So today I drove out to LA to go to a job fair, hoping to find me some gainful employment.  It was advertised on the radio, with the recommendation that you bring copies of your resume, dress in proper business attire, and be prepared to accept a job then and there.  Not so much, really.  I think there were two, maybe three booths accepting actual resumes, and nearly all of them told me to apply online.  If that's the case, why didn't they just send out a big flier telling people where to apply for things?  It just seems a bit silly that I drove all that way for information that could have been exchanged easily on a website or mailer.

Labels: anxiety, happy, life

Hey everyone! We're still alive here in New York, just been a bit busy with life and lots of other crap. The good news is that I am now working, and we should have an apartment soon where we will have more reliable access to the internets. Woot. And now, to the pictures.

Here is the harbor in Olcott, NY, which is the home of a pirate festival that we did not go to because my feet are teh suck. It's pretty, though, and Fuzzy's aunt and uncle have a business here fixing boats for rich people.


Here is my new favorite alcoholic beverage, the Sloe Gin Fizz, which is super yummy and keeps me from getting drunk because the sweetness makes me stop drinking them long before the alcohol does much. It's got sloe gin (which is sweet and red), with sweet & sour mix, a bit of soda water, and a little swirl of dark rum on top.


Plus, as you can see, it's served with a weapon and fruit. How can you not like a drink that comes with a weapon and fruit?


Here is my most recent yarn, which I love to pieces and looks like this, except with more purple in it.


I love it so much, you get TWO pictures. That's love, that is...


And here's what I'm doing with it:


It's the Morning Surf Scarf, which has been floating around on the internets for years and which, most recently, was in Spin Off magazine, which if Patrick is reading, I heard is the worst movie ever made. Just saying.


Here is a canon in someones front yard, which we have come to nickname the EEEBIL CANON! or The Canon What Is Up To No Good. Note the wicked eyebrows. I pass his cute little face every day on the way to work with Fuzzy.


Patrick is visiting, hence the previous Inside Joke(tm). We went to Niagara Falls, and donned the Great Trashbags of DOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!! Patrick's transformation into a drooling tourist minion is nearly complete.


And here's me, rockin that hefty bag... Rawr.


Here we are piling onto the Maid of the Mist with everyone else in the free world.


Here we are after the boat ride, and Patrick seems to have had a little accident! Whooopsy!



An here's the obligatory picture of the falls, the American Falls anyway, with the horseshoe falls in the background. They really are purty, I must say, and they look much more impressive from the boat.


And now onto a serious note. My dad was diagnosed with colon cancer on Friday. I don't know much beyond that, but for those of you out there reading this, please, pray or wish or hope or do a rain dance or a blessing or whatever you do, but send him your well wishes for me. I would really really appreciate it.

Labels: anxiety, happy, knitting, life, photos, spinning, yarnporn

So tomorrow, in the early afternoon, I go to the podiatrist to have foot surgery, again. I have had big toenails removed twice at the health center, where I knew it would not be permanent (but it was free), and then once, last summer, before Costa Rica and the utter implosion of my entire life, I had them both removed in what was supposed to be a permanent solution to an inherited problem. They removed both sides of each nail, leaving a narrow strip up the center, then killed both sides of the nail bed with a chemical called phenol. The podiatrist took of "extra" so that we could "eliminate" the chances of them coming back. They still grew back.

I have tried, with many people and on many occasions, to explain exactly what I go through with my feet. I am 28 years old, and I have had severe foot pain for the last 10 years of my life. It has prevented me from doing a great many things, from being more active in a general sense to walking places with my friends. I've endured hundreds of scornful looks from people I care about, because it's hard to believe that someone my age could be this infirm and immobile, and it's easier to just think me lazy.

It started out as just excruciating pain in the big toes, where the nail is ingrown. If you've never had one before, its kind of like having tiny knives on both sides of your toenail that slowly cut down into your skin. Every time you move, the knives move too, inflaming the skin around your toenails. They get infected very easily, and antibiotics only clear it up for a few days because, barring removal of the nail, the wound cannot heal. Slowly, the continual infection has led to a lot of generalized foot pain. As I sit on the couch at night watching TV, I will all of a sudden feel pain like someone stabbing a fork into the bottom of the ball of my feet, or the bottom of my feet burn a lot like I am walking across hot coals. I feared it was permanent, and I can't tell you in words what the dread of that felt like, the idea that I would never be able to go a day without this pain. Then I tried the antibiotics, and the pain cleared up a lot. That gave me the hope to go through with this again.

