part of some geneticist's plan

In case anyone thinks disability is an easy road to a free ride, I'd like for you to know that in the last ten-ish years I've been through bankruptcy, a disability hearing that emotionally shredded me after years of trying to be strong and hiding my problems, lawsuit from an insurance company that lasted for months, continual threat of lawsuit from a series of collection agencies that refuse to recognize correctly followed protocols for debt relief, illegal garnishment without recompense, and continuing multiple daily phone calls meant to harass me into a payment plan on interest I don't legally owe (the payment plan wouldn't even touch principal before I die, so this is lifelong debt entrapment).

I have lived with this daily for the entire time you guys have seen me public. I am so used to it that I barely even mention it once or twice a year, and almost never complain about it. My lawyer says no one can do anything unless I answer a phone and allow them to bully me, so I don't answer the phone. I have missed important calls because of this. So many different numbers call me for collections now that I can't trust anything even within my area code. Thanks to internet, I've been able to trace these numbers to real addresses. If you have an empty house or apartment in your neighborhood that never seems to have anyone coming and going, it's probably a property used to legitimize a landline so it will come up as a real person. I know a lot about how badly Americans are legally harassed because I've lived it for a long time. This is the modern answer to illegal search and seize, taxation without representation, and locking people up in the poorhouse until debts are paid, except now it's done covertly so it looks 'nice'. You get to keep living in your home, but that's about it.

The reason this is coming up is because I am finally digging out. For so long we lived under threat of audits from so many directions that I just kept shoving everything into sacks. Today I shredded sackloads of EOBs, formal letters and notices, and bank statements going back at least 7 years. I'll keep last year, but after everything I've been through, I'm pretty sure every bit of that is recoverable since my life has been dredged up very thoroughly at least 4 times.

I glance at them as I shred. I think things like wow, that was 2 years before Bunny, or wow, that was the year Bunny was born. Everything that has gone through my hands today has this new point of view.

Bunny might be seeing me more. My house has been upside down for many years. It was upside down before she was born 3 1/2 years ago, and over the last 3 years has been flipped like a pancake, mixed around like little hurricanes, and frapped into forgotten corners. Everything in my house is very mobile, even if it's in stasis in a sack. And there are many sacks.

You can't keep moving sacks around in a house with a very energetic 3 year old. She's old enough now to get into closets and drawers, and I'm old enough now that 1- I can't keep up and stop her, 2- I'm actually too tired to care, 3- and we'll never recover if I don't do this NOW.

So I am purging my house. Lotta memories in these sacks. That was the year I came under lawsuit right on top of my first big anaphylactic reaction (cashews) (within an hour of med rescue I was getting phone calls). That was the year I was on daily steroid just to breathe for 9 months. That was the year a baby came early 5 days after my surgery and then I had a baby at my house. That was the year before her pregnancy and I had to be crashed off 2 hormones and wore heart monitors off and on for weeks, and I felt like such a mess that I was terrified I would really die this time without knowing what happened to everyone out there.

Since I came back out public, I have quietly super stalked people I knew from elementary and high school, jobs, fandoms, and even random people that stuck in my mind for some reason. I have very thoroughly tracked a number of people down to make sure they're ok. I didn't really talk to any of them, but I can see they're ok.

I am such a broken person. But I'm ok, too. I wanted to be ok, and I've worked very hard to be ok. Today I am letting go of the past. I'm done with that part of my puzzle. I've worked through a lot of stuff and I've reached a place where I feel like I've said out loud what I needed to say.

I've been blaming the January medication dose fail for what I've been feeling as this spring comes on. My psychiatrist thought maybe a neuropsych eval would be in order. Today my psychologist said it's not a good time. Scores are permanent and I'm currently transitory. He reminded me I have a history of disappearing after big blitzes. He talked to me about pacing myself. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what that means. But he's right, I'm right at that edge, aren't I? Not really disappearing, but gone nonetheless.

