all of our plans have fallen through

i used to sit in the same spot in my apartment for days, barely moving, staring at a screen of some sort nonstop, and if a bird flew by my window i would think, "wow! a bird! just flew past my window! this must be magic! something has happened! i should blog about it! amazing!" now that is obviously an exaggeration, but at the same time, it really isn't. how many blog posts have i written that ramble on about nothing? dropped contact lenses and boring grad school lectures and lunch dates were all things that, at one point, deserved to be preserved in writing. and now... nothing. things happen and all i do is get through them and never look back. i don't like it.

one of the points that i seem to whine about repeatedly is how much i don't like the hype about new year's. i just... don't like it. it's always my birthday that feels like the fresh start for me. that deserves resolutions and looking back and a clean slate. new year's has always just been the sign that the vacation is nearly over, that projects need to be completed and work needs to be done and oh my god how did i let myself procrastinate this much? 

but maybe i need a stupid day that has been given a false sense of importance right now. maybe i need a january first to get myself back into writing.

(but, really, i may have a lot of posts about new year's and even more posts about nothing, but those are nothing compared to the number of posts i have where i declare that i am going to do something and then never do it. a lot of those declarations have to do with writing. and who am i kidding? what makes this any different? although, i would like to say here officially that despite the fact that my word count tracker didn't appear on my blog this year and i didn't blog about nano, i did write consistently every day for the month of november (better than any other year) and ended the month with over fifty thousand new words of fiction to my name, but that's neither here nor there.)

i feel like i am overusing the word "but." 

in the spirit of writing about what happens in my life, even if that "what" is nothing, my siblings minus the one living with her family halfway across the world all came to stay over at my house for christmas break (basically wednesday through this morning). we had a bunch of plans for the weekend. we were going to have fun. and then two out of three of my siblings were hit by a stomach bug (i'm guessing the same one that cricket and then my dad suffered from in the past couple of weeks) and suddenly the weekend turned into delivering gatorade and chicken noodle soup and doing laundry. the best laid plans and all of that... 

*The Way It Was - The Killers

how does anybody get anything done?

sometimes people will say something referencing the fact that i am sort of somehow maybe on my way to becoming a holder of a phd and i just kind of laugh nervously and make some comment along the lines of "it's been a bit of struggle 'till now but that's the plan" because deep down i know how completely ridiculous it is. i mean, i do want to get the degree to end all degrees and all that, but there's something very self-sabotaging about the way i'm going about actually getting it.

take, for example, today. i was supposed to spend the day reading articles and doing some preliminary research so that when i meet up with my adviser this friday he won't know that i have spent exactly zero minutes thinking about my dissertation over the winter break. zero. and that i maybe stretched the truth a little (or a whole freaking lot) when he asked me in emails if i was following certain things and i told him yeah of course i am. but the best laid plans... and other useless idioms that let you know that that is not what happened.

instead i spent the day reading fanfiction (which i am apparently back to doing) and getting worked up over fictional characters. and i also worried a bit about a stain on my "books turn muggles into wizards" t-shirt because dressing like an adult is apparently beyond me. i did manage to get a load of laundry done and take out the trash, but that was about as much responsibleness as i was capable of. there may have also been a bit of pretending that the nervous tension in my stomach was solely caused by the stories and not at all by the fact that i was procrastinating life. and you know how much research i got done? none. i didn't even open the articles. i didn't even open the email the articles were sent in. but i did get the urge to write some fanfiction again, so there's that.

also, i bought a ring today and it's a little too big and seems to be getting bigger by the second which is making me sad.

also number two, last night i got exactly two hours of sleep (if that) because i was just. not. tired. and i wasn't tired the entire day and now it is past midnight and i am still not tired and what is wrong with me? i'm usually (well, at least for the last couple of years) that obnoxious person that has to sleep for like ten hours a night. and all i can think of is this girl they were talking about on the radio a few weeks ago who had a tumor on her brain which made her never have to sleep ever, and i can't remember what happened to her and am pretty sure that i don't have a tumor on my brain but my mind is nothing if not a lover of what if's and late-night hypochondria. also, lightheadedness. i've been feeling light-headed a lot recently and that's not a sign of brain tumors is it? i'm pretty sure headaches are, and my normally constant headaches have been noticeably missing from my life and thank god for that, i tell you.

this post has gotten wildly off-track.

anyway, long story short, i am not an adult and am getting pretty bad at pretending to be one. also, i wish i had studied english and was doing a phd on fanfiction and its role in something or other. i would be right on track. (i overuse the word also.)

