The cable company has eaten my brain

I do a lot of thinking while I'm trotting the trails and roads in Mt. Tabor Park. I don't figure anything out, but I try. I start out slowly, treading cautiously on unreliable ankles, while my brain churns through the current list of resentments: Mom, cable company, fall, Mom, steep hill (ugh), cable company, end of summer (grrrr), no car, Mom... round and round as I shuffle along the trail. Pretty soon my knees limber up, my lungs stop laboring, and my brain sinks into a welcome sludge of endorphins. Ahhhh.

Occasionally I notice that I'm being passed up by just about everyone in the park. Long-legged tanned age-indeterminate men, young short-legged women in spandex pants, yappy dogs, long-haired skateboarders, bicyclists, they all go speeding by me as I plod along at the edge of the road. The only people I overtake are old ladies, so I guess I'm still doing okay.

You may recall that the maternal parental unit dragged up on apartment living, opting to move back to her cave-like condo, where she can step five paces to her private smoking area, where her garden is just over the fence, and her friends are a yell away. I've got to credit the old bat: She went all in on the move to the retirement community. There wasn't a single gray pantie left in the condo when she moved out. Everything but the kitchen sink got moved; I know, because I helped move it. Then, when she made up her mind that she wanted to move back, she didn't waste any time. She called the movers on Monday and by Friday the fancy retirement apartment was empty. Just a couple nails in the wall showed that anyone had come and gone.

I haven't been over to the condo yet to see the disarray. I've been wrestling with the cable company to get my mother's landline activated (by phone, of course—I haven't actually gone over to their retail outlet to challenge them to an arm wrestling match, although that could be my next ploy). The cable TV and internet modem were activated successfully, but I don't know what it is about my mother's phone number. For some reason, the phone gods don't want to release it from limbo.

You know how you run into a brick wall sometimes, metaphorically speaking... you bash into it and get rocked back on your metaphorical heels. You say, whoa, what was that? Then you run at the wall again, because you don't really know how thick or how high the wall is. You don't know what it is made of, either: are they real bricks or those phony papier mache bricks that they use on movie sets? Bam, you try again. Hmmm. Could be they are real bricks, you think to yourself. Well, but if I just keep bashing into the wall, sooner or later, it will crumble, right? It will give way before my dedicated onslaught. My passionate energetic relentless assault will reduce it to rubble, sooner or later... right?

Well, maybe not. This is what is known as escalation of commitment. In the real world, this kind of brainless doubling-down gets countries embroiled in wars. In business, this kind of stubborn resistance to reason results in products like New Coke (which just happened to turn out well, lucky break). In my own tiny world, if I count up how many hours I've spent on the phone with the cable company yelling “technical support!” into my handset and listening to their insipid hold music, it would add up to a week's worth of time spent not earning. I'm doubling-down on that damn phone number. After all the time I spent getting it ported over from the phone company, there is no way I'm going to give it up and settle for a new number. It's a matter of principle now. And brick walls. And sore heads (mine, of course; the cable company couldn't care less, I'm sure.)

I called Mom on her cell phone to give her the update on her landline situation. She sounded as weary as I felt. Tomorrow she will come over to drop off the last of the empty boxes she borrowed from me, and I think she will hand me a little stack of cash. It's guilt money. (She can't call it gas money anymore, because I no longer have a gas tank to fill. But she'd better not call it wages.)

She knows she put her kids through a wringer these past few weeks. Moving her was no small feat, emotionally or physically. Even though she hired movers to move her back, she knows we are all exhausted.

“We just want you to be happy,” I said for the umpteenth time. Hey, fake it till you make it.

“Where would I be without you kids?” she said, and I could tell from her voice, she wasn't joking.

“You don't have to pay for love,” I said, thinking, why, oh why, doesn't she give me enough money to make a difference! Argh.

She's safe. She's home. I don't think we dodged a bullet; I think we all pretty much took a shot to the gut. But we survived. Tonight I feel pleasantly beat up after my slog in the park. Just for today, I'm present, or as present as I'm going to get. Tomorrow I'll do a little dance for the phone gods and hope for a miracle.

Rewind

I've been away from the blog for a while, immersed in life and not feeling energetic enough to share. The vertigo is destroying my frontal lobe, grinding off layers of brain matter with every wave. Well, I know that isn't really what is happening; I know vertigo is an inner ear problem, not a brain problem, but that is how it feels: like heavy ocean waves are beating the inside of my brain. I've found the symptoms get worse with stress. Ha. Does anything get better with stress. I ask you. Really. I'm asking. If you know, please tell me.

What am I so stressed out about? Thanks for asking. The usual crap: weather, earning, creativity, cancer (Bravadita's), transportation (lack thereof), and my mother.

Actually, news flash, the weather has been pretty excellent: mild late summer days punctuated by a little bit of much-needed rain. Really not much to complain about. It's that rich moment just before the leaves go golden. I guess it's really the turning of the earth and the angle of the sun that puts the melancholy in me. Sometimes I wish I could sleep until April. I've heard naps can be good for you. Maybe not that long, although I'd be willing to try it.

