Elegantly Green

Green.  That’s the topic of today’s poem.  I really felt like rhyming again today so here it goes…

GREEN

Green, my favorite color.

Green, the color of grass.

Green, the emerald other.

Green, envious, sharp as glass.

The leaves on trees.

The feathers on Sam.

The look of sickened wheeze.

The color grazed by a lamb.

Some love green.

Some hate green.

Some can’t decide.

They are in between.

A primary paint.

A color of jealousy.

A shade that can taint.

A green that makes some look crazy.

Green is cool, calm and collected.

Green is not like any other.

Green is the one that is perfected.

Green is just my favorite color.

I love green, it is the one that rocks.

Agree, with me--if you don’t I won’t stop.

I can go all day long.

Test me out--you will be wrong.

Okay, now I’m the one that wants to stop.

How can I though--it just won’t drop.

I’m going to leave now, make this thing end.

Goodbye for now, goodbye old friend.

Sam

Today, out of nowhere, I was taken out of my cage, knowing not at all as to what was happening.  I was locked into a new habitat that rested right next to my parents scary and terrifying chihuahua/pug named Abby.  She taunted me the whole car ride with her sleep, her peaceful and silent sleep, for I was afraid she would wake up at a moment’s notice and attack me.  Where were we going, I terrifyingly pondered.  What is going on? 

I am a handsome green parrot.  I am on an unknown adventure.  I am Sam.

The car stopped, and the dog woke up.  I messed in my cage (despicable!) and was eventually carried out of the car into a vaguely familiar house.  What am I doing here, my parrot mind wondered.  Where did we go?  What did I do this time?  I had all these questions in my brain that fumbled away from me once I entered the house and saw another dog.  This dog was even scarier, with her black coat and schnoodle (schnauzer/poodle) body.  She barked at me, and twirled around my dad’s feet, probably trying to take him down, so she could get to me.  She knew I was the overall threat.  That’s one smart animal, I decided.  But she won’t fool me!  The twirling and barking continued and I didn’t think I could take it anymore.  They put my cage up on some strange table, and left it there for a while.  I can get out of here if I try, I thought, trying to devise some sort of plan.  Don’t fail me, parrot brain, for we can do this if we try.  And then, I remembered my trusty pal, the little engine that could. 

Thomas the Train, if I can somehow escape my fate and open this cage, I will have you to thank.  It was then, sitting in my cage, atop this strange table in a strange home with strange people, did I start my optimistic chant.  I think I can.  I think I can.  I think I can.  I think I can.  I think I can…  I continued saying these three words, praying to get out of there, praying for some help.  And when help came, I was stunned.  Thank you old friend!  Thank you, Thomas!  It worked!  The cage opened, and I couldn’t believe my senses as I climbed out.  I grabbed hold of a wooden bar that had magically appeared for me outside of my cage.  The wood felt rough against my claws and I held on with a vengeance.  I will get back at the people who brought me here.  I will!  And then, just as my anger was reaching a boiling point, I realized that my father was the one holding the bar and I was just merely being transferred from a tiny carrying cage, to a more suitable one for the guy I am. 

Although I was being raised to first class rooms, I was not happy, and kept thinking of that little train that could, that little train that was always so optimistic.  I can get out of here, too!  I could be like, Sam the Bird, the little parrot that could!  Or Bird, James Bird!  As soon as I thought that I could be as studly as James Bond, I was hooked, and I knew that I must get out, that I must do it fast.  But how?  With all of these people around?  I knew that the people were just as good of predators as anyone, however I knew the big problem was the dogs.  Abby, so sure of herself and not scared of me, just waltzed around like she wasn’t terrified of the new place either.  Therefore, I saw her as a huge threat.  I mean, we have been living in the same house for a while, but that doesn’t mean my terror would just automatically cease.  The other conflict in this Bond story of mine is the black dog, despicably named Lucy.  She terrified me with her happiness, her energy, her irresistible face.  I knew that all three of these reasons were why she turned me on, why she made my feathers turn red in embarrassment.  How could this be?  How could a dog, let alone the one that is trying to ruin my life, be the woman of my dreams?  I love every part about her: her bark, her pant, her run, her play, her personality.  How in the world could I, a cage-sitting, green-feathered, hazel-eyed, long-clawed, untrimmed-beak parrot, fall in serious LOVE with a female named Lucy?  Love was hitting me that day, and it was hitting me hard. 

