One more.....

Songs to End The Year With.

Goodbye 2012.

Happy Birthday Dear Friend!! I miss you terribly, and I wish you were here.

That being said, I am still miserably sick. My cold having morphed into a sinus infection, then a respiratory infection, then laryngitis, and now atypical pneumonia. *Laughs* But isn't that the way it always goes?

In addition, my dear, sweet car died yesterday, which was a bit of an adventure since the transmission gave out on 9th and Van Buren. Lol.

But in spite of these things I have been unimaginably happy today. I walked down to the store to do my shopping with a smile from ear to ear. Headphones on my head, just skipping along.

2012, despite how it might look to the casual observer, was actually the best year I can remember having. Sooooooo many good things happened, that the bad stuff was just totally eclipsed.

I am super grateful for so many things

For awesome adventures in the wilderness.

For reclaiming my spirit, my life, and my house.

For Bikram Yoga, and afternoons spent sweating the stress out.

For time spent rebuilding engines with my Dad and Little B.

For weekends spent playing the the mud.

For bikini and champagne mornings on top of mountains with good friends.

For a year filled with awesome fossils.

For Picketpost Mountain.

For College Graduation, no matter how exhausted and sleep deprived I may have been. :)

For sunshine and good books.

For Autumn Color on the Verde River.

For red lipstick, which makes all things tolerable. ;)

For headphones and hula hoops.

For catching horned toads.

For self-portraits and getting back down to my high school weight.

For the extraordinary amount of love I am continually surrounded with.

And for terrible, ridiculous pictures that remind me of how awesome You are, and how badly I miss you. <3

You know Dear Friend, I'd give anything to have you back here, and to be able to roll around in the ridiculousness that follows us everywhere. But that being said, I'm super grateful for how awesome you continue to be, even when you're far away. I'm grateful for all your blog posts, for the million pictures you post to me, for hand written text messages, for the crazy amount of love and support you gave me this past year (and every year since, like, the dawn of time). I'm grateful for our tandem evolutions and for the way things unfolded for us this year, even if it was at times super hard and messy. I'm looking forward to getting to see you again, and to all the fun stuff that's sure to come with it. I love you more than life.

I'm super grateful for all the wonderful things that happened to me in 2012. I'm looking forward to all the blissful things 2013 is sure to bring. And I'm sending you all my love, as always. Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, I miss your face.

Sick!

I am officially sick! So very, very sick.

My sister did this to me, you know.
She sat right down next to me on Christmas Eve, all germy and infectious, and failed to mention until she was leaving that she was ill. I woke up today realizing I've just been incubating all those lovely little germs, and have gotten progressively sicker by the moment.

In other news, I left work today and somehow managed to rear end someone on my way home. It was...unpleasant.

It also has not helped my mood.

So I've been drinking turkey stock, listening to music, and desperately wishing I could fall asleep.

Instead I'm drifting here in the in between land. Half asleep, half awake, and totally sick.


But on the bright side, the fact that your phone is working properly has been cheering me up. Even if I'm continually harassing you. :)

Love and stuff.
Me.

Merry Christmas!

I miss you furiously.

It seems so totally and completely unfair, the state of things. Having to pass holidays without such critical players in your life. My family looks at me like I'm mostly crazy when I mumble quietly to myself about your absence. Like the situation wasn't, and hasn't continued to be totally fucked up on at least some levels.

But I suppose that's to be expected.

I never was, WE never were, for that matter, the kind of people who half-ass things. Obsessive friendships included. All heart and total disdain for the realm of social norms.

Christmas here was lovely. We did our thing last night, on Christmas Eve since Sister and Little B have multiple families to visit with today. We had a low-key affair. All finger foods and hanging out on the couch. No big dinner or fancy dress, which made me happy. It was one of (if not the) best holiday we've had as a family. I'd go into more detail, but there's not a lot to say. We just hung out and passed the time. We opened some gifts and ate some food, and all things were lovely.


This morning I woke up and all I wanted was a fried egg sandwich. I wanted it REALLY bad. But alas, I had no eggs, since I so rarely eat them (I have textural issues with eggs a lot of the time...*shudder*), and the grocery store was not open. I debated driving around to see if some sort of fast food place was open, but decided if I put that kind of energy into the quest for food and then failed my day MIGHT be ruined. Instead I took a bath and watched some Ugly Americans.

Now, mostly clean, (I somehow neglected to wash my hair...) I'm taking a bottle of sparkling cider, a bag full of TOC's top-secret-family-recipe cookies, and my hula hoop up the mountain. Which mountain, I haven't really decided. :P But I'm confident I'll know the right one when I've reached it.

I miss you more than life. I miss our holiday feasting, and I'm sad you're not here. One day, however, I'm confident we'll be able to resume our little holiday rituals and all will be right in the world.

Sending you all my love.
Me.

And This One!

A Couple More..

I owe you so many songs!

Here's a few. Just for you. <3

Wednesday Brings Good News

Wednesday morning I woke up with both sunshine and rainbows radiating out of literally, every orifice, such was my extreme happiness.

I skipped into work and pulled up my grades to find that despite my seemingly abysmal experience with my stats final, and the general lack of effort/intense procrastination I had put into this semester, I still have a 3.4 GPA (for the semester, obviously). So that made me extremely happy.

This was followed by a letter which read

"Dear Carolyn,
Attached is your graded final paper. You received an A+. Yours was the best of all submitted. It is always more difficult to present a good counter argument than a book report with personal reflections. Well done! You should be proud. It has been great to have you as a student. Much success in your career."

This was a particularly big win for me as said 8 page paper was written in the last hour before it was due, while I was in the bath, sobbing uncontrollably over the state of things.

The downside to that piece of joyful news, is that this is what ALWAYS happens to me when I procrastinate. I don't know what it is about intense pressure and stress, but I always pull A+ work out of my butt. This just serves to reinforce my own belief that my chaotic, and emotionally draining system is the one that makes the most sense grade-wise. I don't know if it's that I don't think or care any more by the time I get to the point of actually doing the work, and therefore am not tempted to overwork it, or if it's just simply that my brain can only get its act together when it's facing eminent impending doom.

The rest of the day Wednesday I skipped around, happy as a clam.

So much LOVE to you and yours Dear Friend!!! I miss your FACE!!!!

The Poster.

So, I had sort of half-assedly done some work on the poster before 10 pm Monday.

Sort of.

And by that, I mean that I had purchased a poster board, poster board supplies, and thought about what my topic, maybe, could possibly be.

But in the real world, that does not actually equate to real work.

Monday night I continued to drag my feet in typical LittleFoot fashion. I cleaned the house some, and I gave the dog a bath. I occasionally spent a few minutes looking up articles and jotting down notes, but not really.

Around midnight I attempted to glue some black butcher paper to my white trifold poster board with modgepodge. This was a bad choice. Everything got soggy and wrinkly, and had to be ripped off. This made a trip to Walmart unavoidable. I had hoped to find a black tri-fold board, but they were sold out of everything but white. Alas, I grabbed some rubber cement and some glue sticks and returned home.

It took me the ENTIRE night to get this damned thing done. The whole thing. Every. Last. Minute.

I took at least 4 baths in an attempt to focus my mind an settle my stomach/nerves. I was not at all successful in this, but at least I was really, REALLY clean.

Twice during the course of the night I attempted to lay down for a power nap. This however, only made the gut-wrenching anxiety worse, and both times ended with me vomiting compulsively for ridiculous blocks of time.

