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On this day in 2011 my husband suddenly returned home from work, announced that he was moving out and that he found a room, threw some documents at me—one was a schedule that I was required to adhere to and it would result in our eventual divorce, one was a letter where he blamed me for his decision to leave home because I had purchased a doll a few months earlier on the day before my scheduled hip surgery and he said that it added to the clutter in our home, and one was the first alimony check that he had written to me. He never once indicated that he was the least bit unhappy until the night he left home for good.
On top of it, he left me three months after I had undergone hip surgery so I couldn’t run after him as he ran out the door after throwing those documents in my direction. He also left three days after we shared a lovely Christmas Day together.
It turned out that he had left me for a friend of ours who had long suffered from severe mental health issues. He got engaged to her in 2012—just eight months after he moved out (while he was still legally married to me). He sent me divorce papers in a .pdf format that was attached to an email that he sent on December 24, 2012 (Christmas Eve). He married her just two months after our divorce was final in June, 2013. All that I remember that his sudden remarriage not only shocked me but it also shocked several of our friends as well.
In the years since I’ve heard from longtime friends who told me that they’ve run into my ex and his second wife from time to time and, according to them, the couple look unhappy and miserable. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 I saw my husband walking outside while I drove past him and he looked very miserable so my friends were right in their assessment of him. (I haven’t seen his wife in a long time and I don’t want to either.)
The good news is that I rarely see him. This year I only saw him twice and they were both within a few days of each other back in July. The first time I saw him was at a local farmers market while I was looking for a parking space. I saw a familiar looking man but I wasn’t sure who it was. He had very long curly hair that was dark with streaks of grey hair and his beard also looked long and unkempt. He was wearing dull grey clothes. His stomach had such a pronounced bulge that he looked like he was four or five months pregnant. He suddenly turned around and I got a shocking look at his face. I’m glad I was in the car when I saw him because I don’t know if I could handle reacting to him if we had physically ran into each other. Try to imagine a hermit who has been living in a cave for the past 10 years who was subsisting on an unhealthy diet with very little exercise and you’d get my ex-husband.
I saw him the next day when I was about to leave on my trip to Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach for a few days. I needed to buy a few things at the local store before I could head on the highway. After I made my purchases I went back in my car where I was straightening a few things on the passenger side of the seat before I started my car. Meanwhile another car had parked next to me. I paid that car no mind because I was focused on myself and my upcoming trip. As I was driving away I saw a man get out and he looked vaguely familiar. I realized that it was, once again, my ex-husband! He was wearing the same dull grey clothes I saw him wear at the farmers market the day before. I was glad to get out of that area without having to say anything to him.
I haven’t seen him since and, if my luck holds out, I probably won’t be running into him before 2023 arrives in four days.
In the years since my marriage suddenly ended I did a lot of looking back on my past life with him as well as talking to other relatives for insight. I now know that my husband isn’t as intelligent as I thought he was and the main reason why he got ahead in his life was because he was admitted to Oberlin College as a legacy student. (Both of his parents and one of his aunts had attended that same college.) On top of it, his father was an executive at a tech company (which has since gone through so many mergers that it no longer exists) and he pulled some strings to get my future ex some plum summer jobs that were related to his college major, which gave him a definite advantage in terms of experience when he learned through his school that NASA was looking to hire programmers and he got the job soon after he graduated. I wrote more about this in detail two years ago so I’m not going to regurgitate it here other than to mention that I recently came across this article in The Guardian about nepo babies and, in some ways, my ex fits that description. (In fact he does have a famous relative. His grandfather was the diabetes researcher Michael Somogyi who has his own Wikipedia page.)
Let’s face it, if my ex-husband was very intelligent, he would have never left me for a seriously dysfunctional woman because he would have predicted that entering into a relationship of any kind with her could a potential disaster for him.
After talking with other people, I also came to the conclusion that the real reason why he wanted to marry me was just so he could prove to his parents that he wasn’t destined to become a bachelor. He used to tell me from time to time that it would be cool if our marriage outlasted his parents’ marriage (which ended in a divorce) but it never occurred to me that he only wanted to stay married to me long enough so he could have bragging rights about how our marriage lasted exactly one year longer than his parents’. I already wrote about that in more detail last year so I’m not going to get into it here.
Here is where my ex-husband’s stupidity has totally impacted his life. Had he and the mentally ill woman whom he left me for were simply living together and one or both of them realized that their relationship wasn’t working out, they probably could have a situation where one or both of them simply move out of the townhouse that they currently share together. But since he legally married her, neither one of them can just simply move out without involving lawyers.
Of course making a decision to separate would require one or both of them to admit that they made a mistake and they should go for a legal separation than a divorce. The worst thing I could say about my ex-husband is that he is the type of person who will not admit that he made the wrong decision about something that he is passionate about. There were times when my husband exerted pressure on me to go to art school part-time while working full-time to the point where he even called the school I attended at the time inquiring about whether I had received the course catalogue without even consulting me first. I was livid when he told me this after the fact because he made me feel like a small irresponsible child instead of a wife and it reminded me too much of my parents being so strict on me when I was growing up that they didn’t trust me, not even when I got good grades in school. For years he would never admit that he was wrong for calling the school without talking to me first.
So, yes, I can easily imagine him preferring to be in a miserable marriage because he was so sure that it was the right thing for him to do instead of facing facts and realizing that maybe he would be better off separated. Because doing that would require him to admit to himself that he was wrong and he doesn’t want to do that.
