This is how long I've been out on the webs again. It's funny and fortunate that I actually dated that pin. This clicks back to the pin I made.
As you can see next, pinterest started keeping stats in 2015. At first I thought that was because I connected it to a dotcom as a business account, but I checked and apparently I did that in 2014, and I remember when pinterest alerted me to the new analytics after I had already verified it with that connection. Anyway, who knows how many more times this pin was engaged in the 3 years and 3 months that pinterest didn't yet provide statistics for me.
That is one item in one fandom in one specific analytics summary.
Leaving little bits of ourselves here and there is important. I'm currently watching freedom of speech reactions on another host going crazy about algorithms against opinionating, debates over who is the real truther vs some kind of psy-op, and I have a different angle on it.
I trust no one. Someone could be completely right but that doesn't make them someone to trust. I'm watching mass flocking sifting people out into little 'fan' groups obsessing over 'truth', and what they're missing is asking how trustworthy are *we* as the little fans in these groups? We might be completely innocent and well-meaning on our ends, but so stupid about something that we don't realize we are doing something detrimental to the whole group.
'Muricans need to learn to think outside our 'freedom' boxes. A lot of people panicking lately had no idea we've actually been inside a deprivation tank for a long time, and they're finding out we do actually live in just as much of an information block as the rest of the world. Whatever this 'freedom' is that we think we have is so pale in comparison to actual truth and news outside our sphere that it would appear we are living in a fish tank.
Everyone wants 'truth'. The truth is that there never has been 'freedom', and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can move on and actually find ways to spread truth. Some of us use a form of encryption that has nothing to do with computers or internet.
Humans tell stories. Mythologies, nursery rhymes, prose, plays in theater- these all carry meanings embedded into word arrangements that conjure visuals. People using platform hosts to share 'truth' and hitting walls simply need to wake up. You are still asleep if you are feeling irked and riled up over your sudden loss of freedom of speech. You never had it. They just let you think you did.
We still have the freedom of expression. We are still allowed to tell our stories. God knows how much I've written in Pinky blog about finding my personal meaning by sharing my stories and some of my dreams. I may not reach ten thousand people in a 15 minute live rant, but I have reached over 100,000 just typing silly words. The goal is to get past the borders, the vehicle is fandoms, the message is encrypted in stories and dreams.
This is how ideas have survived occupations during wars for countless centuries. I think Americans have forgotten that. Maybe it's time they learned how to do that again.
My house reached a serene state today. Even the hamster voluntarily came forth when I appeared with a baby leaf of romaine, and there was joy across the land.
All flu germ evidence is being dealt with post haste. Trash, towels, sheets, dishes. All.
I suspect it's the weird mix of being low key affected by flu B and the tamiflu, but last night I dreamed the Brady Bunch was a real life reality show family, and that season one Mrs. Brady had been a different person, and season two Mrs. Brady was in real life AND ON THE SHOW having an affair with Greg Brady, and the whole family knew about it. Alice didn't even give a crap, and Mr. Brady was kinda getting into Cindy, and I think that's about where my brain went ohHELLno and woke me up.
Oddly, not one spec of it had anything to do with minecraft. My dreams usually go all minecraft on me. I've barely been playing over the last week compared to my usual. I did, however, get Bunny to take medicine by promising to let her play all by herself on a singleplayer, and she went to town spawning parrots and donkeys and going all pyro with a flame bow. She plowed down and fell out of the world once, but she did pretty good trying to place blocks for a little house. She's only 4. The first five minutes would be excellent, one hand on arrows, spacebar (up), and shift (down), and the other hand toggling pointer and middle finger clicking and the hotbar wheel. I know, right? But she hit the wall pretty consistently after five minutes and after that would be tired of it and going back to Paw Patrol, thank goodness.
I barely got any down time for nearly a week straight. Last couple of days were literally 12 hour stay on alert days after a very long weekend of all of us being miserable losing sleep. I'm going to coast out on this song while some of you stay glued. You're probably feeling rotten, too. Hope you feel better soon. 💕
click to purchase this print on canvas, metal, wood, or greeting card
Woke up from one of those very long tangled dreams to Barry Manilow singing a new Christmas song about superheroes, and thinking ok, that lisp of his is getting way worse...
I was at a friend's house up the road after not visiting for a very long time. For some reason, I needed to use her shower, and only very briefly saw her to ask, because she had to rush off, but handed me a folded note. I didn't open the note right away, just wanted to get that quick shower and go home, because it's always weird taking a shower in someone else's house.
By the time I got upstairs, the house had grown a bit bigger, added rooms, appointed details, and naturally I had to slow down and think Wow, she always did love her house. I made it in the upstairs bathroom, but for some reason I had to go back downstairs and outside real quick. I don't remember why now, but this happened over and over and over umpteen times, and each time going back into her house, the house kept getting bigger, more people kept showing up, until the entire building was nearly as big as a small shopping center, and every bit of it was still her glorious house, decked for holidays and people everywhere.
She wasn't the sort to have loads of guests, but very quietly the genteel artist type who loved Americana and flowers and the good life, excellent with complex recipes and always a picturesque purebred dog by her side. I didn't think about any of that in the dream, which would have thrown it all off. None of it seemed out of place at all. Everything that kept adding on an becoming more detailed and thronging with more people seemed right. It felt like exactly the kind of holiday party she might love if she had been born a very wealthy person. It had her spin on it.
I don't know how many times I made it back upstairs to that bathroom, which also kept getting bigger and more elaborate, but I finally opened the note. The topside was typed, and I don't remember much of what it said, but it was to me from her. Then I realized the underside was handwritten in felt tip pen, and oh no, the bathroom was damp (the shower was steaming it up), and a lot of it was running onto my hands and my clothes. Most the words were on me by the time I tried to decipher it, and the harder I tried to read it, the more it faded until it was gone.
I realized about then that I was in my shabbiest jeans about to get a shower, and there were dozens of people arriving all around for the start of the party, all dressed up from where they came, like one big family had just come from a ski slope and were all laughing and red from the cold and in matching sweaters, and another family had just come from a big church service and were still all dressed up and looking for the wine cellar (I don't recall her having wine around either in real life or the dream), and many other groups, and I thought Wow, she has a LOT of people connected to her. She'd always seemed so quietly reclusive to me, but I imagine I saw only a glimpse even though she was right up the street.
So I left the bathroom again, intent on going home to get better clothes, but it was too late, the party was starting, Barry Manilow was singing, and I woke up.
My very first thought this morning was maybe she had died and that was one of my heaven dreams, so I did quick recon and she hasn't, whew (although now I'm hoping there isn't something else). Yes, even though she moved far away a long time ago, I know where she is, what her house looks like, and a tiny little bit of how she's doing. I don't deep lurk very often, but a handful of people have never left the back of my mind, so once or twice a year I check on them.
So, psyche analyze this dream. Barry Manilow singing a Christmas song about superheroes. A friend's house growing very big and luxurious. Me trying to get a shower and being embarrassed about my shabby clothes. A note I couldn't read.
I have lately (this past year) become a bit self aware of how public I am. It feels awkward, and even though I'm not bothered by it most of the time (in my aspienado mind I'm just an avatar living a story), I've been feeling a little bit shy for possibly the first time in my entire life (I'm diagnosed with a mild to moderate level of narcissism, thankfully not dinging the psychotic bell or anything, but this is thanks to the childhood I survived as I've pointed out on facebook, you can find tests online to see how you rank, as well).
