behind the curtains

Just wanna say to people I know who still peek out from behind the curtains because no one hears you screaming for help, I know. Me too. I'm out here, yeah. I'm a perky pinky nowadays. But all that stuff still goes on inside.

Today begins the long holiday season. Please know I am here, and I see you, and I hear you. Just because I'm out here doesn't mean I'm not still lurking in the dark. I know it's hard to talk about your stuff, and it's really hard for me to be a friend, but please know I am here. We are here together lurking, ok? I see your numbers, your geolocations, your IPs.

Depression lies. It makes us feel alone and tells us people don't care. This one night of the year when all the 'freaks' come out and it's ok to stand out in the open and not be noticed- I notice you.

If you need someone to talk to right now- *click*
international suicide hotlines
national domestic violence hotline (U.S.)
veterans crisis hotline
24 hour crisis hotline (depression)

I'm having a day myself, but I'm going to be all right, because I want to be. I'm not believing the lies today.

:edit: 11-26-14 In case you want to keep reading. awake when I'm asleep

Happy Pinkyween

You know you're brainless when you assume you've had your second cup of coffee because your cup isn't where you thought you left it, but then you can't find it anywhere to rinse out, and you finally run into it in the microwave.

There's a Pink-O-Ween board on pinterest. You get cool effects when you click their pic.

I finally got my jackolantern done last night. Ok, Scott got the drill out and plowed out some marks I made. Kids see one face coming up the steps and another face turning away from my door. And yes, there is a wad of pink Christmas lights in there.

Halloween is my fave holiday. I tell everyone that. Most people have no idea why. Thank goodness that has radically changed and Halloween is getting fun again.

For years I watched the Ghost Hunters Halloween specials and wore my TAPS tee, so Halloweens feel a bit empty since they stopped doing that.

Then last year there was a really fun Snarkalec Radio Halloween show.

No idea what the plan is this year. I'll probably tweet or fall asleep while @bonenado watches TV and hands candy out.

I need to get myself pulled together, we've got a burrito kitty showing up in about 7 hours or so to get some goodies, and then we must stand vigil for the yearly protection racket which has been nearly stamped out the last few years by a super religious family on our street that throws street blocking praise parties that terrify all the little kids in normal Halloween masks, so we drum our fingers for the tiny batches of looters that manage to make it through the blockade every half hour or so.

This one already has the bonenado family genetically enhanced indomitable spirit. Fear for the future.

crazy long post and WINNING

I'm only minutes out of a dream where giant bugs from a space infestation took over our entire planet and they used their collective hive mind and ingenious nanorobotics to quickly take over our food supply from raw earth to finished product. It still all basically looked the same, but every single bite of food we were stuck eating was molecularly contorted and embued with giant bug something, and it was mutating all of us into a giant sticky mass of collective thought, literally. I remember picking through a few items in a cafeteria and spitting stuff out, I remember finding a few survivors scrounging for old outdated food in garbage heaps that hadn't yet been incinerated, and I remember an attack we coordinated on one of the giant blobs that was filling up a whole university and ingesting students and faculty into its collective. I remember it oozed around my foot and I could hear other people's thoughts for a brief second before I yanked my foot loose with a big sucky squelching noise, and I lost my shoe to its stickiness. I ran really hard across a lawn to another building and up some stairs, and that's about where I woke up.

This is Pinky's brain on a diet. Srsly, as I'd say on the twitters.

Those of you still new to me don't know I have been a devout Kathy Griffin fan for many, many years. I loved when she taunted Hollywood about weight loss and made fun of all their gimmicks while she suffered through simply cutting her calories down, saying she was snarky and mean because she was hungry all the time.


Ok, moving on. Two days to Halloween, and you know what? That awesome list I made yesterday, all the things I got done and had a GREAT DAY, and I *still* forgot to buy candy for trick-or-treaters. I KNOW! BRAIN FAIL!!!! Because that is the one thing I didn't actually have written on the list.

When I go back and read it was mutating all of us into a giant sticky mass of collective thought I can't help wondering if this infestation has already happened, because look at all of us tweeting pix of our food porn...

