Category: Megalomania

“Why Are You Single?”

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

I get this question far more often than I think I should. I feel it should be obvious why I’m single: I’m a fat, pasty bulldog that lives with my dad and a roommate and is in the process of trying to straighten out of the financial mess that I got myself into starting a few years ago. What man wouldn’t want that? Meow. Irresistable.

Okay, so maybe there’s a little more to it than that. I guess there’s actually a lot of little contributing factors to my singledom.

The first has to be the ending of my previous long term relationship. That ended ten years ago. No lie. The relationship wasn’t that great, it didn’t end on a positive note, and I was young and emotionally immature. It took me quite awhile to unravel all of the ends and outs of what went wrong. For years, I thought it was me. I thought me behaving badly was just how I was in a relationship and I avoided any prospect of getting into one to save the other poor soul, no matter how badly I wanted that person.

Years later, I realized that what happened in that relationship wasn’t the person I was and that I am quite capable of being a healthy individual in a partnership given the right partner and the appropriate communication.

Unfortunately, I missed a few opportunities in the meantime. Part of those misses were because of my fear of intimacy, but the other part were because of my obliviousness. I had a guy that I was totally enamoured with ask me to makeout with him and I didn’t because I thought he was joking. I thought it was because he was drunk and I was the only single girl in the room. It never entered my mind that he might have been serious.

There was another factor in that missed opportunity, as well as a few others, and that’s respect. The particular guy I was so enamoured with was part of a group of friends that I had worked really hard to gain their respect, to have them think of me as an equal and not just a girl tagging along. In my mind, to give in and make a try for this guy would lessen the respect this group had for me. I’d lose everything I’d worked for and the likelihood I’d be able to get it back would be lower than when I started. Yeah. Pride and respect trumped it all.

That has to be my biggest regret in life, that particular missed opportunity. I still think about what might have been sometimes, though those times are getting fewer and farther between.

And if all of that isn’t good enough, I imagine the fact that I don’t get out much doesn’t help me. I can’t meet anyone if I’m sitting at home. I’m not a big social outing kind of person. I go through phases. I’m going to a lot of baseball games this summer. I went out a lot when I was involved in the indy scence of pro wrestling. I’ve gone to several geek conventions. Bars aren’t really my scene and in a small town, there’s not much else to do. I’m more of a homebody anyway. And it’s no doubt cost me.

It is also entirely possible that a little bit of my singleness rests in the hands of the guys. I’m not exactly what a guy is looking for in a girl. I’m not the ideal they’re told by the media to seek. I’m pale and fat and a brunette. I’m a fighter and an ego bruiser. There’s not much about me that’s dainty or pretty. I don’t look good in a belly shirt and I like sports too much. There’s nothing stereotypical about me and that turns guys off, I don’t care what they say. Any guy who says they just want a girl that’s sweet and smart and looks don’t matter is blowing smoke.

Not many guys are going to spend too much time getting to know me to see if maybe I’d be good for them. Maybe if I was skinny, maybe if I was pretty, maybe if I behaved like a girl in the romantic comedies, they might hang around and give me a shot. But on looks alone, I’m more trouble with their buddies than I’m worth.

It’s hard to find a guy who doesn’t have a pack mind like that.

And I have yet to find one.

Of course, a big part of that is my hang-up.

I’m still working on a way to get unhung.

Bad Words: Uncaring, Unsympathetic

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

We’re not getting into the words that make people squirm. The harsher words; the ones that people want to gloss over and ignore. But remember what I said when I started this: people who love and care about me have called me these words.

I’ve gotten a tought rap with these two words, uncaring and unsympathetic. I’m a tough girl. I keep the touchy-feely emotions to myself. Emotions are messy and complicate problems and bung up solutions. I prefer to stay logical and either vent the emotions before or after I figure out what needs to be done. Sometimes the venting comes while I’m doing it, but it’s all very efficient.

