Many Things Do Not Fly

Anyone who knows me knows that my life is nothing if not a lesson in how to have empathy people I judged or could not empathize with sufficiently in my life up to this point.  Current example:

I think I may have mentioned that I have a sleep disorder.  It runs in my family.  It’s the kind that sleep doctors love, because it’s rare and interesting.  Until I was medicated in my early twenties I would act out my dreams with some regularity.  The Docs called it a Parasomnia.  I used to walk, talk, spit (once recently actually), scream, pee, kick and  have vivid waking dreams where I saw insects either dropping from the ceiling, or crawling near my head. When this happened I did everything I could to get away from them as I gradually came to consciousness.  It’s a very strange and scary feeling.

The waking nightmares and the bedwetting got to be a bigger deal when I had someone sharing a bed with me.  When I became a parent, the fact that I was waking myself up a dozen or more times a night, really wore me thin.  I lost weight, and felt sick to my stomach much of the time.  It wasn’t until I described some part of this to my wonderful mother-in-law and she said, “Honey, it isn’t normal to see the clock that many times through the night.  That’s not normal sleep.”  that I thought to go see a doctor.  (Thank you Linda)

The doctor first tried hypnosis, which I thought was silly, but figured couldn’t hurt.  It didn’t hurt,  it didn’t help.  The next thing they did is prescribe a very low dose of an old-school anti-depressant; a really old, very cheap drug called Imipramine, which for some reason tended to regulate sleep cycles and with great regularity eliminated bedwetting.  After taking it, for the first time I could ever remember, I fell asleep and the night disappeared.  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, it was morning.  It was like a miracle.  It’s been close to 20 years since I wet the bed.

I would still have the occasional waking nightmre, and act out some of my dreams, especially talking or yelling.  But these behaviors decreased greatly.  Over the 20 years my dose has been raised 3 or 4 times.  When I seem to be having non-restful sleep, or multiple nightmares (I don’t really count super stressful times in my life as a time when I  need medical intervention, those sleepless nights go away on their own eventually), I check in with the sleep doctor.

That’s the background.

Recently I’ve been seeing  different sleep doctor, and when I complained that I was drowsy during the day (I have had a two hour commute at the classic sleepy time of the day, right around 3-4pm), he said he thought it was the Imipramine.  It has a longer half-life, “It’s an old drug.  What we call a ‘dirty drug’, with lots of side-effects.  There are some newer drugs, ‘cleaner drugs’ which would be out of your system more quickly. I think you should try going off the Imipramine and onto this other, newer and cleaner drug.”    Given the choice, who the hell wants a dirty drug over a clean drug?    I decided to make the switch.

I cannot overstate my strong feelings of disgust for emoticons. I don’t mind too much the kind which are cleverly made from the existing symbols on the qwerty keyboard.
The kind which cause unreasonable rage and ire to swell in my breast are the cartoon kind. I hate the yellow smiley or winky.
I thought when the smileys started to move, that I had reached the pinnacle of my frustration. I was wrong.
Today I chatted with a guy I know from Columbia. He always wants to chat on MSN because he can use his little cartoons. I try to ignore them. I asked him if he knew how to spell the spanish word jengibre (one word for ginger). His response was lightning quick. It was a short looped video thumbprint of a white haired bearded man stroking his beard in thought. Holy piles of eviscerated rodents! I threw up a little in my mouth. If I can get a screen shot and share with you the violation we are talking here, I will. That shit is whack.

Below is a quote taken from an internet site where people can review their experiences at local businesses:

February 22, 2008 “I went to Red Nails because it’s close to my house. But NEVER again! You really do get what you pay for. Nina, the Manager, did my acrylic fill in about 10 minutes. She barely understands English, is rude and mangled my poor cuticles because she’s so distracted “yelling” at all the women that work there (in another language, of course). This place makes you feel like you are in a cheap car wash. Next time I will go further to a reputable hotel for my fills.”

I’m going to Red Nails because City Pages says it’s great and a great deal. It has the added appeal that there are a few REALLY bad reviews on line. I get suspicious of any review that mentions not speaking English as a huge drawback, mentioning it twice is even better. I noticed that almost every bad review mentioned that the management and employees didn’t speak good English.

A typical pedicure costs around 70 bucks. My good friend Bill would quickly calculate that out to 7 bucks a toe. It’s more than I can justify spending on such frivolity. But 30 bucks? I can swing that. Even if it means I have to repeat myself sometimes, and can’t have a deep conversation with the woman scrubbing my feet.

