Happy Love Day

May Love Day grant release from grief and bitterness.

Yeah, I’m one of those “holiday themed guest towels” ladies.

Picked up the habit from Mom, who fretted excessively about the state of the hallway bathroom whenever guests were coming over. She had quite a collection of “guest towels,” most hand-embroidered, by her mother or grandmother. I have some of those now. Or, she would buy packets of paper “guest towels” and it would be my job to arrange them precisely on the rack before any guests arrived.

They had guests over a lot, almost every weekend, for cocktails.

After the first two years in this house, we never had guests.

Ever.

Mike didn’t like to socialize, fell out with his family and mine, and wouldn’t have them or anyone else over here. So it was just the three of us, for fifteen years.

Now its just the two of us. I’m still working on the house to make it fit to have anyone over. Not sure I’ll ever get there.

But I put the towels up anyway, to brighten the place, because my daughter does love holidays. Sets her calendar by them.

She calls today Valentine’s Day, but more often, she calls it “Love Day.”

“Happy Love Day, Mom!”

Thanks, sweetie.

Today I’m thinking about bloggers I’ve “met,” by reading their blogs, where I found some shared experience.

Commiseration.

And because of that, I know there’s a good chance some of them will be hurting somehow, today, on “Love Day.”

Missing a loved one. Feeling lonely.

Or feeling betrayed.

If that’s you, I hope today you can remember love, and try to remember it with joy.

Easier said than done, I know. I’ve already had one quick round of weeping today, when my daughter repeated, “it’s hard to live without a husband,” echoing me, because I had  said that to her after we talked about how it is hard for a young woman to live without her Dad. Trying to show her I share her grief, in my way.

“It’s hard to live without a husband, too. I miss him too.”

“I’m Dad’s Valentine in heaven.”

Yes, sweetie, you sure are.

“You’re my best Valentine, Mom.”

Sniff. Sniff. Blink, blink.

“You OK, Mom?”

“Yes, sweetie, I’m fine.” Tissue.

Today I’m thinking of those who grieve. Those who feel their life has been diminished, and can never be whole or full again. Those for whom today is a day where each breath threatens to become ragged, and each exhalation risks an accompaniment of tears.

I hope today on Love Day you can remember that you are loved, and that, as Mike said to our daughter from his deathbed, “love never ends.”

I am also thinking of those who have suffered loss not through death, but through betrayal. I have read how they have endured infidelity and lies, that, when discovered, left them feeling that everything they thought they knew was wrong, that the love they thought was theirs isn’t, and may never have been, and their life as they knew it has dissolved, leaving them feeling cold and hollow.

And then feeling really, really pissed off.

I’m hoping, if you are one of the betrayed, that today, you can decide not to dwell in anger.

I hope that you can decide not to let bitterness consume you.

By losing Mike I learned that despite whatever pain it has inflicted, life is precious and time is limited.

It makes me sad to think that someone’s ill treatment of you has caused your life to stall and sink and left you mired in fury and pain.

Mike and I went through it. We stayed together.  We made it back to each other, after years and years, back to the love that was there underneath it, all along.

I know it’s a struggle. I’ve been through the un- and underemployment, the caregiving and the financial worries. I’m hoping today in spite of it all you’ll find a hand, or the strength, to pull yourself out of the mire into the light that can be the rest of your life.

I have found solace by finding gratitude. For every breath that may get raggedy, for every tear that may fall and for every time my resident angel, my amazing daughter, beams her beautiful, unconditional love my way and out into the world.

Today if you are hurting, I hope you find consolation.

And if no one has claimed you as theirs today,

Will you be my Valentine?

“In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.” – the Beatles.

Wishing you peace, solace and light on “Love Day,” I remain,

Your off-to-bake-some-heart-shaped-cookies-and-fully-intending-to-enjoy-my-share-of-them,

Ridiculouswoman

Menacing Midwinter

The rabbit survived. So did I.

The glass exploded. One just like the one pictured there, on the windowsill.

It didn’t “break.”  It didn’t “shatter.”

It exploded.

I could not believe how much glass was in that glass.

It was everywhere – inside and under the dishwasher I had just taken it out of, under the fridge across the floor, into the living room and the breezeway.

Tiny shards of it in my fingers and the meat of my hand.

WTF?

