A · Life

I'm trying to sneak this at work, where I don't normally have Internet access, so we'll see how that goes. I may have to abruptly post it unfinished.
I should find an iPhone app for this, as I'd be more likely to use it, but I so detest typing on the iPhone. I don't... experience the Internet like I used to.
Happy New Year, everyone. I do still read LJ. I rarely comment, but I think comments all the time. i've always kind of been like this, I just am worse lately.

I was reading old entries from '06-'08ish, and god Damn, people, did I ever need to be on antidepressants. Really. Holy crap. I've forgotten them two days in a row now and am feeling pretty cranky, but it's still way better than I was. How did I not know about brain chemicals before? Sheesh.

I'd do a retrospective on '11 like everyone does this time of year, but I don't have time to collect my thoughts sufficiently. That seems to be the story of '11 for me, though-- I don't have time to collect my thoughts sufficiently to say anything organized or edited, so here's some random crap I spewed out, how's that! It's effective as a means of getting through life, but it's kind of sad... I was reading some of the essays I churned out back then and good heavens. Just having an hour or two to sit and write and reread and edit... I could really make some beautiful things with words. Nowadays, not so much.

It's probably a question of priorities as much as anything else, because it's not like I have less free time now than I did then. (Or do I? I really don't know how to objectively assess.)

I do vividly recall that I used to write entries, reread them, edit them, and then post them after like half a day of rumination. That was nice. I remember that being nice. This journal was such valuable therapy for me for so long...

Things will change soon. I'm sure they will. My life is fine, and good, and happy-making, and I'm better off than I was back when the only thing I had going for me was an obsessive hobby of writing essays and fiction. ... I really thought I'd finish a book someday, once, and I really worked hard on it, and I really had time to think about that kind of thing once. I miss my fictional characters. I never see them anymore. I don't know how long I can live like that, but I can try. Maybe I'll have time to get back into nonfiction soonish?

Eh. We'll see. It's the Year of the Dragon, and it's supposed to be a year to make momentous decisions. That's the plan.

Being thankful that I have family that I miss, as opposed to family I actively avoid/dread seeing.
Called big sister in GA, where the whole family is gathered, to wish her older son a happy birthday-- his 4th-- and say hi to everyone. The nephew has been made the cake he wanted, which is in the shape of a destroyer sailing on the ocean, complete with a radar tower made of marshmallows, and licorice rigging.
The noise was absolute bedlam. Three large dogs, two little boys, three full-grown sisters-of-mine (we're impressive in full cry), our mother, our father, and two husbands-- older sister's and baby sister's. It was just a house full of sound and excitement. And I was sad not to be there.
But I'm about to go hang out with the family of Z, over at his aunt's house, and that's not so bad at all. Gonna drink half a beer before I go, though, just to get a little head-start and make my knee feel better. I'm wearing a knee brace today; a tripping mishap at derby practice on Tuesday did something to that lower patellar tendon on my right leg, which has been bothering me and now is really angry with me. (The knee's not swollen, I can bend it right double and sit on it, but extending it hurts. It's absolutely the tendon. Well, at least it's not the meniscus.)

And I'm wearing a cute dress so that's something too. Mm this is good beer.

Ugh. I can post more easily from my phone to Tumblr and Twitter, so I have been. I wish I could get those posts echoed here, if for no other reason than to archive them, but also because I don't mean to abandon LJ entirely.
The wireless Internet we relied on at work suddenly got a password; it was from the place next door, and they had the cable guy come by to fix something, and he must've pointed out that they had an unsecured signal and should lock it down. So they did, and now I have no Internet at work except what I can do on my phone. Which should be a lot, but as it happens, I'm not that good at using the tiny screen, so I have certain websites I can navigate, and most I don't. LJ is one of the ones I mostly don't. I definitely can't type anything ambitious.
So anyway. Feeble excuses.
I was looking back through old entries, and good fucking Lord, the depression meds have helped. I still am annoyed, stressed, and generally irritated by life, but I am sooooooo much better than I was. Holy crap, that was bad. I'm better, a lot better.

My uncle died, I don't know if I mentioned that on here. They diagnosed him with lung cancer just after Labor Day, told him he had a year to live, told him chemo would help him, gave him one dose of chemo, and it shut his kidneys down and he died right away. So it was about a month from the time he got sick. I was scheduled to come see him the Thursday of that week, the fastest I could get home, but he died on Monday, so I missed him. The funeral service was an open house at the historical society where he volunteered, and over two hundred people came, and there was a line down the sidewalk. Everyone made a point of telling my mother what a generous, good-hearted, cheerful, funny man he was, and how much he bragged about his talented, clever, beautiful nieces and their exciting lives. He never got along well with my mother, though, and never seemed to want to spend time with us, so she was glad to hear these things but still regretful she never really got to see them herself.
The last coherent thing he said was to my mother. "I love you," he said. "Sort of."
It was true.
Now she has to clean out his house, a beautiful two-story brick townhome dating to the nineteenth century downtown in Troy, which is literally stuffed full of a mixture of feral cats, garbage, and priceless antiques. His personal records are immaculately organized until 2001 when his depression got bad and he self-medicated with alcohol. Then things are randomly stuffed into boxes, under the television, on the floor, under the bed. It's a nightmare, and my parents are exhausted dealing with it. But at least my mother can sleep now; the whole time he was sick she had terrible insomnia, just worrying about what would happen.