My pace has been fight or flight for so long that learning how to slow down has been arduous. I grew up working very hard, survived a really bad accident without medical aid or even a single pain pill, faked being well enough to get a degree, hold jobs, and raise a family, and then I hit that wall so hard. And I couldn't get up for awhile. I disappeared. Stuff happened, I made a decision to make a solid commitment to be 'out' for people who love me (I've been known to not answer a phone or see anyone for 3 months straight), and along the way I also made the decision to enjoy being who I am, who other people are, and if I can't be in the thick of it, at least stay on the edges and watch. But somewhere along that way, I lost myself again, Pinky had to save me, and now I'm in a new place not sure what to do with myself. Funny that my physical therapy team has also been on my case to pace myself, slow down, stop powering through.

I've mentioned I'm a high risk person in every conceivable way. I've been able to share things in blog posts I couldn't share with my own family or even my psychologist, who has known me for a very long time. My new year's resolution was for more #transparency, but then stuff blew apart again and now I'm wondering, Ok, just how transparent do I get? Just as when I first started blogging publicly and had to make decisions about content, audience, and direction, I'm seeing all new decisions I need to make about what kind of forward progress I will be sharing. I definitely don't want to be a drag, but I also hate sugarcoating. I loathe being a whiner, but I feel dumb trying to laugh stuff off sometimes. My anger can be too consuming, my sarcasm offends even me, and when all else fails I dissolve into dirty limericks. You guys have no idea what I am truly capable of. You know what one of my fave things to do is? Twist porn up into vaudeville. But that gets old really super fast, draws the wrong crowd, and then I'm peeling the rowdies off. And besides, no one ever really gets why I mock. The whole point is that I mock and the art itself gets bypassed for snark.

I'm not sure how often I'll be checking in, but the daily discipline thing has stopped. I have the discipline, obviously. But like my psychologist said, I wasn't pacing myself. I ran hard and fast against a clock, driven by a past that nearly took me down, and that part is over. The worst really is finally over, hopefully for awhile. I'd like to enjoy a few things.

Like my house! It's about time I made this MY house. I still have no idea if we'll wind up having to sell it if Scott's work sells, but for now, I'm the one who lives here the most, and I need to make it more user friendly to bouncy Bunny. Time to dredge the past up and put it into the shredder. I want my bedroom back.

IF my plan works, I'll be paying everything off, but I'm taking myself off the racetrack. It has been so long since I've been able to sit and *enjoy* something because of all the neverending pain, I am really enjoying minecraft. I am finally able to sit longer than 20 minutes at a time. I still have to rotate my activities and I still have a hard time, but a year ago I was excusing myself from shared play constantly, and this year I'm not. I can't even tell ya how wonderful it is to be able to sit at a table and hang out with someone for awhile. And guys, that is NOT an invitation to everyone to jump on, ok? I can handle one thing at a time. I'll get to projects when I can, and I do have a line of people asking me to do stuff. I love all of you and I wish I could be more than one of me to do it all. I feel very blessed and loved that people actually still ask me to check stuff out and do stuff, and I apologize that I can't jump on some of it.

But I am still here. 💗

DALTSU

That's code. I think there are probably ten people on the planet who remember what DALTSU was on what we fondly called purple list. No, this isn't a reveal post about DALTSU.

A little over a year ago I wrote My name is Pinky, and this is my Haus where I started sharing how far back I go in fandoms. I had a flashback today that sent me on the kind of hunt that has a person wading through piles of boxes and dredging out the contents, and nothing inside has been touched in so long that you can't believe it's been 20 years, or just shy.

Among the contents of one box, I ran right into the old Darkwing Duck / Joxer crossover story I wrote and submitted to a fan book for Ted Raimi's birthday one year (still don't know if it ever made it in), and now I can copy it here.

click for more Xena pins

Let's Get Dangerous

Quick note: In a recent Tedlist post I wrote 'I am a HUGE Darkwing Duck fan, and I think it would be really cool to see Joxer get more into the spirit of his self perceived heroism.' I was blown away at the number of responses I got; Rob asking if I was "PROMISING" to do this crossover, Phil offering to post it, Purple Lemon sending me fabulous Darkwing Duck artwork, JJ and others saying I should post it to Ted Tales, and Lana herself telling me Darkwing Duck was one of his favorites. So, *NOW* to get our intrepid hero into a cape...
*****************

There was only one other time he could remember feeling this miserable, and come to think of it, he'd RATHER be tied up naked in a bale of wool in a hot barn, dang it.

