I know, I said I'm taking a few days off, so right now this is the real deal and I'm not going to post it yet. It needs to age a little.
Just after midnight last night there was a shooting at a school in a small town that I know well, or at least used to. I haven't been back there much since my mom died a few years ago. My whole family is down there (except my kiddo in Houston), and since I have history in that small town going into a book (not naming names), it doesn't matter that I didn't know the kids involved in the shooting. All it took was hearing it happened to set off an entire day of funk and memories.
Later in the day I was doing dishes and one of the sudden memories that triggered was Scott putting these almost ridiculously heavy giant boots on (think logger boots on steroids) to go with me to meet an ex family member because we didn't know if my ex would show up, and I was understandably very nervous (well, you'll understand if I ever get the book out). After the meet up was over and Scott was back home taking his boots off, I asked why in the world he wore them, and he said it was in case there was a fight. Apparently he's been scrappy enough to understand the importance of footwear in a nasty showdown, which it thankfully didn't come down to because my ex didn't show up with the other person, but when he said those words I thought, "This man will take care of me", and that was the moment that really sealed the deal on our lifelong friendship. I've always felt safe with him. Next week we'll be celebrating our 23rd wedding anniversary.
A few years after that happened, the memory about the boots triggered and I realized for the first time that my husband (we were married by then) was the only person who had really believed the stories I told about my ex without question, and that blew me away. I had been grappling with a small handful of people not believing me for years. My mom called me a liar to my face, and her friend, an elder's wife, said I watched too much TV and was trying to get attention (which still pisses me off to this day), so the memory of someone believing me enough to take "silly" precautions like putting on a giant pair of heavy boots nearly brought me to tears. And then a few years after that, he finally shared some pretty scary stories from his own childhood. Turns out he believed me because he'd personally seen abuse up close.
I've been talking about where I got the name Pinky and how Bluejacky spawned Aspienado, but I've never said where Janika actually comes from. I've mentioned that my little girl named me Janik when she was four, but now I'll say that was the town we lived in, where this shooting last night took place. Back then, Janik was an alcoholic that told her little girl to lie down in a ditch and hide if the police came. Janik survived the Phoenix underground because she survived a nearly off the grid family of in-laws and a crazy ex in the heart of Booger County, a place where people go to disappear from the law. Despite the peaceful overtones, that town is a boiling cauldron of teenage time bombs caught in the event horizon of a black hole of drugs and porn and violence lurking in shadows many fail to even see. I often feel like I escaped, as do others who move away, never to return. I met people that would quail your souls, people the world doesn't even know exist.
Janik was a survivor. Janik learned hard and fast sliding out of control during a slew of big mistakes slamming one right after another why we need to be kind and honest and take care of each other. Janik was a ringleader keeping a gang of underage kids out of trouble one year, maybe not in the right way, but none of mine got shot or shot anyone else. Three of us were shot at, but not shot. I won't bring up the people outside of Wendy and the Lost Boys that we knew who were raped and questionably murdered around that time and no one ever got caught. All I'll say is I kept my boys away from the bad stuff. Wish someone had been looking out for me when I needed it.
This came in the mail today. Over 300 hardback pages of high quality behind the scenes photos and stories about filming Sherlock. Clicks to amazon if you want a copy. Not being paid to share that.
Tuesday 7-26
I'm allowing myself an hour a day on singleplayer if I've been good all morning doing real stuff getting my life back around my house. This is from a mesa world where I've built the most hideously ugly house you ever saw over a gaping cavern and have been playing let's see what happens if with the natives. For instance, they don't all understand to come up the stairs into the house, and they hide underneath watching their family remain safe while they wind up plunging through the sticky webs trying to get away from zombies.
Meanwhile, upstairs we're having cake and watching scary movies and posing for pix, just a jolly good time.
Yes, very nice pose, got it, thanks. They love having their pictures taken. But yeah, seriously hideously ugly house.
With taste.
I may be a cruel dictator, but we still enjoy the finer things in life. Yes, that's a big screen TV on the left that we watch from the bed.
Holding a couple librarians hostage is the only way I convince the gang to come back into the house, but some of them are still stupid enough to run underneath and get zombied.
I want a real house like this over a gaping cavern.
This is from earlier, did a float outside the window peeping Tom kind of thing. It all went to hell when one of the guys stupidly opened the door for a zombie crashing the party and I wound up nearly destroying the room over all of them fleeing upstairs and turning. Totes had to redecorate.
