I have a doctor ' s appointment today to discuss my psych medication (along with this beastly sinus/chest/ear thing I ' ve got going on), and having that ahead of me always makes the day difficult... Like let-your-tongue-grow-fuzzy-from-dehydration-just-to-avoid-getting-out-of-bed difficult... (Don ' t adopt that last sentence as your own life philosophy... I feel tired and depressed and have a sinus cold on top of that, and yet I still beat myself up for not being a maven of the home business industry, and then I beat myself up for beating myself up... - I was suddenly struck with something I had failed to notice before... The last seventeen months of my life have been stressful due to my bout with cervical cancer, the Palinode ' s broken back, my psychological issues coming to the forefront, etcetera, etcetera... It is a simple idea that we ' ve all heard about on talk shows and seen advertised on the covers of self-help books: there is opportunity in crisis... When I grew frustrated over the Palinode ' s physical inability to even get a glass of water for himself, I took that as an opportunity to learn to breathe and stay focused on one thing at a time and to remember to make the space to love the man behind the pain that wracked his body... … View Post »

You happened into my life at just the right moment... … View Post »

When She Wore Ponytails has bestowed the Kick Ass Blogger Award upon me , which kicks ass, because life ' s been a little, pardon the expression, crazy, and I feel like this website has been suffering as a result... Some people scoff at these awards that get handed around, but I think they are an excellent vehicle for showing off the bloggers you love that you might not normally highlight... The rules for giving and receiving the award are simple: Choose five bloggers that you feel are "Kick Ass Bloggers"... I am devoting my five awards to bloggers I met at the BlogHer ' 08 conference San Francisco , because if I don ' t narrow down the pool somehow, I ' ll be giving eighty-seven of these things away... She offered me her gently-used Mac laptop so that I could use my computer fund to fly to the conference, and then she let me room with her, which made the conference just affordable enough for me to be able to also eat food while I was there... Jen from Jenandtonic : It was only half-way through the conference that I realized that I was staying a day longer than my roommate and that I had not one extra dollar to spend on securing the room for another night... She took me in, hung out with me, helped me through the anxiety-inducing airport freakout phase of the trip home, and she let me use her deodorant... Without her, I likely would have spent part of the weekend jittering up and down like a jackhammer across the lobby of the Westin St. Francis ... … View Post »

Okay, so I have to go to this appointment with a doctor in an hour-and-a-half to get a form signed that says I am basically too psychologically incapacitated to do much else other than make it to my doctor appointment, and these kinds of appointments freak me out... I have to go in and sit in the waiting room at the mediclinic for an hour while pretending to read a magazine that smells like cheap perfume samples just so that I don ' t have to look back at all the weird people who hang out in places like that... Last time, there was this guy I know in the waiting room, and while I was trying to avoid his eye, because I can be weird like that, I noticed that he was avoiding my eye, too, which pissed me off, because the ego has a way of getting irrationally out of hand... I ended up spending half an hour surreptitiously trying to catch his attention, because being ignored was driving me crazy... Then, when I was taken back to see the doctor, he just kept looking at me and asking me what I wanted to do, and I kept saying I DON ' T KNOW, because why the hell else did he think I was in there looking for more help for my screwed up brain?... Also, as I mentioned yesterday , he proceeded to tell me after that that my depression was probably irritating my spouse, as though that should be my reason for seeking help and not the fact that I hallucinate sometimes, among other things... He ' s just a regular doctor, not a psychiatrist, who is filling out forms for me and monitoring my medication until I can get in to see the actual psychiatrist to which he referred me, so he ' s not really trained to deal with weepy messes who only say I DON ' T KNOW... … View Post »

That doesn ' t make any sense to me, either, but that is the best way I know how to describe my memories of the last month of my life... I have some pictures and snippets of ideas in my head about where I have been and what I have done, but there is no coherent, chronological string along which anything is threaded... Imagine that everything from the past month was pairs of socks, and that they went through the wash only to have half them fall into a black hole in the dryer... Rather than quell my rising depression and anxiety, it has let those stay and then thrown in compulsive thoughts and behaviour to flesh out my issues, because what ' s the use of being crazy if you ' re not going to go all the way?... [After that last sentence, I left the apartment to get the mail and found myself standing downstairs by the mailboxes with a mug of coffee in one hand where my keys should have been, which meant that I was locked out until the Palinode arrived home from work, and so I have spent the last hour-and-a-half sitting outside and then in Abigail and Smyrish ' s kitchen in the clothes I slept in the night before with a cold cup of gritty coffee as my sole possession... Today is the first day of moving myself back down to my original dose, because my obsessive scratching, refusal to wash anything sharp when I do the dishes, and need to keep track of exactly how many squares of toilet paper I use in a twenty-four hour period harshes my buzz in no small way... I am in somewhat of a better place since then, though, despite the increased medication ' s side effects... What I mean to say is, don ' t worry too much about me making it through this messy spot... … View Post »

My heart did this fluttery thing, and I hugged myself with a bit of sweet joy, and then I ran to the kitchen to grab a chunk of this spicy sausage that the Palinode picked up on a trip, because this particular kind of spicy sausage is amazing and perfect for celebrating, especially when paired with a small slice of smoked gouda... I am in no way going to foist them upon you here... I am just going to occasionally slide a link in here to let you know that I ' ve done a review over there, and if you happen to click on that link, let it be known that it will be entirely your fault that you went over there in the first place... That ' s the way us humans work, all of us wanting different things at different times all over the place... … View Post »

There are few things that I wish I could take back in my life, but the way I treated you toward the end of our friendship is one of them... … View Post »

We decided to hang out at your house after school... … View Post »

I never swim in it, because I prefer to remain covered from neck to ankles in summer months and earlobes to toes throughout the winter... I wouldn ' t mind if other people did that, too, because those of the female persuasion tend to have ugly knees, and those of the male persuasion tend to have issues with not looking completely dorky in shorts... Anyway, I was just out by the pool, and there are a million wasps out there, because my parents-in-law like to watch the slow rise of alarm in their houseguests, and lo and behold, one of the houseguests, a little boy, was just stung in the baby toe on his left foot... I am given to believe that that sort of thing really hurts... From my comfy situation seated in the warm sun with a stein of beer in my hand, I had no right begrudge a pretty cute little kid his right to yell his head off when stung on his babiest of toes... And then, I got to thinking about how I have never been stung by anything other than a mosquito, except maybe basically innocuous spiders, and that ' s a pretty good run for someone who ' s thirty-five, and that I was kind of asking for it if I was going to be a total jerk to a seven-year-old, even if it was only in my head for four seconds, so my stein of beer and I made a run for the house, and that ' s where I am, and I ' m not leaving... I am can be a bit superstitious about thoughts translating into reality, so when I think about wasps, if I even catch only the barest whiff of my feeling self-congratulatory about having never been stung, I start to feel those stingy buggers crawling up the backs of my arms and on my neck, and I know, I just KNOW, that my thoughts have infiltrated their hive mind, and they are all moving in slowly, arguing over who gets first bite... Now I am feeling quite thoroughly repentant for my bad thoughts about that kid ' s reaction to being stung, because he ' s a kid, and he really didn ' t carry on so much as get pissed off about it, and if it had been me, I know I would have been the loudest, foullest-mouthed thing within a twenty-block radius of the back yard... … View Post »