I don’t feel sorry for either one of them. In fact, I feel more sorry for the 34 people in Buffalo who recently lost their lives as the result of a major snowstorm (which is excessive even by Buffalo standards) than I feel sorry for my ex-husband and his wife. Hell, I feel more sorry for the number of Ukrainians who have lost their lives this year as a result of Russia invading their country than I do for my ex-husband and his wife.
To be honest, I don’t give a damn if their marriage continues to exist or not because I have little interest in reuniting with my ex-husband. He has never apologized for the hell he had put me through during the separation and divorce and he has refused to even examine his role in the end of our marriage. (At least I did attend weekly meetings of a support group for people who are separated or divorced although I haven’t attended one in a long time and I even went to weekly private sessions with a therapist until I had a hard time affording the $40 per hour sessions.) If I was to reunite with my ex and we got remarried, it would only be a matter of time before another seriously mentally ill woman moved into our area, my ex decided that he fancied her, and he would once again suddenly run away from home, convince her to marry him while pressuring me to adhere to his personal separation schedule yet refuse to talk to me in person or on the phone. (During our separation he only communicated with me via email and he refused to answer any emails I sent him. He also frequently threatened to sue me if I asked him to at least slow down a little bit on that schedule he had put out. That frequent lawsuit threat via email makes him a cyberbully.) That’s because I now know that he now prefers severely mentally ill women.
By the way I recently came across this TikTok video on my For You page about how nerds make great husbands and fathers. My ex did appear as a nerd where he read a lot of science fiction novels, watched the original 1960s Star Trek TV series to the point where if he could identify an episode based on just watching one or two minutes of an episode, played a continuous Dungeons & Dragons game with two of his friends from Oberlin College every time the three of them got together (which petered out in the late 1990s when two of his friends had a falling out for reasons that had little to do with their game and stopped speaking to each other), and watched every Star Wars movie up to the year that our marriage broke up in 2011. (I have no idea if he has recently seen the recent Star War movies or other Star Wars spinoff series on Disney+.) If TikTok had existed prior to late 2011 and I came across this video, I would’ve been in full agreement with the woman in that video because my ex seemed very stable and solid. I never had to worry about him taking drugs or screwing around with other women or doing something totally illegal.
All that changed for good when he suddenly left me without him ever telling me that he was unhappy or anything like that. I had no idea that he had a thing for mentally ill women like pedophiles have a thing for young children. It never occurred to me that something like being obsessed with having sex with the mentally ill even existed until he left me for her. It all goes to show that nerds or men who pretend to be nerds are just as capable of suddenly self-destructing or permanently fucking up their lives as non-nerds.
As for me, I feel more peaceful being alone these days. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than reunite with my ex-husband.
Way back when I was still happily married I purchased this hilarious Christmas present for my then-husband as a gag gift. It was a doll that was based on Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last leader of the old Soviet Union before that country fell apart. In the West Gorbachev became popular because he was part of the Perestroika (reconstruction) political movement, which advocated for Glasnost (openness) policy reform of the Communist Party.
Gorbachev recently died at the age of 91. For years I assumed that the countries who managed to gain independence from the Soviet Union would show appreciation towards him since it was his reformist policies that paved the way for Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and numerous other countries to gain independence. But then I saw some videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube that say otherwise. This BBC News article spells out why there is less love for him among the former Soviet republics than in the West.
From a Westerner like myself, we admired Gorbachev because he represented a hopeful change from the Cold War, which had gripped the U.S. and the Soviet Union since 1947. Both sides spent tons of money manufacturing nuclear weapons so, as a result, there are enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world several times over. Both sides interfered in the internal affairs of smaller nations like El Salvador and Hungary while saying that this was necessary in order to prevent the spread of communism or capitalism to that country.
What was worse was that when Ronald Reagan became president, he ordered more nuclear bombs to be made even though we already had more than enough nuclear bombs that could destroy the world several times over. To be honest, if you have enough nuclear warheads to destroy the world 20 times over, it’s ludicrous to make more nuclear warheads to destroy the world 30, 40, 50, or more times over.
I was thrilled when the Berlin Wall finally fell and Germany was reunited. I was also happy for the Soviet republics who did manage to gain independence. I thought that there was a potential for a new world.
But then the Soviet government fell itself and Gorbachev resigned. At first it seemed very hopeful when a new government under Boris Yeltsin was put in place and they decided to not be a communist nation anymore. But, as time went on, sadly the Russian oligarchs began to dominate everything and Yeltsin’s policies ultimately paved the way for Vladimir Putin to take power.
From my perspective I was initially happy when Gorbachev paved the way for something radically different only to be gradually disappointed when Russia eventually traded in one form of authoritarianism for another until I became totally depressed at the shitstorm that Putin had unleashed on Ukraine this year.
Getting back to the good old days when a new peaceful world was possible thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, I found this Gorby doll on sale in a catalogue that specialized in selling goods made in Russia or Russian-themed goods in general. That mail order company (which sadly no longer exists) had inventory that was interesting to see. Prior to Gorbachev’s rise to power, buying anything made in Russia in the United States was extremely difficult because of all kinds of import restrictions. But when Gorbachev made his Glasnost policies a reality the U.S. government began to soften its restrictions on Russian imports so I had access to some Russian goods that would’ve been impossible to find just a few years earlier.
