The end.

When I started this blog semi-anonymously, I had two very good reasons (neither of which you'll find documented here, as I was at blog-city then). First, I was going to be forced to face my estranged father at my sister's wedding and I was having a colossal meltdown. Second, because my husband's career had taken us to a horrid little town full of people I didn't much want anything to do with, and I was pretty much hating life. So I figured that I could thin out the bitching and moaning I was subjecting my sister and my husband to by posting it in semi-humorous rants on the Internet instead.

It kind of worked, and things were lively enough over here that it was worth keeping going.

Fast forward to now; I've got under-my-real-name content going on another blog, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. I'm back in LA and have successfully avoided my father for years. The only thing I have to bitch about and don't want to do so publicly is the huge fibromyalgia flare-up that currently has me on disability.

And let's be honest - I don't have that many suitable-for-print worthwhile thoughts per day. If those are all going to my "real" blog, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, and I'm saving all my non-public thoughts for here, this blog will look like:

Ow! My leg hurts.

I can't put any weight on my feet today!

I have this stripe of pain that starts at my waist, goes through some internal organs, circles around to cause a striped headache and then down to the waist in the back. Weird, huh?

Extremely shaky today and my eyeball hurts.


You get the idea. So I think it's time to say farewell to my alter ego Miss Buttercup. If you haven't already got my real contact info and I "know" you (e.g., we read each other's blogs or we've talked in the comments) just shoot me an email at mercybuttercup at gmail dot com and I'll hook you up. If you're a lurker I never got to know, thanks for reading (actually, whatever your status, thanks for reading)!

OK, let's get this party started!

Hey - I'm back! But is anyone else? Let's try some conversation starters.


1. The boy. He turned four last week! And apparently he's decided what he wants to be when he grows up: some sort of electro-folk gloomy dude.

We have also reached the age of awesome conversations about butts. Why, here's one from just tonight. He had taken on the chore of wiping himself, and then suddenly decided he didn't want to do it anymore. When he requested my help, I told him to do it himself. When he refused, I asked why.

"Because... because every time I do it, I touch my bottom!"

"You... uh... OK, well, honey, that's kind of the point. You're supposed to touch it."

In the most insulted, appalled tone imaginable: "When there's POOP on it?"

And suddenly, between us, I did find that the whole process was a tad to defend. I came up with some crap about everyone having to wipe theirs and how it wouldn't be fair to ask some person to have to wipe TWO butts - yeah, I know, I was freestylin' and it worked.

2. Stupid health stuff. I have now been through every single drug used for fibro with no benefits to speak of (lots of side effects though). The last one, Cymbalta, enhanced a tremor I'd been having so drastically that I asked my Dr. about it (I'd just assumed it was a fibro symptom) and he emailed me back with those words every girl longs to hear, "I'm referring you to a neurologist immediately." She, in turn, has discovered many things to rule out, and possibly some nerve damage in my leg, which wasn't even on my radar as a problem.

3. Awesome people. My Mysterious Benefactor, mentioned in the previous post, came through, and I can now be a part-time employee for six months. I used to think I would recover during this time, but seeing how run ragged I still am, I think it may be a graceful road to some sort of disability.

4. Awesome TV. Some of you will remember that I love - far beyond the measure by which I have loved any other televised event - Pushing Daisies. It's back and man, every time I think "that was the best thing that EVER happened on television!" the next week proves me wrong.

Very careful readers will remember my inappropriate crush on the show's star, the 14-damn-years-younger-than-I Lee Pace (it may help to provide context if I tell you I've only ever dated way older men, so -14 seems more like -25, which is gross, and also I have never in my life dated anyone under 30, so I'm not even sure they're human) (it may also help if I tell you that while all that is in fact true, I'm just playing...this doesn't actually bother me).

But this week, it came close to actually bothering me. You see, the show had contrived to dress Mr. Pace in some garb, um... a uniform of sorts... a costume that did not mesh neatly with thoughts I was having, can we say that?

Fortunately, I found an interview over at My New Plaid Pants with the creator of Pushing Daisies (and everything else that is good and right on TV), Bryan Fuller. The brief but illuminating dialog that was such a help to me:

JA: Lee Pace dressed as a priest. I don't really have ... any question here... moving on...

BF: It is a recipe for excommunication.

So it's not so much that I feel like less of a terrible person; it's the comfort of knowing there are other, equally terrible people just like me out there.

Where I've been.

Not happy, generally, for several reasons.

My great plan to go gung-ho on my health problems has resulted in exactly what I feared it might - I found helpful doctors, they tried every treatment known to mankind, and nothing helped. Also, some things made things worse. I haven't been below a 7 on the pain scale for months - but I get euphoric when I hit 7, because it's SO much better than 8.

Not helping this is that I'm stuck at a low-paying job working for a sexist jackass who doesn't give any paid time off to speak of, making it almost impossible to look for a better job because the place is 35 miles in the opposite direction of civilization and I can't afford half-days off work. I can't even afford to do the long-term things my doctors recommend for more or less the same reason.

My husband, as you may recall, has taken a job in another time zone. So of course, I miss him, and I'm also left to deal with everything here, including our son, who is having such behavioral problems he almost got kicked out of preschool a week or two ago. My schedule is so tight that I panic when I need to stop at a gas station.

Also, politics are pissing me off. I should never be allowed to follow politics, because I go from completely ignoring them to losing weeks' worth of sleep reading every word on every candidate's website. And what would be best, right here, is if I don't say another word about this subject.

So all this is why I haven't been much into talking.

