I'm anxiety bonkers. Can't shake it. How much of it is my financial panic? How much is this illigical, groundless selfishness over the Possible Boy/Aural Girl dating situation? And why the hell does that present itself as anxiety, too?
I wish I could switch back and forth between Human Annabell and Robot Annabell at my own convenience. I'd be a robot long enough to complete a certain set of tasks every day, keep all budgeting and accounting in order, and maintain perspective on all emotional life-pimples. I can be human for everything shiny, savory, or available as a mouse.

I can't write, either. The last few days. Writing too much for my  businessy crap? Spending too much creative energy on photos and blogs and forums and general whoring? It's effective, but I'm sprinting back towards insane.

See what I mean? Can't write worth a CRAP. So frustrating.

Do Not Pass Go

My migraine doc calls it "dullness." I refer to it as all sorts of things, including "the crazies," "the zappies," "being stupid," "like I'm stoned," and who knows what else. It's common in migraine sufferers, it's actually a symptom of the migraine (right along with light sensitivity, nausea, etc.), and  it means I don't function properly and there's not a thing I can do about it. I can't always tell when I'm in "dullness" mode. There will be days when I'm chugging along, getting things done on the computer, and I switch over to online kakuro (which I play a lot) and I can't add anything in my head or remember numbers from one moment to the next and I realize my brain is misfiring all over the place and whatever I had been working on earlier probably contains tons of mistakes. Or it took 20 times longer to complete a simple task, or I did the wrong thing altogether. This happens to me at some point during the day almost every day. Sometimes it just flusters me and I just have to accept that it's time to put down what I'm doing and move on. Sometimes I'm stuck in a situation where I don't have that luxury.

I don't even know when or exactly how I miscalculated my finances in the last few weeks. I'm usually quite good at managing where my money is at any particular moment, maintaining the delicate balance between savings, checking, and credit card so that as much as possible is in savings and as little is on credit at any given moment. Well, I paid off my credit card in full and somehow thought there was more in my checking and savings than actually existed in my checking and savings and with my wonderful world of auto-payed bills, as of this morning I have $34 liquid.
I'm panicking.
I shouldn't be panicking. If I can quiet down the panic enough to function without the audible wavering of desperation, I make phone calls and drive around tomorrow until I have at least $200 in cash. My head still fucking hurts and it may keep hurting, but I have a feeling it will hurt less once I'm not worried about my bank account.

It's funny that I have all this anxiety about money. Money isn't real. I'm very aware of that. I feel about money the way a child feels about the dark, or maybe the way I'm supposed to feel about my period. I get far more embarrassed talking about money than I do about my menstrual cycle.

Holy shit my head hurts. It's in my neck. Why haven't I gotten my jacuzzi jets fixed? Get Manbug back over here with Dr. Mary Jane. That would be swell.

Fucking fuck, I feel so much I overload and cry and my head explodes. I take everything in and absorb what I can, live and write what I can, try to dispose of the rest as waste product through my tear ducts, and then anything left over turns into pain.

I texted Aural Girl and Possible Boy, asking them to stop by some time tonight because I'm feeling very down. Apparently they are at a Bulls game (migraine hell, which is why I can't be AG's basketball buddy) but still absolutely are happy to stop by whatever time they get back. This makes me cry, too. It's the huge, unhidden, open-hearted love and kindness. It's what means the most to me in this entire world. Not just the two of them. I know, I know, I bring this up a lot, but I've had some amazing friends over the course of my life.
In therapy today we talked about my propensity to sidekick myself. When it comes to another human being, the reasons I love and like and don't and everything in between aren't  a list of assets and liabilities--it's a feeling. I don't think I'm the crazy lady who likes you or doesn't because your aura is too murky, but I definitely trust some sort of deeper sense even as my logical snark-machine of a brain is churning out pros and cons.
So why should anyone like me? I know my list of traits as well as a 27-year-old woman can know her own list, but it's not about traits. I can't get a feeling about myself so I try to base it off other people, but who do I trust? Can I trust myself to choose good people to trust? Again with the spiral of the ether and all that, and somehow the conclusion tends to be that I'm annoying, a social pariah, and I overthink everything.
I have trouble being present in my own life.
I've always written off the random boys who think I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread; I thought I needed somebody stronger than any guy who could possibly be crushing on me. But that's exactly who I need: someone who does see me as wonderful and shiny and all that; that's the real support.

