Okay, so I’m suitably devastated in a very self-centered way. My boss, whose name shall remain a mystery, announced he is leaving for greener pastures.
I could not be more happy for him. He has been underappreciated for a long time, and it has deeply affected his personal happiness. He is [...]
I have joined a Yahoo! group for US families adopting from Ethiopia. My reasons are to gather information from folks about their experiences. I’ve gleaned a few hard useful facts that will help us ease our child’s journey (when that moment arrives), but for the most part, this group appears [...]
As I’ve written here several times, I suffer from Major Depressive Disorder. My depression, however, was never the “can’t get out of bed” kind. It was more the “don’t talk to me or I’ll bite your head off” kind. These days, however, I’m struggling with what appears to be some [...]
To get more sleep, I got myself a DVR to record John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I know they re-air at 8 pm the following evening, but I’m usually not in front of the TV until about 9:30, so I saw the general “necessity” (read in the context of my [...]
My son’s psychiatrist is going out of business (I guess you have to say “closing her practice”) because she can get paid only 37% of the time from the insurance companies. She is a developmental pediatrician AND a child psychiatrist so charges health insurance as a primary care physician. I [...]
I am a day late in the May 1 Blogging Against Disablism event. Life intervened on my schedule, and I’ve been working on this post for a few days. Although this is tardy, I offer it as my contribution.
A little over a year ago, a student named Cho Seung-Hui [...]
When is a disease just a disease, and when is it a character defect? When it comes to alcoholism, it all can seem intertwined. The AA Big Book refers to alcohol as “…cunning, baffling, powerful…”. As with a lot of the writing in the Big Book, it has that anachronistic, [...]
I should empty out my camera phone more often. Get a load of this Easter bunny. Between him and Blake, I don’t know who’s having the more rollicking great time at the Easter Egg hunt this year:
Allison tagged me. Sigh…
As if, after all this blogging, there are five things anyone DOESN’T know about me 
Seriously, here it is:
5 Things Found In Your Bag
1. Wallet
2. Checkbook
3. Lexapro and Wellbutrin in a pill box
4. Receipts from Lowe’s, Target, and Sally’s
5. Bright Green Hairbrush [...]
I have not written in a while because I’ve been unable to come up with the words to describe the pain of what happened to me recently. So, I titled this post with a saying from Al-Anon. The ultimate goal of a sober person is to detach with love from [...]
You know why I like blogging? It’s the closest thing I know to mindlessly rattling on while stoned and eating spaghetti at an all-night diner with your philosophy major roommate. It’s word processing pushed to the limit: no eventual paper, no editor, no proofing, no pagination. Truly unfettered blah, blah, [...]
Who Made You? God Made You! Why Did He Make You? Because He Loves You.
The above notion was something I had to memorize in case the archbishop were to call on me during my Confirmation ceremony. He never did. And the questions he threw were truly “softball” anyway.
No one [...]
Okay, I’m a little dramatic.
Blake is doing better, and I’m beginning to come out of my self-imposed exile inside myself to blog again. I feel really stupid. The last couple of days, I’ve had the “I’ll have to blog about that tonight” experience, but I didn’t because I said [...]
The time has come to close up this blog. I began blogging with a desire to reveal what is most personal to me (not dumb personal, like a drunk facebook picture, but emotionally genuine personal). As with my songwriting, I have always tried to focus my blog on revealing that [...]
We’ve finally unpacked all the pictures. They’ve been sitting in boxes, and now most of them are hung up on the wall. While we were unpacking them, Blake was asking all kinds of questions about who everyone was. He’s always trying to piece together what [...]
I am convinced that the Gitmo prisoners are forced to listen repeatedly to the sound of the voice of that woman on the Royal Caribbean commercials extolling me to “Get OUT There!”
What is it about the search for vacation pleasure that makes me so sick to my stomach? I [...]
I watched an episode of Law & Order SVU this evening. It was about a mother of a teenage girl who supplied alcohol to her daughter’s friends, which led to their deaths. As with a lot of Law & Order episodes, the morality tale was not terribly subtle. But, something [...]
Hear me out before you condemn me as a regressive believer in biology-is-destiny.
The press coverage of the Democratic nomination process has a lot of us wondering how folks who are paid to be analytical and objective can be so swept up by Obama, and so ready to toss Hillary overboard. [...]
I’ve been moping, no question about it. But moping (in my world meaning protracted depression) does strange things in my brain. I start to get more creative in my thinking, rather involuntarily, and things start to string together in new ways.
Maybe this is just a function of getting older [...]
There’s a place where others live, but I’ve never been there. They seem to know themselves, create a destiny, assume goals, attain them, and all without doubt.
They know their values are their values. They don’t question whether they simply mimic the values they’ve been raised with. They don’t worry [...]
What is it about the ability to openly make fun of boys and men?