BUT! I have a Mysterious Benefactor. Well, not that mysterious, *I* know who he is. A person of our acquaintance recently made what is apparently a lot of money in ye olde show business, and in the kind of heartwarming story that never actually happens, wishes to use that money to help people he knows who need it. It's not the sort of money that will change our lives forever, but it'll take the pressure off for a limited period of time, and right now that is looking like a goddamn miracle. So... watch this space?

A heartwarming Christmas story

I just noticed I've not been back here in so long that the URL got bumped out of my autofill. This is mainly because I'm just sick and overextended and that's not so much entertaining to talk about.

Some comment I read on a blog somewhere reminded me of this unseasonal story about my estranged father. He is, as regular readers may have gathered, a loathsome excuse for a human being, and probably the least offensive thing about him is that he is the whitest combover dude alive and he claims to be black. Not in a genealogy way, just in a "wouldn't it be hilarious to be black?" way. He and his wife have assigned themselves both rap names and "rasta" names. It's quite gross, but as I said, it's one of his finer qualities so at a certain point you lose the energy to argue about it. Usually.

One Christmas he had gotten a special tree-topper in Brazil. The rest of the tree was decorated, and with great ceremony he took it out of its box.

Me: No. You cannot put that on the tree.
He: It's an angel. I had it made specially.
Me: Are you kidding me? It's a mammy doll!
He: It's an angel. See? Wings.
Me: It's a mammy doll. See? Everything but the wings.

This continued predictably for several minutes, until finally I, still in high dudgeon and yet at the same time giving up, said the following sentence:

"OK, well, you'd just better hope no OTHER black people come over."

Stop. Rewind.

"...no OTHER black people..."

I stopped to process that and then fled the premises with an "Oh my god, I have got to stop hanging around you people."

(I do not believe that my use of "you people" was racist in this case.)

Have I mentioned that my inlaws are awesome? And now at the holidays, we just hang out and eat and have pleasant and hilarious conversations? One of the best things about marriage is a second shot at a tolerable family, you know, if you happen to be in need of such a thing.

One adorable thing followed by three not-so-fun facts.

I think we can all agree that this child is extremely cute. Yes?

Less cute:

I got a big ol' shot of painkillers on Wednesday and it did exactly nothing.

I am following that up with the sort of pills you can get good money for on the street, in increasingly large doses, and they too are doing exactly nothing.

And: If you judge whether a person is disabled or not by whether he or she has a permanent blue card to hang in his or her vehicle, I've just been declared a disabled person. This is freaking me out in a number of ways, although really it's just the answer to the question "You often cannot get from your car to a building, THEREFORE:" I feel as if I should look more disabled or something. Moronic, yes, but this is the brain I was born with.

All in all, things are kinda blowing, and yet I have that cute kid up there... so, who's complaining?

Tourism in your own city, and more.

Mostly because of the situation in the post below, I did not have a very pleasant week. It was salvaged from being a crawl-into-bed-and-never-come-out week by the fact that, through different channels, I fell back into touch with no fewer than three people I'd really been missing, one of whom I had wholeheartedly believed would never speak to me again because of a stupid misunderstanding. So that's pretty good, yeah? Except I was still feeling run over by a truck.

So Mr. B. decided to take me somewhere I can't believe I've never been, Galco's Soda Pop Stop. As some of you who have hung out with me on certain defunct forums will know, I'm sort of obsessive about odd soda flavors, and more so about finding the exactly perfect version of standard flavors such as cream soda and root beer. This is a whole store full of almost nothing but soda (also candy and, um, meat), all in glass bottles even. I stocked up on a few old favorites and bought a couple things I hadn't tried before, the most exciting find being a pineapple soda that does not contain ester of wood resin, an ingredient I consider my single weirdest food allergy. I considered but passed up for the time being the mint julep and rose petal flavors (the website suggests you send a dozen rose sodas to your beloved, which is adorable), but hey, there's always next time!

(Note to Keith: Despite my dislike of coffee and coffee-flavored things, a certain scene from one of your books always stuck with me, as a soda person. So I bought a Manhattan Special for Mr. B. Now I just have to make him drink it.)

The next thing we did was go to LA's newest and most oversized outdoor shopping mall, The Americana at Brand. As you may know, for someone who can lean toward the crunchy-granola lifestyle in some ways, I adore artificial things perhaps even more, so I have no ethical problem with the idyllic-fake-city concept in general; the fountain that gives periodic water shows is spectacular, there's a playground in the middle, and - they've hung goddamn chandeliers over the streets, you guys. Liberace would be proud. The shopping? Seemed overpriced, but there was a Barnes & Noble so I never really got to the rest of it.

Sadly, even though we had carefully planned our trip so that I wouldn't be on my feet for more than a few minutes at any one time, and kept as many of those minutes as possible on grass or carpet, my lower half gave out on me in a big way, and it's just now that I can walk around the apartment a little without actually crying. I've got an appointment with my doctor on Wednesday and am going to request that we move as aggressively as possible on trying to deal with this, because it's getting really bad, really fast.

So that's my lopsided week. How was yours?

In case you were wondering.

I believe I have alluded briefly here and there to my working in what one might consider less-than-fair conditions.

A major part of this is that we have different policies for male and female employees. We always sort of thought this was a coincidence - that my boss was making different decisions about different people and it just HAPPENED to fall along gender lines.

Yesterday, when called upon a particularly egregious example (women with kids in school can't ever work from home because we "don't have good environments for it," but two dudes with small children at home were just hired to telecommute), he informed us that this was reasonable because "men are better at compartmentalizing their time that women are." He was dead serious.

Two things I hate more than almost anything: confrontation and job-hunting.

I think both are in my future.