I saw the Gorby doll and I decided to purchase it for my husband as a gag gift for Christmas. I took the wrapped present with me to New York for my husband to open on Christmas Day because, for the first few years of our marriage, we had a tradition where we celebrated Christmas Day with his mother at her place near Bronxville because she was divorced and my husband and his sister both felt that she shouldn’t spend Christmas Day by herself. (Some years my sister-in-law and her then-husband would join us and other years they would stay in their then-hometown outside of Rochester where they celebrated with her then-husband’s parents and other relatives who all lived in the area.) It was one of those years where his sister was celebrating in Rochester so it was just my husband, mother-in-law, and myself.
When my husband opened his present, I remember that he got a laugh out of it. My mother-in-law was less impressed. I removed it from the box to get a close look at it. At one point I decided to squeeze the doll for the heck of it and I saw his mouth open and make a loud squeak. I laughed and so did my husband. I squeezed the doll a few more times and my mother-in-law totally snapped and started yelling. (She was a very volatile person who would frequently throw temper tantrums if she didn’t get her way.)
Shortly after Christmas I brought the doll with me to work. At the time I worked in the corporate offices of a now-defunct computer reseller. I don’t remember why I brought the doll with me. I know that the company used to have a wind-down on Friday afternoons where we socialized around 3 or 4 p.m. Some weeks they were themed, such as wearing crazy socks. It’s possible that there was a theme like bring the weirdest item that you owned and I brought Gorby. I remember my coworkers totally cracking up at the doll with his leather jacket and striped tank top.
Eventually Gorby was stored in a bin and I forgot about him. When my husband walked out on me in late 2011, the Gorby doll was among the numerous things belonging to him that he left behind. It was only with the death of the real-life Mikhail Gorbachev that I decided to take him out of the storage bin and look at him again. I shot a short video showing off this doll and his ability to squeak, which I uploaded on to TikTok, Instagram, Clapper, and YouTube.
At long last I’m getting around to writing about my summer trip to the beach. Since it expanded to five days and I did a lot, I’m going to write a multi-part series starting with the events leading up to my trip.
Lately I’ve been feeling all sorts of angst. Much of it had sprung from the news. Russia decided to kick off 2022 in a spectacularly bad fashion by invading Ukraine in late February right after the Winter Olympics had ended. There is a growing rise of this horrible right-wing faction in my own country that was based with a toxic combination of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and unbridled capitalism along the admiration of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and it was all concentrated in the Republican Party. I’m seeing it played out on social media where people are posting all kinds of stuff that has led me to get more stressed out. Even TikTok has been infected with this and it was the place where it had focused on people doing silly dances and showing off their toy collections.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind hearing testimony from people whose lives have been impacted by the recent Supreme Court’s repealing of Roe vs. Wade. But I have seen seeing so many stories of women who needed abortions as a result of rape or incest, women who had ectopic pregnancies who had to travel out of state beecause some states had even banned the procedures for those kinds of pregnancies (never mind the fact that an untreated ectopic pregnancy can kill both the mother and fetus), and similar stories that my mind began to suffer from information overload.
It’s not just abortion I’m hearing about. I’ve heard stories about increased threats against people of color and LGBTQ people and similar stuff. Plus it’s also the midterm elections this year so I’m hearing disturbing stuff about Republican candidates.
Social media had become so toxic and draining that I recently had to set time limits on my smartphone’s social media apps because I would spend too much time scrolling through posts full of doom and gloom when I should’ve been working on more productive stuff (such as my art and tidying up the house). I started doing this a week before my Ocean City trip and my mind began to feel clearer and less stressed after just a few days.
There were other reasons why I felt I needed a vacation. One was I unexpectedly saw my ex-husband for the first time in over a year. I went to a local farmers market and I was looking for parking when I saw a familiar looking man but I wasn’t sure who it was. He had very long curly hair that was dark with streaks of grey hair and his beard also looked long and unkempt. His stomach had such a pronounced bulge that he looked like he was four or five months pregnant. He suddenly turned around and I got a shocking look at his face.
I’m glad I was in the car when I saw him because I don’t know if I could handle reacting to him if we had physically ran into each other. Try to imagine a hermit who has been living in a cave for the past 10 years who was subsisting on an unhealthy diet with very little exercise and you’d get my ex-husband. After I saw him I began to ask myself what had I ever seen in him but then I had to remind myself that he didn’t always look this way. When he was with me he used to take pride in his appearance and personal grooming. It seemed like ever since he left me for one of our friends with a long history of severe mental illness he has let himself gone literally to pot. I don’t even know if the person I fell in love with when we were both college students at the University of Maryland even exists anymore.
For nearly a year I’ve been taking a series of online classes that are offered through Google and Coursera where I would get an IT certificate. I had finally taken and passed the last exam needed in order to finish my last class in the program. There are additional lessons but they are all on how to finding jobs in the IT field along with helpful hints. I know I should be doing those lessons so I would completely finish that class but there was something else that was calling me to return to Ocean City, Maryland.
I realized that I still had free time to do whatever I wanted without having to consider someone else’s work schedule. If I find a traditional 9 to 5 corporate job, my ability to go on vacation would heavily depend on how generous the company would be with leave time. I know there is a trend in people working from home with flexible schedules, which was the result of the Coronavirus pandemic over the past two years.but there are traditionalists who are clamoring for a return to the traditional 9 to 5 workplace where everyone has to be in the office and there’s a chance that I’ll land such a job.
Basically I decided to put off taking the last lessons for a week just so I could do one last vacation before I have to go back to work because I don’t know when I’ll get the opportunity again. I dipped into my savings from my late mother’s life insurance policy to do this. Since I was dipping into savings, I couldn’t afford some lavish vacation so I decided to go back to Ocean City.
