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.

Annabell copes with stress by making statements of grandeur

There is so much life, and so much to life, sometimes it's hard to bear. But it's incredible and I love it and I have to remind myself so it doesn't hurt.

It makes me a writer. I will be a great writer so long as I don't get struck by lightning or anything terrible too soon. I'm never sure how much I buy into all the "meant to be" crap, and it doesn't really matter one way or the other if I believe in it or not. But I can and I will take everything I am and see and experience and use it to be a great writer. Maybe I won't live to see my own success, but I think that's ok, too. My parents and grandparents are almost entirely responsible for my current financial status, so I suppose it's fitting that any wealth or grandeur achieved be visited upon future generations. Not sure I believe that, but it sounds right. I still have the guilt about not supporting myself. I want to support myself. But I also want to accept who and what I am and be happy.

I am not my parents.
It is not my job to appease my parents.
Everything is relative.
Everything is a matter of perspective.
There are no absolutes*.


*mmm...paradoxy...

Gay Marriage

"Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

but what if it was "Steve and Eve?"
would we all spend our lives searching for partners with rhyming names?
and what would Eve have done once she found herself in a loveless marriage with a gay man?
would he ever be open and honest about it to himself, let alone to her?
and if he was, would she be supportive, or just bitter?

recurrent dream, get happy

Recurrent dream I had again last night:

I'm back at Unnamed Liberal Arts College or (like last night) Interlochen Arts Camp, only it's now a built up with restaurants and bars and shopping malls and a monorail/elevated train/bus shuttle system. In the Interlochen versions I'm going back to work again but I have to be a few weeks late because of some other commitment so I'm coming into things in the middle and it's ok but only kind of and I'm dropped in the middle of things and I have to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing and where everything is and I look for markers of the few buildings that stayed where they used to be but so much has changed and I realize how long it's been since I've been back. I look for HDS and sometimes I find her and that's wonderful and exciting and makes me happy.

Dream theme/summary: you can't go home again. I wonder why that's so pressing and common in my sleepy subconscious. Am I trying to go home again? Interlochen was my happy place and Unnamed Liberal Arts College (particularly my friends) was happy place when I wasn't busy being horribly depressed. I'm trying to create new happy places now. I'm trying to remember my happy times to prove to myself that I am capable of being happy. Concentrate on good thoughts and good things. I have an easy time doing that with external stuff, like how gorgeous the universe is (have you seen the lake by my apartment? Chicago's architecture? Absolutely everything on my bus ride downtown? I love that bus ride), but a much harder time when it comes to anything internal. Back to the whole "I suck" thing that is so engrained in everything I think and do. But why? If there's so much gorgeous in the universe, and I am part of the universe, why isn't there gorgeous in me? So I'm trying to find and concentrate on the gorgeous parts. Find and concentrate on the happy things and happy thoughts that are internal. It's exhausting. Probably because it's so unnatural for me right now. Which is sad, not dumb like I automatically think. Sad. Why is it dumb? No. Sad. The fact that I think it's dumb is sad. So let's fix it. No, fix is too harsh. Work on it. "Work on it" gives it the time and energy it deserves and takes.

This is why people go stay in hospitals or Bell Jar-esque resorts for months while they get happy. It takes a lot of concentration to completely change your thought process.

yes, condo!

I bought a condo!!!!!!!!



It's amazing.

holy fucking condo?

Oh my god I'm buying a condo.

I put in a bid yesterday.

They didn't laugh at my bid.

They countered.

I'm going in to negotiate later today.

Holy fuck.

Fucking shit.

Shitting fuck.

This place is huge and gorgeous and if we can push them down far enough that it's worth it, that would be amazing.

Two bedrooms.
Two bathrooms.
Huge.
Gorgeous.

If it doesn't work out, my third choice is pretty nice, too. But if we can make this happen today, hot damn.

Sads

I've got The Sads and I don't know why. Is it the medication? Is it whatever was before all the fun with the medication just catching up with me again? I don't know. But I'm crying and deep-down sad and I've been hiding out at NBF's since Saturday and just went home tonight even though I really didn't want to. I just want to hide there forever. Curl up into a little ball and not deal with anything. Not be alone. I'm having trouble writing and I can't concentrate on anything still and I don't feel like doing much of anything, so staying there and watching movies and reading and eating and playing with dogs was perfect. Sometimes when I'm in depression mode I want to be alone. Right now, I want to be not alone, but not in public either. This is when I used to show up in Birdie and Sunny's room/house in college. My parents are the last people on earth I want to see. I want my super-close friends and to cry a lot and for the hurt to stop being hurty. Why am I all hurty?

Fixing My Exchange Rates

Pegging your happiness to another person is a lot like pegging your country's currency to the dollar—when you're feeling week and unstable it may seem like a good way to prop up your emotional economy, but ultimately you have no ability to micro-manage when your markets' ups and downs don't coincide, and the whole thing is just a total fiscal policy cop-out to begin with. "Oooh, Annabellians can't help their sudden decline, just look at the US Dollar. Maybe she should have pegged to the Yen..."

But hey, why not peg to a person, a currency, an anything. As long as I'm going through all these crazy psych drugs that mean the physical feelings of my emotional feelings aren't matching up and it's hard enough to tell who and what I want when it doesn't go along with who and what I think I should want, I could just as easily pick a religion or my horoscope or the migration patterns of salmon. I just want to pick something and follow something real and concrete for a change, because the whole head/heart thing just doesn't work. Sometimes I'm allowed to listen to my heart, sometimes I'm not, and I'm terrible at discerning the two when I'm not going up and down on drugs.

My therapist is a big fan of "choose happy," and I'm trying to "choose happy," but is this big nagging chunk of me keeps doing its "I'm still here and I'm not happy and you're just ignoring me" dance. But where's the balance of working through things versus brooding on and obsessing over things? Staying positive versus ignoring what's bothering you? These things are hard for me and they occupy more of my emotional and mental space than life has room and I don't like myself very much as a result. I'm working on it. Or I'm trying to work on it. Or I think I'm trying to work on it. I don't even know. I go to therapy. I take pills. I write. I cry. I snuggle dogs. I knit. I write more. And I keep waiting for some sort of miracle change, like I'm trying to get somewhere. Logically, I know this is my life. The process. Stop. Smell roses. Lather rinse repeat. This is where I am and I have to stop worrying and hoping and working for this magical "one day" shiny happy salvation idea, but I'm not there yet. The logic is there, the heart is not. The heart is used to being sad so we keep singing our sad song together. Yes, the song gets happy, but it doesn't stay happy. I live in my little overfeeling life of overprivelage feeling overguilty and overwhining and then getting mad at myself and feeling more overguilty for the overwhining
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP. DOING IT AGAIN. This is definitely the "bogged down" category. Stop it, self. Watch more 1978 Battlestar Galactica. Snuggle more dogs. And for the love of gawd, start an intellectually stimulating project so you don't have so much extra brain energy to spend being crappy to yourself.

Anyway, Malaysia was on a fixed exchange rate and they're doing pretty damn well now, so who am I to make these ultimatums?