That was the beginning of Sam’s adventure to Erin Marie’s house.  Will he ever get home?  Will he ever become James Bird?  But most of all, will Sam, a sad and lonely green parrot, ever find love with Lucy, the mystifying black schnoodle?

An Ode to Eyebrows (Just Kidding, It's a Bash!)

Is there anyone, anyone at all, who has a clue as to why human beings have eyebrows?  Why?  What do they do?  What is their purpose, if there is one?  Why, why in the world do you and I have eyebrows?

These are the questions I ponder, and to prove my curiosity to the weird hair above my eyes, I am going to dedicate a poem to my eyebrows.  So here it goes:

To my eyebrows, that rest above my simple brown eyes.

Just watching me be sad, laughing at my cries.

You taunt me and tease me, you make me so angry.

Why do you hate me so much, just because unlike you, I can see.

You look so weird, just a random tuft of hair on my face.

What are you doing there?--you watch me like the cops on Cold Case.

You could be so nice, you could shade me from the harsh and brutal sun.

But instead you keep your mane short, doing nothing other than what you call fun.

Only with a mirror can I look at you, can you be seen.

You try to be invisible when you’re not--why are you so darn mean?

My mouth chews my food, my nose breathes in air.

My ears listen for me, my hair is just beautifully there.

My eyes give me sight, my skin gives me cover.

But you, you don’t do anything--you will never find a lover.

I apologize for my anger, my harsh and serious truth.

But you deserve it, bully, you will never run your own kissing booth. (huh?)

You don’t make any sense, moving up and down at your own pace.

You are dorky and weird and sadly on my face.

I’m sorry, old friend, but the truth must come out.

Listen to me, I’m talking to you--don’t make me shout!

I’m done here with you, you and me are done.

Goodbye to you, so long, you are now officially shunned.

Off to waxing!  But don’t worry, I am keeping most of you!  Wouldn’t want to look weird would I?

The Poison, The Stench, The Rancid Smell--Did I do that?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been the victim to bad perfume blues (I don’t care if there’s no one around to see you raise your hand!  Just do it!)?  Raise your hand if you were poisoned by your friend’s new fragrance?  Raise your hand if you have caught that whiff, that terrible whiff of an older lady who just brushed past you with that acrid perfume?  I was the friend.  I was the older lady.  I was the odor, and even though others have felt bad for me because of my diabetes (explained later) I couldn't shed tears over this one, because THIS was all my FAULT.

I was getting bored of the perfume bottles I owned so I waltzed into my mother’s bathroom and studied her perfume bottles.  This one looks interesting.  No, wait I like this one.  Mmmhmm, this is the one.  I pondered my options, trying to decide what fragrance I was going to try that day.  I did a random draw and ended up with a unique bottle that was set to haunt me the rest of my day.  I sniffed the top and figured it smelled okay.  This one will do, I thought.  That was my mistake.  I thought it smelled okay, I thought it would just simply do.  I didn’t check with my mom first to see if this was one of her better perfumes.  There, right there, was the place where I screwed up.  And boy, did I pay for it.

I picked up the bottle, I opened the cap, and I sprayed.  I sprayed that poison onto my wrists.  I sprayed that potent fluid onto my neck.  I sprayed that perfume scent into my hair.  And that was when I smelled it.  I smelled just how bad the perfume I just dowsed myself with was.  Great.  Now I have to deal with this smell all freaking day.  How could I be so dumb?

As I went downstairs to tell my mom and dad I was ready to head to Costco with them, like we planned, I was already disgusting myself.  When my parents smelled my rancid odor, they were just as disgusted as I was.  The difference?  I had to live with it all day.  This smell was never going to leave me.  All day, all the time, everywhere.