At this point, I've been awake for almost 72 hours. I haven't been consuming anything other than coffee. And I am vomiting up blood. Not tons of blood, but enough for me to know my ulcers are now herniated and my stress level is clearly unreasonable. Not the most pleasant of realizations.

By five in the morning the bulk of the poster was done. Things were formatted and printed, crafty supplies had been assembled, the butcher paper had been appropriately affixed to the poster board, and it was time to go to work.

There was literally no time to assemble the poster.

No problem, I told myself. I'll just leave work extra early and cut/glue this sh*t together in the library before class. Easy peasy.

I arrived at work and immediately broke. My brain just slammed up against the wall of sleep deprivation. I had reached the number of hours I could go without sleeping. I rapidly began unraveling.

Help arrived about 15 minutes behind me in the form of J. Thank the universe for small miracles. I was clearly unwell. Doing that thing where I think I'm talking, but really I'm just moving my lips...J was confused. Anyway, we got all the things ordered, and pushed the orders through. I managed to get through one pull rather quickly, but all this was done in between bouts of throwing up and bursting into tears.

I called my dad, long after I'd fallen off the cliff of reason and sanity, mumbling through clots of tears and snot about how terrible life was, how badly I did NOT WANT TO TURN IN THIS POSTER, how my whole body was convinced the world was ending and I couldn't convince it otherwise, and for gods sake, I just wanted to stop throwing up.

He told me for like the millionth time in the past 48 hours to 'rise above' and I promptly hung up on him. He then text me 'rise above' at least twice over the next half an hour which really, really just broke me.

Dad does this thing, where he finds a mantra, and then just keeps chanting it over and over again. In this case it was 'rise above'. That is initially helpful and I feel like dad is on my side and cheering me on. Then about the fourth time he says it I start to get irritated that he's not even listening anymore and is just spouting out a canned response so that he doesn't have to deal with me anymore. Its mildly irritating, but not world ending. By the millionth time he's said it, I am beyond furious. Seeing red, flames shooting out my ears, going to burn down the world irritated. I text back 'STOP TELLING ME TO RISE ABOVE!!!!!' but managed to leave out all of the profanities and cruel things the angry me wanted to scream, which I thought was a victory.

I then called my boss and asked in my nicest, tear choked voice if I could pretty please be excused for the day due to what can only be described as Acute Failure To Function. He let me go home, and I, for the first time in days, finally fell asleep.

I only got to sleep for about two hours, but it was by far, the best sleep I have ever had in all my life. I woke up feeling better. Still sick. Still vomiting, but much more coherent.

I got to work on my poster, the assembling of which, took me much longer than expected. I got to class almost an hour late, but I got there. I turned the damn thing in. (Which I seriously DID NOT WANT to do.) I ensured that I would actually graduate. (Something I also DID NOT WANT to do.) I read all the other posters. I filled out my critique forms. I ate some food, and I had a ridiculous Buffy fan girl conversation with some other people in my class, and then I left.

I met dad up the road to confirm that despite leaving work in what can only be described as a sleep deprived meltdown, and telling him to stop telling me to rise above, I had in fact completed my work, just like I said I would. No matter how unpleasant doing so may have been.

I felt instantly better upon completing the semester. Now that I was past the point of sabotage, all things were coming up roses. We walked around and bought Bear a ASU sweatshirt for Christmas. We talked about things, and Dad did his best to contain his excitement.

I should have gone home and gone to sleep. If I had been a sane, or even reasonable creature, I would have gone home and gone to sleep. But the Jew was in town, (she was leaving the next day) and there's not a power in the 'verse that will keep me from seeing my friends when they come to town.

We hung out at her sisters place for most of the day, laughing at the state of things. H came home and brought us Zoo Light tickets, so we went and wandered around the zoo for a while. It was basically fantastic. I love her to death. You Dear Friend, and the Jew, have just always been there, for as long as I've been me. Dad thought I should have gone to bed instead, but I just couldn't. It wouldn't have been fair. You guys are awesome and I will drop all things to see you guys whenever you're in town.

I went home, and at some point I drifted off, and sleep was delicious.

Statistics.

I totally did it! Yay! Hooray for graduation! It was awesome.

Several things happened that altered the course of my week. We'll have to back up a bit to explain them.

Monday the vomiting continued. I picked up a stronger anti-vomit medicine, and while it definitely helped slow the rate at which I was throwing up, it did nothing for the continually mounting anxiety that was the root of the problem. I can not describe how tightly all my organs were balled up, or how terribly painful and nauseating it was, except by pointing out that my iron stomach pills, even the new stronger ones, failed to stem the flow of bile fromst my lips.

I stumbled through the first half of my shift, teetering at near-panic attack anxiety levels, but managed to hold it together. The whole time I just kept thinking, you could just not take this test and all of this anxiety will go away. It would have too. It really would have solved all my current issues for me, it would have created new ones, but I would have felt better at least.

It's hard to explain the brain-body disconnect I struggle with on issues like these. My brain gets it, it's calm and mostly logical, it knows what's up and it tries to tell me that everything is fine and I need to chill the f**k out. The rest of me however, is unable to listen. I have the most physiologically intense flight or flight response imaginable. All my hormones, neurotransmitters, and organs are screaming:

RUN!!! WHY ARE YOU HERE!?! THIS IS YOUR WORST CASE SCENARIO, NOTHING IS WORSE THAN THIS!! RUN! ALL THE BAD THINGS IN THE WORLD ARE THIS WAY! LETTING YOUR MOTHER PEEL ALL THE SKIN OFF YOUR BODY AND THEN EAT IT WHILE YOU'RE ALIVE AND LISTENING TO HER RELIGIOUS RANTING ON A CONTINUOUS LOOP THROUGH THE ENTIRE PROCESS IS A BETTER OPTION! LETS GO DO THAT! OKAY?! COME ON! LETS GO! WE HAVE TO GO! N O W !!!!!!

Its awful. And resisting it is soooooo hard. Those chemicals are designed to make you run, and dear gods, did I ever want to run away. I cried softly most of the morning when nobody was looking. I continued not to eat anything for fear of making the vomiting worse, and at 9am, I stumbled off to school.

My statistics final was not something I was looking forward to. I dislike statistics. It's not that it's particularly hard, I mean, I passed dif eq., so in theory this isn't really a big deal. It's just that I don't care. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I don't know if you've ever seen me try to learn something I don't care about, but it's pretty funny. I mostly come up with a lot of reasons why I need to avoid it. Then I turn nothing in for at least two thirds of the class in protest, then I realize that I really do need to actually learn enough to pass the final, panic, and try to cram the whole semester into the last 3 or 4 weeks of class. True to form, that's how this class went. At any rate, I was, as always, vastly under prepared for the final. I showed up sans note sheets, as making them would have required effort me to stop panicking and do something, which was clearly never going to happen.

I sat down at my desk and immediately calmed the f**k down. I was past the point of no return. I'd already shown up and had not been flensed, the world had not ended, and it was exactly what my brain had been telling me it was, just a test. I set about making my two allotted cheat sheets. I only completed about a half a page before the test had to start, so that was less than ideal.

The test itself WAS actually my worst case scenario, as I quite literally forgot how to do anything resembling statistics the moment it was handed to me. I couldn't make sense of my cheat sheet, the batteries in my calculator died, and I was left to my own devices. Namely, guessing. Thank the gods for multiple choice exams. Anyway, I finished in record time, due mostly to the fact that I was just merrily guessing away at anything that looked like it might have resembled the right answer. I turned my exam in and hopped back on my bike.

