Hi Darling Ones,

Even before the fascists regained control of our country (which wasn’t so hot before), I vowed I would spend 2025 noticing and celebrating happiness.

This is a project I’ve been half-assedly attempting since the triple whammy of my dad’s death, The Stroke, and the end of my 24-year friendship with BFK all in the span of 11 months. I had, and have, a lot of reasons to wallow in woe is me.

To be fair, after this week we ALL have a lot of reasons to wallow. I need to say that because lots of people really want to win The Suffering Olympics and tell me how much sadder/rougher/whathaveyou their life is. I refuse to participate. Everyone’s fighting a hard battle and all that. Plus, I don’t think you get a trophy upon death for having suffered the most. If you do, you can find me in the afterlife and brag about your trophy.

One of things that I’ve noticed since BFK broke up with me is how much I allowed her energy to impact mine. It sounds woo woo, but hear me out. BFK had a lot of misery in her life some real and some trumped up for attention’s sake. I carried a lot of her anger and sadness in solidarity, and it was exhausting, but I did it because I love her. I will do that for everyone I love. It’s part of being human. However, it’s frustrating to see someone miserable for years and years and refusing to do anything about it. Part of the reason BFK dumped me is that I told her she needed to do something different to change that. Oops.

As my friend EM said, nobody wants to hear they’re in charge of their own happiness. Another thing I need to say: mental health and neurodivergence makes happiness more difficult for some. I know!

The worst part about writing on the internet is people think if you don’t mention every fucking situation then you are ignorant of those things. It’s hard to cover all the bases in one simple blog post.

It was not my plan to have this week filled with small happy things, but it happened. I’m going to share a few with you.

• While I was not pleased with this news, Dr. Davies, my eye guy, was thrilled that my eyes have been stable since November. He claims that’s good. I claim it’s crap because my vision is still garbage (the distortion persists). He and my neurologist seem to think stability is good and I’m all, “that’s like thinking Cs are good.”
• On Wednesday I got to meet my friend Hotrod in real life. We’ve been arguing on the Internet for about 20 years (we think), but this is the first time we got to spend time together. You think it’d be strange to meet someone you’ve known online for 20 years, but it was surprisingly not awkward. We took a pic together before he left Supergenius HQ and texted it to our families and they were as happy about the visit as he and I were. He gave me a Pie book, which I’ll talk about later.
• I got a new water softener. Spending $1500 on it was not my favorite, but the plumber kid was my favorite. He was not a child, and I almost pooped my pants when he said he was 38. He almost pooped his pants when I told him I had a stroke. “You’re too young to have a stroke,” he said. So yes, I love him.
• I also love him because when were setting up the installation I asked him if he wanted a deposit or something and he said, “Nah, I trust you.” I told him I was a freelancer and I said the same thing to my clients.
• Some Darling Ones threw some cash my way and that really helped with the Water Softener. Plus, I got to buy some yarn because one of them said that’s what the money was for (thank you!)
• I hung an old drawer organizer on my wall. It started as a way to display some of the thimble collection my Grandma Chromey started for me, and then I added my best rocks, one of dad’s Pez dispenser, five Burnt Sienna crayons, and some of my other toys. Now I’m obsessed and accepting rocks, happy meal toys, and other garbage to put on it.
• My friend Solace was all, you should listen to the new jasmine.4.t record, specially the song Tall Girl.

It was a week that did my mood good, Darling Ones, and I wanted to share that with you.

Love,
Jodi

The post This Week appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

The first of the month is known by two things around these parts. I consider it Filter Day and Los Gatitos consider it Friend Liberation Day.

It’s Filter Day because it’s the day I change all the filters, and by that I mean two of them. The furnace’s air filter and the coffee maker’s charcoal filter that does something, I think. On certain months there are four filters to change, the one for the water in the fridge and the one for the air purifier. I live a very filtered life.

Changing the furnace filter makes me feel like the most excellent and responsible homeowner. I change it very month because the furance repair guy I thought was gonna sexually harass me after the repair told me to. “Buy the cheapest filter you can fine and change it every month,” he said.

I thought he was gonna sexually harass me because after he made the repair and as he was repairing my bill he said, “Look, because I like you and you’re funny, how about. . .”

And then he said if I wrote a check out to him he’d charge me for the part at cost, saving me $400. At that point I wanted to sexually harass him (kidding, sheesh).

For the record, I HATE HATE HATE having to let repair men into my house. It gives me high anxiety. Appraisers, plumbers, delivery men, etc. I even got into it once with ol’ Shovelly Joe, my former neighbor, because he wanted to check my water heater to see it it was leaking and I wouldn’t let him in.