Ok, that was a stretched out overly-inserted paragraph. I'll just daintily step away from it instead of trying to fix it and move on.
I don't know yet how I feel about being aware of feeling sorta shy. It's not the kind of shy that people automatically think of as shy. I'm not afraid of anyone seeing me. I think it's more like I'm shy of seeing myself. I'm shy realizing I'm in this role I'm playing out. I'm cognizant of being ME.
When I was a child, I'd have very disturbing moments, almost out of body experiences, about being a skeleton walking around, about living in a skull, about my arm not being 'me', about my legs feeling like doll legs that I moving around from the inside. I know now that is a dissociative disorder. Not feeling in the moment, running all the incoming through filters, losing track of time (quite badly sometimes), and delayed emotional response most of the time come from this dissociated thing. I am often walking beside myself, following behind myself, distracted away from myself, coming back to myself. I am often not in the moment.
I love that I had that curious dream at the very start of 2018. I love that I have another mystery to solve about myself. What was in the note? I already know why Barry Manilow. My best friend that was murdered later gave me her double best of Barry albums before I moved away when I was 14. Christmas over the last ten years has very much become about superheroes, we are inundated with merch and entertainment on all sides. The beautiful house growing larger and more detailed was actually all in my head. More and more people arriving is me connecting, while I hide out in a bathroom. Click that. It's very pertinent. As for the shower part, that's baptismal, like washing off the old and putting on the new. Cleaning off. Refreshing ourselves. Maybe it's time I faced this.
I've still never reconnected to that friend. I've not reconnected to a lot of people in my past, but that particular friend had a very strong impact on me. You guys know how I feel like I'm walking through people's minds when I find their artwork somewhere. She takes photographs. I've seen all the public ones. If she reads my blogs at all, and I know she did in the past, then maybe she'll find this post and feel a little hug in her mind. I wasn't able to be what she needed when she was here, but I understand now. And that is the way our lives work, isn't it?
She was one of the very rare few who knew me in real life.
:edit: nearly 6 hours later- I burned 4 1/2 years' worth of correspondence between my best friend from school and I after I heard she was murdered. Clearly that is a horrible regret I live with, the note I can never seem to read in so many of my dreams. THIS TIME- the. words. got. all. over. me. That just screamed through my brain just now. The words are IN ME. I was handed a note and the words got all over me.
I'm not in the mood for a psychotic break right now, so I'm going with this is all normal and it's cool because I'm going to write a whole bunch of words this year that are totally going to vindicate that sad ritualistic grief burn. Creating Rituals to Move Through Grief
I know what books I'll be looking into this next year, thanks to this video, Earliest Examples of the Mandela Effect. That chick's research goes back to 1999 and actually uses some well thought out science, which will be fun. I watched another vid, which lines up with conclusions I've come to myself over the years.
For instance, I discovered that the most interesting thought process follows the question "If I could go back and tell myself anything, what would it be?" I took that question very seriously for years and decided that everything I am doing NOW is the result of this question. Everything I ever wanted to understand about reality and why we are here is all coming to me. I concluded years ago that I am affecting my past, and that a lot of the weird stuff I seem to go through might actually be from me at a later date. I've had far too many coincidences, remote views, dreams that come true, and deja vus in my life to not be meaningful in some way, and I gravitated to synchronicity as I was looking for answers, which I've talked about many times. I've 'always known' who I need to be and what I need to be doing, I just didn't always know how and with what at the time. It's like I had to accumulate experience and knowledge, like you do in gaming, to be able to level up and do bigger things.
Here is one example of that process. For years I questioned faith if people assume praying changes nothing once a certain time has passed. How can an omnipotent god be constrained by something like time? (Especially now that we can visualize stepping outside of time ourselves.) I didn't realize I had the opportunity to test this until I found out later it worked. I was on my way to nursing clinicals at an insanely early hour, and about halfway there I had a sudden urge to pray for my kids to get to school safely. That was not a daily habit back then, and I was very distracted with pain issues, so it felt weird for that to come so strongly into my mind. I took it seriously and focused a few minutes on asking for my kids and I to all arrive home safely that day, and that the day be easy for all of us because it felt like things had been so hard lately. After we were all home hours later, I found out the school bus had just missed being broadsided on a major highway by a big transport truck. The kicker was that happened before I prayed, so where did that big urgent feeling come from? I immediately thought of quantum reality and figured time going forward or backward has no power over anyone I could possibly pray to about affecting reality, and that meant my prayer was still very meaningful and important after the event had passed, particularly because I didn't know about it. I think that the not knowing somehow gives us more power to affect change, and I don't mean that *I* changed anything, but that I inadvertently asked it to change and it did.
The key is the not knowing. The whole point is about going with your gut and focusing on what you want. What do you REALLY want? Give that all your focus for a quiet minute or two. This has become a daily habit for me. I use the form of prayer because I honestly can't not believe in someone being more powerful than me being able to see all this stuff from the outside. Given the new breakthroughs in cosmological thought about simulated universes, this isn't that big a stretch. I think our wording is very misleading, instantly lending to downplaying intent and purpose, but it makes total sense to me that we mimic our bigger universe by creating more digital universes ourselves.
I've turned this process into a shared journey.
clicks to source
And of course I played around. Since every time I do a search for ANYTHING and Benedict Cumberbatch usually pops up in there somewhere (hence #bengruity lol), I thought I'd do a deliberate search for "Benedict Cumberbatch Mandela Effect" to see if anything pops up, especially since he's got one of the largest fandoms in the world possibly mass mind quantum changing everything around us, right. Well, guess what. The only things I could find at all were one person swearing his name had really been Cumberpatch, one person certain he'd played Doctor Who at some point, and one person swearing they'd witnessed him dying in a car accident with a girlfriend that apparently doesn't exist now. You'd think there would be a lot more weirdness around as big a deal as him. Maybe the fandom has locked him into place. Benlocked.
My first opioid since the 5 mg shot of morphine in ER last year that sent me straight into PAWS hell. Post surgery medication this time sent me super floating straight into euphoria. I. love. EVERYONE. And now that I've been intro'd to high dose vicoprofen, I'm already planning strategy getting back off it before I abruptly run out. Can't break them in half because enteric coating, so trying to stretch them out longer in between. So far handling nearly 6 hours between doses now. I know they want my pain well controlled but I started with only 20 pills every 4 hours and that drop off is going to be pretty evil.
And my dreams are wildly unreal. Everything disconnected the first night, literally watching myself doing cartoon dishes in a cartoon house, everything in my dream was animated and blinking back and forth between minecraft. Cartoon, blocks, cartoon, blocks, I finally just got up for awhile. When I went back to bed I started having memory dreams from being under anesthesia, like when my airway was put in. Felt my teeth clonk, abruptly woke up. It was fake. Felt a knuckle bump on the top of my head and abruptly woke up. It was fake. Kept falling back to sleep and abruptly waking up as I relived some of the prep before the really deeper going under, so just staying up nearly all night was easier. Couldn't really function, so just played on facebook. Sorry if I flooded your feeds with super share, lol.
The really cool thing was pre-op before anesthesia. For the first time in my life I had absolutely no anxiety at all in a medical setting. I don't know if I finally just reached a state of too tired and didn't care or what, but nothing at all bothered me or stressed me out. I knew I'd be knocked out soon and was looking forward to it, answered questions over and over again like a string pulled doll. I managed to do the smile and eye contact thing, everything went smooth with interaction, yay.