At that point, I realized guessing might have been a bad plan, as I sort of need to pass that class to graduate. The panic set back in. I called my dad to tell him it went terrible, end of the world terrible, and to demand that he confirm that he will love me anyway. He complied, albeit begrudgingly, as he does not understand my rather intense need to prepare for the worst case scenario.

I returned to work, finished my shift and headed home to work on my poster.

Well...

I survived the night.

I got some degree of sleep, but it wasn't much.

The panicked vomiting continues, now though it's a result of an unreasonable anxiety load and nothing is going to stop it. My stomach is just rejecting life at this point.

I never should have opened the flood gates. That was a bad plan. Something which seems to be the theme of my life this week, ha!

I'm taking zofran like tic-tacs, but it's not keeping the bile down, so I suppose I'm just going to have to take a vomit bag with me to my biostats final. It won't be the first time I've had to do that, but it WILL be the last. I am at least excited about that part.

I did not do any real work on my poster over the weekend. It is now officially due in 29 hours, but I have managed to convince myself that it is do-able. So that's an improvement.

The Jew is in town, which makes me suuuuuuper happy, and provides a really nice distraction from the state of things.

That's all I know, or at least, all I write in between rounds of vomiting. Gotta run.

Love and stuff!!

Still Awake.

I'm still awake, Dear Friend. I can't find my phone, I think I must have left it in the car, but I just can't bring myself to get dressed again to go check. It's so warm in here, and so cold out there.

Anyway, if you've called and I've neglected you I'm super sorry. :( But I love you lots.

All that coffee may have been a bad plan.

By midnight I was reconsidering my plan to stay awake for the next 48 hours. I should have listened to you. Obviously you were right, this has doom written all over it.

I tried to lay down and get some rest, if not sleep, but there was WAY too much caffeine in my system. I was restless. My joints ached. My heart was racing. I was vaguely nauseous, and not at all tired.

My brain just kept going, trying to figure out ways to get me to sleep.

At some point I convinced myself I should probably go drink a bunch of water and puke it back up, just as a precautionary measure. You know, to wash out any remaining coffee residue. That way I don't find myself even more awake at some point in the future.

Well, I set that plan into motion and immediately regretted it. It seems I lost sight of exactly how much I hate throwing up, right up until I found myself past the point of no return.

Unpleasant physical aspects of vomiting aside, it seems I forgot exactly how efficient the stomach is at processing liquids, as it had been more than 4 hours since my last pot of coffee and my stomach was mostly devoid of any remaining liquid remnants. It was however, still full of my rather heavy steak and potatoes dinner, which I apparently was so excited about that I failed to chew it properly. It is incredibly disturbing to regurgitate food six or so hours later and still be able to identify different food items.

As I stared at my dinner, revisited, I began to worry that I had already processed all the coffee, and as such had only managed to deprive my body of my dinner, which it clearly needed. I got up, took a multi-vitamin and made myself a second dinner. This DID make me feel better. Both the nausea and rapid heart rate have dissipated, but the achy joints and general restlessness remain.

So now here I am, at 1:30 in the morning, still awake, and still not even vaguely interested in studying for the biostats final awaiting me in the morning.

That being said, I AM going to attempt to get some rest now. I don't expect it to go well, but I am going to try.

I love you tons. Tons and tons, and I wish you were here. Tuesday is my last day of classes, and I intend to come home and pass out for at least 14 hours. After that I'm all yours.

Lots of love,
me.

It's pouring rain

and I am happy.

I got a service award at the company party tonight, something which I was incredibly stressed out about. Remind me to tell you all about it when finals are over.

In the end I showed up late, in a dress that was possibly too low cut, and slightly too long. In new (and very high) heels (that I was initially a little unstable in), and the reddest lipstick I could get my hands on.

And you know what? Everything turned out great. :)

Now it's raining, which (as I'm sure you know) is a real treat, and I'm going to go to bed.

Here are some pictures of me before the party. :)

Miss your face.

Incipient Mutany.

Dear Friend, I hate all things, and I wish you were here.

As predicted the sun came up this morning. Time continues to tick by at a constant rate. And I continue to unravel.

My Dear Father brought me breakfast at work early this morning. Chocolate milk, coffee, a box of donuts, and various hot breakfast items from McDonalds in hopes of rallying my spirit.

Instead he found me at my desk. Hunched over. Frazzled beyond belief, having not slept at all last night (in spite of my sleeping pills), and having failed to keep any food down since the early hours of yesterday.

I had exactly one bite and promptly threw up.

I am starving and exhausted. My organs are all twisted up in tiny little, tight, cancerous knots. And in fifteen or so minutes, I have to put on the big kid pants, walk into my classroom, and get my sh*t together.

For.
Reals.

It is my absolute worst case scenario.


It will be okay, I keep telling myself it will be okay.
And it will.
Because there is no other option.
But how I'm going to (make myself) get from HERE
to OKAY
remains to be seen.



My heart is racing, and I've been quietly weeping all morning, but it's going to be okay.
It's gotta be.


I miss your face.

Screaming Temporal Doom!

And the frantic, irrational crying has begun.

As I sit here, avoiding for yet another day, choosing a simple topic for a research poster, I am now fully and completely aware that this is a full frontal attempt at sabotage.

I
DO
NOT
WANT
TO
GRADUATE.


And I know that that's counter intuitive.
And I know that I sound like a nutter.
But that's also my truth.

I do not want to do this project because it is the lynch pin holding this whole graduation thing together. If I just decided not to turn it in, I could just avoid this entire paradigm shift.

I am somehow much more comfortable with the Little Foot that needs to stay another semester, or possibly even the Little Foot who intentionally failed out of college in her final semester with only one class remaining than I am with having to redefine my life as Little Foot the college graduate.

I
HATE
CHANGE.

HATE.

Even minor change. My day is dramatically damaged by having to park more than two spots away from 'my' (usual) space. I don't even like changes that don't really change anything at all, like when people call a food item by a different name, for example. Like 'pepper bellies' instead of 'frito pie'. (It's been 2 months and I'm STILL hung up on that one). I might not SAY anything, but things like that, they leave me really rattled. And I stay rattled. For extended periods of time.

And I know that it's the ASD talking.
And no, knowing does not make it better.
It makes it much less confusing.
But infinitely more frustrating.

Especially when I'm on the phone in hysterics with my saint of a Father blubbering my eyes out like a big, slippery walrus about how not fair it is that I have to graduate from college, and he, like the sweet, sweet Dad he is, somehow manages not to scream back that I sound like a crazy person and nothing I'm saying is making any sense, and that I need to put on the big kid panties and get on with it.

Even though I know he really, really wants to.

He manages not to give me any advice, since even the slightest suggestion is likely to push me over the deep edge. He somehow manages not to mention the list I know he's writing, (even as he listens to me wailing) of what a huge accomplishment this is, and all the things I should be proud of, and all the things that will remain the same, and how nothing is really changing at all because it will only make the whole mess worse.

Instead he reminds me that none of this is fair.
That most of my life is like backwards day.
That good is bad.
That bad is good.
That I like the work, but fear the reward.
And that he doesn't get it, but he gets that he doesn't get it.
And that he gets that I don't get it either.

And that somehow makes me feel better.

Instead he talks to me about engine parts. All the tiny little things that make them run. The pieces that fit together, why they're important, and why they're special. He talks to me about the weather, or how the weather used to be, and I forget about the terrifying unknowns looming in front of me. That black inky mess of screaming temporal doom that's lingering out there just days ahead of me.

