Shooting Pain

I just gave myself my first shot of Ketorolac Tromethamine. Still woozy, but I can in fact see and was able to walk from my living room to my computer chair in my office, so the initial wave of "omigawd! bright lights! splotchy! can't stand!" already passed.

Yes, Virginia, I'm back to shooting up migraine meds. Different from the DHE I used to have to squeeze into my tummy fat. "Sub-Q" aka "subcutaneous. "That was a smaller needle but way worse since the injecting part was much slower and more concentrated. This is "IM" aka "intramuscular," so I stab it into my thigh quick like a dart and barely have to look at anything. It still took me several false wrist-flicking starts where something inside stopped me before I hit the skin, but in it went and so did the medicine and maybe I'll stop feeling like shit soon.

All day today I've been in pain and asleep with migraine dreams or needing to be asleep. I took my other new drug earlier, but it clearly didn't help as I still had to give myself the shot. Please please please let the shot break the cycle. The 21 month cycle that has me in all kinds of useless self-hating demi-stupor all the time.

I went to the Diamond Headache Clinic for the first time on Tuesday. My regular neurologist referred me to a specific doctor there as the expert on hormones and migraine, since my hormones are nuts and no one ever wants to let me near The Pill with my stroke risk crap. That's why I have all these new drugs. She (Diamond Headache Doc) also suggested I do biofeedback, which I hope to start ASAP, and if that doesn't work, my parents get to dogsit for a few days while I go in as an inpatient and they hopefully IV drip the hell out of the migraines until they stop coming back on a daily basis. Modern medicine may not have caught up with the "why" or the "how" of migraine, but it likes to beat migraine with sticks until it shuts up temporarily. Diamond wants to use more aggressive sticks, I'm all for it. Get me out of this hell. I'm not counting on it and I'll still have to live my life with the big constant question marks of functionality, but I'm getting desperate to live my life. I try to accept being incapacitated for days and make the most out of when I'm not, but it's so frustrating and it makes me feel like I'm failing myself and when I am doing ok I should be doing everything and when I'm in between or if I ever take time when I'm physically capable of being productive to enjoy things that aren't productive, there's this guilt that I'm wasting my few precious moments and I may not get them again.

What's a girl to do?

Fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it

Conversations with 8-Year-Olds

"They're still talking."
"Yeah, grownups like to talk a lot."
"A lot a lot."
"I guess once you're grown up you stop having games and toys to play with so you talk instead."
"That's terrible!"
"It doesn't have to be. Talking can be fun."
[skeptical look]
"If you know how to use them right, words become your games, your toys. Words can be fun."

*actual conversation I had today

My building had a garage sale today. Only my downstairs neighbor and I brought anything out to sell, but many of the Cast of Characters came through. I sold my old microwave and bought a mirror for my dining room and a bag of bubble wrap.

One neighbor was having her porch professionally landscaped (really). Some cross between interior and exterior decoration with flower pots and chairs and a giant umbrella that looks perfectly nice but seems a bit out of place on a second floor porch with the third floor porch directly above blocking the elements. Then again, maybe the umbrella should be taken completely out of its utilitarian comfort zone and used as a general decor item. People hang pretty fans on their walls, so why not an umbrella over my coffee table? I'm not superstitious, and wouldn't it be lovely during the long Chicago winter if my living room set came straight from a the deck of a Carnival Cruise?

I'm not sure when exactly that last paragraph turned sarcastic, but it did. It would be amusing to turn my living room into a tropical resort, but I like the warm living space theme better than the tacky-with-irony right now.

At any rate, the landscaper brought along her son for the day and the poor kid had absolutely nothing to do. For the first hour he just hung around and played with my plastic toy cash register and found new and bored-looking ways to climb up and down the bottom few stairs. When we hit the afternoon lull in both customers and conversation, I asked the kid if he liked games or arts and crafts or anything I might be able to bring out for him from my condo.
"Arts and crafts!"
Boy had he come to the right place. I brought out my cardmaking stuff and showed him how to make envelopes and he had a grand old time. I'm just glad I don't pay for the paper considering how much he went through.

When I was a kid, I didn't want to be a kid and I wasn't very good at it anyway. Now I finally see the merits and it's time to grow up. I was much more comfortable with adults before I became one. It's harder to see when you're in the midst of something; maybe I like being the "other" so I can maintain perspective.

