my point of view, such as it is

CAUTION- Graphic content.
Strong warning on triggers for rape and violence.

I know y'all know I strongly discourage comments because I'm weird and you're all cool to never comment even though that's an option, but this post has comments turned off. This is the first time I've ever put all this together in one place with real names and searchable linked content. I'm still not capable of getting through convo about this event, but at least we'll all know now where my head is sometimes.

Three years ago on pinky blog I started blogging through a daily depression trail that starts every April first through my entire adult life. I started questioning why, and you guys watched me uncover and start dealing with a repressed memory. Today is the first day I put together the bits and pieces and deal 'out loud' with what happened.

This is Julie Ann Jackson. She lived on 816 N. Watson Ave. when I knew her in school. She was my best friend from the fifth grade. Her hair was naturally golden, and she was slightly chubby in a very pretty way. I considered her my only real friend (because that's what aspienado does, one real friend at a time) even though she was very popular and had lots of friends.

Aside from biting my hand when we were ten because I was being so bossy that she had to find a way to make me shut up, she was always kind to me, and every time I showed up near her, all her other friends moved over. I never thought about why, but I knew that was my place. I know now that she knew I was different (I'm autism spectrum), and she elevated me to an intellectual status dismissed by everyone else, including my family. I was the only one in school that could keep up with her on all kinds of testing and reading material, although I never bested her at anything. She was one of those true MENSA types with a very easy personality, and she spent time not only including me, but teaching me how to draw horses and taking turns writing stories that we passed back and forth in classes. We attended all the sports events together, and the only times we were apart was for being in different classes or activities. Because of her, I actually had other friends in my life that I probably wouldn't have had without her.

My family moved to another state right in the middle of the ninth grade. I've written about how hard that was, the day I left I didn't even get to say goodbye. Thankfully, Julie loved snail mail, and we sent off letters to each other 3 times a week like clockwork for at least four years. I did get to go back the summer after graduation and visit, and she gave me the royal treatment. I was family to her. She escorted me around showing me off, took me to her house, drove me around talking about college and friends she had and her boyfriend. I was as out of the water as a Vulcan fish with my Asperger's, for those of you who know Spock history, but that didn't phase her in the least, and I let her do all the talking and leading me around while I just soaked her in. She had grown up while I was gone, and she was beautiful and charming and didn't miss a beat. After I went back home we continued writing to each other as she started college and my family moved again. I had a big box full of all her letters the night I got the phone call.

I've written in several places what that night was like, but I'll keep it simple here. Emotionally I almost instantly went into hard shutdown. For those of you who've never experienced that or know anyone who has, I very literally chopped off my emotions right then and there. I didn't cry. I didn't feel. I didn't talk about it. I hung up the phone, ignored everyone, and went back to bed. The next day I took the box full of letters outside and burned the entire thing without a second thought. I didn't feel anything doing it. I didn't reflect. I didn't have a reason.

Nearly everything that happened over the next several years was the result of that hard shutdown. I went through a bad marriage and became an alcoholic. I wound up in a big city underground of drug dealers. I met people completely off the grid doing despicable things, and I talked to people who witnessed or lived through atrocities that would make most people very sick. I didn't blink an eye.

After I stopped drinking I started turning my life around, went to college, remarried, raised kids, had jobs, met people on the internet and finally started having 'friends', although much of it went badly very quickly. I never questioned that until one particular friend stopped talking to me, and without warning I spiraled into an abyss of despair that lasted for months. I felt so desperate to understand why this was happening and why I couldn't keep friends that I started seeing a psychologist, and have spent years learning how to see myself objectively, how to assess and make goals and plans to reach my goals, and how to deal with feelings. I'm not just autism spectrum. I have a complicated diagnosis that includes delayed response, which means I just don't deal with my emotions.

So by 2015 I'd been working on all that with my psychologist for eight years. I still didn't know what the real reason was for that particular depression in April, and I didn't yet realize I had displaced it onto the friend I lost that woke me up out of that hard emotional shutdown. Somewhere in 2015, one of my sisters delicately brought up my friend's murder, saying they'd been afraid to tell me it was showing up on the internet, and she was right, I was absolutely terrified to click around and find that pain. I started going through a series of little shutdowns over and over between 'waking up' to more and more ability to feel in real time, and I guess all the stuff I should have processed through years ago started processing, and believe me, putting off dealing until later doesn't make it any easier. When I finally started remembering and as I was slowly able to start reading about this very famous case, all the feelings and emotions swept over me as fresh as they should have from the very start. I was making up for 30 years of lost time processing through all those emotions.