Because while rationally I understand that everything will be as it is, and nothing at all will change, there's not one teeny-tiny piece of me that really believes that.





I wish we worked toward graduation blindly. Unaware of how close it was looming above our heads. I wish the whole thing was done in secret. That the powers that be would just call you in the middle of the night and demand your presence before bestowing a degree upon you.

Because I would be okay if I couldn't see it coming.
It's the knowing it's out there that's awful.



Will I do this poster? Probably.
Will I show up in class tomorrow crying? Also, probably.
Will I be able to articulate what the heck is wrong with me? Probably not.
And that's okay.

As long as I keep moving forward it's all going to be okay.
(Or so I tell myself)

Procrastination is My Middle Name.

Well, it's a new day, and a new week. I'm less than 24 hours away from having to be able to prove that I'm moving forward on my final project and I have STILL yet to so much as come up with a list of potential topics.

I have, however, thought a lot about starting to think about thinking about possible topics, for what that's worth.

I have also, in fact, done everything else there is to do, that does not involve actually doing any work on this project. Or at least, almost everything else. So at some point in the semi-near future, I should (in theory) run out of other things to do, thereby forcing me to work on the project. Or so one would hope.

At the moment, however, I remain somehow, unconvinced that I will have anything to show her tomorrow, save for the always impressive excuse of 'I work better when unmonitored'...Pathological Demand Avoidance and such.

I am, however, confident that at some point, probably very, very near the deadline, I will get my act together, (probably while drinking brownie batter and crying) and finish this project.

My process looks something like this:

That's all I know. I love you lots. Lots and lots, and miss you perhaps even more.

I hope all is well. <3

My life

Is punctuated
with cats
finding plastic bags
to chew on.

It makes me crazy.

Just when I think I've eradicated all the plastic bags, one of them finds another one.

I
Hate
That
Sound.

Honestly, I hate most sounds right now, as I am finding all things terminally irritating and distracting.

At the top of the list is cats chewing on bags.
This if followed by:
The sound of water in the fish tanks. (which I am continually 'topping off' today in a futile effort to eliminate the trickling sound.)
The dog licking things.
The cats licking things.
The sound of the air conditioner running (because yes, it's still in the 70's here).
And of course, my irritating neighbor, who I believe is most likely wrestling bears.

I have now moved out of stage 1 (happily doing anything buy homework) into stage 2 (unable to focus due to external stimuli). Stage 3 (pacing around nervously) and Stage 4 (emotional exhaustion due to sleep deprivation) are rapidly approaching, which only when completed can stage 5 (completing actual homework assignments) begin.

It might be a rough couple of days.

So much for avoiding posts like these.

I miss your face sooooooo much. I hope your day gets better. Lots of love.
Me

mmmmeaty.

My brain feels all...mmmmeaty. like hamburger meat, or possibly ground up bacon. It's hard to say.

What isn't hard to say is that I have absolutely no interest in finishing any of my work for the semester, and I have successfully spent the past week actively avoiding anything that resembles a final project.

In fact, my abstract for my (only significant) final project was due on Nov. 20th, and I still have yet to so much as select a topic. Yeah...

And yet, I remain somehow, totally unconcerned.

It's not due until the 18th, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to pull this out of my ass in its entirety in the later hours of the 17th. I'm not sure what exactly that says about me, but I'm sure it's not good.

Then again, maybe it is.

My brain feels like meat-mush, so it's hard to trust its judgement right now.

I woke up extra early today, with every intention of at least looking into the kinds of topics I might want to consider doing my project on. Instead I've cleaned the house, taken a bath, watched season 1 of Archer, gone to Starbucks, taken the dog for a nice long walk, (inexplicably) gone to Walmart just to walk around, updated both facebook and instagram waaaaayyyyy more times than is acceptable, and now I'm writing you. Which is not at all to say that writing you is last on my list of thing to do, but rather that I've been trying to avoid another insufferable, oh-my-god-I-don't-want-to-do-my-homework (apparently I forgot to finish this sentence because you called me. Lol.) post, because I'm sure, by now it's become monotonous.

It's safe to say nothing is going to get done today.

<3

I miss you.

I've been making mental lists again.

Of things I desperately want to read once the semester is over, (Solzynitsyn, Gogol, Gravity's Rainbow, The Fifty Year Sword...) which only serves to remind me that there is (seemingly) no one in this entire godforsaken desert (which I love so desperately) who is even vaguely interested in reading anything other than Harry Potter, Twilight, or 50 Shades of Grey.

This makes me sad.

(Truthfully, this makes me incredibly worried about the fate of humanity, but that's another issue entirely.)

It's even more depressing because I know you and I would have had ridiculous literati lunches had it not been for all the time and distance between the two of us.

It's not fair, and for the record, I don't like it.

I do like you though. :) In case you somehow forgot.

I probably won't get a chance to talk to you again between now and the 21st. Procrastination has become an art form, in the truest sense of the term and now I've got a shit ton of work to get done in the next week and a half. Boo.





In other, totally unrelated news, I watched the trailer for Les Mis. last night and began weeping uncontrollably. It's that damn Do You Hear The People Sing? song.


Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!


It's Season 6 of Buffy all over again...the ridiculous obsessive fan girl in me just can't keep it together anymore. Anyway, I can't wait to see it. IN A THEATER. (<- huge deal)



That's all I know. Lots of love. <3

Just a quick note about The Beast Folk.

So, the last couple of nights I've had recurring dreams about different interactions with some sort of hybrid swine people.

It wasn't until I woke up in the early hours of this morning, still in the grips of a NyQuil induced stupor half way through How The Beast Folk Tasted Blood that I realized what happened.

First of all, I've been taking huge doses of NyQuil around the clock for the past 3 or 4 days in an attempt to sleep through the worst of this strep-y nonsense.

Secondly, in said drug induced stupor I apparently have been hitting 'play' on my "Audio Novellas" playlist instead of my Moby Dick audio book that I normally fall asleep to.

As a result I've been listening to The Island Of Dr. Moreau and Heart of Darkness on a continual loop in my sleep.

The results have been some pretty weird dreams.

Last night, for example, I dreamt you and I were trapped on a deserted jungle island. We made some badass weapons, went hunting for food and killed one of those hybrid swine folk. Then we dug a pit and barbequed it, luau style. Only it turned out to be like, SWSNBN, only in Beast People form. But we still ate it. Then we put the head on a spike (A la Heart of Darkness), threw the bones in the fire and danced like wild things until the ashes went cold.

This whole thing just totally reinforced my belief (by the way) that in a survival scenario, you and I would be terrifying and unstoppable together.

That's all I know.

Love!

Eight.

Seven.

six.

five.

four.

three.

Two (woah, woah, woah)

One

XP

So that's how you found me.
Rain falling all around me.
Looking down at a worm,
With a long way to go...


I am diligently avoiding doing anything resembling homework...again. I know, I know. It's nearly the end. Pull it together, girl.

But I just don't wanna.

Plus I'm just soooooo sick. (That's a valid excuse still, right?)


I miss your face, like, woah. And I wish you were here. I wish I had more things to say. I wish I were less sick and more motivated. Lol. I don't know. Two more weeks.


Ugh. Anyway, I owe you like a million little songs. I'm going to turn my playlist on and hit shuffle. I'll post the next 8 songs that come up. Should be a fun little experiment.

Ready?
Go!

Sick.

