pinkyblue

I haven't been saying much this month because I'm working on other projects and paying attention to other things, like what friends are doing on their projects. I'm taking a little time to notice other people's stuff. Ok, yeah, and lurker games. I'm also going on more braincations without taking the medias with me.

Still here being Pinky, though.

click for deviantart source

Staying busy.

Nixarctica

Hopefully from here there's nowhere to go but up. Crack of dawn is always the coldest. Check this windchill. We are officially colder than Antarctica. Saw that roll through on my local weather on facebook.

Really thought my stats would calm down after I privatized my facebook feed 9 days ago, since facebook was my strongest traffic driver, but apparently that didn't deter anyone. And doing that definitely nailed down a solid steady number of notification hits, because I thought maybe those were extra pings from facebook redundancy 'safety' settings, but apparently not. Whoever you are, I'm holding up my coffee cup to you. I am now able to look at a naked core readership before I even link outside of the bloggersphere.

Okie doke, where were we. I happily jogged down a weird path this week while I let my head settle around real life, and I kinda need to bullet point and catch up.

• MRI came back, confirmed the usual aging spine thing with a new twist, cervial hemangioma shows up in report now. No idea if it's just better reporting for something there all along or if it's new, but it is 'unremarkable'. Probably something they'll just keep an eye on...
• Laying super still on a hard, flat MRI bed for 40 straight minutes was stupid hard on me over the weekend, between bodywide fibro flare and nerve compression was almost unable to walk for a few hours on Saturday, but thankfully coming back out of that.
• Everyone around me keeps getting sick the last 2 months. I haven't yet been really sick like that. Hope I didn't just jinx myself. But if this is real, I've been sticking to raw cruciferous in salads, buncha cooked cruciferous like caramelized brussels sprouts with aged balsamic and parm, yogurt, and chicken. Little bit of cheese and occasional microwaved nachos in small portions. Lotta water. I don't drink anything else but coffee in the morning and a cup of tea in the evening. If diet has an effect on positive immune health, that's what's doing it for me. Stop eating your candy and ice cream and get off the cigs and booze, guys. I'm the puny one and here I am not sick.
• My new 3x3 daily/weekly/monthly personal/home/internet chart is working really well. Syllabus doesn't seem to be doing it for me this winter, so I'm doing chart, ticcing off as I go. Tic chart, guys. In the 3rd grade I got gold, silver, blue, or red stars on a weekly chart for how fast I timed on a multiplication test. (A 'times' test.) In 5th grade I got a circle for every book I read to add to a bookworm. I had the second longest bookworm in the class, went around 3 walls. Charts are fun, but a lot of work to make. I use one sheet in a notebook. Upper third is a list for monthly, just need to see one tic beside each item. Middle third is a list for weekly and I divided into five sections across for all the weeks in the month, each section needs to have one tic in it for each item. Lower third is a list of daily stuff I do, and I don't bother ticcing it. I mostly do it anyway. It's there to remind me to stay on track. Concise, contained, at a glance. Each month I'll make a new page, and I can compare how I do to the months before.
• I've been allowed to take over twitter duties for my fave minecraft server, now that I'm part of staff. I think it's a great way to divert off the twitter mess and pull a tight focus on something I love.
• I need more squirrels in here.

I created a new playlist for positive vibes, to borrow a word from a friend. Music and visuals that calm the mind, as it were. I do this a lot and you guys never see it because I don't share that part of me that goes really deep into the quiet so I can float out of myself. I had a hard time sifting through and sorting out all my Pinky junk the last few years, and I feel like the best direction to go this year is just ignore the F* out of everybody, you know? Be me. Float away in bliss and enjoy my moments. I seem to have arrived to a new place, and I'm ready to take better baggage with me going forward. It's really hard to brain train into calm with chaos and challenge all around, but it's totally worth it. Let's see what I can find this year. :edit: Sorry, didn't realize I had this playlist on private, lol.

braincation in wonderland

I am here today. It clicks to more info.

Neurologist  firmly insisted yesterday that I bump up my 'tiny' gabapentin dose, so over this next week I'll be doing the ramping up to next level thing. There aren't any particularly pressing symptoms other than my whole nervous system coming more and more 'on' (as I call it) over the last 6 months despite intensive physical therapy, but since insurance allows another brain image, it's in queue on standby in case this year goes downhill. Sticking to my backup noncompliant nature, I made sure it's ok not to go get that done right away. I think he said the last one was 2013. I can't find evidence of it (shock, right? I document everything), and I have a horrible memory for time framing stuff, so I'm going with that. It's been long enough that if this year goes off the rails, it's time to see if there is visible change going on. I've lost count of all the brain scans I've had since my 20s. Can't remember if I've at least had a CT head shot since 2013, but I'm betting yes.