I feel like I'm playing the self-actualization game and I keep completing levels and at some point I win the Relationship charm but I'm not there yet and I can't see how many more levels there are to go or what I still have to do and that's frustrating.

Will someone just sponsor my blog and give me tons of money to write whatever I feel like all day?

Maybe tonight I'll revive my phone sex account. Also good for money.

So Much Love in the World...

Aural Girl came over this evening to tell me that she and Possible Boy decided to start "Dating."
I'm feeling too many things. I'll get as many into words as I can.

I'm afraid. I found these real, true, quality friends and they are wonderful and right here and they care and understand and support and are so full of love and adoration and are just as happy to have me exist as I am happy to have them exist. I don't want anything messing that up and I'm absolutely terrified of shifting the balance in any way that might hurt this amazing thing we have right now.
I want more than anything in the world for them to be happy and find exactly what they could potentially find in eachother, and if there's even the slightest chance that they could be one another's Someone, then there's so much potential wonderful in Aural Girl seeing Possible Boy's...possibility.

I'm still attracted to Possible Boy but deep swoons and jealous flare-ups subsided some time ago. I don't think I believed I was more or less "over him" until tonight, and I may feel very differently when I see him/them, but at the moment the "Boy I Like Is Now With Another Girl" thing isn't strong enough to make it  through the rest of what I feel.

I'm afraid of everything that comes next. I already feel a bit like a third wheel, but I tend to do that to myself; half the time I play side-kick in my autobiography. Now if the two of them become a romantic unit, they suddenly both have eachother fulfilling that giant deficit in a way I can only watch and wave and smile.
That's assuming things go well.
Over-analyzing will be death of me, but I feel the fear and I'm addressing it, dammit. I've had plenty of  experience being friends with both members of a couple and when things aren't going well in couple-land I never know what to do. Going back to high school, I'd have couple friends with one member cheating on the other, telling me about it in detail while keeping the other member in the dark. Two different versions of the same incident, and I'd try to fix everybody and give advice taking both perspectives into account, meanwhile never having a relationship of my own as experience/reference. I know this isn't the same, but patterns pitter patter about my brain and scare the shit out of me.

This is not about me. This is about them. And it could be a really wonderful thing for them. It could be a disaster, too, or anything inbetween. I guess we'll see.
I can't look at this as a big sucky thing that leaves me on the sidelines. They still adore me. None of that has changed. And there's still so much world. I have a fucking menagerie of "gentlemen callers." I seriously considered calling Manbug to fuck away my woes.

Chain Boy* was over here last week when my head was really awful and it was nice, but I know better than to just fuck with him to make myself feel better. And maybe I'll actually crawl outside my most recently fortressed comfort-zone and spend time with other friends, other neighborhoods, other Boys. There are many more stories to be lived. I'm experiencing a highly saturated chunk of my life.
Finally getting together romantically with Aural Girl is such a huge thing for Possible Boy, I want to be able to be as excited and happy for him as it/he deserves. But I can't see theirs without also seeing the giant hole where mine could be, and it hurts like hell.

*Boy who like(d/s) me for quite some time now but I don't like myself around him and he's really negative but then we have a nice time together randomly until he starts saying I remind him of his schizophrenic ex-girlfriend needs a name in here and I'm going with Chain Boy for a number of reasons that are amusing in my head.

Iguana on a Hot Tin Streetcar

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone."
-Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams fucking rules. I went looking for a good quotation of his to use for something un-blog-related and found pages and pages of reminders why I think he's awesome. I don't usually include him in my Greatest Authors Ever list, but I think I should probably start.

