I am sitting in the Sarasota airport B gates. This is the very same airport that the 9-11 terrorists flew out of. This morning we drove by the flight school where they trained.

Creepy.

The flights are extremely overbooked. I am considering giving up my seat for a free round trip ticket. I’ve heard reports from Detroit that it’s going to snow 13″ by Wednesday. Although I have to get back because a good friend (Jane_o_la’s husband) is sleeping on my couch. His dad died a few days ago and he’s coming back home. I was over at his parent’s house a few weeks ago. His dad always called me “Cinders”. I’m thinking about his voice when I walked out the door, “See ya later, Cinders”. As I have just experienced, you can’t really do or say anything to make it all better.

Sad and creepy.

The first two days of my stay here in sunny Fla. were rain soaked. I was okay with that since rain is better than snow. Yesterday was sunny and I took advantage of every second. I walked up and down the beach for hours and hours collecting rocks for my fish tank. Because of the storms, there were dead fish, starfish and birds littering the beach. I found a starfish that was unbroken and alive. I brought it inside and put it in a bowl. After a few hours it seemed like it felt better and was crawling around. I was trying to figure out a way to get it home and put it in my tank. My mom kept saying, “BAH! throw it back in the ocean”. But I knew if I threw it back in, it would just wash up on the beach again and dry up in the sun. Unknown to anyone but myself, this starfish was a way for me to put my karma right.

When I was about nine, we took a winter trip to Florida. I would go into the tourist shops and along with the shot glasses, magnets and collectable spoons,I was fascinated by the light orange conch shells, silver dollars, and red bumpy starfish. I asked the lady how they got the starfish. She said, all you have to do find a starfish, pour a bunch of salt on it and let it dry in the sun.

The place that we were staying at had shallow tide pools formed by solid brown rock and sand. I would squat for hours with my hands on me knees, looking at the small crabs and shells and the occasional fish. One day in my marine observations, I found a starfish. I was very excited. I don’t remember how, but I obtained an economy size bottle of Morton’s iodized salt. I ran back to the spot, found the creature and picked him up by one leg and held it up to the sun. His little sucker feet reached out from his underside trying to grab on to something solid that wasn’t there. I ran back from the beach to a small strip of grass, put it down and started to pour on mounds of salt. It soaked up all the salt and with in ten minutes, his little feet weren’t moving anymore.

At this point I became horrified.

This whole next paragraph was going to be about why I was horrified and how up until that point I hadn’t considered what I was doing really killing something because I just wanted the object of a dried starfish so bad. But instead, this is getting long, and it is now Tuesday morning. I’m going to stop. I’m drinking vitamin enhanced orange juice, trying to make peace with the mounds of white, wet, could snow outside of my window.

I’m having a hard time of it. Last night was the first night at home without Sid. In the middle of the night I woke up half asleep, wandered out into the dining room and grabbed my boot off the floor because somehow in my dream state, I thought it was Sid. Now, I have to get dressed to go see Harry and his mom. There was a viewing yesterday, and I think maybe today also. I don’t think I can go. But we’ll see….I hear that vitamin enhanced orange juice can work miracles.

I was just reading n2sing’s journal. She said she put up the fight club test for me….I’m not sure why, but since she did….I took it.

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What FIGHT CLUB character are you?

I’m at Detroit Metro waiting to get on a plane to Florida. I’m looking at all the people that are dressed in black, carrying leather brief cases, talking on cell phones. I’m painfully aware of how much I don’t look like that right now. My hair is uncombed, I have on no makeup and my allergies are acting up, so my face is breaking out. My head is killing me and I can’t seem to drink enough water.

I’m just sitting on the floor watching people buy Cinnabons at the Cinnabon kiosk in the middle of the Delta B gates in Detroit.

Jennifer picked me up at 11:30 yesterday morning. We went to the fish store because she said it would be good. The fish store is very womb like and calming. So we went and looked at the fish, and the coral and all the anemones. It was nice.

