it keeps hurting so much

every friday and saturday now i spend my entire day with my dad, except for the occassional saturday block party. i try to be "productive" - whatever that looks like - but i end up bumbling around, nothing complete, little accomplished. words of encouragment go into one ear and out the next. his arm stays motionless. please dad, you move your hand now. you can do it. that's it, take a step. then i recount the steps, diagnosis, surgery, doing okay, another surgery, good, good, hospital. not good. recover? please?!! no. he's stuck. i feel stuck.

i wonder if i'm crying more because it feels so helpless or because when i reach out for a shoulder to cry on...i don't know where to turn. i also wonder what it would be like if they never got a divorce. if instead of having to drive 30 minutes to get to my mom, i can just turn around, walk into the other room and say mommy, hold me.

i don't really know what i need to do; just crying because i know tomorrow will come and i'll at least face it. and monday will come and i'll have to go to work.

that's my story today.

replay

not good enough...
damn, what happened this year? why did i wait to talk to him? was it the endless hours of research and finding the best surgeon or the endless hours of tv that i wallow(ed) in? because now...he can't talk and he can't tell me how he feels without anger and name calling. it hurts and then it doesn't. god, i'm so incredibly blessed to have a home, to have some friends, food, everything i need.

my dad is angry and detached because he thinks its the easiest thing for everyone. he doesn't want anyone to see him like this (possibly to remember him like this - sick and hurting); i can't change him.

in my own anger, i slammed the door on my fingers today and it looks pretty gnarly. some bruising and dried blood now. crazy eh?

goodnight.

addicted to television

i'm addicted to hulu tv and it's really bad, but i realized that i can't stop watching (outside of any mind altering hypnosis) because i love the instant satisfaction of happiness. i am addicted to happy endings.

holden caufield

sometimes... i just want to put my life in a box and stop time. maybe even turn back time and forget that we have to worry about a future.

emotion: listless. hmm...or actually incredibly filled by the spirit today but just as quickly, i felt it sucked right out of me.

i have no idea what's next and i know i can just sit and watch episodes of greek because i need to sleep and i need to connect to people and places. bla bla bla.

back to hulu. this is not exactly the life i had in mind. tomorrow?

swing of your hips...

oh boy, this song is great...
makes me desire/want for a better day that i know exists. does that make sense? it's somehow wraps me in love and community (yes, faith and desire...drowns me in love...pull me down hard). like ocean waves with far too much water that rocks you afloat and envelopes you like you've never seen and puts you at the top looking down on crashing whites - 8 feet of scary abyss and that's only above the water. below, a mystery. leaves for only one complete and satisfying feeling: awe of this great creation.

today, i get to spend the entire day with my dad. sadness comes a bit easier, but the joys are also higher. hmm...

brotherhood and community - i think i'm finding more of you and i pray (on a tangent) for santification (through suffering) and for wholeness in community with God and my brothers and sisters.

i am pretty sure i haven't made much sense at all. i think it is all about love for one another.

good day.

oh happy days

jazz downtown, amigos buenos, hotdogs --- no buenos, tarea, facebook all day, cool nonprofit campaign, trust in dios, hmmm...BEST PART OF DAY: dad was super smiley and happy. what happened? haha, god, all that praying worked? of course you listen, just wasn't sure how you were going to respond. Praying still.

we were in the hospital yesterday. dad had another seizure, this time i wasn't home to see it, but i've finally accepted that things are just going to be and i can't force anything to happen so i've been pretty content with life. His burden/yoke IS much lighter.

buenas noches.

Hortensia* (ha, what an awful spanish name...i'm going to make another one up)

litigations gone too far

really like this wall street article:

Law is supposed to uphold social norms of right conduct. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that this was “the first requirement of a sound body of law.” By making people potentially liable for their negligence, law provides incentives for reasonable conduct. But the converse is also true. Allow lawsuits against reasonable behavior, and pretty soon people no longer feel free to act reasonably.

Welcome to America. Mud and reeds have been dumped on natural and necessary human activities throughout American society. Playgrounds have been stripped of all physically active equipment, like monkey bars, with the effect, among others, of contributing to a crisis in childhood obesity. Health-care costs are skyrocketing, in part because paranoid doctors are in the habit of ordering unnecessary tests to provide a possible defense in case there’s a lawsuit. Because of fear of legal claims, teachers can’t put their arm around a crying child.

Lawsuits are easy. Whenever anything goes wrong. It’s easy to come up with a theory of what might have been done differently. There could have been a warning. There could have been more supervision of the playground. The doctor could have ordered an MRI for the headache, just to make sure. Exposing people to liability against the standard of hindsight, however, creates not a safer world but one in which people simply avoid socially useful activities. Obstetricians quit. Seesaws disappear. Businesses stop giving references. The City of New York did, in fact cut the limbs off trees near playgrounds so children would not be tempted to climb them.

All life’s activities involve risk, and therefore the inevitability of accident and disagreement. The role of law is not to provide a consolation forum for those who have felt the misfortune of risk, but to support the freedom of all citizens to make reasonable choices, including taking reasonable risks. That requires judges, wherever someone makes a claim, to balance the seriousness of the risk against the social utility of the claim. Those rulings are the building blocks of our common law system, which, the English Law Lords recently reminded us, “is just the formal statement of the results and conclusions of the common sense of mankind.”

Judicial activism has a bad name. It’s one thing for judges to impose affirmative legislative mandates, like forced busing, but far more disruptive for judges to sit on their hands and let private litigants sue for the moon. Want to fix the legal system? Shine the spotlight on the judges.

The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2003 p. A20