In case you'd like to know more you can -click this- and read an article of interviews with the medical staff who saved Colleen, the person who survived. Here is a good quote from one of the nurses.
One of the nurses in that operating room called me to say Guzman's crime was as vivid to her today as it was 30 years ago. "I remember every detail, because it was so horrific," she said. Doctors and nurses spent nearly 12 hours trying to save Bush's life, and that nurse said the experience taught her about strength and fight and survival. "It changed my life," she told me. "I made a decision that night that if anything like that ever happens to me, I'll fight to the end."

The official true crime book Escaping the Arroyo (which I have not yet had the muster to read), has a Facebook Page, and you can find author info on Amazon and her dotcom.

This crime story was also featured on Investigation Discovery. I still can't bring myself to watch that.

Here comes the graphic part. This is the part I live with in my head now that I've put nearly all of my pieces together.

This last week was Julie Jackson's death anniversary. On April 5th I kept triggering into a memory of my dad and a sheep. You see, I've seen a living body stabbed. I'm about to tell you a story about saving a sheep's life, and after that I'm going to get really rough. I'm making sure you really want to be here reading this... It's ok to stop if you want.

When I was around ten or twelve I think, making my next sister down about 8-10 and my brother 5-7, Dad found a sheep loose in the alfalfa field. Sheep will gorge to death sometimes, but my dad was able to force her out of the field and up a little hill before she flopped over gasping for breath. He ran to the house, called us kids to follow him right now, and as we arrived was already commanding us where to sit on different parts of that sheep, to hold her down at all cost, don't let her move at all, and we obeyed immediately because we had been taught like that. As soon as we got square on pinning that sheep down (who, incidentally, wasn't moving much at all because she couldn't), Dad whipped out his big knife and plunged it into her belly, then dropped the knife and pulled the wool apart on both sides of that big hole and barely got his eyes shut before he was sprayed all over with the vilest smelling stomach spew you ever saw. He never once let go of keeping that wound open while us kids were instantly working very hard to keep that sheep down in one spot, because naturally every instinct in her body would be to fight whatever punctured her.

After that was over, which didn't take long, we were almost too cramped to stand up because we'd locked her down so hard, and Dad was just nasty. The sheep got up, shook off like a dog, and trotted off, feeling much better. We had to hose Dad off, and we didn't get an explanation until that stuff was off his face so he could talk.

It's not very often you see someone stab something out of the blue, and it's probably even more rare to see children help hold a living being down to be stabbed. We didn't whine or cry or question. Our dad could do anything in our eyes back then, and even if we didn't like doing what we were told, we did trust him to know exactly what he was doing.

And that is leading to this. (I know, you're thinking that wasn't graphic, but if you get queasy or cry easily, you do need to leave now.)

I grew up helping butcher sheep. I know how to hold a very heavy body down, how to drain its blood with a little nick, and how to keep it from automatically thrashing while the blood drains out. This is very important if you don't want the meat bruised up and you want all the blood out. Blood will spoil much faster than the carcass and must be gotten out so that the meat doesn't spoil if it has to sit.

Since I sat on sheep and helped skin them from childhood, I know what blood smells and feels like, I know how heavy dead body parts feel (especially the head), I intimately know how bodies feel while they are dying with all the tiny little muscles twitching for awhile, all the jerks and gasps and groans. All these things are automatic reflexes a dying body does, desperate for oxygen, working hard trying to increase blood flow. When the brain is still alive and the body is dying, the nervous system comes on full blast trying to stay alive.

Imagine what it must feel like to be raping someone while you feel all that happening in the other body against you. Imagine being able to smell the blood gushing out all over you while you keep stabbing. And it's not just blood. What we see on TV shows and in movies is so clean compared to real crime. Being stabbed in different places pops open different kinds of fluids along with the blood. Imagine smelling bilious stomach contents while raping someone. Imagine smelling intestinal content, being slimed with it and blood while you're raping someone. Imagine the jerks and gasps and groans going on all over the body while the eyes roll grotesquely around, all the smells and sounds and all that slime...