Calendar sync was a little off the rails this morning, but I think that's all fixed now. Not sure how, but still balancing to the penny with my money.

I guess in between minecraft surges (usually 15 minutes long) I'll be getting ready for a possible Bunny sleepover tomorrow. I'm on point for the rest of the debris field from years of mobile office to magically fall into place now, will mostly be a bit of drudgery through keep/toss & find homes kind of stuff. My mobile work area has been slo-mo remodeling into permanent work area last couple of months, and I'm so ready for this to get done. Another diligent month or two will hopefully establish my dominance in this house. I say that knowing Bunny will probably be inspecting like a store visit from regional by the time she hits 4... You know what I mean if you've ever retailed.

Me and minecraft irl.

j'adore parentheses and commas

Got the calendars out yesterday and started the Bunny spacetime mapping. Executive decision from both meemaw and papa was a resonating *no* when a Bunny weekend came up. Not complaining, I adore that kid, but meemaw was left far behind in the vaca / date night / weekendcouplewithoutakidintow thing years ago during the last 3 boyfriends (before there was even a kid), and if I were to total the Bunny hours we've put in the last 24 days (including driving time) and, what the heck, toss in an ER trip looking for a possible hernia, and what the heck heck, I've been going to bed every night at 6 p.m. for nearly a week now- I think we're due a break. I understand parents have kids around all the time (except when they're at work and I was a stay at home mom***, plus I raised a full time step kid and oh what the heck, towed around extra cousins for a couple of years so people around town thought I had 4 kids) (did I mention I was already having autoimmune flares back then?), but we're talking @bonenado and I actually taking kids on anniversary and Valentines dates with us, because we had no one else and at least we were getting out of the house.

***To be absolutely fair, I actually left my kid around Bunny's age behind for 3-4 months while I worked in another state, and all around that time before and after, my mom helped a LOT with her while I did 18 hours of college and 60 hours of work every week one semester. I pretty much saw sploit asleep and that was it, so please understand I'm really not complaining. In fact, that was the year I nearly drowned myself in alcohol until I nearly crashed my liver and still managed to keep my grades up and be awesome at work. I really do get all the things. But I really do need rest right now.

So we're preplanning possible routine Bunny weekends, barring scheduling jilts from whatever bug is going around and holidays jamming up custody tussles over another kiddo caught in the fray. Also, @bonenado got a lot of wood split and hauled for his very aging parents, which wouldn't have happened if we'd said yes. Weighing options here- freezing old people or hyper kid while parents get a weekend off...

And really, @bonenado shouldn't even be doing that level of work at his age (my opinion), many men out there have never worked as hard as he has in their lives, especially not being paid, and especially spending nearly his entire vacation taking care of other people instead of taking off in a high $$ RV home like the neighbors seem to do several times a year, so this is just meemaw reflecting on how we need to keep papa in good shape to keep seeing a Bunny growing up.

Anyhoo, I've got little exes on the calendar for the possibility of being available every other weekend so I can stay on top of whatever heads up comes our way. And then I allowed myself a day off yesterday (in between sorting and homing material in 4 more sacks of scattered swoop save Bunny bomb stuff and folding laundry) and just played minecraft all day (if all day means walking away from Jawn every few minutes and then remembering I had a game going and coming back to it), and it was awesome.

New Sherlock tonight!!!! Have you guys seen this link from Sherlockology? Click the pic for Google Street view of the flat they film in.

Coffee time.

braincation

I think it's time to admit I've been stalled in a deep funk about my writing for the last 9 months. It's still creeping along, just not going public. I noticed I went through a series of phases about it, like denial and displacement and all that, but I'm sort of coming to embrace that this Year of Suck (which is a double whammy because I was looking forward to it for so long) is a thing I don't need to pretend isn't happening or apologize for or fret about messing up plans or whatever. It's very simply just what it is, a year of suck. I can only apologize to people who've asked me to write for them, and people who wait for more installments in other places.