I went to Red Nails with my friend Lydia. She was the only person daring enough to go with me. The girls were nice, the manager today was an Asian man, clean-cut, in a button down suit and pressed slacks. The place isn’t the lap of luxury, I’ll admit that. The waiting area chair was wobbly, and it’s true, no one was fluent in English. But I’d say the cost (about half what a similar treatment usually costs) and the incense laden altar to Buddha with a whole papaya on a plate in front of it made up for the less than stellar communication skills.

Lydia and I decided if we were in charge of the place, we’d lose both of the TVs ( I hate TVs in public places) and turn off the fluorescent overhead lighting and replace it with lamps at each chair. We’d put on relaxing music and crank up the incense one more notch. Other than that, it was a cool place, a fun afternoon outing. Took about a half an hour.

Lydia giggled so hard that I couldn’t talk to her during the scrubbing part. When I asked the girls doing our feet if they get a lot of people laughing, they didn’t understand. That was the only time I wished for better English skills. I bet they see lots of interesting stuff.

We were soaked, soaped, pumiced, scrubbed, massaged, clipped, filed, cuticle pressed, painted., paraffin dipped, peeled and dried. Oh, and we got a calf massage, which I think I could do without.

There was one moment as I was sitting I my massage chair with remote control, soaking one foot and having the other one thoroughly scrubbed up that I looked around and thought, “My god, this looks for all the world like slavery.” (Well except for the part where they get paid) .

Every single employee was Asian (Vietnamese I think). All but the manager were female, they all dressed mostly the same in print smocks and high heels. All squatting on little stools in front of happy, joking white women and doting on their feet. It creeped me out just a little. That, and the fact the employees  never smiled, except for the polite kind of smile.

I got to thinking, what if they all are brought over as sort of indentured servants or something. How would I ever know? I tipped generously.

Oooh I love this discussion of Susan Boyle and should she get a makeover. I say yes, she’s going perform on stage, and people want to see your eyes. But that’s not the biggest reason I want her to have a makeover.

I want her to have a full makeover (no surgery or shots) so people can be fully aware of just how much finesse, illusion, even, goes into what people think is beautiful. Call me shallow. I say polish her up.

Well maybe better said, What I didn’t notice immediately.  The most obvious was that she was probably trying to sell me  on joining this new venture.  Imagine how quick her turn-around would be if she went right home and started making calls to people she knew, right?

The inner me is still not sure that’s what was happening, but the reasonable me has decided that the inner me is an idiot.  But not That much of an idiot.  I guess my suggesting what she had just bought into was quite likely a scam of some sort was tantamount to a pretty firm, “No, Thank you.”

She’s excited.  She’s so excited.  She and her husband live comfortably, not luxuriously.  They have lots of dogs they support, but no kids and no mortgage.  He works nights, I can imagine they’d love to find something a little less draining than that with which to support themselves. Apparently this deal has two ways of producing income: first is you sell memberships to other people, secondly, the Company has some sort of agreement with big, reputable companies, to… To what?  I still don’t understand what they do.

She said she didn’t understand really either, but it involved third parties who did bill processing and credit card applications for companies like Best Buy, Dish Network, GE Security.  It even involves taking current companies she might already work with (like cell phone companies, or cable companies- neither of which she uses) and running your account through the Company.  That way, every month some money from her monthly bill would actually go back to her.

So it must be that her opportunity for income growth is if she can convince lots of people to agree to run their current bills through XXX Company, and then a portion of their bills will go to her as well.  They call that “Residuals”. If you get enough of those, you can be independently wealthy, and move up the rankings in the Company.  I don’t quite understand what moving up the ranks does, but it seems to involve a Lexus.

We got off the phone agreeing that we’d both go and do more research and we’d touch base in a day or so.   As near as I can tell, this is a scam, but it’s legal.  They sell the opportunity to sell products which a person could sell without the Company being the middle man.  What the Company has, is a great polished looking website (although the phone number is never answered and the only thing one can buy on the website is merchandise with the Company logo on it), hope, and a subtle us/them attitude.  Us is (with some exceptions) Christian, working-class men and women.  Them is poor, lazy, uninspired or cynical people who don’t believe in anything (much less their dreams) and are afraid to ‘think outside the box’.

