize around them.  I’d like to hope that some intelligence would prevail and remind us of who we aspire to be.  Perhaps some of us would even rise up and try to restore our nation to at least the stage of progress we had left off at, before we all went crazy and comatose.

But why does it even have to come to that?  How is it that so many Americans have dumbed down to this degree?  How do they not see “the emperor has no clothes”?  (i.e. the [insert candidate] has shit for brains.)  To some of us, it’s so obvious.  Is intelligence devolving?

I feel like we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb that is the earth itself if we continue to ignore the glaring symptoms.  The people who blindly vote infantile greedy charlatans into office are going to get a rude awakening.  They don’t see they’re enabling their own demise, as their poor choices ripple out at the world and come back on all of us.

It’s like toddlers have taken over.  I’ve seen what a room full of two-year-olds can do to each other and any infants unfortunate enough to be in their path.  It’s not pretty, but your hands are tied, as they wreak destruction.  Is this what we’ve come down to, the lowest common denominator?

I know, I’m just an old, under-educated hippie preaching to the choir, simplifying a complex issue, but why does it have to be complicated rocket science?  Why do we settle for mediocrity and corruption as usual?  Look at that lineup of power-hungry dumbasses and ask yourself how we even take them seriously or entrust our grandchildren’s future to them?

We have to be better and smarter than this.  This isn’t a game show or the Super Bowl, it’s our one short life on earth, with which to make a difference, or at least to not screw it up worse for everyone else.  What little power we do have to influence outcomes ought to be wisely used, not squandered or forfeited.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled drivel.

Here is some food by me—chana dal and apricot cake.

Here are hyacinths with salad seedlings hiding behind them.

It was raining and thundering outside, but we’re hobbiting down, awaiting spring.

Never a dull moment when you’re in our situation.  You never get complacent, or assume all troubles are finally behind you.  It keeps you on your toes.

This time, as feared, the IRS had to get their turn.  Probably the name change triggered it.  E got the dreaded “quiz’ which is a questionnaire from the state to examine you on all sorts of ridiculous, irrelevant info from your past, most of which doesn’t even pertain to her.  But if you get any questions wrong, it sends up alarms.

She went and sat down with our tax preparer for assistance with the quiz and the IRS, whom they talked to for a while, trying to sort it all out, but it wasn’t resolved.  She has to send their form back and hope for the best, but may have to end up going down to the big IRS office in Dayton, where you take your life in your hands just parking, sit in a building all day hoping to be seen, and possibly have to return and start all over again.  She dreads an audit.  Not only is it scary and humiliating, but it adds one more last straw to the mountain of setbacks that have beset her and hold her back from just moving on as a normal person.

Of course it doesn’t help to be in a backward state like Ohio, where anything different or nonconventional is suspect and sparks a witch hunt.  Religion and politics get mixed up together and distort what should be a straightforward process into an ordeal.  All the official documents and paperwork are properly submitted, clear and indisputable, but ignorant small-minded bureaucrats can’t let it go.  It’s one more way to persecute someone who already feels demoralized and crushed.  This is how marginalized people end up suicidal.  You try so hard to jump through the hoops, with honesty and integrity, and mind your own business, but it’s never enough.

Well that’s today’s rant.  Stay tuned for the next exciting adventure, which I’m sure there will be.  We know one day this will all be behind us, and we’ll move on in new surroundings.  E would love to just be a regular person, blending in, no drama.  It’s a goal most of us take for granted, or even try to rise above, but for her, an average, quiet, non-assuming life would be a luxury.