Sunday night I went to bed with a slightly sore throat. It was sore, but not terrible. It got progressively worse through the night...sore enough to wake me up several times. Around 3:45 or 4 in the morning I decided to just get up as it was obvious I wasn't going to be able to sleep any more.

I stumbled my way into the bathroom, my limbs still groggy from the NyQuil and prodded at my grossly swollen neck glands. I attempted to look in my mouth, but opening it/sticking my tongue out was painful.

I decided I would need to make it count, as I would most likely wuss out of opening my mouth again for days...oh if I only knew how true that was....

Anyway, I groped my way around the house in search of a flashlight and then stumbled back to the bathroom feeling rather victorious. I perched myself atop the sink and peered into the back of my throat (illuminating it with said flashlight) and then my world ENDED.

My right tonsil was grossly swollen and pitch BLACK. (They were both swollen and black-sh, but the right one was REALLY bad). How is that even possible??!!

Panic seized me.

My skin grew clammy, the room began to spin, and I spent the next 40 minutes in the bathtub alternating between googling "black tonsils" and vomiting profusely (which did not help AT ALL with the throat pain).

Around 5 I text my dad "911, HELP. FEVER. CHILLS. BLACK TONSILS???!!! GOING TO DIE"

Dad texted back, "ouch." followed by "just self medicate, I'm sure it will be fine".

Totally not helpful.

I poked at said giant tonsil with a q-tip and it POPPED. Black stuff began oozing out of it and I started vomiting again, mostly I think, due to panic. (possibly also due to the gross and/or ick factor).

At 6:15 I gathered up the courage to call out of work (talking was sooooooooo painful) and headed to the ER, having totally convinced myself that my tonsils were necrotic and I was at death's door.

On the space on the ER form for why I needed to be seen I wrote "woke up and tonsils were black??!! Poked one and it POPPED??!! Pretty sure that's not supposed to happen? Why is this happening??!!"

Nothing of note really happened at the ER, save for the throat swab. I told her ahead of time that I sometimes (read:always) have control issues and because I've never had a throat swab before there was no telling how I would react.

Apparently, I do not react well.

No sooner was the q-tip in my mouth than I was biting down and ferociously shaking my head from side to side. To make matters more awkward, my mouth would not open to release the swab. Would. Not. Open. After a few minutes, I calmed down and released it. Feeling more prepared for the second swab I decided we should try it again, but the results were the same.

Finally I just asked meekly if she would please just let me do it, since apparently, I was not about to let her swab my gross tonsil. She consented and the swabbing proceeded without issue. It did however, return from my mouth covered in blood and black stuff.

My lab results came back positive for strep throat, which was amazing because despite being immuno-compromised, I have never EVER had strep throat. It's the one thing I've traditionally been resistant to, but apparently there's a first time for everything.

In addition, my gross black/popped tonsil was a tonsillar abscess which had to be drained. This was...unpleasant. However, I felt MUCH better once it was over with.

That being said, I still feel like death. I've spent the past 36 hours alternating between fitful naps and hot baths. (I think I took upwards of 8 baths yeasterday alone.) My throat looks much more strep-y today, covered with big streaks of puss, and grossly swollen (but much less black). I'm having a hard time sleeping, both because I have to take meds every 4 hours, and because the pain in my neck/throat/teeth/ears is insufferable when laying down.

I have to go back to work/school tomorrow, so hopefully I'll sleep better tonight and I'll be able to talk a little bit better in the morning. :/

That's all I know.

I miss you terribly.
Lots of love.
Me.

Better.

I felt almost instantly better after writing that last post, and fell fast asleep (for the first time in days) shortly thereafter. The anxiety since then has been coming in waves. It washes over me, and then retreats. I expect things will remain this way through the end of the semester (which NO, I am not looking forward to. AT. ALL. Mostly because it brings with it waaaaaay more change than I'm comfortable with.).

I'd write down a list of anxiety sources (though the aforementioned one is by far the greatest), but I think that having to look at them all written down and staring back at me might push me over the edge. Lists are not my friends. Or at least, written lists are not. They're fine in my head, but insufferable and suffocating once written down, so for now at least, the plan is to focus only on the immediate task at hand, and pretend everything else does not exist.

You know, my usual M.O.

We'll see how long that lasts.

In other news, I'm in the middle of building a frame for my new bed. It's basically a hack of some Ikea bookshelves, and I'm pretty dang thrilled about it. I've got to pick up one more this weekend after I get paid, and then maybe I'll post some pics of it.

I say maybe, because if history is anything to go by, the very act of writing that statement down pretty much guarantees that I won't follow through with it. Demand avoidance, and all that.

I'm moving the larger of the fish tanks this weekend, which will be interesting considering it houses all my big fish. I have a 14 inch black ghost knife in there (named Marlow) who is going to be super pissed about the situation. There's also a pretty big pink tailed chalceus (Heathcliff), some large catfish (Starbuck and Stubb), a large angel (Queequeg)[who for the record, has gotten HUGE over the past year or so], and a big/fat gold spot pleco called Tashtego.

How exactly I'm going to transport them has yet to be decided. Some of them will undoubtedly be transported via bags, like they are when you purchase them from the fish store, but some of them, particularly Marlow, are just too big to spend very long in a bag. Right now I'm thinking about maybe using the cooler? But we'll have to see how that goes.

That's all I know, or at least all I can think of today. I'm currently suffering through a biostats lecture, I'm starving, and my computer is dying. But if this is the lowest point in my day, I'll be super pleased. Lol. :)

Lots of love.

monday monday.

Sundays.....

Saturday Song.

Song for Friday.

If there were a merciful god,

he would have given me a brain aneurism by now.

Or so I tell myself.

This week I have begun rapidly unraveling. The problem(s) started two(?) maybe three weeks ago. They all seemed like such minor things at the time, and in true Little Foot fashion, I failed to notice the impending doom. Instead, I just wandered around telling myself everything was peachy, that my marvelous happy/hyper energy was due to all the wonderful things I have in my life right now and not at all related to the fact that I was running full speed at (and rapidly approaching) my maximum anxiety level cliff.

Until, that is, I suddenly stopped being able to eat/sleep/concentrate and began wandering around on the verge of tears with my organs all balled up in tight little angry knots. Then, and only then did I notice the drop-off ahead.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's the end of the semester. This ALWAYS happens. And to some degree that's true. But it's not usually on this scale.

I wish I could write out what exactly it is that's bothering me, but really, I'm not even sure I could. What started out as a lot of small, seemingly insignificant things has somehow snowballed into an avalanche of giant, significant things, desperately seeking to destroy me.

They won't, don't get me wrong, but it's days like today that I have to remind myself that if I were a weaker person I would have given up by now. That I've only made it this far because I'm stubborn as all get-out and I just refuse to give up. Even when dark, terrible, impossible things seem to be looming over me. Even when I'm a panicky, anxiety ridden mess. Even when I'm failing to function on a satisfactory level. I still just keep moving forward.

Aaarghhhhhhhh.

What I really want, more than anything is a hot bath. I've convinced myself, albeit, rather foolishly, that that's the one thing that has the power to make me feel better. Of course, to add to the list of minor annoyances, I can't take one for like, another week. And all the showers in the world (and believe me, I've had more than a few today), just aren't cutting it.

*Le Sigh*
First World Problems.

I miss your FACE, Lady. I wish you were here to commiserate with me. For now though, I'm going to have a bowl of Waldorf Salad in your honor, and pray to the powers that be to get me through the next three weeks. Lol.