Pre-op was sad for the people around me though. A much older guy on my right was there for lots of lymph removal around his face and neck, would be a long surgery, and he rattled everything he knew about American presidential history, all the places of historical significance he'd traveled. Heard quite a lot about Andrew Jackson before someone asked him if family members were there to drive him home, then he stopped and there was a sad no. Was anyone out there for him? His pastor... Did he not have family living nearby? A son and a daughter, and neither one made the time to be there with him. He's obviously end of life in a high risk surgery and his own kids weren't there. He stopped talking after that.
An older woman on my left just quietly cried. Not quite sobbing, but nonstop quiet crying. She was asked if she'd like family to come sit with her, said no. Was anyone out there for her? Yes, her mother and her daughter. Was she sure she didn't want anyone? She answered with a very miserable sounding quiet no. I guess the relationships were better held at a distance. She wound up having a very horrible surgery involving vulva repair after leg loss, and we wound up in recovery beside each other. She was right, both her mother and daughter were emotionally distant. At least they were there, though. She got a call from her husband on dialysis during recovery, and she asked how much he'd been drinking before dialysis, sounded like he made it to fourth in a bottle of fifth and it wasn't even noon. She got after him, hung up, rolled on her side facing me and shut her eyes, didn't talk to anyone. At least he called, and at least they were there.
Through all this I reflected on my own life. I have family who loves me. We're not perfect and quite a lot of our backgrounds are highly dysfunctional, be we love. each. other. We are there for each other every day, we talk and say I love you every day, we care about each other having sucky days. And I felt fine in pre and post op knowing I was loved and I loved my people. I was truly at peace.
It's really nice to reach a place in aging life where you realize you don't have any sadness left in you about relationships. I've reached out, done what I can to heal with my loved ones, let go of the rest. Every day I do my best to reach out to someone, be there for someone. I don't always feel reciprocated, but I know those are my own brain chemicals, not theirs. I know all I have to do is say "I need help" or "please help me" and they'll be right there. If I feel blown off, I don't sit and sulk like I used to when I was younger. I ask the TV to be paused and I start talking. We talk until I either get tired of my own voice or feel like I said what I need to say. No one yells at me, and I know my own tension is a burden so I try to reign it in. I don't put head games on my people because I know I'm the one with the personality problems from my mental health diagnoses, and I do my best to communicate clearly, effectively, and succinctly. I need you, I love you, thank you.
And then realizing all the changes I've been working on also helped-
I changed my diet in 2011 and started healing my diabetes damage
I started physical therapy in 2011 and worked on better mobility and endurance
I have been working with a psychologist on depression since 2007
CPAP has been wonderful helping me get my brain problems under better control as I'm learning to sleep properly
Being on gabapentin has helped so much with the nerve pain that my anxiety levels have gone down in general
Being able to see success in what I'm doing through stats gives me goals, something to work on, so I feel productive. I hadn't looked at stats on wordpress in a long time, so when I got a real question asking for help yesterday with a real problem, I got to work focusing on helping someone instead of whining about myself after surgery. And then I looked up my stats and was blown away. Aspienado is my most viewed wordpress blog. I don't like using wordpress and rarely check stats, and Aspienado is a work blog for my first book and mostly private. But what is available to read gets found, from all over the world.
I also spent much of today downloading and reading a new book that I'm writing a review on, and I want to do a good job because I know it'll be seen over time by thousands, including a handful of directors, producers, actors, and a worldwide fandom. It's important to feel successful doing real work, and opioids through pain have made it really easy over the last 24 hours to focus on work. This is how it was for years, opioids and pain. I remember feeling good about being a difference to someone even with so much pain. Lately I've diverted into genuinely enjoying playing and being creative on a game server with a family of very diverse people, some with their own physical and mental/emotional challenges, but it felt really good getting back into writing over this last 24 hours. I'm glad I have built all that up to fall back on. I've come from hermit to twitter gang to facebook groups to #clanfam. I have a large network of people who care if I show up, and I love seeing them online, as well. I even got a phone call today and was elated. Barry is glitchy, too, like me, and we're both working on reconstructing how our friendship started. Imagine years of memories just falling right out of your head. We both know what that's like.
And most of all on my list of how I've come to be at peace is my joy. I was depressed for so many years, at times quite severely, and I hung on so hard. Bunny's little face very day is my joy, and I'm glad I'm still here every time I see her. She's my baby's baby, my pet kid, my challenge, sometimes my boss, lol. It's very fulfilling when a little kid genuinely loves you. I guess I was needing that.
Through all these things I've been learning how to balance my natural innate negativity through embracing publicity, challenging my baditudes and praying to be good for other people. I have prayed for 2 things for myself through the years. Usually prayers are for other people or all of us or something, but 2 very definite things I have prayed for myself.
Years ago during my worst illness and growing ugliness (hair loss, weight gain, attitude affected by meds and pain), I cried and told God if I must lose everything else, at least let Scott come home happy to see my face. I looked pretty rough for a few years, and I had to stop fixing my hair and wearing makeup. I couldn't afford nice clothes with all the money going out for medical, and we went bankrupt before I wound up with full disability. I was so depressed. God, please let Scott be happy to see my face, because I don't know how he can stand to even look at me. Well, my hair still hasn't gone gray and I barely have a wrinkle on my whole face and I'm 56. I've been told that being on estrogen therapy for 20 years can do that, but was also told I'd start aging very quickly after getting off those in 2012. Not really holding my breath resisting, still can't wear makeup, but I've been able to grow my hair back out and Scott and I laugh together about something every day. I'm glad to see his face because he's my best friend, and I guess and hope he's still glad to see mine, even when I still have bad days and get very cranky with him, and he doesn't deserve it. My brain is my enemy on those days, not him.
I also reached a point where I prayed for healing. I was raised stoicly believing that to pray for one's own anything was vain, so I've never really prayed for my own well being. We are all here to learn through our suffering, right? Well, after some deep thought just before I met my latest doctor in 2011, just before Christmas of 2010, I prayed for healing. I had come through some very hard years of months and months of back to back viral illnesses on top of severe nearly unlivable nerve disorder pain, and I was reaching a point where I wasn't sure I could keep hanging on out of spiritual duty. I was breaking inside and could no longer hide it. I reasoned for a few days that if I really do pray for healing, I mustn't be stupid about it. God doesn't work miracles for us to toss it back. If I commit to that prayer, then I commit to true healing with everything possible I can do to help take care of myself. I wouldn't get better to be stupid about it and ruin my health again. One day I was ready and I prayed. The next day the holes in my pierced ears had both closed up. They had never done that in 20 years. I immediately decided it would be blasphemous to get them repierced and gave all my earrings away. From then on has all been positive progress. It has been long and hard, but I wound up with the best possible primary care doctor, got diagnosed immediately and fast tracked so the right specialists and physical therapy. Years of doctors before him were just struggles with very addicting medications and the long slow descent into the hell of premature aging, without hope.
So laying there in pre-op, I knew I am ready now. I've done what I've apparently set out to do in this life coming to this earth, and I felt at peace. I've learned how to heal relationships, how to take much better care of myself, how to network with other real people with success and hope in mind for all of us. And I want to continue that. I know I'll have brain crash days and be very mixed up and brain chemical spills splashing on others, and I hope they can keep forgiving me. I'm facing a future of dementia as I age, and since brain problems run in my family, I've accepted the idea that I need to keep brain training now while I can to be good for people before I lose more control of this wonderful machine I live in.