Side notes- Back on double zyrtec, thank you rain burst over Mirkwood. It'll be like this through September now. Also, this week is full blown aspienado. You guys have no idea the 'nothing' I feel like I'm hanging onto a sheer cliff face and the people I really need not being available, the panic attack I made it through in the shower, the self doubts eating me like piles of worms, the horrible realizations that I'll realize later were lies my head is telling me. Staring at this pic on Jawn's screen and telling myself I can do this...
Scott forgot his phone today, and I conveniently have a blood draw scheduled, so I'm going to get out of the house and take his phone up to him.
Thoughts.
My best months on twitter are all Lexx related, bar none. In the past I've gotten nearly 9000 profile visits a month, and top tweet stuff in twitter analytics is always Lexx. For some reason I seem to have developed a different awareness of my public self over the last year, like I have never before felt this kind of shyness. This is a brand new feeling for me, feeling shy after years of Lexxing to the entire world, having my stuff translated and copied and replicated all over the world, talking to people in entertainment like it's all cool and not a big deal, knowing from my stats that some fairly big players glance at my stuff sometimes. I did all that not caring who saw what, who said what, who hated or liked me, it was all the same to me. Suddenly- it's not all the same.
I didn't come back out for Lexx, and even though Pinky far outstrips anything Lexx for blog stats, Lexx has been and always will be part of who I am everywhere I go online. Why do I feel shy now? STA, as a niece used to say. Something to think about.
Bluejacky is at a standstill. I am the cat who walks by himself, and all things are alike to me. quote
Pinky says maybe not.
Aspienado is past the panic attack now and looking around for breakfast.
RPG in oddizm
Wednesday 7-27
They had to use my hand for blood draw yesterday. This is getting ridiculous. They say drink water, well, I drank water. This guy told me it's more about the water I've had over the last couple of days, just drinking water right before going in doesn't do the trick. I'd like to blame my new med arrangement, but we were blowing veins out before we rearranged. I must be chronically dehydrated in spite of how I think I'm doing.
Never chug 3 bottles of water in a row. I used to do that. You get weird headaches doing that, and it's not good for you. I drink 1-2 bottles/glasses of water with every meal, plus a couple tall glasses in the mornings waking up and meds and stuff, plus the glass in between here and there through the day, plus 2-3 bottles of water in the car every time I go to town. Is that not enough? What changed? It used to be enough. I don't know what's going on in there. I wish I could get direct cell reports and do projection meetings with organ groups.
A little real world before I go all minecrafty again. I like looking up real estate from some of the places that check in on trackers. I don't mean specific incoming, I mean the general areas. This one is pretty sweet, asking price $817,000. Nice digs.
What's funny is I'm living in a house on acreage that easily be worth half a million on the east or west coast but assesses to only 126,000 here now (goes up and down with the market) because cost of living is so much lower. We're mortgaged out because real life stuff, pretty sure half the nation is living by the skin of their teeth right on the edge of possible job loss (company sell out in our case) after medically inspired bankruptcy. It's neat seeing other real estate from incoming tracker areas, kind of get a feel for some of you. Anyway, I seem to be getting to know the southern California area pretty good in particular. waving hi
You caught that hint, good. Yeah, little bit of stress going on, some of you probably remember me mentioning Scott's boss maybe selling out any time over the last couple of years, just got more hints it could be imminent (as soon as next month) or by the end of the year or something. We've been living on this edge for so long.
And since I bring up stress, I noticed last night that a few of my family are involved in fundraising for the medical expenses mounting up on the shooting victim I brought up a couple days ago. If there is a good part at all to a shooting on school property, it's that the main target survived being shot 3 times.
Despite my anxiety surge yesterday, I noticed I handled traffic just fine. *hugs neurontin* Thanx, buddy. I think I'm adapting, though. Starting to boing out of bed early again. *I* personally think that's a good thing, my health team might not.
Ok, first off, quick disclaimer- it's amazing how much a person can do with an hour of minecraft once you're used to playing it, so all the following is NOT me playing on minecraft all day. I spent my morning yesterday during my drive into town thinking about new strategy going forward on the webs, and I'm liking what I'm thinking, plus I made @bonenado an awesome supper of stuffed pork chop and seasoned roasted mixed veg (it really was a pretty dinner), so I allowed my hour of solace in minecraft for being a good girl. I'm a nice boss.
THIS is the hideously ugly house from the outside. I love it.
Got that last room done.
Me and the guys out for a night of ghost hunting. The excitement was palpable.
Aaaand it all went to hell. I just left the vid running like a web cam and walked around doing things in real life. You get to see villagers panic and bump each other off into the cavern like idiots, and the zombies getting in. I mean, if you're bored and really need something, here you go.