So as I entered my car, I could already tell that the trip to Costco was going to be a long one, right from the minute all of our doors closed and there was nothing in the air except for that pungent scent.  I started to gag as we left our garage and headed to the store.  I seriously felt that one more whiff and I was going to throw up.  At that moment, I felt bad for all the friends and older ladies and any woman who ever had bad perfume.  Before, all I ever thought about was how the bad perfume smelled to me.  I never thought about how the perfume might have smelled to them.  They were just trapped, unable to run away from the worst, just like I was.  Why did the world grant young women this curse?  Why, world, why? 

“Well, I don’t know, Erin.  Why would you question me like that?” 

Because all over the world, you ruin girls’ days! 

“It’s not my fau-…” 

Yes it is!  Don’t you even start with me about that!  We’ve talked about this before!

So yeah, the car ride pretty much “stunk” and the Costco run wasn’t much better.  I felt bad for the people around me.  I felt bad for the poor food resting in the freezers that couldn’t move, couldn’t sprint away from my stench.  I felt bad for, most of all, me, who just wanted to smell different for a change, you know?  (sniffle, sniffle)  Poor, poor me.  But then, something happened.  Something big, something that would save me from me, something that would save my day.  It was rumbling inside of me, a hurricane forming.  The world was finally going to rescue me…

…………………….

…………………….

…………………….

(momentum building, momentum building)

…………………….

…………………….

…………………….

(wait for it!)

…………………….

…………………….

…………………….

And then I sneezed, and the moment passed.

I was tricked, I was trapped, I was caught by my leg with a snare.  I almost believed, for just one second, that my day would turn around.  Well it didn’t, and I stunk up the entire store with my scent.

I wanted to feel bad for myself, I really did.  However, I knew it was my fault.  I’ve never been one to feel bad for myself, even when others thought they should. 

One day, I was hanging with my friends during lunch, having a good time, laughing at someone’s joke.  Just a few days previous, a girl I just met was beginning to hang out with us.  I really liked her, and had absolutely no problem with her new arrival, until she said this:

“My mom feels really bad for you because, you know, of your diabetes.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better about myself and my diabetes?  And if so, how?  (That really sounded like one of those essay questions you would see, huh?  What can I say?  I’m just dying to go back to school…J)   What was I expected to say to that?  Thanks?  For what?  I don’t need people’s sympathy.  I don’t need them to worry about what I can and can’t eat (I can eat anything people!).  I don’t need them to do anything to help me with my type 1.  The only thing I need from them is to just be my friend, which my close amigos have done!  Whatever, it doesn’t matter about what she said.  As my family and I say, her heart was in a good place.  She wasn’t trying to make me annoyed, or angry, or uncomfortable (even though she did, duh!).  She was just trying to feel good about herself, feel like she helped me in some way.  But she can’t and she should’ve just said nothing on the subject other than a question about the disease and how it affects me.  I would’ve been happy to educate her.  She could’ve learned something new that day!  But she didn’t.  Oh well. 

I just have one question, though:

Why was her mom the one who felt bad for me and not her?  Is that strange, or is that strange?  I’m going to go with strange. J

Soccer and Scrambled Eggs? A Tough Day for Both

Okay, so today was a letdown for the U.S.A. soccer team playing in the World Cup finals.  They lost.  After watching almost four hours of the game, and for the result to be a big fat loss, I was pretty angered.  It was a great game though.  It started off with U.S.A. getting a beautiful goal, followed by a Japan goal, a U.S.A., and then another Japan.  After a 30 minute overtime, the score was 2-2.  That was when my darn TV failed me.  We were watching the game as a recording because at 11:00, when the game began, we were cleaning our house (which now looks sparkling clean!).  My sister, expecting that overtime may be held, set the TV to record the program and one hour after.  Well, apparently one hour extra was not enough because right before the shoot out began, the one hour ran out and it and didn’t record the most important part of the game.  Why, out of all the things I have recorded, did you fail me now, TV?  Why?  We were lucky enough to realize the channel that the soccer game was on was the same one that was playing on our TV while we were watching the recording.  Thankfully, that meant that all we had to do was rewind the channel to see who had won.  And I was devastated.  I totally thought that U.S.A. was going to win; I thought that they had it in the bag.  But I was wrong!  And like I said in one of my previous posts, I’m wrong a lot!  Darn!  I guess they have two years from now to redeem themselves, however they made me really disappointed today…

