Funkhouser [allegedly] claimed that his wife’s diary was leaked  by the lawyer for the woman suing them:

“It is on her personal computer, but a portion of it wound up on my personal computer. I was required to turn over all material on my personal computer to the opposition lawyer during the discovery process for the trial…”Who then is wrong? Gloria, who never spoke these words to anyone, but wrote down her anguish, anger and pain? Or the lawyer who used her power to publicly slime Gloria to extract money from the city?”

I don’t buy it.

I was a litigation lawyer for eight years, so today I DO know whereof I speak here.  Without giving you a free law school education, here’s how the discovery process works in layman’s terms:

In a lawsuit each side is allowed to build their case using documents and testimony from the other side.  To get documents each side serves A Request For Production of Documents and Things (called a Request for Production or RFP) and they list out what they want.   (Lots of wrangling goes on here, because obviously nobody wants to produce a thing to the other side.)   I’ve never seen an RFP that DOESN’T ask for diaries written during the time of the events that led to the dispute, so having Gloria’s diary get turned over doesn’t surprise me a bit.  However, when documents are gathered, it is standard practice to BATES STAMP each document produced to the other side (and often to stamp documents you are fighting about having to produce.)   Bates stamps are basically fancy page numbering, and anymore people just do it with little labels or hell – I’ve even seen them hand-written.

Look at the diary.  No Bates stamp.

And a really sharp lawyer will try to get what is known as a Protective Order before the discovery process starts so that particularly sensitive information (such as diaries) would not get leaked.  When there is a protective order, documents that are subject to the order are almost always labeled, “CONFIDENTIAL - SUBJECT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER.”

Nope, don’t see that either.

So did Gloria’s diary REALLY come from opposing counsel, or someone else?

Image shamelessly stolen from Tony’s Kansas City because it should be THE official image of Gloria Squitiro for time and all eternity.

No, I’m not talking about myself, childrens - I’m doing just dandy, all considered.  No, I’m talking about Gloria Squitiro, the Kansas City (MO) Mayor’s wife who is bat shit crazy.  Don’t take my word for it, read her diary and then compare it to the DSM-IV Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder.  Now I’m no psych, but I do know a thing about crazy.  Hell, my neighbor’s retarded cocker spaniel could do the math on this one:

(1)   Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. [Not including suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5] - The woman’s troubles all started because she refused to let her husband do his job and actually not be by her side 24/7.

(2)   A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.  Her kids, Joe Miller, Dan Ryan — the list goes on and on.  Joe Miller had her pegged when he wrote in his email to her (page 21), “That has been a pattern in our relationship from my perspective — intense conflict, then peace, then conflict again. And though we have managed to work it out each time, it is a pattern nonetheless, and that has a lot to do with why I feel we are at an impasse.”

(3)    Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.  She truly fails to see where she ends and another person begins, especially her husband.  Staffers repeatedly had to talk to her first AND THEN SHE would tell the mayor.

(4)   Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving). [Again, not including suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5]  I can say this because I am a fat woman:  she’s a binge eater if ever there was one.  I don’t want to get into the other issues (ew) but she certainly is a reckless airport parker.  Just ask “the fucking meter-maid at the airport”  (page 17).

(5) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.  Now I can’t testify as to this one, but one can only imagine that she does; her whole pattern of behavior is self-injurious.

(6) Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).  See…the whole damned diary.

(7)  Chronic feelings of emptiness, worthlessness.  Well she doesn’t have this necessarily, but you only need 5 of the 9 criteria to have BPD and right now she’s got a count of 6 of 7.  Let’s continue…

(8)  Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).  “I have hit Funk more times in the last 18 months than I can bare.  I don’t know how he remains with me.” (page 32)

(9)  Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms. Once again, see…the whole damned diary. She thinks everyone is out to get her (and the mayor).  And let’s not talk about these so-called spirits she sees.  Koo koo, koo koo.

So.

How ya been?

I’m slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things, though the ride has been a bit bumpy. When I was Captain Caregiver to my dad I was able to take catnaps here and there. I imagine my current employer frowns on such behavior. (This is the one and only time I miss not having an office with a door like when I was back at The Firm.) On the upside, my mom is doing much better. After cooling her heels in the hospital for about a week and then in a nursing home dementia-care unit she’s made some real progress. She has no memories of the past two months, which is just as well. I’m moving her back to her assisted living apartment this weekend - it should be interesting since she doesn’t remember ever being there. Eventually she’ll move to Kansas City, so if you know of any good assisted living joints in JoCo give me a shout. I’d like to move her to Village Shalom, but she’s not Jewish and I don’t think I can teach her enough Yiddish to pass. (Though once her dementia gets worse I am gonna strap a Star of David around her neck and try to convince her she’s a Jew. What’s the point of having a relative with memory problems if you can’t mess with them? Besides, it’s revenge for making me join 4-H as a kid.)