He could see it as clearly as yesterday, hanging out around the sheep pen at the annual shearing; crusty old farmers muttering curses and grunting in the heat while the pretty little sheep girls (really farmers' daughters, but they were so much cuter thinking of them as sheep girls for one day), anyway, while the pretty little sheep girls cut out ewe after ewe for the next shearing. Joxer had attempted to wade into the milling flock with them, mainly to show off a few manly skills without his shirt on, but after they spooked and mowed him over in whatever otherworldly terror only sheep can see, he sorta crawled, then sorta limped back to the fence and managed to flip over it before an especially fattish ewe could butt him right through it. He stood up and leaned nonchalantly back on the fence as soon as he'd been able, looking discreetly around to see if any of the sheep girls were laughing, but they were busy dodging and diverting and apparently hadn't seemed to notice, thank Zeus.

But Jett had... There was just no escaping a twin. Well, triplet, really, but they hadn't been counting Jace ever since Jett depantsed him in the town square at the tender age of twelve and found him wearing one of Mom's corsettes and several garters. After that, Jace basically hung out with milk maidens and sheep girls, so Joxer was careful when he scouted this particular pen.

"Thought you were Jace there for a minute." Jett had perfected that sneer to a fine art, but he still hadn't gotten the glint in his eye down. He was practicing it right now.

"Hey, we don't mention his name in public, remember?" For some reason, Joxer was the only teenager around for miles who still talked back at him like that, and Jett wasn't quite sure if he liked that or not. Brother or not, though, Jett had a reputation to nourish.

"We're not in public, brother." The sneer got sneerier.

It was true to a point. The din of bleating sheep pretty much muffled nearly everything the farmers were yelling at the sheep girls, who simply ignored them anyway and continued sorting one ewe out here, one there.

"So!" Joxer tried sneering back. "Besides, when's the last time you saw Jace without something lacy over his chest? Gimme a break!" and with that, Joxer had squared his shoulders, jutted his jaw, and puffed his chest out for a little manly emphasis.

Big mistake. Jett had snickered and twisted him into a headlock before Joxer could get a breath out to yell whichever password they were using for "I give up" at the time. He wasn't terribly clear on how the rest of what  happened came about, but it was a couple of hours before enough sheep were sheared and turned out for the din to die down so his voice could be heard filtering through a mountain of wool. By the time they'd untied and unwrapped the big ball of wool from around him, he was woozy with the heat and soaked slippery with sweat. He did remember the sheep girls giggling, though, and one of the farmers yelling at them to run find his pants. They never did find them, no telling what Jett had done with them, but somehow they'd gotten something else put on him and carried him home. He'd broken out in a beautiful case of hives after that and hadn't been able to wear wool since.

And this had to be every bit as bad. Worse! Dang ticks! If it wasn't an itchy bite up one leg, it was a crawly sensation up the other, and no telling how many times he'd had to dart off the path behind a tree to shake out his trousers and check his legs, then get all his gear readjusted and run to catch up again. It was getting pretty ridiculous, this shortcut through THESE woods in THIS heat, and on top of it all he'd blundered right through some poison oak catching up last time. Well, actually, that was the first time all day he'd appreciated having all those hot clothes and armour on, but it still slapped across his face and promised all kinds of hell on his nose and lips the rest of the week.

"Ok, let's take a break! Gabrielle, refill the water skins while I check Argo's hoof again. Joxer, I need you to help me out here."

Great, just when he was enjoying the word "break" he had to go and let the horse lean on him again. Why the beast couldn't just lift a leg up was probably another curse from the Tick God. But she'd started limping a couple of hours before, and Xena discovered that not only had she picked up the tip of a blackjack thorn in the right fore, she'd also managed a hairline split sliding off a rock as she suddenly shifted to her left fore when the thorn slipped in. Consequently, they were now traveling very slowly through the evilest forest Joxer had ever experienced. He didn't know whether the slow part was a good thing because it allowed him time to take off his pants every 15 minutes to look for ticks or a bad thing because the slower they went, the more ticks he seemed to pick up. He wondered if Argo was as miserable with ticks as he was, then decided Argo had him beat with her sore feet. Joxer noticed, however, while Argo was leaning heavily on him and slowly crushing him down, that Xena's bare legs moving around somewhere on the other side over there didn't have a single tick on them. Hmm.