I’m very efficient. Friends and family agree; they come to me for help because of my objectivity.

But! The other bad words have a tendency to taint the good words. Being logical and efficient and tough is fine unless you’re also selfish and unthinking and unaware. Then it’s not so great. It’s not viewed quite as kindly.

I admit to being uncaring and unsympathetic at times. Probably more often than I should be, more often than is socially acceptible.

Uncaring goes back to being selfish. If it’s not about me, I don’t care.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who choose to be victims who whine about their situations without a move to fix them, who create their own messes and sit in teh middle of them and cry. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. There are a lot of people around like that. I’m kind of outnumbered in that respect.

I actually used to be quite sympathetic. When I was kid, I was sympathetic to the point of sensitive and sensitive to the point of tears. That sort of thing isn’t tolerated well in my family. We don’t do sensitive because sensitive is seen as weak and weak is bad. Weak doesn’t get you through life, it doesn’t get you through the sometimes cutting exchanges with my family, and it doesn’t get you any special treatment.

So, over time, I acquired a thicker skin and maybe it’s a little too thick in places. I might have gone a little too far to the other side. Got a little too tough.

I’ve been working on it. Trying to be a little more sympathetic to those that really deserve it. It’s not easy, but I’m making a few small strides in the right direction.

At least I think it’s the right direction. I won’t know until I get there, I suppose.

Fat Girl Belly Dancing

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Several years ago, let’s guess 2004, I decided that I needed to get healthy. Not just lose weight, although that was part of the goal, but to change my eating habits, excercise more, and strengthen my body. I chose to do this slowly, hoping that the new changes would stick. More than once I had tried to start exercising and never had the follow through because, well, I hated it.

So this time, instead of once again hiking my fat ass up on the treadmill and walking mile after boring mile (I really don’t like walking unless I’m getting somewhere), I looked for an alternative. I decided to try yoga. It was easy enough that I could stick with it, but difficult enough that it challenged my muscles. At the time it fit into my schedule well as I was going to college (that was my third stint). I popped in the DVD and did twenty minutes before school. As time went on, I started learning new poses and incorporating them into my own, made-up routines.

I was actually impressed with the difference. Maybe I didn’t lose a ton of weight in the first few months that I did it, but I noticed that I was getting stronger and that I was feeling better. It was enough to encourage me to stick to it. It became the core of my exercise program.

After a good solid year of yoga, I added weights to the regime. And then after some time doing that, I looked to add some cardio to my workout routine.

I started with dancing at first. I just put on some music and bust some moves like I did back in the day when I was hitting the under 21 club on a regular basis (the whole motivation for me to get into shape was that I felt I wasn’t keeping up on the dance floor as well as I used to). It was fine for awhile, but I got bored with it pretty quickly, oddly enough.

Then I happened to catch a belly dancing workout program on FitTV, back when it was FitTv, before Oprah took things over and messed it all up. It looked challenging enough to give me a workout, but fun enough that I’d stick to it. And I felt that it would work with the yoga and the weights I was already doing it.

When I started belly dancing, I was terrible. No doubt about it. I was required to use muscles that I didn’t know I had. But slowly, I started to get more of the moves down. It got to a point where I had memorized every routine of every episode (they only aired one season on a loop) and I was keeping up with them pretty well.

My routine paid off and I lost weight because of it. More importantly I felt better.

But belly dancing had an unintended effect on me. It brought out a latent femininity and sexuality that I didn’t realize I’d had.

I grew up as a tomboy. Yeah, I wore dresses up until the third grade, but they did little to deter me from playing hard with the boys. My mother always said that she didn’t raise girls. I’ve never been very good at being girly. And because I do tend to hang out with boys more than girls and because it’s kind of a rule that if you want to be respected by the boys, you have to be like the boys, that’s how I rolled.

