So Many Things

If they made a movie about my life, I really think it would be entertaining. In fact, I think it would have it all — insurmountable odds, crushing defeat, moral dilemmas, lessons learned, and a keen sense of comic timing. When I was young, I believed firmly that I wouldn’t live to thirty, and now that I’m nearly forty, I wonder if I was onto something. My life has been, like, four lives already, and I don’t anticipate slowing down anytime soon. It’s a good feeling, but it’s also hard to explain. Most people ultimately want to settle down or fly as close to the sun as possible, and I definitely fall into those camps sometimes, but I think — more often than not — I just want to explore the world “with eyes unclouded by hate.” I used to think if you were an explorer, you had to be an Icarus and/or Dionysus-type, and maybe you do have to have that at least as potential energy, but I’m finding myself in a place right now where I’m utterly content to just mosey through life, molting, migrating, and metamorphosing as I have to, want to, or am otherwise compelled to. I seriously think I should write a book, and I will, one day. Hopefully soon.

Christ alive, it’s been forever since I last blogged! You haven’t even met my cat yet!

Rowan

Meet Rowan Tolliver Baudrons. If you follow me on social or know me personally, you’re already aware of this addition to the House of Baudrons, but maybe you don’t know the fuller story of how he came to be with me. And unfortunately, it’s going to have to stay that way, because

The cliffhanger notes are that Adam finally caved and decided he would allow a cat in the house, so my 2022 Christmas present was Rowan’s adoption fee at the SPCA. My beautiful baby boy was being called “Waldo” there, for no apparent reason, because he’s impossible to miss. My only prerequisite for a cat was that they like me, because most of my other cats haven’t. Rowan immediately jumped into my lap at the shelter, and I absolutely fell head over heels for him right then and there.

He is FIV+ which means that he’s more prone to infections than other cats, and shouldn’t be allowed around non FIV+ cats (to keep it from spreading). He loves to play, snuggle, eat, and watch for mice in the wall. He also loves to be outside, and surprisingly took to a leash right off the bat, so I take him on walks around the yard a lot. Unfortunately, he can get overstimulated quickly by the smell of another cat or the sound of a passing vehicle, added to that the fact that bird flu is practically surrounding us at this point, he’s pretty much an indoor cat only. I had a stroller that I outfitted for him a while ago, but it was way too big to bring to my new place, so I’ve actually just recently ordered one that folds up really small. Can’t wait to take him on walks without fear of being scratched to shreds.

Friends

I’ve made some of the best friends I’ve ever had here. And almost all of them are thanks to Bumble BFF, who’da thunk. Allow me to introduce you to the main cast:

Meet Amber, the most natural and fun friendship I’ve had in years. Amber is a hairdresser two doors down from the Cancer Resource Center, and we became friends after an unusual HVAC situation in the building pushed us together. I can’t imagine my life without her now. We’re the kind of friends sitcoms are based on — our personalities are a lot alike in some ways, but very distinct and complimentary in others. She is an incredible single mom to two adorable kiddos, an absolute babe, and that thing that everyone said I was in high school… a free spirit. Spending time with her is some of the most fun I’ve had. I feel so lucky to know her.

Meet Philippa (on the left). She’s from England and just got her doctorate from Cornell in 19th century American literature. When I saw her on Bumble, I couldn’t believe how pretty she was, but more than that — I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to meet her. When we finally did meet, I swear, it was like the woman I’ve always drawn had come to life in front of me. We had immediate chemistry and so much fun together, until she graduated and moved off to Philadelphia with her fella. Sigh. We still talk regularly though, and in fact, I got to spend the weekend with her and her old/my new friend Alicia just recently. She and Amber both have ADHD and talk so fast, but I know them well enough now to be able to interrupt them and say things like, “Wait! I need to catch up!” or “Don’t say anything yet! I’m collecting my thoughts!” It’s so nice to be able to communicate openly without fear of offending. :)

Meet Jessie (on the right)! She’s reserved, skeptical, and unapologetically on a mission to figure shit out. When I saw her on Bumble, I almost swiped left because I think her main photo was of her dog (and we all know how dog people can be), but then I read her job title: “New Word Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary,” and I swiped right on her like she was the last roll of toilet paper on the shelf in 2020 (remember that?). Anyway, Jessie is not only unbelievably cool (she even plays the piano), she is — like I said — determined to address the difficult things, so that she can live a happier and more fulfilled life, and she inspires me to do the same. Sharing a love of language and learning is pretty fucking great too. She and Andy are having a “Gray Party” this weekend to try and buoy our dark, Winter souls. I can’t wait.