Imagine being all done and staggering back to the open the trunk of the car to start over on the next person. Imagine finally being satiated and driving off, thinking no one would ever find your mess out in the desert like that. Imagine someone actually living through being stabbed 30 times and crawling up the side of an arroyo to a highway. I grew up in the desert southwest. I can imagine a bloody slimy body being caked with dirt and grime and full of weeds and ants by the time it got to a highway, and I can imagine how terrifying that would look to someone stopping at the sight. And that was before cell phones. All that time that passed. All the grit and work and waiting it took to LIVE. And hours and hours of repair with a medical team. All that recovery. And then living with the memories the rest of your life.

I emotionally shut down when I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I never thought about any of that because I just couldn't go there. I had already grown up with so much experience with death, with seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling death.

So all week long in my head, I have been there with my best friend. I have been feeling her body being violently punctured, I have been smelling her life fall apart into slime all over a nasty person's raging body, I have been hearing the squashed grunts and gasps and wheezes, and feeling every muscle strand in her body straining for oxygen as her blood drained out, the muffled frenzied thrashing being held down for the rape as her consciousness slipped away.

I cannot stop crying.

Friends, when I give you a heads up that it's a bad week and beg you not to take me personally if I fail, please understand hell is filling up my head, and I can barely hear or see you over the pain I am in.

Here are all my posts with the tag #sadness.

I have to run out the door. If there are typos I'll fix them later.

I have failed this city

I banished myself to my room for the rest of the weekend. My biggest challenge is not being able to Pinky in real life. btw, all pix click to sources.

So it was like when the Master kept hearing that beat over and over and it drove him mad. I just had to turn that off. Statcounter is gone, the blogger page count is gone, it's all gone.

In the interim, I lost it over a cupcake joke and turned something tiny into something really big and stupid, and all sifted out, I'm pretty sure the root of the big meltdown was pain management fail and me trying to keep covering and doing instead of timing out earlier and saving us all a lot of awkwardness.

It's been a long chilly very damp spring during a tough life change event now being loomed over by an impending death event, and I broke away from my focus into meltdowns left and right. I've gone back to super core dark corner on the ol' PTSD coping skillz, and I'm basically just not talking to anyone.

But I am reading the internet. It's a nice compulsion in a pinch.

Sorry, got distracted, but this next click is so worth getting lost in.

I'm not sure when I'll turn Pinky blog back on, but I'm still in here.




:edit: 5-29-17 I meant to stay banished longer, but I got a sweet inclusion in an official autie blogger list, what kind of timing is that. The cosmos kicked my butt right back out there.

Little Favour

Remember when I moved 197 files to a stick, deleted them off my laptop, dumped the trash, and then immediately accidentally wiped the stick? And then as I went back and started redownloading and collecting the files, the one I wanted most had been removed and was irreplaceable?
plowing face on the dance floor
the Question
>=l

Of course I just let it go and didn't allow myself to keep obsessing about it, so I failed to notice it being snuck back onto youtube 6 months later. I can't believe a year and a half has gone by since that happened. Anyway, I nabbed it again and I feel better now.

I talk about my stuff here on Pinky blog, but I don't name names and I don't get too gross with details. Actually, as much as I yap on, I imagine some of you are getting tired of my dodging around not sharing more, because I leave out quite a lot. Why that vid struck an important note with me has to do with how very emotionally shut down I was as a child. I would have been capable of being the child in that vid if I'd had a proper handler/trainer. I was so caught off guard at how that twisted into an entirely different story, and it gut punched me like nothing had in a very long time.

I know a few people like me. We grew up the same way, we all hit the same weird existential walls, and most of us figured out why it's important to choose positive emotional connections over remaining in a shut down state. Those of us who learned to choose and act on our own wills are virtual power players among the people around us, subtly changing histories all around us 'simply' by being kind and gentle. It does seem simple, but it's an everyday grueling sort of thing that goes against our natures, and sometimes puts us at odds with people we love. But we choose to open our eyes, take the extra step onto a precarious balance, and reach out to others like us, others who are waking up and changing the world in ways never before imagined in human history.