Last year I went back to Ocean City for the first time in 10 years. I spent three days there. Day one I traveled there. Day two, which was the only full day I had at the beach, was seriously marred by the arrival of the remnants of Hurricane Ida. I had planned on going swimming that afternoon after driving around the area on a very hot morning only to find the sudden arrival of clouds. I tried to go to the beach but the winds were very strong so I got grains of sand striking my face and the water was too choppy to swim in. I managed to go to the boardwalk but it was seriously truncated due to the high winds. On day three the temperature had dipped so low that it was too chilly to do a quick swim in the ocean before checking out. You can read that saga in full detail (along with pictures) right here.
This year there had been several very hot days with temperatures in the 90s so I was feeling a desire to go back to the beach. I decided to spend five days, from Monday-Friday. I figured that the chances of at least one day where I could go to the beach.and take a dip in the ocean would be higher. But I really couldn’t afford to go for all seven days so I decided to just go on the days when most of the locals would be at work. (I know from past experiences that Ocean City tends to be a bit more crowded on the weekends with a mixture of locals, weekend beachgoers, and people who were staying there for all seven days.)
At this point I’m going to break up this text-only post with a video that was written and performed by my late high school music teacher Tim Landers and his band, The Landers and Heinz Project. It’s called “It’s a Shore Thing” and it’s all about Ocean City. (If you want to learn more about my experiences with having Tim Landers as my teacher, you can read this post that I wrote about him way back in 2017.)
If you like “It’s a Shore Thing,” you can either download it or stream it online (depending on the platform in question) from AllMusic, Amazon, Apple Music, Shazam, Spotify, and Qobuz. Now moving right along to the rest of this blog post…
Just like last year I decided to use Expedia.com to book my trip. I decided to choose the Thunderbird Motel because I stayed there last year and I was impressed with the service and cleanliness and the rates were relatively affordable to me. Everything went without a hitch like last time so I decided to do the booking on a Friday afternoon and I planned on spending the weekend preparing for the trip by doing things like the laundry (I needed clean clothes) and digging up my swimsuit.
I even signed up for EZ Pass. I tried buying an EZ Pass transponder (it’s supposed to be sold through both the MVA and Giant) but to no avail. But I discovered that Maryland has a new program where you can register your car’s license plate and tie it with a credit or debit card and you can travel through the EZ Pass lanes without needing a transponder. I decided to go through with it just so I could avoid the stress of driving through EZ Pass lanes without an EZ Pass. (I found out the hard way that Maryland made all of its toll roads EZ Pass only. Once again, you can read more about it right here.)
But then something happened that made this trip more stressful than it should have been. Part of it was my fault. I got an email from the motel and I didn’t open it right away because I figured that it would be the same email that I got last year where it had the details on when I could check in and whether I needed to wear a facemask before entering the office. The following day I was busy with doing stuff around the house and I had my smartphone on vibration only so I didn’t look at it very much. By the time I checked my email and smartphone (which indicated that I had a voice mail message_ it was late Saturday afternoon. Basically both messages said that there was a hold on my debit card from the bank and I needed to get it squared away if I wanted to keep the booking on my room.
By the time I called the motel the office had closed (it was Saturday night). I called the following day and they confirmed that they couldn’t get my debit card number through and I needed to call the bank. The bank was closed on Sundays so I had to wait until Monday, which was the day I was supposed to leave for Ocean City.
I didn’t do any packing that weekend because I thought that there’s a chance that the trip would fall through and I didn’t want to pack a suitcase for nothing. I still went ahead with doing the laundry because I needed clean clothes no matter where I was going to be.
To be continued in my next blog post.
Other Posts in My 2022 Beach Vacation Series
Prologue
My 2022 Trip to the Beach Day One: July 25, 2022
My 2022 Trip to the Beach Day Two: July 26, 2022
My 2022 Trip to the Beach Day Three: July 27, 2022
After ruling the United Kingdom for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II has died today at the age of 96. For everyone who was born after 1952 (myself included), Queen Elizabeth was the only ruling British monarch that we have ever known.
On one of their last albums, Abbey Road, The Beatles recorded this short tribute to the queen called “Her Majesty.” At the time of that album’s release in 1969, Queen Elizabeth had only been on the throne for only 17 years.
I’d like to share a mixed-media piece that I did of the queen back in 2002, when she was celebrating her Golden Jubilee (for her 50-year reign).
Queen Elizabeth
Mixed media (ink and computer graphics)
9 inches x 12 inches (23 cm x 31 cm)
For the technical details on how I created this piece, you can read my original post that I wrote back in 2010. I still have memories of when I entered this piece in the 2002 Greenbelt Labor Day Arts Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland where it won Third Place in the “Best Mixed Media”. At the time I created this piece I wasn’t sure if the queen was going to be around much longer, which was one of the reasons why I decided to honor her Golden Jubilee. But she proved me wrong by living 20 years longer.
The earliest Queen Elizabeth anniversary I was aware of was her Silver Jubilee back in 1977. That was because, in the midst of the pageantry surrounding that momentous anniversary, The Sex Pistols came out with their notorious song “God Save the Queen.”
Queen Elizabeth picked an auspicious year to die because this year was also her Platinum Jubilee, which celebrated the 70th anniversary of her reign. Three months ago there was an official video released where she had tea with Paddington Bear. I’ll just end this post with that video since I feel that it’s the best way of remembering the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. (And that’s not to mention that this video is incredibly cute and funny.)