My Kind of Town, Not My Kind of Drugs

I've always been willing/happy to move to another city if there was some other city with a solid concentration of my friends. The more I look at condos, the more I realize that everybody isn't going to just magically congregate in one place and I need to keep chugging along towards stability and pretend adulthood and as long as there's nowhere else to go, buying a condo in Chicago makes a lot of sense. Hell, this one was my idea, not my parents'. And there's a lot of great stuff out there. So condo it is!

So la-dee-da, staying in Chicago for at least Obama's first term (roll your eyes at me because you always knew I'd be in Chicago forever anyway) and now a few of my favorite people may come to me.

One is applying for jobs post-masters degree graduation. He was like a less healthy (mainly because I was even less emotionally healthy) version of NBF back at Liberal Arts College. I do have a history of turning into an idiot around him, but the last few years I seem to be over the idiot thing (I'm not sure when and where he turned into a human being instead of a demigod, but as long as the glitch in my perception is fixed, it's a decided improvement) and we have much fun together in less-than-gigantic doses.

My friend who lives in Madison auditioned for Chicago Civic Orchestra, and I reeeeeally want him to get into that for next year because he'd have to come down here more often but could still stay living with his fabulous girlfriend in Madison while she finishes med school, and Civic is an excellent gateway to many other Chicago (ok, and other) orchestra opportunities and she's all Midwestern Cheesecurdy anyway and unlike some friends that I would just be trapping in a web of evil, I have a sense he could be perfectly happy as a Chicagoan. Mwahahaha.

Am I trying to justify planting my condo-buying roots here while NBF gets ready to move to his no longer certain or shiny future? And why do I cling to NBF most when he's fussy? I cling to a lot of people most when they're a certain level of fussy. Too fussy and they can go fuck themselves. But that familiar level of sad and self-hating and you are suddenly the magic little center of my existence. Case in point: my dog. Those of you who know my dog, stop laughing.

My health has been particularly frustrating. In the past 16 days I've gone from a daily dose of 225 mg of Effexor to 0 Effexor to 40 mg of Prozac to 60 mg of Prozac to now 10 mg of Prozac. Slap on top of that the 1 mg tabs of Lorazepam I get to bite in half as needed to keep me from jumping out of my skin and make sure I can still digest food and I'm a treat to be around. 900 mg a day of Neurontin, 100 of Topamax, and .05 of Synthroid feel like old friends now. The foundation. The sandy beach atop which I must build my castle. Oooh, cheesy metaphor.
At any rate, all the stomach troubles and the jumpiness was due to the Prozac. My psychiatrist thought by switching directly from the Effexor to the Prozac I could avoid the Effexor withdrawal and I'd take to the Prozac right away. Instead, I went through the full withdrawal thing and then all the batshit insanity was classic serotonin side effect crap, meaning my body did not adjust nicely to the Prozac and my psychiatrist added anxiety meds just to counteract the Prozac and dropped me waaaay down on the Prozac and I'm still feeling jumpy and useless and having trouble digesting things but in theory it will go away in a few days. In theory. And my head still hurts and my left eye is still twitching. You don't notice the eye thing unless I point it out and you look very carefully, but it's there and it's weird and I'm broke and I can't get anything done towards being a productive member of society and it's making me very fussy.

How many more years until you go to the doctor, they stick you with a needle and instantly know your exact body chemistry and what's wrong and how to fix it?

Back to happy thoughts, brain. Happy happy happy thoughts. Hot Dog Sam and her hubby are likely to move to Chicago in a few years, too. They would totally live in my neighborhood. We'll totally force our dogs to play together the way our parents used to force us to play with their friends' children of various ages and personalities, regardless of compatibility. It'll be awesome.

more drug problems?

My stomach has been pissy for days and I'm now pretty sure it's the drugs. I've got this nervous jumpy shaky feeling, particularly in my legs, like I can't hold still, but then I feel too crappy to do anything productive with it like go to the gym. And I've been doing terrible things to food, worst in the mornings. It's like the physical crap from being really anxious and worried about something, but without any of the emotions to help it all make sense. Can't I just lead a normal, healthy, productive life without the medications and crap? Please?

Biggest real worry I'm feeling right now: paying for the psychiatrist on Thursday, since he requires a check up front and then the insurance can come in and be useful. I should start doing the phone sex thing again. Make some money.

NBF likes saying things like "The need for love is the one true failure of the human existence."
I think the need for food is a much greater failure.

I want to take the people I love most in the universe and have them all live in the same city and stay there and be happy.

crampy period happy fun time yay!
Might explain a bit of the batshit insanity from yesterday. Now it's just that familiar but very strong ouchy ouchy ouchy right in the guts that never lasts more than about a day but is quite concentrated and distracting and I try to do things to distract myself from it but it can't be anything too important because the pain wins many a mini-battle along the way.
Want to punch hole in the wall a lot.

Also, the burning/Thursday smell turns out to have been my lampshade pressed up against the lightbulb and, well, burning. Oops. At least that was rooted in reality.

I want to rip out my uterus and all my inner girl parts and maybe a chunk of my intestine, too, while I'm in there.

Body Head Indent drugdrugdrugdrug

Drug switch not going so smoothly. I've felt like nervous panic for days, but in a very obviously chemical way. I'm having a very hard time getting anything done, including writing this. I don't know why. The impulse to write is there, but the impulses to do all sorts of stuff are running around. It's translating any of those impulses into actions that feel like I'm running a million volts through a big giant rock or a big clay blob. I also really want to keep backspacing everything I write. And for the past hour everything has smelled/tasted a little like blood/Thursday. I don't even know what that means, but that's what my brain keeps identifying the smell and taste as: a combination of blood and Thursday.

This backspacing thing is annoying the hell out of me.

Dog should go out again and I should take him, but that's harder than it should be. I don't like the way the "shoulds" ended up placed in that sentence but I'm leaving them so as to avoid the backspace and refiguring it all out.

I think I'm so backspacey because I usually think in full sentences so the whole thing is there before I write it but now I'm in fragments so I have to keep fixing each piece of sentence as I go. Makes it much harder to write, but I wanted to make sure I captured this lovely mindset for posterity (emphasis on my posterior).

When I woke up this morning I thought I was so nuts because I was hungry, so I made scrambled eggs and cheese and stuck them in the small corn tortillas I have. I ate one and a half and then almost puked my guts out and got hot and cold and wanted to punch the dog when he tried to touch me.

My stomach has been doing nasty things ever since. I'm sticking to applesauce.

And I think this is somehow progress in my Effexor withdrawal, since it's been 48 hours since I've had any and I only took 75 mg the last time and 75 mg 24 hours before that, and this doesn't really feel like my Effexor withdrawl. This is new. Chemical and bad, but new, so I'm much less inclined to pop more Effexor.

Soundtrack in my head through most of Happy Fucked Up Fun Time: "Let Me Entertain You" and "Little Lamb" from Gypsy (which I saw for the first time the other day) and Weezer's "Buddy Holly."