*Take It Like A Man - Dragonette

there's a joke here somewhere and it's on me

you know what happens when indecisiveness and forgetfulness get together and make you mess up your birth control pill taking? your body thinks that you stopped taking your birth control. and you know what happens when your body thinks you stopped taking your birth control? i suppose the expected answer here is "you get pregnant," but no. this happens:

body: oh no. ohhhhhhh noo. i'm not getting regular dosages of hormones. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?!

me: okay, calm down. you can-

body: AAAAHHHHHH NO HORMONES!! WHAT DO I DOOOOOO????!!!!! 

me: if you would just take a second and-

body: okay, okay ummm maybe i'll just... umm... HERE! HAVE A FEW MIGRAINES! AND CRAMPS!

me: what the hell body. you did this on your own for twenty three years. get it together.

body: ANXIETY! I CAN MAKE ANXIETY! HERE! HAVE SOME MORE!

me: would you stop screaming? it is really starting to freak me out.

body: THESE ARE BAD SYMPTOMS FOR BASICALLY EVERY SINGLE THING EVER. HAVE THEM ALL. AND MORE ANXIETY! AND ANOTHER HEADACHE!

me: !@%@$%^#$@#!#$%!!#$&#$@**^%##*^%#!#$

body: NAUSEA! I CAN DO NAUSEA! I DON'T REMEMBER HORMONES BUT NAUSEA IS GOOD!

me: *starts sobbing*

body: HERE IS MORE ANXIETY! AND LOTS OF SLEEP!

me: *still sobbing* there is nothing left to feel anxious about! oh no i didn't bake gingerbread cookies this year! why am i such a failure?!

body: DOESN'T MATTER. HAVE SOME MORE! AND INSOMNIA NOW!

me: i hate everything. 

body: I GIVE UP!

i am seven hundred percent done with life right now. 

i have also been up since three in the morning. i found fangirl online and read it on my phone from a site that doesn't have a mobile app so the text was really tiny. yesterday was supposed to be productive but it straight up sucked. maybe i'll tell that story tomorrow. 

having my hormones out of whack has hindered my storytelling ability. it also makes it very exhausting to do normal things (including all of the fun stuff that i said was going on in my post yesterday) because i just want to sit down in the middle of walmart and cry and punch everyone in the face and also eat a soft pretzel and maybe have a chocolate milkshake. but instead i have to be a functioning human being or something. uggghhh. 

*Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen

what's been going on around here

yesterday i was supposed to catch up on my nano word count, and while i obviously didn't catch up, i am closer to catching up than i was on friday. if i write a few big word days this week (and i'm not even talking super big, just two or three thousand words) then i should be juuust fine. (although i still find myself taking too long to start my actual story and writing around all of the exciting parts, and i never respect my favorite authors as much as when i realize that my story really sucks and i have no idea how to fix it. i can have a good premise but then i realize that my plot is sucky and how does that even happen? every. single. time. you'd think i write a good one as a fluke or something at least.)

and just in case any of you care, the lump on my ankle from the lyme disease is finally going down. like, it's now probably more than fifty percent smaller than what it was a couple of weeks ago, and yes, okay, i'll admit it: i guess my doctor was right. my shoulder pain (which didn't go away with the antibiotics so i was wrong about that, too) is pretty much gone as well. so now i'm going to connect those two in my brain. by the end of this month, i won't only have a fifty thousand word novel sitting in cloud space, but i will also be lyme free and pain free you will (fingers crossed) never have to listen to me talk about it again.