I'm so very tired. My pain has been increasing for months (that's a good thing, means nervous system is healing), I'm worn out from handling years of so much stuff for other people, I'm finally starting to SLEEP regularly (I hadn't done that in 20 years), and I think my body has taken the bit and said NO MAS to the ol' brain. No more wild exuberance at 4 a.m., no more juggling 5 projects and an ADHD child, no more super me being there for everyone while I'm micro scheduling nutrition and rest and I'm the spooniest one handling all this stuff. No. More. Till. I've. Had. Some. Real. Rest.

I think I'm going to spend my week with the laptop unplugged and see what happens. This means no facebook messaging (don't get that on my phone, guys), no blog updating, no minecraft, no research and studying, no checking on things...

I've processed a lot of stuff this year. Just loads. Getting an adjustment disorder with anxious mood diagnosis last fall after finally processing stuff from years before probably means I'm still processing. I was so super trained through childhood and an abusive first marriage to simply shut down that it's taking years to get it all opened back up and dealt with. I've been through days that have felt so excruciating that I'm not sure how I even keep breathing.

I think what I'm realizing is, I can't just keep pushing through it. I'm stuck in it, I need to let it keep processing. I've been going through mini-shutdowns over and over, thinking in black and white terms, but the middle ground might be just walking away from public for a few days and hopefully not panic about missing all the neat stuff going on out there. Distraction, while very helpful during intense days, is a shutdown vehicle, and something is trying really hard to coming through my heart and soul right now. Now that I know I'm handling the neurontin ok and have private touchbase in place, I think I need to step back and let it on through.

woke up to hater porn, how is your Monday?

click for Angry Gamer Cat memes

First ban on my Lexxperience FB page this morning, idiot with a header full of pigs in bonnets and a feed full of really bad Muslim sex cartoons. Not tolerating crap, people. Added a 'review posts' setting so my page won't get spammed. In case some of you Lexx fans don't know, I've been deleting and banning determined haters for YEARS. One year in my Xanga past, someone created multiple accounts over and over and over just to keep pasting very lengthy diatribes about how I was going to hell (pick a religion and insert here, I've heard it ALL), and I just don't think it's cute when a brand new facebook account with a suspiciously familiar name (recent 'friend'?) starts following my cool stuff out of the blue to start religious and political wars. I did my best not to let stuff get ugly on twitter, but dayam if that crap starts on facebook. I have no problemo reporting haters.

Back to Pinky stuff. Been thinking for a couple of weeks about writing up a new syllabus. My old one is outdated. My pattern has changed. We're not having regular weekly Bunny visits like we used to now that she's getting older (I'm sure that'll pick back up a bit this summer), and I'm also running out the door lots more this month taking care of my own stuff.

It'll hafta start from the ground up with a whole new Plan again, plus resetting my short term and long term goals before I can put a work schedule back into place. Lately, all my writing work has been spontaneous and haphazard. I miss my daily discipline that I had in place like clockwork for several years. My output isn't as driven as it used to be. 4 a.m. minecraft is taking place over early morning writing, which might actually be a good thing on days I have to run out the door. Maybe I'll get back to less wordy on Pinky and more wordy on my writing projects. At any rate, braincation needs to be over now.

All this month I'll be running out the door 3 times a week, mostly mornings, so my morning workout time may need rescheduling. I'm usually doing my workout by 7 or 8 a.m.

In spite of all the extra activity suddenly starting back up, I still seem to be staying caught up with chores around the house, which means my energy level is up and my depression level is still down a bit, yay.

Still on top of bills and billing and scheduling more billing. Usually late winter is all about @bonenado helping me float through financially, but this winter I've juggled ALL THE THINGS and not dropped the ball once. This is probably the first winter that's ever happened, so huge high five and go me on that one. I went mildly glitchy, but I never hit my annual brain fail.

Time to get all over this day.

the first executive bored meeting of the new year

We. are. exhausted.

I haven't slept this much in ages. I think I've gotten as much sleep in the last 7 days as I have in the last month.

We made it up through the end of season 2 in the Sherlock marathon and called it quits for now. Never yet caught up on Doctor Who. We decided we're getting so burned out on the slam of new TV shows piling up in the DVR that we went through the timer list and deleted 15 of them. We don't have netflix, hulu, or amazon prime, just Dish, and even then there's a whole slew of channels we just don't get, like HBO and Starz, and STILL we're burned out on new shows. Definitely not like the old days (ten years ago, haha) when we twiddled our thumbs watching reruns.

I've been doing my thinky planny stuff, though. There have been meetings and executive decisions and lots and lots of coffee.