How am I going to get this dog out again? Why isn't he toilet trained? I'm so never getting any work done ever and we will both end up wasting away in mud puddles for lack of self-sufficiency.

Sucky Me Off

Why would you ever, after lasting maybe 90 seconds, assume that your partner is hunky-dory? I don't understand it. Nor do I understand the amazement when I don't let the offender off the hook. I suppose this is why and how such offenders exist and continue to exist long after the sexual revolution and Cosmo and the internet. But dammit, you do not get anything else nor are you going anywhere until you at least make an attempt at getting me off. I'm not demanding two hours of advanced Kama Sutra here.

Boy I slept with totally sucks and now I want him to go away. Really he was annoying the hell out of me before I even slept with him and I knew I was using him from pretty early on in things. But he got exponentially more annoying the more time I spent with him. And while at first I feared I was pulling a "don't want to be part of any club that would have me for a member," it became abundantly clear that I just don't find him interesting and I was using him but he was boring and not very good for the using and now I want him to go away. And I'd feel worse about being the Bicked Bitch of the Best, but he's not even a particularly good person and is a total universal taker and if anything needs a good smacking upside the head. So now I have to figure out how to get rid of him because he clearly doesn't see things the same way and I'm done. No more. Not even worth using anymore. He smells. Literally. Not just smoker stinky but also unwashed stinky. Stinky stinky.

On the plus side, now my confidence is up and I can pursue better, cuter, less smelly boys. Hopefully without having to hack this one to death with a machete first.

Countess

I went to a psychiatrist for the first time in a few years. No more Effexor! Yay! Switched back to Prozac (which worked well for me back in 2000ish) as of today, plus he's going to talk to my neurologist about just how high and terrible my stroke risks are to see if I can get on birth control after all. I still think birth control would help all kinds of non-pregnancy-related things in my body, like the friggin' ovarian cyst that I had and my evil evil periods and my migraines in general and my cyclical swinginess.

He asked me about the last time I was happy. I have happy moments and hours and days all the time. Then he asked me the last time I was happy for a whole week. Um, summer of 1999? And even that's questionable. I also think I sound like the whiny over-privileged child of a doctor and a social worker with no valid reason for a lifetime of negativity. Then again, that's a very negative thought and doesn't help matters.

I have been feeling better emotionally this past week, for whatever reason. I camped out at NBF's for a number of days with ouchy brain, this time prepared with clean underwear and plenty of my medication. I've been to the gym five times since I joined January 31 and that's certainly helping emotional matters, since it's a place I can go and I only have to be a certain level of functional and I don't have to talk to anybody but I can if I want to and then I get to feel all pleased with myself for having gone to the gym and doing something productive and self-lovey. One of the boy people who works there (I've only actually seen him twice) is cute and sarcastic and makes me a little girl-stupid, but in a good way.

There's another maybe boy who clearly likes me a lot and/or really wants to get in my pants and I'd love to say more here about him but I don't actually know who reads this thing anymore and I don't want to hurt anyone or anything along the way, so email me if you are a reality friend and entitled to details.

Head is pressury distracting hurty.

The whole "tackle the big projects first" thing does not work for me. I have to start off doing something that's technically somewhat productive but I don't mind doing to get myself geared up for real work and the "big" projects. I never was one to jump into pools, but rather start with my toes and slowly lower myself in as I got comfortable until I was ready to duck my head under.
Yay ten billionth water metaphor.

Anyway, now I tackle. Or, more acurately, begin dipping until I am ready to tackle. But just writing is a start for me, and I made myself a headache journal template so it's easy and has exactly what I personally need to track. Two semi productive things! (cue thunder crack and Count Von Count cackle).

The smoke/carbon monoxide detector battery beep is going off in the vacant apartment next door but the door is locked so I can't shut it up and instead it is driving me insane. I called the apartment management company two hours ago. Kill kill kill. I could just do what I need to do and then leave, but much in my recently formed tradition, I'd rather subconsciously punish myself and procrastinate on what I need to do in my apartment and let it make me miserable because I think I deserve to be miserable. Wheeeee!

I need more intellectual pursuits so my brain doesn't go self-analytical-insane-self-picky-wtf all the time. My aunt and uncle company job sure as shit doesn't keep me stimulated. Think of more cards all the time. Think about rebranding my whole "company" (I put it in quotes because it feels like quotes...it really is a company now with its own business checking account and EIN and everything) and making something out of it in a way that I can do. Try to think about the phrase "the way that I can do" without my heart sinking and my eyes welling up like I'm some useless washed up wreckage of humanity. Try to concentrate on the process that is my life instead of my misguided inner notion that I'm supposed to be something or do something. Reconcile the things That I actually want with the things I'm able to accomplish, and start liking myself enough to allow myself to accomplish things. Call the people I keep saying "I really need to call ____" and know that it's ok that I'm going to spend the conversation in tears and be the needy self-centered friend for awhile.

I've been fighting myself so hard this past year. I've been trying to see the world as positives and make the most of my can't-kill-me-and-way-better-off-than-most-of-humanity-but-still-hard-for-me-to-digest shit sandwich.

Crap. Maids are here. Another source of guilt: my parents paying for maids to clean my apartment because I don't do it myself and they insist. Going to print things to be mailed for Etsy business and run errands and then back to NBF's house where dog is hanging out. So much more to write and bitch and brood. Bah.

Not Dead or Dying

Today I tried an hour-long session of manual lymph node drainage with bits of traiger mixed in so that I wouldn't be "overwhelmed" by too much lymph at my first session or something like that. It was wonderful. It gave me new ways to look at my migraines and the pain and something that's like visualization except I'm capable of doing it, and everything felt really good even if it didn't get rid of the pain it helped give me tools to cope with the pain and lessen it and make it not matter as much. Very handy. I also became aware of quite how much I live in my head, not just in the metaphoric sense, but I carry myself from my shoulders on up and basically ignore the rest of me except as it connects to my head. My head rules everything. It's the bratty kid in class who takes over all the attention and ruins it for everybody else. I have to learn to acknowledge the head but then quickly move on to everything else. You are not the boss of me.

Then I went to the Saab dealer to get the recalled piece of my car fixed and get my $100 oil change that they say I'm supposed to get as a peace offering to my car, hoping it will start liking me better and stop having huge problems all the time. My phone right now only charges when it feels like it, so it was completely dead and I had no concept of time as I waited at the Starbucks down the street and read the Onion and did yesterday's RedEye crossword and Sudoku, still stoned on Lymph and Traiger. It was oddly pleasant.

