Ramblings of a Middle Aged Lunatic

                I woke up this morning thinking of Lehman Dining Hall for the first time in at least a decade.                 Lehman Dining Hall was the primary eating establishment on the SUNY Potsdam College campus, where I attended college.   I worked there for about two years.   I was officially a dishwasher, but there were always open shifts for every position posted on the bulletin board that you could pick up to make extra money.                   As with any job that is low skilled and boasts plenty of peers to pal around with, it was a fun place to work.   My job was gross but easy.   There were four dishwasher positions.   Two people stood at the conveyor belt where students shoved their trays loaded down with uneaten food.   Their job was to dump the uneaten food into the garbage disposal and place the dishes in a rack.   A third person hosed it down then shoved the racks into an industrial sized dishwasher.   Armed with clean gloves, the person on the other side

Have you ever lived in terror?   Heart stopping, fear-for-your-life terror?                 I never have, not in real life.   I’ve only experienced that kind of terror in my dreams.   Echoes of a past life, or just imagination, whatever the cause, I always wake up and the feeling dissipates.   Thankfully.                 What if you couldn’t wake up?   What if your life was one long nightmare?                 That feeling, that suffocating, can-hardly-draw-a-breath, frozen-in-place-feeling, is why I support allowing illegal aliens to stay in this country.   Because no one should have to live with that feeling.                 I understand the arguments against allowing illegal aliens to stay in the country.   I even agree up to a certain point.   Our laws exist for a reason, and people who enter our country need to abide by them, or they can’t stay.   That’s common sense.   And it logically follows that, just by being in our country, illegal aliens have already broken o

     My family and I have begun the process of cleaning out my mother's room.  This is not a small task.  My mother literally had tons of clothes.  Enough to open up her own boutique.  Many of them were brand new and still had tags on them.  Included in the booty was the outfit I had purchased for her from NY & Company at the mall for Christmas.  It was still in the gift bag.      Since all of us are tight on money currently, we each claimed our still unopened Christmas gifts in order to return them to the store.  I've put this task off as long as possible, but today was looking like a good day, relatively speaking, in that I managed to get dressed before evening and was actually feeling motivated to run errands.  (It hasn't just been grief getting me down, I've had an awful stubborn cold hanging on for weeks).      I packed up the outfit and headed to the mall. This was not something I had been looking forward to doing, because all I can think of is how happy

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https://pvsharmablog.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/meet-shannon-heuston/

Yeah, so this happened this week…                 If you are acquainted with me at all, you know I am a walking, talking, relationship disaster.   Some of that is related in my semi-autobiographical novel The Playground , where I explore the reasons behind the phenomena; alas, I also think luck plays a part and I am decidedly unlucky in love.   (I’m not lucky in cards, either, which is completely unfair).                 My last relationship took place over a span of a year.   We met in October of 2016.   It took me until October of 2017 to decide I was completely done with him.   It basically followed the same trajectory of my other relationships.   He was completely, head-over-heels crazy about me the first month or so, then minor chinks began to appear in his devotion.   Just like C&C Music Factory, Things that Make You Go Hmm.   They must have known the same kind of men.   I found myself in an oft visited and reviled place-having to justify shitty behavior to my close

                    I was smack in the middle of an odd, but not unpleasant, dream.                 I was on a game show and my ex was just called onstage to be a contestant.   As I watched his current girlfriend throw her arms around him and give him a good luck smooch, I uttered an evil laugh.   Somehow, I knew he was about to be called out for all the awful things he’d done to me.   I was eagerly awaiting his comeuppance.                 Then a disembodied voice spoke.   “Shannon, help me.   Shannon!”                 As I swam out of sleep, I realized my mother was calling me.   It was pitch black.   A glance at my digital clock revealed the time was sometime after five in the morning.   As I struggled to my feet, banishing the tinge of annoyance at having been abruptly awakened out of a pretty great dream, I wondered what could have happened.   Immediately, I thought she may have fallen using the bathroom.   She had just returned from her job as a live-in health aide o