So tomorrow, in the early afternoon, I will have them cut out entirely, the whole nail, on both toes, and I don't care what the damn doctor has to do to the nail bed, but this needs to be the last time. I can't bear the thought of waking up one morning and finding them growing back again. I would probably lose my ever loving mind. So pray for me, if that is what you do, or at least will me the mental strength to deal with this again. The worst part is the injections into the toe. Once that part is over, the rest isn't so bad, it's the recovery that worries me.

Behind this like are pictures, but if reading this post has been uncomfortable, you should probably *not* look.

pain

Labels: anxiety, life

I've been busy with school and work and stuff, and I haven't updated in a little while, so here's a bit of an update...

* I will never be a field primatologist. In addition to my physical issues with breathing in the rainforest, I could never, ever deal with watching an animal die without doing something about it. I made the mistake of watching that new Lemur show on Animal Planet, and they just let little Gizmo die of hunger and exhaustion. He'd been abandoned by his mother and troop when he got hurt, and they just kept leaving him behind, and he soldiered on as long as he could and then just gave up. I know it's "bad science" to interfere, but it doesn't make rational sense not to. Lemurs are endangered, because their habitat in Madigascar shrinks alarmingly every year, and they're already down to a miniscule percentage of the island. Roll him some fruit, for chrissakes, catch him and get him into a zoo if he won't be able to learn to feed himself again, but why just let him shrivel up and die? It's cruel, dammit. Dead people I can deal with. Maybe it makes me wierd, but I've always had more of an emotional attachment to animals than people. Maybe it's because animals never let you down or betray you.

* Everyone who is a student should go to www.theultimatesteal.com and get their $60 copy of the Office Ultimate Edition. My favorite thing ever now is OneNote, the most brilliant computer program I've ever seen. Yeah, it's Microsoft, and I have a bit of problem endorsing anything they sell for matters of principle, but it's a 90% discount, so at least they're getting less of my money. And OneNote is seriously making my life more awesome. It now contains my knitting patterns, recipes, notes on the research I'm doing, a growing list of the books I own, sizes of various friends and family members so I can make things for them, ideas for my business, contact info for important people, and loads of other things. It's like a USB drive for your brain, only more organized. It's awesome.

* I sold two copies of my mini-scarf pattern on my etsy shop! Soooo excited!!!

* I started with a new counselor, and I'm being treated with EMDR. It's a way to train your brain to refile things in the non-emotional centers of your brain. This happens normally over the course of time, but EMDR makes it happen faster. It doesn't make it so you can't feel grief or saddness, just so that it doesn't take you over in the same way. I have high hopes for it.

* Chris got me a screaming card for valentines day. It has cartoony critters on it. It is awesome.

Labels: anxiety, etsyshop, life

This is my first time back to Southern California since I came down for the funeral in August. I knew I had changed a lot since then, or rather I had been changed by that singular even that steamrolled over my life and has left me damaged. It's funny, the way the PTSD works. I go days and days feeling completely normal, whether because of the drugs or because I just don't think about it every five minutes anymore. And then there are days when something happens to trigger it again, and I feel like I'm not quite connected to myself anymore.

Being here has been really odd. It's been years since most of my friends lived here, but this is the first time that it's felt quite so empty and dead to me. It's like the part of me that lived here, that part of my life, is completely dead now. I drive down the streets here, and it doesn't feel like life is going on in the houses, or like families live and make memories there. It just seems cold, like concrete. And it's a way bigger area with a lot more stores and coffee places and restaurants and stuff, but it feels like I'm suffocating from being around all these people. It's just a city full of memories I don't know if I want anymore. I'm ready to move.

The spinning has been going good, and I am really enjoying it. It's a challenge, but one that I feel is really suited to me. It works well with my compulsion. I'm the kind of person who can't see paint chipping without peeling more of it off. The more detailed something is, the more absorbed I can get in it. It's meditative, in a way, because it allows me to turn off my brain for a while. I also cannot rave enough about the woman who sold me my wheel. She has been wonderfully helpful and attentive, and you should all go check out her shop on etsy: Heavenly Handspinning Spindles and Wheels.