When I got home and checked my email, I learned that my friend from camp who had all her guts transplanted in October and has been in the ICU ever since died this morning. While I'm heavy-hearted and feel terrible for her parents and family, I'm less sad or upset than I expected or somehow think I should be. I guess with all the months of misery and knowing every time I checked the blog her family kept of her progress that it could say that this was the day she finally died, that entry finally appearing wasn't much of a surprise. She'd been getting a little better, but really, she was still suffering and living a sad pantomime of a life. I thought about her a lot when I started complaining to myself and others about my own current life position and inabilities, since the world's my fucking oyster by comparison. After all, I can do things that really are living. Even if I can't eat certain foods or drink hard liquor or go party my brains out or work a normal job, I can feed myself through my mouth and eat many many many things that taste wonderful and I can still drink beer and smoke pot in moderation and I can even take care of myself on all basic and most higher levels 99% of the time. And my migraines can't kill me. So for as frustrated as I get looking at all the people who can just fucking live and not have to think about it or fight with their bodies on a day-to-day basis, I've been worse myself and I could be a whole lot worse, as in dying or dead.
Maybe I'll start chanting "not dead or dying" every morning while I shower and brush my teeth. See what that does to my psyche.

Neurology, Neurosis

An hour and a half on the train this morning with temperatures around -3°F not including windchill and I got my car back in time to drive to my neurologist appointment. I held January 11, 2009 as a special date in my heart for some time now, since that was when my "pre-existing condition exclusions" expired on my insurance. Translation: migraine- and depression-related medical shit now gets paid for. And while there's still no new incredible cure for my lame vessel of a head, I'm getting an MRI as soon as I schedule it so we can see pictures of my lame head. It's been about 10 years since my last MRI, but I'm not particularly hopeful that updated photos will say anything new. Maybe there's something that this much better neurologist can see or catch, but from everything he says, I'm an extremely typical severe migraine patient and the best we can do is pain manage with drugs drugs drugs and acupuncture and anything else I find that helps. Because my left eye droops when I'm migrainey, I'm supposed to look in the mirror the next time I'm mid-migraine and see if my left eye and nostril are also runny and if the left side of my face is red and splotchy. If so, I have a very specific type of migraine (definitely probable candidates...I know that's the sinus side that gets cranky) called Paroxysmal Hemicrania. If so, the one and only treatment is an NSAID called that indomethacin that I'd take daily, possibly instead of the gazillion pills I'm on now. Downside: indomethacin does terrible things long-term to your guts, particularly your stomach and kidneys. I'd have to get all of my everything else checked constantly, and if anything started going downhill, I'd have to stop the only medication that's been found do really help that type of headache. My migraines aren't going to kill me, but they can't really be fixed, either. And no birth control pills, like, ever, even with the ovarian cyst thing and the evil clotty crampy periods and my promiscuous unprotected sex. Ok, two out of three. But once again, I'm reminded of how much modern medicine still doesn't know. We think our bodies are supposed to work and when they don't we should be able to fix them or quit whining about it and overcome and Just Do It and No Fear and all those other slogans and mottos and things people say on ESPN and to 9-year-olds in football helmets. But fighting isn't working for me. I should go back to the meditation center, except that felt like a fight with myself, too. I have to stop fighting myself and my body all the time. I'm trying so hard to accept what I am. It's hard and it hurts because I still get mad at myself for not just being ok or at least accepting my not being ok. I've always been much quicker to understand things on an intellectual level than to feel them, and it frustrates the hell out of me that I can't just make myself feel what I think.
I just want to be happy.
I'm taking the steps that are supposed to help all of that (going to therapy, on happy drugs, trying to cultivate new friendships and keep stoking old ones, concentrating on the good things in my life...which I actually do but I use this blog to get my whining and bitching out since I'm spending so much energy the rest of the time trying to put a positive spin on everything).

I always have a hard time in winter. I need to declare a time to drive down to Nashville and romp around with HDS in the warmer and our dogs can try to eat eachother. I wish it was less than an 8 hour drive, but maybe that would help. I don't know. I keep looking for these things to help or cure or fix. That's part of who I am, too, and that needs to be ok, too. More time in the meditation center with the Buddhists, less time in the internal throes of Jewy guilt.

Cold Comfort Ferrari

NBF is back from his South American Christmas and New Years and I am very happy. I missed him way more than I expected to. I keep telling myself it was because I was sick for much of the time, battling the nastiest cold I've had in at least 10 years (I still have the remnants) and just wanting live human companionship that required minimal effort on my part. I have other friends who are zero effort, but they do not live in my neighborhood. I've been working on cultivating my other Chicago friends, and I have some great other Chicago friends, but they still require calls and plans and wearing pants, and when NBF moves, that's a big hole he will leave behind. I knew that already, but his three week absence made it clear how much it's going to hurt.

My car died again. No clue why this time. I was driving down Lake Shore Drive when it started feeling funny, like the acceleration was jerky even when I wasn't accelerating or something, but no lights were going on and we were almost to where we were going anyway and I pulled into the turn-off lane and started to break when all the lights came on at once and the car died right there and wouldn't start up again. The City of Chicago tow truck people came before I'd even found the phone number for AAA and towed me onto Lower Wacker so I'd be out of traffic (no tickets or impounding or anything, it's just their way of getting you off the highway so you don't cause more problems...very smart in my opinion and the woman who towed me was very nice) and I then got a four hour time window from AAA that they wanted me to spend in the freezing cold in the car waiting for the tow truck. NBF spent the first two hours with me, no truck. Called AAA back and they said I could wait in a cafe and they'd give me 15 minutes warning before the truck arrived so I could get back to my car. NBF went home to walk the dogs and I went into Descartes on Michigan Ave to drink hot chai late and knit until the tow truck came about half an hour later.
The driver of the AAA truck was probably in his 40s and while we drove through snowy rush hour traffic, he rambled and I coaxed his life story. He's a single dad who ended up raising his two daughters after his wife of 15 years turned out to be batshit. He didn't say batshit, but the woman flew off the handle and had multiple affairs and didn't really fight for custody or anything then tried to blame her older daughter for not just saying in court "I want to go with my mom." Mind you, I only heard his side of the story, but from his side, she sounds pretty batshit. He's also extremely happy and proud that his daughter made it through high school considering what a rough time she had with the divorce and everything and that she's not pregnant or into drugs, and while he hopes she will some day go to college or something, he's glad she's come this far. It was nice to hear. He just seemed like a really solid, decent guy trying to make the best possible lives for his two girls. It was a good story.

Now I have no car again. It would be easier if I really had no car and just lived my life carless and maybe belonged to iGo or something for the times I needed a car. It would be easiest if my car didn't randomly die on my every other month. I don't know what I do wrong. I take it for its regular oil changes. I feed it premium gas. I even got it exciting snow wipers this year. Still, it insists on hating me. Maybe I should blame the entire country of Sweden. Next time, I'm getting a hybrid Camry. The Camry gods are punishing me for straying.

My sister moved to Portland, Oregon. Portland is the new Brooklyn. I'm still looking at condos here in Chicago, even though it's freezing and I think I'm crazy and still can't really believe I'm looking at condos.

Now that it's 2009, my 10 year high school reunion is officially next year. If I don't do something awesome really soon, I'm going to have to make a baby so I have something to show for myself. I was so scarily driven in high school and the people who actually remember me probably expect me to be a Fulbright scholar or have a Pulitzer or something by now, instead of spending a good 8 years trying to figure out how to reconcile what I want with what I think I should want and how to make what I want happen without feeling guilty for not doing what I think I should want or do.