So imagine my surprise when I started doing this very feminine dance and actually enjoying the sexy, girly qualities it brought out in me. I gained even more confidence and felt beautiful despite the fact that the world condemned me (and still does) because I’d never be a size 0. I didn’t think that I could ever somehow incorporate my tomboy self that always have been into the strong, sexy self that I always wanted to be and come out a full person. It’s funny that an exercise routine could do that to me.

So here I am now, having gained back all of the weight I worked so hard to lose and I’m trying to find a way to lose it again. So I’m going back to the beginning: yoga, weights, belly dance. It worked before, it can work again.

More importantly, I need to get back to the state of mind I was in when I was doing this routine the first time.

I need to get back to being a fat girl belly dancing.

The Reading of the Lips

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Papa was hard of hearing. He had a good ear and a bad ear, and over the course of the years, the good ear got worse. We learned at a very young age to make sure we had Papa’s attention before we spoke and to speak loudly and slowly. Papa could hear some, but he also read lips to help fill in the blanks.

I grew up understanding the concept of reading lips, but as someone who could hear, didn’t really think much about it beyond knowing it helped Papa undstand us.

Then my mom turned me on to baseball and the Cubs.

The manager when I was a kid was Don Zimmer and he was a fiery, round man who liked to argue with the umpires. I remember him getting thrown out of several games. There’s nothing like a kid’s curiousity and I was dying to know what Don Zimmer said to get thrown out of the games. Since I couldn’t hear, I decided to do what Papa did and learn to read lips.

I taught myself by watching movies that I had memorized. I knew all the words, so I’d watch them without the sound on and watch how the actors spoke. From there it was just a matter of translating what I saw there to other people. It took some practice, but I got the hang of it.

The new skill served me well. I finally could figure out what Don Zimmer was saying when he argued with the umpires.

Turned out it was a long string of curse words, but the magic word seemed to be “mother fucker”. If you’re worried about my young girl’s mind being warped by being exposed to that word, please don’t. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it…er…read it.

Since then I’ve applied it to more than just baseball. I’ve developed my own troubles hearing in certain situations and lip reading has bailed me out of some awkward situations.

I’ve also developed the odd habit of watching TV with the sound off. I’ve watched a lot of TV shows that way and for the most part I can keep up with the show. Obviously, I’m at a disadvantage if the speaker has their back to me or if there’s a lot of movement. However, I have gotten pretty good at filling in the blanks.

Or in the case of SyFy movies, making the movie even more interesting.

Now that I’ve gone full circle in a sense and am back to watching baseball regularly, I find myself once again being thankful for my skill. Sure it’s great for arguing managers, but my skills have improved since I was a kid. Now I use it to see what guys are talking about in the dugout and on the mound. I get a heads up at what pitch is coming next and I get to see what the guys on the bench and in the bullpen are discussing (hint: it’s not always baseball).

I’m still stumped by Spanish, though.

That’ll be the next level.

The Name Game

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

In theory, parents take great care in selecting names for their children. The consider the meaning, possibly naming them after relatives, look at the initials, sound it out for the rhythm, spell it out for the look. They take into consideration the possible nicknames, good and bad, and seriously consider the consequences of the child living for the rest of their lives with that name.

In reality, they just pick something they like, spell it the way they want (something that’s gotten way out of hand), and then wonder why the kids end up hating their names.

To be clear, I don’t hate my name. I used to hate it when I was younger, as children tend to do when they’re growing up and establishing their identity, but now I can’t imagine being called anything else (nicknames excluded, of course). However, I have to admit that my mother saddled me with a pain in the ass.

It should be noted that this isn’t the worst name I could have gotten. She had several picked out for me, including Carrie, Lauren, Sara Elizabeth, and Christina Maria. Thanks to Dad for putting the kibosh on the last two.

It was late in her pregnancy when she added Christin to the possible name pool. She’d seen a movie called Hardcore starring George C. Scott. A lovely little film about a man finding out that his runaway daughter works in the sex trade. One of the characters was named Christin, though spelled Kristen in the credits, and Mom decided that she liked the name. We’ll just nevermind that the character was a porn star/prostitute and I would have to one day reveal that fact in my high school sophomore speech class.