I had just taken it out of the dishwasher, and accidentally tapped it – just tapped it -on the underside of the Bulgarian-installed quartz countertop.

And BLAM.

It exploded.

Rational minded me instantly assumed that I had chanced upon the perfect point on the glass that was scratched or hairline cracked or otherwise weakened just enough to cause some sort of scientifically explainable reaction.

Kablooey.

I had to vacuum the inside of the dishwasher along with the kitchen and breezeway floors, missing a church service I wanted to attend, because it was unsafe for my daughter or Sophie the cat to walk through the kitchen until I was sure it was shard-free.

Earlier that morning, the relatively new television started acting weird, too, providing sound but no picture – just an odd sort of lavender glow.

Turns out I had connected the HDMI cables in the wrong inputs after switching out the DVR for a no-charge simple cable box (which still makes me mad – that even though I get internet service from this provider and I could watch TV via internet only, they still make me have a box and their salesperson was unable to give a technical reason why  – grrrr.)

Then the shelf on the new hutch on my new desk half-collapsed – one of the pegs that holds it up just suddenly fell out.

What’s going on?

There was nothing significant about the date that I could remember. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, other than considering giving up on my book, and missing Mike, and feeling a little lost about my future, when the glass exploded.

After I got the glass cleaned up and the shelf fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to complete an online job application, and just as I was finishing it, my computer spontaneously shut down.

Just turned itself off.

Wind? Was there a power surge and the strip cut the power? But the lights on all the other chargers plugged in to the strip were still on.

Weird.

These past few days, every time I veer in the direction of giving up on my notions of writing, speaking and singing, something interrupts, or switches off, or falls apart, or explodes.

It doesn’t feel like encouragement.

It feels like menace.

I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweaty panic, wondering what the hell I’m doing and what could happen, all the bad stuff that could happen, in my capacity as a professional-class worst-case-scenario OCD worrier.

My heart races. I cringe and writhe, remembering long-ago embarrassments, mistakes, and failures, imagining they will all happen again now, and be much worse. I read nonsense on my phone for two hours to try to calm down and go back to sleep.

And then, today: a sparkling bright, perfect winter day. No extremes. Just a spotless blue sky, sunshine and fresh snow on the ground.

One day of calm, after the vortex, and the ice, and the wind and the windblown snow.

The house has stopped creaking and snapping and kerpowing, now that the temperature has moderated, but I predict a spate of “giant potholes that ate Chicago” blog posts and news stories, come spring, because of the insane temperature swings we’ve had. A thaw-and-freeze cycle that cracked steel holding up Lake Shore Drive is surely causing concrete and asphalt pavement to crack and crumble all over the area.

Old Sophie caught a mouse last night, and lovingly left it’s gnawed corpse as an offering  in the middle of the library rug.  She’s still got it, the old girl. I just wish she wouldn’t flaunt it in the middle of the library rug.

But we’re gaining daylight – the sun is up when I rise, now, and I can still contemplate a walk in the late afternoon.

It’s too soon to say we’ve turned a corner – March is yet to come, all lion and lamb, and it always, always snows one more time in April.

Waiting for the clock to run out on the agents who have my query and trying to screw up the courage to start another round instead of giving up, I remain,

Your anxious, worried, but like the backyard rabbit who survived the vortex by hiding under the deck, as yet unconquered by winter extremes and associated all-night-vigils,

Ridiculouswoman

But Enough About Me, Or, What Have I Done For You, Lately?

Does this blog add anything positive to the world?

So, Grandma Noises. Mom’s face in the mirror.

I want to make it clear that I’m grateful for those things, and for Mom and Grandma and all they were to me and all they gave me.

I’m grateful I have made it to an age where I make Grandma noises.

I’m grateful to Grammie for being there in Maine, putting up with a snot-nosed, whiny, sad, bored, fat little punk like me, for two solid weeks, summer after summer.

I’m grateful I can see my Mother’s face in mine, and remember the good things she did for us, in her way.

Although they pretty much detested each other, my Mother came weekly to give Mike a day off when our daughter was an infant, driving 30 miles from the burbs into the city.  It was a long, long day, because I was commuting 70 minutes each way and was gone from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. most work days, and Mike took full advantage of the time, as he should have. He needed the break.