Warm sleepy dog on lap is a wonderful thing. Too bad I don't feel like that's enough to show off, and that I need something to show off, because warm sleepy dog makes me happy. I'm just still not strong enough in what makes me happy. Bah.

self-help

I do not do my self-destructive crap because there is something wrong with me or I am bad or malformed or failing in some deep inherent way. At age 26.5, I am used to feeling bad. I'm used to feeling like emotional crap. It's familiar. It's my default. It's pretty easy to trace back through my childhood and see all the pain and angst that made for my most common theme. But that's what I know how to feel and know how to live with, so that's the pattern I create for myself.

This little light bulb went off a few weeks ago. My procrastination and other dumb shit I do to screw myself up always felt like some deep uncontrollable flaw or something I should be fixing but wasn't and that was bad and it was another big icky-feeling judgmental turd on my soul. But this is oddly freeing. I know I'm only doing it because I'm used to it. That's much easier to break free from. Still not easy, but far less epic.

Right now I have a sinus headache from hell. I had a terrible cold this last week that's finally loosening its grip, but my sinuses are shot to hell now. I think I should be exempt from sinus headaches because of my migraines.

I may be buying a condo. Like, soon. Holy shit.

Cysterly Love

As I clung to the shaggy green fibers of my bathmat and tried to concentrate on my fingers and the feeling of the floor instead of the pain in my abdomen, I wondered if I'd ever be able to eat again. I thought about Julie and her four years of tube feedings. I understood the ability to give up all food if this kind of pain was the alternative, but wondered what kind of life one could possibly have without food. Eating is such an important experience for me. I understood having all of your guts transplanted with the hope of being able to eat again. And then I thought about what the transplant did to Julie. How she's been in the ICU, sedated and waving at death ever since. What it's done to her family, with her parents now living month-to-month in Florida in an apartment chosen entirely for its proximity to the hospital and her sister now in charge of everything else back in Michigan. What is life worth? What is pain worth? Will they ever figure out what's wrong with Julie? Would they ever figure out what's wrong with me?

Mine started weeks earlier. I needed to pee even after I'd peed. I wondered if I had an extremely mild urinary tract infection. I've never had one and I'm not a very good candidate for contracting one (since I'm not having The Sex and I'm fairly compulsively clean to the point I use those flushable wipes in addition to regular toilet paper and never go more than 48 hours without showering), but they're so common and easy to deal with, I just drank lots of water and figured it would clear up on its own and if it got bad I'd go to my doctor. No big deal.

I've also been back to More Migraine Than Freedom pretty much since Thanksgiving. Maybe even before. I got stuck at my parents' house for days when my car window decided to randomly fall off its track and after the mechanic out by them fixed it, I was too dead to drive home. Then I went to NBF's house and spent two days there passed out and eating his food and occasionally taking the dogs out but he mostly did that, too.

At the end of January, my health insurance starts paying for my migraine care again. I'm supposed to call my neurologist and make an appointment for then so we can start fixing things again. I don't know why I haven't yet. I think I'm scared it still won't help and I'm sick of getting my hopes up and being a walking pharmacy and new tests and pokings and proddings that result in maybe feeling a little better some of the time but still feeling vaguely awful most of the time.

I go through phases where I do mini-workouts at home, usually including the lame-ass push-ups where you are on your knees, lunges, crunches, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Sunday night I did a lot of crunches including the kind where you lay on your stomach and crunch up backwards. Monday the pressure in my bladder was almost painful, I had to pee all the time (no trouble when I peed and regular good ol' non-smelly almost clear yellow pee came out), and I just kind of hurt in my general low-down inner gut area. I wondered if it was the crunches. Tuesday, it was clearly not the crunches. It still hurt, I still felt like I had an old lady or preggers bladder, and let's just say pooping wasn't a particularly pleasant experience.

I called my doctor. She couldn't see me, but her associate could. Fine. Associate at 3:30 PM.

I made NBF drive me. I was feeling pretty gross, though the actuall pain was less bad. More like "significant discomfort." I told the doctor what was wrong. She squished my belly and abdomen. I peed in a cup. I used to have serious issues with that, having to talk myself down from my OCD tendencies almost as much as getting blood drawn. Apparently, I'm much better at dealing with it now. No big deal.
Tentative diagnosis pending urinalisis: bladder infection. The place that was the most uncomfortable when she squished was apparently my bladder, and this was after I'd peed. The instant dipstick test of my urine was positive for traces of blood, too, which would indicate bladder infection. So the doctor gave me antibiotics that were "known to be good on stool" and said she hoped the drugs would clear up the problem before we even got the confirmation from the lab that it truly was a bladder infection.

My doctor's office is on the 11th floor of the Galter Pavilion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. We dropped off my perscription at the Walgreens on the first floor, got dunch at the Au Bon Pan on the second floor, and went back to the first floor to pick up my perscription and validate the parking ticket.

I dutifully took my pills that night and Wednesday morning and night. I still hurt and didn't feel like eating much, but I mixed ramen noodles with Indian mashed vegetable curry for lunch and finished off the last of my raisin bran for dinner.

I woke up Thursday some time before 6 AM in pain. I had to pee, I had to poop. I did. It hurt my guts to do so, especially the lower right part (higher than the earlier pain, but below my belly button). I still hurt. A lot. It was like the worst gas pain and/or the worst period cramps ever, but in the wrong places. The experience was like having really terrible diarhea, but with regular poop. Running to the bathroom, clutching my guts, hoping it's over, crawling back to bed without the pain subsiding, big sharp stabs, wishing to fall back asleep, back to the bathroom, not wanting to have to sit up any longer, clutching the bathmat, thinking of Julie.

I called my doctor back to say what was going on. To say I was in hell, the worst pain of my life and I get migraines. Migraines aren't so sudden. They are extreme, but at least you can adjust to them. This was sharp and intense and unfamiliar. Help. I don't think this is a bladder infection anymore, since I've been taking my antibiotics. They left a message for the doctor to call me back when she could. I don't know why I knew I wasn't in immediate danger, but I did.

I called my sister. My mom was seeing clients that day and I didn't want to bug her. This was painful, but even if it was something serious, there was no reason to have her around stressing and missing things in the waiting room of the ER or something when I knew my sister wasn't doing anything. I woke my sister up and she said she'd come in a few hours. I figured that would be fine. If I needed more immediate attention, I could call NBF or 911. Until then, I didn't want to leave the comfort of my own bed and bathroom and the run back and forth. Mostly, I wanted someone to come and walk my dog for me and deal with anything else that might arise, since I was completely incapable.

I may be buying a condo very very soon. In Rogers Park, preferably right on the lake. I have the money my grandparents left me that apparently my parents have also been supplimenting over the years, and it's sitting in a nice tust fund that's purpose from the start was to finance education and/or a first home. With the economy in the shitter, the entire housing market looks like Filene's Basement. Part of me is very hesitant to buy something here, since I'm not positive I want to stay in Chicago long-term. I miss many of my friends who live in other states, NBF is moving to San Diego to be all lawyery in a year, and yesterday the temperature hit 8 F not counting windchill.