So hope and gullibility are two aspects necessary for this thing to fly, the third is self-doubt.  I frequently don’t understand things.  But if I ask a few questions and I pay attention, I can understand almost any business model or philosophy.  My adult self knows this, but my inner child self secretly is embarrassed to say when I don’t understand something.  This happens to many people, I think.  I know when I asked Honey about it, she repeatedly said she didn’t really understand it, but that she’d be learning more.

My philosophy really is, if you can’t explain it to someone else, you don’t understand it.  If someone wants you to get involved in something you don’t understand, they are trying to scam you.

I’m thinking about calling her back and asking more questions to see if I can get a better handle on what the hell makes her want to do this.  I’m thinking about calling the Company to see what they hell they SAY they sell.  How can a website not give the user any idea of what in god’s name their business is?  It’s weird, I keep thinking I  must be missing something.  It’s like eating styrofoam.  There seems to be structure there, it’s even a little crunchy, but something really important seems to be missing…

One cool thing is that if I publish the company name, my readership will spike and tons of people will come on and call me a DreamKiller and rant about how ignorant I am.  I’m thinking about it, but I don’t want any trouble to come to Honey.

There are lots of things people believe which I cannot make myself believe.  I only rarely try to make people unbelieve.  Religion, for example I don’t mess with usually because it’s important to so many people, and just like proselytizing, anti-proselytizing makes you seem like a jerk.  It would get way too exhausting.

On the other hand, there are times when I try really hard to convince someone of my point of view, when I cannot do so.  I had one of those this week when my tenant called me out of the blue.  She and her husband are darlings.  I love having them for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they always pay the rent early and she always includes a hand written letter with the check.  These letters are pleasant and informative, if a bit weird.  She tells me about the wildlife they’ve seen this month, neighborhood activities and how their life is going in general.  They’re usually about a page or two long, and generously sprinkled with happy-faces, hearts and exclamation points.

Honey (not too far from her actual name) called just to let me know about a program she and her husband had gotten involved in.  The description was a bit fuzzy to me, but I never claimed to be a genius.  She talked about paying 300 dollars to buy into the program, and that if she sells 3 memberships, she’ll make her money back.  Everything after the first three is pure profit.  I said I didn’t understand what she would be selling memberships in, was it a discount club?  Was it an investment club?  She said she didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but she was going to a meeting where they would explain it all to her.

From the get-go it sounded like a pyramid scheme, aka a multi-level marketing scheme, aka a Ponzi scheme… It sounded to me like a text-book scam.  I told her this.  She laughed and said she still had a number of questions about it and she’d be checking it all out.  While I was talking with her, I plugged the name she gave me into google.  It popped up with lots and lots of hits.  33 thousand hits.  A fair number of them were alerts from  people saying the company was a scam.

Didn’t sound like a good deal to me.  I like Honey, so I told her I had done a quick google search on(XXXX) (the company she was joining), and it didn’t look reputable.  She was a little taken aback, but soldiered on, talking about how nice the people were, how they went out of their way to help her out, although they wouldn’t get any proffit from her.  I asked her the key question one needs to ask in a situation like this, “Honey, is there anything I could tell you that would convince you this wasn’t a good idea? “  Her heart was already set on this path.  I could tell.  I should have let it go.

I got off the phone, promising to look into it further, and extracting from her a promise that she would as well.  Why did I do that?  I was only going to be convinced I was right, and she was only going to be convinced that she was right.

Tomorow, I will tell more of what I found, if you’re interested.

Ok, lets go over the things I like about this place and the things I don’t like.

Like:

• Truckloads of fruit coming to the market every day: oranges and pineapples by the truckoad, and fruit trees growing on every street.
• Bats drinking out of the pool at Las Sabilas.
• Birds drinking out of the pool: at dusk, the bats would start to fly around and eat mosquitos.  Sometimes they’d detour on their fly-bys and dip into the pool for a drink and leave a little ripple.
• Street food vendors
• 50 cent beers for the locals
• Flowers that change color during the day
• brown-eyed babies, curvy Mexicanas and bedroom-eyed Mexicanos
• Jasper swimming in the pool
• chilaquiles: Jasper’s favorite breakfast food in Mexico.  Deep-fried tortilla strips in chile sauce, sprinkled with cheese.  Served with tortillas and frijoles.  Tastes a lot like chilli-cheese freetos.  A lttle heavy for my tastes at breakfast.
• carne de cerdo en chile: Pork swimming in a red-chile tomatillo sauce which was out of the world.  We had nary a bite of cumin in our travels for those of you who object to it.
• jugo de naranja: fresh orange juice
• jugo de piña: fresh pineapple juice
• aguas frescas: Lime, or orange, or rice, or tamarind, or  grapefruit or other random ‘ades’  with spices or not.  Quite refreshing  in the hot sun.
• gorditaas con carnitas y salsa verde: street vendor selling hand-made tortillas grilled to melt the cheese with meat and tomatillo salsa.  The cheese and tortilla were browned and nothing less than heavenly.

