Spiky

Sooooooooooooooo...
I've been up since 6:30 AM and I've been doing stuff the entire time. Cleaning and laundry and shopping for May gift-getters and at around 10 AM I was going to take a nap so I could get back to a normalish sleep schedule but then I wanted to sweep every possible surface before I took a nap so I could mop after my nap and then it was noon and the pain showed up and I hadn't taken my pills yet and I needed to eat and while I was eating I started doing stuff on Etsy and putting together pretty collections of possible gifts and then it was the afternoon and I had to do the one project I absolutely had to do today and then my psychiatrist called to say he actually had gotten the lab results fax and my nortriptyline levels were high (duh shit, this is why I'm crashing most days when the sun sets and in a content but shaky stupor during my awake times). At some point I blinked and it was 6 PM. I made dinner. Now it's approaching 9 and I'm still quite alert, unshowered, and need to go to Walgreens to get my new lower-dose prescription nortriptyline before it closes or I go to bed, whichever comes first. Before I can go to Walgreens (3 blocks away) I have to drive to put air in my tire (1.5 blocks away) which has been soft since before the last time I drove, two weeks ago. Tomorrow morning at 9 AM I intend to be at a demolition sale in Park Ridge. I may be a little bonkers, but it's an easy drive.

Oh, good, it's raining. I'm being 50% sarcastic. Good for my head, bad for walking to get the car and then finding the car a new parking space. And that whole putting air in the tires thing. Maybe I'll get up tomorrow at 6:30 again.

The rest of my week has been a blur; everything  feels blurry. I haven't seen Aural Girl in some ridiculous amount of time.
>>Insert note: thunder and lightning outside, so my dog has to be touching me: my legs are crossed and he's resting his head on my elevated foot.<<
I only saw Possible Boy last Sunday for grocery shopping. And I feel like I haven't seen anybody, including myself, in ages. I've seen My Twin (new official code name for friend from junior high and high school with whom I'd lost touch and now we just started meeting up weekly downtown) but in my dreams I frequently see people from my past so something about it feels surreal. It's wonderful, but surreal. We used to say we were twins back in high school because we'd say the same thing or think the same thing all the time. People used to say we looked alike, and we had similar builds, but I'm blonde and pasty white while My Twin is deep mocha African-American and uses her hair an art medium. Still, we held ourselves the same (despite her dance background) and had the same speech patterns and we fed off eachother like Hall and Oates or something. Then we went our separate ways, I thought I'd failed her by being too young and self-involved...Ten years later, we've both changed and grown up and gone through a lot, and the same stuff that made us "twins" as kids seems to have ripened into an older but just as twinny version. I go around collecting people I like and identify with; My Twin was a cornerstone of my collection.
And then I got snippy over the use of the word "meta."

On most tv shows, characters go through some trial or tribulation and learn some life lesson, but things have  to be set back pretty much to zero by  the end of the episode so that you don't have to worry about the continuity and congruence of the episodes. I think I'm a little like this, too. I was reading through posts from last summer to see if I'd already given My Twin a code name, and it's the exact same thing day after day. Posts individually may seem like they mean something or are going somewhere or like perhaps I've really learned my lesson this time, but the accumulation is no more than pencil shavings, and I'm not using a pencil.

Life is so weird. Place your bets now on whether or not I'll make it to the demolition sale tomorrow, if I'll make it to any other sales, and who will go with me. I'm giving 5-to-1 odds I'll have a male or no companion. Who knows a bookie?

Too Much Frankincense

I don't know where I've been all day. I know physically, and I even managed to accomplish the things that had to be accomplished, but it's been a day for feeling slow and zombiesque.
Maybe I ate too much Trader Joe's polenta.
Sunday was a zombie day, too, but I managed to get my butt out the door and run errands with Aural Girl. JoAnn's and Target and Trader Joe's, oh my. I would like to discuss Possible Boy's Christmas present in here, but that is something I will censor due to his possibly reading this.
Aural Girl's gift, on the other hand, is both harder and easier. My brilliant Plan A is too expensive, and I could get her the cheaper version but I'm not so sure it's worth it. Plan A1 was to get her vintage fabrics from an estate sale, since the one time she came estate saling she got an old sewing machine - the kind build into its own sewing table - with all the table's contents, the matching chair, and the contents of that chair's flip-up seat. Grand total: $25. Even before the sewing machine find, we'd talked about taking sewing classes together, so I've been on the look-out for fabric at every sale ever since. No luck. I can't tell you how many times over the summer and fall I passed up bags and boxes and piles of amazing vintage fabric because I didn't want to start hoarding fabric for myself. Now that I'm looking for it, no luck. I found some scarves that I bought, but they may be better to sell than to gift.

I think Neighbor Guy is an alcoholic.
He told me what he wants me to give him; he wants the vintage maps I got at a garage sale with him this summer. Or at least some of them. Over the summer I tried to give him the one of Camaroon/Viet Nam/that whole mess circa 1970, but he left it here. I thought about getting it framed, but he's the person who looks at the only artwork I've had professionally framed and says "The picture is nice but that cheap frame is hiddeous. It ruins the piece." So I'll get him a Jane Austen novel or something. He loves Jane Austen.

I had to lay down tonight at 7 PM. The zombie weirdness was getting sharp, like a thick hazy cloud rolling around in my head, bouncing off the sides all day that began to turn dark and thundery. I set my alarm for 8 so I wouldn't ruin my chances at falling back asleep for the night, but of course I managed to kill my alarm and wake up at 9:30 with my dog whining at me. At that point, I figured I'd be better off if I could just sleep through the night, but my dog wouldn't stop fussing so I figured he needed to go out. Coat and shoes on, I'm ready to go out the door, and he crawls back into bed. Bastard. I spent half an hour trying to go through and organize some of the crap in my office, popped my bedtime pills, again tried the perky-voiced suggestion of "out?" to Mr. Fuzzlump, and now I'm back in my office, coat and shoes on, creeping up on midnight and feeling the clearest I've felt since Friday. Still, I know my best bet is to go back to bed. I'm going shopping tomorrow with Possible Boy to get a "thank you for hosting" present for Aural Girl's parents.
Which reminds me. I freaked myself out a bit when he called. I didn't realize quite how creepy-out-of-it I was, and I'm pretty sure I sounded normal, but I was on my way to the kitchen for food when the phone rang, and when PB asked about ideas for gifts, it was all too much for my mind to handle. It was like I was still stuck in the tar and sludge of walking down my hallway towards the kitchen while thinking about what to eat (a complicated multitask in my clouded state) and then going from there to a ringing telephone and human contac gave me quite a jolt. Too many stimuli. We'd already hung up before it dawned on me that PB spent the weekend in his home town with his own parents. That I could have just agreed to join to NAMBLA by the time my brain caught up with my mouth's auto-pilot function. Is it the drugs I'm on? The migraines themselves? Something that's causing the migraines? Something totally different? I know I said I'd sit back, relax, and accept my unintentional stonerism. Then again, I say a lot of things.