Meet Mamiko, or as I like to call her in my head, “Miko.” I should just ask her if I can call her that in real life, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. It’s so cute! Just like her! Mamiko is from Japan, but spent her middle school years in the states. She moved to the city (NYC) with her husband years later to work at Sony, and then they moved to Ithaca right around the same time that Adam and I did, for her fella to get another degree. Currently, she’s a UX designer, but her passion is writing and illustrating, and we’re learning how to tattoo together! We share something very special, something I wasn’t expecting — it’s like we were cut from the same cloth when it comes to how we process experiences, and I don’t think I realized until we met how much I’d been craving that kind of understanding in a relationship. In other words, y’all, Miko is Magik.

Honorable and by no means diminutive mentions to Sarah, Julia, Jen N, Jen G, Jen H, Steph, Frank, Indi, Jeff, Kim S, Emily & Kyhl, Nathalie & Spencer, Trina, Hoyt, Cindy, Caleb, and I’m definitely forgetting a few. I am so lucky to be surrounded by such solid, awesome humans.

Divorce

And speaking of awesome humans… after nine years, Adam and I decided to conclude our marriage last Summer, and begin whatever the next chapter of our relationship would bring as soon as possible thereafter. If he ever gives me permission, I’ll write a respectful tell-all, because it’s a very interesting tale, but for now I’ll just say that the separation was amicable and loving, and we are doing our best to remain sensitive, kind, and connected during this delicate time. It can be extremely difficult of course to express empathy for someone when you beat them so epically at Scrabble. I’m trying though. [Carla: 392, Adam: 228]

At first, I moved close to work, but that was too expensive, so I decided to move out-of-town, to the cheap little Village of Interlaken. I actually just learned that I live in the Town of Ovid, but my address is Interlaken, for some reason. All these hamlets and townships and villages are so confusing out here. Anyway, I live in a tiny house currently (not the cute, modern kind), but hopefully not for too much longer (keep reading to find out why!). Adam moved too, but he’s still in downtown Ithaca because the man likes to walk!

I did jump on some dating apps recently just to see what’s out there, but I can’t even really fathom getting into another LTR anytime soon, and you couldn’t force me to get married again, to anyone, not for all the tea in China. What a scam!

DWI

This may come as a shock to some of you, because I’ve been pretty quiet about it since it happened. Yes, the ordeal was kind of embarrassing, but more than that, it was complicated, and with the stigma attached, it hasn’t seemed worth the effort to try and explain very often. I really hate withholding information though, so I’m going to give you the nutshell version here, and you can ask me questions if you want.

The long and short of it is that I shouldn’t have been driving while intoxicated at all, and I completely understand that, and will never do it again. The nuance of the situation was that I was driving competently and carefully, and was only pulled over for going a few miles over the speed limit (in a known speed trap). The arresting officer was new, nervous, and not truthful in his report for some reason, which I considered contesting, but knew it would be a big, involved hassle, so decided to just go with the flow.

Because of my impeccable driving record and the lovely DA, Luke Fenchel, who was representing me, my sentence was to:
1. Complete a certified substance abuse treatment program,
2. Only drive to and from work and medical appointments for 90 days,
3. Attend a victim panel event,
4. Pay some fees,
5. Remain gainfully employed, and
6. Refrain from fraternizing with disreputable sorts,
which I’m happy to report I carried out almost perfectly (disreputable sorts coming soon), and only have one fee left to pay before the entire thing is behind me (and only on my driving record as a traffic infraction).

Honestly, it was a great experience. And one off the bucket list too! Not the DWI part — just getting arrested in general. They wouldn’t let me stay the night in jail though, so that remains. It was not the “scared sober” experience I was expecting, but don’t worry, that’s coming in just a minute with the disreputable sorts.

Work

I still work for the Cancer Resource Center, but we became “affiliates” with our local health system, Cayuga Health last Summer, and they just became Centralus Health at the start of the year, so technically-speaking, I am now a Donor Relations Coordinator at Centralus Health. I love my new bosses and coworkers — they’re wonderful. And I’ve been able to transfer most of the marketing for CRC over to the larger/consolidated Centralus Marketing Department, which has taken a HUGE load off my mind. Unfortunately, what I’ve come to find out about the field of “Development” is that it is a largely unstructured and amorphous livelihood, employing intuitive-yet-strategic manipulation of human relationships and emotions to extract specific-yet-unrestricted financial benefits for whatever.