(In contrast, my sister is named Lindsay after Lindsey Wagner. She got the Bionic Woman, I got a hooker. Years later I got my revenge by middle-naming two of my sisters kids after actors that portrayed a hobbit and a dwarf in The Lord of the Rings. Take that!)

I ended up with name Christin because my mother decided I didn’t look like a Lauren and Mom’s roommate in the hospital named her baby Carrie, which led mom to believe that I’d end up being one of many Carrie’s in my class. I always found that amusing considering Mom’s sister is named Kerri. Different spelling, same name, but that was apparently okay. And for the record, I didn’t have any Carrie’s in my class.

So I ended up with the name Christin.

My mother decided to spell the name the way it sounded, Chris-tin. And thus began my long, never-ending journey of constantly correcting people on the spelling and pronounciation.

The spelling I can forgive somewhat. I went to school with several variations of my name. Christin. Christan. Kristin. Kristen. Kristan. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how creative people can get. Out of boredom, I once came up with twenty-four different ways to spell my name. However, mine is one of the rarer versions. I could never find my own personalized stuff (I had to settle for Chris or Christi) and I could count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with their name spelled like mine.

What really kills me is the pronounciation problem. I can also count on one hand the number of times I’ve had a teacher, college educated and literate, looked at my name and pronounced it correctly. Remember, my mom spelled it the way she thought it sounded. I’ve never had a kid read my name and mispronounce it. They’re learning to read and they learn that skill by sounding things out.

Adults, on the other hand, know how to read. They just glance at my name, get the gist of it, and I end up being called Christine, Christina, Christian, and in one instance, Kirsten. Going to school in a small town, I had a lot of the same kids in my classes for twelve years. By the time we were all seniors, a teacher mispronouncing my name would be met with a chorus of correction.

And that correction has continued, but I admit, I’m getting lazier and lazier about it. My name is misspelled on one of my bills. The IRS misspells my name on my tax refund checks (they really have no excuse as my name is spelled correctly on my social security card and they have that number). I had one driver at work calling me the wrong name for a month because I didn’t feel like correcting him on it. I waited until someone else did it, which was kind of a rotten thing to do, but when he asked me about it, I told him the truth.

“I’m used to people not getting my name right. I’ll answer to anything now.”

A lot of people don’t understand that. It’s my name. It’s a very important part of my identity.

True.

And thanks to a lifetime of people getting it wrong, that’s become part of my identity, too.

Bad Words: Selfish, Unaware, Unthinking

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Selfish, unaware, unthinking.

Now we’re getting down to the nitty gritty.

I am a selfish person. I admit it straight up. My parents railed against any sort of selfishness from the time I was little. They told me to share, told me to think of others, put the needs of others before my own. It was never to be about me and always to be about someone else. Other people should be more important.

Well, I got news for you: those lessons didn’t stick.

That’s not to say that I don’t share or I that I don’t help people in need. I do my bits and pieces here and there and I’ve been told I’ve been a decent help to friends and family when they need it. I share what I have when I can when it’s appropriate.

But I am still the center of my own universe.

I admit it. I am as egocentric as they come. I’m selfish with my feelings and my attention and my interests. If it’s not about me, if it doesn’t pertain to me, if I am not involved in some way, you’d better believe there’s a good chance that I don’t care about it much. More than once I’ve done things or gone places or said words that I didn’t really want to do, go, or say just because I know it’s more socially acceptible to do so.

Many times, though, I don’t because I don’t want to. I put what I want ahead of what other people want.

I am most selfish with power. I will tell you right here and now that I may be a good leader, may handle responsibility well, but you do not want to give me any authority over other people. I turn into a tyrant. I don’t mean to, but it happens. I’m selfish, so it’s all about me. If it’s all about me, then it’s all about my way and my way is the only way. And because I don’t give myself a whole lot of slack when it comes to getting the job done, nobody else gets any either. Their performance reflects on me and I don’t want to look bad. All about me.