Here is my first yarn spun on it, still on the wheel:


And a little closer up:


It's roughly the same, quality wise, as my first plied yarn on the spindle, with slightly more variation in thickness. At this point, it's a matter of practice, just as it was with the drop spindle. The wheel might take me a little longer to conquer because there's more all going on at the same time, but I'm sure that with time I'll be churning out some really nice yarn on this baby.

And here is the yarn in the bath:


I'm ready to go home to my husband. I'm ready to move out of this state, and into someplace new, and a new chapter in my life.

Labels: anxiety, life, photos, spinning

When a dr gives you pills to help you sleep and says "but you probably won't like them", you should maybe ask why. just sayin'. I looked them up online, and hey, it's used to treat schizophrenia, so I maybe got a little freaked out, and I might have put them away in the back of a cabinet as if they were going to attack me in my sleep. But hey, funny thing, you get a little desperate when you haven't slept more than a half hour at a stretch in over a week and you call the dr and they can't get you in for more than a week. So I took one, yesterday, at 7pm, and I layed down. I was freaked out and afraid, but didn't have a panic attack, which was refreshing, but I wasn't sleeping. so I layed there for like an hour waiting, and I finally fell asleep. When Chris got me up for work, I couldn't get my eyes to focus, and the sleepy-eye thing wasn't going away. two and a half hours later he had to get me from work because I apparently had a high fever, and I still couldn't focus to read, or concentrate, or stop raving about how wet my water was. hmmmm. He brought me home, and I slept more, until 5 pm. so yeah, spent roughly 19 out of 24 hours sleeping. Those little round bastards are going back in the back of the cabinet.

Spinning is really addicting. I was warned about this before I started, so I can't say I didn't know, but Zelda might be glad I knit her a sweater when I start harvesting her fur. She's the softest cat in creation, it would be totally awesome to make a Zelda sweater. (see: reasons my counselor thinks I should stay in therapy.)

The knitters I've met at the stitch n' bitch group I found are awesome. I'm really enjoying making new friends, especially since I can tell all my inappropriate stories about primate genitalia, and they laugh! And thanks to some of their stories, I may never be able to look at a VW bus the same way again. Just sayin'. I hope when we move I'll be able to find a local group and make awesome friends. I haven't had a lot of social interaction lately, and it's something that makes me feel better, when I can get it.

New books mysteriously arrived today. They involve knitting and spinning. Stacy is pleased.

Also, ravelry is pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.

Labels: anxiety, creativity, happy, knitting, life, spinning

Things are getting more stable for me now that I'm on paxil, but I suspect my asshole side comes out a bit more, or maybe its just that my sense of irony is coming back. At any rate, I've been feeling better for a few consecutive days, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the whole thing. Tomorrow I have two presentations: a 15 minute job with a couple other students about the evolutionary origins of schizophrenia, which I am nervous about because I'm being graded on it, and a 90 minute class lecture on primate social structure and mating strategies, which I have an awesome power point for, and which I am excited and not really nervous about.

Chris is on his way to me with chili and cheese covered food. Diet? What diet? We don't need no stinking diet!

Labels: anxiety, happy, life

I am 28 today. It doesn't feel any different than 27, and birthdays never do, but maybe this is my new year rather than in January?

Today was better. I had a group project to work on in the morning, and we did it over breakfast at one of my favorite places. Then me and Kita and Diane went to Michael's and got artsy projects. I colored a velvet poster of a dragon with markers all afternoon, and it was awesome. It requires more attention than knitting, so I can't think while I'm doing it, which, as it happens, is a good thing. Maybe I'll go back to painting. We also watched Veggie Tales collection of silly songs, which was awesome too.

After we took Kita home, me, Diane, and Fuzzy went out for dinner. It was nice and relaxing. After dinner we all watched Transformers. I don't care if it's not fine art, I know this, but I love it anyway. Is it wierd that I have an emotional attachment to Bumblebee? Because I do.