But I have family here. And I do have friends here.

I wasn't aware that I'd fallen asleep until the phone rang. My sister was downstairs and needed to be let in. The pain was quiet now. She walked my dog, who was desperate enough to go out and familiar enough with her that he didn't do his usual apeshit barky routine. My guts were still uncomfortable, but nothing like earlier. I was afraid to eat but I kept drinking. My sister and I talked about calling various friends we knew in the health professions. My dad is a doctor (former internist turned Insurance Company Health Administration Bad Guy, except he's a good guy...) but he was still in Bermuda for some conference thing. Then my sister mentioned kidney stones. We looked them up on WebMD and I decided that sounded right, since it was right around where the pain was and it came in two big waves and maybe there was a stone hanging out in my bladder. I kept drinking water but was afraid to eat. My sister had oatmeal. We called my doctor back and left the message that maybe it was kidney stones? Just a thought.

I took a long shower and shaved more carefully and completely than I do for bikini season. I figured if people were going to be poking around at me, possibly at my "lady parts," I wanted to be as well-groomed as humanly possible. The shower also felt fabulous, and I had a fear that I would check into the hospital and they would keep me, like Julie, and this might be the last good shower I got for a long time.

The doctor's assistant had called while I was in the shower. They wanted me to come in for a CT scan ASAP, but the soonest they could get me an appointment was the next morning at 6:20 AM. I could go to the ER and hope to be squeezed in some time before that, but there was a solid chance I still wouldn't get in until the next morning and would be stuck in the ER. I called back. 6:20 AM, CT scan it would be. My urinalysis from Tuesday came back with no signs of infection, so it clearly was not a bladder infection after all and I should stop taking the antibiotics. It could very well be kidney stones. Sounded like it. Then I asked about food. Apple sauce, soup, jello. I said I was feeling like eggs. "No eggs."

I had none of these foods in my apartment, so my sister and I had to go grocery shopping. But first we started watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I enjoyed very much and she fell asleep. I talked to NBF and informed him that I was crashing at his house so he could drive me to the 6:20 AM appointment. He was unthrilled but I knew right away he would do it.

My sister fell asleep and I got restless watching the movie. I hadn't eaten or taken any of my medications all day. We headed out to the grocery store.

I was in a daze and spent twice as long as usual (those of you who've been shopping with me know this is already an annoyingly slow process) picking

By the time we headed to the grocery store, I could barely walk straight. I hadn't eaten all day, which meant I hadn't taken my regular pills, and I felt like total crap. My sister was also hungry, and she's not very good when she's hungry, either. I stocked the cart with both super-bland easy to digest non-food foods and things I needed assuming I would be able to eat like a normal person again. I was really out of it but managed to do a fairly good job with my choices in the end. I also needed quarters so I could do a load of laundry before heading to NBF's house and the hospital. I wanted lots of good clean underwear and my hoodie and other things claimed by my hamper. I handed my sister my credit card so she could get in line and buy the groceries and I headed over to the in-grocery-store bank. No quarters, but customer service had rolls. I went to customer service. I pulled $10 out of the part of my wallet that has my quick-access stuff, like my credit cards, my drivers license, and sometimes cash. The customer service guy informed me that a roll of quarters was $10.25 because they charged a 25 cent service fee, and pointed to a sign. Lame. I complained, decided it was worth it anyway, told the customer service guy I wasn't bitching at him personally, since I knew it wasn't his fault or anything, and went back to find my sister starting to put groceries up on the conveyor belt. We discussed Jello shots with the check-out guy as he scanned watermelon, peach, and strawberry (oh how I wished they were intended for booze) and headed to the car. My sister really wanted to go to the bagel place by my apartment and it was unquestionably cold enough in the car to leave the groceries, so that was our next stop.

By this point, I was beyond stupid. I might as well have been completely drunk, having not eaten in a good 18 hours and going through Effexor withdrawl to boot. I wanted soup, but apparently the bagel place no longer sells soup, so I ordered apple cider. My sister did a make-your-own sandwich (all the ingredients you want for $60) with egg, salami, cream cheese, and sprouts. Weird girl. I went to pay for it and found my credit card was still floating by itself in my purse without the drivers license etc. chunk of my wallet. Where'd my cash go? Where'd that wallet chunk go? I paid with the credit card and started ripping my purse apart. I took everything out. I emptied my pockets. I went back to check in the car, including the grocery bags in case it fell in. Nothing. It was gone. Did I drop it back at the grocery store? I knew I had it when I took out the credit card to give to my sister to buy the groceries. I had to have had it to get the $10 to buy the quarters. That was the last place I knew for sure, customer service. I might have had it at the checkout, but maybe not.

We went back to the grocery store. We searched the parking lot. We asked at customer service. Nothing. We looked around the floor. Nothing. We found the guy who checked us out. He remembered us and tried to help us look. It was a very short amount of time and space between when I knew I had it and when I knew I didn't. No wallet. It contained my drivers license, one credit card, my ATM/debit card, my AAA card, my health insurance card, and probably $40 in cash since I'd just gone to the ATM the day before. I left my name and phone number at customer service in case someone turned it in, since I was sure it went missing right around there.

Back at my apartment, I called the credit card company to cancel the card and make sure no one had charged anything on the card that day. I hadn't used that particular card (it links to my parents' account and is just for emergencies) so it shouldn't have any charges.
The first charge made on the card was at Walgreens, at most 20 minutes after I know for a fact it was in my hand. Five more charges were then made at Target and Best Buy within half an hour. My ATM/debit card was only used to buy gas along the way. We canceled the cards and disputed the charges no problem, but I wished there was a way to instead make the next time they tried to use the card set off all kinds of alarms and have the police show up on the scene. The way things are now, they get to keep whatever they stole from the six transactions, even if we don't have to pay for them.

My sister sat me down and made me eat applesauce and soup. I started to regain my basic brain functions. I did laundry. My sister looked at Facebook and potential three bedroom places for rent in Portland, Oregon. I packed a bag with clean comfy clothes for the next day and enough clean underwear to last a week (I'm not sure why) and she handed me over to NBF by 8:30.


UNFINISHED

Dream: storms and sex and drugs

I was dreaming about dust storms and these giant pod things (like, building-sized) that I was in with my mom and sister and this guy I had a crush on on-and-off from elementary school through high school

and then I went into the bathroom and I was at a bar or a club or something and I'd only had one drink but I was really fucked up and I thought maybe someone had slipped me a rufie and I sat down by the sinks and then the bathroom got really crowded and we all had to stay inside because of the dust storm and a flood or something

so they drunk guy next to me decided he wanted to have sex with his girlfriend right then and there

but there wasn't much room so a bunch of other guys helped prop her up and people were cheering and I was taking it all in but really wasted and couldn't really move

and then they wanted me to get in on the orgy acrobatics thing but I could only function enough to shake my head no and half push them away
then the flood splashed past and I started to walk out of the bathroom and follow exit signs but fell down by the bar at the top of the stairs so some other guy was going to be helpful and there were a few guys who were trying to either help me or get with me and I couldn't really tell which and I was really dizzy and eventually I ended up in a car with my cousin-in-law and one of the guys who really was helpful and they were taking me home.