Since it’s all about me it leads me to be unaware of the thoughts, feelings, and needs of other people. I’m focused so much on myself that those things have a tendency to slip by me undetected (to be fair, I think  I earlier established that even if I am paying attention, I don’t always pick up on certain things). It’s not necessarily an intentional act of neglect; I’m not purposefully ignoring people. I’m just not paying particularly close attention to them because they are not me and what’s going on with them doesn’t pertain to me.

Because of all of this, I come off as unthinking. I already have the tact problem; the selfishness just compounds it. These two words combine with being unaware to make me appear so inconsiderate that the word doesn’t do it justice. I’m unthinking. I don’t bother to consider how my actions and words will affect other people. I’m that selfish.

Again, I’m not saying this out of pride. I’m saying it out of truth. I know I’m this way. I know I do these things. I’m not proud of them, but they exist. I’m not trying to excuse them, just acknowledge them.

The selfish things has given me a bit of a complex. Because it was drilled into me so hard as a kid not to be selfish, when I recognize my selfish behavior, it causes major guilt.

I don’t want to be selfish. I try not to be selfish. But I am and it still happens. As such, I don’t ever feel like I’ve earned any “me” time because I feel like I haven’t given enough time to other people, which has a tendency to make me more selfish because I haven’t gotten any “me” time. It’s a vicious cycle that I’m working very hard to break and not having a whole lot of success doing it.

And until I get my head out of my own ass, I’m not going to have much success at becoming more aware either.

The one thing I can say that I have improved is being a tyrant. I still have my moments, but I’m the first person to shun leadership and will only take it grudgingly. And then, I’m very, very careful about how I dictate and delegate.

The rest of my selfishness, just like the rest of me, continues to be a work in progress.

Goodbye, Papa

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

At 4AM the morning of Saturday, May 7th, my beloved grandpa passed away. As luck would have it, I woke up at 5:30 that morning thinking I had to go to work and the resulting confusion woke me up enough that I decided to go to the bathroom before trying to go back to sleep. It was no surprise to find my dad awake in the living room as I passed through. It was on my way back that he told me the news and I realized that my roommate Carrie was in the living room, too.

The first word out of my mouth was “Really?”

It wasn’t that this was completely unexpected. Papa had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure years before and had a pacemaker/defibrillator. He had a slow progressing form of leukemia that he chose not to treat. He was on oxygen. He needed a scooter/wheelchair to get around. His health had been slowly declining since my grandmother died, partly because he wasn’t taking as good of care of himself as he used to.

He’d also been in the hospital for the past few weeks. Once the current trouble with his heart was straightened out, they realized his kidneys were shutting down. There was nothing they could really do for him. The goal was to get him strong enough to go home with my great-aunt so she could take care of him the rest of the way.

Papa never made it out of the hospital.

Part of that was because Papa didn’t want to do the therapies they were asking him to do. And he was being downright hateful about it. He was being nasty to everyone and wasn’t cooperating and they finally decided to move him off of the therapy floor and onto the fourth floor before moving him to hospice care. Without doing the therapy, there was no way my aunt could take him home to take care of him.

They moved him to the fourth floor on Friday night. He was dead Saturday morning.

I didn’t go see him in the hospital. I don’t regret that. The last visit I had with Papa was a pleasant one. He was in a good mood, feeling pretty good that day. We enjoyed a nice day of family and laughter and conversation and food. The last time I saw my papa was definitely a high note.

I never wanted to see him in the hospital. It had been hard enough watching the active, jovial, fun person I’d grown up with fade into the unkempt shadow of his former self. I know it sounds cliche, but it’s true. A lot of the life went out of him when Grandma passed away.

