How to become a drug addict - tomorrow

Piano Cat

But first, how to share a lovely social occasion with friends.

But before that, a few comments from the day:  I did not feel like cooking.  I needed a break from cooking.  I need to be able to eat something that I haven't personally cooked.  I need to be able to eat, period. God, the pain is constant.  I'm going to go back on Prilosec and hope for the best.

I love our new couches and being able to put up my feet.  So do the doggies and I even found Anakin sitting on my part of the couch this morning, smiling like the Cheshire Cat. I made it to my therapist's office; I had a phone message from the Very Nice Lady in Employee Relations asking for a doctor's note and I didn't freak out and throw the phone out the window.  I am still so stressed about this whole "separation" thing, it doesn't take much to set me off.  

Lap Cat

Today's "worst of all" had nothing to do with me personally, but hurt my very soul.

This headline:

Planned Parenthood facing investigations over ‘abhorrent’ video on body part shipments

This discussion captured on the video:

In the video, Nucatola is seen and heard discussing Planned Parenthood's policy of donating fetal tissue to researchers. The activists ask Nucatola whether clinics charge for the organs, which she skirts around.

The language is graphic.

"Yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs," she says. "Some people want lower extremities, too, which, that's simple. That's easy. I don't know what they're doing with it, I guess if they want muscle."

She described how they are able to get other organs without "crushing" them. "We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact."

I saw that, and then I cried.

Forget the drug thing - maybe tomorrow. That's a really evil story and I've had enough evil for today. Let's try to end on a high note:

Yesterday we met our friends, another married couple of A Certain Age (we're all Baby boomers) for drinks, steak dinners, and lots of catching up.  We keep in touch on Facebook, but it's not the same as good old face-to-face.

I met the husband from this lovely couple 46 years ago this September.  Yep, I was 16; do the math. This is another one of those stories about enduring friendships.  What is a little different about our story is how it all began.

Most of us have had long-term friendships, and my experience is that they start in a couple of standard ways - kids from the neighborhood, or schoolmates, or coworkers. That's just logical, I suppose - I even met my husband at college.  So technically speaking, I also met this friend in school, Lawrence High School.  All pretty customary, except -

He was the teacher.  One of those teachers who was very kind to me, then and throughout college, when I started showing serious signs of the anxiety and depression that would plague me the rest of my life.  Kind and thoughtful and supportive, utterly ethical and appropriate in his behavior.  Just the kind of teacher who always put students first.  And he married a lovely lady to boot, and we clicked, so - thank you both for being our friends.