I got a little panic attacky after dinner, but thats pretty much par for the course in the evenings for me. Really, it was a nice day.

Oh, and my big accomplishment? Last night I slept without taking any Ambien at all. Thats the first time that's happened in MONTHS. I really hope this new drugs works for me. I don't care whats working as long as something does.

Labels: anxiety, creativity, happy, life

The reason I'm posting about this day, even though it was embarassing and kind of degrading, is because I think it will be cathartic, and I think it's important to be open and honest about this, not only because of me, but because so few people understand this, and maybe someone out there will feel less alone if I talk about it.

I went in to work this morning, and my stomach was feeling churny and awful the way it does 90% of the time now. This was full day number two of my transition from one psychiatric drug to another. For those who have never taken them, psychiatric drugs need to get into your system for a bit before they start to work, like antibiotics, except that this process can take anywhere from days to weeks. Both of the drugs I'm dealing with are SSRI's - selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. Seratonin is a neurotransmitter in the brain that is associated with happy, basically. The "reuptake" process is when cells pull seratonin out of the system so it can't bind to the receptors in your brain and make you feel happy constantly. It sounds wierd, but brain chemistry is a delicate balance, and the neurotransmitters help to moderate your response to different situations. With depression, panic disorder, or PTSD (the last two of which I have), the seratonin is off balance somehow. The drugs keep the level of seratonin - the "happy" message - higher than it would be otherwise, to theoretically help you feel better.

When you switch from one drug to another, you take smaller doses of each during the transition time, which makes it tough. There's not enough of the new drug in your system to work yet, and you're weaning off the old drug so that its not as available to your system as it was. That transition time, for me, is not going well. This morning, I wasn't feeling well. The symptoms of a panic attack are like what you would expect of a ManBearPig jumped out and attacked you. It a lot of ways it feels like a heart attack, and a lot of people end up checking themselves into the hospital because thats what they think it is. Your chest feels really tight, think like after you've been having a hard cry for a long time. Your limbs tingle from the flood of adrenaline which, if ManBearPig attacked you, would help you to run away faster. You feel like you can't draw enough breath. And after a while, the adrenaline overworks these systems and makes you feel like crap. In addition, it's incredibly frustrating, tiring, and saps you of mental strength so that anything, absolutely anything, will make you fall apart. Thats what happened to me today.

I was feeling sick, so I asked Chris to bring me in the herbal stuff I got from the local herbalist, which helps and doesn't make me feel as drugged as the "fast-acting" anxiety meds. I asked if he wanted to have lunch at me, and he said he was too busy, which is fine normally, but today it felt like such a huge rejection. I didn't say so, but I was close to tears when he left. I went to my desk to take some of the herbal tincture, and I would up spilling it all over myself. That was it. I was a wreck, and I had to call him back to get me so I could go home and change my clothes. My coworker is the nicest woman on the planet, and she said to take an hour, change, relax, get lunch, and come back. I might have even been okay if we'd stuck to that, but bless her heart she arranged for other people to help her out in the front office so that I could take the rest of the day off. I adore her, she is the cat's pajamas.

Chris and I DID eat lunch together (imagine that, he's more flexible if I tell him how I feel, what a novel concept *facepalm*.) I didn't want to be alone, though, so I went to Diane's and we hung out for a while. While I was out of the house one of my bosses apparently stopped by my house to check on me and I wasn't there, so he called and left a message, which I got later. I then had the worst panic attack ever, I thought he was gonna fire me. I knew I didn't do anything wrong - I didn't go home because I was sick but because I was a wreck and needed to calm down, and being along at home was SOOOOO not a good idea. I was incredibly upset, not to mention sometimes I hyperventilate and feel like I'm going to pass out. I called him back when I got the message, and fortunately he was just checking on me. Have I mentioned that I love the people at my work? I panicked because I feel bad - a lot of the time lately I've been having trouble keeping it together, and sometimes my work suffers because of it. I am incredibly lucky that they are being so patient with me. Compassion is such a rare and precious thing. I was relieved to still have my job, intensely so, but the chest pain from that attack has still not gone completely. I need to sleep, but I'm waiting until a normal night-time hour so that my sleep schedule (har har) doesn't get thrown off.

