Thanksgiving in the ER

This was last night's prevailing scenario in the ER:

You visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday and sit down to dinner together. The Southern cooking is so good!--salt cornbread, turnip greens, ham, stuffing, a variety of casseroles including hashbrown, squash and the ubiquitous God-forsaken green bean casserole that always turns up on this day, 4 different types of chocolate cake--and you just can't get enough of it.

You begin to have abdominal pain, probably caused by your attempt to sample all the fixin's and go back for seconds. Still, you continue to indulge yourself. After all, how often do you get to eat like this and not feel guilty?

The cramping begins. You run to the bathroom and just make it in time to hurl all your hard work into the toilet. You no longer feel as if you've overeaten, but that bitter bile taste in your mouth sure doesn't resemble the cranberry sauce you just had. Back to the table after cleaning up. After all, you don't get to see these people very often.

But your GI system doesn't care about your social life. Everyone can hear your intestines writhing as you dramatically rush into the bathroom and make a split-second decision as to which end should kiss the bowl first.

Your family is concerned. They tell you that you should go to the ER. After all, you could get dehydrated.

The next thing you know you are lying on a cot with a bright fluorescent light over your head and I am sitting on a chair beside you starting an IV. Your significant other is holding your hand. You really do feel much better after puking up the last of those heavy sour cream-laden mashed potatoes, but hey, what the hell--you tell me that your pain is an 8 out of 10 anyways.

I draw your blood. You get a bag of IV fluids. I nag you for a urine sample for an hour until you finally decide to drag yourself up and hobble to the bathroom. You get some Dilaudid. It knocks you out for an hour or two so that I don't have to listen to your whining about how long this is taking. Your labs come back normal. I take your IV out and you wince as the tape is being removed. I say sorry, it's worse on men with all the arm hair. You get your discharge papers that say "return to the ER if symptoms worsen." You and I both know they won't.

Bottom line: You eat too much food, you get sick.

early November photos

The colors were still changing in early November. Today it was in the 60's! Hard to believe that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow. The air is so fresh when you step outside, the sun so bright. It reminds me of bacon frying in a pan. I think that bacon is the official state smell, judging from the fact that when you stop at the welcome center on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, bacon is the prevailing aroma in the air; either that or it is ham. This must be the tourism department's surreptitious method to get people to stay for awhile.

Happy Birthday little buddy. I love you.

My first award!

I just received an award for my blog from Nash Deville at A Yankee in Tennessee, a fellow northerner just trying to get by in the south. Thanks Nash--and to everyone who reads this--whether you agree with my viewpoint or not. I must also give a shout out to Tennessee and her interesting people for providing me with the inspiration to create this blog.

“Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.”

~Herbert Gold, Elder Statesman of The Beat Generation

imaginary surrender--not!

Alright,

Lets just pretend for a moment that I'm starting to like it here. That even though I say I miss the Chicago winters and all the complaints about everything that Northerners tend to have (because they spend too much time indoors together during the winter), I really don't miss them very much.

That I don't feel like a hell-bound heathen among all the churchgoing people.

That the water has not given me what my beautician aptly described as "Your Tennessee Hair" A.K.A. straw, and the southern change in latitude is not bringing me one step closer to discovering a subtle but fatal spot of malignant melanoma.

That the word "ya'll" slips forth from my lips, and I welcome it as "learning the dialect."

That the wolf spider I let stay alive the first time I discovered it (because it is a natural predator of the brown recluse) was not found residing on my daughter's pillow the other morning and didn't try to climb into her mouth, causing her to vomit all over herself.


That I drive the appropriate 15 m.p.h. speed limit in school zones, and do not get reprimanded by overzealous crossing-guards with crisp white gloves when they see my Chicago Bears plate on the front of the car.

That blondes do not outnumber the brunettes here. God save the redheads like myself.

That I look good in a spaghetti-strap sundress, a main wardrobe staple of the female locals May through September (especially at football games); unlike in Chicago, where dresses are mainly worn to church, weddings, and funerals, A.K.A. to church.

That I finally stop saying "pop" when referring to Sprite and instead call it "soda." Wait, I mean "coke."