UPDATE (September 9, 2022): Just a few hours after I wrote my post, I decided to share my old mixed-media piece of Queen Elizabeth on a few social media sites. I even decided to create a short video slideshow of my piece where I paired it with The Beatles’ “Her Majesty” song. You can view it on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
Meanwhile I have a Queen Elizabeth story that I forgot to share last night (mainly because I wrote this post while I was half-exhausted). Way back in 2007 I was married to an employee at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He came home from work one day saying “You’re not going to believe who is visiting Goddard.” When he answered Queen Elizabeth, I was surprised. But, yes, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, actually paid a visit to Goddard towards the end of their visit to the U.S. to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia.
I remember that my husband told me that the officials had to hold a lottery in order to determine which employees would actually be there to greet the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh (that’s mainly because that particular NASA campus is large with around 10,000 employees). My husband lost that lottery so he decided to take a half-day off from work on the day that the royal couple arrived because he didn’t want to deal with the more intense-than-usual traffic jams that stemmed from Elizabeth and Philip, their entourage, and the reporters from all of the major news media outlets. (That visit happened in the morning so my husband didn’t report to work until after lunchtime.) Yesterday’s NASA blog post had a photo of Queen Elizabeth greeting the NASA Goddard employees back in 2007.
It turned out that it wasn’t the only time that Queen Elizabeth had showed up in my local area. Back in 1957 she went to her first American football game with Prince Philip when she saw my future alma mater, the University of Maryland, defeat the University of North Carolina at a home game in College Park. Later that same day Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip decided to go to the nearby town of Hyattsville, where they visited their first American grocery store.
Unlike her visit to NASA Goddard, that earlier visit happened before I was born and I only learned about it yesterday when my friends were sharing links to old news stories on Facebook.
Yesterday Anne Heche tragically died at the age of 53. For years her private life (including her public struggle with mental health issues) had provided fodder for the gossips columnists, which gave the general public the idea that she was only a lunatic and nothing else.
Years ago I saw another side of Anne Heche and that was as an incredible actress. My late father-in-law and his second wife, who lived in New York City, had scored tickets to a Broadway show called Proof and had invited my then-husband and myself to come along. So we made the trip to New York where we all went as part of a family outing. (I think my ex’s divorced sister might have been there as well without her son—who was probably visiting his father that weekend—but I’m not 100 percent sure of this.)
Anne Heche played the lead role as a mentally unstable math genius and she was definitely a force to be reckoned with onstage. She was very convincing as the math genius on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the time of her appearance in the play that I saw, it was after she had ended her relationship with comedian Ellen Degeneres, which led to her own real-life mental health struggles. I’m sure she drew heavily on her real life for the role and it showed.
I think in some ways she may have even transcended the script in her acting. A year or two later there was a movie version of Proof featuring a different actress in the lead role and it was one of those films that quickly came and went in the theaters and is largely forgotten today. It was too bad that Heche wasn’t given the opportunity to reprise her stage role because I think the movie’s long-term prospects would’ve turned out differently.
I think of Anne Heche as the Syd Barrett of the acting world: A very talented performer whose career was tragically impacted due to mental health issues. (In Heche’s case, she claimed that her mental illness stemmed from being repeatedly raped by her own father as a child.) I don’t think she was ever able to fully recover from her personal demons given the way that she died. Based on what I saw on that Broadway stage years ago, I think what happened to Anne Heche was very tragic. If it weren’t for her mental health issues, who knows how many more movies she could’ve appeared in where she could’ve wowed audiences with her acting ability. It’s possible that she may have even won an Oscar at some point. As it stands, Anne Heche is basically an example of someone who was never able to fully live up to her potential.
Rest in peace, Anne.
UPDATE (August 15, 2022): Anne Heche was finally disconnected from life support today. Her body was only kept alive a few days longer despite being brain dead because she had signed up as an organ donor and the doctors wanted to find which organs could be donated and to find suitable donors.
I recently did a video where I opened this interesting Soviet-made matryoshka nesting doll that I’ve owned for years. I purchased it sometime in the late 1980s-early 1990s through this mail order catalogue that specialized in selling imported goods from the Soviet Union. This was back when Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet leader and he had ushered in his famous Glasnost (Openess) policy that liberalized Soviet society just a few years before the USSR literally broke apart.
I had purchased a set of cosmonaut matryoshka nesting dolls as a Christmas gift for my then-husband, who worked at NASA. His biggest ambition was to become an astronaut but poor eyesight had prevented him from achieving his dreams. So he did the next best thing: Work at NASA as a software engineer. He dealt with unmanned flights so he basically coded satellites for various flights. He loved that cosmonaut nesting dolls that I purchased for him. When he abruptly walked out on me with zero advanced notice, he left this matryoshka doll behind so it belongs to me now.
I have a book on nesting dolls that I also purchased through that same mail order catalogue called A Collector’s Guide to Nesting Dolls: Histories, Identification, Values (which has since gone out of print but you can still order it used through Amazon, Abe Books, and Biblio). It was published a few years before the Soviet Union collapsed so parts of the book is dated but it still is a great reference when researching matryoshka dolls that were made before the USSR fell apart.
According to that book this cosmonaut nesting doll was made in the Brest region, which is now located in Belarus. This doll is definitely a departure from the usual maidens that one finds as nesting dolls.
I made a video about this doll, which you can view on TikTok and YouTube.
