Attention Livejournal users: there is a new feature that will increase your crazy by 4000% without actually telling you shit! Would you like to participate y/n circle one.

In other news,

I am engaged to someone who has been a very good friend of mine for 2 years, with whom I have had a whirlwind romance since roughly the beginning of the year! We moved in together a couple of months ago and are getting married in Chicago late next April. I had come to believe that I was unpartnerable material, that sustainable relationships were not something I was capable of being a part of, and then I was somehow fortunate enough to be completely clotheslined by the rightness of us. Sorry if that's sappy. This is why I've had a hard time mentioning it here: it's impossible for me to do casually. this is the most important thing that's happened in my life to this point, and I have trouble finding words to convey that without sounding...well, supercheesy for starts.

In case 1+1 hasn't equaled 2 yet; yes, this is the person who acted as catalyst to get me out of my previous position at work and into my current one. It is more lucrative and more frustrating, the frustration being mostly because of...god, I don't want to get into it. Maybe in a subsequent, secure post. Let's just say that never has a raise been so completely unworthwhile. My talents, they are squandered! My blood pressure is so high it's almost normal! So I'm working on rectifying that.

Contortion has hit a wall since I broke a rib and couldn't go to class for a while, but I'm trying to find something to fill that void.

What with traveling to Cleveland to meet the fiancé's family, taking time off to host my sister (yay!) and parents visiting here, and going to London in September, I have not enough time off left over to go to the Twin Cities, etc., as I'd like to touch base. But guaranteed that I miss and love all of you, and that I'd like nothing better than to see you again!

I have a cracked rib from falling badly a week ago. First broken bone of my life. Not fun. I'm sleep-deprived enough that I feel nauseated all the time, and weirdly reticent to take the Vicodin I've been prescribed.

I had an MRI for my mysterious unilateral pupil dilation episodes, which was a fascinating experience. I have no masses on or near my optic nerve and have been told by my doctor to embrace this as a perfectly healthy oddity of Me.

Last night was hard. I couldn't sleep, I had suicidal thoughts for the first time in over half a year, and I am utterly exhausted today. But my mood is better today, and it's good to be reminded occasionally that I need to take care of my brain. Depression isn't something that just goes away one day because your life is the best it's ever been. But being happy in life does make the occasional dysthmic episode easier to handle in healthy ways.

I have internet again! Kind of. With 2 weeks to go at my old apartment, the city began doing work on the water mains, disrupting AT&T's infrastructure in the process. After some spectacularly failed customer service / technical support, I simply cancelled my account with them. Eli even managed to wrangle from them an assurance that I wouldn't be billed for any of the time I went without service.

Now we have internet up and running at our new apartment, after yet more spectacular failures on the part of AT&T, and one eventual competent person. Mirabile. I've actually enjoyed the lack of internet, though -- I'm so much more productive without it always available. Too many distractions, too much ease of access. I like having to work for things, but will get suckered into the path of least resistance. Right now? I should be building a shiny new dining room table (thank you IKEA).

Yesterday we began unpacking some of our books. It's amazing how much more home-like the apartment feels now that we have books about.

It feels good to be Home.

Having survived the wilds of the Amazon rainforest, scaled the Eiffel Tower, documented the modern lilies growing in Monet's old pond at Giverny, and lived through many a night of me singing karaoke with none of its glass components shattering, my camera fell victim to a night of roller derby last month.

And my parents, understandably, are demanding proof that this Eli guy really exists.

I'm looking for a good point-and-shoot digital camera below $200. Recounts of any experience with such a device, positive or negative, much appreciated!

Okay, this one appealed to me. From viajes:

The Make Stuff Meme

The first six (6) people to respond to this post will get something made by me. It will be about or tailored to those six who respond first.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
⇒ I make no guarantees that you will like what I make.
⇒ What I create will be just for you.
⇒ It'll be done this year.
⇒ You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a mix CD. It may be a story. I may build something. I might bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
⇒ I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well, if you expect me to do something for you!

My apartment is old. It has sagged and wrinkled over the years, and has formed strong and outdated opinions on several matters.

I suppose the closest thing it has to a brain would be its thermostat, which is definitely riddled with Alzheimer's.

The last two nights I have woken up sporadically to find that the temperature has dropped to about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, ice crystals forming on the windows, my breath swirling and hanging above my head like a mobile over a crib.