This is the most difficult struggle I've ever had to deal with, this whole panic disorder/ptst/depression thing. I want more than anything else to go back to normal, to be able to function like I used to. Did I used to be lazy? yes. Did I always function as well as I could have? no. Will I ever take for granted being able to get out of bed without fighting myself? never. not ever. It's so embarassing when you can't even control your emotional response to silly things like spilling something on yourself. It's embarassing to have to admit to the people you work for and with that you just can't handle being at work and being professional right then. It's hard to feel like a ticking time bomb, and it's hard to have people look at you like you might go off at any second. Every day that I wake up and leave my house is a victory, and I don't always get that victory. Even the most patient, compassionate person occasionally looks at you like "why aren't you better yet?" They can't help it if they've never been through this. I didn't understand before, and I've been judgemental in situations like this even without realizing it and without wanting to be. Unless you've been here, it's hard to know how physical this struggle is, how much it degrades your body while it eats away at your soul.

For those readint this who have never suffered with any of these things, please take these things into account when you deal with people who do. I am extremely lucky; the doctors tell me I will get over this, that it probably won't last forever and that one of these days I'll be able to go off the meds and feel normal again. Some people don't ever get that chance, for some people its something they live with forever. They are not lazy, they are not pathetic, they are not making excuses. They're surviving, one day at a time.

Labels: anxiety, life

Once there was a girl named Stacy.

Okay, so Stacy was kind of a dork, maybe, and this picture is from before she lost 40 pounds, but you get the point. Anyway, she went through this major ordeal that made her feel like a crazy person.
Just sayin. Anyway, after a long time, Stacy and her husband, made a huge move across the country to New York State. On her 29th birthday (hinthint!), her husband got her a wonderful English Bulldog puppy, whom she named Winston.


Winston was totally awesome. He liked to wear shoes in the snow, and would spend hours on Stacy's lap, snurfling a bit because of his foldy face, and when she came home every day his whole body would wag because he was so happy to see her.

Once Winston had settled in, Stacy and her uber-friend Tully decided to get them a pair of angora bunnies.
The bunnies were cute, kind of like a giant cotton ball with half a face in the middle of it. Tully and Stacy combed the bunnies every week, and collected their fur to make yarn out of it.

One day, Tully said "I've got it! We can make yarn out of alpacas and goats next!"

And they did. They bought a huge plot of land and filled it with goats and alpacas. They also built a barn, and two big houses that were connected by a rope bridge, because none of these people every fully grew up, but thats ok. They also built a little cottage for Stacy's mum, with a fireplace and everything.

Stacy's sister, Amie, thought she was a nutbag at first for wanting to raise animals. But in the end, even SHE had to admit it was totally awesome.

JUST SAYING!!!!!

(p.s., the last picture may also have been taken before I lost 40 lbs. just sayin'.)

Labels: anxiety, creativity, goals, knitting, life, photos

So I went back to the psychiatrist yesterday, because stuff just hasn't been working for me, and something needed to change, and fast, because I sorta felt like I was trying to run a marathon stuck in quicksand. I was trying and trying, and still every day was getting harder and harder to take. So I went in to one of the normal drs, who gave me another prescription for the fast-acting panic attack meds and took me to the front to get an appointment with the shrink. He changed my meds to something thats supposed to be better for panic disorder and PTSD, and so I started switching over last night, taking half of my old meds with half of the new meds. Today I feel sort of weird, like I stare at things a little longer than normal, and I've just been sort of dreamy. It's not bad, except that I doubt whether I'm gonna be able to concentrate on anything today, and my body just feels sort of weak. Not like I can't move or walk or something, but sort of like I don't want to. I'm hoping that I'll feel more normal when the new medicine has properly titrated into my system, because I definitely feel more relaxed, just maybe a little too relaxed in some ways (but even THAT is a huge improvement.) I did okay last night taking half of one of the sleeping pills with one of the fast-acting anxiety things. Wasn't the perfect sleep, but then my normal sleep was never perfect sleep, and at least I got some rest and theres the potential for making the rest of my sleeping pills last longer, and maybe stop taking them entirely, which would be nice. I kind of feel like a human medicine cabinet right now.