I recently made a video about a Russian matryoshka nesting doll that’s a bit unusual compared to the other nesting dolls I’ve profiled in this blog. This one is shaped like a bear and it even has tiny extended bear ears. I’m trying to remember when and where I purchased this one but I’ve since forgotten. I know that I purchased it years ago when I was still married. I may have purchased this doll either from a store in New York City (during a visit with my ex-husband’s father and step-mother) or at the annual Christkindlmarkt in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (during a visit with my ex-husband’s sister, who still lives near Bethlehem). This bear is cute and I don’t regret purchasing it. I made a video about this matryoshka that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.
I decided to make a video about a Russian matryoshka nesting doll that once belonged to my late mother-in-law. All I remember is that my father-in-law used to take frequent business trips to various places both inside the U.S. and overseas when he worked as an executive for a now-defunct tech company. For one trip he was sent to Eastern Europe. My mother-in-law decided to tag along because both of her parents had immigrated from Hungary. (In fact, her father was the famed diabetes researcher Michael Somogyi.) This was back in the late 1970s when all of the children were grown and attending college and she had plenty of free time so she was able to tag along. I know the trip lasted a few weeks and they did visit her parents’ native Hungary but I don’t know exactly which Eastern European countries they visited on that trip. I know that it was during the Détente period of the Cold War where tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union had cooled off and it was relatively easier for Americans to visit Iron Curtain countries.
I noted on the video I made that she bought it on a trip to the Soviet Union but as I think of it, I’m not 100% sure if my future in-laws had actually set foot in that country or if they had purchased this doll at a store in a different Eastern European country that catered exclusively to tourists. Since they are now both deceased, I can’t ask them. Even if they were still living, I’m not sure if they would’ve wanted to talk about that trip since it was just a few years before my father-in-law left my mother-in-law for a coworker who became his second wife.
All I know about this nesting doll was that it was obviously made in the USSR because it was painted as a maiden dressed in traditional Slavic clothing, which is the type of design that was frequently used on these dolls prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. After the USSR fell I began to see more imported nesting dolls in stores and other craft events that were painted as other subject matter besides Slavic maidens. I’ve seen nesting dolls painted as The Beatles (with John Lennon as the outermost doll and Ringo Starr as the innermost doll), Winnie the Pooh and his friends, Mickey Mouse and his friends, owls, superheroes, and more. It’s almost like the artisans were freer to be more experimental with creating matryoshkas after the Soviet Union fell than before.
My mother-in-law kept the doll after her divorce and she brought it with her when she married her second husband and moved to his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. My then-husband ended up inheriting that doll after she died in 2010 and we brought her home to Maryland. He left that doll behind when he suddenly walk out on me in late 2011 and he had never asked about it or requested that I give the doll to him. So now I own it. She is very pretty. The only bad thing is that the innermost doll is missing but, otherwise, it’s a pretty doll.
I shot a short video about this doll, which I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.
A couple of months ago I vowed that I would purchase fewer dolls than the last couple of years while focusing on making new videos about dolls that I already own. I’m holding myself to that vow and I’m succeeding so far. My latest doll-centric video is about a doll that I purchased years ago.
The doll in question is a Russian-imported matryoshka doll (or nesting doll). Here’s some background. Back when I was still married, my husband and I used to visit my late father-in-law and his second wife at their condo in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They were living in this incredibly awesome location where Central Park was just a few blocks away. In fact, nearly everything they needed was just a short walk away, whether it was groceries or cough medicine or whatever. If they wanted to go further outside of their immediate neighborhood, there was a subway station located just a block or two away from their condo.
During one of our many visits I decided to walk around Manhattan. The thing about Manhattan is that not only are there all kinds of huge flagship stores (including American Girl, Macy’s, the LEGO Store, the Disney Store, and so much more) but you can frequently see some entrepreneurial types set up either blankets or white folding tables with merchandise on sale at prices way lower than the bricks and mortar store. (That’s because these individual sellers didn’t have to pay overhead charges like rent and utilities.) Some items were used (such as books and CDs) while others looked new (such as socks or costume jewelry).
I saw one of these individual vendors selling Russian-imported matryoshka dolls and I was intrigued. Most of them were very expensive (about $50 and up). I ended up buying a small doll with just two layers because I remember it was relatively cheap at around $35-40. The outer layer is based on Boris Yeltsin, who was the first president of the Russian Federation and he served from 1991-1999. When you open him up, you see the inner doll that’s based on Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last leader of the Soviet Union before it completely collapsed in 1991. At the time I purchased that doll, Yeltsin was the current leader of Russia while Gorbachev was the former leader of Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union.
I’m old enough to remember when the Soviet Union fell apart. I was thrilled because it meant the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. I had hopes that there would be a new Russia that would be devoted to democracy and not repress its citizens. I thought that perhaps Russia would become like the Scandinavian countries where their citizens had political freedom yet also had a secure social safety net so no one would fall into complete poverty and destitution. I was still hopeful about Russia’s future when I purchased that doll. Had Russia made a successful transition to a full democracy, I would’ve been proud of the fact that I had the foresight to buy a matryoshka based on the two men who would’ve helped make it a reality. Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way with his reformist Glasnost policy. But, sadly, Yeltsin made a number of blunders that ended up paving the way for Vladimir Putin.
I still have that matryoshka doll and I was inspired to make a video about this doll because Russia has been in the news a lot lately (due to its invasion of Ukraine). I brought the doll with me (it’s small enough to carry in my bag) to a local coffeeshop where I treated myself to a bagel and I shot this footage that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.