Back to now. Wait, go back to yesterday. I've done my best to avoid entanglement with a living, breathing psychiatrist for decades, but wound up being assessed by one last year about this time right smack dab in the middle of a manic euphoria episode. Since I'd been plastered for years on handfuls of meds for really ludicrous amounts of pain and suffering and had only recently gotten clean from stuff that Hollywood people wind up in posh detox hotels for, I was not aware that I have manic swings because who can tell through all that crap? Explains a few things about my childhood and my adult personality, though, so I'm good with it, and after a year of negotiating my way back out of MOAR MEDS, I was thilled yesterday that my psychiatrist was thrilled that not only had I not gained weight on last month's prednisone, but had lost 5 pounds since and am actually sleeping 8-10 hours a day regularly now, and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, convinced the man that I am disciplined enough to stay off head meds.



I blame society. Click this to see who I grabbed this glorious Johnny Depp cosplay from.


And this gave me the warm fuzzies.



This won twitter yesterday. Click for source.


This won facebook.

Gotta end this somewhere. Where's my celebration song?!! Hang on... here we go.

Eat me!

I actually said it- So much for Halloween, may as well just let it go and wait till it comes back around next year.

>< 

That's a facepalm. You know, eyes squinched shut. Ok, nevermind.

I've been getting my days (and weeks) mixed up even more monumentally than normal, and it hit me yesterday Halloween cards I had for a couple of months hadn't been sent out yet, and then it hit me last night I haven't even gotten my bills ready to go yet, and it's hitting me this morning that the rest of the holiday slide is going to be like this and I may as well just let it all hum over my head now. I can't both participate AND keep a steady schedule of any kind going. So back to my old ways- holidays is what other people do. I sit in a corner in my own little world vaguely aware of the world twirling around me.

So I made a big ol' list last night, I've got a big ol' day in front of me to get this stuff back in line, and since it involves driving I'm going to enjoy what I can of autumn peak before it's gone, because I was wandering around Walmart like a derelict yesterday and I didn't even pick up Halloween candy for trick-or-treaters. Yeah, it's that bad.

Meanwhile, @bonenado is having a ball. I live vicariously through him.

This scene saves me.

GO PINKY (stress bomb = pink confetti glitter)

They say go big or go home. Pinky wants to go back to bed...

We're officially in countdown now. Four days to Halloween, a month after that till Thanksgiving, a month after that till Christmas, a week after that is New Year's, and suddenly it's all about property taxes and getting our car tags up to date. Scott reminded me yesterday that I still haven't made a single popcorn ball yet. Does anyone else have mini panic attacks over popcorn ball stress?

@DepressedDarth says it best. Click the snip if you wanna go retweet it into your own timeline so you can look cool, too.

I think I'm awake enough now to GO BIG.

Now go grab Monday and throw it against the wall. WE CAN DO THIS. It's ok if you trip and end up flying like Arthur Dent, you know, because Monday. I'd put another GO BIG here, but by now some of you are giggling about the whole wrong idea, just go drink your coffee and quit stalling.

Squirrelimus Prime

From wikipedia.

Fifty-three is the 16th prime number. It is also an Eisenstein prime, and a Sophie Germain prime. The sum of the first 53 primes is 5830, which is divisible by 53, a property shared by few other numbers. 53 written in hexadecimal is 35, that is, the same characters used in the decimal representation, but reversed. At least four multiples of 53 share this property: 371 = 173₁₆, 5141 = 1415₁₆, 99481 =18499₁₆, and 8520280 = 820258₁₆. 53 cannot be expressed as the sum of any integer and its base-10 digits, making 53 a self number. 53 is the smallest prime number that does not divide the order of any sporadic group.

The last time I was a prime number I had some wildly interesting self growth spurts.

Now I'm brainwashing our future. Y'all better hold on tight.

 

Scott getting after me to fix my team NOW because his morning ADHD on coffee is making him very pacey.

let 'em rip, people, it's my fête d'anniversaire joyeux

Every birthday comes with a price. Today's was a nearly 30 minute phone call from an insurance company because my guy on Wednesday wrote my identification claim number wrong on a new policy application. Since I've had much worse birthdays, I'm hoping for his cosmic sake that all his other paperwork turned out just fine and he has a better weekend than usual, because I believe my birthday should be wonderful for everybody.

