The stars need to realign, now, please. This is going to be a lengthy post. Grab a cuppa and sit down.
Let me recap the last week for you.
Thursday
Thursday afternoon, I went up to Dallas to go to a conference. We go to this conference every year, and it’s good for us on a business level. It is, however, a clusterfuck year after year, because every year a new host committee takes over and there’s no continuity between the years. In other words, there are no lessons learned from year to year, so if something goes wrong one year, it’s just as likely to go wrong the next.
We always have an exhibit booth. The chair of the exhibits has proven, year after year, to be the least competent member of the team. This year was particularly bad. I don’t know why certain concepts are so difficult — send an acknowledgement when you get my check? — but they are. The communication this year was a gem: every message from the exhibit guy started the same way: “Exhibitors: Dave here. Checking in about things.” Are we in the military? Did DADT get repealed when I wasn’t looking?
So, we arrive at the exhibit hall to find that the extra table that I ordered wasn’t there, and that the actual exhibition company had no record of the order. Neither did four of the five people at the exhibit booth have name badges, even though I sent them to “Dave” when he asked for them. Interestingly enough, I had two name badges for myself, apparently in case I brought along my evil twin with the same name.
The actual conference itself went fine, once we learned that we couldn’t actually rely on the exhibit team for anything and learned to troubleshoot stuff ourselves.
Cut to …
Saturday
My session, which I was presenting by myself, was the last session of the day at a teacher’s conference … on Halloween. So, I considered the 17 people who turned up a blessing. It wasn’t my best presentation, but they seemed to enjoy it, so wah. Natalie and I were driving back together — the other two members of our consortium had pulled rank because they have small children and needed to get home for trick-or-treating. I packed up my stuff and left the room, wondering where Natalie would be, since I hadn’t actually arranged this in advance. I found her standing at a table not far away, with her cell phone in her hand and a confused look on her face.
“I just got the strangest call from Sue,” she said. “Neguinho just died.”
Neguinho do Samba was a musician from Salvador da Bahia, in northeast Brazil, who is probably best known in these United States as being the founder of the samba-reggae movement, and one of the founders of OLODUM, the drum corps featured heavily on Paul Simon’s album The Rhythm of the Saints and in the video for Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us. (If you click through to the video, Neguinho is the guy in the green shirt with the white hat and long hair leading the drum corps.) More recently, Neguinho founded Banda Didá, the first all-female drum corps in Salvador, which focuses its work among lower-class, black women (Salvador being the most African of Brazilian cities).
Natalie met Neguinho and his partner Viviam in 2004 when she took a group to Salvador for a month long seminar, and has been working with Didá extensively since then. She brought them up for a residency a couple of years ago, and she’s been back to Salvador several times, always spending part of the trip with Neguinho and Viviam. She was planning another seminar for the summer that would work more exclusively with Didá (and I had already invited myself along).
I met Neguinho once — literally, “Hi, nicetameetcha” — and I was shocked, to say nothing of Natalie and her friend Sue, both of whom have cultivated a close working relationship with Didá over the years. Sue had been contacted by a friend who saw the ambulance pull up at Neguinho’s house in the Pelourinho and heard the news from Neguinho’s daughter, who was with him when he died, and she had called Natalie right after with little more information than that.
I wound up driving home so that Natalie could make and receive phone calls from various people — and there were various people calling from as far away as São Paulo.
Cut to …
Monday
I took Monday off, partly because of the conference, but mostly because Mom had asked me to go with her while Dad had eye surgery.
Backstory: a couple of weeks ago, I called Mom on a night when (unbeknownst to me), Dad was back in Columbus doing a training session for a group up there. She mentioned that she had had an ocular migraine.
“Oh, yes,” said I. “I’ve had those.”
Lemme ‘splain if you’re not familiar: a migraine is a constricting of the blood vessels in the head. The most common is the type that involves the constricting of blood vessels around the brain, which causes the massive pain that most people associate with migraines. However, it can also happen in the eye, which tends not to involve pain. Instead, you get a bright flashy light that devolves into a ring that looks like the “marching caterpillars” you get whenever you select something in Photoshop. The ring usually widens out–now, here’s the tricky bit. Until the migraine wears off (usually about an hour or so), you have only peripheral vision functioning, giving you the bizarre sensation of not seeing things that you’re looking directly at.
Over the course of this conversation, it transpired that she had been having these daily. “Have you seen the doctor?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “my GP is on vacation, but I’m going to see the eye doctor again.”