If I were to get the same number of “joke” emails that I get about boys and men, but the subject were African-Americans, or gays, or girls, or women, or name-your-disempowered group, I’d be considered a [...]
As if that’s news.
Okay, I’m not the most diplomatic type, but I mean well. I really do. I frequently find myself talking about the elephant in the living room, or the emperor’s new clothes — pick the metaphor of your choice — and making people angry and uncomfortable.
When I [...]
The most simplistic interpretation of quantum physics (and that’s the only one I have) is that the behavior of sub-atomic particles changes as a result of being observed. I am living that now through this blog, and wonder about the value of the blog in general.
This world, for reasons of [...]
Envy. It’s the sixth of the seven deadly sins. I have a big issue with it, and it swallows me up at times more than any of the others.
Or, sure, I can eat a few too many cookies sometimes. And I’m no stranger to sloth and wrath, but, envy [...]
I’m an undergoing an education in elementary education. It’s not all bad, but it’s a lesson that you think I would have learned by now. You have to speak up, you have to advocate. I think that folks who regularly complain about government not doing things well perhaps do nothing [...]
The most prominent RSS feed on my iGoogle page is the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s toy safety recall list. I’ve been subscribing to it since the big scares about lead paint hit the mainstream media this past year.
Since subscribing, I’ve noticed a pattern. Many of the [...]
I made some noise with the school about consistency with the SBIT plan (see this post). Lo and behold — all of a sudden my son is not being sent home or sent out of the classroom to the principal’s office. What changed?
I was told that sometimes kindergartners are [...]
My 21 adult years in New York City almost wiped out childhood memories made in a far less glamorous place. When I was 4, my family moved from Jersey City to Suffern NY, a suburb about 30 miles northwest [...]
I need to address the issue raised by Blake’s teachers during our meeting about his difficulties at school. During what they called a “SBIT” (pronounced “sih-bit”, stands for “School-Based Intervention Team”), the following conclusions were arrived at:
I was put through Catholic school from 1st grade through high school. It was a different time then. The tuition was free when I first started in 1965, and then it went up to a hefty $100 per year by the time I graduated 8th grade. By 12th grade, in [...]
There was an AA meeting in the West Village in lower Manhattan called “Midnight.” Those who were regulars called it “Midnight Madness.” Meetings began at 8 pm every day, and went through until 3 am. There were also some mid-day meetings there, mostly specialty meetings for HIV positive folks, or [...]
If you live in Charlottesville, and find the holidays alienating, here are a few resources. Be alone with others — it’s easier than being alone by yourself.
SHOPPED OUT: What Would Jesus Buy?
If frantic holiday shopping is giving you the hives, take a break from the stores and [...]
Do you feel it? It’s the weight of Christmas bearing down on your psyche. In my case, the weight of guilt over just who made these items, what their lives are like, why I’m buying them, or in most cases, not buying them. I can’t afford to shop at the [...]
For the better part of my adult life — well all of it, really — my personal annual rhythms have gone counter to those of the world-at-large. There were years of working all-nighters, and all weekenders, for school. Like, on a bright sunny Saturday morning, I’d be riding on the [...]
© 2007 Cathy Finn-Derecki
Some days I blend in to the crowd
Almost normal, not so loud,
Clean up good, look just like them
when no one’s there it comes again
It saddles up
right next to me
jumps in my head
pain-shake-me free
it hurts like hell
unbar the door
[...]
Lowe’s Home Improvement stores recently felt obligated to issue an apology. They called the artificial Christmas trees in their catalogues “Family Trees.” This caused outrage by folks who argue to Keep Christ in Christmas. I remember the refrain Keep Christ in [...]
Blake is so full of anxiety these days. In a five-year old, anxiety gets expressed very inconveniently for most people around them. It disrupts group activities, makes embarrassing noise in public places, makes you late, sometimes hurts your ears or your back, makes a mess you need to clean up, [...]
An AA joke: “Alcoholism is a threefold disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.”
I never really thought this joke was all that funny, or applicable to me. I never really “whooped it up” on the holidays much, except a couple of times. There was the time I met my first husband [...]
I hate to indulge myself in feeling old pain. I’ve been pushing things down for a while, and some of it is coming out sideways. I hauled off on my husband a couple of nights ago. I’m angry a lot, and it’s leaking out of me at the most unexpected [...]
This weekend has had me visiting the local shopping mall (the Fashion Square Mall) twice. Once was for Santa’s first night. The other was this evening’s drive-in movie in the parking lot, featuring “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “Polar Express.”
Last night, the Santa’s workshop setup in the mall was [...]
There is a very big reason why I don’t like Blake watching Nickelodeon. He has zero sales resistance. He has watched only DVDs, Disney Channel and PBS Kids for most of his life. But, he’s starting to outgrow the Disney Channel morning shows. Yesterday, he asked to watch Sponge Bob.
I [...]
Words by me not required.