Fin.

No, this post isn't about you

Ever wonder what it would be like to have sex with people with whom you wouldn't necessarily actually have sex? What aspects of your current relationship (whatever it may be) would manifest themselves, and how?

I think about a certain past Boy. Our friendship was complicated to say the least. We could have a wonderful time together, driving around and going to diners and just hanging out and talking about life and the creative process and frustration and happiness and being silly and goofy and dumb as shit. But I had hopes and expectations and things I wanted him to be that he wasn't, and he could turn into a molten asshole on the head of a hairpin. When we hooked up, we always knew we shouldn't. There was something tumultuous and rebellious and sinister about it and we knew it, but the idea that we couldn't fight our passions and our bodies just made everything more desperate and burning and forceful. It was like all the hurt and anger of our relationship came crashing out and rippled and exploded until we were sated. But then he, having expressed what he needed to express, was satisfied, while I wanted more. I loved the tempest and had more to "say." I wasn't done.

Like the sad self-hating creature I was, I kept right on going in this cycle for years. Years. I don't know exactly what changed in me or the friendship to make the "tempest" stop, but hooking up is now just a familiar and pleasurable way attending to a physical need. It's also significantly less frequent, since said Boy has lived in another state for several years.

But it's not always the same part of a relationship that comes through. My sample size is way too small and my imagination is way too busy. I take one friend and wonder if it's the playfulness that would show up, or if we'd get weird and cerebral like we sometimes do, or if it would be just completely comfortable and whatever and ok, because that's also a part of things. Or another friend who might seem totally awkward and wrong, but also might be completely harmonious because we know eachother so well and in such strange intimate ways...

Yes, I need to get laid.

excuses, excuses

Tonight, I got on the train in the wrong direction. Not my normal route or station because I went to catch the express one station beyond my usual stop. The red line towards the loop is on one side of the platform, so I assumed the purple line on that side also went towards the loop. It does not. It took me two stops into Evanston to realize this.

I was feeling ditzy and out of it and the gazillions of pills I'm on don't help matters. I was ten minutes later to meeting my dad for dinner than planned, though I'd texted him as soon as I got onto the right train.

According to him, my train mistake is part of my pattern of self-destructive behavior and people don't want to hear the excuses, they just want to hear that I'm sorry and I know it's not ok.

That's the kind of thinking that keeps me depressed and self-hating and crazy, not to mention, it's just not true.

I'm sorry for the intrusion on my dad's time, because he cares about timeliness (which is a serious pot calling the kettle black, but that's enough negative campaigning there, Annabell McCain...), but what are 10 minutes, really? Our reservation wasn't even until the time I showed up.

My "pattern of self-destructive behavior" could be seen as a "pattern" of all kinds of things. It's the pattern you're looking for. Getting on the wrong train is dazed, and this wasn't some major life anything. Plus, the fact that I could ride the train at all should be cause for celebration. My head has been very cranky the past few weeks and my "monthly cycle" is in super-fussy-mode, too. I had enough foresight to check the map from the el stop to the restaurant, knowing I haven't been "all there" and I didn't need to waste time hunting down Wacker when I could look it up before leaving. And I left my apartment with time to spare, as proven by my making it to the restaurant only 10 minutes late with a full wrong-direction train and then more waiting for the right one.

Not every imperfection in life is an excuse. Sometimes, they're just reasons. Because I'm human and I'm trying really hard to let myself be human and have that be ok.

Apparently, Topamax has terrible horrible withdrawal symptoms similar to Effexor's terrible horrible withdrawal symptoms. I have been feeling like cold sweaty death for a bit over 24 hours now, even though I got the Topamax back into my system a good 8+ hours ago. And NBF's dog won't stop whining at me. She is here for a doggy playdate/her and my mutual entertainment and company while NBF was at school all day, but I am not allowed to do anything other than play with her and at the moment that is annoying. Earlier it was just fine, because I was a doggy snuggle sandwich with a furry love blob in each hand. Now, I'm trying to get a teeny-tiny bit of work done while I'm sitting up, but that means getting sereneded by persistent whines.

Dream

I've been having dreams about anime. I'm alternately watching and taking part in a series in which consciousness is entirely cyberized so that you can enter/hack into the consciousness of anything from other people to fish. The main character is a variation on the General from Ghost in the Shell and there's some sort of shady something going on that she's investigating (I slip back and forth from watching and being her) and these rings of bad people are clearly about to do something and the question is what, and you don't know who's good or bad or themseleves or anything, and there's a general societal feeling that anybody not completely good is bad so that there is very little trust and checkpoints everywhere for everything and lawyers are some of the only people who know the real rights anybody has when being checked and for life in general, so they're this whole class of people that have a strange power of understanding the system which can then be used to help or to hurt people, so both good and bad people have really intense opinions about lawyers since they both completely distrust but also desperately need them. The main character person has no idea why the 2 or more lawyers that are trying to get in with the bad people ring and what their motivations might be, good or bad or inbetween. And the inbetween is a really difficult area to deal with, because the masses tend not to believe in it but the main character at least (particularly when I'm her) sees that the only good aren't the perfectly good and that people are mostly just people and that needs to be accepted.

my little d has the big C

aaaaaaaaaand now my dog has a malignant mast cell tumor. Awesome. It's kind of on his back left side above his leg towards his butt. Sunday, I thought it was a cut. Then he wouldn't leave it alone, so I stuck the collar thing on him. It scabbed up but it still looked weird, so I brought him to the vet. And it's cancer. Awesome. Probably low-grade and as not-a-big-deal as possible when it comes to a cancerous tumor, but no one wants cancer, even the least bad form of cancer, and I love my dog very very very very very much and it's clearly bugging him and I just want to hold him and snuggle him all the time (since I found out like 5 hours ago).

More Migraine Life Philosophy Crap

Originally written as a response to another person's blog post about dealing with chronic sinus issues:

For as far as we've come in medicine, there's still SO MUCH we don't know. There's this expectation that we can somehow find the "answer" and fix whatever is wrong. And sometimes we can. And maybe that "cure" is out there and if we make the right choices, we'll feel better. And maybe it's not. And even if it is, there's no way to know if we've made the "right" choices or if we ever can. And that's frustrating as hell, especially when you feel like crap for the whateverith day in a row and it's hard enough to function with the constant distraction of pain and ickyness but now you have this extra job of figuring out how to make yourself NOT feel like crap. OR do you just learn to live and love and accept your pain? Know that it is part of you and that you may never find that golden panacea and instead spend that last little burst of energy on coping methods and enjoying the good functional pieces of your life?

There are no answers. I have to decide for myself every day what's most important and what's doable. Some days the decision is very conscious and struggly. Some days I don't even think about it, but I'm still making these choices. It's a strange, strange little world of serious chronic pain that creeps in and becomes a part of your life.

