Even Superman needed a break...

I want a fortress of solitude. There I said it. This isn't new. I've always been a fan of "me time." Probably somewhat beyond the norm.

Freshman year of college, I shared a room. This is fairly common but this is the only time in 8 years of boarding at school when I had to share my actual space. This meant no naked dancing and singing (although there was that one time when my whole suite...umm, never mind). Since our rooms were smaller, the dorm raised our beds a good four feet off the floors, so our drawers could fit underneath. There was some extra space, so I filled it with a ton of stuffed animals (yeah I'm that girl) and put up a tropical towel to block out the rest of the room (I was broke then too). I called this area my safe haven. I used to hang out under there occasionally when I needed to get away. Usually my roommate, who was really good about never trying to have me committed that year, would watch me go under without saying a word. One day, I was already under there when she came in. I stayed for another hour without saying a word. When I finally emerged, my roommate screamed. Um, sorry bout that.

Throughout the rest of college, I would continue to "run away" in not so subtle ways. Whether it was pretending that I wasn't home when people knocked at my door or having a strict no bra, lifetime movie marathon every Sunday rule, I was all about the "me time".

As you can imagine, moving back home where I share a room with my grandmother has really put a cramp in my "me time." As it stands right now, while I've been unemployed and living at home, I'm supposed to have three days a week from 10am-2pm blissfully by myself while grandma goes to senior day care. I crave these moments of silence. I job hunt, read emails, listen to my headphones and YES I do occasionally do the naked booty shake, just to prove that I still got it.

Because I so look forward to these moments, I become disproportionately disgruntled when they get stolen from me usually via the following ways
1. My brother (who snores loudly and therefore disrupts any essense of silence in the house) woke up late/has the sniffles/has errands to run and stays home
2. My mother has the flu AGAIN (my mother is incapable of just having the common cold) or
3. Grandma refuses or can't go to the center

Now I realize that whining about this makes me a brat but hell even Superman had to get away for while. Shoot, on that one Justice League cartoon, he stayed away on his own birthday (given, Braniac or some other baddy had brainwashed him and he needed rescuing, but you get my point). So I promise to stop whining, if someone could just perhaps find it in their hearts and/or pocketbooks to provide me with my own Fortress of Solitude.

Just in case you need a little guidance, here are my upgrades.
1. The whole place has to be super ridiculously soft. Like huge body sized pillows anywhere. I want the ability to take a nap anytime I want to.
2. I need a television with NO EVENING NEWS. Seriously, the news, at least in NYC, is the most depressing thing ever.
3. A really dope sound system.
4. A jacuzzi bathtub and unlimited supplies of bubble bath.
5. Only cheesy romance novels by or recommended by my favorite authors. I can save the autobiographies and historicals for when I come back. This is my time here people.
6. Rosie, the maid from the Jetsons. She can handle the housekeeping and provide me with just the right snack. ("Rosie, I'll take a Thai Iced Tea, a turkey burger deluxe and a tiramisu, please."
7. A really fantastic view with maybe a mile long path for when I get the urge to take a walk.
8. A full dance studio with dance floor, bar ... and a pole. Stop judging me.
9. A Blair Underwood type (or actually Blair Underwood) manservant for, um, whatever else I need. (Hey hey hey, even Batman had Alfred. Why can't I have my own?)

So, internet world, if you can work on that and get back to me, it would be much appreciated. Until then, wine and chocolate it is.

Memorable Moments

So I've told many people that I think we all have several moments/events in our lives that change us forever. I mean, clearly tons of people believe that too. But I guess where I differ, is that I think some of those moments may be small, even seemingly insignificant. And they can happen over the entire course of your life. I have the anniversary of a very sad and big one coming up next month so I've started thinking about all of them. Here are just a few.

Event: Age 7- I started taking dance classes
Impact? My father is a remarkably talented musician and I never had any desire to play an instrument. Dance became my way of expressing my art. To be fair, I've never been anywhere close to a professional grade dancer, but my love of the art form and music in general continuously gives me a feeling of being PRESENT. Like thru music, I can feel, touch, smell and taste the moment. And that's glorious.