One of the discussions brought up in conference is that I have been extremely overextending myself. I assessed my time management and decided there is no way I can continue the TWD live tweet review AND do the writing I really want to do for Lexxperience during the 20th anniversary (I've had 1400 hits in the last 4 days by people around the world who take my writing very seriously, I'd be ~stupid~ not to put more time into my own hobby after neglecting it so long) AND keep organizing and working on material I'd prefer getting published sooner rather than later. Plus there are other things I want to write that I'm much more excited about than The Walking Dead.

When I came up with my plan to 'game' social media 3 1/2 years ago, I had very specific goals and wrote out a mission statement. I've decided it's time I stop detracting and undermining my own efforts with jaunts into lesser projects that I wind up spending several days a week on. Also, I refuse to cut out family time to pursue my goals, so since I must make time cuts somewhere, it simply has to be the amount of time I spend checking on feeds and timelines.

New year, new ways of doing things. All PMs and DMs are now my discretion only. There is nothing personal behind me ignoring private contact. I make just about everything in my life public sooner or later, friends and family across the States and around the world can check any time and see what's going on in my life without me having to stop and answer questions.

I'm currently listening to the Vienna Philharmonic while I wait for the Sherlock special. I used to listen to music like this all the time. It's wonderful just having it going in my background tonight. And it's about to start now, so brb....

~~~~~~~~~~~

And I never came back because I fell asleep again.

Scott's up, and we are listening to a DIY TV show with a table saw going at 4:20 a.m. +_+ This could be a long day.

The Sherlock special was beautifully layered last night. We paused a jillion times to excitedly compare notes. All these years with @bonenado, and we finally have a show we both equally tear into together, side by side like pro intellectual wrestlers. It really is a shame we don't do our own little podcast about it, because Scott's pretty awesome with canon details and comparing all the version character and story styles, and I'm pretty awesome at spotting every little bitty detail as we watch and remembering past episodes, plus I'm not just any Moffat fan, I'm a Moffat conquering the world fan, and what we saw last night topped every Sherlock ever written or made, or marketed. Moffat and Gatiss, in my opinion, are the most intellectually savvy writers on the planet. Anyone who can't see the whole picture of what they are doing are nothing more than brain level proletarians to me. I just insulted 99.99% of the world.

One of the list of blogs I read that I get email delivery on is Stone City Blogs. I highly recommend it for anyone who is bored, whiny, or otherwise frustrated over the little things this year. It's one of the first things I see every morning, and therefore usually my incentive boost for the day.

I've danced around the whole it's not you it's me thing for months, and then ok, it's you for a few more weeks, and then back to but I own that it's really me through the holidays, and now I just give up. What part of plz to stop poking the tiger in the cage can't be understood is beyond me, but if I don't rise above this NOW, I will forever be bogged in it. And I do admit I create the monsters around me because I am one of the most naive people on the planet. I've mentioned over and over that even my psychologist says I'm easily led and that I've gotten professional advice from a publicist to simply not respond, and what do I do? I respond. And then I get all pissed off because someone yanked my chain again. The whole crabapple thing was very real. If I'm triggering that easily, it's time to rethink how easily I fall for enabler relationships that wind up triggering my claws. Dealing with it delicately on a public blog is the only thing not making it worse so far. This is something I've been privately contacted about a number of times over several months by concerned readers who see everything that goes on in real time on social medias and understand the dynamics of what is happening, and while I appreciate some of the attempts to help me keep my balance, I fear that talking about this any more will only make it harder to sheath the claws, so going forward, I'll not mention this any more. This is it. I'm done with the poking mechanism and I'll simply no longer respond to it here, there, or anywhere.

I really love this song. People who don't get this visual, the character set up, the ship, and this song don't get me at all.

braincation

my livingroom is about to explode according to this logic

Here's the thing. I'm still at least 5 episodes behind on Doctor Who, I wanna marathon everything Sherlock before the holiday special happens in 4 days, and I really really wanna see my fave Christmas-time movie.

click for the saddest meme collection ever made

What is my fave Christmas-time movie, you ask. Only the baddest assest movie EVER.

When asked what the all-time best ever Christmas movie is, my response exactly. #bumpit, Dwight.

Also, I feel like I'm getting a cold, my data plan is maxed out 10 days before rollover, my internet is super glitchy from this neverending rain, and lappy keeps abruptly shutting down anyway before it melts.

SO- I'm going to camp out on my couch the rest of the week and glue my eyes to my TV and lose myself in awesome. I can't say when I'll wobble back into your lives, maybe peek out once a day, maybe for New Year's Eve, maybe for the Sherlock special, no idea, but I need down time like you wouldn't believe. I've also got some planny thinky stuff to do. I hope your holiday weeks are going as smoothly as possible, and please don't do anything stupid.