By the Power of Grayskull

Aural Girl needs love and support and I couldn't even drive to the grocery store let alone pick her up from school or do anything else helpful, loving, or supportive. Grrr. Only one of us is allowed to have any sort of problem or physical ailment at a time; it works out so much better that way.

She still managed to bring me apples on her way home.

My psychiatrist had never heard of She-Ra or He-Man. I didn't think he was that much older than me, but he must have missed the cartoon wonderland of the 1980s somehow. I brought it up because I just discovered She-Ra on Hulu. I've only watched the first two episodes, but holy shit.

Possible Boy called. I'm going over to his house to watch Billy Elliot. Much better than my Law & Order SVU marathon in my own livingroom I had planned for the rest of my night. Still quiet, still dark, but human contact and a change of scenery. Had I been capable of coming up with such a plan, I would have planned it.
Migraine doc says the "cognitive dullness" is a not-so-unusual symptom of the migraine itself. No reason to get frustrated over things I can't control.

Domestic Violence*

My migraines are my abusive boyfriend. I live in fear, do everything I can not to set them off, make excuses for them. "This time they'll be different. I have a new medication now, I'm doing biofeedback, seeing a new doctor, changing my diet." Then the cycle begins again and I'm isolated from my friends and family, unable to concentrate, doing what I can to hide and ignore the pain.

*Apologies to anyone who is now or has ever truly been in an abusive relationship.

Day ?

It's hanging on again, day after day, ignoring medication after medication. Am I doing something wrong? Something different? Something bad? What's the variable? Is it something I can control?
My house is a mess. I expect the migraine to break and then I can clean up, but it's not breaking and it's been too many days of bad. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, cleaning the house will just have to be my quiet, slow, in-the-dark migraine project. I've learned how to live like this, had extensive training, so deep breath and prove myself a worthy advasary for The Beast.

My poor dog is going stir crazy. Half-assed walks and throwing treats up and down my hallway aren't sufficient entertainment for him while they're a little too much for me.

I. FUCKING. HATE. THIS.

2 Shots, 5 prescriptions, and a spatula. If i manage to pick up my car and make it home in one piece, today will be one for the win column.

I keep starting posts and then not finishing them. They're all saved and can be edited and completed later. My brain is being bitchy and making it hard to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. I'll try to keep this short and hopefully get one fully formed idea out and published before I lose it again.

 Today I had to pick up the stuff I bought at last week's auction. Today the migraine continued to kick my ass. Today my car wouldn't be ready until after 2 and I was supposed to have a psychiatrist's appointment at 4.
Lucky for me, today was Presidents' Day and Possible Boy ha the day off work. All the stuff I got at the auction barely fit in his otherwise empty car. I had help loading and unloading and it all went exponentially faster and easier than the multiple trips and hobbling around I would have had to do on my own.
But there's something even better than just having help get crap from point A to point B. I was feeling really shitty and there was this human being who would drop everything and help me without question and without declaring himself a martyr and making everything a lesson, a criticism, and a judgment. I've had other friends like this in my life and I feel so fortunate. In the past few years my head has only gotten worse, so I'm thrilled to have people who are quick to do everything they can living a block away.

Tomorrow I see my psychiatrist at 10:30 and my migraine doctor at 1:30. Whoopie.

I don't want to do aaaaaaaanything today. I want to hold as still as possible with warm dog and warm computer and no shower and watch tv and movies. Dog is so warm, livingroom is so sunny, body is on the shores of that little island of Notinpain but certainly not running across the beaches or building sandcastles. These are the days that trouble me. I never know if I should push myself to do things and be busy and that's all I need to feel better, or if by pushing myself I'll end up crashing and burning and breaking things. When I feel just a touch worse, it becomes clear and I slip into my migraine-mode and I knit and do my other quite low-stress projects and stop being so hard on myself. I'm not sure being hard on myself gets me much further when I feel well, so I think today I will try allowing myself to do and not do whatever and trust that if it's really that important,  if I really care about it and it matters, I will get it done. So how much longer before I shower?

