Peachy Fuzz

I am super fuzzy out of it today. I am not in pain or anything, and I've had an extremely productive morning all things considered, but I am a total space cadet. I actually finished my crystal chandelier and did absolutely everything I physically possibly could without a second, taller person around and/or a ladder to install it in my hallway. Then I took apart the chandelier destined for my dining room as much as I could, but I can't get into the center where all the wiring comes together. I think I'm not strong enough and it's just too old and rusty crusty from spending 50+ years untouched, but I got all the other pieces apart and took pictures at every step so I won't have problems remembering how it goes back together. Then I went looking for the sockets I bought, thinking I'd at least make the sockets and the socket covers the same size and get that done, but as I looked through my container of hardware stuff my brain fizzed and bubbled as it tried to make sense of the mass of objects. Sometimes, I can very quickly glance at a group of things and then look away and tell you how many there were, what colors they were, things like that; this was the exact opposite. I stared and stared and instead of "wrench" and "socket" and "hammer" I saw mushmushmushmushmush. So no driving for me today. I'd planned on going to sell some lamps, but Man plans and God laughs. I need to find another micro-concentration project. That's what I'm good at today. Small tasks with one thing at a time. I could polish a huge box of silver if I had such a thing. Maybe I can take more photographs or make more envelopes. That feels useful and takes the right kind of functioning.

It's hard for me to express my fuzzies in writing. Writing seems to be one of those micro tasks that I can do amidst the fuzz. I will space out for who knows how long in the middle of a sentence, but that doesn't come across if I'm able to pick up the sentence and you read it all at once later without the five minute lost-inside-my-head-following-some-random-train-of-thought pause.

I fear the crazy in me.

Ok, I may be going to The Mall and Target with Aural Girl. Get me out of the house, and with a baby sitter so I don't walk into walls. I need Draino and a few other things, so this is good. Last night I finally got her and Possible Boy to watch Dr. Horrible. I'm not sure how much they actually liked it, but I probably over-hyped it and then we had to watch it on my tiny little computer and Possible Boy and I were both in odd (not bad, but odd) moods and I ate half the olives my parents left after Sunday's dinner.

Speaking of olives, I need to eat again.

Media, Men

Song in my head for the past bunch of days:

I finally watched the new Star Trek movie. That's some super high quality nerdiness. The graphics and everything were so amazing, it's hard to imagine 20 years from now we'll look back on it and roll our eyes or laugh at its campiness, but then you look at the original Star Wars movies and those were revolutionary when they came out. Still, it was fabulously refreshing to see things that didn't look like "The Future" always looks. Not just slight variations or improvements on what we have or are doing now, but bigger jumps and random side-steps so it's not all flying cars and giant computers and robots that do the dishes.
In short, awesome movie.
So good I didn't spend the entire time wishing I was smooching on Possible Boy, with whom I was watching said movie, on his couch, under his blanket. Ugh. For the first time in my life, all these boys want in my pants. There's an argument to be made for "getting my numbers up" while I'm young and spry. Let go. Make stories. Experience life. How many girls would kill for even a kiss from Ken? Beetle's brother invited me over last night while his roommate was out and I doubt his intentions were entirely pure and friendly. Dijon's compliments stopped feeling so friendly and safe. And I suspect even Possible Boy would be more than happy to screw my brains out if there weren't emotions involved.
But there are emotions involved.
Pesky, pesky emotions. I want in boys' hearts, not just their pants. Reciprocal hearty likeyness, which seems to be particularly difficult. No more of these stupid chains of he likes me but I like this other guy who likes this other girl who likes another guy who likes yet another girl. This is what I get for hanging out among the Lonely. Birdie said it really well the other day: the Boys I like and I are deeply and profoundly lonely, but we will also do anything within our power to make sure we stay that way.

Today, I made myself a schedule for my amorphous daily life. It has everything from eating meals to working on long-term projects to taking my pills to writing in my blog (scheduled for now). I missed the whole afternoon chunk because I took a rainy-day coma nap, but I still got tons more done than I have been and it felt good to have direction and something to turn to and say "what's next?" Also, I forget things and get distracted so easily these days. Yay schedule.

I'm hungry again. I made real food for dinner, but I guess I didn't eat enough of it. Must drag dog out for final pre-bed walk.