"There's still a little drainage, but it's running clear, so at least there's no infection setting in." Xena let Argo's hoof down gently, but that didn't stop her from continuing to use Joxer as a crutch. With a big "umph!", Joxer dug his shoulder into Argo's armpit, if there was such a thing, and she thankfully shifted over before Joxer fell flat with the horse on top of him. He straightened up with a groan and a drip of sweat in his eye and happened to glance over just in time to see Xena make a little flick motion with her fingers on her thigh.

Ah-HA! So THAT'S how they did it. No clothes, no ticks! After Gab got back with the water he kept a careful eye on her, too, and counted several flicks by the time Xena said the break was over. Meanwhile, Joxer was itching like the demons of Tartarus, and couldn't WAIT to get a move on again so he could drop back a little and try out an idea...

"What's wrong with your face?" Gab was suddenly looking very intently at him, but it certainly wasn't one of those looks he'd always dreamed of-- maybe more on the slightly what-a-gross-bug side of of the spectrum of Gabrielle faces, and it make him squirm with embarrassment.

"Looks like poison oak." Xena had glanced up and gone back to rubbing Argo's fetlocks and pasterns down with a mint salve to help ease the pain radiating from her hooves. That was the best thing about Xena- she never gawked or smirked no matter how stupidly Joxer flubbed up, so at least he could keep a little dignity.

"Well, you look like a duck," Gabrielle announced. "Not a wood duck or a mallard. More like one of those fat white farm ducks," she nodded decisively.

"Great, now she thinks I'm a duck!" Jox muttered, and crabbed off to be more alone with his demons while the girls gathered stuff up so they could move on.

As soon as they were out of sight, Joxer tore off all his armour and every stitch of outer clothing he had on, leaving a pair of baggy boxers covered with little smiley faces that his mother had embroidered for him. It wasn't like anyone would see him HERE, in these stupid woods. He tried the flick thing a few times and decided it was fun flicking the little buggers off like little catapults. He flicked off a good 20 or so, then wadded all his gear and clothes together. He had to unroll the wad and grab his blanket out to whack a few ticks off his back that he couldn't reach, and decided that if he tied one end of his blanket around his neck and let it hang down his back, the ticks back there would crawl on the blanket instead of him. He put his helmet back on, girded his sword around his boxers, picked up his gear, and strode much more happily through the now much less evil forest.

And quickly discovered that he'd waited too long to catch up...

Not a problem. They were probably just getting up and over the ridge about now... a ridge. What ridge? He'd been so busy itching and cursing the evil woods that he hadn't noticed whether they were sorta going up, or sorta going down, or sorta staying somewhere in between. Rats! Well, he'd just have to use  his superior tracking skills, that's all. He bent down a little, looking this way, squinting that way, and found several obvious signs that a horse had been through recently. After he finished scraping his boot off with a stick, he stuck out his chin and squared his shoulders and marched resolutely onward.

Marching with resolution is weary work, and an hour of it eventually had Joxer stumbling up and over another ridge. To his surprise, it ended in a tumble of bracken and rocks and stretched into a beautiful valley that would have made an ideal backdrop for a picnic with a beautiful girl, had Gab and Xena not gotten lost somewhere back in those evil woods. The idealness was preempted, however, by a mob of crazed sheep who were caught in a tangle of thorns, and they were both so embedded that the little boy herding them home couldn't pull them out. It looked like a couple of thieves had come along to offer the boy a hand, sheep prices being what they were these days, and they kept knocking him down while they tried to cut the wiry blackberry branches enough for the sheep to be able to at least move forward.

