That's right, Kai started a seed world based on "Pinky", so there you go, already getting spoiled for Valentine's Day.
Went to my chiropractor yesterday. God bless chiropractors. Pic clicks to good chiro story.
I mean, not cured, but definitely way less pressure on that spot in my neck. Since I go 2-3 times a month, I know all this stuff, and still credit this guy for enabling me being able to walk again, much less most of the neck issues and severe prolonged headaches being a distant memory now, but I'm still dealing with a nerve damage issue that goes back 2 decades, still getting that MRI to make sure it's not a new arthritic condition coming on. Also, my blood pressure came back down after the adjustment, which was a basic light traction move. I didn't tell you guys I was rocking 160/100 for 3 days because the pain was so bad (and that's ON blood pressure med). When you go past a 10 on the pain scale, because when you live in so much pain you can actually bypass the whole blacking out, vomiting, or weeping over the pain being so bad, you slide into a weird delirium where time falls away and you don't remember where you are and stuff. Imagine driving like that. Wednesday got pretty interesting. I had to make sure I didn't drive on up to Kansas City. (Imagine me driving like that in the old days bombed out of my mind on pain meds and muscle relaxers. I don't know how I didn't have a million accidents.)
Ok, one more and then I need to GET TO WORK! Time is flying.
Ok, maybe more than one. You want to go down into that Pinky cave, don't you?
We have some excellent karst topography under the house. I get so lost in caves that I decided to create a marker system for this one. The pink square is where you stand to float straight back up to the main ground level entrance.
One more. Kai is a genius. We have a working fridge. This isn't the final shot, probably somewhere in the middle of the experimentation.
I usually have a 6-hour window before I go into brain drain, but I'm going to try really hard to rock out a few Lexx posts this weekend. We'll see what happens.
I ran across a blog post yesterday that's already been pulled back into private, where the discussion included a somewhat dubious but very thoughtful and well written bit of prose on what a soulmate is. Shortcut- anyone in the Merlin or Sherlock fandoms knows exactly what a soulmate is. It's the two sides of one coin thing, and I wish that post were still available because it had such a nice paragraph about how soulmates bring out the best in each other even through the worst of times between them. I personally believe we can have more than one soulmate, that we become networks of soulmates over time and possibly through more lifetimes, and we are all working together to solve a big puzzle of why are we here, what does this mean, and ultimately discovering that our love for each other must be the answer if we are to keep surviving this earth. Anyhoo, after 8 years of wondering every day what was going on with me without her, I think we can pretty much dismiss the whole infatuation thing and call soulmate for what it is. The question has come up. Yes, love, in love, gooey feely stuff, but we all know how asexual super aspie Pinky Robot sees brain sex. My fave view of twitter is it being a polyamorist's dream come true. We can have truly intimate relationships at the touch of our fingers now without having to go through all the motions.
You guys know it's not really Ben, right? RPG in Oddizm
It's funny how a person can go through life not seeing the significance of something simple, until looking back highlights a sense of continuity. If anyone had asked me three years ago why I showed back up as Pinky, I would have said it was like a random thing that popped into my head, like a leftover echo from the past. I never had a plan to make Pinky a meaningful thing. I forget how long I was on twitter before I ever attached another name to Pinky. A year? I started wondering this last month where Pinky actually came from to begin with.
I was first called Pinky in the third grade. I always wound up in the rowdy gang on the playground, and we got a particularly rough Red Rover circle going for awhile until the teachers broke us up. One kid in the group could never remember names, so he named us colors. "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Pinky right over." The goal was to break through the super double locked arms without being flipped over. (I'm usually the one who thinks up the new rules. I guess we flipped a couple of kids a little too hard.) After the teacher broke us up, they stopped calling me Pinky and I forgot all about it.
I have no idea why that kid named me Pinky. I actually hated the whole soft pink girly thing and never associated myself on purpose with the color pink if I could help it, although I thought Pink Panther was the bomb, and by my teens felt cruelly inflicted when my mom wouldn't let me have any violently hot pink and neon orange smashed hippie clothes, saying pink and orange clashed and could never be worn together. That was about the time Tupperware helped push the bold new orange kitchen motif, and I loathed how my mom jumped on that one, and extra-ly loathed anything pink if it didn't have orange in it just to be spiteful. I raged against the pink, as it were. Nowadays I laugh because pink and orange together are so trendy and fashionable again. @bonenado's girlie had pink and orange wedding colors, which I thought was delightful, and Bunny shows up in pink and orange all the time.
My next pink phase was when a friend I palled around with in college had a pale pink puffy coat through the winter, and I could always spot her in the crowd and go meet her. She was a pretty big person, which never bothered me, and extraordinarily witty so I never got bored, and I nicknamed her The Big Pink because of that coat. I never said it out loud because I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but I was quite fond of that handle and still think of her as The Big Pink. That was also about the time I got into my weird pink aspie diction games, walking around saying "pink" in as many different styles, inflections, and voices as I could, which I mention in You may be an aspie if... Other aspies and auties reading this are probably nodding.
