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.

I Like the Smell of Bleach

"Don't let me forget to buy milk at the store."
My maternal grandmother said this to me once when I was little. We went to the store and both forgot the milk. Twenty plus years later, I still remember forgetting.
Other people try to forget and go to great lengths to do so. Drink to forget, sleep with strange men to forget, play guitar or parasail or set things on fire or join the army. I spend all this time dwelling on thoughts and memories better forgotten, when POOF! I just can't anymore. I can't always reliably remember what just happened, what someone said, any of it. I've been obsessing over my lack of remembering, but really I should take this as a gift. I can't dwell on what happened if I can't remember what happened, and if I stop dwelling on the fact that I'm losing my memory, I can fade into a nice worry-free bliss.

Lost at Sea

I am such a space cadet that I went to my blog right now thinking I hadn't written today and really should before bed.

Time.

Memory.

One of my neighbors was standing outside my gate when I came back from The Mall and I wasn't sure if he was the person who has lived above me for the last seven months or the new guy I haven't met yet. People all look the same, a thousand times worse when I'm fuzzy. Is this what crazy feels like? Does this count as crazy? Should they take another look at my brain scans? I still have the CD. Maybe a chunk of my brain is made out of sponge cake.

Ugh. I'm having the flasheys. I keep thinking I see lighting or a camera flash somewhere outside my window in my peripheral vision. It drives me crazy when there's the possibility that the flash happened in reality and it's not just my brain misfiring. Breathe, Annabell. I've set my life up so I can swim through these day like a pro. I feel like I swam the English Channel against my will but made it to the other side and felt the sun on my face and the warmth of human contact as dried off with towels in two shades of blue. Now I want to stay in the sunny and warm forever and only swim in my jacuzzi, but I find myself back under icy waves and I have to use those muscles I worked so hard to build up and then wished so hard to abandon forever.

Remember the Goal

My memory is getting worse. I've been back on name brand Topamax for a full month and I'm still finding fragments of conversations and events straggling about in my skull and that creepy uncertainty where and when and if they occurred. Am I going certifiably nuts? They've taken many nice pictures of my brain, but when looking for tumors, I wonder if the doctors would be able to spot a leak instead. Flowers for Algernon. Maybe I need to be using my brain more on a day-to-day basis; do calculus problem sets, half an hour on the tredmill, learn 50 words in Sanskrit, then crunches and push-ups, all by 10:30 AM. I'll be a picture of health and energy, both mental and physical. I'll be President of the Universe by next Friday.
Where's my orange juice?

Thoughts I'm still capable of having

Really really really like Possible Boy. No clue how to proceed. No clue no clue no clue. Talked a bunch at the bar. He's even sharper and thinkier than I realized. So what the hell happens next? I enjoy this part, but I don't want to screw up and ruin whatever is supposed to come next. I've never done things in the right order or in any sort of healthy way. I don't think he has either. Are there directions somewhere? An instructional video, perhaps? This part of squishy boy-girl (or boy-boy or girl-girl or microwave-toaster) stuff is much less troublesome in movies and books because you generally know what's going to happen. Smash head into things.

Went to a few antique shops today. Sold nothing. Estate sale tomorrow morning at what appears to be a pack-rat house. I want to get there early. Then I have therapy in the afternoon. Maybe my therapist can teach me how to make Possible Boy Actual Boy. Today felt like a day of wandering. Many of my days feel like that. At least I cleaned my house some. That felt productive. Got my lazy butt on the treadmill by 8:30 AM. Need to keep that up. Remind my heart that I'm 27 and not dead yet. Biofeedback taught me that the way I naturally hold my jaw keeps a huge amount of tension in my temples. Could be a major factor in my migraines. Now I'm stretching out my jaw like a weirdo every time I think about it.

I made myself the best lunch today. Chicken breast covered in chile ancho, cumin, and a bit of cayenne then grilled on the George Foreman and served with tomatoes and avocados on corn tortillas. Extremely tasty. I'm begining to accept rice milk as a suitable liquid for cereal. It's better than getting migraines and not bad as a food substance. I still don't drink what's left in the bowl once the cereal is gone.

My memory is getting worse. I have trouble remembering what floor my biofeedback is on (nine) even though I go every week, and I ran into an Etsy friend yesterday and couldn't remember her name.

Time to be asleep.