This is very long and right now my brain is tired. I've made it through nearly 24 hours of fairly high dose opioids and enjoyed it immensely, but soon I let it go again. Addiction is a bitch, protracted withdrawal will make me mean again, and I wanted to write these feelings out before I forget I had them.
I dreamed last night I was in another waiting room, gathered up my stuff when my name was called, and as I was incidentally walking by Charlie Sheen, stolidly not looking his direction in my own dark glasses, he called out "Good luck!" and I just said "Corey Haim, dude" and kept walking.
I am neither shocked nor surprised. Ever since my first marriage, nothing about sex with kids of ANY age shocks or surprises me any more. I'm educated in the social sciences, I've seen the statistics, I've met quite a surprising number of people with stories to tell, and all I can say is it's all around us all the time. It's not new, it's not over there, and it's not rare.
YOU know someone who does kids (and even babies). YOU know someone with secrets that would make you throw up. You shake hands with them, work with them, pass them on a street, maybe even live with them, and even though all the signs are there, you don't notice, not because you're dumb, but because you're that innocent.
Sex with kids is rampant in the U.S. It's not just in other countries, it's not just in bad neighborhoods, it's not just around people who do drugs. It's in your church, your school system, your area of employment, your hobby group. Someone you know, maybe more than one, is an untagged child sex offender. They might be the most stand-up person you know, and yes, you would be quite shocked. Being a saint in public is the perfect cover.
Open your eyes. When kids do something weird, say something off the wall, get quiet, get too rowdy- keep your eyes open. Pay attention. Stop brushing off weird and simply just pay attention. It might take a few days, weeks, months, but there will come a day that will curl your hair and make your stomach drop out your shoes, because you'll suddenly be aware there is a child who knows way too much and is so careful it's scary. Or maybe there's a kid who is way too young to be flirting like that. Something.
When I first came back out public I had a 5-year plan, and so far it's going ok, just on a slower track than I originally envisioned, but a much richer and more vibrant track, so I'm good with it. It hit me today that I haven't thought much beyond that, and here I am already past the 5 year milestone.
So- Where do I want to be 5 years from NOW? This is a game I've played with myself for a couple of decades, and it actually works because it makes me think about priorities and goals and stagnation and stuff like that. I got the idea from a survey I did once.
1) What were you doing 10 Years Ago? Wow, the nursing school year. I remember the big mystery over who was smuggling mummified cats out of lab, and practicing catheterizing fake people. My favorite word was auscultate. 2) 5 Years Ago? I crashed into the fabled midlife review crap I used to ridicule others for. Can’t wait to find out why old people are saying “60 is the new 40″… Sounds like a very loaded statement. Let’s see how gracefully we can hit brick walls every other decade. Heads up to the mid-30′s crowd. 3) 1 Year Ago? Wasted out of my skull on medication just to be able to walk, heartbreaking end to an awesome friendship, discovering the joys of the empty nest, and plunging headlong into youtube fanaticism.
The year I took a break from the internet I did a lot of deep thinking about that stuff in reverse- where do I want to be a year from now, 3 years from now, 5 years from now kind of thing. I stopped at 5 because I really couldn't see past it. So many things in my life have abruptly changed or cut off and you never know who is next on the ol' chopping block and all the changes things like that entail, so I didn't force it.
I've done plenty of looking back and assessing how far I've come posts. I haven't really done any going forward that far posts. Part of looking and planning forward is assessing right now, and I think I pretty much assess right now to death, don't I? I'm done with physical therapy unless something changes, I'm continuing to self monitor with a medical team, OH, Scott's job finally sold so there's a little bit of a snip in the annual income, kiddos are in my house, and we're dealing with even more hard stuff, so this post is more an exercise in focus than actual planning, but this is a good way to lay down a foundation and set up scaffolding for that.
Let's get a direction. I could go in any direction, and a lot of it depends on financial independence (which my original plan was intended to help push). I have kiddos in Houston, I have people all over the world I'd like to see, plus things I'd love to do if I were able, but if I've learned anything it's Keep It Simple, Stupid. The simplest thing to do is sift top priority out, and that's kiddos. In the last 10 years I've seen my Houston kiddos what, 3 times? I think in the next 5 years I'd like to see them at least a couple more times. If I'm going to do that, I have to be able to travel and survive stepping out of my own routine and comfort zone into a different environment, and I'd really like to do that with more brain on. So of course, top goal for the next 5 years is be ready to travel. NO JUNK FOOD, no stupid mistakes like what happened with the new shoes being laced too tight, no wasting my money or energy on things (or people) who will make this priority drop into a lower place. And anyone who expects that will need to understand I might feel very crabby about making that kind of a choice. I used to be able to jump and go be with people through crises at the drop of a hat, and I did it all the time for a number of people, and I just can't any more. I need to be ready to say a polite NO and stick to my guns if I want my own kiddos to stay top priority.
I know this sounds trivial, but I want to be done with the junk in my room. Every time I've started going through this old stuff that has piled up (and a good chunk of it isn't even mine), more gets piled up on me. My room is like a catchall in a family of packrats. Granted, @bonenado is a very neat packrat, constantly rearranging the entire basement and keeping a spotless closet, but a lot of this stuff is pure junk in my eyes, and we're so busy sifting through more junk (Bunny is a funny cosmic joke on this whole thing) that I never seem to get back to the original junk I keep trying to get rid of. I used to have to keep organized piles of stuff from the bankruptcy and my disability case, just piles of EOBs overtaking piles of other stuff that never quite got done for Christmases and stuff, and it's just ridiculous now. It's been so long since some of that happened that I can now just burn whole sacks of stuff, but they're buried under more sacks of stuff that needed sifting out, including baby stuff and my mobile office stuff that keeps getting bombed apart. I finally taped my publishing contract up on the wall. I see it every day. I lost that piece of paper so many times because suddenly people in my house in the middle of sorting and writing. I need a whole room I can spread stuff out in that can be guaranteed no one will ever touch, but I have basically 2 feet of kitchen counter I've commandeered, a corner of a table, the dresser in my bedroom, and a strip of wall by my bed. Oh, and a corner in the closet I won't let @bonenado touch. I can't even tell you where my stuff is in the basement any more. I have entire music collections probably worth some money that have been engulfed. Everything ever done by the old guys like Bach, music from all over the world, a collection I dreamed of growing up and to this day have never enjoyed. I don't have the kind of life that allows me to have my own record collection out where I can get to it in my own house where no one will destroy it or move it or bother it, and it has sat for years down in the dark with the spiders. To get it all out now and listen to it- I'm trying to guesstimate how long it would take to listen to the entire collection in the few hours a day I actually get to be home, and that is usually interrupted somehow. 2 months? I'm guessing at least 2 months to listen to all that. Maybe 3. Chopin, Schupert, Rachmaninov... Yes, all the Beethoven, all the everything you ever heard of. I own it. I've talked before in the night was smashy about how I don't get to run my house the way I want. dragging brain back into focus
Actually, that all reminds me of a very realistic dream I had a kind of long time ago that stuck with me and helped me let go of fighting for all that stuff.
