MFA Mama

for the record

I do not love anyone one jot less than I did when I woke up this morning.

Including myself.

Next stop: Istanbul 

Call me names, disown me, insult my intellect and sanity if you must, THIS IS HAPPENING so, y’know, be excited, maybe? 

I sure am.

awake

   Today makes two weeks here in “New Englandesque,” the blog-name of which irritates my lovely hostess to no end, but since the objective here is imprecision, I am letting it stand.

   I feel like I’m just now waking up from a terrible dream. The move itself was a blur of 48 hours without sleep and not keeping my pills down, which quickly resulted in my descending into a pit of crazed stupidity and icepick headaches and dropping fifteen pounds, and THEN I was down for a week with the flu.

   Not quite how I’d planned on preparing for my first time leaving the continent, but I plan and G-d laughs until they pee a little, and here we all are!

   The gluten issue is a huge PITA, because while I plan on availing myself of the free state-sponsored language classes for immigrants once we’re there, I pretty much only know how to pray and apologize in Transylvanian* at this point, and while I’m sure I will need to do a lot of both of those things next week, neither of them will help me figure out what I can eat! I’m taking a backpack full of Rx Bars and jerky and Splenda packets, and I’ll probably buy whole fruit and cheese at one of the open-air markets. I’m super-grateful to be able to make this trip and have anything to eat at all, and it’s not something I plan to dwell on, but that said between y’all, me, and Typepad? I am big-sad about not being able to accept any amazing local food I am offered!

   Oh well. Eyes on the prize! I finally decided to go with Amazon’s top-rated compression socks (knee-high), and ordered a pack of power adaptors so I can charge my phone (I don’t think it will work over there as a phone, but am hopeful that I’ll still be able to connect to wireless?), and all I have to do now is finish recuperating from the flu and not get dismembered in Istanbul (too soon?) on the way there. 

   Once my feet hit the ground in Transylvania, I have a couple of meetings with headhunters (re: jobs, they don’t literally hunt heads in Transylvania although some of the immediate neighbor-countries I do not plan to visit are a little behead-y) and plan to spend at least one day at the local transplant hospital getting their input on which supplemental insurance plans, if any, are a good fit for us. Transylvanian healthcare seems to be a lot like healthcare in the UK in that everyone has access to it but if you are willing to pay you can get “private” care faster, and I am hoping to ascertain whether transplant patients go to the front of the line automatically out of necessity like in the US or better get private insurance if they want to stay alive. Also, some drugs are only covered by supplemental plans, and OF FREAKING COURSE Pristiq is one of them, but I don’t know what the OOP price is (if it’s much less than the cost of a supplemental plan I’ll just pay the market price, but if it’s the same or more I’ll probably go ahead and spring for the better coverage). So there’s a job day, a hospital day, and a checking out the social services day, and if all goes to plan I will then have at least two days to explore, and I’ve wanted to go to Transylvania since I was in college so I’m pretty excited! I didn’t go then because I got pregnant with The Bad Seed, and it feels like I got sidetracked for nineteen years but am now back to going in the direction I always should have? 

   Life is funny sometimes, and I can’t wait to get back to the business of living.

* No, not really. But “Transylvania” makes me giggle and I don’t want to name our new homeland until we are safely there. Sorry, actual Transylvania!

socks

   This is random, but LET’S TALK ABOUT COMPRESSION HOSIERY! I decided to buy some proper compression socks for the long flight to Istanbul (thirteenish hours; Istanbul to Transylvania* is like, three or four MORE but I have a several-hour layover to stretch my legs on the way), and WHOA. There are a LOT more options since my last long flight (visiting my Only Living Relative, now deceased, in Hawaii). There are knee-highs and THIGH-highs and open-toed versions and ones with just a stirrup strap under the instep.

   Does anyone have the expertise to tell me which kind I ought to buy? Any brands y’all recommend or hate?

   Why yes, yes I *am* freaking out a tiny bit about this whole solo globetrotting thing I’ve gotten myself into, but Transylvania requires immigrants to have been to Transylvania before (which: socialized medicine? TAKE MY TAX MONEY! Don’t care if we have to live in a cardboard box in a war zone!). Hotter has absolutely ZERO Transylvanian blood in his veins, he’s just tagging along as the spouse of a part-Transylvanian, and we couldn’t afford to both go, so here goes nothing!

* sorry actual Transylvania, I am not REALLY moving to your country, but have borrowed its name to use for our future home until we arrive safely. I’m sure actual Transylvania is lovely though?

ancestry

   KavaNOPE was a good reminder to me to get the ball rolling on genetic testing; when The Bad Seed starts raping people I want authorities to catch him FAST. So I ordered a kit from Ancestry (they’re currently on sale through the 21st; this is NOT sponsored, but a reader privately came forward last week as also having had a psychopathic child with a known rapist so if there are any others out there in that boat I wanted to pass that along).

   I haven’t even spit in the tube yet, but am currently not in the very best place mental-healthwise, and so my subconscious mind has been treating me to some pretty crazy nightmares, the silliest of which last night involved getting my results and finding out I was “50% Tennessee Hillbilly.” I...don’t even know anyone in Tennessee, but dream-me was super bent about it! Even more so than actual-me when I recently found out through less-scientific means that I am part-Russian (and at the same time found out that I am eligible for Transylvanian* citizenship, so I will take it).