Store(age)

I've been feeling so much better. I think it's the stupid diet. Taking out milk was the real kicker. Today I'm eating tons of eggs to see if it's milk AND eggs. Eggs eggs eggs (in addition to other food, too) over the next few days and we'll see what happens.

I'm already legitimately exhausted from a morning of two estate sales (one sucked, one was an $11.50 goldmine) and one antique store (they didn't want to buy what I had, but I know what that particular store sells now).

Then I went to the grocery store and demonstrated to myself that I'm not all hunky-dory regular person.

I signed up for my own Fresh Values Card. I've been using my mother's forever and keep forgetting to sign myself up so I can reap the occasional benefits. Today, I had time and remembered. But as I filled out the form, my hands were shaking. They do that, sometimes worse than others. They have since high school. As I wrote my name, the shaking was bad enough that you could barely read the first letters and it wasn't the fault of my crummy to begin with handwriting. I don't think I've ever been that shaky before, or at least not when I've done something noticeable.

I contemplated the 20 cent difference between regular and organic limes (organic won) and the $3 difference between regular and organic eggs (regular) and went up and down almost every aisle so I wouldn't forget anything. I didn't trust myself to remember or make decisions without going through the logic very consciously. Pondering the expense of my favorite gluten-free but over-priced cereals, a man I knew I recognized said "Hello!"

I drew a total blank. Did I know him from high school? Familiar, but no clue.

He was the groom at the wedding when I was the makeshift photographer. He had to remind me. I stared at this man through a camera for countless hours, and then again on my computer as I cropped and adjusted picture after picture. Then we met up again to upload everything onto their USB drive. None of that stuck in my head. It's all part of the blurry squish of the past two years. He was totally nice and friendly about it and we talked for a few minutes before I was back to judging milk substitutes.

But AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! I know it's not my fault. It just frustrates the hell out of me when I go into my brain to find something and it's not where it's supposed to be. Memories used to go in and stay in. Now, it's more like trying to lodge pencils in a classroom ceiling or juggling one more item than you comfortably can handle while wearing baseball gloves. It's that much more frustrating because you can do some of it or a version of it, but under current circumstances, there will be misses. I get fussy when I miss. Fuss fuss fuss.

I want to go crash so maybe I'll feel good tonight and go out. Possible Boy makes me smile. I don't know what's going on, but he's swell and I'll keep being dopey on his behalf for the time being.

New Whirled Order

I feel stoned. I kind of am stoned, in that I am on drugs, but I am not on marijuana, or anything else illegal. I went to my new neurologist on Monday and he spent three hours with me and was extremely thorough and asked all sorts of questions about the exact location of my pain and the type of pain and if I preferred hot or cold on my face when I was in pain and if external pressure felt good or bad during headaches and things like that. He also determined that my specific type of migraine is very high stroke risk and I never should have been on a number of the drugs I've been on in the past. Awesome. So the new short-term plan is to keep me on what I was on most recently (50 mgs twice a day of Topamax and 225 mgs of Effexor XR once a day) so we don't mess with where I was before as we add the new drugs: Gabapentin (generic for Neurontin) three times a day and Oraphenadrine Citrate (generic for Norflex) twice a day as needed. The Gabapentin is normally an epilepsy drug, like Topamax. I'm starting on 100 mgs at a time (three times a day) for a week, and then I'm supposed to move up to 200 mgs at a time for week 2, and 300 mgs from then on. That means eventually I will be taking at least 14 pills a day, every day, theoretically for the rest of my life. We'll see if I can do it on schedule, since that's apparently a bit faster than my doctor would normally get me started, but since I've been so crappy and told him to "just fix it," he went with the more agressive dosing.
But I'm not so sure I can handle it. I've basically been stoned out of my mind since Tuesday. I'm not quite sure what I did the last few days. I slept a lot Tuesday, but then yesterday and today I know I was awake, I'm just not sure what I did. That's fucked up. I made some greeting cards. That's good, I guess. I don't entirely remember making the greeting cards, but I have the results to prove I did it. I've been on Etsy, too. And some other websites. And I took pictures of my dog in his hoodie in the snow on the beach. Oh! And yesterday I went to my first therapy appointment with my new therapist! How the hell did I forget about that!?! I got on a bus and went downtown and she was good and quickly recognized that I am intellectually aware of many of the things I need to see (the big one being that my mom doesn't see anyone as capable of doing anything without her help and it's not just that she sees me as a permanent child who will never be able to be a functional adult) but our big goal for therapy needs to be getting from the mental knowing to the internal feeling and accepting. She also told me to read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, so I stopped at Borders on the way home. Then the bus was running late and there were a gazillion people waiting for it, so I figured I'd go into Lush and poke around since the first bus would be crowded and just get one of the next busses. And I did. And I ended up talking to the salesladyperson about Etsy a lot since she had a friend who sold jewelry on there and she was thinking about opening a shop of her own, so I gave her my card and she gave me a bunch of free samples (standard at Lush anyway) and as I left my bus was just pulling up and I even got a seat. I ruled.