Lots Of Love!!! <-(also could be lol, HA!)
me.

Friday.

Tomorrow would be OUR Thanksgiving dinner, and I'm both dreading and looking forward to it simultaneously. Right now however, I'm exhausted. Bleary eyed. But happy and thankful for my wonderful life.

I miss your face. Terribly, in case I haven't made that clear enough. <3 I wish you were here. <3

Turkey Day!

Today I am grateful for so many things. For the wonderful year that I've had. For the things I've managed to achieve. For my wonderful family. For my amazing friends. For YOU Dear Friend. For my critters. For my job. For the clear sky we had tonight, and the amazing view of the stars. For clarity. For inner peace. For self-sufficiency. For ambition and life goals, two things I had taken for granted before. For all sorts of magical things that make my life blessed.

I'm grateful for these things everyday. Today however, I say an extra big thank you to the universe, for these things and many more.

Life is Beautiful.
Turkey is tasty.
And now I am tired.



I miss your face Dear Friend, and I wish we could have spent the night drinking amaretto sours and stuffing ourselves with turkey and pie together. I can't believe this is the second Thanksgiving since you left, that feels...I don't know, almost impossible. I hope your day was lovely, even though you had to work. I hope there was as little stress as possible, and that at least the food was spectacular.

Lots of love.
Me.

Wednesday

Wednesday was brutal. I worked my ass off, and then I worked it off some more. The needs were endless, and the requests just kept coming. Every time I though I was almost done something else came up. Ridiculous. On the bright side though, my dad did bring me pie for breakfast, so I guess that means I broke even. :)

Tuesaday!

Interpretive dance makes my life. Also, Pink is a sexy bitch...just sayin'.

One more for good measure...

I freaking love Cher. Love. All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly. I can't help it, and today was one big, long, Cher dance party. I am ANXIOUSLY awaiting her new album in December. All things in life are beautiful right now. All things. Lots of love. *muah*

Song of the day!!!!!!!

Huh.

What a strange day today was!

I woke up this morning in a pretty good mood. I finished scrubbing all the carpets and got a handle on the rest of the housework. A little later my sister came over and we hung out for most of the day. We've somehow become pretty good friends over the past six months or so. Anyway, she's currently camped out in my living room.

Also, I'm moving in with her. Like, now-ish. Like giving my notice of intent to break my lease in the morning. I know, right? Where did that come from?

I'm sad to be leaving my lovely apartment, particularly since I just got it looking the way I wanted it to recently, but I am happy for a lot of other reasons.

I'll tell you all about it the next time we get to talk. I miss you tons.
Love and stuff,
Me.

Song for Friday!

Song for Yesterday.

This one is just sooooo mellow and beautiful I could just wrap myself up in it forever.

Thanksgiving!

Today is going to be a wonderful day, it's decided. I can feel it in my bones. I've got to finish the carpets and take care of some other pre-gaming stuff regarding this weeks festivities. How I'm going to make it through three dinner parties, I'll never know. But rest assured, I will! And not only that, but they will be AMAZING.

I.
Am.
So.
Psyched.
!!!!!

(Though, clearly nowhere near as psyched as if you were going to be here, but I think that goes without saying at this point. I miss our dinner parties to an insane degree.)

I'm also super ready for this semester to be over. :) Not that I'm not enjoying it, and not that I don't just LOVE school, because I do, but because at this point, I'm totally just...done. *laughs*

I'm ready for some me time, at least for a couple of months. I'm ready to be able to quit my job if/when I feel like it rather than being bound to it by my impossible class schedule. I'm ready to do something different for a little while. I'm ready to take the GRE, and then to devote the next ten years of my life to absolutely nothing but studying. I'm ready for a lot of things. However, I am not ready for class on Monday. Nope, not at all. ;)


Eh, I miss your face Dear Friend. Lots and lots. Song of the day is Angry Johnny. Love!!

Thursday.

I'll take your breath away....

Song for Today.

Well Dear Friend, I survived another Wednesday. :) Now the sun has set, I'm eating homemade cookies and listening to Dressy Bessy, all week in the knees from its loveliness.

Miss you terribly. <3

Song for Yesterday!

Flayed.

Today I flayed my little toe. It's exceptionally gross. I tripped in the dark and stepped down (hard) on that little metal piece the protects the corners of the box spring. It's rounded and not even vaguely sharp, but it somehow went in deep and peeled a big, super thick flap of skin off.

Gross, and/or ick.

There was blood everywhere. In fact, I can't recall another (accidental) injury that bled anywhere near this much.

I'll post the picture for you in the morning, but the depth and inherent meaty-ness of the whole thing can't accurately be conveyed via photography.

And with that, I'm going to bed.


<3

Give 'em the ol' razzle-dazzle,

Today Dear Friend was one of the more productive days I've had in recent memory.

It started out poorly as I inexplicably had four cups of coffee just before bed Saturday night and as a result slept fitfully. This was further exacerbated by a series of phone calls and text messages that punctuated what little sleep I got, from two thirty to six am. Around eight am I admitted defeat and hauled myself out of bed.

I was a bit restless this morning which was mostly I think, due to delirium, and I just couldn't commit to anything. I sort of half did several things on my to do list before getting dressed and going grocery shopping.

I got my food, came home, put it away and had lunch. I opened up the windows and doors, (it's in the 70's now), and watched some more AbFab. At some point I got restless and started cleaning.

Not only did I clean the vast majority of the house top to bottom, but I restructured and re-organized some areas that were starting to get...cluttery. I went through all my things and packed up everything that needs to be donated and got rid of all the old TVs and stuff that I have lying around. (Now I just have that one storage closet of doom to go through!) I also got rid of the patio furniture that I no longer want and swept and scrubbed the patio.

I spent a great deal of time re-working my bedroom and I am now, officially, ninety-nine percent satisfied with it. The only thing it's lacking are actual curtains and then it will exactly as I want it. I'm hoping to get those up next weekend, but I can't totally commit to that just yet. :)

At any rate, my house looks awesome, which is particularly great since its damn near Thanksgiving, and my house is going to be crawling with people over the next couple of weeks. I'm trying desperately not to lament the fact that you won't be here for the festivities again this year. Its weird having holidays without you around. This year is going to be even stranger than last year since I've got an entirely new thing going on and three separate dinner parties to execute. Hopefully the deviation from the old routine will help.

At any rate, I miss your face. I hope things are super fantastic. Tell P I say hello.

Song of the day is a dream sequence from AbFab



Sweet dreams Dear Friend!! :)

Poor Oscar.

Well Dear Friend, somehow yet another weekend has come and gone. I'm not sure where all the time goes, but I am sure that it's going.

This weekend was so lovely, but almost totally uneventful. Yesterday the dog and I mostly lazed about. I had intended to do a great many things, but instead we mostly spent the day with the windows open watching AbFab and enjoying the weather. Mostly...

Oscar's been feeling unwell for the last couple of months. He's had one bladder infection after the other, and has been generally unhappy. The vet suggested I start feeding them wet food in addition to their dry food since part of the problem may be that he's just not drinking enough water.

I did this, and both the cats were very happy about the new wet food, or at least they were...for a couple of hours. The first cue that something was wrong was a terrible odor that kept wafting through the house. I had anticipated this though, so I wasn't particularly concerned. However, later in the evening our AbFab marathon was interrupted by some strange sounds. I paused the video and heard Oscar's very distinct, soft little mew, punctuating what can only be described as the sounds of acute gastrointestinal distress.