When I was little I'd watch these old movies where the kingdom turns out for the queen's birthday or something, and as I got older I realized that basically it's nothing more than giving the poor people a supervised day off so they can admire someone wealthy having a wonderful time, and as long as you entertain them and booze them up, they're sorta good with it. We do the same thing now with television.

I may not be much more than a search engine queen, but I hope everyone I know and everyone they know has a really good extra special something today, like maybe your lunch was awesome or traffic goes smoother than usual or your spouse or kid gives you a great hug or money shows up somewhere or maybe you get even something as simple as a quiet nap- I hope something in your day makes you feel good, even for a little while. If I could hand out birthday presents on my birthday, it would be that nice feeling you get when the stress lightens up and something cool makes you smile. Click the unicorn for a cute story.

@bonenado is lucky, he gets to eat all my little birthday petits fours because I can't have any more wheat, but I'm going to make up for it with losing another pound this week, yay!

And for my extra special friends and loved ones, may all your farts today be pink.
 

Lexx m'a fait stupide

K, I don't even know what to do with this. Not sure what bothers me more, that he's pink or that I found him in a 'pink goth' search. Someone spent quality time working on this one, which probably makes the rest of my day incredibly successful no matter how many times I fall on my face.

This, too, came up in the same 'pink goth' search, and I'm torn between being disturbed over these search parameters and wondering how far I live from Hayti and whether there is more cool weird stuff over there.

*wow* Not pink, but *wow*. That clicks to a page full of death guitars.

I find more pink and black in 'pink emo', and although I love the color smash, the whole vibe just isn't me, so moving on. This is the best I can get this morning on 'pink death horse' but the address it came from is so corrupted that I had to reconstruct the original site address, which I did, yay, so click for awesome wallpapers.

 You actually have to scroll down to this and click it to get the full size wall of this pic I just posted. I did that, totally safe, worth the extra step.

Oh what the heck, one more before I get busy on chores.

Now we need a jam. Have an awesome day!

hugging is weird and that's really too bad when people need it the most

Oooooooooooookaaaaaay, that was interesting. It was time for
, yay!

I remember the good ol' days one year in my youth where I'd wake up and have a scotch and soda and then show up for work at 11 p.m. to spend all night cleaning up after births and dead bodies and stuff. I remember craving rum and coke every morning for three months when I detoxed cold turkey into a completely different lifestyle. I remember the day it hit me I was an alcoholic after I fell off the wagon, and I remember at how shocked I felt at how easily I got away with it, and I remember how sad I felt that not one friend or family member approached me about what was happening to me. It was like I had become invisible.

So you all know how glitchy I get, right? I'm sitting in an insurance office at 9:30 a.m. enveloped in whiskey fumes while this guy leaning over the desk is showing me lists and stats and stuffs, and as difficult a time I was having, it dawned on me he was barely holding it together and that if I wanted to get a good deal, it was up to me to figure out what the heck was going on between three different formulary manuals. And while I was oh so slowly connecting the little dots I needed in my own head, I was watching his head trying to gracefully hide the stumbling around he was doing himself, thinking all he had to do was get me to sign something and dang if I wasn't asking some very interesting questions about one particular med that I have to have every day and how my cost would be affected, because we're talking a possible difference of several hundred dollars over the next year.

It's been a really long time since me and scotch were breakfast buddies, but I remember toward the end how much energy I had to put into passing, and still a coworker here or there would wink at me. This guy was beyond that. On top of the excessive paper rustling and me having to remind him a couple of times with my own glitchy brain where we were with my questions, it got a little bizarre watching him abruptly toss my papers onto the floor as trash and then roll over them in his big chair. I've been in a few nice offices for different things, never saw that happen before.

So while I was holding my own head together, I was watching his fall apart, and I couldn't help wondering if he'd already lost his family or maybe something bad happened, or maybe this just built up over time until he could barely hold his life together and this office had given him a sympathy job, because I've been with them several years and today was the first time I saw him.

After I signed and walked back out the door into the beautiful sunshine, I had a truly lovely drive home appreciating how completely undrunk and virtually unmedicated I am nowadays. I can't even imagine having to deal with alcoholism in midlife, it was hellish enough as a young mother.