My walk to work takes me under a wide tangle of railroad tracks. The underpass is deep and wide enough that in the summer it is cool, in the fall it is warm, and at night it is dread and foreboding. Many pigeons live there, and the occasional human.

Yesterday, my walk under the tracks was punctuated about every fifteen feet by dead pigeons, their eyes frozen over, their feet curled into little talon fists. The cold was so intense that it had frozen them to death.

Today, there were more birds, and a person; wrapped in a tangle of textiles, issuing the faintest wisp of steam that reassured me there was still breath in them. I left him my lunch and twenty dollars, and hope to whatever there is to hope to that between the food, the money, and the rising temperature it will be enough to keep him from becoming another body under that bridge.

No sister for me.

Her flight got canceled again (third one running), and is now due to arrive at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport about half an hour after my bus leaves downtown Minneapolis.

I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.

It's been two years now since I've seen her! Two years! Last time we were together I still resided in East Grand Forks. I was still married. I was still miserable with my life.

Maybe I'll put my other travel plans on the back burner for a while and go crash her life for a week this Spring.

The perigee moon is so intense that I have been using its light to navigate through my unlit apartment tonight.

I saw an ophthalmologist yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with my eyes.

She recommended I speak with my primary care physician about getting an MRI, since that leaves "something wrong with brain" as a gaping possibility.

I find it much more probable that I experienced some kind of one-time fluke, and that, occasionally looking like a cut-rate Marilyn Manson aside, there is Nothing. Wrong. With. Me.

Unlike me, there is definitely something wrong with my keyboard. Hopefully it's just the batteries choking out a death rattle.

Less than a week until I get to visit Home for a few days. I wish that the nature of the Megabus ride didn't make the trip seem so Odyssean. This year I won't be traveling overnight, so at least it won't strip me of any more sleep than I would otherwise be likely to lose.

What kind of life do I want to lead? One in which I play smart odds, collecting small but reliable winnings...or one in which I take the risks?

When did I become so cold and pragmatic?

For the first time in my adult life, my mood is generally good enough for the effect of the seasons on my mental well-being to have been quite obvious this year.

So I've been making a concerted effort to spend at least an hour of each day under my full-spectrum light, either reading or painting, and between that and my sheer cussedness I seem to be doing rather well with it.

The single most useful discovery of my entire life: happiness is not achieved but created. You can spend your whole life meeting goal after goal, making more and more money, gaining higher and more elaborately titled positions; but, the simple effort of sitting back and saying "I like who I am and what I do with my time" is infinitely more rewarding than any and all of these things.

Duh. Very duh. But TRUE.

Some days I still find myself lingering on the parts of my life that aren't perfect -- and, my being human, there are many. But virtually any time that I stop to consider all of the things about my existence that I treasure and enjoy, I wind up content and exhilarated.

Dilation of the pupil and rotation of the spine
All you see is what you want but what you need is mine

I scribbled that into the margins of a notebook back in high school, back when I was still operating under the delusion that I had a real knack for verse. I have no idea from whence my inspiration had come, but it has apparently been lingering in my mind under some cobwebs ever since. It's gotten dusted off in the last day and has been running through my head; last night, after dealing with distorted vision in my left eye all day, I noticed that my left pupil was fully dilated while my right pupil remained normally responsive. I had no heightened sensitivity to light in my left eye, just an ODDNESS to my sight. Also, it was a very disturbing visual effect.

I did a little bit of halfhearted googling on the issue and turned up a search result that stated "A unilaterally dilated pupil is often viewed as an ominous sign." Clicking on the link turned up a demand for $32 to obtain access to the full article, with no obvious link to an abstract, so I shrugged and called it a day.

I do desperately have to see an optometrist to resurrect my prescription for contacts. My insurance covers ophthalmologist visits as well, and I suppose at this point I should probably go to the extra effort of digging one of those up.

I'm starting to have paranoid fears that Palin is nothing but a sin-eater. Imagine for a moment that McCain invited her on the ticket only to steal attention away from Obama's incredible momentum and to bear the brunt of the criticism against McCain, only to be cast away for a more feasible running mate with not enough time left before the election for the Obama camp to do anything but stand in slack-jawed horror.

