three wishes
Sep. 24th, 2004 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fearlesstempOh my God. You guys. My grandfather is so trying to drive us insane. Insane! And it's WORKING! He's left sad, pathetic messages for weeks and weeks (always directed at me, because my voice is on the machine – and I have to tell you, coming home to one of them is the perfect cap on a long day. They make me want to cry, or possibly rip the answering machine out of the wall) about how much he wanted to go home.
"[Gross throat-clearing noise]," the message would say. "Jess? It's Grandpa. I want to go home. Can I go home? I love you, sweetheart. God bless."
Sometimes I would be home when he called and we'd spend a half hour in an endless, circular discussion about how he wanted to go home, in which I would make a number of cheesy, corny, Think Positive statements.
After all of that, the nursing home and my aunts made the decision to let him go home October 1. They started building a ramp for the wheelchair on the stairs, they started arranging aides to cover for him, looked into outpatient physical therapy.
And now are you ready for this?
He doesn't want to go home! He wants to stay.
Now we're scrambling to figure out how we can keep him in there. I can see it happening: we will figure it out, and he will announce that he wants to go home again.
The situation with my grandfather is kind of like the presidential election for me, in that both of them make me want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a long time. I would do it right now, except I wouldn't be able to reach the phone, and I dropped half of my banana down there today and so there's probably some banana-stickiness happening there. Also, I'm not sure when/if they vacuum back here.
My life is so boring lately. My life is always boring, but lately it's been more aggressively so. Tonight I have to go to a family party and I will have nothing to talk about. Maybe I could pretend to have laryngitis? Something to consider.
Something I'm considering right now: The discomfort of having done something stupid and possibly rude on such a small scale that I'm not sure it even registered with the other person, so that apologizing is out of the question. Do you know what I mean? I'm trying to think of a better way of describing it so that this mess of a paragraph makes sense, but I can't. And I'm too lazy to describe what actually happened.
This happens a lot with me, because I hate the idea of hurting another person's feelings, but am by nature so oblivious to things that I can sometimes say or do (or not say or do) things that will, ten to fifteen minutes later, blindside me with their stupiditiy and rudeness. And I'm all about apologizing – I've never had a problem with saying I was sorry, to the point that it annoys other people that I say it too much – but there are those occasions where it's kind of a fuzzy thing, where it's so small that it may not have even mattered to the other person and apologizing for it would be impossibly embarrassing and possibly even more rude.
Argh! I am crazy. That is the root of my problems. I need a road manual for life! Or possibly magic wishes. If I had one selfish wish, I would wish for perfect eyesight. If I had two selfish wishes, I would wish for perfect eyesight and the ability to genuinely enjoy exercise. If I had three selfish wishes, I would wish for perfect eyesight, the ability to genuinely enjoy exercise, and the grace to navigate any personal interaction with ease.
But there are no selfish wishes, and so I fully anticipate stumbling through life with astigmatism, chubby thighs, and awkward pauses. Oh well.
"[Gross throat-clearing noise]," the message would say. "Jess? It's Grandpa. I want to go home. Can I go home? I love you, sweetheart. God bless."
Sometimes I would be home when he called and we'd spend a half hour in an endless, circular discussion about how he wanted to go home, in which I would make a number of cheesy, corny, Think Positive statements.
After all of that, the nursing home and my aunts made the decision to let him go home October 1. They started building a ramp for the wheelchair on the stairs, they started arranging aides to cover for him, looked into outpatient physical therapy.
And now are you ready for this?
He doesn't want to go home! He wants to stay.
Now we're scrambling to figure out how we can keep him in there. I can see it happening: we will figure it out, and he will announce that he wants to go home again.
The situation with my grandfather is kind of like the presidential election for me, in that both of them make me want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a long time. I would do it right now, except I wouldn't be able to reach the phone, and I dropped half of my banana down there today and so there's probably some banana-stickiness happening there. Also, I'm not sure when/if they vacuum back here.
My life is so boring lately. My life is always boring, but lately it's been more aggressively so. Tonight I have to go to a family party and I will have nothing to talk about. Maybe I could pretend to have laryngitis? Something to consider.
Something I'm considering right now: The discomfort of having done something stupid and possibly rude on such a small scale that I'm not sure it even registered with the other person, so that apologizing is out of the question. Do you know what I mean? I'm trying to think of a better way of describing it so that this mess of a paragraph makes sense, but I can't. And I'm too lazy to describe what actually happened.
This happens a lot with me, because I hate the idea of hurting another person's feelings, but am by nature so oblivious to things that I can sometimes say or do (or not say or do) things that will, ten to fifteen minutes later, blindside me with their stupiditiy and rudeness. And I'm all about apologizing – I've never had a problem with saying I was sorry, to the point that it annoys other people that I say it too much – but there are those occasions where it's kind of a fuzzy thing, where it's so small that it may not have even mattered to the other person and apologizing for it would be impossibly embarrassing and possibly even more rude.
Argh! I am crazy. That is the root of my problems. I need a road manual for life! Or possibly magic wishes. If I had one selfish wish, I would wish for perfect eyesight. If I had two selfish wishes, I would wish for perfect eyesight and the ability to genuinely enjoy exercise. If I had three selfish wishes, I would wish for perfect eyesight, the ability to genuinely enjoy exercise, and the grace to navigate any personal interaction with ease.
But there are no selfish wishes, and so I fully anticipate stumbling through life with astigmatism, chubby thighs, and awkward pauses. Oh well.
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Date: 2004-09-24 12:52 pm (UTC)And the subtle probing is definitely a good idea, and I should do it more often than I do -- usually I'm so shy that unless I'm positive I've done something wrong (in which case my guilt and shame overcome my shyness), I tend to keep my mouth shut as much as possible. Though this afternoon things have been fine, and I'm almost positive it's blown over.