Author: Melanie

Real magic doesn’t come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.
— from Expecting Adam, by Martha Beck

Do you think that if you get to be truly happy, you have to pay some kind of karmic price for it? I can remember thinking that if J ever came back to me (this, of course, was back when I was sure we were destined to be together) and we got married and had a family and I had everything (I thought) I always wanted, I would have to lose something else I loved, just to keep the cosmic balance sheet in check – like you only get to be so happy without it costing you something. I don’t know if that’s making any sense, but that’s what I thought.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because, over the past month or so, I’ve been the happiest for the longest period of time I can consciously remember being in a very long time. Usually, I have periods of happiness regularly punctuated by bouts of sadness, but lately I’ve just been happy, plain and simple. I mean, last Tuesday I cried a little, just because of the day, and the Braves made me sad Wednesday night, and there have been frustrations here and there, but nothing major has happened to knock me into a funk. I don’t know if it’s the weather, or that it’s baseball season (I pinpoint the beginning of this period of happiness to Opening Day), or the headway I’m making on Couch to 5k and the resulting health benefits, or that I’m making an effort to be more positive (because I am), but I just feel good practically all the time: the sky seems bluer, my cat seems sweeter, my job seems less stressful, things just seem to be working themselves out.

And that worries me. I was thinking today – while I was out on a long walk through a park near my house that I’d been to once before, but not on such a beautiful day when there were sunbathers, and people playing catch, and dogs running around, and kids playing baseball – that as happy as I feel, there’s an undercurrent of waiting for something to happen, and I couldn’t figure out what it is. Then I realized: I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. On some level, I’m expecting that, in exchange for the happiness I have right now, I’m going to have to trade something I might not want to part with. It’s kind of the way I felt after I lost my hearing – things were going well, I was really starting to be happy with myself and my life again after a long period of being miserable, and then, BAM.  And I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s coming around again.

That’s silly, right?  I mean, it’s probably just being nervous, because I’ve been thinking that I’m starting to feel good enough to start doing things and going to places where I’ll have to interact with strangers in order to meet new people, and maybe even find someone I like enough to ask out.  I’m comfortable here now, and I know that to get to the next place I want to go in life, I have to take matters into my own hands, and I’ve been thinking about ways to do that, and so I’m probably just anxious about that.  I hope that’s all it is; I like being happy, I like smiling my way through the day and looking on the bright side, and I don’t want to waste time looking over my shoulder worrying about what bad thing might be about to befall me.

I could use some reassurance, if you’ve got any.

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
— James Joyce

Dear Person Who Found My Blog By Searching “www hispanic escorts houston .com”:

Not exactly what you were looking for, huh? Perhaps I should have been more clear. Please accept my deepest apologies. I do hope your search was ultimately successful!

Love,
Mel

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.
— Earl Wilson

Well, judging from the (non)response to my last two posts on the Braves, none of you people care about them. That’s ok with me, but don’t think it’s going to stop me from telling you my stories.

I was at the game last night, Braves v. Nationals. I was hopeful: Jair Jurrjens, a good young pitcher, was on the mound for us, Chipper is hot (batting .410 with a .690 slugging percentage – that’s awesome, in case those numbers mean nothing to you), and the Nats are struggling.

The game was scoreless into the 6th, each pitcher doing a nice job – not many strike outs, but lots of pop ups and ground balls. Each team scored one run in the 6th, and then, despite a Nats threat in the bottom of the 9th, we went into extra innings. No score in the 10th, though the Nats loaded the bases – and McCann made an awesome double play at the plate to save the day – then the 11th.

In the top of the 12th, Teixiera hits a double, McCann grounds out to first, Francoeur grounds out to second, then Teixiera scores on a base hit by Kotsay. I lose my mind cheering wildly while Nats fans, including my companions, shoot me murderous looks. Braves up 2-1. Gotay takes a walk.

Now it’s 2 on, 2 out, top of the 12th with a 1-run lead. The Braves have not won a 1-run game all season (no other team in the majors has fewer than three 1-run wins). The pitcher’s spot is up. What does Bobby Cox, arguably a baseball genius, do? Pinch hit for the pitcher to try to drive in at least one more run, right? Uh no. He inexplicably lets Acosta bat, essentially conceding the third out, and Acosta heads back to the mound in the bottom of the 12th. And that’s when the wheels fall off.