That sounds lofty. I say it that way because we are living in an age that has never before happened in human history. We can all see each other now, all over the world, any time day or night. We can all whisper our secrets now, share our sadness, and talk about our dreams in a way the world never could even a hundred years ago. But so many are still caught in sticky webs, trapped in lies, hostage in their own families, doing what they have to do to survive.

We live on a planet where wars are fought with children, where children are rented and sold as sex toys, where children are beaten from very young ages for the most minor infractions by dysfunctional adults who were broken as children themselves. What we see on the top- schools, malls, churches- is just a cover over what we don't see underneath. Right now there are children in cages in every country on this planet, and we talk about someone rescuing a kitten in traffic. Right now there are children acting more grown up than everyone reading this because they've learned they have to hold it all in to survive being a rape toy. Right now there are children in training to be super soldiers, and yes, we are seeing this more and more in TV shows, and my opinion is that the more we see stuff fictionalized, the more calloused we get to reality. We fuss over filming details. We follow actors around.

There are very important things going on all around you every day in real life that you don't see, because you've been trained to stay asleep, keep your eyes shut. Open your eyes. Notice the person who is different and apart. Smile at them when they glance up to let them know you really saw them standing there. You don't have to do anything else. Just let them know you saw them. Let your presence on this earth touch people who are closed off because they have secrets you know nothing about. It doesn't matter what those secrets are. What matters most is that they feel like someone saw them, because they are part of us, and not something to ignore and hope goes away and never touches your life. If you knew the half of what already touches your life you'd throw up.

You can't fix anyone, and you most likely can't save them, and if you try to reach out without knowing what you're doing you might wind up in all kinds of mess. But you can plant seeds. A genuine hello via eyes and smile is a very human thing to do for someone who is hiding that they are having a very bad day and possibly a life you wouldn't survive yourself. They don't have to smile back. They might even look at you funny, or get upset. Just look away again and mind your own business, it's ok. The important thing was that you made an invisible connection, a tiny change that down the road might make a difference. We don't see how that happens, so we aren't rewarded for doing that, are we? We just have to trust that it works.

It worked for me. I remember every person who made a genuine invisible connection with me when I was my most closed off. Those teeny tiny connections added up to a great big thought forming in my mind, and that thought started changing the way I see and live. Sometimes the most fleeting glimpses into a kind stranger's soul can make a lot of difference.

In the meantime, that vid (movie short) I'm talking about is 20 minutes of deeply haunting story with all kinds of dangling questions, and you can read more about it here.

surviving fandoms

*le sigh* Back to a real life post.

I blame these guys.

"Pine Processionary Caterpillar"
click for info

Really, I have no idea, but there's such a big health warning all over most of the stuff you look up about them (especially for kids and dogs) that I can only conclude that my house being covered in them for 2 weeks is making me sick, because even though I have a leaf mold allergy, I have never been like this in October. Itchy eyes and scratchy throat, yes, hacking super sticky globs and nearly choking, no.

At any rate, we're going on 18 days now and it's progressed into lungs over the weekend and it's not going away any time soon, so once again I will drag myself up to clinic and see if I qualify for antibiotic now. In years past I've been on antibiotic every other month, but I've gotten so healthy now that my glands barely even get tender for a day and the rest of me always looks really impressive for someone complaining of specific problems at my age.

I remember my parents dragging through chest gunk because they were too stubborn to go to doctors. One year my dad coughed for around 6 weeks and dragged around looking awful. He's still busy, tried calling yesterday and he didn't call back till he got off the tractor. 87 years old.

So all that is kinda quelling the birthday chocolate cake waffle with coffee cream cheese dip thing, I can't smell or taste anything right and nothing sounds good because I'm gunky gross, so I'm putting it off until some of this clears out. If aliens abducted me right now they'd be wowed over what a super productive sticky mucus machine I am.

Brief crabby whine sentence stating that I'm super jealous of people who don't have to live with allergic reactions. You guys suck whining about stuff when you can easily 1- breathe, 2- eat what you want, and 3- not have to live on round the clock antihistamines nearly all year long.

*clear*

Ok, moving on.

I'm going to keep watching The Walking Dead. It's just now getting good. In fact, I can now honestly finally say I respect what they're doing with this show. Watching Rick breaking from his internal point of view, reality blowing apart, not knowing which fear was real or imagined, all his emotional connections blowing apart until he was alone with only death- I hope that ep wins awards galore.

THAT is PTSD, guys. That is exactly what happens to people who go through moments of super anxiety not knowing what to believe or hang onto, moments when you can't make decisions because you can't even trust your own brain to keep giving you stuff to hang onto. Not all of us are in an apocalypse like that, but when you're driving on a highway and have to remind yourself to check whether you're really driving because you can't tell...

That scene was an art form that I thought was exceptionally well done. You need to pick up on what happened in that scene so you will understand Rick's point of view going forward. You might not like a few things Rick does in future. He might be a mess and fall off the hero pedestal. He might wind up a wild dog killing everyone. Or he might wind up psycho enough to take out Negan. But for awhile he might be a very weak unlikable character. Are you a fair weather fan?

Allowing ourselves to be too overwhelmed by our emotions to handle something and shutting down is turning our back on dealing with stuff. I had to learn at a young age to shut those emotions off, or set them aside for later. Human brains are fantastic for survival if we learn how to use our emotions as tools. It's good to process through them, but if they are in the way in time of crisis, especially if freezing up costs you or someone else harm, the best way (for me) to deal with that is step into role playing and then look at what happened later. It's really hard, but if that's the only way you can escape a difficult situation, like domestic abuse or surviving abduction or something, then that's what you do.

Whining about a TV show focusing entirely on how an apocalypse shreds us emotionally for not playing fair showing us something gruesome that hurts our emotions is a little bit antithetical to being a fan. I've been through fandoms full of the staunchest fans booing and hissing because something didn't go their way and they want it refilmed, and some even spend years making life projects out of how unfair a television show was. Seriously not kidding. I watched a lot of people shut down years of friendships over political side taking nonsense the last couple of months. Well, that's how fandoms are, too. It's cool if you don't want to watch a TV show, but going on and on about how unfair something is and you're not going to watch any more is kinda silly. Just stop watching it and move on. It's just a TV show.

The really interesting thing is watching some of the fans go through what Rick did, just bust apart and say no mas. Fans mirroring the scene. That is an incredible amount of power to give a TV show over your life.

Just saying.

From me to you guys. Hang in there. It might be worth watching Rick come back and eat Negan.

the monsters never stop

Monday afternoon 7-25

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.

aspienado

I dreamed last night that way in the future, a really old library in St. Louis had the last remaining section on twitter, and it was devoted to Star Wars tweets. They were divided into 3 sections- parody accounts/tweets, movie quote tweets, and fan gifs, which were randomly playing around the library aisles like full adult sized holograms. I blame this dream on a few twinges of possible (but not really) regret during my recent mass unfollowing of useless Star Wars accounts and an article I ran into last week about how the Library of Congress actually attempted to document twitter and gave up after a year saying that our millions of thoughts would need far too much work and storage space and could never be properly reassembled into archives outside of twitter itself.

I also dreamed about living in a really old building that was rotting out, and a giant tree limb had grown into one room over a dining table and was covered in a big web with millions of spiders and other bugs. It bothered me very badly that as bad a shape as this place was, it still commanded a high price as living space. I sort of blame this dream on a combo of playing minecraft and watching both Divergent and Insurgent within a 24 hour time span.

And then I dreamed both these things were all actually one big place over time, and I got to see how it became demolished bit by bit and renovated into futuristic new materials and hallways and furniture and people, and I'm going to blame it on this cool tweet I saw come through last night, because I have always loved anything timey wimey since I was a little girl. It's up to you how far you want to take the emotional metaphors in my dreams, since I am spending my month redirecting out of a rut and creating a new work plan for this year. You can check out the book on Amazon and click this snip to get to his account on twitter.

And then he tweeted this. Yes, it clicks back.

One direction I'm definitely staying away from is not being truthful about who I am, especially on networking sites. It's one thing for people to make parody accounts, which I find entertaining, it's another for people to actually list specs and credentials about themselves that are erroneous. I've openly stated I use a pen name registered with a publisher, and at one time paid to use it as a business name. However, I don't appoint titles or descriptions to myself (so many entrepreneurial CEOs of startups out there), and I don't say I'm somewhere I'm not (it's cool if people want to identify with 'the biz' in Hollywood or the UK or whatevs, but allowing others to believe you're actually there physically when you're not is called 'conning'). I am a real person in a real place dealing with real stuff and trying to do real things, and I'm still just discovering how much my own reputation has been dented by connecting so deeply with a few others that don't seem to understand the value of social media cred beyond being popular for talking a lot.

Before some need to protest, I know all about juggling a public social media presence with a dangerous past, so yes, I don't think people should publicly share physical addresses unless they are real business locations. That being said, there was a person once about a year or so ago that suddenly blurted something on twitter that I had to ask be removed, and that person knows better. So I find it interesting that person still lists erroneous info as legitimate business cred.

Part of my problem lately with this big flip into a new direction is the anger I've bitten back for a long time about not being taken seriously. I finally just had to spell it out- I felt duped. I felt baited and reeled in like a total noob, and then my sense of naive aspie loyalty was played until I was so confused that I got stuck in philosophical self questioning. So while some of you are wondering what in the world is going on with me suddenly diverting into minecraft and seeming to be going nowhere, I'm wrestling with some very emotional depression over the winter and being guided into calming down between a psychologist and a good friend who knows how to redirect and keep my mind on something in lieu of self destructing. That's important.

Part of the big change is friendships. I am totally on board with social media saving lives. Sharing and touching base are pretty awesome when you need them the most. However, becoming dependent on social media as opposed to getting real help (supervision, meds, actual real people looking at your actual real face and smiling actual real smiles at you and actually listening to you actually talk) can be like spiraling out of control down a black hole. Twitter is not a cure for depression, guys. It's a crutch. Yes, it's a very good crutch when we need it, and some of you saw me tweeting around the clock for months at a time there for awhile, but it's still a crutch.

It takes a few guts to step out of your real actual door and find real actual help. I totally understand that. I have lived through unimaginable anxiety and PTSD. It has gotten so bad in the past that I'd pull out of traffic on major highways just to get out of my car, or drive in freezing sleety weather with my windows down because my claustrophobia would be so bad. It's gotten so bad at home many times that I'll suddenly drop everything I'm doing at home and drive into town (that first 15 minutes on a highway is horrible) just so someone will see me die if I drop dead, and I won't be all alone (because depression lies, especially in the middle of having a nasty anxiety attack), and sometimes it's so bad that it's all I can do to lightly touch my steering wheel with my fingertips over and over while I chant or something because I'm so terrified of my car.

Depression and PTSD are horribly very real. I've lived for decades with stuff that people still don't know the half of, and I've made it this far. There comes a time when a person finally just has to admit that some people don't help make this better. People that hide behind masks and smooth things over and tell me in private what I can or can't say don't help make this better. And finally realizing it's like the blind leading the blind, the severely depressed coaching other severely depressed on how to HIDE being severely depressed...

Guys, that's dangerous.

All the big thing on social media now is talking about how hiding our depressions behind smiles is what is killing us. Believing other people telling us we have to smile is what's killing us. Letting other people tell us how we have to play head games with them is dangerous.

I've had one of my best winters in at least 12 years. Best Christmas in ages, best health in forever, and what you guys didn't see me grappling with nearly every single day was pop up suicidal thoughts. I don't want to die. But I have PTSD and severe depression, and several people on social media were triggering me over and over and over, and after weeks and even months of asking them to stop, I finally just lost my temper on 3 different people, 2 of those were pretty public.

I don't want to die. Neither do other people who are hiding severe depression. Not everyone is as brave as me asking 'friends' to back off. It takes a lot of guts to stand up to people who are used to tagging you a lot. My anxiety was going out of control again, especially on major highways. I was once thrown from a violently flipping vehicle. You guys have no idea the trauma I'm still working through from my dad pulling me out of an ER and taking me home with internal bleeding without a single x-ray. I had absolutely no mental, physical, or emotional support from my own parent through a car accident that should have killed me. I've had to deal with aging parents and my stupid childhood flashing back while I'm trying to write a very honest book, and through all of this, I have yet to hear one word of comfort about finally dealing with the loss of my friend to a murder or watching my mom die very slowly from a person who claimed to have read everything I blogged. Is it any wonder I blew up on Christmas Eve after being PM'd about someone's one of two moms taking some Christmas presents away. I wanted to say grow up, but I realized I was the one sticking around for that drama. Maybe it's time for me to grow up.

Friendship is about balance. I am trying to find my balance and keep working. I'm dealing with cognitive disability doing it. My last attempt at honesty was returned with being unfollowed on other accounts and no closure. You know what? I would be stupid to take that bait and pursue answers. There are no answers except that I was gullible again. If I'm the one making the same mistake over and over believing people when they say they love me, then I'm the one who needs to take at look at why that is happening. I'm easy. I make a good pet. At first...

And then I start digging holes all over the yard and leaving half eaten mice in shoes and taking off through windows and fences, and the head games pivot around who will last the longest in another unbalanced relationship before the explosion happens. And it did happen.

My job on this earth is to put stuff into words. That is my natural inclination, to wrestle with how to say the stuff that's hard to say, how to make it easy for other people to understand another point of view, how to share ideas that are difficult to talk about. I believe I was born deficit especially for this calling. I've had to work so hard to get to this point, and I know what I have to share is important. It's worth the work and all the time and effort, and everything I go through and learn about myself adds depth to what makes what I need to say so important.

Depression is not a game. You don't ice it over like a cake. You don't tell people they have to keep their masks on. That's conditional love. A lot of people don't seem to understand the concept of conditional love. Don't even call it love, ok? Stop baiting each other with the word 'love'.

True love is doing everything in your power to break down the walls that are hiding what is killing people.

That is why aspienado was born on this earth.

love you just a little too much

click for wallpaper

I've run across a few writer blogs with posts about how one handles more than one project at a time, and how that can refresh a person, etc blah blah. Then I talked to @bonenado about what if, and he indicated he'd really like to see my favorite super secret exciting scifi one get done. Plus I've got a group project for another scifi on indefinite hold, and notes for several more that venture into other genres. I still think this one needs to get done first, but if I wind up reclusing, I'll keep a rotation plan in mind.

more wallpapers

I have somewhat jested for years I need a handler. Nobody ever knows what I mean. I've already been through the torture, even if it was haphazard and mostly unintentional or subconscious. I've already trained myself to super focus. A person could even make a case for mild twinning and that's why I feel so lost all the time. All I know is that pulling all the splinters back together has been every bit as challenging as everything else I've ever gone through. Doing it on my own... well, let's just say that I didn't hear Scott walk in the door after a day out with mama and Bunny yesterday, and if he'd been any closer when I ran into him around a corner, I'd have been able to deck him into a wall. It was funny and we laughed, but PTSD is no joke, and the adrenaline that shot through me in nanoseconds made me feel kinda shaky for a few minutes. Even after all these years, I know if I snap I would be able to take someone out in a very nasty way. Spending so much time over the last several months crunching my stuff into a readable format is doing things to my head. Every little bit I step back with my head whirling, thinking that was real. So many things I never told my psychologist...

more awesome wallpapers

Today I'm fleeing into Lexx. I'm sad that particular love is so neglected and I have several little projects there on hold, as well. I just need a break. Giggy is getting impatient about getting her character post. Not Ellen-Giggy, the Giggy in my head. I know people see me tweet with Ellen sometimes, but like I've said before somewhere buried in all my posting, Mark Hamill doesn't exist in a galaxy long ago and far, far away. By the way, when Ellen let go of the @giggerota handle on twitter, I grabbed it so someone couldn't turn it into something smutty. Really get tired of parody accounts that ruin the character. If Ellen ever wants it back, it's hers. Until then, it's just going to sit there ignoring troll bait.

and even more wallpapers

I woke up with this song in my head. I think it really bothered me that I was so ready to hurt Scott yesterday before I realized it was him. I've been so very lucky having him for a best friend. His patience with me surpasses anyone I've met, and we laugh a lot. You guys who've seen Sherlock, you realize John is his handler, right, because Mycroft can't control him. Irene butting in was a mess. She was trying to break from her own handler (Moriarty) who had her handling a whole ring of powerful people. Everything you see around you, when you open your eyes, is a heirarchy of handlers, like a tupperware sales pyramid. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for the majority of us regular people, but too many cooks around a pot messes up the meal. Irene messed Sherlock up. Then when John got married, Sherlock lost his handler and went off in a very dangerous direction, which has left us hanging for s4, because the sociopath finally did become a murderer, even if it was to protect his best friend/handler. People who don't know what it's like not being able to have/keep friends might not be able to realize how deep that kind of relationship can go emotionally, and how easily a person like that can step over a very big line. Or maybe they can. Maybe that's why the world loves Sherlock.