Don’t like:

• Not being able to throw the toilet paper in the toilet, instead having to throw it into the trash after using it: Mexican plumbing can’t handle toilet paper.   There are some habits which are very ingrained.  Toilet habits rank among those.
• Buses and trucks driving on side-streets: buses and trucks make loud, loud noises.  When they drive past you on a side street, or hit the air breaks, it can be very jarring.  More than once Jasper jumped and covered his ears.
• not knowing the tip protocol: according to my sources, one should tip a waitress, and the person who cleans one’s room.   But the taxi-driver does not expect to be tipped.  It’s really a hard situation when you just don’t know what’s polite.
• itchy spots from the sun: our swarthy guide didn’t really buy our excuses about not being able to stay in the sun longer than a couple hours.  People with sun-friendly skin just don’t get it.  They think you might just be out of shape or lazy.
• no door on the bathroom: your family might be close enough to not mind sharing a room while pooping.  Mine isn’t.  We’re not even striving for that.  We like a closed door between the pooper and the outside world.  This required ingenuity on our part.  We started to discretely ask each other for “private bathroom time” wherein the entire hotel room was off limits to family members not using the bathroom.
• sleeping in a bed that isn’t  mine
• machine gun toting guards: mostly at the banks or jewelry stores
• $1.50 beers for the Gringos: knowing about this instance makes one feel uneasy in every other commercial interaction.
• chilaquiles: Jasper’s favorite breakfast food in Mexico.  Deep-fried tortilla strips in chile sauce, sprinkled with cheese.  Served with tortillas and frijoles.  Tastes a lot like chilli-cheese freetos.  A lttle heavy for my tastes at breakfast.
• cecina:  corned beef jerky.  Salty, dry, crisp-fried, thin sliced pieces of beef served with frijoles and a salad.
• String mops: String-mops may be the root of all evil.  I’ve never seen them leave a floor cleaner than when they arrived on the scene.  I’m somewhat of a freak when it comes to cleaning a floor.  This caused some tension in our relationship with the maid.
• Acres and acres of Chinese-made crap being pedaled: street markets would pop up spontaneously in the night while we slept.  We’d go out walk through, smell and eat the street-venders’ wares and get out. How many shoes can one world need?  We saw enough shoes in our trip that i am comfortable adding shoes to my list of things which need a moratorium of their production.   By 6 in the evening, they’d be gone.  Even the trash was gone.
• Cucarachas: only saw 3 on this trip.  This is a record as far as latin american countries.  we usually see many many more.
• deformed and disabled beggars : these put a damper on many a walk-about.  Jasper found it unconscionable that people without arms or legs, or both, would be left to beg for coins on the street.  The only way he’d leave the hotel room was with a pocket full of change.  Jasper asks important questions like, “how does that guy even get to the corner?  He’s just like a basketball with a head. Someone must bring him in a wagon.”  When I asked my Mexican acquaintances how they handled talking about the beggars with their kids, they couldn’t understand the question.

We arrived after a very nice flight. I say whoever gave me ativan all those years ago was a moron. Xanax is way nicer, doesn´t make me too weird and I can still spell.
Neto met us at the airport so we didn´t have to figure out how to make a phone call from the airport.
First meal, tacos from a corner taco stand, heavy o the grease, lots of unidentifiable meatish bits, good salsa verde and roja with cilantro. We ate them at the hotel )Las Sabilas for anyone who wants to go look it up. I´ll figure out links maybe later. It is beautiful here, lots of water noises and plants everywhere. Best first day of family travel ever. Only one beggar child, and he looked clean and well fed, so I wasn´t broken hearted.

I’ve heard that people want the rest of this story, and since it has no real ending, I’ll tell you where we’re at right now as well as I can.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell it without invading my son’s privacy too much.  I haven’t really figured out a great solution to that problem, but  I do feel a need to own up to a little bit of parental cluelessness.