and i finally have a clean apartment. (except for the bedroom, but if you close the door then you can't even tell it's a colossal mess.) i had to clean it for wednesday when my sister, husband, friend and i all went to watch ender's game and then came back to my place for dinner. (i'm going to start off by saying that no, i did not boycott the movie like so many others, and i thought that, as book to movie adaptations go, it was pretty good. neither my sister nor my husband had read the book, and they never felt lost at all. which is growing increasingly rare i have noticed. (yes, it felt a little rushed. yes, the book was better. but that will always be the case.) i also loved both the character and actor of bean. he was the most adorable comic relief i have ever seen.) but the fact that it is still just as clean half a week later is pretty amazing for me. my tolerance for mess is ridiculously high so this almost never happens.

oh, and my professor gave me a ninety-nine on a paper and then spoke to me after about how "your paper really deserved a hundred, but i don't give hundreds. congratulations." and don't you hate that? if my paper deserves a hundred then give me a hundred. i had a teacher in elementary school that was the same way. she used to say, "if i gave you a twenty out of twenty then what would i give a published writer?" and just, what? you should not be grading my work as a fifth grader on how it compares to a published writer's work. you should be checking that i met all of the requirements, and if i did, then give me the twenty. sometimes, i really don't understand teachers.

edited to add: i also got rid of our fruit fly problem! go me!

/end updates.

*What's Been Going On - Amos Lee

oh, things are going to change now for the better

okay so my blogging this month has been almost nonexistent. like i said, october just hasn't been my month. at all. but i feel like the tides are turning, people. i really do. because i just took the last dose of the antibiotic from hell and words cannot describe how excited i am. no more nausea! no more esophagitis! (that one is kind of my fault but also i am going to blame my doctor for not warning me. basically a few days ago i took the drug without water like i usually do and went straight to bed like i usually do and it got stuck in my throat like it usually does (just not with me) and burned my esophagus. because it is acid. and that made swallowing very painful for a while and breathing very painful whenever i was laying down (like to sleep) or had been laying down for a while (like in the mornings). but it is all but gone now,  and yay for that.) no more tendonitis in my shoulder! (which, admittedly, no one but me ever thought had anything to do with the drugs, but i am convinced it did/does because those antibiotics hated me and i am looking forward to pain-free shoulders by the end of the day. if this doesn't happen, i will be quite upset.) no more counting hours for when i can and cannot eat! no more lyme disease! (i really hope that last one is true. i still have the bump on my ankle that is kinda tender when touched and when i get out of the shower the rash faintly shows. my doctor says this is normal and it will take a while to go away, but i mean, it's been over a month now. i just hope she's right.)

yay!

and i finished ninety-nine percent of one of my papers yesterday and plan to finish ninety-nine percent of the other one today. tomorrow morning i will go over both to make them one hundred percent done and ready to submit tomorrow evening. (being ninety-nine percent done does not mean that it is ninety-nine percent of the best i can do. it's probably more like fifty-seven percent. i could maybe stretch it to sixty-three tomorrow, but as long as i have words on paper to hand in i one hundred percent do not care.

speaking of nothing that i was just talking about, i have been receiving books in the mail all week. and this is partly awesome because books! and partly awesome because they all surprised me! but slightly less awesome because i had forgotten i pre-ordered stuff and didn't take that into account for this month's budget. oops. and even more not awesome because i cannot read them for a while. (there are seven of them so far. five were pre-ordered in the summer when i was bored and had all the money in the world (four of them came together in a boxed set, calm down), one i received to review, and one was the product of a kickstarter i backed six months ago and mostly forgot about. and i still have some books i haven't read from the library sale in the summer and another book that i got in the summer to review. and i have a feeling that the mailman will bring me some more because it seems like his new favorite thing to do. and i just finished a book i really, really liked (and am currently rereading) so i know whatever i read next i will hate just because so i need a pallet cleanser before i get into any of these.

i am off to write my paper (the topic of which i still haven't fully decided on) filled with renewed hope and vigor. (i couldn't think of a word to put after and so i put that. i dunno.) i hope you all have a wonderful thursday, because mine is starting off really well.