I will stay on my meds. I will not let alcohol become a crutch. I will be kind to my mother even when she annoys me. And I will remember my uncle with love, because I inherited his toes, because I inherited his temperament, and because I hope I inherited his charm, his humor, his generosity, and his writing ability. (He had one published book, a nonfiction work about historical places in New York State. His second book, he was about to write, and left four boxes of beautifully organized research about it. I only wish I had time to write it.)

This is the first time I've cried for him. I guess that was good. I have to go clean my house now. This is probably my only day off and home the rest of this month.

So I've been doing a series on Tumblr, telling K's stories, as kind of a writing exercise. It gives me something small to focus on; all my novels are sprawled and scattered and as disorganized as my life. I don't have time to work on them. These stories? I can work on. They're nonfiction, basically; but I'm playing with layers of it. It's told from my POV, mostly in his dialogue. But of course, I never recorded him when he was talking, so it's as I recall the conversation. Some of the stories were originally told out of order, or interrupted, so I've restructured them, and recombined them. Some of them I've heard several times, and have mentally recombined. Some of them I've glossed over things and changed other details to make them more cohesive.
But I'm sure the majority of the editing work was done by him. He tells some of these stories a lot, and he has a finely-honed sense of storytelling. How much of them is fact, and how much gloss? I don't know; he may not even remember. I know how stories work. So there are at least two layers of editing on these stories, which are surely actual events-- he's not a fabricator of truths, just an editor-- but happened so long ago and so far away that it's hard to say what's precisely true and what's been polished for the sake of the story.

So here's a long one, a three-parter, that I posted today; I figure it's as good as any to put on here.
( It's Your Horse, Boy )

So I definitely had some sort of asthmatic episode yesterday. Bad scene. My friend K from Pennsic/elsewhere was the only person who responded to my various desperate tweets/texts/emails; I needed someone to more or less talk me through surviving my day, and he came through in spades, as he has been lately. Poor Z was busy at work and sent me one message: "Don't die." and then made me dinner.
The doctor was unhelpful; by the time I got to him my chest was tight but I was a lot better than I had been, and he shrugged; he couldn't really hear anything wrong. But at least we went over my options for medication again; the things I'd been prescribed at my last visit were $300/mo for the maintenance steroid and $70/mo for the rescue inhaler. I'd put a call in to the doc about it but the thing is, you usually wait on hold forever, and I hadn't had time to follow through.
I got home from the appointment and got an immediate call from the pharmacy, saying that the prescriptions were now $300/mo and $58/mo. They were going to call the doctor back, and get back to me today, but for the record, there is no covered version of the rescue inhaler. They're all within a couple bucks of one another. My insurance plan just doesn't cover albuterol rescue inhalers. They're just something I'm expected to buy out of pocket.
What the everloving fuck? I could see if it was something cosmetic, or something like Viagra where it's not crucial to your actual respiratory success or survival, but a fucking RESCUE INHALER? They invented the albuterol rescue inhaler in like 1955. And they're RESCUE INHALERS. They're to RESCUE you. They're IMPORTANT.
Not covered!
I'm so ready to move to a socialist state. Take me away, Norway! I'll give you almost all of my income in return for not worrying where my fucking rescue inhaler is going to come from. I make $200/week after they take out the $40 per paycheck for insurance. Just for the record.
Ugh.
So I'm fighting off the lingering effects of this asthma thing with caffeine instead, which has made me rather... excitable.
And I squee'd myself into a wheezing fit over the news that Buffalo is getting a real ramen bar! OMG so exciting.

So I forget what I've put on LJ and what's elsewhere. I mentioned that K from Pennsic (AKA The Prettiest Princess) and his wife are seriously working on moving to Buffalo to start a restaurant with me, didn't I? We're still doing feasibility stuff but I'm increasingly fixated on the idea as The Only Right Thing In The World.
K has like a bajillion stories, it's kind of what he does. We spend a lot of time talking, lately. So I've been writing down his stories. The added layer, of course, is that I never take notes while he's talking, so there's probably a whole bunch of inaccuracies. Which just makes it even better.
I'll post some once I've collected a few more. :)