Whenever I tell someone I’m in Development and I hate asking people for money, they usually say something like, “Well, at least it’s for a good cause!” And that used to be enough to keep me motivated — back when I facilitated the women’s support group, boutique wig and prosthesis appointments, and one-on-one guidance sessions with young cancer patients. That workload was unsustainable though, which is why my former boss had me relinquish those responsibilities to focus solely on fundraising before promptly moving to Philadelphia. She stayed on for a while remotely, but left me under the direct charge of someone who presumably thought I’d received any training for my new role, so when I didn’t hit her [uncommunicated] quotas, she wanted to fire me! Me! It was so wild. This person helped me cut my last tie to the worst thing in my life, and was suddenly trash-talking me to my boss behind my back. I don’t often stand up for myself, but I decided to let them both know how I felt about the way they were treating me, and thankfully, I don’t have to work with either of them now.

The job has remained though, because apparently I did a phenomenal job with our annual fundraiser, and people still “see something in me” (I wish they’d tell me what exactly). I have finally been able to suss out why I can’t stay in the field long-term though, and that is because — on a fundamental level — it monetizes human beings, which is a foundation I don’t want to build anything on. More reasons are:
– It has no set structure, so you can’t “learn it,”
– Real-world performance anxiety and social fatigue,
– The work is never done and never enough,
– You have to be nice to assholes, and
– You rarely get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
So that’s why I know I’m not destined to be in this job forever. For the moment, it is paying the bills, and again — I adore my coworkers, but I hope to be embarking on an adventure soon, which will be able to sustain me for the foreseeable future (keep reading to learn how!).

I’m an Atheist

I’m going to write a big, huge blog, if not book about this one, so for this post, I’ll only share with you the straw that broke the camel’s back, which I referenced a few paragraphs ago. One day last year, I was having a one-on-one session with my interim-boss, and I have absolutely no recollection of how it came up in conversation, but she asked me if I trusted my gut on something, and I answered honestly that I didn’t know if I could trust myself on this, to which she responded, “If you can’t trust yourself, why would you trust yourself to trust someone else?” And it was like my whole life had been leading up to that moment, because all of a sudden, EVERYTHING MADE SENSE.

So I’m trusting myself now! — or at least I’m trying to. Self-doubt is a 35-year-old neural pathway I’ve been walking, so it’s probably going to take some time to break in a new trail. The hard part is done though — the trail is blazed, now I just need to keep walking it.

Disreputable Sorts

Speaking of trusting myself, I could’ve avoided the entire following story if I had. Oh well, lessons learned the hard way stick better. To sum up: my creepy next-door neighbor had some kind of mental episode last weekend and tried to kill me. I’m pressing charges (after initially only being concerned for her health and well-being) and requesting a restraining order (in New York called an Order of Protection) because this isn’t the first time she’s been physically aggressive with me, and apparently I can’t stand up for myself under pressure!

Basically, this girl (she’s younger than me) and her husband (in his fifties) gave me the heebie-jeebies from day one, but instead of trusting that instinct, I pushed back, assuming I was experiencing implicit bias based on stereotypes of rednecks and alcoholics. Turns out, I should’ve let my gut lead the way on this one, further complicating my understanding and experience of implicit bias, unfortunately…

Anyway, so this girl and her fella are full-blown alcoholics. Maybe the worst I’ve seen (and I’ve seen some). About a month after I moved in, she asked if I wanted to have a threesome with them, to which I said, “No, thanks,” but she continued to pursue me until one evening, she forced herself on me when we were alone in my house. She was surprisingly strong, but I was able to get away from her and kick her out. I avoided both of them for months, but then a sweet and sociable young woman moved into their building, living on her own for the first time, and we all kind of came together to be supportive of her, getting her set up with furniture and whatnot. So I decided to sweep the past under the rug and try to start fresh with them.

Attacker asked if I could show her how to do this specific crafting thing she wanted to learn, and I thought that would be a nice, innocuous activity I could use to help reset the tone of our relationship. I agreed, but regretted my decision as soon as she arrived reeking of alcohol with an unopened 4-bottle bag of wine. Again though, I pushed down my judgments and taught her the craft… while she drank half the bag of wine, not paying any attention at all. And of course when I was done, she made another pass at me. I scrambled away and literally grasped for the nearest thing I could think of to occupy her hands, which happened to be my shape note hymnal. I bored her to sleep with a music history lesson (didn’t take long) and texted her guy to come get her.