So as you might realize from my devotion to the World Cup soccer, I am a soccer player.  Actually, tomorrow I am going to attend an AYSO soccer camp that will be run by people from the United Kingdom. These camps are so much fun and I love doing them every summer.  It is one week long and probably the best camp I have ever attended.

So, now that I got the soccer topic out of my system, I want to talk about my diabetic Sunday high.  Every Sunday, for as long as I can remember, my blood sugar rises at around 3:00 pm.  At first, I could not figure out why it was that my levels always were high every week.  Without understanding why I had to, I put on a temporarily higher basal (a basal is a continuous dose of insulin Lola gives me).  Then, the Gods spoke to me in my sleep (just kidding, they didn’t).  We finally figured out what the problem was after a long time of thinking my body was just being strange (okay, we didn’t figure it out like right now, but a couple years ago).  What we realized was that the scrambled eggs I ate every Sunday were raising my blood sugar a couple hours later.  Scrambled eggs are a difficult kind of thing to give insulin for because they technically don’t have any carbs (the measurement I base my insulin doses on), however they raise my numbers later.  Strange, huh?  It sure is, especially when we all thought that my body was just trying to tell time.

Movies N' Things (Get it? Like Linens N' Things!)

Everyone has heard of Harry Potter: the young (well, not so young anymore) wizard that rules Hogwarts and tries to defeat you-know-who (if you don’t know who you-know-who is, well, it’s Voldemort.  There, now you know).  Today I watched the new Harry Potter movie and absolutely loved it.  I never read any of the books meaning that I don’t understand any part of it, although they are very entertaining with their action, comedy and romance.  What can I say, I’m an old romantic softy at heart and “love” a good love story.

While we are on the topic of movies, I would like to address the difficulty of testing your blood sugar in the dark of a movie theater.  Today, I ran to the bathroom in the middle of my flick and felt that sensation in my legs when I got up (that’s another problem of sitting in the movies: sometimes I can’t tell if and when I am low sitting down for almost two hours).  So anyway, when I came back I got out my kit and began to get everything ready.  To make testing in the dark easier, I have a little light attached to my kit that I can use.  The problem is how bright that light shines, which should be good, except for the fact that I don’t really want to distract people’s eyes from the movie to me.  Most movies, I just use the dang thing out of ease.  However, there are some serious people watching these Harry Potter movies that really get into it and I sure don’t want to offend them.  So today I attempted it in the plain dark.  I mean, I should be able to complete a simple blood sugar test without looking since I’ve tested about 10-12 times per day for about four years.  Even despite this statistic, it was extremely hard to make sure I had enough blood for the test strip.  I didn’t at first and the meter errored.  I wonder what my mom and I looked like as we were staring at the little screen of Lola (see Diabetes Terminology) waiting for a number that was never going to pop up.  Eventually, we realized the darn thing didn’t get enough blood and I had to get another strip put in.  So I did, and it was a little bit easier because I used the light on my insulin pump which has a much dimmer light.  Although it was easier than testing in utter darkness, plainly testing in a movie theater is no easy task no matter what.  I just couldn’t find the place where I was supposed to put my blood.  Heck, I didn’t even know if any blood came out!  It was very difficult, but good I did because I ended up testing 60.  I had a smarty, which made all the hassle worth it (and the fact that I didn’t faint!  Victory!). 

