The Life and Times of a Pseudo-Quadrapalege

HI! I'm Susan. For those of you who don't know me, my sympathies. For those who do, I hope these posts to be fun, funny, enlightening and at times touching. Well. if you've kept up with this blog, you know that the Admin is facing the reality of his parents' mortality. His father's heart attack (I always knew there was one in there somewhere) and my rare and sudden disabling disorder. It's a lot for a person to handle. I was in my late 40's when I realized my parents were getting older. I decided I need to start making my claim on some of their cool stuff.

I have a rare autoimmune disorder called "dermatomyositis". You can learn more about it here if you want:
http://www.emedicine.com/neuro/topic85.htm

It affects approximately 1 in 20 million people in the world. (And you thought the Admin was unique.) This disorder causes the body's immune system to attack healthy tissue, mainly skin (derma) and muscle (myos). So, my muscles are very weak and sometimes my pillow weighs 2,000 pounds! But, I'm bigger than this and will beat it!

For those who don't know, I'm an old hippie, which basically means that I'm in to all that alternative stuff and a liberal. I'm also a Master energy healer in Reiki. Ironic, huh? Well, in energy healing we believe that disease it born of fear. More on this thought later.

When I was raising my kids I was like most parents, I couldn't wait for the cute, little bundles of joy to be born and then couldn't wait for them to leave home and in between I hope, I spent a lot of time loving them. When my daughter moved into her own place, I had all kinds of ideas as to what I would do with my new found emptinestness. (If Bush can make up words, so can I) That came to an abrupt halt about 3 weeks later when my husbands grandkids were abandoned by their parents. Please note: HAVING CHILDREN IS A CHOICE UNTIL YOU HAVE CHILDREN AND THEN THAT IT YOUR CHOICE! Well, after 2 1/2 years their mother has finally pulled her head out of her ass and has decided to be a mother. She's living with us and doing a fine job. So, she and the kids are going to be moving soon and I am once again faced with the prospects of a well deserved empty nest. A chance to reinvent my life! I can be anything I want to be, or do anything I want to do. I can even travel. However, for some odd reason, I'm crippled by this dis-ease. Hmmmm.

Now to the dis-ease being born of fear thought. What exactly am I afraid of? Stay tuned. Hopefully, the cosmos will send me an answer while I'm napping...I mean 'meditating.'

In the mean time, "Barack to the Future!"

Falling to Pieces

Spring 2008 sucks ass.  I feel like my whole family is falling a part.  A quick recap as to what's happened.

In winter my Father was told he had high blood pressure.  About a month and a half ago, he had a heart attack, a mild one.  However, a heart attack is a heart attack is a heart attack, whether mild, severe or fatal.  Three weeks later, he went in for a triple bypass and ended up with a quadruple bypass.  I went to see him the following weekend and when we arrived, he had left 15 minutes prior.

Around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with high blood pressure.  She was put on medication.  Her body had a reaction to the medication and developed an autoimmune disease.  It's attacking her muscles, ligaments and skin tissue.  She can barely move because of the pain and is currently living in a basement so she doesn't have to walk up or down any stairs.  I went over there last week and had to move some furniture around because she's getting stir crazy.

My brother recently broke up with his girlfriend of five years.  He's depressed and upset.  He says he wants her out (because she left him) and he's packing her things, but his actions say otherwise.  She's creating a lot of drama.  I just learned that he's going to quit drinking, which is good.  The revelation came to him after he was released from a hospital.  Why was he in the hospital?  Because he drank two bottles of whisky and a bunch of sleeping pills.

My other brother across the desert is going to snap one day.  He's a cop, and carries a gun.  He lives in a nothing town in the middle of nothing.  He desperately needs to leave that place, but can't because his son is there.  He refuses to leave his son, which is good.  But that place will kill him if he doesn't leave.

My sister is estranged.  She never calls, she doesn't participate much in family events and I have no clue what is happening to her.  She just had her 23rd birthday, yesterday.

I feel I'm the only solid thing here.  I just want to say to all of them, "I'm here for you.  All you need to do is call.  I will make time for you.  I can offer some objectivity to your life, a different angle.  Just give me a call before you do what I think you're going to do."

Maybe I've estranged myself.  Maybe I'm the one who needs to take the initiative and do something, be there.  Yes.  I think I do.

Update: My mother started a blog. A sort of way to deal with her stir craziness.

FaceSpace or MyBook?

You heard it here first.

FaceSpace (or MyBook) is the merger of MySpace and Facebook, two individual social networking web sites.  I have an account on both.

I like MySpace because you can edit and use HTML coding to make it individual.  You can post html rich messages and I credit MySpace to my expertise in web development.  That is, until they began violating Net Neutrality and forced it's users to use it's own servers for hosting images, video and other links rather than the ones the user prefers.

Since the News Corp $580M purchase in 2005, MySpace has become the largest social networking site on the Internet.  It has also become an advertisers dumping ground.  I'm sure it's revenue has increased exponentially, but the quality of the domain has has declined inversly.  It was the new sacrificial virgin to the News Corp monster.  With MySpaceTV and MySpace Music and exclusive MySpace celebrity interviews, it's become less of a social network and more of a gossip magazine.  I'm sickened by it and if I had any other network to keep in touch with past acquaintances, I'd drop MySpace in a mere second and not look back.

Facebook, on the other hand, is much cleaner.  However, with all the applications that can be added to a profile page, it's becoming less and less "clean."  It should be noted that from here on, I will refer to these applications as "spapps", Spam Applications.  The reason for this: you can't install, open or use an application without being bombarded with demands of inviting all your friends to use the application as well.  It's unwanted and therefore, just like so many other unsolicited messages I get, considered "spam."  In fact, some spapps, like some games, won't allow you to achieve certain levels of the game without successfully recruiting bullying large numbers of friends to use install the application as well, even just once.

The reason for this rant is that MySpace has jumped onto the spapps bandwagon.  I found, or rather, a friend showed, me a "Texas Hold' Em Poker" application, developed by Zynga for Facebook, on MySpace.  It's the exact same application.  MySpace is mimicking Facebook.

Even though Facebook has retained their independence, it hasn't kept them from jumping on the excessive advertising bandwagon.  In part, Facebook isn't exactly to blame for it.  I blame the developers of each application who incorporate invasive advertising schemes.  On the other hand, Facebook documents all sorts of information about a user.  Where they live, which groups they're apart of, how often they log in and which applications they use just to name a few are the kinds of data they keep track of and sell to advertisers and developers.  A practice that is on the border of privacy violations.  Are they allowed to keep a users Internet habits documented and stored?

In short, each is borrowing ideas and implementations from each other and incorporating them into their respective domains.  I see it as a form of sexual reproduction.  Each gives a little of themselves to create a mutated, inbred, muck-of-a-social-network.  Eventually, you won't be able to tell one from the other.  Which will become ... wait for it ... FaceSpace!  You heard it here first.

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