There was no time for contemplation. Joxer threw down his bundle, checked his helmet, brandished his sword, and charged down the rocky slope in full battle cry with his blanket flapping wildly. It was magnificent- he heard himself yelling, "I am the shadow that swoops in the night! I am the radish that sticks in your throat! I am the tick that woaoohhohoooohhhhh!" Joxer slipped, um tripped? Stumbled... no, a warrior catapults, definitely. Joxer catapulted off a loose chunk of rock and for one brief, exciting moment was as airborn as any bird, arms outstretched with his terrible sword, blanket flapping like a thunder god, mouth open in full battle cry.

Well, that was all the sheep needed. They surged hard enough to pull the brambles out by the roots and took off with the little boy chasing close behind. The thieves didn't wait for a second look and took off in another direction, yelling something about leprosy. Joxer hit the ground and slid with his bare body into what remained of the blackberry thicket. When Xena later found him, he was so covered with bites and thorns that Gabrielle gave him a teeny sympathetic peck on his forehead where his helmet had protected him. She didn't want to risk getting poison oak from the rest of his face. They had Joxer tell his story of daring-do several times that night, and the more he embellished it, the more Gabby smiled at him and ducked her head and whispered to Xena, so she must have been pretty impressed with the Mighty Jox.

The little boy had quite a story to tell the villagers that night, too. It had been a rather boring growing season, so the story grew with each telling, about the mighty Tick Man who wore a cape and came swooping out of the forest to save a little shepherd boy and his flock from two swarthy giants. This story became so popular in the region that soon, all the heroes in all the stories had to have a cape and be able to fly or it just wasn't a good hero story.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There you go.

changing future me's lame history

Ok, the real life stuff.

Money and calendar sync done. Not sure where I messed up but it looks like I've got $80 more in the bank than I thought. Did the math 3 times, would be sweet if that's right. All I've got scheduled this week is a couple of physical therapies, yay! So this will be clean the house week. We were super out of groceries, ran in yesterday for FOOD. Oh, finally dumped that 2 pounds I've been whining about gaining about 2 months ago with those med changes. 2 doesn't seem like much, but 2 pounds once or twice a year adds up over ten years, and I really don't want that back, seeing's how I managed to lose 50 in 2011.

Eye doctor stuffs- for the first time since 2004 it's coming up that the weird left eye stuff is probably like the rest of my body, referred. All that weird itching behind my eyeball is the same thing as the weird itching anywhere else. My eyes are fine, they just fake me out because my nervous system. Me and left eye are having a good laugh over coffee.

Submitted a post yesterday for syndication. That sounds so official. Hope to be submitting regularly a couple times a month or so the rest of the year. I need that extra polish experience. I don't get paid or anything, but it will definitely be SEEN. Pinky blog is nothing compared to a site that has over 100K subscribers.

Finally broke down yesterday and picked up a new pair of jeans and a cheap flannel shirt. My old flannel shirt is around 5 years old and holey, but I still love it. I'm not one to have a lot of jeans around, and lately wore out a couple ancient pairs, so I guess time to refresh the wardrobe before I wind up going to town in lounge wear.

Jamming an 8.5 pound pork roast into my little crockpot today might be a terrible mistake. It's even too big for my enameled Dutch oven pot and my speckleware campfire style roasting pan. Kinda facepalming over the idea of having to run the oven all day on really low. Toying with the idea of leaving it in the crockpot for an experiment and just letting future me regret it later. Knowing that's really lame of here and now me to do to future me. A few intelligent brain cells in the back of my mind are letting me know it's not too late to slice it in half and split it into two pots, but lame me doesn't wanna do that. Lame me will move mountains in minecraft and doesn't want to split a roast down...

Btw, a ginsu style fish filet knife is really good for slicing a roast in half while it's still in a crockpot. Easy peasy, problemo solved. All future messes averted, future me will never even look back on lame me now with disgust and loathing for being lame, yay! I can always count on me to look out for me.

#TBT why I stopped writing fanfic...

...because some people really do want to know.

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was contacted in a forum by a nurse in another state seeking a fellow writer to have a little fun smashing Star Wars and Star Trek together. Since this was back in the Dark Ages when smashing fandoms was still considered heresy, I shouted Hooray! and gleefully jumped into emailing back and forth.