Of note: growing up, my parents (mom in particular) would constantly nag and berate about  absolutely everything until it got done. Every task came with a feeling of resentment and conflict. Procrastinating was a form of rebellion, like a naughty pleasure and a scarring masochism. I try to recreate that same narrative of "Shouldn't you be ___ right now? How long have you been doing this other useless thing instead? Ok, after the next ___ you will do the thing you should be doing." Then of course after the next ____ I continue to do whatever it is that I said I would stop doing and bargain with myself. "Ten more minutes." Ten minutes later: "I have to finish this thingy." After finishing that thingy, "That wasn't nearly satisfying enough. I need to do another thingy."  Then, " I told you you should have been doing that other thing an hour ago! Now you have hardly any time to do it. Go go go! What's wrong with you? Why do you always do this?"

As they used to say on the old anti-drug ads, "I learned by watching you!"

Not today. Today, I am allowing myself the freedom of a full migraine day, but without a full migraine, let's see what I do.  Hopefully not get a migraine, because that's already a possibility the way the lights have been moving...

Ketchup

I'm catching up on my Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight after an extremely productive though not visibly lucrative day.
February 4, Henry Louis Gates was on. He's the Harvard professor who got arrested on suspision of breaking into his own home and then people were yelling "racism" in every direction and Obama got involved and eventually the media blitzed the "beer summit" on the White House lawn like it was an actual peace talk between races.
In all of the hubbub and the hoopla surrounding his erroneous arrest, all I heard was that he was a professor at Harvard. Turns out, he studies histories of/through people's DNA, mapping out bloodlines and relations and all the crazy fun intermingling that makes America what it is. I wonder if he mapped out the bloodlines of the guy who arrested him, Obama, and any particularly annoying reporters, just to see if they were his distant cousins.

February 3 Colbert had on a guy who promotes a "caveman lifestyle." The guy seemed like an annoying dick, but at the end he was talking about his "ideal woman" being a carnivorous lactose-intolerant with celiac. Basically, all the things I can't eat. I felt like writing in and saying "I'm your perfect woman but you seem like a self-righteous schmuck. Go fuck yourself."

So hostile. Must be bedtime.

You probably think this song is about you

Love is longing? Is the unobtainable? The feeling that your emotional muscles are being stretched to their limit, that is love?
No.
That is familiar. That is the semi-silent suffering that makes for great novels and television dramas and plenty of mediocre works of truth and fiction, too.
It's what we late bloomers, wallflowers, writers, and dreamers  have been carving into trees our entire lives.
Now here we are, blossoming in a maniac's paradise, the world delivered on a plate via room service, and all we know is longing and books and promises we carved into trees.
I still blossom in wallpaper and words, but there is too much world overflowing with true love and fullness to get caught in webs of longing for its own sad sake.
I know you can see how much world is out there--love is there, too. The searing fades away when you can see the love, the intentions, and the humanity.
Now, I'm lapping up every last drop I can get, but I'm also looking for a partner. My heart does a lot of crazy things, but I trust my intuition lately, and whatever happens happens. I want to feed this to you in pill form. I want to take your sadness and flush it into the ether so it's merely another frosty breath passing through winter.
Mine, too.
And then you will see friends as love and longing as pain and love as possibility.

Another Saab Story

My car is still in the shop. Again. It knows I'm not a "Saab person;" I don't but weird little upgrade parts so the engine does weird little things and I don't go to shows or internet forums to talk about Saab things and I don't speak Swedish and I don't rub down the leather seats with tanning oil. I like the ignition key position on the center console and I like the seat warmers and other than that, I have no business driving a Saab. It knows. It melts and cries fluid and throws belts every chance it gets. I need it to be healthy long enough to empty it out and sell it and buy a friggin' van.

Yesterday was pretty much amazing so I think I'll give it its own post...

@The antiques auction. Man standimg next to an antique saddle says "Excuse me, i think you should buy saddle and i be your horse and you ride me."