Anyway, the reason this is relevant is that Mom wanted me around on the day of the surgery in case she had another one and wasn’t able to drive. And, sure enough, while we were sitting at the house getting ready to leave for the surgery center, she had another one and Dad had to drive to his own surgery.
While we were waiting, I asked about the doctor visit. “Well, my GP is still on vacation, but my eye doctor wants me to get an MRI.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
So we went back to the surgery center and we waited. And waited. And waited. Dad’s surgery was scheduled for 2, and it was supposed to take an hour. At 4:05, Mom went to the front desk because no one had told us a bloody thing.
“Oh,” said the receptionist (who, I might add, had the sort of personality and work ethic that makes Amanda from Ugly Betty look like a superstar), “they’re in surgery now. The doctor is running late.”
When we finally got to see the doctor (4:30), he apologized and said that the surgeon who had booked the room in the morning had overrun his schedule by 2 hours. “They should have let you know that,” he said, “I gave them strict instructions.” — thus sending my opinion of the receptionist through the sub-basement.
We finally got out of there around 5:15, just in time to sit in rush hour traffic and take an hour to get them back home.
Tuesday and Wednesday
Tuesday morning I came in to work, started my e-mail, and realized that I wanted to leave again immediately.
I’m on a volunteer committee that seems to be as determined as possible to make things as complicated as humanly possible for no other reason than they can. Furthermore, I’m not really supposed to be running it — I agreed to be co-chair this year with the idea of easing in my replacement, but somehow it still seems like I’ve done all the work. So, there was that drama.
I’m also working on a project here at work that I’ve been co-opted into, that doesn’t particularly interest me, and that I’ve been dragging my feet on. I’d been asked to comment on a working document, and every time I open it up, it’s the closest I think I’ve ever come to what some guys refer to as “thinking of nothing.” I remind me of Steve from Coupling, trying to pick out sofa covers. “I almost had an opinion about that one.”
And the annoying keeps on coming. Budget cuts. Everyone is tense. People are getting laid off. If I don’t have someone coming into my office to ask me how to do something that’s not part of my job (“I know, but you’re so good at explaining things.”), I’ve got someone wanting to know what I know about who might get laid off (absolutely nothing), and the occasional student who wants to stop by and have a lengthy conversation about life, the universe, and everything. Normally I welcome all of this, but right now, I just can’t take it.
I’ve been working with my door closed a lot.
Thursday
Thursday continues much the same as Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m running another exhibit booth next weekend in Atlanta, and the person I’m supposed to be organizing it with … we’re on the same page. I think one of us is writing with charcoal, and the other is writing with one of those oversized clown pencils, though.
I finally escape from the office and get home with the intention of laying waste to the pork chops that I made Ray buy the other night. I just got my Cook’s Illustrated annual, and I started laying out the stuff to make crunchy pork chops (they’re yummy).
I had meant to call my parents on Wednesday night to see how everyone was doing, but Mom doesn’t like it when I call from the car (my therapist is in South Austin, and the drive home takes about 45 minutes — it’s a good time for long phone calls to anyone except them), even though my new car stereo is now bluetooth equipped, meaning that it’s hands free in the truest sense. I don’t even have to take my phone out of my pocket.
This was funny because when I called and Dad answered, I had the vent hood on the oven running and he asked if I was in the car. I asked how he was, and my very literal minded father answered the question: he’s fine, the bandages are off, etc. After about five minutes of the update on him, as I’m thinking the conversation is about to wind down, he says, “Your mother isn’t doing so well.”
“Why?” I ask. “She had the MRI … yesterday?”
“Yes,” he said. “It turns out she’s not having ocular migraines.”
“What is it?”
“Well, it seems that she’s had a stroke.”
?whatthefuck?
Long story … and, yes, this is a long story … short: she had a mini-stroke, and it has caused some damage to the part of her brain that controls the vision. They’re trying to devise ways of keeping the vision problems from happeneing — and I’m unclear about whether she’s having occular migraines that are caused by the damage, or whether it’s something else altogether. And apparently, as mini-strokes go, it was a mild one, and there is a possibility that she’ll regain function in the damaged part of her brain.
Needless to say, she’s freaked out. So am I.
By the time I got off the phone last night, I was no longer suspicious — I know for certain: the stars are just aligned badly. Everyone I know has had a spectacularly shitty month … and y’know what? It’s time for this shit to be over.
And that’s been my week. How was YOURS?