I went back to investigate, but Oscar met me half way between my spot on the couch and his previous position in the litter box, dragging is poo covered butt down the length of the hallway. His ears were down and back and he looked up at me with a face full of sheer desperation as he scooted his way down the carpet. Poor sick, gross, Cat Man.

I scooped him up and plopped him into the tub.

(Gross.)

Poor, poor Pants Man.

He had to have a bath.
And a hair cut.

He spent most of the rest of the evening curled up in a ball looking deflated.

I spent most of the rest of the night scrubbing his butt trail out of the carpet. :/ The carpet looks nice again, but I'll be picking up a rug doctor this weekend for good measure.

Today he seems to be feeling much better. We've had no other issues with the wet food, I think he just had to survive the initial shock to his system. He's currently curled up in my lap sucking on his blanket and purring away.

Hopefully the worst of it is behind us.

Multi tasking.

This is me listening to my lecture while writing a paper and having dinner and a hookah at King Tuts. There have been internet connectivity issues at home all day and it was just running toooo slow for me to be able to accomplish anything. Hopefully by tomorrow they'll fix it. Anyway...

I think the last time I was here Dear Friend, you were here with me, like days before you left. As a result I'm feeling a bit...nostalgic. I'd say I'm feeling sad, I'd like to write sad as a matter of fact, but it isn't really 'sad' at all. It's something altogether different but I'm unsure how to properly identify it.

I guess that means nostalgic will have to do. :)

Speaking of nostalgic, this song has been so thoroughly stuck in my head all day. On repeat. 'over and over...' <-ha!

Lots of love to you and yours.

In the run down to finals.

We're in the thick of it now. As a result my time is...limited? Missing entirely? One of the two. Anyway, I miss your face. I owe you so many happy little songs, and so many pieces of my life. I'll try and get caught up asap. Lots of love.

*Eeeeep!!*

I don't know about you, but I'm on the edge of my seat watching the election!

You know me, politics and I are not friends. In fact, I distinctly loathe, all things politics/election related except for this part. It seems so much less...I don't know, ominous and hate-filled once the campaigning is over. Now it's totally out of our hands, (or at least it is in theory) so there's no point (again, in theory) in worrying about it.

Now I'm going to go take a bubble bath, have a pumpkin beer, and watch the states change colors.

Today I will be grateful that the campaigning is over. Tomorrow I will worry about the results.

Hooray for the end of the election season!

Lots of love!

Song for Today!

This is my theme song of the moment. This one, and Werewolf by Cocorosie. <3

Saturday!

Song for Friday

Song for Thursday!

Say What?!

November? How did this happen?

I find myself in this predicament every year. I love October so dearly, but somehow the time just seems to hemorrhage out of and away from me. Before I know it my feet are already in November. It seems somehow unjust that time moves so much faster when I try to slow down and enjoy it.

Last week in particular just flew by. I did go out to celebrate Halloween, but did not make it out on the actual night. Instead I spent the weekend before hanging out in costume at Sanctum. They had a blood party and then we hung out at the gay Denny's until the sun came up. It was super fun, but staying out until 5 or 6 in the morning seriously kicks my ass these days. :)

My sister had a costume party, well, actually two of them. I missed the first one because I was sick.

(Did I mention there were 36 hours there where my apartment inexplicably just wreaked of paint thinner? Yeah, it made me super sick.)

I tried to stay home that night and get some rest, but my crazy neighbor, who to the best of my knowledge, has never ever in the two years he's lived above me, had ANYONE over to his apartment, decided to throw some massive dub-step soaked Halloween dance party all night. I managed to sleep through the first couple of hours of it, a-la tylenol pm and my migraine medicine, but as they got progressively more drunk, they got progressively more loud. Around 1 am I got dressed, packed up the dog and headed to my Dads.

In the morning we had coffee, and then spent the day shopping for my birthday. Shoe shopping. The worst kind of shopping there is. Lol. Do you know how hard it is to find a good work/athletic shoe in a size 5? Because it's super hard. It's even harder once you factor in the fact that I just can't justify spending $50/60/70/80/90+ on shoes (even if I'm not the one paying for them). It took all day, but we had lots of fun. We also picked up some power tools (because really, who doesn't want more tools?) and some flashlights, got lunch, and headed over to my sister's for her second costume party. This one was for the kids, so it was really mellow and cute. (Little B was Darth Vader and it was ridiculously adorable.)

My neighbor was up gaming all night the next couple of nights. He threw some pretty fantastic toddler style fits, including kicking the floor and throwing what I assume was the controller to his system. As a result I was pretty cranky for most of the week.

My birthday came and went. I was taken out to dinner by someone different every night the whole week which was pretty awesome. (You know how much I love food!) I also got to see a lot of the people I haven't gotten to hang out with much in the past couple of years so that was really nice.

I had every intention of heading out on Halloween, but when it came down to it, I ended up working late (and coming home grumpy), I was super tired from my neighbor screaming all night (all week), and I just wasn't up for spending the night on Mill. Instead I went home, got dressed up, made caramel apples, had a pumpkin beer, and watched Repo!. My neighbor, miraculously was nearly silent all night, and just having the night to myself in peace and quiet was the greatest thing in all the world.

I'm still (clearly) exhausted, and my neighbor continues to scream at his video games at night, though now it seems to be becoming less frequent again. My writing, I know, has gotten really flat over the course of the last 8 months or so, I know. I'm hoping that once the semester is over and I have some time to decompress my voice will come back to me. In the mean time, you're just going to have to take me as I am.

I miss you Dear Friend! I hope your holiday was super fun! Lots of love.

Song for Halloweek!

Cocorosie - Gallows


Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party


The Time Warp


Siouxsie and the Banshees - Cities in the Dust


Delta Rae - Dance in the Graveyards


Ministry - stigmata


The Postmarks- Every day is Halloween:


Happy Halloween!!!

Only Tuesday?

Ooooohhh mmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyyy ggggggggoooooooossssssshhhhh. Why am I awake? Why is it only Tuesday? And why on earth aren't weekends three days instead of two?

The crazy man who lives above me was at it again last night. (Actually he's been in rare form all week). At this point, I'm operating under the assumption that he's either smoking a TON of meth, or he's a gamer with some seriously unchecked anger issues (probably the later).

The late night screaming had stopped for several months, but it's back and louder than ever. Last night, just after midnight he screamed 'F*ck You!!!!!' so loud that it not only woke me out of a dead sleep, but I literally jumped out of my bed in a panic.

This was followed by hours of similar behavior, on and off. 'NoNoNoNONONONO!!!!' and 'F*ck you, you f*cking motherf*cker' topped the list of favorite phrases, and as usual it was accompanied with him pounding on the floors (my ceiling), kicking and throwing things like a crazy man, and slamming doors.

Both the police and the new building management have been unhelpful thus far, so for the time being I'm just trying to wait it out (again), as apparently this behavior comes in clusters.

For now, I look like this in the mornings:

...so bad, apparently, that the guy at Starbucks gave me my coffee free this morning. Plus an extra black coffee for good measure, though I doubt there's enough coffee in the world to make me feel better. Ha!

It's going to be a great day anyway. I can feel it in my bones. <3

Lots of love.

Trona Part 3.

At any rate, the black mud was super viscous and much harder to clean off my crystals than anticipated. I quickly decided I was wasting time attempting to clean them there and instead unloaded my haul into a different bucket in the trunk and and headed back out there.