And judging by the stories Dad brought home about Papa’s behavior, I definitely didn’t want that to be my last memory of him. He was acting like an ass and my papa was never an ogre in my life. He read me and my sister stories, played with us, took us to the fair. He wasn’t this hateful, nasty person he’d become in the hospital, barking orders at people, bitching and complaining about everything, ignoring family because he was mad. I’m glad I never saw that. That tyrant wasn’t my papa.

Papa was a sweet, kind man who would go out of his way to help a person. If he liked you, you were family. It was just like that. Even though he was the youngest of ten kids, he was head of our large clan. Everyone looked to Uncle Jimmie for guidance. He kept the family in touch with each other, first with a family newsletter and then with a website.

Papa was a smart man. He never graduated high school and got his GED later in life, but he loved to learn. He loved to read. He loved technology. While most grandpas shunned the idea of computers, my grandpa dove right in. He was president of the Decatur Computer Club and is responsible for teaching me and my sister how to use them. I was one of the first kids in my school on the Internet, thanks to him.

Papa was a great cook. He used to have a New Year’s Day celebration at his house. He’d cram a hundred people in that tiny place to serve biscuits and gravy, ham and beans, and all kinds of pie. He’d spend days cooking to get ready for it and then spend all day in the kitchen while other family members took turns doing the dishes. He liked doing it and he just had a knack for it. He had scores of recipe books and there wasn’t a meal he wouldn’t try if it appealed to him.

Papa was my biggest fan. He was my sister’s biggest fan, too. You couldn’t ask for a more supportive, involved grandpa. I think that’s what I’m going to miss most of all. He never seemed to have trouble saying that he was proud of us.

It’s a comfort to know that Papa is back where he wanted to be: with Grandma.

Well, it’s a comfort to me. It’s probably not a comfort to him right now. There’s no way she’s going to let that last bout of hatefulness slide. I’m sure she was waiting for him with flyswat in hand to give him what for.

But once she’s done scolding him, I know it’ll be happily ever after.

Rest in peace, Papa (as soon as Grandma let’s you).

The Many Career Changes of Kiki

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Like most kids, I wanted to be a lot of different things growing up. Unlike most kids, I never grew out of that changing career state of mind. Whatever it is I find that I’m interested in, I want to do that.

My first big career choice came early in junior high. I wanted to be a meterologist. Weather and storms fascinated me. I didn’t necessarily want to be on the TV talking about the seven day forecast, but being in one of those weather centers, tracking tornado spawning storms appealed to me. I thought it would be a fun, exciting gig.

It wasn’t very well received. Saying that I wanted to be a meterolgist conjured up the images of people pointing at maps on the TV and I got a lot of teasing for that. I decided that keeping meteorology as a hobby was better for my self-esteem.

Then towards the end of junior high I set my sights on being a marine biologist specializing in sharks. I love sharks. Shark week was made for me. I read a lot of books about sharks and shark attacks. It was particularly the attacks on humans that fascinated me at the time, but really all aspects of sharks and shark behaviors held my attention. There’s an air of mystery about them that makes them fascinating and makes me want to learn more about them. Being on boats for weeks at a time didn’t really bother me. In fact, my cousin’s grandma offered me a place to live if I wanted to pursue my degree down in Texas.

But, it wasn’t very well received by everyone else. The one thing I kept hearing was “do you know how much math and science is involved in that?” despite the fact that I’ve always been told that I was smart and held to the highest academic standards.

So I changed my mind and looked elsewhere.

I wanted to be a surgical technician.

Too much blood and guts.

I wanted to be an actor.

You won’t make any money.

When I finally got out of high school and into college, I first wanted to study English with the idea of being a proper writer, not just the amateur stuff I’d been not showing to people up until that point. No one said anything because by that point they weren’t interested anymore. I was in college (a community college that I was paying for) and that’s all that mattered.

The second time I went back to college, my eyes were on studying sociology. I’d become fascinated with it during my first college go round after I did a paper on prison rehab programs. I thought that might be a good gig for me.