Afterthought- It's funny no one ever brings up John being a sociopath/murderer, as well. I have deep respect for John. You people thinking I'm crushing on Sherlock probably completely miss the whole John thing in my Sherlock posts. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you already see what Sherlock sees in John.

faith in humanity

I very seldom block or mute nowadays because I almost never check raw feeds. I have so much incoming that it's just easier to go straight to notifications and then from there I go to list feeds or individuals I want to check on.

It's difficult to write about negativity without being a drag, but I'll attempt it.

There are some of us in this world that have already been so emotionally slaughtered with pain and grief that we can no longer handle looking at it. We do our best to stay positive and keep moving. There are a number of things I have to avoid completely, including radio and TV stations, if I want to get through my day intact accomplishing whatever my daily plan is. Once I hit a shatter point, the rest of my day is shot and nothing else gets done.

I have nothing against people noticing bad things going on in this world, and I applaud social media for bringing things to our attention that need to be noticed. We cannot become a better people until we have noticed that there are still so many needing help out of dire and sometimes horrifically abusive situations.

I can generally handle seeing a big post pop up first thing when I first load a page. It happens once in awhile. I just scroll or click and move on. I handle a picture about severe abuse the same way I handle a detailed close up of a big spider- I momentarily freeze, choke back a hard gag reflex, remind myself to take a breath so I don't get dizzy, move my hand on the keyboard while I try not to look at the screen, get the shock out of my line of sight as quickly as possible, and then move on to what I was going to do.

It's important to understand that I'm not offended. There's a big difference between being offended and dealing with post traumatic stress. You can't imagine the blazing shots of sadness and rage I go through restraining myself from pointing out in comments that what someone just posted to get a lot of commentary attention is NOTHING compared to some things I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears from people I've met in real life- 'nice' people who wear nice clothes and live in nice houses and go to nice churches.

And then the comments coming out of the woodwork- I glanced through a few last night and was appalled. The hate seething back toward the accused in the shared photo was so much more overdone than the abuse in the picture. My faith in humanity was completely shot within about ten comments, and they kept coming.

Hate is not the answer to abuse. More abuse back on people we don't even know, which would include innocents across the board, IS NOT THE ANSWER TO ABUSE.

This world cannot heal with hate.

I refuse to drag that crap into my timelines, and I usually refuse to be baited into it, because what it is on social media is an attention game. Getting a lot of feedback on a single post or update makes a person feel like they have friends. That is not how friendship works. Jerking people's emotions around isn't being a friend.

If you guys really want to restore my faith in humanity, stop hating humanity. It's that simple. I don't have a problem with bad people being bad, because that's just who they are. What I do have a problem with is 'nice' people being hateful, and they know better. Gang hating on social media and then posting stuff about love and religion and faith in humanity is a paradox, an incongruity I can't live with. I understand we get worked up, but one person purposely whipping up a crowd until everyone agrees we need to viciously KILL a whole group of human beings because one cat was abused is so utterly ridiculously wrong that I feel sick. Just sick.

I'd also like to thank that person for the post traumatic nightmares I had last night. At one point Scott had to wake me up it was so bad. People don't have to be war veterans to have PTSD.

I'm the one who says we can do what we want on our own blogs and stuff, and I still believe that, and if someone doesn't care for it, don't read it. There are mute buttons all over facebook and twitter. I can handle quite a bit of weird and sad and frustration, but last night disintegrated into Lord of the Flies, and that mute button looked mighty fine after several of these particular experiences kept happening every time I pulled the page open.

Time to redirect my brain. Pulling out the big guns today. I hope you all have great Mondays with wonderful food, and if it falls through in any way, I hope the rest of the day goes as smoothly and easily as possible.