very old 90210 episodes on the laptop (DON'T JUDGE ME)

Never! I have as many seasons of that as I can find online, saved on various drives, for emergencies. Good comfort TV. My sister has Crohn's, but I don't know that she's ever found much that helps, alas. Hope you feel better soon.

Mine was more or less under control until a week or so after Tim's mom died. Then my innards decided that they were going to run the show. I know it's all stress-related, and while I'm working on chilling out, I wish there were some direct whammy I could put on my guts to calm the fuck down.

very old 90210 episodes on the laptop (DON'T JUDGE ME)

Never! I have as many seasons of that as I can find online, saved on various drives, for emergencies. Good comfort TV.

My preference is the college years. Thank god for the public library and its massive stash of TV shows on DVD. (We're also catching up on the Big Bang Theory that way.)

probiotics...of course you probably do that.

My preference is the college years.

It's the high school years that I watched at the time, which makes for great nostalgia trips.

I'm sorry, Steph and Ginger. And I'm all for comfort tv. I'm tivoing all the Macgyver episodes the box can find for me, for comfort purposes.

And thanks, y'all. I sat in the bathroom for a while to let my face do what it would, and I feel a bit better. Good enough for flying, anyway, if the weather cooperates.

I've been known to indulge in 90210 on occasion myself.

Calli, I'm sorry you had a milestone whack you in the heart. Sometimes there are unpleasant things that nevertheless keep you in autopilot, and when they go away, you have to think.

Jilli, Indexed mentioned bustles yesterday.

{{Calli}}

amych, damn, sorry about your flood. That bites. I also see that we are once again each other. I wish that translated to more productivity on my part. I should just bite the bullet after all these years and change my board name to something that starts with a Q or something. Qamyth.

Apologies in advance for this: I wrote to my brother to see when a good time would be to come visit, and it took him several days to write me back. The response I got basically made me want to crawl into a hole and never come out. In a nutshell:

1) The treatments make him feel crappy, so he doesn't want me to come visit. At all. Or maybe someday, but what I know from experience taking care of our mom (which he had no part in, thankyouverymuch), it only goes downhill from here. He thinks he feels crappy now? Wait until he's had a few more moths of chemo/radiation. But I don't want to tell him that, if his doctors haven't.

2) He can't talk on the phone anymore, so email is going to have to be our primary mode of communication. However,

3) My SiL had, in his words, "the worst day of her life" last week, when her father was buried, and he says that she will likely never get over it, and she was deeply hurt that neither I nor Middle Brother called her, nor sent a card. Now, I did send a card, but it hasn't gotten to her yet, mainly because I wanted to send a Mass card with it, and it took me a few days to get my shit together to send it. And, excuses excuses, but I didn't call because the only time I have spoken to her on the phone, possibly IN MY LIFE was when she called to say that my bro had come out of his biopsy okay, and she was (admittedly stressed) but was so short with me that it could barely be classified as a conversation. She has never spoken to me on the phone during the awkward two-minute convos that I have had with my brother on Christmases and birthdays and Thanksgivings sporadically over the years, and while we have always gotten along very well when we have seen each other in person...idk, I just didn't call, and never imagined that it would have this massive impact on her.

And forgive me the drama, but NONE of them were there for my "worst days ever" like when I had to drop out of college at 18 to take care of my mother when she had cancer (sure, they came by for awkward visits on Saturdays for an hour or two, but they were grown and had families and had other priorities), or when I had to singlehandedly plan her funeral because our dad was too incapacitated with grief, or the years in my twenties that I spent in therapy because I kept reaching out to my brothers, hoping we would FINALLY be a family, because I needed and wanted a fucking family, but they had their own families and didn't have time for me, and I finally had to learn how to let go and expect nothing from them, or when our dad died, and we three awkwardly got together and then didn't get together again for TEN YEARS. I mean the brief phone calls were nice, the birthday cards were nice, the twice-yearly emails were nice, the annual-or-slightly-less dinners (because I went to THEM, they never, in the entire twenty years that I have lived in NC have visited me, even though my SiL has a brother stationed at Pope AFB and you'd better fucking believe that they have visited HIM) were fine.

How in the HELL was I supposed to expect, oh fuck it. You can't argue with a family that is as stressed and grief-stricken as theirs. All I can do is what I did: say I am so, so sorry for what I have done and what I have failed to do. I got her cell number from my brother and left her a long voice mail. I told my brother that I am coming to NY some time this fall, and I hope that he'll let me come visit, if only for a few hours. And everything else, I need to let go, like I apparently pretended that I did years ago. THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME. If it ever was, that was a long time ago. It's not going to be about me, and I need to get a great, big grip. I'm not even sure what this post is about, except reminding myself of that. It took a minute to get there. (continued...)