I can tell this is important because I'm crabby

I got up and wrote this at 1:32 a.m.

• Waking up disappointed that a memory of a game I played once wasn't real, and waking up from THAT going aw, man because it meant the game I was still playing wasn't real, either.

And now it's after coffee and I'm quietly thinking.

I need to assess before I go down in flames.

• Neglecting my foot injury is stupid and I need to get to my podiatrist, like I've been saying since last summer. I'm now using a cane part-time after I'm especially stupid doing too much.
• Moving appointments over and over and over has got to stop. I have a broken tooth and since I pay cash it makes more sense to fix it NOW while it still hasn't got a cavity than do a root canal later and pay ten times more.
• Living without any kind of anti-inflammatory whatsoever (med intolerance) and continuing to carry on through outrageous amounts of pain above and beyond what I agreed to has got to stop. I'm the one with the disability papers. Me doing all the laundry and dishes is a courtesy that I'm not being compensated for, and it's costing me health points. I don't mind doing what I volunteer to do, what I do mind is not being compensated in any form for doubling the child care hours over what I agreed to. We're not saving money if I wind up in surgery, point blank.

I'm not 30 years old any more. I remember being 30, raising 2 children on top of chronic illness and college and later on jobs, and the cost/benefit wound up being me sacrificing everything I am so other people could keep doing what they want. I've worked very hard on not feeling bitter about that. Also, cost/benefit nowadays has a little more death at my door kind of slant to it, and I'm not comfortable thinking about going early like my mom.

I understand loss and pain and finding new paths. I am happy to support new paths. I wouldn't mind a little support back, and I don't mean telling a 4 year old to pick up after herself when someone else clearly doesn't model that behavior.

Oh, and on our 4 day break we are going on a big, bad spider hunt. Apparently the warm moist towels and dirty clothes on the floors is really drawing in the brown recluse population, and food all over the house will soon be supporting thriving cave cricket and ant colony surges. I really don't like bugs in my house.

lyrics Inochi wa utsukushii – Nogizaka46

Who picked this planet, anyway?

Pollen map pix click back to Pollen.com
I got these screen shots last night, so today is 'tomorrow' on these charts.

We're starting April early this year, huzzah! I'm already on both round the clock zyrtec and benadryl through the day.

Before I got the hang of pollen maps, counts, and forecasting, I lived on antibiotics for the aftereffects of sludging through (often mistaken for powering through) the slime that tree sex causes throughout the tissues in my entire head and sometimes goes into my chest. Now that I've got a firm grip on antihistamine dosing, I'm able to avoid the antibiotics for things like really bad ear infections, ridiculously painful salivary gland (parotid gland) infections, slimy eyeballs, and of course, our friends the sinus cavities becoming a thriving metropolitan for germ overlords.

I don't know about you guys, but tree season heavily impacts not only my health, but my depression and anxiety levels as my body reallocates prioritizing system management, and if I don't manage all of this, I wind up in walk in clinics and even ERs for some pretty big med management that goes on to super screw my diabetes, and life becomes such a joy that I hate everyone and everything and my baditude affects relationships. THAT is what trees do to me.

I live in Mirkwood. I am surrounded on all sides by rugged terrain thick with Tree People. Some of them live in state and national forests, but quite a lot of them live all around my house. They fight for dominance, and their spring mating dances, while not as raucous as frog ponds (I love hearing froggies in the spring), are violently spew worthy. Everything turns yellow for about 6 weeks (last year was longer), and humans turn into snot manufacturing plants.

I vote the trees win and we leave this planet. Don't know what committee picked this one, but I think we should be living in a dome on a forsaken rock and watching videos of trees from a safe distance. I know, I know, our ancestors could have crashed here and it's not really their fault and we're awesome for actually surviving and conquering a hostile planet, but that still doesn't change my vote.

One of the things that came up with my psychiatrist last week was my idiosyncratic reaction to gabapentin, one of the purportedly safest meds on the planet. #transparency I decided at the beginning of the year to lose some weight, as many do with resolutions, and had lost 4 pounds by the time my gabapentin dose was ramped up. I gained those 4 pounds back and added another 2 almost immediately (faster weight gain than prednisone, folks), and even after ramping the med back down kept adding until I had put on a total of 14 pounds. If we take off the 4 pounds I lost first, that's still a 10 pound increase over one dose change in a very short time frame. I'm calling it what it is, 14 pounds.

This is unacceptable, and now that I'm 1- pretty much back to my weird normal mindset and 2- ready to plunge through tree season, what better time to go back to carb counting and calorie restriction? And exercise. That was the most epic fail part of the dose change. I'm retaining fluid in my FEET and they HURT NOW when I walk around exercising, so I've been taking it kind of slow while the fluid leaks back out. Between physical therapy and antihistamines, I'm actually feeling a little dehydrated and having to remind myself to drink a glass of water once in awhile. In the meantime, staying focused on proteins, healthy fats, leafy veg, and a much better attitude.

You know where to find me.

indelicate

Sometimes it takes me years to put a phrase together. This one is suddenly popping up from years ago when coffee enemas were suddenly all the thing. As a super spoonie, my point of view is being a barium enema in a world full of coffee enemas.

No idea why in the world that popped into my head *now*, but I do remember the day I first heard about coffee enemas. I'd just been through one of my most horrible ER visits ever because the pain was so bad that I couldn't stop crying out like you sometimes hear in a nursing home, and even now I'm nowhere near nursing home age.