Goldie

I took the #70 Division bus tonight from the red line stop at Clark to Paulina. Clark and Division is at the edge of the Gold Coast (super-rich neighborhood), turns immediately into Old Town (still rich, a little younger and cuter, Second City is in the 'hood but on North), and then something was clearly wrong. New shopping centers and developments bore the name "Old Town" but I was pretty sure we'd passed Old Town and it didn't feel like Old Town. We were still on Division. There were mismatched new buildings scattered around huge empty lots, random blatant "green" developments, a big garden that looked like it had been planted on top of a parking lot with a sign advertising its Tuesday and Thursday markets and another sign tied to the fence that read "It takes a village to raise a tomato." The whole stretch felt like a ghost town with haphazardly placed well-intended left-winger projects band-aided over the holes. The bus was back among the affluent and into the hipsters of Wicker Park when it finally dawned on me where we'd driven:
Cabrini-Green.
If you're not from Chicago, that may not be much of a punch-line. Cabrini Green was a notorious housing project. [For more info, have fun with the Wikipedia site and Chicago Housing Authority site.] Six years ago, when they began tearing down the buildings of Cabrini-Green, I would have been much more aware what lie between the red line and Wicker Park and probably would have opted for a different public transportation path. But in 2008, I sat across the aisle of the #70 from a redhead who spent the entire ride on her cell phone flirting and talking about ultimate frisbee. A woman in her 60s got on a few stops before we crossed the Chicago River, still in the heart of the ghost town, but she started to get off at the next stop because she couldn't pay the fare. "Does anyone have one ride on their transit card?" Someone swiped for her to get back on the bus. The area is certainly safer, but what happened to the thousands and thousands of people who used to live there? Where are they now? The CHA hasn't accepted new applicants for housing since 2001. Totally fucked up. It's like the entire plan for Cabrini has been to make the world nicer for Rich White People and worse for Poor Black People. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I don't love the Chicago Tribune or their reporting, but read this anyway.

And another thing! How can so many people be so deeply and disgustingly racist in so many ways?
I am small, blonde and female, and even if I'm wearing old sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, I walk down the street or into a store and IMMEDIATELY get the benefit of the doubt. Cops do me favors, I've never been accused of stealing anything or loitering, no one crosses the street when they see me coming. I am grateful for these things, but I did nothing more to deserve them than any other human being. I just happened to be born blonde and female in a world that values that.

I don't expect any major paradigm shifts from a silly blog post, but if you could think for a minute about the difference between living with and without the constant benefit of the doubt (and the really sick part is we've gotten to the point where it's not just white people doubting everyone else, but everyone else doubting themselves in varying ways and to varying degrees, too).

Please? Do it for the little blonde girl.

remiss

In an email from a friend: "I've missed reading your blog posts - have you given up on Annabell Jo?"

Hell no. Out of the habit. Distracted. That's bad enough, but I'm not giving up.

I'm still migrainy. Nowhere near as bad as they were, but I've had almost zero days with zero pain and symptoms. They're just more livable, and I'm doing a lot more around them, and I'm only really losing maybe a day or two a week instead of only having a day or two a week. I've sold my cards in person more than once now, and my aunt and uncle are hiring me to do some stuff on their website that can be done whenever I'm physically able. I want to take one class in the fall back at school, but I'm not there yet. There's a whole lot of tests and a few doctors' appointments I need to make to hopefully get me to that point, but first I need health insurance.

I still don't have health insurance. On the phone yesterday with the iChip people makes me think I'm really, really close, but I would have said that months ago, too, so I don't want to get too excited. The adjuster from iChip had the exact same problems with the idiots at my last insurance company that I did (it took her EIGHT CALLS to find someone who could give her my policy number, something I was never able to get in writing), so that made me feel a little less crazy.

My car is still "in the shop." It's now done except for a tire, which wasn't the result of the accident (Chicago pothole(s) damaged the tire and wheel itself), so it's out of pocket, so I got a tire for half the price online that has to be shipped from Saturn or something. I'm borrowing my sister's car until I get my own back, which my sister just loves, but my parents are redoing their kitchen which somehow translates to also repaving their garage and outdoor parking space thing, so my sister's car needed a place to stay anyway, and parking is terrible around her summer sublet apartment in the now-cool South Loop.

She and I went to the Taste of Chicago yesterday and had a very nice time. It was as uncrowded as the Taste gets, and I think I was sufficiently distracted by food and being the Person With a Sense of Direction to ignore my persistent mid-grade migraine long enough to have fun. With two strips of tickets (a total of $16) and "Taste sizes" only (each booth offers one of their items as a smaller portion for 3-4 tickets), the two of us had:

• rib tips from Robinsons No. 1 Ribs
• cumin-dusted fries with mango chutney from Vermilion Latin-Indian Cuisine
• jerk chicken with red beans and rice from Vee-Vee's African Cuisine
• chocolate-dipped frozen baby banana from Aunt Diana's Candy Makers
• samosa from Arya Bhavan
• alcapurria (pork filled banana dumpling) from Sabor Latino

Everything was entirely fabulous except for the alcapurria, which was a big fried blob of generic friedness. The jerk chicken was a real stand-out, so my sister and I will have to go to the actual Vee-Vee's sometime, since it's close to my apartment.

My grandma turned 85 yesterday and this past weekend most of my maternal extended family converged on San Diego. That's where NBF is for the summer and I almost didn't see him at all because he is a big fat poo-head. My mom's sister hosted the whole thing (she lives there) and she's pretty fabulous. That side of the family is much easier to deal with in general, since they say what they mean and don't care how much money you make. On the other hand, my grandma can be pretty difficult, but also people have stopped being nice to her and about her. And my siblings were being total schmuck-heads to me in general. Let's just say it was a real test of my Newfound Positivity (thank you therapy...I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic).

Speaking of therapy, big revelation this week: being less loud and/or obnoxious and/or "annoying*" and generally changing what I say and how I act to fit a situation isn't "giving in," it's more like being a teacher altering your methods until the students understand. My therapist is very good.

That should be enough for now. I need to get my ass back writing again in less than seven weeks.


*My sister thinks I'm annoying. All the time. She tells me so. All the time. It's swell.

Growing Up

My 26th birthday is tomorrow. I need to wake up, make calls re: my car accident last week and my health insurance, then my mom and my sister are taking me to lunch. In the evening I'm picking up NBF at the airport. Maybe I'll make him watch a me movie while we eat take-out Indian food. My presents this year are mainly furniture. I put together the first big Ikea piece tonight and am kovered in krazy glue I keep picking off my fingers.
I remember when birthdays stopped meaning toys. I remember when they stopped meaning you were the center of the universe and everybody treated you like a princess. Those felt much more tragic. This is more of a change than a loss. I asked for furniture. I'm excited about my furniture. There are grown-up things I find terribly annoying, but I want to be a silly grown-up, not a silly child. Does that make sense?

Yes, it's been awhile. Yes, I should explain the truck that rammed into me last Tuesday and all sorts of other things, but not now. I'm too out of it.