"find me some meaning"

Okay Twin Cities people. What say you to Valley Fair on Sunday the 7th of September?

Edit: I will gather from the resounding lack of response that there isn't really a critical mass of people interested in said excursion!

Hey, Minneapolis types. I'll be in the cities for Al & Sarah's wedding the 5th-8th, and am trying to plan my stay. What's up, folks?

( Read more... )

Here I am in my pajama pants all ready for bed and reading some atrociously fluffy fiction when my unbelievably loud apartment buzzer goes off. I am confused. It is 11:15 at night and I am not expecting any visitors.

I peek out my window and see a guy about my age whom I don't recognize at all. I go out to greet him, probably wearing a very confused expression, and as I say "Hello..?" he simply holds up my wallet.

Whoa. I didn't even realize it had gone missing. It's scratched up now - clearly, it fell out of my bag while I was biking.

So I thank the guy profusely, and he just smiles a bit and makes a little "eh, whatcha gonna do" gesture and rides away on his bike.

I feel like I should have bought him dinner or something. Whoof. I'm very, very glad I didn't spend the past few hours giving myself an ulcer trying to find my missing wallet.

Edit:
Well, that just went from heartwarming to slightly creepy. Check out what one of my friends at work stumbled across...
Edit:
Whew. Got the missed connection flagged off.

What kind of mobile phone do you have? Do you like it?

My primary concerns are:
1. Size. I'd like something small -- specifically slender, if possible.
2. Durability. I'm kind of a klutz.
3. Reception. I live in a cave.
4. Battery life. I can occasionally go for days without being home long enough to charge a phone.
5. Compatibility with TMobile myfaves.

Have you ever totally forgotten what you look like? I had a moment like that yesterday. A customer did a double-take and said, "Oh man, you look just like Melissa Joan Hart! Do people tell you that a lot?" (I have never gotten that before in my life, and some IMDBing since then indicates that I will probably never get that comparison again -- I look nothing like Melissa Joan Hart.)

So I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to remember how my facial features appear, and I drew a complete blank. People often comment that my sister and I resemble one another strongly, so I called her face to mind, but couldn't think of how mine differed from hers.

Then later I caught my reflection in a mirrored pillar, thought it was another person and smiled in greeting. It took the "Whoa - my actions are controlling that image!" sensation to prod me into realizing it was my own reflection. It was a very disturbing experience, but it gave me the rare opportunity to take away a purely objective impression of my appearance. As it turns out, I think I'm actually fairly attractive. Who knew?

Added to the fairly short list of covers-I-prefer-to-the-original: the Saul Williams version of Sunday, Bloody Sunday. I can DEFINITELY hear Trent Reznor's hand in the production. Oh man, why am I not listening to that right now?

What other covers are there that eclipse the original version of the song?

1. The word "lamaze" does not exist in the Scrabulous dictionary.
2. I work in under 2 hours.

The weather today was stupidly beautiful.  I didn't get anything done.  I should have been in bed hours and hours ago, but I feel too...jittery to sleep.  And depression is rearing its ugly head a bit today.  I have mercifully few bad days, now, but they still sting when they come around.

I need to remember to take care of myself.  I've been forgetting to eat again occasionally, which probably explains why I got so drunk last night on four beers.  I'm a bit embarrassed about that, and a bit concerned.  At least I was with good people who I know will forgive any shenanigans or things said in drunken idiocy.

I'm feeling twitchy.  I'm not sure if it's Spring, brain chemistry, or just that I have too much tying me down right now, but I have wanderlust in the worst way.  I haven't even been in Chicago for a year yet -- this is the fastest I've ever settled in somewhere.  Okay, I'm still not fully established here.  Virtually all of my friends are coworkers, which can get old at times; I love them dearly, but when we go out we talk about work, instead of the things that really matter.  I know we have the capacity to discuss more important things, but it never seems to happen.  But I guess my point is that although I'm still finding my spot in the universe here, I'm happy.  I have friends, I have routines, I have a steady job, and I'm seeing this guy that makes me smile.  But there's something amiss, and I'm not sure what it is.