When it rains, it rains goldfish

Yesterday, chocolate proved itself a migraine trigger. I took my pills and resigned myself to a night at home doing dishes and laundry and watching movies.
The phone rang  a little after 7; Possible Boy wanted me to go hang out with him at the bar. I told him  I wasn't leaving the house, blah blah blah, and we began an extended texting conversation while he went to the bar and I washed dishes.
One of the dishes that needed washing was Aural Girl's Pyrex. I didn't know if it could go in the dishwasher, so I texted her to ask. When my phone beeped to say I had a new message, I assumed it was AG or PB, but no! it was Jame's Spader's now former roommate. I'd started the night running around in one of my slip/chemise/nightie things because I was cleaning and flatly refusing to wear pants or real clothes of any sort, plus, as you may have gathered from my previous few posts, I've been insatiably horny as hell for the past few days. Then both James Spader's ex-roommate and Possible Boy were sending suggestive flirty texts. I like suggestive texts. I also can get carried away with suggestive texts. Apparently I can also read more into them than ever actually exists, as when Possible Boy came over and I put the kibosh on the flirty stuff and then he left just a few minutes into Billy Elliott, I assumed he left because he thought he was coming over for a reprise of November and instead got my nervous-like-I'm-at-a-job-interview mask and zero comfort or encouragement.
I tried to keep watching the movie but Beetle's brother (ok, new name for Beetle's brother: Manbug. It's like a ladybug is related to a beetle but this one's definitely a man) kept texting me, hounding me to come over and smoke up with him. I still refused to leave my house but told him he was welcome to come to me. So he came.
I did, too, but that wasn't until a few hours later...
I wasn't going to get involved with Manbug, and as far as I'm concerned I'm still not getting "involved" with him; the universe handed me this perfect little opportunity and, unlike the other boys on my dance card, I know I can fool around with him and not crush his soul. In the extremely short-term, anyway.

After PB left, I emailed him about our not hooking up. However many of you dear readers just rolled your eyes and shook your heads and asked, "Jesus, Annabell, are you completely socially oblivious?!?" the answer is yes. Turns out not only was it a faux pas in the general being-a-dork sense, but my assumptions that PB's innuendo texting was anything more than playing around was dead wrong. I guess I didn't think it was more than playing until he said he was coming over when I knew he was drunk, but I'm glad I was wrong. He made a point of clearing the air today. I was jonesing for a fuck buddy and trying to be there for him as a friend at the same time and I'm terrible at multitasking, so maybe putting PB at priority #1 made me think he was part of priority #2. Who knows.

I got my hair cut, low-lighted (darkened in such a way that it actually looks like it's highlighted even though the highlights are the pieces that are my natural color), and my eyebrows darkened all for absolutely free and I really like it. We'll see how it turns out tomorrow when I try to do it myself, but for today, I am pleased

People are turtles the whole way down.

Side Effects

Today at therapy I was yammering at a million miles an hour about everything in my life and in my head and being "on the prowl" last night and my therapist asked. "Are you feeling lonely?"

I've gotten much better at handling myself during my migraine isolation, accepting it as not a big deal  because it can't kill me and I still can do so many things; but once I'm feeling like a normal person again, I want normal person things and I want them all at the same time to make up for days lost and prepare for days to come. It's like living in hurricane-prone paradise. Will everything you own be destroyed and washed away? Maybe. If so, you rebuild as fast as you can and board up the new windows so you have someplace to hide when the next one hits, if the next one hits. When they're bad, you're grateful to be alive, but still you lose something. The garden is washed away...is there a point in replanting the garden? Swing set crumpled...do you buy a stronger, better swing set or do you accept that you'll just have to be happy with the pool?

I hug the people I love a little too tight and want to eat as much of the world as I can. Yes, migraines are painfully lonely. I have my dog and I have as much internet as I can handle and I have wonderful people all over the country who send me text messages and make me smile, but sitting alone in the mostly-dark for a week and a half is lonely. More lonely than just the standard having to go through life without feeling complete lonely. It is lonely because I am alone.