*I* was bored by then, so I moved to another singleplayer world I'll likely keep. I world spawned practically in a village and there are 2 more within a hundred blocks of each other, a mesa only a thousand blocks away, and just really neat stuff. I looooove this acacia village. I'm not going to fence it, but I lit it up and fixed the doorways.
And after that I was flying around some more and this happened. Ran into a lone block hanging in the sky, was right in the middle of lighting it up for a marker when a cow spawned right on top of me. Next thing you know I'm in an episode of Can This Cow Be Saved? and throwing dirt blocks around for her to climb down on to the ground. If you don't play minecraft, you might not be aware that passive mobs walk right off cliffs and tree tops and fall to their deaths. I was in a silly mood and took her spawning right there as a Sign.
After I saved her, I knocked the extra dirt blocks back off and created a monument.
And then a trail of roses...
... to a Valley of the Roses where the treetops became natural rose-ringed temples. And the morning and the night were the first day, and the Pinky said, "All is good."
And then over the next hill there was the most nearly perfect desert temple I've ever found, so I'm calling the whole cow thing miraculous and leaving it at that.
And the morning and the night were the second day, and the Pinky said, "All is good."
This made me feel good last night. You understand what this means to a fansite owner of a show about a talking spaceship, right? It felt like a synchronicity hug from the cosmos. Tamsen McDonough voices Lucy, the spaceship on Killjoys. Well, the Lexx was voiced by Tom Gallant, and Ellen Dubin, who played Giggerota on Lexx, is also big voice actor in gaming (her IMDB list is impressive). I'm a big spaceship voice fan, all the Star Trek and Andromeda and other shows that used voice actors for ships, so this is a big deal to me, and I very much appreciate that click during this difficult week.
I'm not ready to push this one out yet. Still got some thinking to do.
This interview wins all the interviews.
~later~ Ok, it's been 3 weeks since med changes and I'm pretty sure a big part of this week's way heftier than usual funk is a result of that (years of blogging comes in so handy), so I went ahead and looked up side effects (I've learned to avoid doing that the first couple weeks so it's not psychosomatic, give the meds a chance to work) and wrote a note to my doctor. I think he's on vacation this week, but I'm on a 9-day countdown to follow up now, so it's up to him if he wants to change anything when he gets back before I see him again. I can handle a list of minor inconveniences with meds, and @bonenado is used to the mood swings, but plunging into actual exercise intolerance isn't acceptable. I've already been through that trade-off for pain management, it doesn't work. It only makes things worse in the long run to turn into a lethargic lump with puffy limbs. I suppose a phlebe remarking on my severe vasodilation during yesterday's blood draw is a red flag, as well, found that on the list for one of the meds. All together there were 14 different side effects piling up on me, many of them common, but a couple of them problematic.
It was nice while it lasted... We'll always have that first wonderful week on cartia and neurontin. I think I'm ok to make it to appointment date, which happens to be my wedding anniversary, lol. I usually wind up with psychologist appointments on that date, one year was neurologist, but almost without fail, every year I'm seeing someone besides my husband for a date on my wedding anniversary.
In the meantime, took a little ride down a lava fall. You don't die in creative mode, so it's fun messing around. Yes, totally swam back up, too. That little white square at the beginning is a block of wool. A sheep fell in and died there.
A note about withdrawing from public this week- People who watch me tend to worry, and then they start contacting when I'm my least capable of handling contact. I'm still popping up on facebook to check on family, still showing up on twitter every day, however briefly, so we know I'm ok, even though this is a very hard week. I'm not in the mood to spell out how hard. Go watch the lava fall video again. Maybe it's a form of subtext or communication from my brain about what's going on inside me. Maybe this entire post is a metaphor. I'm sure it would make a great psyche analysis, all things considered.
I will share one real thing. Weird pain running up one's chest and side of a neck for days on end while meds are excellently controlling nerve chatter and blood pressure and heart rate is still unnerving as hell, and it being muffled like this doesn't make it less scary. If it were in a different part of my body I'd wonder if I had appendicitis or a broken toe or a migraine being muffled by meds, but it's nerve centers that happen to be situated around my chest with my heart beating in the middle of it all, and I can totally understand why some people don't want to live like this. But I don't want you guys to worry so I'm not out there saying it. By the time you read this I'll be past it and busy doing something else, most likely in minecraft or watching TV with @bonenado after work, and we all know talking about it will only make it worse by drawing attention back to it, so don't comment. I have lived through 25 years of trigeminal neuralgia (deemed the suicide disease) and now this unremitting nerve pain through my chest is back full force. If you knew how many kinds of scans I've had and how many different heart monitors I've worn (and how often) ruling out heart problems, you wouldn't believe it, but it's standard protocol every single time I complain about this. Feeling like I'm being shocked and stabbed all day long in my ears and eyes and neck and chest and shoulder and back for 25 years has been very, very, very hard. But I'm still here. I feel like that is my defiant whisper back to the cosmos- I'm still here.