I will be spending most of my weekends back home for the forseeable future, which means I am going to (a) pack my social life into Monday through Thursday and (b) become exhausted. And any hope of a romatic life is completely out the window for now, not that I’ve had a slew of Nice Jewish Boys(tm) knocking down my door anyway. Such is life though.

The death of my dad hasn’t really hit me, though I am assured that it will. Right now my energies are spent trying to care for a mentally ill mother who has by all rights gone completely off the mental grid. For those of you who want to do the math on this, borderline personality disorder + loss of spouse = shitstorm for children. Basically my mom is “acting out” by pretending to be much more helpless than she really is. If you’ve ever seen Absolutely Fabulous, I am the Saffy to her Edwina. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QphnKV3ieb0 And of course, to take the metaphor further, my brother is Serge, the son who is adored because he keeps his distance. Without sounding too cocky, I actually feel pretty damned good - I lived through what I thought would be the most devastating loss of my life and have learned much from it, and instead of feeling sorry for myself and agonzing over things that can’t be changed, I’m much more inclined to DO and to BE and to LIVE - and to grieve in my own little ways. I do feel like an orphan now - I essentially lost both of my parents when my dad passed away. It’s a bit liberating, honestly. (Special Thanks to Shari - I loved Leonard Cohen’s Anthem.)

My dad died yesterday.  I still haven’t had time to really process it, since today was spent with funeral planning and planning for Mom’s new assisted living apartment and everything else.  And then the phone calls and visits from friends and family.  And the exhausting task of taking care of my frail mother through all of this, even though we have an army of people who are trying to help. There are so many loose ends - how do we set up phone service in mom’s apartment?  Does she still know how to work the cell phone, or is her mind so gone right now that a cell phone will baffle her?  And I have to arrange movers for Saturday, and…and…and…

And all this and there is a slim but not completely implausible possibility that I will have to go back to work to KC on Thursday and then go to the burial in Iowa on Friday, instead of having the whole week off like I thought I did.  (I get three days of berevement leave and I think I still have two vacation days left, but I have been on a leave of absence for seven weeks so I don’t know if I still really do or not.)  I am trying not to freak out about that, because there IS a messy solution to this problem, and a messy solution is still a solution.  And until tomorrow I can’t find out things anyway, so why waste the adrenaline.  My dad was always optimistic.  God, how I wish I had that quality.

Anybody who knows me more than five minutes knows I pretty much hate being a lawyer.  They know this because I introduce myself as “Cara ______.  I’m a lawyer but I pretty much hate it.”  I’d rather be a nurse who picks impacted fecal matter out of people’s butts, because at least then I could wash the stink off of me when I go home.  With being a lawyer, the stink remains.

I became a lawyer because it was easier than telling my parents I wanted to sit at home on their sofa and write jokes all day until somebody paid me for them. The thing is, I have never been one of those people who just loved the law, but I’ve always been funny.  I know this, because people tell it to me, as if it is a surprise to them.  “Oh my god, you’re FUNNY!”  (I usually respond that I am also amazingly agile in the sack.  A few of you who know better will get an extra giggle out of that one.)

So as I journey through the last days of my father’s life (and being an unmarried, childless, apartment-dwelling, precariously-employed 36-year-old fat woman) I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating on what I want to do with my life.  The fact that I had a book deal fall in my lap is pretty freakin’ amazing, and probably means that if somebody out of the blue wants to pay me to bring the funny, well then - maybe I ought to go plant some funny seeds and see what sprouts.  Lord knows I’ve got enough shit in my life to fertilize it.

Who came up with this unwritten rule that people who blog have do an entry every day?  There’s no rules, people, THIS IS THE INTERNET.  BLOGGING IS FOR FUN, like watching shitty Burt Reynolds movies and fucking fat women.  Too often bloggers who get lots of hits think they have to come up with new posts to make their “fans” happy.   You know what happens when people rush to put out new content?  You get the blogging equivalent of every good band’s shitty second album.  So CHILL.

We all know most of you fuckers use your computers to surf porn sites in your underwear (if we’re lucky)  and only read blogs while you reload anyway.