That I come to accept the term "toboggan" to mean a hat with earflaps, rather than a sled-like device that you use to have fun with in the snow, because winter is bad, bad, bad.

While it's been fun to make fun of Tennessee (which I really don't think I've done all THAT much), maybe I should change the theme of this blog a little. Write more about family? Get all bitchy like all those SAHM blogs I've glanced at? Nah, my husband hears enough of that. Work? No, composing a novel for that subject (stay tuned). Friends? Don't have many here, and the ones that I do have are coworkers anyways.

Oh well, sorry Tennessee.

going outside

I have never seen this many people walking in the Civil War park, so many elderly. It is a beautiful day, sunny, in the high 70's. But there have been many days like this, and I have been the only one out there. In passing, people manage to muster a weak, insincere smile, as if they have lost a dear relative. Maybe this is a way of healing from the disappointment. Maybe the country going Democratic has brought them back to their roots with nature. Or maybe they are trying to reconnect with the past, a past that they feel is gone forever. Thankfully, it is.

after all is said and done

The sun has still risen in Williamson County this morning. The birds have not distinguished between this day and the last; they are busily going about their task of preparing for the winter, heeding the command of the trees decked out in stately autumn robes. The sun makes its way through a thicket of shrubs, comes to rest on a patch that becomes transformed into a glowing orb of yellow light that is brighter than anything seen on a summer dawn.

The sun has still risen in the South, shining over the red pool of lifeblood that courses itself up through the center of the country. This is a place that I have come to know as a welcomed guest during the past year and a half. Despite our differences, we have embraced eachother; sometimes reluctantly, but with the underlying understanding that we are, outside of any ideological disagreements that are historically North/South, fellow Americans.

The political yard signs are slowly disappearing into dusty garages. I can't help but cherish the pride I had last night for my native city of Chicago as she welcomed a new era in our country, yet I also realize a sort of empathetic sadness for these people here, who I now have a better, less biased understanding of, for their sense of hopelessness in the midst of a new consciousness of hope that has transpired over the past few months, culminated in the celebration at Grant Park last night.

But enough of the sentimentalities for now. My writing is tainted too much by them, and it is easy to be condescendingly sentimental when you are on the winning side of an issue. A simple task to say "Let us move forward together as a country" when you are not stinging from loss.

After living in Germany for over two years, I realized that the best way to overcome fear and misinformation about some things in life is to educate oneself about the other humans sharing this planet. "Love your neighbor" is a maxim that we should all aspire to live by, but "Embrace those with whom you have little understanding" is what we should all be striving for at this point in our history. Our country depends on it.

Early November--They're Back!

The fetid aroma of stinkbugs, or should I say Asian ladybugs, lingers in the cool dry air. These orange and black-spotted ladybug imposters whisk by me carelessly, occasionally slamming into the side of my face. As I bend down to examine a large mushroom, one lands on my arm. I knock it off and it unapologetically releases its fumes.

When we lived in Illinois, these nuisances would make their grand appearance on warm sunny days in October after the corn and soybean fields had been cut down, where they must have been lying in wait. There aren't many cornfields here due to the karst topography (in other words, rocky soil), so I have no idea where they've been hiding all summer.

I left a container of potatoes sitting on the kitchen table, engrossed in my blogging, and when I went back to put them away there was a stinkbug sitting on top. I love how they sound when they hit the floor.

Not to get on an Asian soapbox, but the Japanese honeysuckle is also thriving this time of year. While frost has claimed many shrubs, including my crepe myrtles, this invasive vine is still dark green.

For those of you from the north who've never heard of this, it bears a lovely-scented yellow and white flower that you can suck the juice out of. It smells so good that I was tempted to let it run wild in the burning bush shrub growing near my front door, pictured above. Now I've just decided to wait for the red leaves to drop so that I can search and follow each vine down to their shallow roots and pull them up. It is so evil and unlike me to kill a plant (other than a houseplant), but if I don't do it now, my house will be covered head to toe in honeysuckle vine, and like a scene from Jumanji, we'll have to hack our way out of the door.