Music of the Night

Thing that gets stuck in my head on a regular basis:

Yo Gabba Gabba! (There's a Party in my Tummy !)
Uploaded by Materialiste - Click for more funny videos.

I think I first heard about Yo Gabba Gabba from Mixed Species's blog. Never mind I'm 27 and have no children. When I watch Sesame Street online I can claim it's for the nostalgia. No such excuse here. Yo Gabba Gabba is just silly and entertaining and better than Charlie the Unicorn, so I will continue to go there for an occasional mental escape.

Who knew Al Sharpton played piano?



Ok, that's not Al Sharpton, it's Allen Toussaint.


Real Al Sharpton:

Tell me they're not long lost brothers.

Compressing

Trying to decompress a bit after many days in a row of crazy.

Starting last Tuesday:

• RCN stood me up and I got stuck home all day while developer's contractor guys switched my incongruous sink for happy-matches-the-rest-of-the-condo sink.
• crashed at NBF's house

Wednesday:

• happy 27th birthday to me!
  
• crawled back home by 7:45 AM so contractor people could come put granite on sink
• good RCN person came after I did much yelling at every RCN person possible
• therapy
• psychiatrist
• picked up NBF and dragged him around for rest of day because it's my birthday, dammit
  
• rented cargo van
• drove to Wheaton to pick up 1920s art deco table and chairs I found on Craigslist
• tried to drink a shmancy beer to celebrate but fell asleep after a few sips and was out for the night by 11 PM

Thursday:

• drove (still in cargo van) to O'Hare to pick up NBF's dad
• waited in cell phone lot while NBF's dad got his luggage
• discovered NBF's dad was actually at Midway.
• drove downtown to meet NBF's dad half-way from Midway to us
• NBF, his dad and I carried 1920s art deco table and chairs from van into condo
• picked up futon and big squishy armchair with ottoman and brought them to condo from NBF's house
• stared stupidly while NBF and his dad carried furniture up stairs
• lunch!
• drove myself in cargo van to Container Store to pick up Elfa closet components for awesome office closet that, once installed, will be the greatest thing in my life
• carried 90% of heavy closet crap up to condo all by myself when NBF and his father appeared (NBF left his cell phone and keys in the van when we parted ways for the afternoon...oops) and they helped with the last bit before I had to run off to return cargo van before Enterprise closed.
• Filled van gas tank and returned van. Flirted with fabulous boy at Enterprise place. Wondered why boy was working at Enterprise.
• Picked own car back up. Filled it with gas, washed its exterior, had 70-year-old car wash operator tell me I'm a beautiful woman and my husband should spoil me and they'll spoil me at the car wash whenever I come back, spent an hour cleaning out car's interior down to my leather wipes so it would be presentable for driving NBF's parents either that night or the next morning
• Shower. Nap.
• Back to O'Hare. Birdie's flight came in after 11.
  
• IHOP for pancakes.
• Sleep like dead people

Friday:

• Coffee with NBF's dad and Birdie at coffee shop across the street until NBF called to say he was at my doorstep, so he joined us having finished his last paper minutes before
  
• Shower and get pretty for graduation. Original pretty sun dress had to be scrapped for layered wear thanks to Chicago refusing warm weather on May 17.
• While NBF and Birdie went straight to the graduation, NBF's dad and I drove back to O'Hare to pick up NBF's mom (NBF's parents, being divorced, hadn't seen eachother in five years. Weeee!).
• Turned around to go get tickets from NBF.
• Turned back around towards O'Hare.
• Rain
• Met up with NBF's mom at the O'Hare Enterprise, which is not near the main stretch of other rental car companies and required my driving back up a one-way stretch on the Avis car return and doing several U-turns before following the Enterprise shuttle into a parking lot behind a hotel
• NBF's mom wanted NBF's dad to drive, which was the whole reason we had to go to the airport even though she was getting a rental car. Then the two of them were going to follow me since I knew where I was going. I also printed up directions for myself and them just in case. They followed closely until the very end when we had to start making turns, at which point they decided to pass me. In the end they followed the directions, which turned out to be slightly wrong, I had them stop in a parking lot, went and found them, and eventually led them into the correct parking lot. We were 15 minutes late and shouldn't have been allowed to sit in the seats Birdie texted me that she saved us, but the woman watching the door we went in was nice and we just spent 15 fewer minutes sitting through boring crap.