Event: 5th Grade- I asked a boy to fifth grade prom and he said yes
Impact? That boy would become part of my first epic love story that would span well over a decade. Even better, that boy would become and remain half of an epic friendship.
Funny Side Note: He wanted to go with another girl.

Event 6th Grade - I randomly declared to anyone who would listen that I planned to go to a particular boarding school... not knowing one thing about it.
Impact? My older brother attended the same school for a year. I honestly have no idea why I made the decision to go, but once I said it in 6th grade, I couldn't go back on my word. And I didn't. I attended the school, loved it, and never regretted one minute of the education, experience or friends I picked up along the way.
Funny Side Note: The first time I saw the campus of my new high school was literally the day I arrived to move in.
Funnier Side Note: My application, which I eventually was able to see senior year, was written in blue ink, black ink and pencil. I have NO idea how I managed to scrap through.

Event: 7th Grade: I decided to take drama as my elective
Impact? I found my voice in this class. To this day, the fact that I can project my voice clearly across entire rooms can be attributed to Ms. G. Also, I regularly made an ass out of myself and its been recorded. This equals endless joy in my "old fart" age.

Event: 7th Grade- I started to adamantly correct teachers and classmates on the pronunciation of my name.
Impact? As I've mentioned before, I love my name. And the common pronunciation of it is not the one i use. I've said before that I'll refer to myself in this blog as Dulciña pronounced Dool-Seen-Ya. Non Latin speaking people would probably pronounce it Dull-Seen-Nah. It's the same idea for my real name, i know I'm pronouncing it the way it should be, but people will consistently pronounce it otherwise. By stepping up and correcting people, I think I started to claim my individuality. It was a powerful thing.
Funny Side Note: I have friends from before 7th grade who are allowed to pronounce my name wrong via the grandfather clause. Same friends, however, introduce me to new people with the right pronunciation.

Event: 11th Grade- I spent 10 weeks in Spain.
Impact? This was the first time I crossed an ocean. My wanderlust was born. Also, my love affair with the Spanish language was solidified.

Event:  February 24th, 2000. A close friend of mine committed suicide.
Impact? This changed my entire world and still resonates to this day. It took me almost two years to make any new close friends. I imagine I'll write about this more at some point in the future, because whenever I think about life changing moments, this is the very first one that comes to mind.

Event: Spring 2004. I barely managed to scrape out two senior essays.
Impact? I spent about two weeks never sleeping more than 2-4 hours at any given time. I was a mess and had a couple of my friends concerned that I wouldn't graduate. I'm pretty sure that from this week was born my core belief that when I, specifically,  needed to get something done, it would get done. Believing in your own competence is a strong thing.

Event: August 2006. My grandmother has a mini-stroke two weeks after I move out of the apartment.
Impact? Intellectually I know the two events aren't related. But emotionally, I've never been able to separate the slight guilt that I wasn't there and was instead buying soap dishes for my first solo apartment. This might have also been when the very earliest signs of her eventual Alzheimer's started to show up.

Event: Summer/Fall 2008. The end of my first job.
Impact? It wasn't pretty. It was complicated and there were moments when I felt like bits of my soul were being stolen. But I came out the other side with a new appreciation for the things that made me a more complete person. Work would never bring me 100% satisfaction, and I need to equal more than my job at the end of the day.
Funny Side Note: I took fun-employment very seriously, and managed to travel to Belize, Spain, Mexico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and Aruba during my time off.
More Important Side Note: I also had time to really address the changes that were occurring with my grandmother's mentally as the Alzheimer's started to really make its presence known.


Well there's a snippet of some of my significant moments that have changed me. Can you think of yours?

Money Money Money

So we're far past the point where my grandmother can handle money. She squirrels things away, forgets where they are, and then passive aggressively accuses everyone in the house of stealing from her. It makes things awkward to say the least. Which made tonight fun.