I was a very old woman, at least for the time, and fashionably modern. I had all the latest in clothing, home decor, and lived very comfortably. In the dream I just knew this, I didn't see a lot of it. In the dream I was dressed to leave, in a sitting room detailed with brocades and dark striped wallpaper, velvet covered mahogany stuffed chairs, patterned prints and lots of lace, and I was dressed to the hilt right down to the latest dress boots, gloves, and hat. I was looking around at all of it. I had to leave it. Something had happened (what?) and I had to leave all of it, and I detested the future that lay before me. Someone else would have all my nice things (the grand piano! the drapes! the imported carpeting!!!), and I was galled that I would be forced to step down into squalor. I kept looking around the room, cherishing the finery, cherishing my 'place' in the world, cherishing the quiet wealth dripping all around me. Cherishing my buffer against all the dirty world outside. A carriage was coming to pick me up. Men would come into the house and escort me into the carriage, and I would leave this place and never come back. MY things. MY life. Another family would come in and mess up all MY stuff like a bunch of heathens. But I felt fine, even smug. In the dream I thought and felt all these things, and I felt smug that they would never take them away from me, never really force me to leave. In the dream it was about sitting in that posh room and waiting. No one else was with me, no words were spoken, but deep down I knew that was me, and I watched myself like that, an ugly soul inside a beautiful home. Not one thought was wasted on remembering a person, not one moment of cherishing was about someone who was loved, not even a pet. All that went on while the clock ticked was looking around at the wealth and feeling smug that they couldn't take me from it. I realized after waking it was because I had overdosed on something and timed it for when the carriage would be arriving. They would walk in to find me dead, which would create a whole other fuss and stir, and technically I'd never have been forced to leave my house. Bah on them!
O_O I know, right. What a biatch. Well, I'm not sure what's up with the vividness of it and it really feeling like it was me unless possibly that's a past life or someone else's memories floating around in the night or a remote viewing kind of a dream, which I've done a few times, but whatever it was, I feel very strongly like I dreamed it for a very good reason, and that's NOT to make the same mistake again. In this life now I'm still very drawn to nicer things (not like I wish I had them but more like I feel that it's familiar) but shun them almost with repulsion and live a mostly immaterial life. I'm in a nice house, yes, but most of it is filled with hand-me-down furniture and decor, and not much of it matches. I'm not house-proud. I could (and have) easily lived in trailers and much smaller houses, and even slept on floors and in a car. I just have this really strong feeling that wealth is a trap for the mind, and that it ruins what we are supposed to be doing here.
I think the missed point is that every person is important. Every person is a wealth of potential. Every person is why we're all here, and it's the only common denominator in every other possible variable in our existences. To shun other people for things is to completely miss the point of existing as life. We may be autonomous beings, but we are still an interwoven part of each other in so many ways we can't even imagine.
For instance, I'm very aware in this life that other people create the things I enjoy. Other people labor over the food I buy, other people labor over the clothes I wear, everything I touch and see all around me is because other people are living lives and laboring. To cherish finery without acknowledging that people create it is, honestly, a bit silly. To hold oneself above others over materialism is about as silly as it gets. The materialism wouldn't exist in the first place without other people, the being above them certainly wouldn't exist without them, and the above ones can be ridiculously estranged from the very essence of humanity if they can't see this.
If I really was that old lady in a past life, I'm grateful I got past that. I'm glad my idiot choice to kill myself before I saw other people take my precious finery didn't ban me from going on to live a full life of loving people around me and learning to work together to solve our daily problems.
That was a bit off track of where I want to be 5 years from now, but I'm suddenly leaping to wonder where I'll be 5 lives from now. o_O Wow.
I know what I don't want 5 years from now. I don't want to be an idiot. I don't want to lose people over petty selfishness. I don't want to grow bitter and I don't want to wallow in being sad. I'm going to do a bit of thinking this month while I deal with this tummy ache that won't go away, and maybe I'll have some cool dreams in the meantime.
I want to still be here in 5 years. I want to be a positive force to reckon with.
click pic for more
I'm actually trying to get the lamediamond hoe advancementonmo creatures "Serious dedication- Completely use up a diamond hoe, and then reevaluate your life choices"
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings."
You can read the entire poem at The Walrus and The Carpenter, which is by Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872.
There are a number of literary interpretations, which I don't really care about and have nothing to do with today, but that quote popped into my head after a long night of forever-going-nowhere dreams about stacking black and white terracotta blocks in my stomach and going in never ending circles trying to find my car on a huge college campus and deciding I needed to let a class go before I failed another.
One of the biggest walls my medical team has run into with me is I genuinely don't know how to rest. I've been commanded a number of times to stop doing things, stop powering through, stop everything and just rest. And I'm supposed to do this on a regular basis anyway since I'm super spoonie, and I'm so used to feeling awful that I just keep going in my own very restricted way.
I grew up working pretty hard. I still got in some play time and grew into a prolific reader, but I wasn't the kind of kid who could lay around for it's own sake unless I was reading or guarding the livingroom stereo so no one would change the record. I'm compulsive even on my worst days, and it's all I can do to be 'lazy'. That was a big word growing up, and a nasty word as an adult, especially coming at me sideways during a couple of really bad spoonie years. I try to rest my body by keeping my mind busy on other things, and I've developed quite an obsession with powering through minecraft server salvage and remarket, despite having pretty cool plans for a few builds. Even in my sleep, now that I'm finally actually sleeping, I'm extremely busy in all my dreams.
Part of not resting properly is the underlying prompt to pass for normal. I want to be useful and available, and that means pretending to be able to keep up. Pretending means I hide how miserable I might really be feeling or how hard getting through the day and keeping up might be for me. Pretending means blowing off red flags popping up left and right and dancing around the distractions like minor bothers are bothersome and I don't want to be bothered kind of thing.
I had gotten to a place where I was doing pretty good. Last year was actually pretty good. I was exercising regularly, getting function back along damaged nerve pathways, controlling pain levels with good sleep, nutrition, and real rest. Because I thought I was doing so well, I jumped a little more into holidays, and by January 2017 I was hitching an ambulance ride one day over a pain in my abdomen. My main concern was that I could feel my heartbeat in a very precise spot deep inside my belly, and every time it started thumping hard and fast in there I would get breathless and super fatigued. Naturally, they immediately jumped on ruling out cardiac and a variety of abdominal emergencies, including aneurysm. I've been bad to blow off abdominal pain since I've lived with it my entire life (my childhood was miserable, part of my adulthood was worse), so once I saw I was cleared of anything immediately life threatening, especially aneurysm, I blew the rest off. Yes, I saw a notation on the CT about something I didn't understand, and yes, I blew off follow up with my doctor.
So for the last 9 months I've been blowing off worsening pain coming and going. I'm already very familiar with a number of abdominal issues and had already learned to control a lot of it, and I kept thinking, Ok, this is all familiar, it's nothing, just keep going. And I got through some pretty rough nights without telling anyone and pulled through some really hard days not telling anyone because I want to be available and useful and I'm in a position to be very helpful every single day. After years of full disability, do you know how good that feels?
October went over the top, and I still kept hiding it. I kept telling myself that awful throbbing pulse inside my belly wasn't an aneurysm, and that the hard pain moving around was probably just some kind of flare up, disregarding the fact that autoimmune flares in organs are extremely serious. I toyed around with not eating and taking breaks and other little things that didn't seem to make any difference but helped me just enough to keep faking it. I was able to fake it right up to my girls leaving for a visit with relatives, and within hours I was back in the ER because the weird rose up and spooked me and I was free to collapse into that state of uselessness for a few days if I needed to.
I know nothing yet, except that the tests and consultations are coming like rapid fire after nearly being admitted. All the years I've had so many problems and even a heart surgery, I've never been admitted. So I'm at home dealing with some quite remarkable pain and fatigue and hoping this doesn't escalate into emergency surgeries during test events or biopsies coming back with really bad news.
