cosmic_celery

I haven't made a proper journal entry in quite a while, it seems, apart from showing off the bits and bobs of my costumes. (As it happens, the tights for my girl!five thing showed up and they're very cool - they've got a cool cable-knit pattern on them like the sweater. See?)

There's a couple things I've been wanting to mention on here but I haven't really sat down to do it, so:

There's been some business with my grandmother that came to a rather frightening moment this weekend. We learned several months ago that she has a growth on one of her ovaries. As far as they know it's not cancerous and it could have been there a very long time before they even found it. For a while they were talking about the possibility of going in and having it removed. Initially, she agreed, but then after talking with my Dad, she agreed to reschedule to this weekend. The night before last, grandma got a ride up to the hospital to go over everything and then came home. Once at home, she got a call from one of the nurses saying that she could come back to the emergency room immediately because a test had come back showing signs of renal failure. She refused because she felt fine, and called my mom and me to tell us what had happened. It's at that point that I freaked out a bit. It seemed like nobody was caring that something potentially fatal was happening to a member of our family.

However, it turns out that the readings were perfectly normal for her based on her history (she has one kidney, which skews the results) and furthermore, she's decided not to get the surgery at all. This is largely on my Dad's influence, who is extremely suspicious of hospitals. He thinks that once you walk through the doors, you lose all ability to make decisions for yourself. That part is unfounded, definitely. The other side, which I totally understand, is that my grandmother is an 89 year old woman. Surgery to deal with something that isn't causing her discomfort is definitely a risky proposition. Still, it irks me that nobody is weighing the options.

So, she'll be making an appointment to go see a geriatric doctor...who, I suppose will look over everything - and we'll see from there.

The second thing I wanted to talk about is an incident that happened at my mom's work several months ago. A man who had been fired during the holidays came in, shot one of the management, and then himself. My mother wasn't directly involved, though she was in the building when it happened. As far as these sorts of things go, I think it qualifies as "close to home". Though I have the same sort of detachment thinking about it that I get when I've heard of any other shooting. I don't know if that's good or bad, really. People do strange and terrible things that make little sense to me, and I'll never understand that sort of thing, no matter how close to home it is. But...I'm not horrified by it. Just sad for humanity.

Hm.

Anyway. I think my dad's coming down today, which should be lovely given I as good as hung up on him the other night when he was rambling on about how surgery should have never been an option at all for my grandmother. ...and I haven't had any sleep.

Despite the tone of this entry so far, I'm alright. School is going nicely and I'm learning things I'm interested in. On Monday I'm going to go see about cashing in a bond I've got lying around - I have a list of things I'd like to do and most of them require a bit of dosh.

1) After watching The Five Doctors:

Dad: I like that each Doctor gets his own girl.
Me: Well, Susan's his granddaughter, or at least that's what she calls him...
Dad: Is that some sort of kinky thing? *girly voice* Ooo Grandfather!
Me: Aagh, Dad, no. Just...no.

2) Figuring out which Doctor mom is talking about:

Mom: The handsome one.
Me: Um...Peter Davison? In the cricket whites?
Mom: No, he's girly. The other one you like.
Me: Colin Baker? ...Multicolored coat?
Mom:  Yeah, him.

For all their flaws, I love my parents.

I'm back! I'm glad to be back!

The famed Gilroy Garlic Festival was HUGE. I have no idea why so many people were there. It wasn't that great (I think it would have been a lot better if I was drinking mass quantities of alcohol like most of the crowd), but I had garlic fries and I tried some garlic ice cream. The fries were good. The ice cream was absolutely terrible.

While there I met the mother of my brother's girlfriend (Janice)...who seemed normal until she started talking about how the next day they were going to go scatter the ashes of Janice's dog on some hiking trail up where they used to live. And she was carrying the ashes around IN HER PURSE...and apparently she'd been carrying them around for months. Someone agree with me that that's not normal. My brother just looked totally pooped out. I can't imagine he had fun scattering those ashes the next day.

I got to show my Dad and Stepmom more Doctor Who while I was there, and they love it. Which is awesome. We watched some First Doctor bits and Timelash! Hehe, yes, I know...Timelash...but I love Timelash. And by the way! if you were thinking of getting Timelash on DVD, Paul Darrow is on the commentary with Colin and Nicola and it is absolutely hilarious.

Hmm...that's all for now, I think.

ETA: Oh, and I also wore my Lost Boys t-shirt to the Garlic Festival! Few people got the irony, but it made me giggle.

So, I'm Back. I had a bunch of fun with my dad. We pretty much just hung out, visited book stores and such. I got him to watch a Doctor Who episode (The Visitation) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He liked both of them, but each needed a bit of explanation. 

Through that we kind of got to talking about common themes in our favorite movies, and it seems that mine are: a small focus (a small cast, or a large cast with only a few important characters), and man vs. himself, or man vs. fate dilemmas. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the focus is on the two main characters grappling with their fate as characters within a larger play, in The Legend of 1900, there are two main characters, and the main character struggles with the purpose of his life and his position in the world, and in Bartelby, another of my favorite movies, Bartelby struggles against a society that he not longer feels he fits into. These three movies all also feature outsiders from society, and two of them have boats as a metaphor for the world. Though not a movie, Doctor Who fits in well with that too: a small group of main characters, all outsiders, often dealing with interior and exterior struggles. You could probably learn a lot about me from just that information.

My train ride down and up was pretty long and boring but it was fun to go up and I'm glad to be back where I have internet.