Darling? I'm taking a little trip with my ex.

This time last week, I was on the road to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with my ex girlfriend. My male-shaped spouse was supportive, but slightly uncomfortable.

The commonalities I share with my ex and with my spouse are almost mutually exclusive. Ex and I love road trips to cornball places like folk festivals, Disney World, and remote B&Bs whose only claim to fame is "dykes sleep here". We also love to analyze things to death, which probably resulted in us analyzing our romantic relationship right out of existence. Ex hated the fact that I am a Joss Whedon watching, SF/fantasy reading, MMO playing dork. Over time, there was a whole world of topics I could not discuss with her because they would invoke her ire.

Spouse, on the other hand, gets my weird, geeky-gamer-girl side. We have a core compatibility that has thus far surpassed the potential obstacles to a successful relationship. He thinks the Disney corporation is the unadulterated spawn of evil. We do not travel together well at ALL. He's bemused by my attempts to engage in feminist-centered conversation with him, but he clearly loves and respects me, even when he doesn't get me.

I truly love Ex, and I often miss having her in my life on a more regular basis. I truly love Spouse, and I have no confusions as to where my romantic loyalties lie. Spouse was once married to a woman utterly lacking in fidelity, and I always want him to feel secure with me. But it does feel odd to have a type of emotional intimacy with Ex that I don't think I will ever have with Spouse. It's as if I'm *supposed* to feel guilty, but I don't, so I feel guilty for not feeling guilty enough.

I wonder if heterosexual women have an easier time compartmentalizing emotional intimacy with women from romantic relationships with males.

Repo! The Genetic Opera appeals to me on so many levels of geekitude, it makes my head spin.

I'm especially fond of...

1) Anthony Head
2) A "Rocky Horror falls into bed with Blade Runner" vibe
3) Did I mention Anthony Head?

There's more, but work beckons.

Boo died.

She was a most excellent labrador-shaped dog.

Weeks like this, I desperately wish I was one of those people who could delude myself into thinking that there is some mystical afterlife. Instead, my love and I will mourn, and we will feel tremendous guilt that we decided to end her life in order to end her pain, and we will shuffle around the house looking for signs of her and waiting to hear the thump, thump, thump of her tail as it bangs against the wall, the bed, the table, and virtually any other stationary object within tail-whomping range.

Now there is no one to protect our home from the terrifying onslaught of squirrels by going on Barky Barky Perimeter Patrol. And no one to deliver us the post-work news report by grunting like a pig and wiggling maniacally until calmed by a big old belly rub. We have 4 other dogs in our home, but not a one of them is inclined to soak us with slobbery dog kisses because we were out of the room for TWO WHOLE MINUTES.

We held her while she quietly died. And while it was mostly just a heaving bucket of awful to feel her life fade, and to watch her warm brown eyes go a cold, hazy grey....I will always treasure that moment because it was the last that she was with us.

So, I'm waiting for my mother to fart.

Peristalsis is a funny thing. Normally, one's gut churns along quietly in the background, squeezing, snakelike, until waste and gas generated by digestion passes unceremoniously into the wide, wide world. We notice peristalsis when we're hungry (grumble, grumble) or when we're gassy (I knew I shouldn't have had that broccoli-prune-blue cheese milkshake!). We don't often notice it when it's performing the life-maintaining task of breaking down and absorbing all the nutrients it can find in that slice of pizza and diet coke thrown at it a couple of hours ago.

Well, there's a whole slew of people paying attention to my mother's peristalsis today. The team of surgeons that sliced her open and removed an evolutionary blip dangling from her cecum (but not before said blip perforated and oozed an assload (pun intended) of pus and probably fecal matter into her abdomen). The nurses who spend their days surrounded by the stinks and moans and interminable whining of the recently sliced. The clinical aids, who must have one of the world's most unpleasant jobs, yet somehow seem to find it in themselves to smile and speak comforting pablums to their hapless patients. And, of course, her daughter.

Mom has not farted in seven days. This is due to a combination of factors. First, there's the whole recovery-from-slicing thing. Then, there's the morphine. To complicate life, there are also two small abscesses lurking ominously amongst her viscera, threatening to further gum up the works and create the need for more sedations and procedures. And of course, there's the fact that my mother believes that it is not appropriate for women to fart. I would imagine she finds it doubly inappropriate to fart on command, and with an audience of professional fart-watchers.

She doesn't fart, she doesn't eat. She doesn't eat, she can't go home. So we wait until her boredom with hospital life finally overpowers a lifetime of horror that she, like the rest of humanity, contains a tube from which smelly gas periodically emits.

All of which leads me to the realization that my mother will one day (not today, not this time, not-ever-really-I'm-not-ready-yet) sicken and die.

And that's a whole 'nother post.

Me, me, me.

I always thought blogging was for self-absorbed, exhibitionist ninnies.

I'm either going to have to alter my perception, or acknowledge that I'm much more of a ninny than I'd like to admit.

Right. Ninny it is.