So NBF graduated law school and moved back East. No more NBF. Pretty devastated. Plus side: finally being forced to make new friends, leave my cave, etc. Negative side: no more NBF around to satisfy my social urges when I'm not up to doing anything beyond waddling my ass eight blocks down the way and curling up around somebody else's dog.

Birdie is super-swell. Some of our mutual college friends got married and made babies and live in the Midwest, with a pair in Champaign, IL and another in Bloomington, IN. Despite my reluctance towards long car trips (my life-long motion sickness has been worse and more migrainey in the last few years...bullshit asshit faceshit since it wasn't so long ago I did northern Ohio to Key West and back in a weekend) Birdie talked me into meeting the babies and their parents in Indianapolis and then following the Bloomington set home for the night.
So. Much. Fun.
We met up at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis which was awesome. We spent the entire time in two of the exhibits because our friends' one- and barely-two-year-olds couldn't get enough of the dinosaurs and then played themselves silly in the Playscape.
Our Bloomington-based friends' baby boy fell in love with me the moment he saw me. He wanted to show me everything and hold my hand and have me pick him up a lot. Apparently he never does this, not even with his mom's sister, and I'm not that well versed in the art of very small children, so I felt like the most special person in the universe. Both of the kids are completely awesome and gorgeous and all four parents are just so good. They don't let the kids set things on fire or anything, but they're totally cool about letting them explore and not freaking out if they fall or eat their noodles off the floor. I took a bazillion pictures (on my Flickr and Facebook if you know me in reality) and am uploading them right now. There's also a number of pictures on other people's cameras of me dressed as a turtle, palaeontologist, and bee thanks to the child-sized costumes into which I fit, provided by the museum.

My condo is now just me and my dog and the mess from my house guests that I feel strangely compelled to clean. When my apartments were messy they felt right. When my condo is messy it feels wrong. My apartments were nests. My condo is pretty. It is warm and soft because it is pretty, not because it gets filled with crap.

Piece of story I conveniently left out: Friday night. Birdie and I were going to go to the party of a completely different friend of mine, but he lives 45 minutes away by car and we were exhausted and ended up at NBF's friends' condo a block from my condo. NBF's friend is a very attractive boy but he has all kinds of crazy and baggage and story I know about so while jumping him has always been a bit tempting it's also a bit out of the question. Well, said friend has a brother. His brother was in town for graduation. His brother (henceforth known as Beetle) is also very attractive. We played Rock Band, partook of some substances, and made out to the first half of Team America before slinking off to a more private setting for fun and mutual body appreciation. I'm amazed at the difference between boys who know what they're doing and boys who don't. Boys who understand that girls also want to have fun and are not just there to please boys. I'm amazed how gratifying a compliment is when I know it's genuine. How powerful and awesome I can feel. And how much fun it can be on such a non-emotional level. That's another amazing difference: emotional versus unemotional Boy ravaging. The kiss seems less urgent, the touch itself has a different burn. It tingles and pulls from a different place. I still haven't had emotional sex, and as a result, part of me still feels like a virgin. The act may be the same, but even a kiss that means something and one that doesn't are such completely different beasts it's hard to think of them as the same thing. I wonder if and when the person on the other end can tell. One kiss is acted and thought out and just a prelude and a push below. The other I want to hold and devour. Does the kiss recipient know? I've heard such things about the difference in sex. I'd like to see for myself, but I suppose that requires significant emotional attachment to a Boy. Am I really ready for such things?

Today was my decompression day. Tomorrow I have to get back to reality. Terrifying.

lure me not

Saturday's temptations and desires, in approximate order:

1. kill NBF
2. just keep NBF in some state of half-strangle, half-hug forever
3. kill parents
4. puke
5. fill stomach but puke at the same time
6. puke
7. decorate condo with everything in sight, or exact opposite of everything in sight, depending on sight
8. disassociate self from parents
9. redo ages 20-22
10. make other people interested in good beer
    
11. start watching Saturday Night Live regularly
12. go to random college party across the street from bed and breakfast and make up identity and story and anonymously screw random college boy

My mom wanted to spend Mother's Day with as many of her children as possible, so after much pressure she got me to agree to a weekend trip to my brother's college. "Just one night" she emphasized. Fine. I like my brother. I don't like long drives (it's only 4 1/2 hours, but I still get carsick and migrainey and all those lovely things my body likes to do...and I'm the girl who drove from Cleveland to Key West and back in a weekend for the hell of it...I don't know what happened). NBF moves away forever in a week and I want to spend time with him, but Mother's Day is very important to my mom and I have trouble saying "no" to her. So I'm here and it's not so terrible and I want to play "college kid" in a way I totally rejected when I actually was one. And now I want dental floss. That makes 13 major desires for the day. I think I'll leave it at that.