After that I still wasn’t ready for the vet, so we went to Pronto’s for something to eat. Jennifer said that we needed to go there because it was a “gay” happy place, and we needed some “gayness” in our day. She was right. They were playing obscure 80’s videos that I was trying to name before the title came up. We sat at the bar and ate sandwiches and drank a few drinks. I kept crying a little in random spurts. Jennifer said I better stop because the bartender would think she was breaking up with me. That made me smile and I grabbed onto her arm and through my tears started pleading in a loud voice, “Please don’t leave. You can’t do this to me!”

If your seeing a pattern here of me looking to my friend Jennifer for help and guidance yesterday, you are absolutely correct. I am so grateful that she was there to help me through things. She even took the night off of work. I don’t think I would have handled things well at all if she were not there with me.

The vet closed at six, and after Pronto’s, it was five. So I had to go. When we walked in the door, the first thing they handed me was a paper to sign about how I wanted Sid cremated. All of my resolve to be stoic and strong flew out the window. I was in tears again. I looked at Jennifer. She answered for me. Actually, every question asked of me from that point forward, I would be in tears, and Jennifer would answer for me. I signed the paper.

We went into the room the office manager was waiting for me. At the start of this whole sad fiasco, I was furious, blaming them for doing this to my cat. Telling them that I should not have to bear the burden of the entire responsibility since it was their treatment that caused all of this in the first place. She was expecting to talk to me about the bill, but when she saw my condition, she said “we can talk about this later” and left.

They brought Sid in on a little gray fuzzy blanket and gave me some time with her. It was so hard. I just felt that if I picked her up, ran out the door and took her home, she could be okay. I scratched her head and she purred. The vet and the assistant came back in. Since I was still in stage one of the grieving process, denial, I started saying things like, “Isn’t there any other way?”, “are you sure I have to do this”, “Do I really have to do this?”. Jennifer, the vet and the assistant said that I did. They gave me a few more minutes with Sid. I picked her up and held her in my arms.

The vet and the assistant came back in the room and asked me if I wanted to stay while they gave her the injection. I didn’t think I could stay, but I didn’t want to leave her either. I turned to the assistant and through my tears, asked if she would take care of Sid. She assured me that she would. Jennifer said that she would stay also. So I kissed Sid on the head and went to the car. Ten minutes later, Jennifer came out.

Now I am at the airport going to Florida to be with my parents. This trip had been planed for over a month. I thought about canceling, but getting away for a few days might be good.

Thank you everyone for your calls and emails. I just have been laying low….please don’t take it personally.

I have to put my cat to sleep. The doctor said that her liver is not getting any better and she would probably be in the hospital for the next two weeks which at the minium would be fourteen hundred dollars. She told me if she did survive, there is a strong chance of her having to take insulin shots for the rest of her life.

I feel like crap. I feel like if Buddah was giving out grade for my life handling skills for the last few days, I would have gotten an F-. But really, I know that isn’t true. But somehow I feel if I’m really hard on myself, feel guilty and take the blame, things would be better.

My friend Jennifer just called. She took the night off of work to come over and help me. That made me cry harder. My friend Alma is coming over too. Maybe Buddah wouldn’t have given me such a bad grade. I guess I have to be doing a little bit right to have friends that would be there for me like that.

I was with Sid every day for the last eight years.

The cat in the hospital is Sid….I have two. I called this morning and she is doing the same. They said she probably has feline diabetes. That she probably had it all along, but the reaction from the shot brought it on full force. I think by the end of the day I will know if I have to put her to sleep or not. But the way things look, I think I will have to.

I feel very crummy and wish my mom was here to pet my head and say everything is okay. But not my actual mom, another person that was nice and would do that for me.

I am supposed to be finishing up a cd project for a friend and leaving for class in ten minutes. I had a migrane last night, and am randomly bursting into tears.

The first part of this day sucks.

I was told by my adoring fans….okay adoring fan….maybe two adoring fans…..that if I don’t start updating on a more regular basis, I will loose my peeps.

Please peeps….don’t leave.

Jane_o_la told me just write “this day was great”, or “this day sucked”. That would be enough for her.

My cat is is the hospital. She had a reaction to a cortizone shot that they gave her for itching. She wasn’t eating and just laying there. I should have brought her in sooner, but I thought she was getting better.

Now they are telling me she might not live.

This day sucked.

This excerpt was sent to me by a friend. We laughed because we had an eerily similar conversation (me being Terry and him being Gene) a few days before he found this. I have talked to many guys on this subject and they have expressed to me that the views below are extreme, and not the norm. So, at first, my opinions seemed to be validated. But then, my jaded, toughened, cynical cindigo came out and said….”well, if that really is the truth, and they told you so…..wouldn’t that pretty much ruin any chances of them ever getting into your pants?” . Hummmm….yeah, so why would they tell the truth. Not ever one is Gene Simmons don’t ya know.

I’m torn. On one hand, although I believe this bravado to be real, I think that the intensity is marked for a minority (maybe slightly higher) of men. On the other hand, maybe I am not as jaded or wise in the ways of men as I thought. Maybe it’s all true and I will really have to devote all of my waking hours to becoming a full fledged lesbian. Sensible shoes, dream catchers, wolf sweatshirts…..watch out girls here I come.

So I’m asking for the comments of men. Please tell the truth, and always remember, you can post anonymously. What do you think about this?

February 6, 2002 — THE quiet and high-minded National Public Radio airwaves were shattered earlier this week by a name-calling confrontation between - of all people - tongue-waggling KISS frontman Gene Simmons and soft-spoken interviewer Terry Gross.

Simmons, a guest on Gross’s show, “Fresh Air,” called her “boring.” And Gross called Simmons “obnoxious.”

No one could remember the kind of dust-up that reminded fans more of the Howard Stern show

“The notion is if you’re going to welcome me with open arms you also have to welcome me with open legs,” said Simmons, was on the show to promote his new book, “KISS and Make-Up.”

“That’s a really obnoxious thing to say,” Gross fired back.

“No, it’s not. Why should I say something behind your back that I can’t tell you to your face?” said Simmons.

The interview was apparently so controversial that NPR has declined to make it available on its Website where it posts at least portions of nearly all other interviews that appear on “Fresh Air,” one of its most popular daily shows.

At one point, Gross asked Simmons about his “studded codpiece.”

“It holds my manhood, otherwise it would be too much for you to take,” Simmons said. “You’d have to put the book down and confront life.”

The conversation continued:

Gross: Has it come to this? Is this the only way you can talk to a woman, with that shtick?

Simmons: Let me ask you something - why is it shtick when all women have ever wanted since we crawled out of caves is, ‘Why can’t a man just tell me the truth and speak to me plainly?’ So if I do that, you can’t have it both ways.

Gross: So you really have no sense of humor about this, do you?

Simmons: I was going to suggest you get outside of the musty place where you can count the dust particles falling around you and get out into the world and see what everybody else is doing.

Gross: Having sex with you?

Simmons: Well, if you choose but you’d have to stand in line.

Gross: OK, well we since you keep bringing this up . . . You write that you’ve had 4,600 sexual liaisons.”

Simmons: You’re supposed to say ‘so far.’

Gross: “So far. To you this will be asking the obvious, but why have you wanted so many encounters?”

Simmons: “M-A-N, the notion is plain.”

Gross: “I’d like to think the personality you presented on our show today is a persona that you’ve affected as a member of KISS, but that you’re not nearly as obnoxious when you’re at home or with friends.”

Simmons: “Fair enough, and I’d like to think that the boring lady who’s talking to me now is a lot sexier and more interesting than the one’s who’s doing NPR, studious and reserved.”

Gross could not be reached yesterday for comment.

usually I don’t like or most of the time even read forwarded emails, but, this one made me crack a smile….so in liu of the crazy, manical, ranting post I was going to put up…..