Pavlov, Schrodinger, Machiavelli, and Freud walk into a bar

And Plato is a bartender... Hang on a sec, we need a piano man. Or something.


I had a eureka moment this morning after that last post. I've been struggling for at least two months with how to handle letting someone with severe depression know I'd like to stop being tagged in certain convos without triggering problems and without encouraging private messaging to do it. I really need to be done with private messaging. It all suddenly came to me in one sentence- "I'm not on twitter to promote religion." Once that gets said, I may ask to be untagged from those convos. I believe in tolerance, but I'm to the point of extreme impatience after several polite hints and finally just flat saying in private that I'm not going to retweet certain things and then being very publicly poked with tags afterward, as if there were a leveling up kind of game.

I have a big variety of followers, many different religious and political beliefs, many different agendas, all ages and sexual orientations. I believe in people first, ideas second. I learned growing up watching other people that it's kinda stupid to condemn other people for not agreeing with one's own point of view, especially when that point of view is first and foremost based on the concept of forgiveness. Several religions promote forgiveness and tolerance, and this can be practiced by anyone, even without religion. All the same, one person's obsession with what I can only think must be an attempt at something humorous can get a little tiresome, and I can tell a few friends have been keeping an eye on my tag feed and are probably wondering how much longer I'm going to put up with this. Some people enjoy poking other people to respond, and I tend to let it go on way longer than I should because I can't tell if it's deliberate obnoxiousness or sarcasm or friendly and possibly even innocent annoyance by someone who genuinely likes me as a person and doesn't know how else to interact. I compare it to feeling like a tiger in a cage being poked by a little kid, which I've actually seen happen, and the parent didn't stop it, and none of the onlookers said anything, while the tiger on display actually took it really well until it abruptly turned and sprayed pee all over the kid. I'd rather not sink to that level, but basically that's what I do, isn't it, in the form of nice words molded around me grappling with a problem. Imagine if the tiger could tweet how it was feeling to the world or blog about its life.

I have an agenda, which I don't bring up very often. My challenge is sales without alienation. If what I intend to sell heavily depends on my personal honesty, and my targets are emotional crises subjects with interpersonal relationship challenges (or the families of such) (delicate wording is like a game to me, I can't help but love this sort of mental wrestling), how do I be myself without harming my own agenda? Because I'm really super good at rocking boats until they flip everyone right into the water. (And don't protest just because you've never seen me do it.)

Everything I'm practicing now with Pinky is about not rocking boats. I'm practicing and getting good at handling not only staying public, but balancing interacting with a variety of personality types on social media. I know crossing the streams can be bad and that one set of friends might not mix well with another set, and I do everything in my power to keep it fairly cool and non confrontational.

One of my biggest problems both online and in real life is being a sucker. According to my psychologist, I am easily led. My aspergers diagnosis has legal connotations, and a panel of judges appointed a payee to oversee my finances. If I hadn't been married, a legal guardian might have been appointed over me. "People with an ASD respond and perform neurologically inconsistently depending on emotional state, familiarity with the people and situation and various sensory experiences. For example, they may be very talkative in one setting at a particular time and later be UNABLE to speak well in the same setting."

That document should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to remain public with me. If I really do wind up 'out there' in interviews or whatever (notice I'm not rushing this, egads), I may actually lose a few friends if they are that clueless how I might be in real life, even after knowing me so long on the internet. It's not that I'm a regular jerk about stuff (anymore), but if I'm going down a rabbit hole right in front of you and you do all the wrong things trying to pull me out, you will find out exactly how much chaff is being burned down to the gold in your heart in the ugly fire I set on you. I've been told I'm scary by people in my own family, and it's because I'm unpredictable when I hit meltdown. I'm so afraid of meltdown myself that I have contingency plans in place for any given moment and every conceivable scenario. I can look intensely hateful and draw blood with little flicks of words without even trying, and you will think the rest of your life that I must really have hated you all along underneath everything. Very few people survive being friends with me if I'm caught not able to hole up in a corner for a quick braincation. The only way I survived as a child was my mom beating me until I learned to turn into a rock. If I turn into a rock, you best be scattering. If I turn to stone and stop responding, that's your signal to step back. Fortunately, I'm usually over it pretty quickly, and I can be bribed with food. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention and stick something in my face that I'm allergic to, then whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul (and I'm pretty sure Baphomet won't.)

