My mother and I sit for hours just chit chatting. Laughing a lot. The older they get, the less filter. Like wearing a bra, fuck it. TJ just visited for dance day, so funny and so quick, watching us. I must be a very old soul, says TJ, since as far as she's concerned my resting state has been"fuck it" for as long as she can remember. They make me giggle like nobody else except that one suffering fucker in south buffalo, whose "mouth feel" is the current favorite family quip. It just fits so many situations, right?! 🤣 🤣
We talk around and around and around it all. Trauma, my job, his job, how they draw the same kinds of people who feel at home in proximity to dying (him) or craycray (me), how dying and alive and craycray are the human essentials, underpinning every seemingly stupid ass other thing. I explain what "scope of practice" means, technically means but also in practical terms how it means "helpless" as often as it means "empowered to", how fluid that really is, how stingy or generous a person can be with their power(s), how easily hurt all the people are in this complex equation. How other ways are needed to offset the ways that equation kills us - like laughing, the borderline cruel hilarity that lives inside these professions, as untranslatable as my mother herself. I explain the education pipeline, from kid with an aid's job to high end provider, maybe sojourns as EMTs or CHWs or CASAC survivors/grads, with me's at intervals throughout for them all, crossing and recrossing paths in different roles and life stages. What job did Nebraska steal again? Interventions of empathy. (Pregnant pause.) 🤣🤣🤣 🤣 Oh my god, that IS funny. "Gin, you gotta write this shit down!" I do Ma, nearly every day, but how do I capture the hilarity of ivy league guys whose privilege means people have laughed at their unfunny jokes all their lives - can you imagine how fucked up that makes your reality?? Physicians might, as a rule, be that kind of not funny - yikes. "Remember when he said trying stand-up was on his bucket list?" 🤣🤣 Yea, Ears ruined that golden opportunity, I was ready to find an open mic THAT DAY, but Ears is kind, "You really don't want to do that, man." 🤣🤣 What would nurse open mic look like? You really whizzed that thing 🤣🤣.
"Where IS he?", asks mom, holding up her hands in the honeycrisp apples pose. Probably really busy. "Well, he is a hound." That's not what I meant 🤣, but if he is at this very moment banging all of West Seneca blowing off steam, trust me, he deserves to. "It's a shame he's scared of you, I just wanted to see him again, ya know, alive."
I would slap down the afraid of me thing again (🤷🏻♀️ dunno), but I can see she is afraid. Of all the dying and of time. Of course they would never see each other again, and that wasn't up to her in the first place, and maybe this will be her last summer, or his, or mine. Any of us, for all the reasons and ways we just might snuff out. That's why ya gotta keep laughing, why she wants to.
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| she is good for me - I'm holding weight, heart steadying, even through the (perfectly normal) grief of losing a friend like that - even though all my damn kids have moved into my fuckhut and we are stuck in the city 🙄 - still, little by little, I mend |
How does one read the astral omens on a day that brings no new news? No planets changing signs or directions, no luminaries forming angles — it's like rolling blank dice. They show the dots you want them to show. What dots would help you win? What experience do you want to have? The sky is a blank page; the day is unwritten.
wishing well - cheyenne marie mize - from the girls dancing playlist (girls of color bootyshake😏)
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