That was one of the major plus sides to my friendship with NBF: we were happy just to be in the same room together, so I could be half-dead and he could play his computer games and we weren't alone. He was my husband-without-benefits. He wasn't particularly gracious about it, but if I needed to go to the store for something and couldn't drive or think, I could usually convince him to take me. Monday when I was mostly dead and needed to go to Walgreens I almost called Possible Boy for assistance but I decided I wanted to do it myself to prove I didn't need anybody. And I don't need anybody in a literal sense. For as bonkers and flighty as I feel much of the time, I'm quite self-reliant. But I don't  want to be alone. This doesn't require Husband or even Boy, just humans. Basically, it's no surprise I was ready to feed last night and spent today itching to affect the entire universe.

Ungrounded

I'm feeling better again. I was going to watch the season premier of LOST at Possible Boy's house but he decided he wanted to go out and not stay home for three hours of couch potato-ness. I texted James Spader to see what he was doing, since I know he watched LOST, too, and he would also be an entertaining watching-buddy. He would be full of conjecture and criticism, a side of myself I've been sprinkling with coarse ground sugar instead of feeding its usual lemons. (Un?)fortunately, James is out of town. The episode will be online tomorrow and I was much more interested in getting out and having fun tonight than watching other people run around an island, so I went to the bar for improv night.

Holy shit am I squirrelly.

I've been cooped up and feeling like crap for a week, and tonight was/is my explosion of all my kinetic energy not knowing where to go.

I left the bar shortly after Aural Girl did. Sometimes Possible Boy and I can't talk to eachother. This was one of those times.

But tonight, I was feeling dangerous. There was a bar full of Boys and I wanted to get in trouble. I wanted to do something with all this energy, wanted to watch something explode.

So I left. Before I could hurt anyone, or even ruffle feathers that might later need to be unruffled. But even now, I'm sitting here completely sober with too much fire behind my eyes, still wearing my boots and my coat. I could go back. I could prowl and devour and find something male and fleshy to prove I'm alive.

Down, girl.

Evening Ramblings

Sometimes my dog is so cute I can't stand it. According to a former light of my life/scourge of my soul, my dog is actually thinking "I am going to eat your face" every time he stares at you with those adorable, wide gaping eyes. Well, maybe my dog should eat the faces of the boys I bring home; I tend to let those boys treat me like crap, so somebody needs to be looking out for us...

That's not fair. I'm looking out a bit better. If I wasn't, I'd totally have gone for one of the not-particularly-nice-but-still-interesting boys. I may be subconsciously trying to train Possible Boy to treat me like crap, but he's one of the most frighteningly kind people I've met in my entire life. But there are more fish! Billions of fish! I have some pretty spectacular friendfish, and now I even have spectacular friendfish down the block, so when the next Boyfish comes swimming along I can freak out and cry and all those other things with people who can physically hand me the bag of marshmallows.

I fought the Topamax Withdrawal Monster today and won. Two phone calls and an email to my doctor's office, two phone calls and finally just showing up at Walgreens, and TADA! Topamax. The shakes are going down and I can almost walk straight again. Hooray!

I just want to watch pseudo-edgy TV dramas all the time. And say "pseudo-edgy" because I'm too cool to actually think anything on television is edgy. I'm sooo edgy. I live in Rogers Park. Sometimes, there's crime. There's even black people. Sometimes, I even talk to them. Oooh, edgy.

Oh shit. I put my chicken back on the George because it was still raw-ish. That was a good 20 minutes ago...
Chicken didn't really burn, but my dog may get a serious treat tonight...

Poke Her Face

My hands are covered in dry superglue. I made a bunch of cards with envelopes to match. I can't sell the sum total of what I did for more than $30, but I left a mess and I created things and I enjoyed the process and my head is better now than when this day began.

More things I want to write about but I'm crashing (finally...sleeping much of the day has me wide awake past 1 AM). I'll write a treatise on Lady Gaga as a songwriter and Gagaism as the new dadaism later. Just watch this because it is in my head and totally changed my opinion of Lady Gaga: