Pssssssssssssst!!!!

[Whispered:] Hey guys. Over here. Shhhh. I don't want Blogger to hear. He's kind of sensitive these days, what with all the exporting and stuff he's been forced to do. I don't want to aggrivate him any further. But, that being said...

I’m happy to announce that nearly all the bruising and edema, caused by the recent html-based operations going on back here, has finally resolved. (Unfortunately, there’s still some chafing.) To celebrate, I’ve baked you all a triple crème brie with some brown sugar and pinenuts on top and set it out with some nice crackers. And there’s champagne! So, without further adieu, come on over to check out my new do and my new digs!

Please adjust your links to the new location: lacubanagringa.com

Perhaps just a little high-dose Ibuprofen will do...

Just to keep you informed, Blog and I are doing well in the post-anesthesia care unit. Surgery went well…but we’re still a bit hazy from all the nipping and tucking and htmling…and I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for us to take the bandages off quite yet. Shouldn’t be too much longer, though. In the meantime, we’ll carry on with business as usual around here until the big reveal.

And for my loyal seven readers, be prepared to change web addresses for this here No Method, Just Madness is movin’ to a new house! Exciting times! Will definitely keep you in the loop!

The Family Jewels

Daddio’s nuptuals are quickly approaching. He and La Italiana want a small, humble wedding. And to help add that extra personal touch, The Brit and I are going to contribute. He’ll be the wedding photographer (he did a great job at one of my good friends’ weddings in Mexico) and I’ll be making the bride’s bouquet. I’m also in charge of decorating the banister to the staircase down which La Italiana will be making her fashionably late appearance. Me, faux tafetta and tool are about to become deeply involved like we've never been before. (Well, except for that one halloween where I was Like A Virgin.)

In any event, Daddio sent me an email the other day regarding our large, extended family, some of whom I last met when I was a child:

Dear Daughter -

I don't know if I told you this, but my aunt Amelia, her husband, Raynaldo, and my cousin Tuto will be joining us at the wedding. I wanted to send you a picture of Amelia so that you would recognize her in case I didn't get a chance to introduce you first.

She is a rather demure and plain looking person as you will see by her picture.

Love, Dad

Then he attached the following photo:

To which I replied:

Daddio -

It’s quite clear to whom we can attribute the swell looks in the family.

I can’t wait to tuck myself into one of her inviting wrinkles and take a drag off of her cigar.

Love,
LCG

Hopefully we won' t have much post-op pain

Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming changes on this site. With help from my very engineery and technologically superior Gringito Mio, my blog is going under the knife. In celebration of our six month blogiversary, Blog and I decided she’d get a brow lift and a jowl tuck. I rallied for the liposuction, but Blog here thought that having a big ass builds character…so she vetoed the idea. Gawd, she can be such a bitch.

In all seriousness, there are some serious html shenanigans and hullabaloo goings on back here behind the curtain. And, if we press all the right keys, we’ll have a new look and even a new, exciting masthead…with a real life picture of an identifiable part of my person!! For those of you who follow along here regularly (and I think there are seven of you now), you’re probably thinking that part might be my ass. You’re mistaken. (Though not mistaken for thinking I actually considered it!) (I did.) (But even I have standards of decency.) (Ha!)

Keep your fingers crossed that we don’t somehow manage to html ourselves a big, red, blinking delete button!

Jetlagged? Or just the usual tomfoolery?

We were stopped at a red light when a slightly disheveled woman crossed the street using the crosswalk just in front of my car. She looked to be young, mid-thirties maybe, and was carrying a tattered, balled-up, wooly blanket. It struck me as odd because she was carrying it much in the same way one might carry a swaddled infant, or a full porcelain punch bowl, across a room.

“Hmm, that looks a bit peculiar, don’t you think?”

The Brit brought his head forward off of the headrest in my front passenger seat and opened one eye to look, first at me and then at the woman. Having just arrived back from his two-week business trip the day before, his body was still on China time.

“What do you suppose she’s carrying in there? A baby?”

He opened his other eye. “Hmm. That…or maybe a small dog. [Pause.] Or a great big bunch of vegetables.”

Cigarettes & Alcohol

No one was coming for his heart or his liver, and it was clear why. No sooner had we taken a scalpel to the skin over his abdomen…my attending starting down by the pubis while I started from up under the xiphoid…we met at the navel…we got through the even poorer protoplasm below it and entered into his peritoneum to find a belly full of ascites fluid. His bowels, thin, pale and filled with air and succus, bobbed up to the surface of the yellow fluid. I placed a suction device deep into his abdomen and watched as the fluid drained out, much like it would from a bathtub with the drain pulled. Liters were drained and what remained were the sad contents of his jaundiced abdomen. The now visible liver did not glisten as expected, and it certainly wasn’t its usual color. It was cobblestoned and knobby, cirrhotic, tortured by this man’s very close and very daily relationship with alcohol. No. We wouldn’t be touching that. Or his pancreas, which was nearly calcified through and through likely from several bouts of alcoholic pancreatitis. His blood vessels, conduits which should be smooth and elastic, were crunchy...hardened by his slavery to cigarettes. Attempts to cannulate them revealed rinds and rinds of yellow, cheesy, calcified atheroschlerotic plaque, filling in the lumen, obstructing blood flow. It was a wonder this man’s legs were getting any blood at all.