The reason I'm writing this is because I haven't had the fresh smell of whiskey on someone's breath bring back so many memories like his did today. After I cleaned up blood and contagion all night long, I would step out into the morning sunshine and go home to a bottle, and for a very long time in my life I really missed that bottle. It was months after going sober before I stopped smelling it in my memory and craving it above everything else in my life.

It smelled disturbingly good on his breath today.

It's been over 20 years now.

What I wanted to say to this guy- Hi, I'm an alcoholic. And I know you are, too. And I hope your life gets better and your sadness gets better, but I also know from experience that it can't while you have that bottle. So I hope you don't have to fall down first to let go of it. Because falling down sucks. I was one of those who had to fall down, so I know. I also know some people don't get back up, because it's really hard to do that. Some of the bravest people I know are alcoholics, and I really hope you become one of the brave ones who lets go of the bottle in time for your life to get better before it's so bad that the bottle is the only thing you have left. And then I would have liked to give him a hug, but it would've been really weird.

Anyway, I basically got my monthly premium cut in half without losing any benefits because I refused to go with the big Humana/Walmart plan being assumed on me by a guy with whiskey on his breath. Humana might be a godsend for some people, but it would've been a nightmare for moi since my health care keeps revolving around emergency allergy response. Epipens are mind blowingly expensive.

really glad LinkedIn doesn't report how often I mix up appointment dates

Dragging through the sludge work this morning. You guys probably have no idea how much of my detail work is based on lurker presence. So this morning I'm like Ok, ok, I'll update my linkedin... Sorry linkedin is so snobbish about forcing people to join before they can see the full profile, but these people can. You can jump in, too, by clicking that and flagging me down, but since I rarely get over to linkedin, be patient. Might be a couple weeks. No, my persistent lurker isn't in that bunch. The lurker is sealed up tight, all I can see is that he/she views my profile.

Oh, I also suck at writing up recommendations, sorry about that. I mean, I don't get the push notifications for a month because I'm so bad about checking that email account. When your email fills up with stuff like this, you tend to not bother. No idea what this is about. It's a years old email account but the only one we've got that gets stuff like this. No, I don't open them.

Just had a super oh crap moment, looked at my little desk calendar and I have an appt at 9:30, so see ya.

The Edge of Story

Either time travel exists or angels walk among us. Maybe both. But not the bad kind, like in Doctor Who. I question the evolutionary advantage of long sharp teeth in a race made of stone and 'eats' us by absorbing our energy, so first thing, get Weeping Angels out of your mind. Except you can't now. Dang, I just screwed up my whole post with an entirely erroneous and misleading idea. Hang on. May as well just get it out of our systems. I'll wait while you go check this out. Click the snip there.

Cool, huh? Ok, where were we? Oh, yeah, time travel vs angels among us. I could add to that quantum subconscious awareness of the future, but then you'd wonder why I make so many mistakes, to which I'd answer back some gobbledygook about the light cone of all possible future events, and we'd wind up so far off track that we'd forget the rest and go get another coffee. Which I just did in my cute Halloween mug that I got unbelievably cheap on red tag clearance when I worked at Kohl's. Really miss those perks.

I'm really slipping this week. I'm stuck in a weight loss loop because I keep eating Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and Rice Chex (not together), and I know better. I've been shamefully neglecting facebook and its odd combo of Lexx fans, new baby pix, and various and sundry meltdowns interspersed with pet pix. I haven't checked my JanikaBanks email in over a week, maybe even two. I even declined several calls from my publisher. I blame ISIS, ebola, spiders everywhere, and my neighbor coming back after 6 months of neighborly freedom. My world just shut down and suddenly I'm hitting Amazon for fixes again, because isn't that what we are trained to do in a first world society when we feel overwhelmed.

Oh wait, I was going somewhere with a thought. Time travel exists vs angels walk among us. I was tooling around town and once again just missed being broadsided in an intersection by someone paying absolutely no attention to reality around them, and even though the impact was imminent and mere inches away, I sailed right through that intersection as if it had never been a thing, and I noticed this time (because stuff like this happens every single time I leave the house on my own, it's creepy) that I not only didn't even blink, but had no emotional reaction, not even a Ha, bet that woke somebody up as I am wont to think when envisioning someone else's oh crap moment that makes me chuckle.