Another place that is a hard environment to test in is at school.  I don’t mind testing in front of my friends, but I don’t want to direct extra attention to me with a blood glucose check in the middle of a lesson.  So far, I have done very well doing a quick level test under my desk, however it is not the ideal way to find out my blood sugar.  That’s just something us diabetics have to go through, like it or not (I’m going to go with not J).

What I have gotten very good at is sneaking a glucose tab into my mouth during class, sucking it without moving my mouth,“sugaring” up when I am low.  But now, ever since I got my braces off and am wearing a retainer, it is much more difficult.  Before, all I had to do was pop the sugar right into my mouth.  But now, I have to take out my retainer and then pop the sugar, all the while, making sure not to drop my retainer on the ground.  GROSS!  I haven’t even mentioned my germaphobe personality before on this blog.  Well, now you know.  I used to wash my hands until they bled.  Yeah, it was pretty bad.  But, I’m a lot better now!  I put on lots of lotion and only wash my hands when needed!  Yay me!  I’m slowly but surely getting better!

Today, I didn’t know if I was going to blog.  I went to the movie, dinner, then Target to do a little shopping.  It was later than usual when I got back and I figured I could just write tomorrow.  But this morning, I saw that I had a person from England reading my blog!  My own writing made it overseas!  I just want to thank that person from England, along with my friends here, and my family.  You make this blog worthwhile, meaningful and overall SUPER FUN for me.

Got writing?

What's Up With That?!

I’m sure no one ever wants to go to a doctor appointment, however some more than others.  If you didn’t understand my subtle hint of letting you know that my appointments are worse than most, you figured it out now (…because I just told you J).  The reason for my terrible visits is not because of the finger prick at the end (I do that like 10-12 times per day).  No, that’s not my problem at all.  My problem is the doctor herself.  She’s a quick-witted, dark-haired bully.  Yep, you heard right.  My own doctor is a bully.  Now, I came up with the perfect answer to one of her questions about bullying.  Next year, when she says, “Are you being bullied by anybody?”  I will politely answer, “Yes, sadly I am.  And she’s in this room right now.”

This doctor is a very thorough one, which is the only reason we have stayed with her.  However, her jabs every five minutes sting.  Almost to the point that I want to cry.  Yes, cry.  If she asks you a simple question like what your favorite color is (in a fast and slurred manner) and you don’t answer within at least two seconds, you get reamed for it.  If you take a second to count how many months until your next birthday, you will get pummeled (um…who really counts down the months before your birthday when you’re over five years old?).  If you don’t understand a question and want her to repeat it, she laughs it off and thinks you are not paying attention to her (or maybe I just didn’t hear the question!  Goodness gracious, woman!).  Not only was my doctor being her usual rude self today, but the nurse who checked my height and weight at the beginning was not pleasant either (oh and by the way, I grew 1.78 centimeters in a year when I’m supposed to grow 5!  Yay me and my non-growingness!  I know it’s not a word, but just go with it).  For one thing, this nurse talked really soft and quiet so I had no clue what she wanted me to do next.  But another, when she laid out the paper gowns, my sister got the normal blue one that everyone gets, however I received a white robe with ducks, butterflies, and insects scattered on it.  Really?!  A thirteen year old gets the three year old gown?  Of course, I once again was discriminated against because of my size.  At my own doctor’s office!  A place where I am supposed to feel comfortable, not on edge about my crazy doctor and mindless nurse!  What a joke of a place, huh?  Yeah, so it wasn’t a great day at the doctor’s office, but right after I got to go to my gymnastics class I attend every Friday. 

I love gymnastics, though I don’t do it competitively.  I go once a week, just for the sheer joy and excitement that comes from performing a round-off double back-handspring (which I did today!).  The two coaches that run my class are hilarious and super fun.  So the ending to my day was a victory, considering the fact that the start sort of sucked (thanks to you, my fellow doctor).  I went to Rubio’s after and had a delicious fish taco.  YUM!  My doctor’s just a weird one, whom you will never be able to change.  Darn!  That’s really a shame she’s like the only good doctor in the area.