I know Possible Boy will read this. It makes me pause before writing, then I write what I was going to write anyway. Totally honest. Dammit, why couldn't things have worked out? Maybe NBF, my therapist and 99% of humanity are right: I need a better filter, one can't be totally honest, The Game is important, etc., etc. I tried to play, but I suck at it and don't like it. I just need more practice, maturity, acceptance, or some other adjective I don't quite believe right now.

Seriously. Stop writing. Eat something.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Male protagonists have deep, conflicting lives. Women comfort, support, inhibit the men. Women's stories rarely get treated with the same depth or complexity. I'm trying to think of some good meaty female main characters to disspell my own theory and at the moment none come to mind. I just watched Munich.

Help me out here, people. Great gritty girl character where the whole point of the movie isn't that it's a girl in what "should" be a male role?

One of my friends who is black and female apparently used to imagine clothes and things on Generic White Person when she saw them in the store and wondered how they'd look on her. I wonder how much of my over-valuing of boys as friends and humans in general is because all the best characters have always been boys. Either that or the grass is always greener when you are beige shag carpeting.

I ditched the auction today. I need to sell off more of what I currently have before loading up on any of the things that I saw at preview night last night, but since the real spark of my not going was much more of an emotional temper-tantrum I feel unnecessarily guilty. I'm still trying to find my controlled grip again post-NBF visit. It's all quite fragile; this thin layer of awesome is dangerous. People see the thin layer and expect me to be able to do things, and I expect myself to be able to do things, too. I have to remember that I am still a) human and b) gimpy. Neighbor Guy set me off earlier today when he came over as I was trying to leave. He needed to use my printer right at that moment to print out his resume. I was in the midst of printing things out so I could leave and get to one of my lamp buyers before they closed and the auction began. By the time Neighbor Guy left and all my pictures were printed out, there was no way I'd make it in time and I was stressed enough without the rush. I was a good friend even though I wanted to hit him and maybe it's best I didn't spend 8 hours at the auction today since now I'm rested and well-fed and tomorrow I can finish the phone calls from my "DO NOW" folder before therapy and then try to sell all my rare old books and the lamps and get my car emptied out and my wallet filled up.

I wonder if Possible Boy or Other Girl are at the bar...that would be nice. I could use the non-Neighbor Guy-human contact. I think Neighbor Guy is from another planet, anyway.

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.

dancing, eating, watching, listening, and knitting

The "Take Me Out Right Now" dance looks very similar to the "I want you to pay attention to me for the next 30 seconds and then I'm going back onto your bed" dance. Very annoying when I stop what I'm doing, thinking my dog is dancing the former, only to discover, no, it was the latter.

Last night around 9:30 PM I was craving Indian food like a crazy woman. Last night around 10:30 I paid $23 by check to the delivery guy for chicken korma and and order of naan. It took more research than it should have to find Indian Gourmet, which says right on its website that they are "Greater Chicagoland's only Indian restaurant that delivers." I wasn't thrilled with the apparent price-gouging or the fact that they didn't take credit cards (I had roughly $12 in cash in my apartment), but I needed my fix. Turns out, for $23, I will be able to eat for the rest of my life. It wasn't until my third rice and korma bowlful this afternoon that a dent finally appeared in the vats of food. And it's really good! I got the korma because the acupuncturist told me not to eat spicy foods, and with no butter chicken on the menu, it was the only dish that said "very mildly spicy." As a person who normally likes spicy food, this had enough flavor that I didn't miss the kick. The rice had whole bay leaves and some other whole herb that I recognize by taste and smell but still can't place. And the naan tastes like flat challah. All-in-all, it was the best $23 I've spent on food in a long time.

Since last night, I've watched three movies and listened to an hour and a half of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe via iPod audiobook. During those bits of audio-visual entertainment, I knitted an uneven pair fingerless gloves for myself. I have been coveting fingerless gloves ever since I first saw Birdie wearing great ones in some of her pictures of Facebook. I would have just bought myself a pair somewhere (they're not that expensive and I can excuse the purchase as functional), but my stupid wool allergy made it impossible to find any that were both comfortable and attractive. The ones I knit aren't great, but they will do and they don't clash with my nice coat.

I should do more audiobook listening while crafting. It's even better than TV or movies because I don't have to look up.

updating

The Comcast people never came or called. I should have called them, but I am lazy and my computer is picking up some new random free signal, so at the moment I am internetted, though it could go at any minute.