The pain was bone pain. There's no way to medicate for bone pain except with heavy narcotics, and they have to be very cautious with those during some kinds of testing. The test itself was also one of the most painful I'd ever been through, barring spinal taps. If you've never had a spinal tap (sans radiology or numbing meds, and throw in a student) and you think kidney stones suck, you have a real surprise coming.

Anyway, I went in for one symptom and wound up with a very different one springing up from simply lying in one position too long on a very uncomfortable table (6 hours is way too long when bone pain says howdy), and I was having to walk nearly naked in a little gown to a public bathroom after a barium enema and it was all I could do to hug the wall and walk, and how I even made it to the bathroom like that is beyond me.

I know this is gross content, but since my childhood got a jump start with a barium enema and one of my worst pain memories as an adult is tied to one, it really surprised me to see a whole health movement joyfully jump on coffee enemas. Like, is your life not miserable enough that you need to do something weird to yourself?

There are two kinds of existence in this world- inflicted and inflicting. You are either inflicted and miserable, or you are inflicting and creating misery. You might even be the sort that mobius strips that back into inflicting misery that you create back onto yourself. There are all kinds of self harm.

Some people are born to be miserable. They have genetic variants that assure this. They live in environments or families that support this. They never asked for it, and they would do nearly anything to escape it if they could. For some people, these are lifelong and what I call 'slow terminals'. They fight to live even in horrible pain.

Some people are born feeling fairly decent and run around doing and living and being without a thought until something in their world comes crashing down. They have good genetics and live in homes where they at least feel safe and live in environments that aren't constantly threatening their health and safety in some way. They didn't ask for this, but when they think about it they feel unhappy. They feel emotionally stressed and not good enough and belittled somehow. They sometimes start looking for ways to stress out even more and they call it stress relief. They harm themselves with drugs, starvation, cutting, risk taking, and more. These people seem to miss having physical challenges like survival against the odds thrust upon them, so they create them.

Imagine those two groups of people being able to switch places.

linear is a nice change

I made it all the way through June this year without suddenly freaking out that I timewarped and missed the Fourth of July. This year I embraced my stuff and I think I'm ok now. And the dream changed last night.

Every year around this time I have a dream that I'm trying to call my mom on my phone, and I never can get the number dialed right. Last night, after a very cool day watching my stats here flip to 15,000, which I never would have guessed could happen in less than a year, and then plunging into a Giggy post (just feels really good to think), I dreamed I attended a big party with hundreds of guests flowing over into several rooms of a huge house, and instead of being one of the first to leave, like I've always done in the past, I stayed until nearly everyone else had left because I was looking for my phone.

I never did find it. All kinds of junk was left behind in the after-party mess, and I collected several lost phones and played around on other people's laptops and even an antique typewriter, occasionally running into others who were also looking for their lost things. I decided to try calling my phone from other people's lost phones. Boy, was that a joke. I knew the number. I could see the numbers I needed to press. But the only digit I ever pressed correctly was the first one. I worked and worked on it, and kept having to start over and over. I finally decided I may as well just accept the wrong phone in my hand and hijack the data plan, just plug my own passwords in and get my stuff done until someone cut the plan off. Strangely enough, I could input passwords just fine, I just couldn't call my own number. The second I realized that I woke up.

I feel it appropriate to revisit this song. I first posted it in 2008. Dark City is about adapting to change by using the power of our minds, even when nothing around us makes sense. I know this sounds cliche, but I know personally how hard it really is because I've gone through the whole glitchy brain thing- we can choose to become powerful people. We've gotta be willing to honestly assess and embrace who we are, and then make a plan. Baditude is everything. Use your powers for good.


And now it's time to GET TO WORK.

moonshadow

I have nothing to blame this on except to confess I'm a horrible person sometimes. Snips click to source.

I try not to take things personally nowadays, but that one really irks me. It's not like I hold grudges or anything, right? But I guess tonight was one of those missed-a-med-dose-while-jetlagged combos that set off a few triggers and next thing you know, I come out shooting, just like the old days. You can get to my articles from the tweet sources after you've clicked the snips.

Read this next batch from the bottom up, new feed piles in on top when you're on twitter. And thanks to trackers, I'm able to see real time response to mobile alerts on twitter.

Why am I saying this? What is the point? In the old days, I was a nobody blundering around and found myself catapulted to a sort of morbid fame that still to this day has a number of people around the globe checking on everything I do. Nowadays I have way more friends, way more klout, and I'm doing things on purpose. People blowing me off have no idea what I'm about to do.

I don't monetize. I don't get paid to do anything I'm doing on the internet. In fact, I've invested quite a few of my own dimes into this whole writing thingy. I've never paid other people for material to put onto my own sites, because I don't believe in being too busy to fill in my own content. If someone is rising like cream to the top of podcasting and blogging on other people's content, then that person is a middle man who knows how to buy and resell.

I'm not a middle man. All my content is created by me for my own amusement. I decided nearly three years ago when I came back out that I'm not going to get lumped into someone else's domain hoping to use them for a ride, and they're not going to use my content to pay for their web hosting.

I have nothing against content writers. I have nothing against shared domain presence. What I do have a problem with is someone publicly dissing me and still using me as a traffic router. So yeah, I thought it was hella funny to run into a wide open tweet offering money to anybody for content. Kinda reeks of desperation. Not saying that's what it was, just saying. I'll even daresay someone's been drinking up the income on the road trips and needs to pay some bills now, so it's time to pump up some traffic.

You guys will never see me beg my readers for money or my traffic for content. As long as I am able to get on the internet, I will enjoy other people and I hope they enjoy me. And whoever those 60 people were- that touched me, more than you might imagine.