This was what my shoes looked like before heading back out the second time:

By this point, things were pretty well picked over, (there were a lot of people there) but I still managed to collect several more really nice fist sized crystals. I headed back to the car with my finds, packed up, and headed back to the gem and mineral society.

Here is what my shoes looked like when I'd finished at the mud pits (they got sucked clear off my feet twice!):

[I still have to email the photos of the actual crystals from my phone to myself so I can upload them here, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work blogger from my smart phone...actually, I can't really figure out how to work anything on my smartphone except facebook, and that's only because it already had an app thing installed on it. Lol. Technology and I are not friends. At any rate, I'll try and get them up for you today-ish.]

In between field trips I wandered around, I ate lots of tasty things (they were selling something called "pepper bellies" which I ordered out of sheer curiosity, and it turned out to be Frito pie. I've never heard it called a pepper belly before, but it was still delicious. :) I bought lost of pretty things, and then wandered back to the car to work on cleaning the mud off some of my crystals, and to wait for the next trip to begin.

The second trip was to the Blow Hole. Basically, this whole area sits above a giant underground brine lake. All of these precipitate minerals grow down there in large formations, and once a year they drill holes in the ground, lower a hundred pounds of dynamite into each hole, and then detonate it to blow all those formations into smaller pieces. Then they lower this pipe attached to some sort of machine and it sucks up the brine and crystals and blows it all out over the ground so we can pick through the crystals.

I have a video of it on my phone, and if I can figure out how to get it on here, I will totally post it for you. If not, the dirty jobs episode "mud excavator" covers all of this pretty well. :)

Anyway, the Blow Hole is where my creeper troubles started, but I'll leave as much of that out of my story as possible because, really, it's just not that interesting.

The crystals I got here were prettier than the ones I got from the mud pits (and way cleaner), but significantly smaller. Here's a picture of the ground, totally covered in crystals.

And one of a hanksite crystal I found:

My computer is dying now Dear Friend, so more later, as always. I miss your face woman! So much!

"Hermit" Is Not A Life Goal.

When I was in fifth grade we had to keep class 'journals'. Every day we were given a topic question and then we had to write about it. There were two questions that I answered 'incorrectly' which raised some red flags and resulted in parent teacher conferences. These two things have stuck in my craw for, I don't know, twenty or so years now. :)

The first was: If you could drive any kind of car when you grow up what would it be?

My answer was that I wanted to drive a hearse. Not a hearse like you see today, but a glass-paneled horse-drawn hearse like the Black Moriah in Tombstone (because of course, I'd just been there and it's super cool. Who wouldn't want to drive that thing?). It of course would need to be painted purple, because everything is better in purple.

(This is the Black Moriah, just for reference)

This immediately got me flagged as 'troubled'. Now, sixth grade was not my finest year. In fact, my life was at its most chaotic at this point, for a variety of reasons that aren't worth going into here. What is worth mentioning though is that for all the darkness in my life at this point, I was still a model student 99.9 percent of the time, and the legit issues that I had were the result of poor social skills and a total inability to read subtext. At any rate, I remain irritated that my purple hearse was deemed so socially unacceptable that my parents had to be called in. I felt then, much as I do now, that I justified my decision well, and that it was a reasoned and rational answer to an open ended question. Besides that, I don't think a purple horse drawn hearse is the hallmark of a serial killer in the making.

What I learned from that first 'wrong' answer was that people don't actually want to know what I want. They just want to hear that I want the same things (or at least similar things) that they do. I spent most of the rest of the year answering my questions based on what I thought my teacher wanted me to like. This, strangely enough, has been a valuable life skill, but that I suppose is neither here nor there.

The second question was: What do you want to be when you grow up?

This seems like a fairly straight forward question. I lapsed a little on my previously strict 'only write what the teacher wants to hear' rule on this one, though I did censor myself somewhat.

As I'm sure you know Dear Friend, as a child I wanted to be one of two things when I grew up.

The first was a grizzly bear so that I could live alone in the woods and eat lots of berries...and also, you know, anyone who bothered me. I opted out of giving this response since years earlier I had been told that I shouldn't want to eat people, and that no matter how hard I try I'll never EVER be able to be a grizzly bear. Never mind that eating people wasn't my goal per-say, but rather the consequence of sustained and forced social interaction. And never mind that my whole life everyone was preaching the 'you can be anything you put your mind to' mantra, so 'anything' does not include bears? Seems to me like someone should have qualified that one before I had my heart set on something outside the 'anything' realm.

Anyway, the second was a hermit, so I could live in the woods and eat lots of berries and be left alone. This, truthfully, remains my life goal, though it takes on other names from time to time (and now it's more like the high desert than the woods, but you get the idea). At any rate, this was not acceptable either as everyone is so concerned with socialization and social interaction and networking and whatever else that they just can't grasp why anyone (who wasn't a potential serial killer) would want to be alone all of the time. My parents were subsequently called, counselors were consulted and I retained the mark of the troubled child.

But the fact of the matter is that I'm the happiest and the least lonely when I'm alone. This has always been true for me, even as a very small child. Other people, well, some other people, I guess I should qualify that - close friends and immediate family - are fantastic parts of life. Amazing and wonderful, and all sorts of other things, but without quality (and quantity, really) time alone to recharge all of that becomes meaningless as the amount of sensory input just shuts my brain down and I fail to function. Besides that, other people slow me down. They are, for the most part terribly inefficient, talking constantly about things they want to be doing, or could be doing, but not actually doing them. That bothers me. I just want to sit down somewhere quiet and do things. I do not want to have to sit down and talk about all the possible ways to go about doing it.

Anyway, my point in all of that is, that my end goal, even now, is to get to a point where I can spend the majority of my time alone, working on research/projects that interest me with minimal forced day-to-day interaction with other people. I'm not opposed to having to work with other people, really I'm not. But I want to get to a place where I'm able to have some level of control over how much face-to-face interaction I have to have on a daily level.

People ask me what specifically I want to do with my degree, and I don't have a good answer for them. Because the fact of the matter is that I don't really care WHAT I'm doing, so long as I'm doing it somewhere quiet, and preferably alone. That's just where I do my best work. Simple fact.

But no matter how carefully I word my response, and no matter how carefully people try to word their replies, what their answers always boil down to is this:

Being a Hermit is not a (socially acceptable) life goal.

And you know what? I think that's lame. I think it was lame when I was in fifth grade, and I think it's lame today. We're not all the same, and our end goal shouldn't be to homogenize the human experience to the point where we all fit comfortably into tiny little socially acceptable boxes. I don't recoil in horror when I meet someone who wants to be a pharmaceutical rep, even though that's my own personal version of hell, why does everybody recoil when I say my end goal is a quiet life of introspection?

At any rate, today (while having this hermit conversation yet again) I came up with the solution to my problem. From now on whenever anybody asks me about my life goals or what I want to do with my degree or anything else I'm going to tell them my goal is retirement. How I get there is irrelevant, as long as I get to retire. And do you know why? Because that period, the post-retirement period, is when reclusive behavior begins to become socially acceptable. Because at 65 or 70, society assumes you've earned the right to pack up and move into the a yurt in the middle of the desert to eat nothing but cactus fruit and scorpions and only to interact with other people at their leisure.

At 28 however, it's still as unacceptable as it was at 10.

And for that matter, it's still almost as unacceptable was wanting to be a grizzly bear. . .it's just slightly more plausible.

And that Dear Friend, that, was all she wrote.

I miss you terribly. I hope your weekend is marvelous, and say hello to P for me. (Bebop too). Lots of love.

Me