As far as earning goes, I am still editing other people's massive dissertation train wrecks for money. I don't like it, but I can say with a bit of pride that I'm getting better at it. I'm sure that is good for the clients. For me, maybe not so much: I don't think just because I'm good at something, that means I ought to do it. I got caught on that hook for years... sewing, typing, driving the short bus. Ack! My good friend said to me in 1989, “It's never too soon to stop doing what you hate and start doing what you love.” Those oddly convoluted words granted me permission to stop sewing for a living, an activity I detested. Maybe I can find another set of equally interesting words to set me free from editing. Hey, it could happen. All I have to do is finish my book, market it, and watch the cash roll in. Said the crazy insane woman.

I'm doing a fair amount of walking these days, compared to before my car went to Ford Focus heaven. I was sort of hoping to have achieved buns of steel by now. I'm sad to report that is not yet the case. I'm still working on it. Now I've almost convinced myself that I don't need a car, that in fact, I'm a better planetary citizen without a car. That doesn't stop me from eyeballing the shiny not-so-gently loved cars parked in the used car lots I walk by on my way to my weekly meeting. I'm just looking. Mostly at the little yellow striped mini. It's gone now. Oh well. Another missed opportunity.

My younger brother gave me a bicycle he wasn't using, in exchange for one I gave him that was too big for me. The exchange was leisurely, taking place over the span of ten years or so. In the interim, he seems to have lost the helmet I gave him, so I need to get a new bike helmet. Plus the bike he gave me has no front brakes and the seat is stuck too high. But it's got great big fat tires and it's small enough so that falling off it doesn't seem like it would be fatal. I wonder two things: Will riding a bike will retrain my brain to find its balance? And is this bike stolen?

I've saved the best (or worst) for last. Last month you may recall, my siblings and I moved our maternal parental unit into a lovely apartment in a large retirement community. I remember feeling a great sense of relief when we finally got pictures hung. Apart from the ongoing telecommunications nightmare requiring me to check in with the cable company every day, I thought things were going pretty good. Unfortunately (for me), my mother has hit the reset button on her move.

I accompanied her to her doctor's appointment last week. As I helped her fill in the forms in the waiting room, I started to get a bad, bad feeling that all was not right in retirement village heaven. Depressed, lonely, bored. Depressed, lonely, bored. In a warehouse for old people.

In the exam room, she sat on the exam table in a gown, with her old lady blue jeans half on her legs. When the doctor came in, she kicked her feet like a kid and said belligerently that she wanted to move back to the condo.

The doctor asked her to stick it out another month, but I knew that was a waste of breath. My mother is a bulldog. You wouldn't know it to look at her tiny 93-pound frame, but when she wants something, she goes after it with a single-minded focus. Maybe that's because she can only hold one thing in her mind at a time these days. The move pretty much destroyed her short-term memory. She may be hoping it will come back if she moves back to familiar territory. Logical. She reminds me of what a cat does during an earthquake: run until the earth stops shaking. Wherever the cat hunkers down equals safety. Right now Mom's world is shaking. The condo represents safety.

Most of my blog viewership has departed, leaving only a few friends and family members, all of whom are over 50, I believe. So you get the word rewind. I don't need to explain. If you are under 40, you may not be familiar with the word rewind. Just think of your parents' VCR. Or that old 8-track tape player in your basement (antique!). My mom wants a mulligan. A do-over. A reboot. She's calling a moving company tomorrow to help her rewind time.

My first thought was, how could she do this to me? Fortunately, my second thought was, how can I support her in her quest to be as happy as she can be in her final days? My third thought was, what the hell am I going to do when my turn comes?

A phone company and a cable company walk into a bar...

And I bet you can guess who pays the tab! Yep. My mother. The phone company and the cable company are fighting over who gets to be my mother's telephone service provider. There can only be one winner here: The apartment building is wired for cable voice, not for phone company voice. We are trying to get her old number ported over to the new apartment. But the phone company is hanging onto her for dear life.

When two bullgods clash, humans are no better than ants scurrying for cover. The Titans toss lightning bolts while I sit with my mother's cigarette smoke-infused Trimline phone to my ear, tentatively dialing 0 to talk to a representative. Their messages fly through the ether, barely missing each other: While I'm on the phone with the phone company, the cable company is leaving me messages at on my home phone, telling me that this entire frustrating telecommunications hell is happening because the phone company won't let go. I picture some muscle-bound demi-god holding my scrawny twig of a mother over a fiery abyss (laughing loudly, of course, because you can do that when you are a demi-god). Luckily, Mom is oblivious. Her main concern these days is selling the condo. The fact that her phone never rings doesn't seem to bug her as much as it bugs me. Probably because she's not the one trying to get through to her on the phone.

Through a strange technological twist of fate, my mother can dial out on her cable-company phone line, but no one can dial in. The disembodied recorded voice says, “This number is not in service.” Not what you want to hear when you are trying to reach your 86-year-old mother. We are stuck halfway between the two companies. Meanwhile, Mom is paying her bills like a good soldier and wondering why I looked so stressed out.