Mom cared for our daughter, making nurse notes (she was a retired R.N.) and cleaning up where she could, in an under-furnished and unamusing townhome in a transitional city neighborhood.

She produced funds when funds were needed in the dark times of under- and unemployment.

She taught me to drive a stick shift, picking up keys and announcing we were getting in the car one day, totally unexpectedly, when I was 16.

She whispered when she sewed, drawing me in, and teaching me how to hem and mend. She was frugal. I am not, but at least I know how to hem a dress or a pair of pants and I have made clothes when I had to (a dying art, apparently – I had a coworker who walked around in too-long pants, because she didn’t know how to sew. I was gobsmacked. How could any neurotypical child who can safely handle a needle and thread reach adulthood without knowing how to hem a pair of pants?)

Mom made pies, rolling the crust out with sharp, fast, angry strokes, this way, then that. Once in the pie plate, she crimped the edges with grim determination.

Both Grammie and Mom made jam and jelly and chili relish and awesome chowder.

They often persisted long past my tolerance in demanding I hand over new clothes to be altered,  get a haircut, or go outside when all I wanted to do was read.

But I wish I’d been more grateful, then, and that I had told them that I was.

I hope they hear me now, on the other side.

David Kanigan quoted the late Julie Yip-Williams, author of The Unwinding of the Miracle, on his Live and Learn blog recently. Ms. Yip-Williams wrote about her life with cancer (the same kind of cancer that took my Mike), and her book was published posthumously.  There’s a review of it in the New York Times.

“Live while you’re alive,” she wrote.

I confess I haven’t read her book yet:  but the Times review reveals that she meant “live while you’re alive” not in the bucket list, run-off-and-climb-a-mountain-or-run-a-marathon kind of way, but in the every-moment-no-matter-how-seemingly-ordinary-is-a-gift way.

To that I would only add, express gratitude to others, while they’re still here to hear you.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I do this – why do I blog?

(Seems to be kind of a theme, lately – Jungian synchronicity – I started writing this before I read Fractured Faith‘s or Writer of Words’s similar posts – but it seems several of us are currently thinking about what this blogging thing contributes).

For me, it started as a way to process grief, and just write. I love words (just ask anyone who has tried to get one in edgewise when I’m talking).  Building words into sentences that convey ideas or emotions makes me feel at home. (There are few places I feel completely comfortable – sitting at my computer writing, singing, and speaking or performing in front of an audience are about it).

But I don’t want blogging to be just for me. I want it to be for you, the reader.

What have I done for you lately?

Have I given you something to laugh about, cry about, something to feel, something to enjoy?

Have I given you writing that is good enough for you to bother reading it?

Has it meant anything beyond just me, yapping about my little life?

Has it made my little life less little?

Have I told you lately that I love you? For reading, for commenting, for being there?

Mike died. What will happen when I do?

Will I have contributed anything of value to the world?

Would anyone say anything positive about me? Would anyone even show up?

Trying to listen twice as much as I talk (ok, laugh, but I actually AM trying) and thinking about how to use what small gifts I may have to contribute something positive to the world, I remain,

Your loquacious, grateful, perplexed, anxious, wondering what’s-it-all-about-Alfie,

Ridiculouswoman

God Help Me, I’m Making Grandma Noises

Not ready to fade…but I’ll take the senior discounts!

Grammie had a distinctive way of clearing her throat.

“Eh-ehehehehehehhh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”

As if she was trying to clear phlegm discreetly.

But there wasn’t really any way to be discreet about it.

That sound drove me nuts, and she did it a lot.

I was sure I would never, ever make that sound.

You know where this is going.

I caught myself doing it the other day, while looking in the mirror at my Mother’s face looking back at me.

I had been so determined not to turn into my Mother, or my Grammie.

And I have been unkind to them both in my writing and my mind, remembering only the annoying stuff (Grandma) and the painful stuff (Mom, a lot of it.)

Yeah, so, Karma’s a bitch, right?

Since Christmas, my daughter and I have been sitting together in the evening for our “music time,” listening to something soothing, and chatting, or just sitting together, until she decides she wants “quiet time,” and turns off the stereo, so we can just sit in companionable silence together.

That’s when I notice I have begun to resemble a slightly more colorful Whistler’s Mother – rocking in my 5-generation rocking chair, the one that started with Great-great Grandma, then Great Grandma, and then came to Grammie, then Mom, then me.

Wearing a flannel nightie, a shaker cardigan,  (not getting paid for those links, just wanted to give you an image of what I’m talking about) a wide plaid shawl on top of the sweater, around my shoulders, and a hat.

God, help me – I don’t want to be a docile, rocking-chair, throat-clearing granny, or a  crotchety Mom, fussing over my daughter’s hair or clothing choices. Not yet, anyway.

I have no intention of going gently into “seniorland.” (Oh, but I’ll take the discounts, thank you very much!) I will reveal my age only so others may marvel at it – “impossible! You don’t look a day over (insert highly unlikely much younger comparison here.)”

This year is a big one for me – when a certain date rolls around, my life as any kind of woman (as opposed to bent, chin-hairy crone) hits the “sell by” date.  I am scheduled to dry up, turn grey, and stop expecting much, especially not love, from life. I am expected to fade uncomplainingly into invisibility, and generally get out of the way.

Hell with that.

You may find me improperly dressed for a woman of my age, singing too loudly at inopportune moments, using foul language when inspired to do so, and generally making a spectacle of myself.

Because if you ask me, as Margo was asked, “is it over, or is it just beginning?” I’d reply:

Enjoy the ride, bumps and all!

(Now if I can just clear my throat….)

Going shopping for a dress like that, I remain,

Your non-smoking, sans diamonds but rockin’ the Bette-Davis attitude,

Ridiculouswoman

Mood Music

Name your cryin’ song, your guilty pleasure song, and your rock-out-in-the-car song!

Yesterday? I’m putting that down to a bad hair day.

That’s been fixed. The bob’s lookin’ fab today, which improved my outlook tremendously.

But the song from yesterday’s post has stuck in my head.

That song made me feel hopeful in the middle of a bad self-pity party when Mrs. McWhiny reared her ugly head, even when I thought I’d kicked her to the curb; the song  helped me pull myself together this morning to fix the hair and face, and generally get back into compliance with the Middle-Aged Woman Rules.

Everyone has their “cryin’ songs” There are just some songs that make me bawl every time. Cathartic.

In addition to “cryin’ songs,” there are songs that are just really fun, there are “guilty pleasures,” those songs you’d be embarrassed to tell a friend you like, but you rock on with them in the car. There are songs that inspire, that make you laugh, that give you hope.

They can be in any genre from country to classical to rock’n’roll.

Beloved Chicago songwriter (and really one of the best songwriters ever) Steve Goodman wrote some unbelievably touching songs – just try to get through “My Old Man,” where the recording keeps the bridge where he got choked up, without crying. Good luck.

He also wrote a lot of really funny songs – and they’re funny largely because they touch on something that is true – or at lest “truthy,” to paraphrase Stephen Colbert.

For example, Goodman, with John Prine, another best songwriter ever, wrote a song to illustrate that a true country song had to have trains, Momma, dead dogs, divorce, drinkin’, trucks and prison, plus farms and Christmas. The story goes that David Allen Coe, who was the first to record it, and Prine, both complained to Goodman that these things were missing when he originally finished the song.  So Goodman (and Prine) wrote an extra verse (watch the whole thing to the end, it’s worth it, but if you’re in a hurry it’s at about 2:18):

Read the lyrics, and the song notes linked in the upper left here, for the story as told by Prine.

So, how about you name your favorite:

  • cryin’ song
  • guilty pleasure song
  • song that you just have to sing along to in the car

OK, I’ll go first:

I did my cryin’ songs a while ago.

Guilty pleasure: The Calling, Wherever You Will Go

Sing Along Song: It has to be “Bohemian Rhapsody,” right? At least the Wayne’s World head-banging part? No? Ok, let’s see – Oh, another for the guilty pleasure list, I guess –

Bon Jovi, “Livin’ on a Prayer” Roll down the windows and wail that sucker!

Um, but as far as rolling the windows down, you should probably wait until spring comes again.

In the meantime here’s a cute scene from the Big Bang Theory where Howard and Amy discovered a mutual guilty pleasure (for those of you in need of instant gratification, it starts at about :58):

Go ahead – what are your cryin’ songs, guilty pleasures, rock-out-in-the-car songs?