Ten years ago today my husband came home from work, announced that he was leaving, threw a few papers at me (including the first alimony check, a schedule for our eventual divorce that I had to adhere to, and a letter explaining why he had to leave) then bolted out the door before I could say anything else. In his letter he mentioned that my recent purchase of this doll had added to the clutter of our home.
That night I wrote a post expressing hope that the separation would be temporary. But I later learned from friends that he left me for a friend of ours who has a mental illness that’s so severe that she has an experimental pacemaker implanted in her brain. He got engaged to her just eight months after he left me (while he was still legally married to me) and he married her just two months after our divorce was final.
I was originally going to write about how I had lost respect for him and how I no longer think of him as among the most intelligent and honest people I’ve ever met but then I realized that I had already wrote about that last year.
Basically my husband left me just three months after I had my hip surgery and three days after Christmas. He never indicated that he was the slightest bit unhappy until the night he left home, which totally shocked me to my core.
The hardest part about the whole divorce thing was how my husband was before and after he left. While no marriage is ever 100% perfect (and anyone who tells you that is either lying or is totally delusional) he had a lot of good qualities. This year also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the time when I fell twice in over a week. Those two falls were enough to knock my hip replacement (which I originally received in 2008) out of alignment. I had to undergo hip revision surgery in order to put my hip replacement back into alignment so I could walk again without using a cane or being in pain. My husband took care of all of the arrangements for my hip problems. He accompanied me to the orthopedic surgeon’s office, he coined up a physical therapist for me after I left the hospital, and he even lined up rides for me to get to and from physical therapy once he had to return to work. He was incredibly phenomenal in how much he helped me and I think it would’ve have been harder for me without him. I had even recorded his personal caregiver’s chant whenever he helped me with putting on the special TED hose that I had to wear for weeks after my surgery. He even took care of me when he came down with bronchitis while dealing with stresses at his own job (he was working on a major satellite project) and he also served as treasurer of our church. When it came time to decorate for Christmas, he insisted on being the one to take down all of the decorations from the attic because of my recent surgery. He even cooked a wonderful Christmas meal for me and we went out looking for overdecorated houses, which I documented in this blog post.
After he left it was as different as night and day. When he returned just three days after he left to gather some furniture with a couple of movers that he hired (it was mainly a desk and chair and a bookshelf), he refused to talk to me at all. I was left with taking down all of the Christmas decorations and putting them back up in the attic (which was the polar opposite of when he was concerned about me taking them down from the attic because he didn’t want me to strain my hip). He refused to communicate with me other than to send emails demanding that we separate our finances according to his own schedule that he had mapped out. Whenever I begged him to slow down or reconsider he would threaten to sue me. What he did was cyberbullying. During a rare face-to-face meeting I told him that it didn’t have to be like this but he said that it did. On top of it, he sent a divorce petition in an email on Christmas Eve. When I consulted my own divorce lawyer, he said that it wasn’t a real petition because there was no case number assigned to it. (My husband expected me to sign it and mail it back to him. Had I done it his way, I would have had no way of knowing whether I would actually be divorced or still legally married.) So my husband had to actually file for the divorce the proper way.
In short he just became mean and nasty after he left me. For solace I read Vikki Stark’s book Runaway Husbands, which definitely fits the description of my husband. I also read Jackson MacKenzie’s Psychopath Free and Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door as well as the sequel to Runaway Husbands, Planet Heartbreak. I now realize that my husband probably has some kind of a personality disorder (such as narcissism) but I can’t say exactly what kind of a personality disorder because I’m not a psychiatrist. It was through seeing a therapist that I realize that my late mother-in-law’s very volatile personality (which included frequent temper tantrums over very minor issues) had a hand in how my husband turned out. I also started attending weekly meetings of a support group for people who are separated or divorced, which had been a tremendous help to me.
I’m still mystified as to what happened to set my husband off like that. He never once indicated that he was unhappy in our marriage until the night that he left. The only clue is what my late mother told me a few times after my husband left (but before she became too ill with multiple sclerosis to do much talking and socializing). According to her, on the day we were married his father told my parents at the reception that he was pleasantly surprised to be at his son’s wedding because he thought that his son would never be married.
Why would my new father-in-law say that? I didn’t communicate with him after my husband left (other than to email his cell phone number and telling him not to call at our house since he was no longer living there) so I have no direct quotes from him on that. He passed away in 2017 so I don’t have the option to contact him about this. I know that my father-in-law met my mother-in-law when they were both students at Oberlin College and they married soon after they had both graduated. Oberlin is a small college and it’s common for students to meet their future spouses there.
In contrast, when my husband attended Oberlin, he had been in two relationships but both girlfriends ended up dumping him. So my husband was still single when he graduated. On top of it, his younger sister, who met her future husband when she attended a different small college, got married just a few months after they both graduated. So my father-in-law concluded that my husband was destined to be a lifelong bachelor until he met me when we were both students at the University of Maryland. (I was an undergraduate and he was a graduate student.) My husband was 27 when we got married so it’s not like he was married very late in life. (I was 23 at the time.)
In light of what happened, I now realize that my husband married me not because he loved me but because he wanted to prove to his family that he wasn’t going to be a lifelong bachelor.
If he really didn’t love me, then why would he stay with me instead of getting divorced early in our marriage? When we were first married my husband would say that it would be awesome if we were married longer than his parents (who were divorced). He would especially repeatedly say that on our anniversary. When his younger sister’s marriage ended in divorce, he would also say that it would be great if we were married longer than her. I would agree with him while not realizing that he was only pretending to love me so I would stay with him.