   So I guess we’ll see! I’m telling y’all because every brick-and-mortar person who finds out starts squeeing over genealogy and then looks at me like I shot Santa when I tell them I’m not looking for long-lost relatives (the ones I’ve already discovered on my own are all more than awful enough!), just trying to do society a solid.

 

* Um, yeah, sorry actual Transylvanians, I am just using your country as my future-home’s Nom de Blog while they process our immigration packet because it makes me giggle. I am not actually moving to Transylvania. 

   

flu

   It just figures, the second I get safely out of the South I start dying.

   If anyone has any tips on shaking the flu in twelve days or less, let me know, because I’m supposed to leave in about that long for a solo trip halfway around the world 😳

Northern Light

   We are no longer in The Dirty South!

   Instead we’re in the New England general vicinity, and the trip was HORRID (think down by a cat, a dog, and a flock of chickens, driving through the night two nights in a row in a box truck, marriage nearly ending kind of godawful), but we’re here. It nearly killed us all, but we made it. My in-laws are dead to me, but we’re close enough to the Canadian border to make a run for it if things go downhill, I leave for Transylvania in two weeks to meet with a Transylvanian headhunter and look for an apartment, and there are two hairless cats purring at my feet.

How are all of YOU?

27 8x10 color glossy pictures...

   I’m over here breaking my heart and head over the baby pictures when it occurred to me that I have a direct line into my ex-husband’s home: this-here blog. SOMEone in my ex-husband’s neighborhood is a faithful reader! Could be my ex (I mean, he always could have learned to read? It’s probably not him, he never gave a damn about a word I said in a decade of marriage and between that and his allergy to the written word I just don’t see it), could be The Bad Seed (I mean, probably; he’s got no friends, no girlfriend, and nothing better to do than read his mother’s blog like the creepy-ass voyeur he’ll be someday if karma doesn’t catch up to him first), could be my Middle Child who just...I still don’t know what happened there. He was such a sweet, decent child and then he just turned frigging evil like “oh hey I choose the people who beat you over you because they are human and make mistakes but when you show humanity and get mad about it I mock you all of a sudden and tell you what a crazy loser you are because I have no original thoughts and just want my father and felon brother’s approval.” I honestly don’t see Middle Child caring enough about my thoughts to read here. I guess it could be Judah. I don’t even know with that kid, he’s a closed book.

   Anyway SOMEONE over there reads this blog. Do y’all want your baby pictures? I am keeping a few to remember you by from before you opened your mouths to hurl your father’s taunts at me, but don’t want or need two giant tubs of reminders of what I defended from your father until you were born and he could begin to con you. If not I guess I’ll pitch them but that just seems really sad. At least to me. 

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

Selling 95% of one’s worldly goods is a bad trip down memory lane for someone like me, but I’m too pragmatic to just leave it all in a pile. 

It’s heartbreaking, but also freeing, selling the gifts that were never given, the once-pined-for items left behind, the things one had hoped would become heirlooms, the actual heirlooms you have no one to pass to and that hold no good memories.

In a way it’s a drawn-out goodbye I didn’t want to give to the life I tried to make here.

I haven’t taken the wooden castle I hoped my grandchildren would play with down from the top of my closet yet to put on Facebook Marketplace, or listed the table it fit perfectly on top of, but I’ll do it tomorrow.

Figuring out what to do with the tubs of baby pictures will be harder. 

One more week until I leave the state of my birth for the last time.

Requiem for a Prius

RIP MFA Prius, 2014-2018

In news that should surprise absolutely no one, the fellow who murdered her was a member of the ethnic group that collectively want to kill everyone in Transylvania. 

Yes, I was in it.

I am...about as well as any uninsured* person who was in an MVA in America would be. Probably one thing broken. Couple things sprained. Little bit bloody. Nothing lifethreatening, I am 99% certain.

Except the car. Oh Florence. The Machine will miss you until the day she dies.

Amen

* meaning no health insurance; of course I had car insurance I’m not a criminal FFS

On up

   International moves, man. Shit is TRIPPY. I am simultaneously having to track down information from four branches down my family tree and get rid of 99% of what I own. Sell this, use the money to buy a certified copy of that. Ooooh, is that a real gold seal? Suddenly I am in regular contact with the State Department and agencies whose names I cannot yet pronounce overseas. 
   A friend innocently asked if the boys would want any of the animals we are leaving behind. I said I had no way of asking; I’m pretty sure I’m blocked from contacting them and they weren’t sentimental about throwing ME away so probably not. My ex and his bad seed have probably either killed me off or made me out to be the monster under the bed.
   In case anyone was worried, Katy now lives in the Silicon Valley and looks down her nose at tapwater, and the barncats and canine contingent are going to the same home in a few weeks. The skins of course will come with us, and that in and of itself is a production that gives me hives, but if I submit all the right paperwork to all the right places, carry the one and fly into the right airport they won’t be quarantined and will go straight to our new home by taxi with us.
   Man, I’m going to miss the Prius.
   Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve found a loving home for my Longhorn skull. It’s a lovely specimen but I can only bring three suitcases where I’m going, so!