Dude arrived, and together we attempted to get her up and headed toward the door, but she must have been hallucinating, because, long-story-shorter, she tackled me and had my head and neck in a choke hold before I could even process what was happening. Fortunately, her guy was able to pull her off me and restrain her, but not before I’d felt what it was like to have someone try to kill me.

I am pressing charges, even though I wasn’t planning on it initially. I’m sick and tired of not prioritizing myself. Apparently, subconsciously, I’m so afraid of being selfish (AKA Satan himself) that I would rather put myself in mortal peril than hold an attempted murderer accountable for their actions. Would anyone like to take a guess as to how I got this way? There is an ironic hint in parenthesis in this very paragraph. ANyway, let’s move on.

Camper

Shortly after the sexual aggression last Summer, I was talking with my friend Lauren about the situation and mentioned that it would be so awesome if I lived in an RV and could just pack up and leave when shit like this happens. She asked if I was serious, and I said, of course I was, and she told me that through a series of tragic deaths in her and her husband’s families, they now owned a truck and camper that she’d be happy to rent to me to own. So over the course of several months, we hashed out the details, and over Thanksgiving, my buddy Josh drove me out to West Tennessee to pick it up!

A huge, massive, neverending thank you everyone who helped my dream become a reality. Tim and Lauren, Barbara and Ross, Josh, Erin and Stephen, Dad, Walter, Anna Laura, you guys are the absolute best.

There’s some work to be done on it, but I’m handy, and I know handy people, so the plan is to be living in it full-time just asap! I’m waiting for the weather to get a little better before I take it in to get inspected, then I’ll be removing the toilet, cleaning out the black tank, removing the bed, TV, and couch to make room for my half-queen bed and art studio. You can be jealous, I completely understand.

Health

Oh, I guess I didn’t say, but I’m physically fine now, regarding the attempt on my life. Psychologically I’m pretty shaken, to be honest. Witnessing the horrible effects of late-stage alcoholism, combined with my own DWI, having recently been diagnosed Insulin Resistant and told that the medication I have to take for it stresses the liver, having had two pre-cancerous polyps removed from my colon, and gaining 20 pounds in a year has led me to start making some serious lifestyle changes.

So I’m obviously cutting back on my alcohol intake. Not that it was a LOT before, but now it’s down to almost-none, which feels fine. I don’t smoke anymore, and I don’t really miss it, so I might as well give up all the fun things while I have the momentum.

As part of my Insulin Resistance treatment, I literally have to eat regularly or I’ll become hypoglycemic (not fun!!), so I’ve stocked up on healthier snack food. I discovered that one cup of Italian ice is a pretty decent substitute for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, which honestly is going to make an enormous difference, I’m sure. I recently completed the YMCA’s LiveStrong program for cancer survivors, which helped jumpstart my exercise practice again, I have a tiny manual treadmill that I use every day, and I’m starting a weekly yoga practice with some friends.

I had a DEXA scan late last year that confirmed a significant decrease in bone density, which was expected due to my cancer treatment. I had a Breast Cancer Index Test done on my original tumor, to determine if five more years of treatment would be worth the bone loss, and apparently the results of that are in, but my oncologist is keeping himself to himself. IF the results show that it would not be worth it, my treatment will be complete in April of 2026, which is basically one year away and I am so excited, even though I shouldn’t count my chickens just yet.

Mental health-wise, I’m doing really well, all things considered. My awesome therapist, Julie, moved back to California last year and I started seeing Lorie, an art therapist shortly after. She has been marvelous and is really helping stir up my creativity again. I’m so thankful for her wisdom and candor. And of course Rowan has been the emotional support companion of the century. He snuggles with me every night and gets me out of bed when I can’t on my own.

Da Feucha

I did not think this post would end up being so long. WOW. Okay, so I’m just going to whip through my future plans — I’ve already mentioned most of them, but here is my vision for 2025 – 2026:

I plan to move into my new home-on-wheels at the latest by this Spring. I hope to find a semi-permanent place to stay parked most of the time, preferably a spot where I can plug in to electricity and city water, but beggars can’t be choosers. By next Winter, I honestly hope to be tattooing a lot, and potentially even doing some traveling to escape the wretched godforsaken cold and dark. In 2026, as long as my treatment is finished, I’m hitting the open road. I’ve been thinking about becoming a “content creator” or what-the-heck-ever an “influencer” is — essentially just putting my life on display on the internet for anyone who may find it interesting.

Aaaaand I am going to sleep sitting in this chair! So I guess that means it’s time to sign off. If you’ve read to the end of this, and have a minute to spare, would you be so kind as to leave a tiny comment? I like to know that I’m not screaming into the void.