Meanwhile, Bravadita has had a bad week. On Wednesday, she had a breast removed. Wait, that sounds so bloodless. Let me rephrase: Her left boob was trying to kill her so the doctors cut it off. With scalpels. She lost a lot of blood. Then they put some wadded up padding in its place and sewed her back up, with some drains left hanging to squirt out the leftover juices. What the hell!

Vertigo was bad yesterday. For the first time since this whole stupid vertigo thing began last May, I had objective vertigo in addition to subjective vertigo. That means not only did I feel like I was on a boat on the ocean, but the ocean and the boat were spinning around me like an invisible hurricane with me in the middle. For a few minutes I sat very still. As I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling my stomach begin to roil, I saw my life disintegrating into complete disarray. Wreckage of the future, here I come! Next stop, bus bench, shopping cart under bridge. Then I did the Epley Maneuver on my head, first one direction and then the other. The waves subsided. The hurricane stilled. I sat up, a little wobbly, and carried on with my editing job like nothing happened. Because, really, my life is good.

Meanwhile, as our planet groans with the insults we heap upon it daily, people are uprooted across the Middle East, fleeing for their lives from a disaster the United States helped to create: You broke it, you bought it seems to apply here. I pondered the state of the union and the state of the planet on this 14th anniversary of another bad day as I walked in 90°F heat 30 minutes to get to my meeting. I think I would be willing to open up my home to some refugees. Maybe a couple of teenage girls. We could talk about makeup and boys. I don't mind sleeping on the couch. Maybe I could eat some yummy Syrian food. Maybe they would be inspired to vacuum occasionally. I hope they like cats.

After the phone call to the phone company, I was wrung out. Because it was almost dark, Mom let me take her car. As I left, she slipped me an envelope full of cash (not enough to do more than buy some groceries and put gas in her car, but enough to prove she loves me). When I got home my smoke alarm was chirping loudly, and my cat was waiting by the door, glaring.

The chronic malcontent is stuck in telecommunication hell

The past couple weeks I've donated my life energy to communicating with the telecommunications monopolies that rule our town. They are surprisingly difficult to communicate with, considering that communication is their business. Go figure. I can now sing the cable company's hold music, albeit somewhat off key. I must say, I like their jingle better than the classical music that fills the interminable gap between their weary phone reps' I'm going to put you on hold now and the third-party verification software system, which wisely bypasses a live operator altogether (leaving no one to scream at).

You never know what can go wrong in telecommunications. Then things start to go wrong, and you are amazed at how much stuff can go wrong. The list of wrong things doesn't seem to end. Telecommunications is currently the root of all my woes. I'm seriously pondering what it would be like to simply cut the cord completely and go live in an ashram. Well, not seriously. Where would I find an ashram in my mother's new neighborhood? I'm not even sure I know what an ashram looks like. Now that I think about it, I may have walked by twenty ashrams on my way to Target and never even known it. See what I'm saying? You never know about things. Wrong things and ashrams. What's next?

This all started with Mom's move to the retirement community, which uses the evil cable company monopoly for phone service instead of using the evil phone company monopoly. Mom, bless her bumpy little head, wanted to keep her old phone number. (“I've had this number for 50 years!”). That was our phone number when I was a kid, when we had a party line and the first two numbers were actually letters, standing for ALpine, our telephone exchange. So, of course, Mom wanted to keep her old phone number. But therein lies the problem. That phone number belongs to the evil phone company monopoly. In order to move (port) the number over to the evil cable company monopoly, you (meaning me... that is, I) had to go through a lengthy third-party verification process to prove that yes, we really did want to move this phone number over to the new company, even though it meant some dire things could happen in a power outage (which of course we had the next day, requiring my 86-year-old mother to search around on hands and knees in her new office to find and reset the cable company modem).

As I waited for the beeps and shouted “Yes!” periodically into the phone, I reflected on the way technology screws with us. You see, I did all this last week: called the cable company, listened to the hold music, got the third-party verification, recorded all the appropriate responses after the beep... and for a few days, it almost seemed like it worked. When Mom called me, her good old Alpine number showed up in caller ID. I thought, maybe there is a god!

But then, it slowly became clear that no, apparently whatever god there is cares nothing for telecommunications. In a twist of pure communication bedevilment, Mom could call out on her new cable company phone line, but no one could call in. In other words, the old number was stuck half in, half out of some port somewhere in a bank of computers, where I am pretty sure the cable company and the old phone company were fighting over who would get to have it. It's mine! No, confound you, it's mine!

I think it's Mozart, some classical crap by Mozart, that plays between during the hold time between the cable company and the third-party verification software. On my speaker phone, the volume swells and fades in a most annoying fashion, making me hate classical music more than I already do. (And no, I don't like country music, either, just so you know.)

Maybe you can tell by my snarky tone that I'm harboring some resentment. Yes, it's true. I wish it weren't, and I'm implementing all possible rituals to divest myself of said resentment up to and including small critter sacrifice, if that seems called for (millipedes have invaded the basement). In the meantime, I'm declaring a telecommunications moratorium. If you want to talk to me, send me a damn letter.

I'm not even going to tell you what happened with Mom's cable television. Imagine everything that can go wrong. Multiply that by ten.