That lasted as long as I was in school.

My last go round on the college merry-go-round, I was majoring in psychology with the ultimate goal being a forensic psychologist. There was no way I could be a therapist. I don’t have the compassion needed to succeed in that field. But analyzing and tracking down bad guys is something I think I could have excelled at. I was pretty dedicated to it, too. Took all of the psych classes I could get into (as well as all of the sociology classes; hadn’t quite given up using that) and was doing well in them.

Until I was looking into starting the math classes I’d need to get my associate’s degree so I could move on to get my bachelor’s degree, I realized just how long it was going to take me to get through all of the schooling I’d need (at least a master’s) to get my career started. That’s when I realized that I didn’t want to be a psychologist enough to spend years getting there, which would be even longer since I could only go to school part time while I worked.

It was also then that it dawned on me that the only thing I wanted to spend years struggling to do was what I’d been spending years doing all along: writing. I gave up on the idea that I needed any sort of formal education or validation and threw myself head long into making a career of it.

But that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about pursuing other interests as careers (most recently: helicopter pilot, personal trainer, and sports analyst). Of course, I always look at the time it will take to make those things happen and change my mind.

That’s why writing is the perfect career for me. With a little research and by living vicariously through my characters, I can be all of those things while spending my time doing the one thing I really love the most.

Bad Words: Tactless, Insensitive

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Tactless and insensitive. We’re starting to get into those uncomfortable words. The words that are a little harsher and not so easily dismissed. The words are harder to relate to because we don’t want to relate to them. These aren’t words that we want to admit to.

I admit that I can be tactless and insensitive. Not intentionally (all the time), not that I want to be, but I am.

I truly believe that my tactless tendencies are genetic. I was born with them. That filter in your brain that prevents you from saying things you shouldn’t? Yeah, I don’t have that. Lots of times, it’s out of my mouth before I’m done thinking it.

No big deal, right? That happens to all of us at times. We realize as soon as it comes out of our mouths that we said it instead of just thought it and we shouldn’t have said it. We go red-faced and scramble to make up for it. That happens to me, sure. But most of the time when it happens to me, it’s only when I get in trouble for what I’ve said that I realize that I said it and what I said shouldn’t have been said. I have a kind of delayed reaction to my faux pas that lands my butt in hot water.

On the occasions that I do complete the thought in my head before it escapes my lips, I then have to make the split-second judgment of whether or not I should say it. The call I make is not always a good one. I’ve said a lot of things that I shouldn’t have because to me, I don’t see them as bad.

I’m a terrible judge of these things. I grew up with very blunt parents. In fact, bluntness is as common in my mom’s family as pointy noses, which is to say prevelant and dominant. It doesn’t occur to me to sugar coat things or beat around the bush. It comes out of my mouth pretty much the way I think it without much softening or refining. I don’t necessarily think that it’s going to hurt feelings.

So I’m considered tactless and it’s that trait that contributes to me being insensitive. Whether I think about it or not, much of the stuff that comes out of my mouth is blunt and people not conditioned to that bluntness get offended. It’s not that I intend to offend them. I can’t control their reactions. I try to gauge my words by whether or not I’d be offended, but since I came from blunt parents, not a lot offends me. I can take some real brutal honesty.

Other people were brought up with a little more tact and sensitivity, so it doesn’t fly. They expect a little courtesy. They expect a little discretion. They expect me to keep my mouth shut if I don’t have anything nice to say, and if I have to say it, then I should say it as sweetly as possible.

These people expect too much.

It’s not that I want to be a tactless, insensitive bitch. I don’t set out to stomp all over people’s feelings. There have been many instances in which I was actually trying not to upset someone. But with that tact barometer off, it’s a struggle.

I try to be more mindful of what I say. I try to think about my words, measure them carefully, try to sweeten them up when I need to. And sometimes I succeed. I wouldn’t say it’s a losing battle with these two bad words.

