Get in Line!

RantWoman, It’s a warm sunny day and the trees are gorgeous, bone-dry but gorgeous.  What’s with this inarticulately grumpy?

 

 RantWoman lives on a planet where imperatives of confidentiality and imperatives of communion over shared problems gurgle and criss-cross. RantWoman in her hat of employers who get to interact with terms like disclosure and reasonable accommodations is feeling nostalgic for an application process a few years ago. One of the selected applicants wrote all over her application about her strengths and positive experiences learning to manage a condition that in many cases turns out to be easily manageable. Another selected applicant only disclosed dealing with the same condition when she sensibly sought local referrals. One of RantWoman’s twitches besides overlap with one of the Get in Line moments below is to reflect on whether anything that followed from the program administration side created barriers to either of these highly functional people taking care as they needed.

 

 It was a hard week on Planet RantWoman

 

It was September. Things in the RantWoman emotional compost heap can get easily restimulated in September and one of the Get In Line items below did that spectacularly. Good thing the current moment only involves multiple kinds of lawyers, not multiple kinds of interpreters too.

 

If you need to tell RantWoman that you want to treat someone excels in unwanted touch of multiple people differently than someone who has merely cursed and mumbled under her breath, Get in Line.

 

If you need to tell RantWoman you are bipolar, probably of your meds and have a hearing loss so you need RantWoman to put up with 17 obnoxious behaviors but cannot give anyone else the same grace, get in line x about 6.

 

(After sleep and sunshine, aside from “Get in Line,” even worse Bad Friend thoughts come to RantWoman: “Oh, you’re bipolar. What do you want me to do about it? I know! We can have an ‘I am more bipolar than you are’ bakeoff. It will be a fundraiser!” OKAYYYY even by the “you don’t HAVE to tell us such things” standards at the friendly neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, that MIGHT be a little less respectful than we strive for, but….)

 

If you need to tell RantWoman you are leaving somekind of DV situation have multiple hearing, vision, mobility and communications issues,  and have just been handed two incompatible pieces of accessibility software with no training and told, Go forth and live independently and instantly solve all those forms you can only access online, get in line.

 

If you need to tell RantWoman you may need an ADA lawyer to help you tell another lawyer the second lawyer has to deal with accessibility issues get in line.

 

If the phrase “ADA lawyer” MIGHT wander into the same conversation with a whole bunch of public transit jargon, and you are not a public transit geek yourself, please bear with RantWoman’s need to babble. If you are wondering why RantWoman is not really doing well at basic social give and take, Rantwoman is holding a lot in the Light but beware lest RantWoman start babbling about her public transit fixations of the week.

 

#duckbuscrash #auroaBusCrash

Did we mention that the phrase “fatal bus crash” always sets RantWoman’s nerves on edge? Due to the wonders of Metro math, a fatal crash on a key arterial disrupts bus service all over the city. That was  LASTThursday. RantWoman notes that Thanks to Twitter she knows many of those hospitalized have been released from the hospital or upgraded. RantWoman is grateful. RantWoman is approaching the investigation updates gingerly on personal grounds but with heartfelt prayers and condolences all around.

 

And this week’s Thursday hashtags: #UCCShooting #OregonShooting. RantWoman is thankful to distill these tragedies through the tiny pipes of Twitter.

 

 

Okayyyy, RantWoman and now what’s with the grandmas?

 

Recently it dawned on RantWoman that she is nearing an age when she will be older than either of her grandmothers when they died. Yeah, and…?

 

RantWoman is deeply touched watching several people be grandmothers. RantWoman does not exactly want to follow suit, a good thing since it’s not directly an option. But RantWoman gave herself permission to pick up the rock and look at all the thought threads from a certain wedding anniversary photo montage:

 

A key moment: RantMom’s parents do not look much different from in RantMom’s wedding pictures 5 years earlier. RantMom’s mother Brave Teacher was a farm wife who went back to teaching school when Youngest Aunt was in elementary school. She taught for 20+ years before the state of CO instituted teacher certification.  After that for two summers she went away to college and left RantMom and the future Aunts in charge of all the cooking and canning and running the household.

 

Brave Teacher Grandma also was very forward-thinking. She herself was left-handed. She went and insisted that rantMom’s teacher let her be left-handed and even that she hold the paper in the way that worked best for RantMom.

 

In other words, Brave Teacher Grandma must have been pretty formidable, but RantWoman’s memories are kind of challenging. Brave Teacher Grandma had a wonderful Christmas cactus that sat on a coffee table in her living room, a container of near succulent calm in the midst of the visit RantWoman remembers most clearly: Little Sister was a baby. RantBrother was a toddler. There was at least one and maybe two baby cousins. This on top of extra adults in a small house made for a lot of kid screaming and hubbub. RantWoman had an ear infection and spent a lot of afternoons napping with a heating pad. Miraculously everyone survived. Unlike some younger cousins, RantWoman actually got to meet Brave Teacher Grandma. Go with that!