I've fantasized about how good it would feel to kill someone who was trying to kill me. I know that sounds horrible, but visualizing success and positive imaging are good for emotional and physical health, and I often run through scenarios where I rip someone apart with my bare hands just for trying to hurt me. I think my will to live far outweighs my need to escape this suffering, and I know it's solid because I really do enjoy those scenarios. I think the Spock/Khan fight is my fave.
You didn't see me cry a couple of paragraphs back. Pretty sure it's the meds. They're destroying my kill mode vibe. I need my evil villain-ness back.
This is my house in the winter. In the summer it's way too jungley to see the ground.
It has also occurred to me that whatever meds I start or stop, all must be compatible with the extra zyrtec I'm on now. Zyrtec shouldn't really be a potentiator, but there's a bit of debate both ways with hardcore users. This is one of the milder debates. Back in the day I was really good at timing out and pushing my cocktails, and my doctors kept me well stocked for years until I got this new guy. Well, that's not the goal now. When I'm way closer to end game, yeah, I'll just stay stoned outa my mind, on brandy if I can't take anything else (especially now that opioids are out, and still not allergic to grapes yet), but right now the goal is to be able to stay healthy enough to push end game off further, right?
~~~~~~~~~~more thoughts~~~~~~~~~~~
I have been kicking around several ideas about migrating my Xanga Lexx stuff to wordpress, an arduous job, or custom redesigning blogger, and I keep thinking but I've already done so much of this work... I've tossed around better hubbing and I can't help thinking but I already hub better than nearly everyone else I know, and the ones who are better have staff. Then I think how much time I've wasted and I can't help thinking but my launch platform survived all the stuff and is actually stronger than first projected. What it all finally really boils down to is whether I'm going to publish sooner or later, and none of the rest will matter that much once I do, so the real REAL stuff bantering around my head is whether to just lay it all out on private blogs anyway, because other people do that all the time. I'm not keen on previewing, but I'm very seriously cross with MS Word because I'm so used to a blogging format- omg, after all the work I've been through, would it really be any harder to just blog the frickin books out and manually paste the content over? I can't even tell you the kind of headache I get having to think this stuff through. But everybody does that, don't they?
I've got the titles, one is already a domain, all I have to do is put my content on the web anyway. That's it. It's where I'm comfortable, where I'm most at home. This folders and files stuff and book style format makes my eyes crazy. If you guys have never had optic nerve headaches, you cannot truly appreciate being able to use your eyes without thinking.
Whiny, crabby, bitchy me.
Thursday
I think I need to release this into the wild today before it turns into its own book or something. This has been just about the worst head week I've had since I came back out 4 years ago. Pretty sure the beginning of slinging into this unreal number dimension started with that morphine shot reaction, and then the rest is just a domino effect from there.
And now Jawn is disk checking and bossing me around and stuff. I'm this close to just pouring coffee on the keyboard.
Anyways, I'm doing ok, already demanding Sharknado 4 live tweet time in the family schedule because Bunny bomb on Saturday. I normally don't dwell, so the med thing has settled into I can do this because it's working for what it's supposed to be doing, and it'll be the doctor's call if I continue and tweak. I'm not sure at this point how, but I've got to get my workout routine back. This feeling knocked flat thing might be temporary because the utter relief after living so long through such hard pain yadayada. Maybe I really did just need a week OFF that bad. I spent hours laying around looking at the walls, not even moving. I wasn't too worried until I noticed 4 hours had passed, and then another time 3 hours had passed, but when I'm on my feet I feel every minute and time takes forever to go by and I can't think what to do. Actually got my shoes on a couple of times, but what triggered shooting that note to the doctor was not being able to get past 2 whole minutes of mild exercise. THAT really is the deciding factor on what happens next.
Beating Pinky blog to a ragged pulp, I really need to let this one go. Here, look at my cool ocean stuff going on with Planet Yablo. I found 3 ocean monuments in the same ocean, so I'm linking them up and I'm going to build an underwater city. Yes, I'm sure it'll take a very long time, but something to go back to when I'm bored with regular stuff. This one actually belongs on the StarrStrukk blog, so anything else there has to wait for later.
I guess that's as good a song as any to go out on. Mood I'm in, anything could happen today.