A lot of people have told me over the years that I'm strong and I'm brave. I keep replying back that I'm stubborn and brazenly stupid. I'm very lucky is what I am. I have the kind of mental and cognitive problems that enable me to survive hard stuff without crumbling into self destruction (a plus for neurodiversity and mental illness, guys), and the kind of personal physical and emotional history that has blunted me to pain and self recrimination, so of course I 'look' strong and brave. I'm surviving. Survivors do what they have to do to keep surviving.
It's very possible that I may not have any time for wallowing or guilt over this next month, and it's possible the only way to survive what's coming is to let a lot of stuff go and focus harder than I've ever focused. I accepted long ago that any day could be my last and I've felt lucky for decades that I'm still here. I have my mood swings, of course, but underneath it all, I know I've been very fortunate to still be HERE, saying things and loving people.
When I was on Xanga, I used to answer the featured question once in awhile. On September 23, 2008 I answered If you got a terminal disease what would you do? That might not be viewable on mobile, so I'll copy it here.
We're *all* terminal in the end. I'm a 'slow' terminal. I've already lost a niece who was born terminal but lived to 20, in spite of all medical odds. So define terminal here. I was diagnosed 20 years ago, I'm lucky I'm still alive, and I get up and face every day with progressing neurological deficit and severe pain througout my body. So someone is asking, what would I do if I found out I'm terminal. Well, if a doctor told YOU that you would be completely crippled and blind in less than 20 years if you were *lucky* and didn't go into organ failure first, what would YOU do? I went to college and got my degree. I went on to grad school. I raised a child as a single parent and then remarried and helped raise another child. Every day I prayed that I would live long enough to see my children grown up. Every day I did laundry, made meals, and somehow made it through my day. Recently, just this last winter, I faced that I might die from liver involvement. But here I am, I'm still doing laundry and making meals. Slowly, with lots of rest. What did I do? I faced it and kept LIVING. I didn't ask 'why me?', because statistically, why not me? Everybody's got something, right? I didn't blame God, I didn't hate my body, I didn't go on big campaigns to fundraise for a cure for my disease. What did Stephen Hawking do? He helped flip the world of physics upside down. And dang, he's still alive, too. Some of us just won't die. Being diagnosed with a terminal disease isn't a license to feel sorry for yourself. It's not a 'get out of responsibility' card that says you are now free to smoke and drink and do whatever you want to your poor body. It's not a sign over your head that says you get to go to the front of the line or a free meal. In fact, being diagnosed with a terminal disease is a sure bet that all your friends will fade away because they don't know how to deal with it, and that you won't be able to keep up with the fun stuff any more. So you take a good long look at your life, you learn everything you can about medications and nutrition and how your body works, you have a long talk with God, and you get real with the people around you. If anyone out there has recently been diagnosed with something scary, bless your heart, but take a deep breath and face it. Have a good cry, have another good cry, and keep moving ahead. Say the things you need to say to your friends and family, on a blog, whatever, and get that safety net around you. Communicate with your medical team, talk to a counselor, and don't be afraid to ask friends and family for favors, and tell them thank you. Oddly, for those on the brink and about to step over (I've seen this a few times), some feel the need to reassure the ones they leave behind it's ok, even though inside they are scared out of their wits. They can walk up to the bridge with you, but you step out alone. I think that's what we fear most, unless we're so sick that we're glad it's finally over. Live your lives. 'Terminal' doesn't mean you're done yet.
Everyone who has known me online in some way has met this person inside of me, whether you knew it or not. I don't always talk about my stuff. I might bring it up a lot if I'm processing through something, but I don't let it eat me up. Life is way too short to sink into the quagmire of everything sux. Yes, stuff sux, but I don't want people to say *I* suck. I know I suck sometimes, I'm human, but honestly, I don't like myself when I suck, and I try not to be like that, even if my day, my week, my month, and even my year has super sucked.
I don't have to pretend for anyone. There is no 'have to'. I chose to pretend for a little while because I so loved having a useful place with people I love. But I'm stepping back now, and telling them to go on without me, like I have been doing my whole life in this house. I am part of the background, and I choose to let go of being in the foreground so that I can stay here and keep watching my people. I'm still here, still lurking, even in my own house I am the lurker. I see the stuff other people get to do, I live vicariously, and I feel very grateful I got to be here this long to see it.
Yes, I have regrets, but they're the kind that involve not having enough money to see other people and do things I want, and going there turns my soul black and makes me forget the lucky parts, so I refuse to dwell. Yeah, I feel sorry for myself for a few minutes and get a tear here or there, but I've learned from hard experience not to follow that trail through my mind because once I wind up in the Swamp of Sadness, I drag other people into the sticky mire with me and we all get stuck in yuck. There's no sense in that, it goes nowhere and solves nothing.
So I smash my brain into this kind of stuff. 54 days till Christmas, guys.
I'll share more when I know more. In the meantime, pure distraction. I gotta love all the things and all my people while I still can. 💝
My last thought before waking up was wondering if I had died because everything was going so perfectly right that I couldn't imagine any other reason. It was one of those mall/church/lots of people dreams that feel like I'm in between lives or something. Those are really rare dreams.
click for a runner's story
Pretty sure my latest foot problem is extensor tendonitis, and I'm pretty sure it was my shoe being laced up way too tight at the shoe store followed by heavy shopping at Walmart and no time to stop and get shoes off before Bunny after school. Then yesterday I was back in those shoes for several hours, and even though they were heavenly comfortable and I had loosened the laces, that area just couldn't take any more. I've done a lot of things to my feet, but I've never seen them look sprained on top and inside just from wearing new shoes. I kept reading (here is a search list), and I also ran into a lot of fibro and feet pain on another search. 10 years ago there was *nothing* on feet with fibro. A rheumatologist even told me point blank fibro doesn't cause foot pain. Guess that's all changed, it's apparently well known and accepted now that fibro can wreak havoc with foot pain because it's a nervous system disorder. At any rate, I'm sticking with this one. Control Fibromyalgia Foot Pain - Living smarter with fibromyalgia
I'm having a better year (very challenging, but way better), and I'm on my feet a LOT more for lots longer at a time. I've been slamming my poor feet around and ignoring them, mostly just getting my shoes off and kicking back and hoping it all works itself out. 8 months of that- maybe I need to pay more attention. I'm putting myself back on intermittent bed rest through the weekend (I'll still be cooking and cleaning, of course), so that means hauling the laptop back to my bed and pouring my focus into gaming so I won't feel frustrated all over the world at large. But not till I get back from town today. Sorry, feet.
Oh, yeah, punkin spice was in my dream last night, too. I remember telling my sister I was going to buy her some cloves for her birthday, and then I went Christmas shopping because I had money to blow. The strangest part was near the end, people from long ago (? not in this life ?) finding me and telling me I did really well. If I had told you the really creepy dream from earlier this week all your hairs would go up. Pretty sure there was an abrupt fork in the road we successfully made it past.