To set things up, about a year and half ago, my grandmother used to carry everything including the kitchen sink in her purse. Seriously. Every scrap of post it note, prescription descriptions she no longer took, photos of babies that no one in my house recognizes. It was ridiculous. And when she went to the senior center, she would feel the need to go thru EVERYTHING in the purse, often looking for things she forgot. The worse part was, she had no method of keeping track of her money. Many years ago, someone at the bank decided to give her about 100 of those envelopes they sometimes put money in. In my house, you can find these envelopes all over her room containing anything from spare change to rubberbands to paperclips. She would also keep money in these envelopes. $6 dollars there. $140 here. $24 somewhere else. It was ridiculous. Added to that, whenever she received money from her children, she would often keep them in the christmas/mother's day/birthday card she received them in. And then hide the envelope in one of her 17 drawers.

As you can guess, inevitably, she would remember having some amount of money and putting it in plain site and then is disappeared somewhere. Or she would go through her drawers searching for the ONE envelope she remembered having the money. Did you hear me say 17 drawers. Do you know how much other distracting crap an old lady with Alzheimer's will find while searching 17 drawers? Usually at 1am. So clearly we had to make a plan.

Step One, i got her a wallet. It was important that it was a wallet she would like, because heaven forbid it was too bright, too boring or too fancy. (I really shouldn't complain, I'm ridiculously picky about wallets, and yay I just bought a new one in Vegas, its shiny!)

Step Two- Clear out her purse while she napped. I've learned that I simply am not a big enough person to handle her standing over me while I try to uncomplicate her life. At the end of the day, it's better for the both of us.

Step Three- Purchase and fill up not one but TWO personal address books. (Most of the post its contained phone numbers). One large one with nice big clear print (provided by her health aide as my writing mirrors that of a chicken) and a small notepad one, with the names organised by who she is most likely to contact to keep in her purse at all times.

Step Four- Developed later on. I realized that my grandmother was convinced that she would be robbed if she kept more than $80 dollars on her (are there crime sprees going on at the senior day care centers these days?), she started putting her money in a card in an envelope in a drawer thing again. Leading once again to $100 she would remember putting up which "SOMEONE" most have picked up and moved off with since its not in the place she is 100% sure she put it. So I keep it now, in one of my (very nice) personal wallets. And then I just replenish as necessary. She at times seems bothered with me keeping the money for her but then she constantly forgets that she has it. Or maybe I'm robbing her blind and she's watching me. Who knows? Depends on the day, the moment, the mood.

All this leading to today. She remembers having $40 bucks in her wallet and $20 on her dresser. Mind you, i went out of town for two days this week, but before that A. I took $20 out of her wallet for her to do laundry, telling her she had $20 left. B. My mother instead paid for the laundry (which is a whole other story) C. When i saw she hadn't put the $20 back in her wallet, I placed it in her wallet in front of her.

Of course when i come back, a magical $20 has disappeared. The money she had the on dresser (yup the $20 i placed in her wallet in front of her ) has gone missing. She doesn't know "where it could have gone off to". And the $40 dollar in her wallet was also missing. After trying to explain for 5 minutes, I gave up. I took $20 bucks out the pretty wallet secret stash and gave it to her to place in her wallet.

Interestingly enough there were no questions about where the money came from. In fact, its likely she thinks I just fessed up to having stole it. My mom would have continued to argue forever, but I figure anything that can be resolved in under 10 minutes is a win. I figure I gotta appreciate the small battle victories as I'm most certainly destined to lose the war.

The origination of a name

As I've just made this blog, I have yet to decide how private or public I want it to be. However, I have made the conscious decision to leave my name out of it for now. I imagine, as I become inclined to share this with friends, fam or strangers, the possibility of keeping my name out of this will become harder. However, as I sometimes write to myself in the third person, I need to call myself something. I'm gonna go with Dulciña. It's significant to me, I've been called it before, but not by enough people to make it mainstream. I like that. And it has a tilde, which is awesome.