While the chance of me being raped and/or murdered by the guy delivering an appliance or fixing my toilet is slim, it’s not zero.

Anyway, I don’t mind changing filters, even post-stroke. What I do hate is changing the calendar on the kitchen wall. It’s the seemingly easy task that hits all my stroke issues all at once.

1. Standing
2. Standing while raising my hands above my shoulder
3. Trying to use my floppy scoop to get that small nail through a little hole

It’s a scary, nightmare. Last month I had to dramatically grab my walker as I stumbled a bit because it took me so long to get that nail in the hole. Yeah, I could have my mom or sister do it for me, but I get “asking for help fatigue.” Plus, I like to live dangerously.

Los Gatitos, which is what I call Wendell, Fergus, and Mortimer, like the first of the month because I open the utility coset door to change the air filter and thus free all their friends they shoved under the door. It’s a combination random garbage (bottle caps, a clove of garlic, a pistachio shell) and their actual toys (small pompoms, pipe cleaners, teeny mice). It takes about two days until all that crap is back under the door.

Well, Darling Ones, my goal for April is to write more because it’s good for me and makes me feel better. Since my tremor has come back with a vengeance, I’ve been down in the dumps. Downer and dumpier, I mean. I’ve been pretty down in it since BFK cut me out of her life, the tremor just makes it worse.

Now that the tremor has struck my head and upper body, I call it The Wiggles. When I focus on it, I can do a really good hob of controlling it. But when I’m not paying attention, my head wiggles on my neck. I’m literally a bobble head.

My theory is that this is why walking has gotten so much more difficult. My brain is so busy trying to control The Wiggles while simultaneously convinced I’m plummeting to the ground and mustering up the energy needed to lift my right foot that feels like it weighs 88 pounds that walking is a lot for it to handle. Poor damaged brain.

Love,
Jodi

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Hello Darling Ones,

I’m dictating this letter into my cellular device because it’s eye day and my garbage vision is extra garbagey.

WARNING. There are going to be 77 layers of irony to this letter, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it anyway cause I it’s on my mind. This blog is nothing if not crap that’s on my mind.

As I approach my strokeaversary on Wednesday I’m thinking about how self-centered I’ve been this year.

This is where the irony comes in, how someone with a 24-year-old blog where she writes about her life and crap on her mind now thinks she’s too self-centered.

Despite my fucking 52 years of self-centeredness, I always stayed pretty abreast of the news, even claiming newsjunkie status until 2020 when I had to stop for my own mental health.

But damn things are bad right now. Every morning I shout at Angrboda, my laptop, “LEAVE TRANS PEOPLE ALONE.” And there’s the nightmare that is the holocaust in Palestine. Then Supreme Court’s shenanigans and Turnip‘s resurgence and things are bad every where, except maybe France where they constitutionalized (not sure that’s a word) abortion. Viva la France.

That’s about as much thought as I give things, because then I get distracted by what’s going on in my own head. Mostly, checking on all the weirdness in my body.

Since the stroke I’ve been a bad friend, a bad citizen, a bad human.

I wish I could go back and apologize to all the people I silently judged for seeming to have their head up their ass, too focused on themselves to care about what’s going on in the world and the people around them. I didn’t know what they were dealing with.

This year has been difficult. I’ve never thought so much about my body and how it feels. As I’ve said before, I treated my body like the trashcan around Oscar the Grouch. It wasn’t like a real place I ever respected, thought about or talked about. Now it’s what I think about the most. I spend so much time checking in with myself. Is my leg still twitchy? Is the right side of my head still hazy? And because I started a new med that’s not agreeing with me yet, does my stomach hurt? And because I think about it so much, I talk about it a lot.

Here’s an example. This morning, my mom and Sister #4 were taking me to the retina doctor. It’s a three person affair. Don’t ask why.

As we were driving there, I was talking about how the tremor in my right arm and hand has gone off the charts since the recrudescence. Before this relapse, the tremor was only noticeable at certain times. Now it’s constant.

So, I’m sitting in the backseat because the back is easier for me to get in and out of and I kept shoving my right hand clenched in a fist in between my mom in the passenger seat and my sister who is driving. My fist shakes uncontrollably when I do this.

I was literally like a three-year-old kid. “Look. Look, Mom. Can you see? Look at my tremor. See, Mom? Isn’t it so weird? In the moment, I didn’t even think about how obnoxious I was being, but upon reflection I feel gross.