Christian Charity Raising Money To Feed Non-Gay Famine Victims
How many Americans get to say that they have proudly attended their gay sister’s wedding ceremony with full family in attendance? Now, how many get to see it TWICE, with TWO sisters, in a single year? My family, that’s who. It has been a banner year for courageous love in [...]
I’m swirling with all kinds of thoughts and conflicting feelings about this conference. It will take some time to digest, but, the overall mood here this year is not a hopeful one. The distorted lens of my considerable social anxiety aside, the lack of hope seems driven by the convergence [...]
I’m at the annual Educause conference in Seattle. On the flight out, I read a book that our minister gave to us called “Making Room for Life.” It’s about quite a few social ills in our middle-class American pursuit of happiness. One of the phenomena it refers to is [...]
It’s been over 7 years since I left the corporate world in NYC where I worked for years in the corporate identity and communications field. When I was transplanted into the much slower pace of Fredericksburg, VA in 2000, and became part of the technology administration of a public institution, [...]
I looked up from my seat on the “pity pot” long enough to notice that there’s a proliferation of sign men in Charlottesville these days. These are the men who are hired to hold loud signs about “blowout closeout selling to the bare walls one day only” events at local [...]
These are hard times for me, for reasons too numerous to mention, and probably beyond the boundaries of what makes a blog a blog, and a personal conversation a personal conversation.
My Catholic upbringing tells me always to look at those who have it harder. When I used to complain [...]
We have moved, hence my silence with blogging. Somehow packing, unpacking, getting Blake re-adjusted, unpacking, cleaning, etc. can take up a lot of time. My brain shuts down when I’m doing these mechanical things. But now, it’s waking up.
We didn’t thoroughly move out of our apartment. That is, we left [...]
I’m the youngest of 8 kids. The closest in age to me is my sister, Babs. Her real name is Barbara (named after my Mom who probably thought that was her last chance to name a daughter, until I came along three years later). Babs is a singularly unique person. [...]
I’m someone with few boundaries, which is probably not a good thing on a social level. However, my boundarilessness (word? why not!) manifests sometimes in being able to make connections among things that seem disparate. Some folks I work with would call that “alchemy” and simple mathematics would then say [...]
Larry Craig. The whole story has devolved from it’s opening low point to the usual discussion where “gay” and “homosexual” are being equated with perversion. The public just LOVES the mens’ bathroom thing. It’s dirty and embarassing — just the way America feels about sex in general.
I saw a [...]
I gotta tell you, the vocabulary of elementary school is rushing back to me now that Blake is starting Kindergarten. Also rushing back to me is the authority hierarchies of those prim ladies in the office, the ones that you had hoped never to see when you were a kid. [...]
Ever take an online personality test? I was intrigued by what I saw at Wags Outside (one of my favorite C’ville Blogs) so did the same thing. I never know if this stuff is self-perpetuating, but, I always come out with similar results on these things, and am [...]
I am keenly aware that my minister links to my blog from his, The Farthest Shore. As such, I feel kind of hesitant at times to express some of my thoughts about faith. But, sometimes I feel that being an agitator, and making folks uneasy, comes so easily to [...]
Well, when I least expected it, we found a house. THE house. It’s in Hollymead, and it was built in 1979. It’s like a storybook cottage with a gazebo and fish pond in the back yard. Instead of killing ourselves trying to buy it now, [...]
Tomorrow, my son Blake goes for his first day of Kindergarten. We have spent the last few days together — an unusual occurrence since he’s been in day care. I wanted him to leave day care for a bit so that he could have [...]
When I was born in 1959, my Dad was the administrator of the Jersey City Medical Center. That was a plum political appointment he received in the days of the John Kenny mayoralty in the early 50s. Anyone that knows about the history of the Irish mob in Jersey [...]
I was driving Blake home last night from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville. We had spent the day visiting our old neighborhood, and he had a chance to play with his first, and still only, “girlfriend,” Brianna. He fell asleep in the car with an old iBook on his lap, watching Monsters, [...]
I mentioned in my last post that I am embarrassed in some circles to call myself a Christian. This video says a lot about why.
Last night I participated in another church service where our minister once again used a Rob Bell video. In case you didn’t read this [...]
I see my 48th birthday on the horizon, and I begin to take stock again of where I am in my life. The stock I’m taking is not so much about retirement savings, or professional accomplishment (although, I’m human, and there’s an element of that). Rather, it’s kind of a [...]
I have seen the future, and it’s so pretty that I’m scared for our children. It’s pretty, perfect, fun, and just the BEST EVER!
I’m talking, of course, of the current run of My Little Pony at the JPJ Arena in Charlottesville. To [...]
My friend in Brooklyn and I used to refer to the part of alcoholism that does not directly relate to the effects of the consumption of alcohol as the “-ism.” I think lots of folks in recovery use this term to describe the part of alcoholism that is hard for [...]
Blake and Trixie. 1/20/08.
Blake and me, eating pears. 1/20/08.