So much to update...

This weekend I will be traveling to Pennsylvania via LaGuardia airport to see three of my bestest friends from College Attempt #1. They are all on the east coast and two were randomly going to converge on the third's house (and more importantly, swimming pool), and Birdy said half joking that I should fly out, and I laughed, but then I realized I had no specific obligations this weekend and how amazing would it be to join them? So I am joining them. My dog will be staying with my parents for the first time ever without me. I'm sure it will be fine, since he is used to them and their house and all they have to do is make sure he has food and water and open the door to their yard every so often when he decides he needs to go out, but my mom isn't thrilled at the prospect.

My One Night Stand of several weeks ago is now my Facebook buddy and we message one another with some frequency. I'm entertained but apathetic about the whole thing. Very much a que sera sera.

I am done with summer school (Bs in both of my classes, which is fine by me) and fall semester doesn't start until September. I have a big long TO DO list for the next month and a half, but I haven't been this free and non-stressed...ever? I have the random promo jobs and things to do, but I don't have to actively seek work and I don't have big fat due dates and deadlines. It's amazing. I couldn't go on like this forever (I'll probably start getting restless in another week or so), but for the time being, it's wonderful.

E and Sunny both had birthdays and I never gave them shout-outs, so here is their official shout-out. HAPPY BIRTHDAYS!

Taste of Chicago was right by my school so I spent a lot of time and calories there. I even ate the humus that gave people salmonella, but I was fine. Maybe I have enough other stomach problems that they canceled out the food poisoning.

A few weeks ago, I went to lunch with three classmates (Mr. and Mrs. Toothpick and King Overshare), and King Overshare earned his name by telling us stories about sucking his cousin's toes while his cousin slept and his devastation upon purchasing a "sex machine" that turned out to be too small. Since that lunch, it has been The Toothpicks' and my goal to get King Overshare drunk. He was out of town for the debauchery of my drunken hook-up night, but after the last day of class we all went to a bar and all I can say is holy shit. King Overshare is gay and out of the closet only in recent years, but he managed to make absolutely everyone uncomfortable. At one point he was trying to do a strip show for the lot of us, then later he stretched out across three of our laps and proceeded to lick our faces while we tried to squirm away. He got into a long debate with the token class homophobe over whether or not every person on earth wants his or her asshole licked and God's intentions in creating so many nerve endings in the butt. Apparently, after most people left, something happened with my classmate's male roommate that no one will talk about except to say if the roommate ever sees King Overshare again, he is going to kick his ass.

Saturday night I saw Ratatouille with my parents. Cute and entertaining, though certainly no Finding Nemo.

Sunday was the day of people I knew in grade school. First, I went to my elementary school BFF's engagement party, then another person from back then hosted this movie night and discussion thing, and then we met up with another girl who started at our school in 5th grade and I hadn't seen in at least seven years. The whole thing was much fun.

Monday night Mr. and Mrs. Toothpick from my Fiction II class called to say they were going to see a Thin Lizzy cover band, so I joined them and much drinking followed.

The last few days I have been riding the el in my PJs handing out fliers for the Pajama Men's show. It's easy and $10/hour, so I can't complain.

I'm sure I am leaving out major chunks of life, but this will do for now.

onward and upward

Thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes via phone, email, text message, Facebook message, and any other method I'm forgetting. It was a very pleasant birthday. Fizzled out a little early, but splendid while I was being social. My cousin, cousin-in-law, NBF and I went to a late lunch at Bittersweet, which was amazingly not crowded for Mother's Day afternoon, ate wonderful things, wandered over to Uncle Fun, drove to the lakefront where we tried to fly kites but there was no wind so we played frisbee catch instead and shmoozed for a long time. Then my cousinses had to go (who the hell has work meetings on Sunday nights?) and I went to NBF's to watch the long awaited last disk in Samurai 7, a strange but surprisingly good Anime series based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Then I came home and futzed on the computer for hours on end and now I have some random music in my head that I'm trying to get down on paper but I don't have a keyboard or perfect pitch and it's hard to plunk it out on the violin, especially when it's a two part harmony thing.

Tomorrow, I go to the premium outlet mall with my mom to try to return the skirt that doesn't look great on me.