It. Was. Awesome. I love writing words. I love Star Trek and Star Wars. I had often imagined what could happen if the streams were crossed. I floated happily along through initial construction, setting up several plot lines and testing out character interactions, like Q bugging the Emperor, when I realized I was playing ball kind of alone on one side of the court while Riker was making out with Leia on the other side. It was dramatic and romantic and completely left out plot devices of any kind, even bad ones.

That was my first experience meeting Mary Sue. I had no idea what to make of it. I thought we were writing a cool story, but turns out I was a tool for someone else's fantasy role play. It felt weird, like asking a stranger to watch and maybe even join in. I was at a loss.

Nowadays, fans skip the whole writing thing and do this cool stuff.

Next up was Sliders. I had a really good time with that one. I discovered I could write quick comedies in very few pages, and I had a ball cracking myself up over the time all the parallel Sliders wound up randomly sliding onto the same Earth in someone's shower at the same time and stepping out sopping wet having to figure out whose people were whose, and the Colins were a riot. You'd have to be there. Sadly, no one else in the fandom was interested because none of them were having sex with each other. Still, it's awesome running into Sliders fans here and there nowadays. Click pic for awesome.

A year or so went by, I was rockin out in the Xena fandom and had figured out that's basically how fandoms party, so I became a ringleader and took a rowdy Joxer bunch with me over to a crazy list feed before we all got thrown out of an actual fan club. It was a lot of work, but I loved it, and pretty much played it like a Vulcan surfing a wave in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. Yeah, I invented party Spock and didn't even know it, way back in the 90s. That is who Yablo was.

Yablo was trubba, but my gang was even more awesome trubba, and I didn't care. Until I was asked to read and comment on some fanfic. I'd already written a couple of 3-page comedies to be included in a fan book to Ted Raimi (never found out if they made it), one in particular that I thought was a genius mashup on Joxer accidentally becoming a Darkwing Duck figure, so I thought Ok, sure, let's see what other people have got.

I didn't expect a submission in a big yellow envelope in my mailbox, and I didn't expect it to be on par with erotica. I'm sure there was love in there somewhere, but since I was unfamiliar with the lingo, I simply fell over cracking up, and from there it became a comedy to me. So when I reviewed it, I had no idea that I hurt feelings quite badly.

Can you imagine if we'd had youtube back then? I'd have been in heaven.


From the frying pan into the fire, they say. My fourth experience with Mary Sue was an entire world fandom eating itself over a dead guy and a love slave, with the show itself instigating the never ending frivolities, and suddenly it all clicked. Marketing. I understand.

No I don't understand, apparently. Stepping back from Mary Sues means we can't be friends, whaaaaa. I have my own tastes and agendas, but being swamped on all sides with singular focus on internet orgies of every conceivable kind had me finally standing up brushing it off in private to a few people. Aaaaand, that didn't go down very well because that was back in the days before I knew I was an asexual person with Aspergers and before you know it, I became a worthless trading card left in the bottom of a drawer. Well, that's a quickie rendition of months of oncoming sadness, but you get the point.


I. Write. Stuff. I can take any writing prompt and turn it into several thousand words of honest to goodness story in minutes. I don't need sex to sell it, I don't need to be a character to feel it, and I certainly don't need validation to keep writing.

I see the fights going on through the years over someone stole my idea thing, and the copyright wars over stuff that's barely even legal to begin with, and I just stopped sharing what's in my head. Until Pinky started publicly blurbing at syfydesigns, which has over 26,700 views now, thank you very much. And then Pinky started publicly blogging on a real blog. And I'm sitting here looking at the view count wondering how in the world that happened.

I love fans. I've always said that. Fans are my coffee in the morning. Fans are my catharsis through rough days. Fans are there in the horrible dark nights when I'm scared and alone. The internet is full to bursting with fans being awesome.

But I'm sorry, I just can't have sex with you guys. I know, I'm weird...

But mostly, I'm busy. It's called a contract. And this blogging stuff is called warm up, you know, like athletes do before big games.

As I write, I am realizing my real life trumps all the fanfic I could have ever written. Maybe one of the reasons I don't Mary Sue fanfic is because I don't have to imagine it. One of the reasons I don't read it is because I've seen it all around me. The vamps. The violence. The slaves. The dead.

I have kept so many secrets. I have been so many scary places.