I hope I'm not jinxing myself to say I'm loving these 'nightmares' that metoprolol is known for.
click for links to people freaking out about their nightmares
So last night Scott and I were checking out a new game on the internet and wound up with super stack overload from pausing while we went out to eat and then coming back to frozen screens. And then that turned into meeting Clara and thinking she never shuts up (well, in a good way, I suppose) and she showed me a note where The Doctor (Eleven) had written that he'd introduce to her to someone with the added "by the way, she LOVES to talk" notation, and when I ran into him later I was all Hey, is that my mom you wrote to Clara about and he smiled and put his finger up to his lips and said Shhh just in time as Clara walked up, so she got to go talk to my mom and they really hit it off. Then for some reason a bunch of super tornadoes got stuck by Kansas City and failed to do any damage because #fail, so me and a couple people went outside after dark ghost hunting, and alla sudden we ran into a lifesized Lego of Doc Brown turned into a Minecraft zombie with a Minecraft Lego villager zombie right behind him, and next thing you know Lisa Marie Bowman was narrating us through a Late Night Movie with more Minecraft Lego zombies spawning all around us and standing there menacingly at us, and then a big white cube appeared out in the field with 'Note to Pinky' on it. My last thought before waking up was How do I take a page off a minecraft cube to see what's written next?
If that's a nightmare, yes, please. I've been through several weeks now of the cutest nightmares I've ever had on my life. Just hope it doesn't backfire because I really don't need psychosis in my life. From Metoprolol-induced visual hallucinations: a case series - "For decades, beta-adrenergic blocking agents have been known to cause adverse CNS effects including psychiatric syndromes, bizarre and vivid dreams, sleep disturbances, delirium, psychosis and visual hallucinations"
I suppose I'd better let my psychologist know this is going on in case I get extra weird and wind up in a 72 hour observation thingy or something. So far it's just dreams though. I suppose last night's dream could have ranked nightmare level status if Doc McStuffins had shown up to turn Doc Brown back and save him from being a zombie, especially if Doc had joined Doc in song.
Fandom smashing. It's what I do. If I were anyone significant in merch I'd be creating so much smash merch that you'd be able to get Minecraft Lego Doc Brown zombie in a Funko. My motto would be We have a Funko for that.
Meanwhile, we're working on an Elsa-Rapunzel braid like super cool superfans DO. Ignore the equivalent of tiny tot cursing.
Last night's 'nightmare' was a slasher dream severely lacking anything scary because we all got distracted with being able to adopt planets now, and I jumped all over nabbing Mars before anyone else could and was all that and a bag of chips showing off all over the medias. My new BP med clearly states nightmares as a common problematic side effect, but apparently mine turn into party time, so big ol' fail there, BP med. The other night I dreamed about spiders but it was more like I was following them around wondering why they were in slo-mo. Can't even have a proper spider dream.
2017 is the year of fail on all fronts. It's hitting everyone I know, and pretty much there's nothing to roll with because #fail. It's kinda like my facepalm post, all the good memes are over there. All week long people I don't even know have been letting me know I look worn out- Walmart check out clerks, other grandparents picking up daycare tots, people in waiting rooms, and various and sundry others every time I walk in a door or show up in a line.
That being said, I'm 3 days behind in the laundry and apparently didn't shop right for food this weekend, so I'ma scoot like a snail and go get a few things done today. The only thing I'm not failing at, and this is really surprising me, is getting birthday cards out on time. So far. No guarantees for future birthdays.
Ok, good click on this next one, cute compilation of memes there. Number 14 busted me up. 😁 And they were good enough to keep going. 41 made my day.
I haven't pulled this one out in a long time. Fail isn't over yet.
So this new BP med actually has a strong "nightmares" notation because it crosses the blood-brain barrier. So far they're not actually nightmares, but the dreams are extremely vivid. Last night I was in Mo Creatures running around (literally, in the game), and I paused by one particular very large wall face that happened when admin moved one of my claims from Haven to Valhalla, beautifully flat and tall and perfectly placed for a mural, and then the whole dream turned into Jon Snow discovering cement (imagine how thrilling GoT would be if it could be LARPed out in 3D minecraft) and Sansa wrangling with whether to have her men dig deep shafts to periodically throw someone into with a load of cement. Like Lord Baelish.
Ok, that was fun, accidentally published this already. Fumble finger hit tab and next thing you know I was ripping through the schedule widget without realizing it. Those of you who get emails, sorry about that. Live blogging.
So Bae is a creepy guy. When I got to the part about putting him in cement, I was actually jumping in with pointers on how to maximize one's cement shafting pleasures and showing Sansa how to use mode 3 (spectator) to float through the cement and see the bodies. We can't really use mode 3 on Mo Creatures, but we aren't leveled up for cement, either, so it was a really exciting dream. I was kinda sad when I woke up.
I've been having some fun with extra joint pain all over my body this year, especially feet, and last night one of my feet ramped up into #alltheattention, and then I remembered having eaten a can of tuna, which I rarely do. Ah-HA! I think I can put a finger on the problem now. If you guys don't know the gout diet, there you go. My dad is a very healthy Mennonite and still gets gout really bad, and we had to really sit on him one year to stop eating so much purine rich food. I've completely stopped sending him smoked salmon for Christmas, which makes him sad. Anyway, apparently I'm genetically predisposed and extremely dependent on dairy for my protein intake, and when I deviate into enjoying beef and fish, I sometimes hurt all over. There's nothing I can do about it, and I know better. And yesterday I ate a can of tuna. My bad. But at least now I have some kind of clue why 2017 has been a bit suckier.
I wanna thank a couple people who kept me from totally freaking out yesterday about my kid and her kid being right in the middle of Houston. I managed to get through the weekend ok (my blood pressure was off the wall) and even got through Monday in fairly good shape, but yesterday I maxed out and hit the ol' wall like a bug, splatting my upsettedness around. I personally know a couple of people who've completely lost homes, know a number more who are either displaced or hanging tough swimming around their houses, and having been around a few neighborhoods down there in person, it's really hard to watch it on TV without eventually being knocked over with the fact that it will never be the same again. Even though all those people are actually ok and safe, their homes are ruined and their lives will be upside down the rest of the year, maybe much longer. When your bank and post office and work are all under water, what do you do? When your power is out and there is no plumbing and you can't just hop in your car and fill up with gas, what do you do? It'll be a long time before all that gets back to normal.
I don't know how, because in years and storms past my kiddo's house has had water lap up to the door and knock (hi, may I come in?), but this year they are somehow in the middle of a very small dry patch and even still have power. HOW? I don't know. But we all know that doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy. Schools are out, work is flooded, power could still go out any time, mosquitoes are about to become a huge problem, and all the spiders and snakes are probably finding their way to the little island they're on, doesn't that sound fun.
Need to get my focus back on. I'm with you in my heart.
Ok, back to real life. The last 6 or so weeks of uber stress feels like it's settling into a wonderful mundane routine again, and I hope I didn't just jinx it because that's usually how the next wild ride starts, with me noting how delicious boredom feels.
Go, click and get lost. I did.
I'm not really bored, far from it, but I'm thankfully not feeling frustrated, which I think was spiked by meds. One thing I talked about with psyche guy this month was how roller coasting through this year's nerve pain meds seemed to break open my depersonalization/dissonance, which I suppose could be a natural side effect, but when a person is already gear switching as a coping method, enhancing it isn't necessarily a good thing. Anyway, I know I've been overstating a lot lately, but soooo glad I'm off the baclofen and the withdrawal is finally over.
Well... Lambie (Doc McStuffins) singing in the background while I write this makes me feel a bit on the crazy side, so I'm trying to ignore it. Settling my brain into the toddler brain pool has its perks, but trying to brain real life with that kind of background going is maddeningly distracting.
I nearly didn't come back from this click.