You don’t need an account to play – you should be able to submit your list in the comments. Or you can use the contact page to send your list.

Looking forward to your song suggestions,

I remain,

Your well-coiffed, snapped-out-of-it, sings-at-the-drop-of-a-hat,

Ridiculouswoman

 

 

Thaw Gets Raw

You thought I was joking, about that snow pile, didn’t you.

Well, there it is. Coffee cup, plastic bottle and all, having begun its transformation into – a big, nasty, filthy pile of crap.

It has been well above freezing for three days running, and it has been raining most of the day.

And there it sits, getting filthier and gathering more crap.

How did something once so pristine get so nasty so fast?

And how did I go back to being a quivering blob of nerves, a self-doubting, fearful, pull-the-covers-over-my-head-and-hide, weak, weepy wimp?

I wasn’t expecting this. I thought I had snapped out of it.

Was it that my daughter decided it was time to “graduate” from her weekly art therapy session? She’d been going for at 7 or 8 years.  Suddenly decided she was done. (I asked her and she said it was OK if I wrote about that.)

OK, fine. That’s a mature, adult decision. You’ve gotten all you could out of it, so time to move on.

So why, after weeks where I thought the waterworks were finally shut off,  did I break down, just by saying thanks and good-bye to the art therapist? It’s not like we won’t see her around.

Was it the sense that something was exhausted? Empty? That my daughter had talked as much as she could and made as much art as was in her about her grief?

I don’t know and I still can’t say – but tears are coming as I write about it.

To top it off, we got in the car to head home and “Wind Beneath My Wings” came on the radio when the car started.

My late mother-in-law, whom we hadn’t seen in more than a decade, and whose death Mike learned of a year after the fact by Googling (long story) used to say, “I don’t want anyone crying at my funeral. Just play that Wind Beneath My Wings song.”

Yeah, right, Rose. That one won’t send anyone to the tissue box.

So blubbering turned into sobs, right there in the car, right in front of my sweet, angelic daughter.  Car crying used to be private, so I could get it out while neither of them could see me. But now she’s right next to me, digging around for tissues, handing them to me.

When the blubbering started,  I was thinking about Mike, and how our daughter had been talking herself through living each day without him, trying so hard not to be sad but to remember the happy times. I’m so proud of her.

Me? Not so much. I was thinking about how inadequate I felt and all the things I could have done better and about how much I miss him, too. And something about our daughter taking this step, away from one form of help, ending a routine that started when Mike was still with us, just hit me hard.

And then that song –

“Thank you, thank you, thank God for you….”

Was Rose thanking me?

I hadn’t thought of that.

Did I need to be thanked? For sticking with him and taking care of him? Not just when he was sick, but for our entire marriage?

Decades ago, she thanked me for that, when she came to help during one of the several occasions he “ran away from home.”

Did I need to be acknowledged for how hard it was then and and is now? “Single parenting” in the most extreme possible way?

“When people go to spirit heaven, they can’t come back.”

“No, sweetheart, they can’t. But their love is always with us.”

Grief doesn’t end. It resides. It is the house guest who never leaves, slouching on the couch, barely picking up its feet when you vacuum around it.

I have tried to freeze it over as much as I can. Bury it in projects, activity, busywork.

But the wind will blow, the rain will fall, the thaw will come, and expose all the crap. The raw, untidy baggage – pain, need, loneliness, inadequacy, weakness.

Despair. Bleakness. Gray days passing, one after the other, where my greatest accomplishment is not backing into the five-foot snow pile at the end of the driveway.

I heard this Leonard Bernstein song on the radio for the first time ever a few days ago: (the video might start with an ad, sorry, but the soprano is so good, it’s worth it):

“Still, we know that someday soon, spring will come again.
Summer has to follow.
Birds will come again, nesting in the hollow.
Once again, we’ll know all we know, that after winter, comes spring.”

Counting on it, and hanging on, I remain,

Your cracked, broken, hoping for kintsukuroi,

Ridiculouswoman

Caffeine and Cabin Fever

Clearly, too much coffee causes excessive italicizing.

That’s it. I’m cutting myself off.

Two cups of coffee and I’m a jangly bag of nerves.

Turns out OCD, caffeine and cabin fever don’t mix. Who knew?