However, it’s the instances in which I succeed that make my failures look so much worse. People know I’m capable of being tactful, so when I don’t come through with it at a critical moment, it’s that much more shocking and the fallout ends up being that much bigger.

Dare I say that I’ve gotten use to the backlash. Inevitably, at least once a week, I’m going to upset someone. Something I say is going to be taken badly by someone, no matter how I meant it or if I meant to say it. And I deal with the consequences.

And I cherish the few moments when I get it right.

GERDing My Stomach

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Now that I’m getting a regular paycheck and have this fancy thing called health insurance, I decided to splurge on a doctor’s appointment to get a problem I’ve been having with my throat. According to the very nice doctor I saw, he suspects that my throat trouble is caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease, aka, GERD.

GERD is chronic reflux of the stomach acid into the esophagus and mouth, sometimes it can even get into the nose and sinuses. It’s caused by a weak lower esophageal sphincter muscle allowing the acid out of the stomach. Common symptoms include heartburn, regurgitation, and dysphagia (trouble swallowing). Other possible symptoms can include pain with swallowing, excessive salivation, hoarseness, chronic cough, and sinusitis. It can lead to esophageal damage including ulcers, strictures (narrowing of the esophagus), Barrett’s esohpagus, and elevated risk of cancer.

In short, there’s nothing sexy about GERD.

It doesn’t even have a good sound to it. GERD. The most common reaction when I told people that I had GERD was giggles because it’s a funny sounding word. It doesn’t exactly conjure up an immediate serious reaction.

It’s not a sexy disease. It’s not something you want to admit to having. Chronic heartburn plus. It sounds like something Fish on Barney Miller would have. It sounds like people in a retirement village in Florida complain about while looking over the menu at the Early Bird Special. It’s not something that people are rallying to find a cure for. It’s not getting fundraisers or charity events. It doesn’t have a ribbon. It’s an inconvenient, uncomfortable, funny-sounding disease that people snicker at.

And unfortunately, it’s kind of having a negative effect on my life, which is hard to explain while people are giggling.

First of all, there’s really no cure. I get to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to manage my symptoms. This can involve changing my diet to avoid more acidic foods. I can sleep at an incline. I can lose weight. I can take acid blockers.

That’s all well and good, I suppose. The doctor already instructed me to take a particular kind of over the counter acid blocker, twice a day, every day. I’m supposed to do that for a month to see if that helps. I’ve noticed that if I miss a pill (and I’ve missed one and been late for a couple), I get heartburn. So, I suppose it is helping some.

But the lump in my throat that prompted me to go to the doctor in the first place is still there. It was there for two years before I finally went and I guess it’s going to be there for a while longer. Maybe forever. I don’t know. The damage has probably been done and there’s the possibility that I’ll have to live with the dysphagia for the rest of my life.

Still laughing?

It’s not fun trying to swallow something and not be able to get it down. Ever get a Cheeto stuck? How about a piece of lettuce? That lump in my throat makes it difficult to get some things down on the first try. The lettuce was the worst. It felt like it was just laying across that lump, like a wet leaf stuck to a rock.

I suppose I can hope that the treatment works and the lump will go away and the swallowing will get easier with the treatment, but considering I’ve had the lump for two years, I think I’m passed the point of hope. I think this is it and I just have to hope that it doesn’t get any worse.

It’s not fun wondering about what’s going on in my gut. Wondering how much actual damage has been done and how much more I can expect. Struggling to remember to take my pills (haven’t quite gotten into the swing of the meds yet). Being questioned on whether I remembered to take my pills. Being questioned on whether or not I should be eating/drinking that.

The latter is par for the course. I’m also lactose intolerant to a certain extent (back in the olden days, they just called it a milk allergy), so my mother has always questioned my eating choices. That part I’m used to, but it’s still not fun.

I realize that I’m being cranky about this. I realize I’m taking all of the fun out of this for everyone else.

I guess I just don’t find it nearly as amusing as it sounds.