Bunny is in the other room asking for a cell phone for her birthday. She's going to be 4... Pretty sure she'd be a twitter tycoon in no time.
K, I was gone for half an hour that time. Good luck.
I know, right? Game of Thrones marathon getting the world pumped up for the new season tonight and we're watching tiny tot toons. And my internet keeps browning out, so it's killing game time. Got all the laundry done, though. Oh wait, I hear Toy Story 3. *runs off* And the internet promptly died. Now it's today.
I may as well accept that I'm probably not going to be on board the live tweet train for awhile, possibly the rest of the year. I tried getting on twitter last night and the GoT onslaught was brutal so I just shut it all off. I remember the year I completely missed the very last season of TNG because life and kids, pre-DVR and even pre-satellite option for 2 channels at once in the same house. Years passed before I ever saw the rest of TNG.
Today is my 6 month equipment check for CPAP, so it's kinda like Christmas. I've gotta get to town so I can pick up all kinds of goodies. I'm being a very good girl and playing the compliance game correctly, so insurance is still paying for everything. I just have to keep my scores 70% or higher. I was doing better with hitting 80s more often but the baclofen withdrawal really threw me. Now I'm having to retrain my sleep again.
Last night's dreams were pure stress about getting the book out. So many people were in my dream, like a huge extended family (but mostly people I had no clue I was even related to), and we were all under a time crunch to get to an airport. I was handed my tickets and told the plan 2 hours before take-off, and I was trying to get a shower and get packed and people milling around this huge house and all my stuff kept getting scattered and one of the really older ones got in a car for a drive with a neighbor but left a note on an acorn (??? I probably follow too many squirrels on twitter), and the last thing I remember was one main guy who kinda looked like Michael Douglas in his younger days kept fussing at me about something, and when he finally laid on the floor blocking a door I needed to get through and all I had was a towel, a camel casually walking up the hall stopped and shat all over him and his nice suit, and I woke up laughing.
I reeeeeally wanna get that book out in the next 6 weeks. I'm hoping to have it organized enough to bypass the editor and go straight to publish, which means hard copy will be available around the world in a week flat, and it'll be up to me to get the big push going while they're available.
I wanna curl up in a bathtub full of coffee and melted chocolate and hide on a minecraft server.
This song has been stuck in my head for 2 days straight.
💦 Ever since I read where a vigorous antibiotic resistant strain of a superbug was found growing in hospital sinks, I've felt very suspicious of my own sinks until I got this bright idea to squirt toilet cleaner down the drains, because that stuff coats and clings and will sit there for ages torturing whatever slime is down there, right? Well, DON'T DO THAT. Not that anything terrible happened, but I felt a twinge later and read instructions and looked up warnings and yeah, don't do that. Especially if you have a chrome sink like me. I love my chrome. It looks like I got something icky on it now around the drain.
🍩 I've taken to hiding my chocolate chips in one of my sock drawers. (Yes, I have 3 drawers for sox.) (Now you wish I'd go take pix.) I'm the one allergic to nuts and peanuts, so I'm very picky about chocolate because 1- if it's candy manufactured in a plant that also manufactures or uses nuts and/or peanuts I'm screwed and 2- if the chocolate ingredient in my food come from a facility that processes cocao beans into chocolate AND also processes nuts (very common) I'm screwed. I have been able to handle Hershey's milk chocolate chips just fine even though I've had reactions in past to Hiland chocolate milk and other chocolate foods, so my chocolate chips are like gold in this house. I live with 3 other people. When someone has a half eaten chocolate bar for impromptu microwave s'mores sitting on the counter for days and casually digs into my bag of chocolate chips while we're talking, it's time to hide the bag. Depending on the store I get them from, I can pay up to and over $3 a bag for those, and I ration them because I'm diabetic. One bag lasts me about a week. So I went to get them out of my sock drawer last night while Bunny was in the tub, and apparently my bedroom is warm enough to melt chocolate. The dresser is up against an outer wall and it's been very hot out, so I guess that's not the greatest place to keep them. I'm not sure where to hide them next. I live in one of those kinds of floor plan homes where there are no hallways and that keeps our heating and cooling bills down, but there's also no privacy at all. My main bedroom opens right onto where the livingroom and kitchen join, so it's very inviting. Parts of it are still inaccessible to Bunny, like way high in my closet, but there really is no place to hide stuff from each other since we're all over 5 feet tall. And I can't be too clever, we've all accidentally taken turns throwing stuff we've hidden away without digging through an old box or sack first, and @bonenado loses stuff all the time and Bunny's mama is always looking everywhere for her keys and phone, so I'm pretty sure chocolate chips would turn up really quickly no matter where I put them. I have bendy restrictions, as well, so I can't just put them way back on a shelf behind a bunch of pans, where they'd be discovered anyway if someone wanted a particular pan. You get the drift.
✅ I think I'm losing the point part of a power point.
📱 I dreamed last night my sibs and I all went with my mom to a big place, and we had all thrown our phones into her purse and I forgot to grab mine before we split up at our destination. I went all the way back to the big building that purse was in, dug around the phones, and grabbed one apparently very similar to mine and ran back to where I was for something really important about to start. Got there and had to wait for a few minutes, so I turned on the phone and discovered it wasn't mine. It took awhile to figure out it was my brother's phone, and I was super surprised it was built like a Johnny Depp fan phone, with a Lily app and many other cool and confusing things. Texting kept turning out half in French, so I gave up and used the screen to write with my finger, which was a bit better but still kept screwing up, and I woke up right after I hit send. That is probably the first phone dream I've had where I was able to use the keypad halfway decently and actually got a message off to someone. Anyway, I'm guessing Johnny Depp stepped in because I was thinking yesterday about my brother's Johnny B Good song aaaaand we lost internet, just like that. Live blogging. Yep, just as I was about to link it, so maybe it's a sign and I won't link it. Sorry. Actually, we lose internet constantly around here and keeping our fingers crossed our carrier goes fiber optic really soon. Living near a state forest is kinda like living 3rd world sometimes, anything radio signal is very blinky and the only way we could get local TV for awhile was through satellite, amusingly. My dad still lives in the stone age, but I'm pretty sure I'd lose the rest of my mind if I couldn't get onto a minecraft server. Speaking of, here's my latest bird flip at the economy. I spent months building up an emerald hoard stash via raking up money pumpkin farming. It's silly but it makes other players moan about being poor and they get even whinier about how hard it is having to work, so I get a few chuckles. Being a power player is fun, and believe me, I'm really mediocre compared to a few others. Anyway, here's the priestly whatever that building is (oh, it's a church) paying homage to the almighty emerald.
👕 Welp, may as well go get ready to go while internet is down. Bunny has dental surgery today because that's how they do really young kids now and it's called surgery because they use anesthesia. Beats the trauma of sitting on a kid and forcing them to comply with big scary sometimes painy stuff.
🎈 Sweet, came back and internet is back up. I'm what, 15 days off the baclofen now. I felt it change a couple days ago, like my nervous system snapped back and *boom* lost 2 pounds overnight, probably fluid retention. Food cravings stopped, crap mood swings flattened out, and now all that's left is the pain part but at least I'm not morphing into a slavering werewolf ripping heads off. Likewise, stuff kinda winding down around here after the big funeral, and although there's plenty more on our plates, I think I'm close to seeing my own lawyer about what happens when I make money later on SSI, omg please let that be a thing... Go big or go home. I can't bear the thought of letting all this go and sinking back into the depression with nothing to hang onto.