Work may be a big part of it.  There are aspects of my job I've been chafing under a lot lately.  I may finally be beginning to burn out.  I'm back to spending far, far, far too much time working off the clock; our labor budget is tight, and sales are going to be dipping over the summer.  The position I'm in right now is also not the best fit for me ever -- I really miss the sense of ownership I used to have.  I love Richard, I love him hard, but we have different priorities and approaches to some things and those have been coming up a lot lately.  And I'm beginning to trust my own judgment enough that it makes me cranky, at times, to be playing second fiddle.

What it all boils down to is that I'm fighting some urges to sabotage all the things that I should be cherishing in my life right now.  A huge chunk of this is tied to my commitmentphobia, and I feel like I need a swift kick in the ass over that.  There's nothing that says I'm going to wind up in another 10-year relationship just because I've been dating the same guy for a month now.  A month.  Which puts it right at that terrifying point where I start feeling vulnerable and freaking out.  I've spent far too much of my life pushing people away at this point because I don't want anyone to be in a position where they can hurt me.  Don't fuck this up.  Don't fuck this up.

I'm also really feeling the absence of family.  You know who you are.  At least I've been able to touch base with Mara and Mike lately, but the internet is only passingly adequate for that kind of thing.  There's a huge number of my lifelong friends I haven't had a chance to talk to for ages, and I miss Jessie like mad, made worse by the fact that I don't see us being able to get together any time soon.  I've now gone longer without seeing my sister than at any other point in my life.  Booo.  This definitely helps explain why I've been so obnoxiously clingy.

There is just not enough time, ever.  I've been trying -- and failing -- to find a good balance of priorities lately.  Last week I spent far too much time (and money!) going out every night -- which was a heap of fun, and I'm glad to have done it -- but spending that much time on socializing took a chunk out of everything else.  I haven't been working on my book for months now.  Now that I don't take the train to work, I just can't seem to find the time to write.  I've been listening to a lot more music, but at the cost of neglecting NPR.  I feel as if I'm a bit cut off from what's happening in the world.

Most importantly, though, I've been doing a lot more drawing lately, hooray!  I've been working on some designs for t-shirts -- might as well start trying to find ways to make my talents profitable.  I'm trying to resurrect my old comic, too -- but I had forgotten just how demanding that is.  It's also intensely personal, and for some reason I've been reticent about being as public with this sort of introspection lately.  Hell, this post may wind up coming down when I get out of the funk I'm in right now and think better of it.

I gave myself an intramuscular injection just now. It was terrifying. It must have taken at least 5 minutes for me to get up the nerve. I kept on supporting the muscle, getting the needle ready to throw into my leg like a dart (that's how one is supposed to do it, really! [well, kind of, one doesn't actually let go of the syringe at any point]), counting to 3, and watching as absolutely nothing happened. My conscious will was sending the impulse to my hand to move, but some much deeper innate paralyzing fear of needles/pain kept the synapses from firing completely. When I finally managed to get my hand to obey, there was absolutely no pain. Crazy.

And now little rabies bugs are swimming around in my thigh!

I am at such an amazing point in my life right now. I feel electrically charged, as if billions of ions are dancing right beneath my skin, teasing my arm hairs erect. I am balanced right on the edge of a million different possibilities. I am filled with passion for the world.

I am also filled with trepidation that American Airlines is going to mess up my whole trip before I even get in the air.

What a beautiful day.

I went biking along Lake Shore Drive and made the tactical error of biking with the wind first. When I started to flag and turned around to head home, the gusting-to-30mph-wind was fighting me, so by time I stopped for groceries on my way home my thighs were pissed. Worth it.

I walked around Pilsen running some errands to a soundtrack of whistling, honking, and lascivious comments. Some days this really bothers me. Today it was actually appreciated. Spring is making my hormones go crazy. It doesn't help that this past half year has been the longest stretch of time since I was 15 (14?) that I've been without a partner. Down girl.

It feels incredible to have the sun heat my black shirt past the point of comfort. It is amazing to have the wind whip my hair into a frenzy without my ears going numb. I have my windows open and the air is redolent with thawing dirt and that indefinable odor of Spring that makes me want to do something crazy like fly to Ecuador and spend a week in the Amazon. Oh wait!

My housemate just beat me to picking up all the trash that had accumulated under the snow in our courtyard. I wish I wasn't too shy to have gone out and helped. Whenever we talk, I have a lot of fun. He and his girlfriend seem like fantastically interesting people, but we're all JUST too socially awkward for things to go easily. Sigh.