We were only there for his kidneys. Kidneys that were risky to take, having come from someone in such poor shape. Kidneys that someone in a nearby state desperately needed. Kidneys that this man’s wife had graciously signed the consent form to donate despite the grief she must have been feeling after loosing a husband who, just three weeks prior, had decided to give up both cigarettes and alcohol. A hypertensive hemorrhagic stroke robbed him of his chance to try out his new life. He was only 51.

Far too young if you ask me.

I'll try to get through this without throwing up a third time

Get your barf bags ready for the second installment of Teenage Turmoil…

March 22, 1991

Dear Diary -

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, OH MY GOSH!!!! You will never believe what happened today at school. Before I tell you, I have to say it was the best day I have had since the beginning of this quarter!

Consider that, prior to this, my best day ever was the day I got a new pair of pink and white British Knight sneakers, that should put things into perspective for you.

Anyways, I’ll tell you now. Oooh, I’m getting butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it. Ok. Let me calm down...

God help me if I ever have a daughter who doesn’t go straight from 8 years of age to 24. Because if I have to deal with this kind of silliness, I fear there will be a lot of eye rolling and vomiting. On my part.

Alright. At the way beginning of the school day when I first walked into school, this little short kid came up to ask me if I would go out with Peter.

Yep…this is back when boys knew how to really charm a lady. They’d send a messenger. Or, alternatively, pass a note in class that said:

Do you like me?
 Yes
 No
Hope so.
Love, Peter

The men of my age group today could really learn from the 13 year olds of my past. They were truly well versed at the art of wooing.

And I said “Why, did he ask you to ask me?” And he said yes. Then I said “Well, if he really wanted to go out with me he would ask me himself.” So then the boy said ok and then left and I went to my first and second period.

Nice. Check me OUT! I was girly (and vomitously so) back then, but at least I had balls. Or, descended ovaries, rather. Whatever.

Then, during the break, I was so nervous and I didn’t know what to say if he asked me so Miss Legs For Miles and I and Heidi went walking around. Then we arrived at the lockers just as the bell rang. So that was a relief.

I know, ‘cause PHEW! I might have, like, totally passed out or whatever if he’d actually asked me out. Totally. Like, for real.

Then we went to English. (Oh and by the way during break Shauna pulled me aside and said “I wanted to tell you this before you found it out the wrong way from someone else. I went up to Peter and asked him if he was going to ask you out and he said he was. And I said ‘Good, because I want to be there when she rejects you.’ I meant to say ‘IF she rejects you.’ I’m sorry! Because now he’s mad.”)

Eww. I just threw up in my mouth a little from how sooo 90210, The Early Years this is. Gawd!

Ok, anyways, Paul looked mad and I have English with him so that was kind of bad. I had such a bad stomach ache. But I lived.

Ya don’t say.

Then next came math. And I have that class with him too. In that class (Shauna is in it too) Shauna apologized to Peter about saying that. And he still looked mad.

Lunch was next. I went to my locker and met everyone there then we all went to the lunch area and…ate! Then when we all finished, we went to the PE area because there was a basketball game between the teachers and students. But when we got there and we’d already watched part of the game I had to go to the bathroom. So Miss LFM, Heidi and I departed from the group and went to the “little girls room.”

Ahh yes…the Must Pee In A Pack Syndrome. I remember this. It is widely known in the scientific community that the females' adolescent urethral sphincter can only be coaxed into relaxation, so as to allow micturition, while in the presence of at least two other female friends. Something occurs in the early twenties…oh, I don’t know, something called Growing Up, that eradicates this Syndrome.

Then since lunch was almost over and I wanted to go find Paul because I wanted to tell him that I didn’t tell Shauna to say that we went to the lockers. And as usual he was there with all his friends. So I said “Peter, I didn’t want or tell Shauna to say what she said.” And he said “Oh that’s okay don’t worry about it.”

Among the many things that make me want to hurl about this embarrassingly long play-by-play of the faux mating rituals I participated in as an adolescent, is the pure disdain I seemed to have had at the time for proper punctuation. Dude, seriously. Where are the commas? (I’m sure that when I’m re-reading this blog when I’m 80, I’ll be like, “Dude. What's with all the sentence fragments?”)

So then the bell rang and Shauna and Lana showed up. And ofcourse they were asking Peter if he was going to ask me out. And I didn’t hear him all the way but I think he said something like “The girl hates me.” And Shauna and Lana were saying “No, no, she told us she was seriously considering it.” And Peter didn’t say anything, he just kept nodding or something like that. So I just turned around and said “Yes, I am considering it!”

[Leans over to barf in emesis basin strategically placed an arms length away in anticipation of the nausea this diary entry would elicit.]

And Peter looked at me kind of shocked and said “You…you are?”

So I smiled and then took my books out of the locker and put them in my book bag. Then I was just standing there waiting for Shauna who was still pestering Peter (we had next period together so that’s why I was waiting). So then finally Paul just looked at me and said “Will you go out with me?” And I said “Let me think about it over the weekend ok?” And he said “Ok.” And then we went to our separate classes.

Let me think about it? After all that, after all the build up and the butterflies and the barfing (oh, wait, that was just now, not then), I said Let Me Think About It??? What a dweeb.

Then at the end of the day he waited up for me and we walked to the bus together (but we ride separate buses).

So it was a short walk. Regardless, I’m sure, in my adolescent peabrain, I’d already decided I wanted to have twelve of his blue green eyed babies by the end of it.

Exciting day wasn’t it? I think the answer I’m going to give him is quite obvious, don’t you?

[Barfs again. Then dry heaves for a while.]