I’m so ashamed to admit it, but I’ve lost some people in my life because of my self-centeredness this year. It breaks my heart to have lost one of my very best friends who I love dearly over what I thought was a misunderstanding. It thought this was something I could clear up when I had the mental, physical, and emotional energy to have a taxing conversation. I waited too long and they blocked me on all social media.

Add this 22-year relationship to the L column along with my independence, my ability to drive, walking “normally,” and once beautiful handwriting.

It’s rough. I feel like since I had the stroke some people see me as only a drain, someone easy to dismiss. I mean, I still have value, right? RIGHT?

So that’w what I wanted to talk about today because it’s been on my mind.

Love from the center of the universe,
Jodi

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On Thursday I got an email from a client who I haven’t heard from since the very beginning of the COVID outbreak. This is not unusual. This is the type of client where months can go by without any work from them.

She started her email, “The world has shifted yet again since we were last in touch. She was, of course, referencing the Minneapolis Uprising calling for the abolition of the police.

And here I am on a Sunday evening and the world has shifted yet again since I got her email.

Last night we found out one of Sister #2’s high school best friends died suddenly in his sleep. Or at least that’s what the Chi-High rumor mill has churned out. He’d suffered myriad health problems since an accident left him paralyzed some years ago.

I am stunned at my grief over his death. I don’t think I’ve seen Burgerboy in twenty years? Maybe more? But there was a time in the early and mid-90s where that kid, and he’ll always be an eighteen-year-old kid to me, was a nearly daily part of my life. Hell, we even worked together that summer I worked at the factory.

“He was super annoying, hilarious, and secretly kind.” That’s what my sister wrote about him, and it’s a sentence that so perfectly sums up Burgerboy I wish I wrote it.

My brain has been an emotional landmine today, finding all kinds of memories of Burgerboy buried deep in my memory that blow up my heart and bring tears to my eyes. I remember how he was a willing subject skating (on his skateboard) past me over and over again so I could get different action shots for a photography class. This was in the early spring, still mostly winter in Wisconsin. I remember him pestering me to go buy him a forty at the liquor store that never carded me because I was a 6’5″ 20-year-old. But mostly I remember him teasing me or arguing with me mercilessly about who knows what, and just when I was about to either hit him or cry, he’d break into this adorable, crooked smile that would make you want to hit him even harder because that fucking smile worked every god damn time he cracked it.

This is one of those days where I’m astounded by how many ways a heart can break.

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News of Dolores O’Riordan’s death has picked me up from where I sat on the chilly blue couch here in 2018 and plummeted me back to Eau Claire circa 1993 (or maybe 1994).

Specifically it’s deposited me in that apartment on Gilbert that I shared with Sister #2 and Ben. A place that was often filled with underage skatepunks illegally drinking 40s and playing Legend of Zelda on a 9″ TV while I was off at editing the college newspaper and getting legally drunk on Water Street (as pictured above in a photo by Maarten Daams I swiped from Wikipedia).

I’m not sure what confluence of events led to Ray and I sitting alone in the apartment, something that happened quite rarely back in the day. The alone part, not the hanging out with Ray part. For the record, I just hung out with Ray before Thanksgiving. That friendship is going on 25 years now and even though we go years without seeing each other, whenever we meet up it’s like no time has passed. And every time I see Ray, I retell this story. I’ve told it so much he claims he’s not sure if actually remember the night or just me talking about it.

On that night in 1993 (or 1994), Ray and I were alone in the apartment. I was sprawled on the tator-tot sectional, he was on the floor next to the CD boombox.

“Do you have The Cranberries?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.

Then we proceeded to lay around and listen to “Linger” on repeat for about 10 hours, or at least it felt like that. I believe we were both sober, but who knows? We were college students.

Ray tried endlessly to explain why he was so obsessed with the song. Why it was the best one on the album. I’m sure it had something to do with the delicious way O’Riordan sings the word “linger” or maybe it was the “I’m such a fool for you line.”

I’m not sure of all the hours and hours I’ve spent with Ray over the years this one sticks so stubbornly in my brain. I don’t exactly remember what we said or what else we might have talked about. I just remember that song over and over, Ray pressing the back button every time it ended.

Maybe it sticks in my head because it was one of those last times when I just laid around lazily discussing a song with a friend. There was no ulterior motive, no hoping he liked me or wondering if I liked him. I wasn’t trying to impress him and there was none of that bullshit “I know more than you do” that happens so often with music fans (especially if one of them is male).

We just had nothing else to do, no worries on our minds, just Delores and the way she said linger.

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