I try to talk about the actual events of my life and moving and whatnot and instead get distracted by more internal squish

Did I mention I moved?

I am now the owner and resident of The Greatest Condo Ever: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, huge, a block away from my old place so I'm still in my beloved neighborhood, and retained and restored vintage details with beautiful renovation. I've been sleeping here for a week. There are no blinds up on the windows yet because I have it in my head that I need a second person and NBF refuses to have anything to do with my moving or new place as he's having all kinds of fun issues with his own impending move and life direction so he is a puddle of useless. I bet I could hang the shades myself. I haven't even tried.


"The check is in the mail."
"I'm two blocks away."
People say and do that sort of thing all the time. It's not a big deal. I don't think it's a big deal. You come to expect it and factor it into the universe, whether you're the one saying it or others are saying it to you.
My parents equate it with murder. These things are lies and once someone lies you don't know where it ends or if you can trust that person blah blah blah.
Things are not that black and white. I have way more problems because I'm too honest and too forthright. White lies are not the end of the world. One of the reasons I write is as a confessional, to undo anything I might have slipped or exaggerated or fudged in real life. Did I say 10 minutes when I knew it was likely to be 20? Two blocks was really eight? Say this is the fifth time I've spoken to customer service when it's really only the third? I do it without thinking. It's not a big deal. It does not make me a bad person. Hell, I learned to lie to my parents at a very young age to protect myself. Make them happy, shut them up, get them off my back and then deal with whatever it is. Because shutting them up was always more important than dealing with the actual problem. My motivation was always the guilt and nagging, not the thing itself.
It's almost my 27th birthday and I'm just starting to recognize that I should make my house pretty because I would like a pretty house, not so my parents will be proud of me. I'm still having a very hard time working on the great battle between my desperate need for my parents to be proud of me and living as myself for myself making myself happy. I'm trying to learn to control the emotional muscles, like a psychological version of learning to wiggle your ears or raise one eyebrow. This is the positive I am doing while the weather changes every five minutes and my head keeps me half-blind and dizzy and in pain day after day. That's another thing I need to remember: I really am excused from being a fully functional adult. I am not faking it. Sometimes I feel like I must be faking it. Like I'm just taking advantage and lazing around all the time and doing nothing. Maybe I am taking advantage of my situation. But isn't that what I should do? Take advantage of the position I'm in because it's the position I'm in and for the love of Everyhing, it's not a fucking puzzle I just have to solve and I'm somehow being lazy and useless by not at least spending every minute physically possible solving the problem. I watch my parents doing everything all at once and feel like I should, too. Obligated, since I've benefited so much from their constant work, that I'm in debt to them and to the universe for this life I don't deserve and struggle to be the person who could somehow repay it when everything in me screams otherwise.
They have chosen their lives. They like their lives. I am a good person. It makes me cry to write "I am a good person," but I believe it. They are not always rational, reasonable, or right, even though they believe they are. They can support me on their terms, but I have to live on my own terms. I have to make my own decisions. They are just my parents. I am a grown-up. They, being my parents, may never see me or treat me like a grown-up, but they try. They were so good on Sunday.
Into the Wild.
There's a reason the children of upper-middle-class suburbia become drug addicts. When the past however many generations have expected upward mobility, but you are given the luxury of exploration around a strange rigid prescription for life and still the assumption that you will do at least as well as your parents, screaming "fuck this" and blowing as much of it away on heroin is a good way to obliterate the bubble.
I don't want to lose my life. I get frustrated as it is losing so much time in the migraines. But those, too, are not as bad as they were at one point. More drugs. More doctors. Who knows? Again, that nagging feeling I'm not doing enough, not fighting hard enough, not spending all of my energy all of the time.
Why?
Why is that the expectation? I have so many expectations for myself. Can't I just be a regular human being? Upward! Better! Faster! Stronger! Fix it! It all goes back to the nagging, the doing things to stop the yelling and the Voices (except my interior voices are so clearly me...). Instead of doing things for their own sake. Changing my way of thinking is important. It is good. I am doing it and I feel good about doing it. I deserve to feel good about doing it.