It's been really hard lately. I've come to the realization that my anxiety comes from something like this "one of my good friends seemingly lost her mind ----> the mind is such a fragile thing, and none of us saw it coming ------> ergo, how do I know that it won't happen to me? Holy shit, what if it happens to me?!?!?" sort of thing. My mom and Chris both tell me it won't happen to me, that I'm a different person than she was, that I could never hurt anyone.... but obviously her husband laid down next to her every night... if he'd thought for a second this could happen, he would have done something, so obviously he had no clue... what makes them think they'd somehow know if I was going that way? Tully and my mom both pointed out, though, that the first thing I did when this whole thing started was to go into the dr and counselor for help. I guess at least that's something. I'm just so damned tired of feeling defective. I just want to feel like me again.

Labels: anxiety, life

Once upon a time there was a girl named Stacy. She had a husband, whose name was Fuzzy, and a pair of uber gal pals named Tullia and Michelle. Stacy was going to go to grad school, but school applications can be scary, especially when your life is turned upside down and things just don't make any sense anymore, so they decided to buy a huge chuck of land somewhere in NY and raise alpaca llamas, goats, and angora rabbits, make lots of yarn, and open a store that would offer a huge range of neato creativity-related items.


The End.

Labels: anxiety, creativity, goals, knitting, life

In the last week, I've been starting to feel better, for the most part. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm through this thing by a long shot, but the sense of despair is starting the lighten a bit, and on a day to day basis I don't feel so much like packing it in and giving up. Dare I say it, I'm even starting to be a little bit optimistic that maybe, just maybe, the future isn't going to be as dire as things have been lately.

So I got a little bit brave and decided to try and stop taking the sleeping pills. I knew it would be rough, but these things are habit forming, not to mention the health center at my school has limits to what they will give me and staying on them for longer means that I would have to go see a doctor off campus, which is expensive. So on Sunday night, I tried for two hours to fall asleep, but to no avail, so I took half of one of the sleeping pills. It knocked me out finally, but I did not sleep well at all, and, Monday being a long day, by the time it was over I was dead tired and had an exam to study for.

Last night I was up until 3am studying for exam. Turns out I should have just gone to bed, but too late to change that now. Without being able to get at least 7 hours, I can't take the meds or else I'm just wasted the whole day. So again I lay there, trying fruitlessly, to fall asleep.

It's a hard situation, because it seems like whatever choices I make about my treatment require some sort of sacrifice. If I take the antidepressants, I don't feel so.... Eeyorish all the time. I don't start thinking of escape plans all the time. I don't sit and just cry for hours on end. But the trade off, and I've heard this complaint from a lot of people who battle depression, is feeling like you've given in somehow. It's like you've admitted defeat. You feel like you've traded some of your genuine-ness, some of yourself, for the priveledge of functioning and acting just like everyone else. And no matter how much I tell myself this isn't my fault, or that it's a medical problem, or that my response to all of this stress is not abnormal, it's a feeling that's never quite gone away. I know all of those things are true, but I still feel like a failure, just a little, each and every time I take one of those pills.
And there's no real reason not to take the sleeping pills. They knock me out, I fall asleep fast and I don't wake up until the morning, and it's great, but the fact remains that I just don't want to take them. It feels like one more way I'm letting this whole thing beat me.

I lay there for the last few nights trying desperately to force the anxiety out of my head, playing imagined stories and fantasy scenes through my head, going back to old memories looking for something just to distract myself long enough for my brain to shut down.

I replayed a lot of things from my childhood last night. My dad has this cabin out in the mountains of Southern California. It's an old place, and it's cluttered and infested with mice and spiders and the other things that tend to resist walls out in the wilderness. And I sometimes hated going there when I was a kid, but when I look back on it now I have a lot of good memories there.

It was the first place I ever saw snow falling from the sky, or made a snow angel. I remember the path out back that my dad made, and how my step mother decorated it with her sculpted figurines and cute signs that made it seem like something sweet, fresh out of a disney kids movie. I remember her making potato cheese soup there when I was little, and how we would eat and drink out of these bright yellow plastic cups and bowls that had a little lip around the bottom, almost like skirts. I suspect they may have been left over from when my mom had been there back when her and my dad were still married, but I could be wrong. The place has a big, wood-burning stove, and food always tasted good there, the way it does when you're camping or just out in the middle of the woods. The bathroom had bottles with victorian labels that I wish I could find now, and I remember being sprayed liberally with avon skin-so-soft to keep the bugs away.

