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rue-madame's Diaryland Diary

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Back from vacation

The flight attendant on the way back to Hartford was a total beeyatch. I asked her for water without ice please, and she launched into a brief but very condescending rant about how no one speaks up anymore and don�t they realize that flight attendants are practically deaf from engine noise? Rather than call her a fucking bitch to test whether or not her hearing was truly compromised, I took my water and said �thank you� with a smile.

�You�re not too traumatized by that?� asked TA. �She was such an asshole.�

Then he muttered, �Welcome to Connecticut.�

The 10-day trip to CA was awesome. In LA, we saw all of our friends, ate delicious food, went to a barbecue, saw the Margaret Kilgallen show, shopped on 3rd and at Giant Robot, drove a hybrid around, got haircutes (TA at Rudy�s, me here), met some new clients and had wonderful interaction after wonderful interaction with retail folks and strangers in general. It just could not have been more perfect. It�s funny to say I miss LA as once upon a time I would never have deigned utter it, but damn, I miss LA.

SF was fun but in a different way. It was just as whirlwindy as the LA portion but with more scheduling and more time spent shuttling between families which, as you know, is not my favorite thing in the world. I mean, I loved seeing my sisters and friends whom I miss a lot, and I also enjoyed seeing TA�s nutty brother and sister-in-law, but the rest of the family time was not so great. In fact, it was sad and depressing. My mother grows more and more insane as she ages, and she is meaner and meaner to my father, who in turn doesn�t express his anger, preferring to suppress it and give himself cancer south of the border.

As a public service, I would like to point out that when Paget�s Disease (the skin variety, not the bone) affects men, it affects the uncircumsized penis more than the circumcised one. My father had to have 2 surgeries (which each lasted at least 6 hours) and skin grafts from both his arms and his legs. Mothers who are on the fence about having their sons snipped, please think long (ha) and hard (ha ha.) Circumcision: not just for jews anymore.

TA�s parents are not doing much better. They may indeed be worse off. Not only is their alcoholism out of control and their house a veritable igloo of old newspapers, unpaid bills and cat dander, but TA�s mom was diagnosed last Friday with lung cancer. She is in so much pain that she is on a morphine patch AND vicodin. This is a woman who has spent her life worrying about other people, sublimating her needs to ensure that others were taken care of. Any wonder her lungs have been affected? She practically breathed to give others strength.

The Dalai Lama believes that we should look at issues from all sides so as to understand the positives and the negatives, and I suppose that the silver lining in all of this is that a) TA�s mom is no longer drinking, b) her siblings are all looking after her (even though they are still drinking and smoking, wtf) and c) TA�s eldest brother lives within an hour or so and can be the filial representative. Positives for my folks: they have a rich social and cultural life and many friends they can depend on.

We did manage to end the vacation on a bright note by spending time with tremendous and generous friends. Which is why it was such a major bummer�pardon the Californiese�to get stuck with a bovine and arrogant stewardASS.

1:31 p.m. - 2005-08-31

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