Maybe now I'm just tired. It is after 5 AM. I thought it was 4 AM at 8 PM, but now it's really after 5 AM. In theory I'll get used to these drugs and not feel so damned stoned anymore, but I'm hoping that happens soon. The migraine is better, though not gone, but holy crap I feel stoned. Oh, and I also watched The French Connection, which wasn't nearly as good as The Last Picture Show, and The French Connection won the Oscar that year. Gladiator also won the best picture Oscar, so there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

I'm going to go to the bathroom and refill my water bottle and go to bed now. I don't think I am going to take another Norflex because I am plenty stoned as it is.

I've finally found something that (at least temporarily) takes the edge off the pain!!! And while illegal, it's way easier and cheaper to get than any of my prescriptions! I had NBF get me some pot (see, I wasn't kidding last post) and apparently he owns a bowl, so I smoked all but two hits of the pot (very little...a bowlful, really) and now I'm finding it incresingly difficult to type...the typing's not that hard, actually, it's the editing and following what I'm typing that is giving me a lot of difficulty. Ok, so the real trouble seems to be with concentrating on the words. Also, I apparently go back and re-read the last bit of what I said over and over in my head until I know the next thing I am going to write, and if I don't like how it sounds I go back and delete it. Then I start typing the next thought while I'm reading it all "out loud" in my head (my whole hearing-versus-seeing thought process thing). Ok, now I'm stoned. Stoned seems to be the opposite of migraine: with stoned, I mainly notice it when I'm trying to concentrate on something and can't, but with migraine I notice most when I don't have something to distract me. Stoned is certainly distracting. I completely can't write what and how I'm thinking, at least not on computer. I'll hate to try by hand now. Yeesh, I'm going to see this tomorrow and be very annoyed with myself for writing like a fucking stoner when I'm such a square
nerd
ok can't keep thought in head long enough to complete sentences. Weird. I'm such a nerd. But I can only et down my thoughts if I type really fast and don't go back and look at what I've just written or try to think about it too much because as soon as my brain pauses I get lost and I can't go back and find it because as soon as I do I forget where I was and I can't get throught the whole sentence in a stretch to remember what I was trying to say the minute I go back and edit I'm repeating I know I'm repeatinmg can't type fast enough to keep up with brain but I know it's the typing that's all slow, not the brain that's any faster than usual. But it doesn't hurt! THat's all I've been trying to say but aparently I can't write when I'm stoned. How many times did I type that already? I'd go back and check, but I will then lose where I am now and I'll never get anywhere. I am such a nerd for writing this, such a nerd for thinking it, and such a nerd because I'm having so much trouble. Holy hell. Weird weird weird. I absolutely can't get down what I'm thinking into writing. I can't write. The thing that knocks out my migraine is the thing that knocks out what makes me most fundamentally me. That 70s show stoner "duuuuude" deep moment man. Aaaak! I'm done trying to write this. It's more frustrating (though not in that usual painful nagging way)
I can't deal with multiple clauses.
or my normal repetition thing
because I forget what the repetition was
before repeating it
ok but not that time
but mostly
why did I never try to write stoned before?
I always write when I'm drunk.
Sober, too, but that's the whole writer thing again.
Stoner writing.
I could write the way I write when I'm doing first-person-my-dog:
word
writing word
typing
I can type on page.
I have to rememberwhat I'm doing
bad last sentence.
because it didn't sound like dog.
Neither did that.
It just sounds like stooooopid.

Wasn't I going to stop typing this?
Yes.
Yes I was.
Hey! I asked a question AND answered it and then wrote a reaction to it! New record for length of thought!
Does that mean it's already wearing off?
Nah.
Ok, really now, Annabell (remembered my code-name, too!) stop writing. Stop. Writing. Right/write. Now.