Acosta walks Kearns, and Willie Harris follows up with a single. Then Wil Nieves (who, if I were a Nats fan, would be my baseball boyfriend) mixes up the signs and lays down a bunt that goes right back to the pitcher. Easy double play, right? Uh no. The ball, essentially your basic grounder, goes right between Acosta’s legs and the bases are loaded with no outs. Then, although Acosta should have been pulled at that point, he wasn’t, and he WALKS IN THE TYING RUN. Oh my god. THEN Bobby decides it’s a good time to switch pitchers, and Buddy effing Carlyle, failed starter, becomes the Braves’ last hope. By this point, I’m not even in my seat anymore. I’ve been pacing, then I sit in the aisle, on the steps, with my hands on my head, partially covering my eyes. I can hardly stand to watch.

The Braves pull everybody in so they can make the play at the plate – the trouble with that, as you may know, is that anything hit over the short outfield ends the game. And damn if that isn’t exactly what happens. On Carlyle’s first pitch, Lopez hits a blooper to left that, had Gotay been playing at his usual depth would have been caught. That doesn’t matter, of course, because Willie Harris is faster than a cheetah on Red Bull, and would have beat any throw home from left. But still. Kill me now.

So the Braves find yet another way to break my heart when I’m in attendance. Let’s review:

1. Lose to the Mets 7-0 at Shea Stadium when the Braves are in first place and the Mets are in next to last.

2. Lose both games of a double header at Shea, neither one by very many runs.

3. Lose to the Nats at RFK last September on shitty pitching by Lance Cormier, when if I’d gone to the Sunday game instead I would have seen Tim Hudson pitch a complete game shutout.

4. Lose to the Nats on opening day at Nationals Park on a walkoff homerun by golden boy Ryan Zimmerman.

5. Lose to the Nats last night on crappy relief pitching and a poor management decision.

I have tickets for a game in August. Maybe I should stay home?

In other news, my camera? Is awesome. Here’s the view from our nosebleed seats, taken without any zoom at all:

And here is my baseball boyfriend Brian McCann batting, taken from way up there with digital zoom to 24x:

Awesome, yes?

P.S. Thanks to Jane, technological genius, all of my photo resizing problems have been solved and HMITH will ever after have perfectly sized photos! Yay!

At first I was shattered . . . . As I became more comfortable with my deafness and learned more, I accepted it, made my peace with it, and tried to learn from it.
— from I’ve Lost My What?, by Shawn Lovely

April 29, 2002, 7:30(-ish) a.m.:

Something wakes me, but it’s not the alarm clock. I raise my head, only to discover that the vertigo that sent me to the ER last night hasn’t subsided. I lie back down and reach for the phone to call in sick to work. “It’s Monday,” I remember, “They’ll never believe me.” I put the phone to my ear and listen for the dial tone. Nothing. Confused, I hit the hang up button and try again. Still nothing. I notice that the light on the caller ID screen on the phone is on. The incongruity takes a moment to sink in, but then it hits me: The phone isn’t dead, I just can’t hear it.

That’s when I scream. And I don’t hear that either.

In the instant I realized what had happened to me, nearly everything I thought was true about my life – who I was, who my friends were, what my place was in the world – changed, and I had to learn it all over again. Growing up as a hearing person and then losing that identity was a surreal, terrifying, heartbreaking experience. There was a sense that I no longer had control over anything at all: If this, my connection to everyone and everything in my life, could disappear, could be taken away at random, then surely I couldn’t count on anything else.

In the early months of my loss, I fought sadness and anger so deep they scared me. No one could help me understand what was happening to me – there’s no medical explanation for it – and no one could fix it. My anger unleashed itself on unsuspecting store clerks or patrons trying to pass me in the aisle. “I’m sorry,” they’d say meekly, after I smugly informed them that I hadn’t gotten out of their way because I couldn’t hear them asking to get by,“I didn’t know.” I dislocated my shoulder three weeks later in May, then came out to the parking lot two weeks after that to find my car with a flat tire. Completely defeated, I sat down on the asphalt and cried until someone drove by and took pity on me. I had been given pain medication for my shoulder – Vicodin, I think – and more than once I wondered how many it would take to make me fall asleep and never wake up. I didn’t really want to die, I just knew that there was no cure for hearing loss and that I was not cut out to live in a world without sound, and I didn’t know what else to do. I even seriously considered checking into a psychiatric hospital at one point, because I figured that would be a place where I could be as crazy and as sad and as angry as I felt inside without being a burden to anyone because it would be their job to take care of me.