That's a significant paragraph up there because I keep trying to positive image myself getting through a book signing. I will be pretty incoherent in a matter of minutes (an hour, tops), might be able to fake my way through another hour, but after that I'll need complete guidance to keep me focused and moving. By the end of whatever public session I'm dealing with, I'll need trusted people to lead me away. Yes, my aspergers is that bad. I become nonfunctional. Whatever brilliance I might occasionally display in print will be lost in the idiocy I descend into as I fall into shutdown. Staying on social alert is very different from spazzing out through college classes or automatically cycling through another day on a redundant job.

If I want to succeed, it's important that I communicate well to people on social media. My friends generously allow me to practice on them in public. New people that come along don't realize that my social media intentions are exactly that- practice with my social deficiencies. They bumble right into me and usually never have a clue how I feel about it. I can't even imagine what it's like for some of my better friends to watch it happening again. It's either hilarious or scary, but either way, there are a handful of you that I notice showing up, and I thank you guys immensely for your instincts and watching out for me. Just me noticing you noticing I'm walking into another awkward pickle is usually enough to help me focus nowadays on self monitoring and backing off again before I go into a crouch and launch.

Life experience helps, getting a sociology degree has helped, and a past rife with fandom squabbles has helped. My psychologist has helped immensely, and what really turned it around for me personally was Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way. I'm becoming very experienced at monitoring and managing myself nowadays. That doesn't mean I've overcome the autism spectrum. That just means people more and more rarely see me reacting like the very real aspienado I am in my own home, where I cycle through mini-shutdowns repeatedly, and often disappear into another room on weekends for a few minutes of alone time. If I'm sitting in a room alone with you and not saying a word and not looking at you, you might have no idea I'm still picking up on your every breath and eye roll, even if I don't understand a single nuance hinting at how awkward it might be for you if I'm not holding up my end of the convo, or worse, taking over completely in a nonstop gush of exuberance. I really don't know how @bonenado has lasted this long with me.

Ok, focus. I've been up and down doing breakfast and getting my day going and keep coming back and piddling here. I'm needing to start concentrating on actual work again, and maybe that will be a good way to ignore social media a little more again. October hit with all that finally dealing with the emotionally repressed stuff and I've been way off track ever since, BUT I have to admit this has been my best autumn in many years for dealing with stress and depression and staying pretty oriented and focused. Maybe going off track for a little while was a good thing. I seem to be in a good place in my head.

So I haven't disappeared, but I'm going to try to get back into a work schedule and stay off the twitters and FB a bit more this next month. Not ignoring anyone if you don't see me around faving or liking, just not there, letting it all slide by me while I'm busy like a little elf. I still feel driven, just in a new way I've not felt before, and I need to explore it. It's like a new point of view from a new angle, no longer feeling lost in it.


~later~ I let this sit all day because my head was such a scattered mess after Turkey Day, and I couldn't properly read back through this well enough to see if it made sense. I really don't have a clue how I'm able to write sometimes.

Again, thank you to my very tolerant friends on the webs. I have felt most extremely grateful for you guys, and aside from the usual Thanksgiving list of being thankful for health and family and a nice new roof over our heads, I really am sincerely grateful for #Snarkalecs, SyfyDesigns, #latenightmovie chat gang, my pals from Merlin and other fandoms, and the friends I still have in the Lexx fandom. I really do love you guys.

Don't Let Go

Today is my 22nd anniversary.

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.

walking in the wet wild wood by my wild lone

I feel like my week would be well represented with a stick figure dragging itself across a highway like a turtle. A search for an appropriate stick figure unwittingly leads me into a tantalizing foray into greater minds, and as I watch them whizzing past my head in their limoblogs, still dazed in a backlash of recent pain shock and another plunge into the inevitable spelunking of life's ridiculous overwhelming interruptions, I have to remind myself I can do this, I have awesome stuff, it's worth the effort, and more than anything, it's important.

I've gotta recluse, I'm sorry. I'll try to pop out on twitter, and who knows, maybe I'll feel differently tomorrow or next week, but I've gotta go deep if I'm going to get some of this done. For people unfamiliar with Asperger's, this has nothing to do with rabbit hole slang around sex, drugs, or web surfing, but I definitely go down a rabbit hole. I've been leaving a trail of crumbs ever since April Fool's Day, and it terrorizes me that I'm really going there.

It's Bluejacky's turn to write.