The road out there, at least then, was treacherous and rocky, and I remember being a kid in my dads old bronco (back when they were built like tanks and not fiberglas POS's like they were later). It's literally nothing but rugged wilderness for miles, a drive that seemed to take forever, and then just a patch of four of five private cabins out at the end of it, then the road ends and theres nothing but wilderness again. I was always a little bit afraid out there, of bugs, and rattle snakes, and especially of bears. I remember one time keeping everyone up all night because I was so convinced a bear was going to break into the cabin and eat me. I finally fell asleep, but woke up screaming shortly thereafter because my dad was snoring so loud I was convinced that the bear had finally arrived. It was terrifying then, but it makes me laugh to think of it now.

There were two bedrooms, or at least one big one divided by a partition. In the living room there is a big stone fireplace where my dad would build huge fires that always made my face feel hot at night, and I used to sleep on the fold out couch under fuzzy blankets with grizzly bears and stags on them. It always felt like it was just over the line dividing civilization from the rest of the world, and when I was a kid it was hard to understand the appeal of being so far away from television. There actually was a TV, a tiny, black and white TV with a huge antenna. I tried to watch it once and I remember seeing the animated, Edward Gorey animated introduction to Mystery on PBS. Now I would probably watch it, curled up on the couch, but when I was a kid the music freaked me out and I always somehow blamed the TV for it.
I had a lot of novel experiences out there. At the neighbors cabin, I had my first (and last) powdered milk, and I remember thinking I had really moved beyond civilization in horrifying ways. I shot a gun for the only time as well, and missed hitting a soda can because I was 12 and wasn't prepared for it to kick back. There was one cabin I never saw occupied. It was surrounded more closely by trees, and made all of rock so that, to my mind, it was like a medieval fortress. I was always curious about it, and I still am, I guess.

There used to be a swing in the back, near a pool my dad built out of rocks and mortar. My dad always was really skilled with building things like that. We used to swim in it when I was younger, but the water was always freezing, and one year, when it was empty I was being pushed on the swing and flew off and landed flat on the bottom of the pool. It had leaves and rocks in the bottom, so I got scratched up quite a bit. It seemed very traumatic at the time, but it's one of those things that makes for an interesting story when you get older.

When I got older and started having a more troubled relationship with my father, him and I went out to the cabin by ourselves to spend some quality time. It's the only time I ever saw my father cry, and I think that moment had a really profound impact on me. I remember thinking "holy shit, he does love me a lot." It's taken me a lot of years for me to understand that more fully. My dad isn't as communicative in our relationship as my mom is, and I didn't get it when I was younger that maybe my dad just didn't know how to be the parent that I expected him to be, or even the parent that I think he wanted to be with me. I've seen glimpses of that side of him since we've resumed contact, and I learned to cherish those moments a lot. I think that time we spent at the cabin was the key to me keeping an open mind about it when I was older, the key to me coming around and learning to accept him for who he is and get closer to him now.

My mom told me in the last couple years that, just after the divorce, the babysitter told her that he would come over while I was there and just watch me sleep. I wish I had known about it when I was younger. I might have been less angry with him. I might have felt less like he didn't want to be my dad. I know it now, though, and, just like the snow angels or the heat from the fires he built, it's one of my happy thoughts, tucked away in the back of my mind all the time.

Labels: anxiety, history, life

Ever winter, we are inundated bya hordes of little furry caterpillars, kind of like this one:

They show up all of a sudden, and you see them inching madly across streets all across town, like some sort of great, furry pilgrimage. Now, in a confession that will surprise no one, I am really a giant five-year-old inside, and I LOVE these little guys. When I was a kid I would find them, and bring them home, and put them in a jar with leaves and holes in the lid and try to keep them like pets. My first instinct when I encounter just about any living thing is to want to take it home and take care of it. This is why I have so many pets, but it turns out that it doesn't work so well for furry little caterpillars. I don't take them home and put them in jars anymore, but I will go to completely abnormal lengths to avoid squishing them. I haven't caused an accident yet, but I do swerve around them when I see them on the street. Today I almost hit one with my bike, and I was so upset that I went back to check on him. I was so relieved to find him still inching determinedly along! So I scooped him up into my hand. He promptly curled up into a tight little ball the way they do, like "nothing to see here! just some wierd plant thing! you should just put me back down again!" I wanted to pet him, but he was scared enough already, so I took him across the street in the direction he'd been heading, and set him down gingerly in the grass. This is me at heart: a caterpillar shuttle service.