Pinky became a real thing when @bonenado surprised me one day dragging me into a huge local jeweler and there I met Woody Justice himself, and he personally catered to me, bringing me a handful of rubies to pick from out of his hand. I designed my own engagement ring- a Pinky ring, made of twisted rope gold with a gold rose blooming on top, and a pink ruby set in the heart of the rose. It was one of the smaller rubies, but a true pink so I went straight for it, and he told me I had chosen the most expensive ruby in the pile. I don't remember if I told him I'd been studying gemstones on the side during a special section on rocks during a geology class (which came in handy later as I worked the jewelry counter in a nice store). I no longer wear my Pinky rings (I later got a matching twisted gold rope wedding ring) because they slide off my finger too easily, so I keep them on a necklace.
As more time marched on, the next big pinky thing for me was finger hugs. I grew up refusing to hug all excepting a very few members of my family and extended family, and when my sister's girl felt the same way, I initiated the finger hug. A particularly bad day would get a pinky hug. Finger hugs are very important. They are real contact when a person can't bring themselves to be touched, and that often happens during years of illness when contact is a continual germ threat and hugging hurts, or when personal space feels too personal, or when surviving even just emotionally makes it difficult to entangle or share presence. Sometimes you just can't play the head game and do real hugs for show or ritual when your whole world is a tightly knit fragile sphere of inner circle and everyone else has to stay out. Somehow, she let it be ok for me to reach through that sphere with a finger hug, and near the end I think our last touch before she went away was a pinky hug. I've continued the finger/pinky hug tradition with her sister.
My last big Pinky thing before Pinky blog came into existence was actually being a Pinky. I'd never called myself Pinky to anyone before, even though that was the first nickname I ever had. Pinky was a secret self that no one else ever knew about, until I named myself Pinky to one person in a chat room. I didn't realize at the time that was an emotionally significant moment, and that it meant I was letting someone come further into my head than anyone ever had. (Aspie's so aspie, alas.) About a year later, I 'came out' on a blue blog as a sort of pink freak, as it were. As per my mention above during The Big Pink friend phase, I've been a bit obsessed with the word 'pink' most of my life and never revealed it until April 4, 2008. From my original Bluejacky "You May Be an Aspie If..."
A year later my mom died and suddenly it wasn't fun to rage against pink any more, and I realized I actually do like the color pink in all its variations very much, especially in paisley combos with other colors. Three years after that realization (four years after the coming out about obsessing over the word pink), I came back public as Pinky on twitter, and within a couple months publicly confronted my orientation problems for the first time in my 100 Girly Questions Survey, originally posted on my bluejacky blog. If any of this sounds ridiculously obsessive, all I can say is I have Asperger's, and I have a pink thing that was hidden for many years behind a massive blue thing. Is it possible to be prejudiced against a color? Is it ridiculous to hide a color love from the entire world for one's whole life? Is this some kind of metaphor for an asexual aspie synesthete who struggles to process emotions in real time? It's obviously tied to a history with my mother and our difficulty with my rebellion against standard 'pink' female orientation. Once in awhile I run into other people with outright prejudice or adoration for very particular colors, either feeling so repelled that they avoid it at all costs, or so attracted that they absorb that color into every facet of their lives. I know my weirdness isn't that uncommon.
Anyway, I've had a string of names over the years as I've come and gone, but this is the last one. I will always be Pinky now. I've sworn never to go away again.
Pinky promises are a big deal. The tiniest part of your body symbolically carries the biggest secret, the weightiest commitment, the tightest bonding seal. A pinky promise is more than just a promise. It's bigger than a swear on someone's grave. It's a symbolic entwining of hearts and souls. It's tiny, like a secret. You can be in public and no one might ever see you touch someone's pinky with your pinky. That tiniest touch sometimes means more than any eye contact, and expresses more than any hug, especially if your nature prohibits physical interaction.
Imagine the thrill I got over the very first Sherlock episode being A Study in PINK.
I've been using the word anniversary a lot lately, and will even more over the next year.
I've been all over the map the last couple weeks physically and emotionally. It's a fabulous roller coaster of sickening grief and pain and sudden relief and joy, which isn't surprising given my hyper hormone surges again (thyroid & cyst) on top of allergy season. I'm sleeping great, thankfully, so I'm not full blown manic, but I'm loving every minute of it anyway.
I never dreamed my brain would be so 'on' again. The only people who've known me with my brain all on are lurkers from before 2004. I pray every day it stays this way long enough to keep working on all this stuff I've started. I know I'll inevitably crash again, because aging does that, plus I imagine I have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's since it's in the family, and my mom had hundreds of TIAs (according to an MRI tech) before the big strokes even started (solid family history of strokes), so with me already being autoimmune and diabetic, I know I'm high risk and facing my brain being ravaged head on, and I know it could be a very long and difficult and immeasurably sad road for my family once that starts, because I went down that road with my mom. And she wasn't real old when it all started. I had a brain crash at a much younger age than her from a virus, so without even starting on strokes yet I've already been through a decade of severe brain fog.
So you can imagine me hanging on to every second of lucidity and running as fast as I possibly can while I still have the time.
This song seems to be in my mind every time I boing awake lately.