After meeting with the education director (equivalent to the assistant principal at most schools), I started to realize some things.  First was that Jasper really did bring much of the negative attention he got onto himself.   This will be a blasphemous thing to say in the realm of bullying, but I believe it to be the truth.  Second, was that he was really angry, but not necessarily because he was being bullied.  Jasper sat in the director’s office and talked about these girls through clenched teeth, in a raised voice, glaring at the director.

He talked about how furious they make him in basketball practice because they talk to each other while the coach is giving directions.  When she asked if he could ignore it he said  he couldn’t .  She asked if he could move to another part of the gym.  His response was a moment of clarity for me. “The coach can put me in a different line, but then someone in that line will make me mad.  He can’t keep me away from everyone!”  The director and I looked at each other and then at Jasper to hear if he was listening to himself.  He wasn’t.

The director asked if he couldn’t let the coach make the corrections and he threw up his hands, “The coach doesn’t do anything!  If he tells them to be quiet, they just do it for a few minutes then they start talking and giggling again.”  I asked if they were talking to him, or about him.  They weren’t.  “Well Sometimes they do.  But  they’re just always talking.”

I gently suggested that the fact that there weren’t enough corners in the gym to separate him from everyone who made him mad, might be a hint that the problem was his and not all the other kids’, or the coach’s. He didn’t buy it. We  have been having the conversation on an almost daily basis about focusing on what you can do differently, not on what other kids should do differently.

The director excused him after a little more talk and broke the news to me, “Tomorrow we are sending contracts out for next year to invite students back.  We can’t send one out for Jasper.  I’d like to give it another month, but at this point he’s a really negative force in the school, “  They’ve always made it clear that the school is not equipped to deal with behavior problems, only learning ones.

The next day, he came to me puzzled about a kid in carpool who had snubbed him.  I drive the car pool a couple days a week and I had come to dread his irritable snappy attitude.  The other kids did too.  So when he said, “David was really kind of rude to me today.”  I had to break the news to him just as it was dawning on me.  “David was rude to you because you are mean and snappy to everyone in the car pool. You’re mean to everyone including the driver.”

I was getting emails from teachers about his argumentativeness, and I was generally bummed out.  We had an appointment with his psychiatrist just to check up. He was obviously down when we went there and had lost weight.  She talked with him and with me and we decided to eek up his current anti-anxiety/anti-depressant drug.

About a week after raising that dose, he started to say that kids were nicer to him at school.  He laughed out loud at silly things that kids in car pool said, and his teacher commented about how much less he was arguing in class.  We didn’t tell anyone the change we had made, but it clearly made a difference.  Around here, I noticed that he has started to laugh again.   It’s amazing to me how we were able to slide back into having a depressed angry kid and willing to blame everything around us, including the school.  I’m thinking about writing a second letter backing down just a smidge.

I still say there are things they could have dealt with better, but the problems Jasper was having were going to follow him to any school he went to.  His depression (that’s the best name they have for it)has always manifested itself as anxiety and irritability, and his slide back into it was just as natural as can be.  It wasn’t until I saw him out of my own context (in the office at school) that I realized he was troubled from the inside.  And it wasn’t until he started feeling better that I realized how bad it was.

I feel very lucky that we stumbled on a medication that really works for him and that raising the dose was enough to pull him out of his funk. I was starting to run out of parenting tricks and get very depressed myself.

Jasper and I received 2 apology letters yesterday. They were very nice, with no cross-outs or anything.  Here are excepts,with the spelling intact..

Dear Ms.Morgan,

I’m really sorry for being mean to you and Jasper. I’m really sorry that I swore at Jasper and called him mean names and made fun of him.  I will stop doing that and not talk to him any more.  I’m also very sorry for being mean to you.  The reason I said you were like stocking me is because when you where writing to me I didn’t now who you were.  I felt like you were getting in my buisness, but I guess you were doing the rite thing for me. I feel realy bad for like what I did.  I just don’t want Jasper being mad at me even though I think he is.  I’m very sorry for what I did and hope you forgive me please! with a happy face and a heart

Dear Jasper,

….Sorry that I made fun of you all the time.  I shouldn’t of done this.  I will learn from the mistake I made.  I will never swear at you again.  Sorry for what I did and I hope you forgive me.

I think they were very nice and I remember making Jasper write similar notes and what a battle it was.  Especially with kids who have reading and writing disabilities, wrting a letter is a really difficult task.  Do we acknowledge the notes or drop it?