I am alive and apparently healthy. I keep forgetting Twitter doesn't update here anymore. I should probably try to figure out how to fix that, at least so I don't so frequently seem to disappear into the ether.
I am awake like an hour and a half early, which would be fine and even useful except that I don't know where I put my glasses last night and can't look for them without waking Z rudely, and even if I did look for them, well, I can't see far enough to find them without them. Kind of a catch-22. I need new ones, I really do, and I desperately want to do the Buy Cheap Glasses On The Internet thing, not just so I can switch up my look etc but also because... then, if this happened, I could go put on another pair and still be OK. Because without glasses I have an effective focusing range of two and a half feet, which is not enough to get anything done. Boo.
(I really want to get my eyes lasered, but the odds of my ever affording such a procedure are so low as to be negligible.)
I was feeling mentally better but I am definitely in stress overdrive and also in social awkwardness overdrive; I feel like I offended people and can't get over it. This is one of those feelings I hate, and it's been plaguing me through almost all of my social interactions lately. So that's kind of rough.
The wireless at work, which was provided via the unsecured wireless network at the hearing aid place next door, got cut off; they put a password on it. So now I can't answer email at work, which was something I'd really been relying on to keep up with my social life. I can't research things, can't even answer customers' questions.
I'm editing photos instead, for now, which is fine, except it forces me to stare at the results of one of my worst nights of shooting in recent memory, which I really don't feel like doing. And I keep wanting to take a break and, say, research putting in a dormer window in my attic, or finding out how much a Point of Sale system really costs for a restaurant, etc, and I can't. All I've got is my phone. At least I have that; I'd've definitely gone round the bend without it.

So that's my boring stressful awkward life. I feel physically fine and mentally crappy, oh well. I'm clinging to sanity via text messages and phone calls with K, the prospective business partner, and his wife, but worry they may get sick of it too.
I *did* figure out how to make a phone call from the car, though, so that was kind of cool. The bluetooth in the Volkswagen is reasonably good but best if you point your face at the microphone. As with most things.

But! I have cute photos to share! Not of my new haircut-- I got 11 inches cut off my hair, so now it is merely waist-length. Yes really. I feel like it's super short, but everyone else assures me it's not. I'll take a picture soon, really.
No, these photos are from Labor Day Weekend, at my folks' house, with my nephews. The big one is almost four, the little one almost two.
( Pictures! )

So the thing is, sorry if this is TMI, but I've had my period for nine days now. It hasn't been *that* heavy, or anything, and I feel like a wuss complaining when so many people have even worse problems, but I've always been one of those women with the textbook cycles that are right around 30 days long and only have cramps on the first day and taper off and go away by the fourth or fifth day. So for me, this is like the end of the world. (I think it's finally ending, so, that'll be nice.) The thing that's been most distressing, though, is that I've been losing my mind. Last week I texted a friend that I was so uncomfortable I just wanted to crawl out of my own skin, then beat some motherfuckers to death with my bloody, muscle-clad bones. (I more or less meant it, too; I was so incredibly uncomfortable, and I can't explain how-- trapped at work, maybe, trapped in my body, for sure, just very, very edgy and miserable and I don't know why.)
It's persisted; Tuesday I was headachey and cranky like a wounded bear, and annoyed a customer, which sparked lectures from two coworkers-- extra condescending lectures, I might add-- one of whom thought I was too soft, the other who thought I was too hard on the customer-- and the boss texted me about it two hours after closing, while I was at a roller derby function. And lectured me yesterday morning. Fucking great, that's what I need.
I flew into a rage at two insentient machines, freaked out and lost my shit. (Before anyone else was there, so it was all good.) Every driver was an asshole, every pedestrian a lazy sack of shit, it was just all dire and the end of the world. Even as I was yelling to myself, I knew that wasn't really true; the world is no worse today than it was last month. The difference is obviously me.
My boss even noticed, and at one point told me to "just keep swimming," which made me laugh, fortunately.
I tried to practice harp last night and was rubbish at it and hated it. Which hasn't ever happened before, so that was distressing. I drank two glasses of wine and sulked on the couch.
This morning when I got up I couldn't find my glasses. I usually put them on the side of the bed-- the bedframe makes a little ledge. For once the floor near there was clean and I could tell I hadn't knocked them down. Very occasionally I leave my glasses in the bathroom after washing my face; I usually notice when I do so. But, and this might be gross and I'm sorry but that's the gritty reality of my life, I hadn't washed my face or brushed my teeth before bed; I'd been so tired I'd just gone straight to sleep. So my glasses weren't there.
Missing my glasses is a crisis, because I cannot see far enough to spot them if they're on the floor or on a table. I have an effective focusing distance of three feet, two if there's fine detail (like reading). Anything beyond that is a vague blur and I can't be sure I can even navigate, let alone find a small dark pair of glasses frames.
I had to roust Z out of bed to have him look, and finally I found them. Next to my computer. In the living room. Where I'd taken them off before stumbling through the house to go to bed. I never do that. I never ever do that. It doesn't make sense for me to do that. I am a person who is careless with possessions, sure, but I'm blind without my glasses and can't get from one room to another. So who was I, that I'd leave them in the living room???
It was distressing. So I called in to work. If I don't even recognize myself, I shouldn't be attempting to conduct business.