_________________________________________

to cheer everybody with a bad day up. If you ever think you are having a bad day!!!

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to Laughline, who was sponsoring a “worst job experience” contest. Needless to say, she won.
_____________________________________________________________________

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last
week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not sobad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wetsuit. This time of year, the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of s#*t! sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps down to the diver through a garden hose, is taped to the air hose.

Now, this sounds like a damn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do when I get to the bottom and start working is I take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my ass started to itch. So, of course,I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony, I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my ass was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the dive supervisor
of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were
unclear due to the fact that he, along with 5 other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make 3 agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could reach the decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my ass as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t shit for 2 days because my asshole was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your ass.

Bill S

When I have too much to say, I overload and end up saying nothing. I’ve been getting phone calls from friends and telemarketers. Mostly from friends. Sometimes I answer. Sometimes I don’t.

It’s cold outside, getting dark. The heater kicks on. I feel like a frozen lake. I feel like a black piece of bumper fallen from an SUV. I’m laying on the pavement after an accident next to orange and white chunks of glass. I’m looking up at the night sky, at the pale and looming face of the orphaned moon. I’m thinking that even though the stars look close, they are not. It seems that all the moon has to do is shout “Hello over there!” to the many points of light. It remains silent because it knows that the actual distance could be millions of miles. The moon is smart and reserves his voice for the satelites.

I feel like a stranger, but a nice stranger at least.

Sometimes I look in the mirror, I think I am not the person that I was intended to be. That description isn’t quite right. Have you ever looked into the face of the guy selling flowers on the expressway and could see, just for a second, what he would look like as the head of a fortune 500 company. The woman waiting in line at Target. She’s 60 pounds overweight with unkept hair and grey sweat pants. She turns to pick up a magazine and you see how it could be that she is a gymnist or a perfectly coordinated hostess in a restraunt.

I have an acquaintance that is paralyzed. Sometimes when I talk to him I almost get vertigo because in him there is a very strong halo of the mobile person he should be…..that’s not a good description either. Not just mobile but the life he would have had, who his girlfriend would have been, the car he would have chosen to drive….the things that we tell ourselves don’t define us.

When I look at myself I know that circumstances and choices have formed me into the container that I am today. But there’s something else that I see, and it’s frustrating because I see it with my fingers and I don’t have words to describe it. I don’t know if it’s an observation to notice, to act upon, to change…it’s just this strange feeling of shifting. Like riding snow down a steep but slowly melting hill. Peaceful yet unnerving all at the same time. Confusing and uncomfortable.

So I guess the first wave of results are coming in from the January Project.

I just haven’t had anything to say lately…

Actually, I still don’t…..and now, I’m gonna say it.

I’m watching COPS. There’s a naked man in a park covered in blood walking around shouting at people. Five cops sprayed him with pepper spray. He ran through them and punched a hole in a wooden fence. Can you believe that this is the best thing on television at this moment.

I’m eating leftover nachos out of a white Styrofoam box.

I’m reading a book called Sputnik Sweetheart. I’ve only read the first fifteen pages, but I like it already. Here, I’ll give you an excerpt from the book jacket:

“The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments-until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisiticated businesswoman.”

To fall in love once and for all….so many mixed feelings on this subject.

Before the first chapter starts is this:

SPUTNIK

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first man-made satelite, Sputnik 1, from the Baikanor Space Center in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 58 centimeters in diameter, weighed 83.6 kilograms and orbited the earth in 96 minutes and 12 seconds.
On November 3 of the same year, Sputnik II was successfully launched, with the dog Laika aboard. Laika became the first living being to leave the earth’s atmosphere, but the satellite was never recovered, and Laika ended up sacrificed for the sake of biological research in space.
-From The Complete Chronicle of World History

I had one dream that lasted all night. A small brown and white dog forever staring out the window of a small satelite into the darkness of space.

I am one month into the January project. This is project Cindigo. I have given myself from Jan 2002 to Jan 2003 to redirect the tornado winds of my existence.