We’ll be stuck in the house for at least another 24 hours.

Hours that will be spent listening to and worrying about the loudest popping and creaking sounds this house has made in the almost 20 years we’ve lived here.

Is that a joist cracking? Seventy-year-old nails popping? Window frames warping? Subfloors bending? Hot-water heat pipes pinging, over-expanding under the strain of the boiler (the thank-God-it’s-a-brand-new-boiler, but still) running non-stop?

I am probably the only person caught in the polar vortex who could find so many things to worry about when I am safe and warm inside a house with heat, running water, internet access and hot soup.

If I were Charlie Brown, I’d be the Charlie Browniest.

Climate change is killing coffee, did you know that? So in another few years I might not be able to do this to myself even if I wanted to.

There’s always chocolate. Until there isn’t. Because climate change is screwing with cocoa beans, too, apparently.

Coffee I can do without, but chocolate? Are you kidding?

OK, I’m on a roll here! Let’s find more stuff to worry about!

That steam blowing by outside the window by my desk, from the stove hood fan vent? Is that adding to the icicles dangling from the new gutters? How much can the gutters take, before they give?

There is ice on the inside of the new-ish windows.

There has always been condensation on the windows, old and new, but the only time I have ever seen ice on the inside of the house (windows and wash basin, to be exact) was in my third floor “digs” in a drafty, uninsulated (I’m assuming the UK has advanced considerably since 1980 in the area of home insulation) Victorian town home in Oxford. I’m from Chicago, and up to and including today, I have never been colder indoors in my life than when I lived in England. Perfect storm of dampness, lack of insulation and a laughable appliance called an “electric fire,” which was about a quarter-inch thick piece of “al-you-min-ee-um”,  about 17 by 24 inches with a too-wide loop of electric coil inside, that stood in front of an old coal-burning fireplace that had been half-heartedly stuffed up with newspaper, which didn’t stop its iron flap front from going “tink, tink, tink” all night when it was windy, and which heated a space approximately two inches around its surface, and no further. I slept with a shirt, flannel nightgown, scarf, hat and socks on, under a “duvet” filled with inadequate synthetic something or other and covered in damp cotton. GAAAA!

It was kind of charming when I could see my breath while (“whilst”) studying in the RadCam, but in my bedroom at night? Not so much.

My Mom, a former nurse, used to open the window in my bedroom in the winter, even in subzero temperatures. She was raised by Mainers (“Maine-uhs” a/k/a “ha-dee New England-uhs”) who allegedly put infants outside in the winter, wrapped in blankets in their baby buggies, for their naps, on the theory that “fresh ay-yuh is good for you, dee-yuh.” Sure, as long as you don’t get pneumonia or get eaten by a bear (hey but let’s hear it for the bear who kept that three-year-old kid company until he was rescued, uneaten and apparently pneumonia free).

The floors in my room were wood, not entirely covered by braided rugs. Awesome on bare feet on a winter morning with the window open. Builds character! That’s how we did it back in the day! “We’re getting soft, right?

But I digress. We’re worrying about here and now, OK?

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t use my functioning, recently chimney swept wood burning fireplace today, because opening the flue would allow a blast of arctic vortex to roar down the chimney and freeze us in our tracks.

Did you know in the 18th century there was a sea captain found frozen in his cabin at his desk, pen in hand? So it’s not like it couldn’t happen. Even though the story of the Octavius is now regarded as a myth. But still.

Through the kitchen window I can see two sets of animal tracks heading straight under the back deck.

I don’t begrudge the woodland creatures some shelter (temporary shelter) but please, let those tracks be from a rabbit, not a skunk (does the cold obliterate the smell?) or a raccoon or a possum. Or a coyote or a musky fox.

How long does it take to come down from two cups of coffee? Coffee which clearly causes excessive italicizing?

At least there are no chickens in the back yard anymore to tend to, in this weather. Or more accurately, if there were, frozen chickens to dispose of. So there’s that, anyway.

Still rattled. I’m going to have to go clean something. Vigorously.

Stay warm, and stay off the caffeine. Unless it comes encased in chocolate. For as long as that lasts.

Wishing you a warm, calm, creaking-popping-pinging and indoor-ice free day and night, I remain,

Your over-caffeinated, under-productive, anxious, italicizing,

Ridiculouswoman