Even though I often tried to push everyone away, I thankfully never had to face any of this alone. I have had the good fortune along the way to be surrounded by a loving, supportive family and a few amazing friends, along with extraordinary medical professionals. My parents and Nate and the rest of my family never gave up on me, never let me feel like I was a burden to them, though I know at times I must have been. They also never lowered their expectations of me, which is not something I can say for everyone, and was really what I needed in order to hold on to the person I was. Aimee met me at the ER that morning and never left my side, and when I thanked her later for being there, she wrote (because I couldn’t hear her), “Where else would I be?” Karen’s house was the place I drove to when I needed to go as far away as I could and still make it back by dinner time, and she never turned me away, even when I showed up unannounced. That they – and many others – stuck by me, or took the time to get to know me, or didn’t run screaming in the opposite direction when they heard what happened to me means more than I can possibly say.

Sometimes people say, “You’re so brave,” or “I don’t think I could have handled it as well as you have.” I rarely think of myself as courageous, and people only see me that way because they think what happened to me is unbelievable. They ask, “How did you ever get through it?” I say, “You do what you have to do. You get up every day, even when it’s hard, and you take it hour by hour – minute by minute if you have to: Get out of bed now; go to the gym now; eat lunch now; read this book now. Then you go to bed and do it again tomorrow.” Eventually, it isn’t so hard to get out of bed, and one day you realize that life can still be good and that you want to be a part of it.

It took me more than a year to start feeling like myself again. My cochlear implant surgery in August 2003 went a long way toward helping me feel whole again. It gave me back music, which was more than I had any right to hope for, and makes it possible for me to understand my niece and nephew when they say stuff like “Peanut butter and jelly is my favorite vebgtable” [sic], or sing Happy Birthday on my voice mail. It’s not perfect, of course, and every once in a while I still get mad that this is my life. Usually it’s a TV show that’s not captioned (or is captioned poorly) or someone on the other end of the phone who doesn’t understand the relay and hangs up on me. It still makes me angry that these everyday things aren’t just easy for me. I know, though, that there’s a reason this happened to me, even if it’s not clear to me yet, and so I try to be patient and compassionate. Mostly.

When I think of where I was six years ago today and in the aftermath of this thing that happened to me, it’s hard to recognize myself. So much has happened, and I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if I’d never lost my hearing. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where I’ll say that I’m glad that this happened, but I do recognize that good things have come out it, and maybe that’s enough.

Dread is the first and strongest of the . . . kinds of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not identified what it is.
— Orson Scott Card

Imagine that you’re a perfectly healthy 25-year-old woman.You live on your own, hold a job, work out five days a week, and love music and books and spending time with friends.Normal, right?

Then imagine yourself on a Sunday.You wake up, make breakfast, then go to the gym for your weekly swim.Afterwards, you shower and head to the mall.You walk around for a while, buy a couple of books you’ve been wanting and a really great pair of shoes.

Later that evening, you’re relaxing with the Sunday night crime dramas.As you get up from the couch to get a drink, you feel light-headed.You were lying down and got up quickly, so you don’t think much of it.But the sensation doesn’t go away, and you realize it’s the same sensation you had one summer night three years ago:Whether you’re lying down or sitting up, you feel like if you laid your head back, you might not be able to lift it back up; you’re disoriented.You call your brother, because he’s the one who took you to the emergency room that night three years ago, and you ask him if they did anything for you then other than run some tests and send you home where you slept it off and felt fine the next morning.He says no, so you decide it’s nothing.

As the night wears on, though, the dizziness worsens, your head starts to pound, and you notice that the people on television are starting to sound very far away, and very high-pitched.Now you’re worried, because you lost the hearing in your right ear as a little girl, and the thought of losing the hearing in your left ear is unbelievably frightening.It’s now 11:00 at night.You call your brother back and explain your symptoms, trying not to cry.He’s in North Carolina, though, and can’t help you himself, but he wants you to go to the ER.You shouldn’t drive, due to the dizziness, so you call a friend to come get you.While you’re waiting, you page your regular doctor, who calls back and, after hearing your symptoms, diagnoses a likely inner ear infection and says to come see him in the morning.You decide to go to the ER anyway.

The ER is empty and you’re seen fairly quickly.The doctor asks for the symptoms, and looks in your eyes, nose, and ears with his little light.He’s clearly stumped.He can’t see anything but a small amount of fluid in your right ear, and he tells you to go home and take Sudafed to drain the fluid and ibuprofen for the headache.

You call your parents when you get home to let them know what’s happened, and what the doctor said.They tell you to keep them posted and that they love you.You turn out the light and go to bed, unaware that you’ve heard their voices clearly for the last time.