In time we managed to stay married longer than his sister. Reaching his parents’ milestone took a little bit longer but we did it. His mother died just a few months before the anniversary where we equalled his parents’ marriage so by then his father was the only one who would care about that.
In 2011, the same year that I had hip problems, our marriage finally lasted one year longer than his parents’ marriage. I guess that, at that point, he felt that it was no use to stay married to me because he had achieved his personal record of staying married longer than his parents and I had become expendable by that time. My mother-in-law was also dead so he wouldn’t have to deal with her gossiping to friends and family about how screwed up her son had become by hooking up with a severely mentally ill woman. (Whenever we visited her she used to frequently gossip about how other friends and relatives were screwing up their lives by doing something that she didn’t personally approve of.)
When I saw how nasty, distant, and hostile he had become around me, I began to question whether he really loved me to begin with. He did a totally 180 degree in how he treated me before he left me and afterwards. It was like he had an internal switch that got flipped from being sweet and loving to being nasty and hostile and there was no way that the switch can get flipped back. It was almost like he was only kind to me because he wanted me to stay so I could help him with breaking some stupid-assed family records. The fact that he emailed a divorce petition to me on Christmas Eve only intensified my suspicion that he never really loved me to begin with and he had personally loathed me all those years.
It also explains the too many nights when I was home alone throughout our marriage. At first it was because my husband was still a part-time graduate student at the University of Maryland. But then he dropped out of that program when he had a hard time dealing with the workload from the program along with his NASA job. He became involved in a few church committees over the years (such as the Board of Trustees) and he would be at meetings. Then there was the time when he and one of his NASA coworkers decided to write a book together about object-oriented programming for a small independent publisher. (Ultimately the publisher dragged its feet on publishing the book for several months after they submitted the manuscript so the book became outdated by the time it was finally published.) And the times when he had to meet deadlines for numerous satellite projects at work. And the time when he decided to give graduate school a try again through Johns Hopkins APL and he got his Master’s degree. And the time when he decided to try for a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland but he ended up dropping out of that program.
I thought that my husband’s workaholic tendencies was a factor but now I think that he also wanted to avoid being with me because he never really loved me so being busy two or three nights per week and some weekends was the best way of avoiding me.
If I had known that he only wanted to marry me and stay married because he was in some kind of a stupid competition with his parents and sister, I would have broken off the engagement. I now feel like I had wasted my life being married to a man who was only faking being in love with me so he could prove to his parents that he wasn’t destined for lifelong bachelorhood.
Come to think of it, there’s nothing wrong with being a bachelor if you’re personally happy with being one. Not everyone is meant to get married. I think it’s better being a bachelor than getting married to someone just so you can fulfill your family’s expectation for you because that decision directly affects someone else.
I have a feeling that he only remarried just two months after our divorce was final because he wanted to say to others, “See it’s true love. She’s not some extramarital mistress. It’s true love because I went through the trouble to get divorced so I could marry her as soon as possible.” He could have waited a few years after the divorce before deciding to get married but apparently he had that urge to both keep her close to him (especially since it’s harder to leave a marriage than a live-in situation) and prove to his family and friends that she’s true love. The fact that he took advantage of a severely mentally ill woman to do this is really despicable in my mind.
My friends told me that they both look unhappy these days and I have no reason to disbelieve them because of her ongoing mental health issues. I only saw him once this year and it was when he was sitting outside of a cafe looking at his laptop. I’m glad that I rarely see him because he’s become trash.
At this point I have zero desire of ever reconciling with him again even if his second marriage ends up going south. He left behind so many bad memories of the whole divorce that I would have a hard time overcoming them just so I could reconcile with him. I haven’t been in a relationship since then because I was busy with trying to find a consistent job (I have veered between periods of unemployment and underemployment) and I really want to be on my own two feet before I can even think about another relationship. I wanted to wait until after my mother died because I wanted no family drama over my choice of a mate. I also have a hard time with trusting anyone after having been married to someone who only pretended to love me so I would marry him and stay married long enough to outlast his parents’ marriage.
I also had people in my support group for people who are separated or divorced talk about their experiences with finding dates on Tinder and Match.com and they were less-than-thrilled with their experiences. For example, one woman said that she ended her relationship with a man she met on one of those online dating sites after she called his home and his wife answered the phone. (He had lied to her about his marital status.)
There’s also the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. With the Omicron variant running amuck and my own bad luck over the last 10 years, I would end up dating someone who gave me COVID-19 and I become sick as a dog despite my vaccines.
I used to be friends with the woman with severe mental health issues before she became the other woman then my ex’s second wife. I haven’t spoken to her since I found out about her relationship with my husband. She probably thinks that she was successful in winning my husband from me. She probably thinks that she was really lucky in that he was willing to not only divorce me but also to marry her.
Well the joke is on her. Since my ex has demonstrated his preference for severely mentally ill women, her marriage to him is not safe. That’s because it would only take another woman with even worse mental illness (such as multiple personality disorder or severe bipolar disorder) to move into our area, my ex-husband deciding that he fancies her much more than his current wife, then he’ll literally run away from the home that he currently shares with wife number two and move in with that new woman. Then he’ll refuse to speak to wife number two while demanding that they separate their finances as soon as possible and do other obnoxious things (via emails and text messages) to her until they get divorced so he can marry wife number three.
In short, she’s not in a safe and secure marriage. In any case, I don’t care because it’s her problem, not mine.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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