Now, how did the blog end up with the name "That'sNotMyNameGrandma"? The name came to me in the middle of night when I should have been asleep but instead was overthinking. I knew I couldn't sleep without registering it, so I got out of bed, walked to computer and registered it and it felt right. This has been a constant refrain of mine for the last couple of years. Anyone with friends or family with Alzheimer's know that often times the person, or in this case my grandmother, will start to forget/confuse names. For whatever reason, my name was one of the very first to go. Mind you, I've lived with my grandmother for my entire life minus a couple of years when I moved out and 8 years for college/high school when I was away for the school year. For the past almost 20 years, I've shared a room with my grandmother. So you can imagine my shock when she started calling me Bibby.

I've since learned that Bibby was the name of my grandmother's niece, a woman who is at least 30 years older than me, lives in another country and lived with my grandmother for a couple of years more that 40-50 years ago. And yet I'm her. And when I say that's not my name, she tells me that she's confusing my name with one my sisters. Only one issue. I have no sisters. Bibby does.

This was probably the first time i started thinking about how the mind deteriorates in both predictable and unpredictable ways. If I'm Bibby, then I must have sisters, and in response my grandmother will then call my mother, her own daughter, by a different name. Yes, you guessed it. My mom becomes Bibby's (dead) mother. My grandmother once sent a letter to my cousin in Jamaica. In it, she told him that someone he had never heard of before had sent him a present. I later had to explain to my young cousin that it was my mom not some weird woman who sent the present. Once again she had to referred to my mother by Bibby's mother name.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you I LOVE my name. It is often mispronounced and I often have to correct people, but I truly love my name. And all the Alzheimer's literature will tell you to just go with the flow if nothing is harming the patient. In most other ways, I can overcome. Except this one. It's a failing, I admit it. But maybe I feel like someone else is getting credit for my efforts, and that strikes me as unfair. Especially when I'm being woken up at 2am, 4am, and 5:25am with the question "Bibby, what time of the day is it?"

And that's when I answer, groggy, in the dark, and barely aware of what's going on "That's not my name Grandma...and it's nighttime, you can go back to sleep." 

Introduction

So I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while. And in fact, a bunch of my friends have wanted me to blog for forever. But I've always felt like all the blogs I've enjoyed reading have had particular focuses (focii?). Add to that, all the blogs I love most have similar writing styles. Knowledgeable but snarky. As someone who hasn't really written anything but emails in the past four years, it seemed daunting. How do I make my posts interesting? How do I create and keep an audience? Do I really want an audience or is this just more of a personal thing?

 I have no clue how to answer any of those questions, so I'm gonna wing it. There are a few things I know I want to communicate here. I'll describe exactly how I came up with the title in another post, but here are the things I plan to/may talk about unless I chicken out.     

1. Grandma's Alzheimer's and being a caretaker- I tell these what I think are ridiculous stories about taking care of someone with Alzheimer's. I always been a "you have to either laugh or cry" kinda person. So I see the comedy in a lot of seemingly sad/tragic stories i tell. But i also know they bring people down, so I try to spare them if I can. The more I think about it, the more I want some kinda record of what I've seen/experienced. Obviously the name of the blog is inspired by this.

2. I've been "job hunting"/unemployed for two years now. I will be the first to admit that I've put in some lackluster effort in the past. But no one appreciates being broke more than someone who has already been there. So I'll talk about this somewhat too.

3. Dating. Grr, I've been doing this lacklusterly (yup that's a made up word, I know spell check. Thanks though) for 18 years. I mean, there are times when the dating life of me and my friends seem like the pilot for a really poor but popular UPN show. (And yes, I know that the UPN is gone, but heaven knows that category and description still resonates clearly)

4. Random doo-gooder things. Which is a terrible way to phrase that, but whatever. I care about the world and its people. And if I'm going to be talking in a super public never to disappear format ( hello random government forces, the robots who run Google and Mark Zuckerberg) then I better make sure I try and get people to heal the world. Man in the Mirror is more than a song.

5. Whatever else strikes my fancy. I admit that I'm a rather random person with interests varying from college sports and 80's cartoons to romance novels and autobiographies. And this is my blog gosh darn it. So I'll write about what I want.

Let's see how this all goes.