Having a vivid memory of being thrown out of a violently flipping vehicle, I am acutely aware of moments in time and how our senses can stretch them out and make them feel weird. I have always been able to do this to a point ever since my childhood, not sure if it has anything to do with Asperger's or synesthesia, but yesterday for some reason seemed inside out. I can't see any way our two vehicles couldn't have passed through each other even on the corners of our headlights or taillights, because it was that close, but we both got through the light unscathed and traffic behind me flowed on like nothing happened.

Things like that make me think about existence as we know it, and what we now call glitches in the Matrix. Great big glitches exist all around us, but even Doctor Who tells us we just ignore them because we don't know what else to do with them. Philosophies have been questioning for centuries what TV shows now take for granted as plot devices. I've been making jokes for years about time inversion and the irony of time traveling, even to the point of questioning the validity of assuming reincarnation moves along in a straight time line on a single planet.

Anyway, that was my trigger for Deeper Thought (remember, we are part of a computer that Deep Thought built to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything), and it hit me yesterday that we generally don't mix time travel with angels. Why? Simplest answer- because angels can't time travel. Why are humans so interested in time travel? As per a much earlier private discussion I prompted on a now deleted facebook, I wonder if 'angels' (in part) might be beings who want something, and humans are the perfect vehicle toward achieving their goal(s) toward that want. And now that a whole TV series is based around that idea, I'm not so crackpot any more to bring it up, am I?

I will pose this, which actually goes back to C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy- the angels that were thrown down to this planet want off, and they will do anything to make this happen. If you like Doctor Who, you'll like this trilogy, very creepy.

Something can fix time, and it's not angels. When we pray for safety (and I've seen this work over and over in astonishing ways), the most you can say, if you don't believe anyone 'out there' is listening, is that we control our realities around us when we are more 'in tune' with our own existences. I'll accept that, but I still don't think individuals have power of themselves, but it comes from somewhere. If you want to believe in the Force, fine, I'll accept that, too. Humans are able to plug into an unseen unknowable Something that sharpens us into more than just bumbling genetic copies. I'll make note here to anyone scoffing about nothing more being 'out there'- you have to work really hard to believe that, especially when death looms. I've been there. I've tried not believing. If you have to remind yourself you don't believe, then deep down you really do believe. Humans can't help this. Whether aliens programmed us to be this way or we evolved it naturally somehow, nearly the entire human race automatically thinks there is something bigger out there out to 'get us' or help us. I'm not going to argue any more about this. It's something we as a race can't seem to switch off. Terry Pratchett would back me up.

Back to my Thought. Something fixes things. Sometimes something unexplainable happens or pops right up in front of us, and we go along forgetting about it. If this weren't a real creepy thing for us, I doubt all the TV shows and movies with this kinda of stuff happening would be so entertaining. I think it's a real thing that cause doesn't necessarily lead to effect, and THAT is what creeps us out. We spend all our lives learning to accept that we really can't be magic and fly, like we assumed when we were small children (where does that assumption come from?), and then weird stuff happens like two cars passing through each other in an intersection and the rest of the day is inside out and upside down because suddenly there is a bit of fuzzy memory in the middle of all that vivid moments stuff.

By the way, Blogger wants me to tell you guys it tried to get me to use 'inexplicable' up there, and I rudely shoved it out of the way. Blogger is a whiny pouty sulky thing today, actually locked up my screen for a couple of minutes. OH, and I just found a word it folded up till I clicked on it. Very clever.

So the question now is- can we trust our memories? Are our memories adjustable to match the game? Because sometimes it feels awfully like we're inside a game system. I said nearly 20 years ago we are like Mario, bouncing off walls that might not even be there, and dang if that idea didn't suddenly burst forth on our big screens.

I think we all know what is going on. We're just afraid to say it.

This whole post is me stalling because I'm in a funk and don't want to GET TO WORK!

This is how I feel reading physics books. For reals. Hawking, Gleick, Kaku- all those boyz get me worked up. I'm so close to turning the corner into the cool stuff now that it's hard to hold back and keep grinding through the mundane scaffolding that got me this far. This song is about taking a cool book home from the library or bookstore, right?