I've been getting itchy feet again lately, due to a great combination of things ranging from my recent trauma to just being tired of my messy apartment and the degree of cut-offness in this area. I like the small town thing, I really do, but all the same I wish it wasn't 5 hours to the nearest city. This is what I like about where Chris comes from, it's small, with more quaintness even than you find here, but it's close to Bufallo and Toronto without the grind of Southern California. And I mean quaintness in a good way - nice houses, nice people, small businesses in addition to big chains, lots of parks and green and everything.

When I think about my life after this, I don't think about being rich, or successful, I think about being comfortable. A nice house, but nothing huge. I think about getting up on weekends in the winter and making cinnamon rolls. I think about having a big, squishy bed with lots of comfy blankets. I think about sitting around in the evening knitting, or walking my dog (who will be a mini english bull dog named Winston) on sunny afternoons. I think about sneaking over to see my mom on snowy Saturday mornings in a pair of furry slippers to drink hot cocoa, or what Christmas will be like when we have kids, or Easters or Halloweens for that matter. I'd still really love to write, and to write fiction.

The more I think about all this, though, the more I realize that, most of all, I am defeating myself in my life and in my goals. I always feel like I don't have time for anything, but I spend so much time in front of the computer already, not doing anything productive. I watch way too much TV. I get depressed about the house being such a mess, but I don't get up and clean it, either. I might not be able to fashion this place, or my current day to day life as it is right now into a Norman Rockwell painting, but some of these things that elude me are possible right now. I don't have to wait for the mythical future, I just have to get off my ass and do it.

My counselor, Vincent, and I were talking at our last session about my anxiety attacks. They're really not attached to anything concrete. I've just been blindsided really badly a couple times this year, and so I start to feel like the sky is falling, like something vague but really terrible is going to happen, and I don't know what it is or when or anything. I should really see about getting a job with homeland security. But what Vincent pointed out, and this is brilliant, was that there are things I can control, and things I can't. I know, earth shattering, right? But it's absolutely true, and worrying about things you can't control is a huge waste of time. This is obvious, painfully obvious, to most people. It was perfectly obvious to me a few years ago, before I started this damn battle with anxiety, and before the events of this summer. Somewhere along the line, though, I lost site of it, and I feel like I need to make myself a huge poster of this and stick it up on the wall where I'll see it every day.

But it's freeing, too, in a big way. If I stop wasting time worrying about things I can't control, this will free up lots of times to concentrate on the things that I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much I clean, or write, or how often I practice my cello. I can control how much time I watch TV, or how I react to certain situations.

So here are my goals, by day. I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't make them, but they are something for me to focus on, something that I can control and change, an alternative to giving in to the anxiety or the depression.

Monday: 2-3 hours between classes to work on my TA and RA stuff in the lab. Home, at 5:30 at the latest. Clean for about an hour, practice my cello for 30 minutes, this brings me to 7pm. Write or edit my book for at least an hour. Could work out or knit if have time.

Tuesday: 2 hours between classes and work. I usually nap with Franny, which is relaxing for me so I'm not going to veto it, but if I'm awake this would be a good time to clean, as well, or to practice my cello. Get home at 7pm, so I'll work out, or work on my book.

Wednesday: like Monday, work on TA and RA stuff in lab. Home at 3:30, so have a bit more time, which will make it a good time to work on my book. Can clean during breaks or when I either get enough done or hit a spot where I've got no more juice for the day. Also will work out.

Thursdays: same as Tuesdays.

Friday: Work all day until 5pm, but this is the beginning of the weekend. Will reserve this a break day from book if I need it. Can work out, or knit, or relax with the cats.

Weekends: mostly free. Use this to work on book, work out, clean, get things done.

Labels: anxiety, goals