*Dismantle, Repair - Anberlin

below is a very long laundry list of complaints and whining. you probably should just skip it and wait for the next post.

so basically, things have just really been sucky lately. october has not been my month, and if i see one more person post that they are grateful to live in a world where octobers exist, then i will very likely explode. this suckiness is really the reason that i have not been blogging because there are two kinds of sucky moods: ones that lead to good writing and that can pull on other emotions to elevate it and ones that you just can't write in because everything that comes out is bitter and makes people uncomfortable and is too frustrating to even write and you do not need anymore frustrations in your life at the moment so you just don't. i am so far into the second category that they've elected me their queen.

my life for the past few weeks:

i got lyme disease, as you all know, and was put on antibiotics for what feels like forever. the antibiotics are gross and make me extremely nauseous for hours two times a day and i still have a week left of them. extreme nausea leads to irritability and misery in case you didn't know.

it rained for the entirety of last week. and if you try to tell me that rain is pretty or remind me that i usually like rain then i hope you don't particularly like your face. rain makes doing anything and everything impossible. rain calls for procrastination and lazy days and pushing off the papers you have to write until the sun comes back. which it apparently never does anymore. after struggling for a week to write a five page paper, i finally finished it over the weekend only to realize that i did the whole thing wrong and needed to redo it. which i did. probably poorly. i still have two more papers to do which may be due this friday and may be due next friday and i am too scared to check which it is.

i've been having minor shoulder pains that decided to escalate overnight and and result in excruciating pain and me not being able to move my arm the day before yesterday. yesterday it seemed like it was getting better, (yesterday was kind of a respite from everything which was pretty awesome because it was also eid, but now i kind of resent it because it just makes the lows seem so much lower) but sometime around three last night it decided that it didn't want to get better after all and that maybe waking me up from the pain and not letting me go back to sleep was a good idea. i finally fall back into a light sleep around six something, only to be woken up at six:thirty by my husband's old phone's alarm that was going off in the living room, meaning i couldn't just reach over him, turn it off, and go back to sleep. not that i could have done that anyway since my shoulder was killing me even at rest and hurt even more when i moved any part of my body. still does, so that's fun.

(i went to the doctor for it yesterday, and she said it wasn't from the lyme disease which i guess is good because that means the antibiotics are probably working, but also bad because i don't know what it's from and therefor can't really treat it. she was insistent that i just bumped my arm on something, which i am one hundred percent sure is not what happened. since it was starting to feel better and i really just wanted to leave her office yesterday, i didn't really argue. i am now wishing that i did. her entire examination of it consisted her of telling me to raise my arm as high as i could straight up. that was it. she didn't even touch it to feel if there was tumor growing on it. which i'm pretty sure there isn't, but still.)

because of the nausea and the inability to find a comfortable position that does not make me cry from pain and then from the frustration of having wet spots on my pillow from tears, i have not been sleeping well. the exhaustion is actually what's causing all of the tears. i'm just crying over everything because i'm so. effing. tired.

oh, and my doctor also told me yesterday that there's really no way to know if the antibiotics got rid of the lyme disease because i will continue to test positive for it for at least the next few years. i could still get it again, though, and unless i get major symptoms again i will not know that i have it (because of the testing positive regardless) and will probably end up not knowing about it and waiting too long to treat it and having it mess with my brain and ugh. just ugh, okay?

i think i just really need to sleep. my tolerance level would be so much higher if i could just do that.

and my apartment is a mess and i have papers to write and a ton of grading to do and everyone is on vacation except me and i am tired and in pain and annoyed. i bought a pair of rain boots that are too small and the online store doesn't do exchanges. friday my sister, husband, and i were supposed to go out to celebrate and the universe messed that up, too. my breakfast today was gross and i just really want to crawl in bed with a book - not the one i just finished though because that was so, so, so bad - and stay there until october is finished. you can keep your pumpkin spiced lattes and colored leaves. wake me up when gingerbread lattes hit the menu and the trees have shaken off every last leaf.

the only reason i am posting this is because today is blog action day, and i have not missed a blog action day yet and refuse to miss it today. my post on human rights was more like a call for the entire world to die, though, so i thought maybe if i got some of this out of my system i could write a less morbid post. just in case i don't though, now you all know why. 

[one] okay, so my doctor finally called me yesterday (and by that i mean her secretary called me yesterday after i called her the day before and asked for her to call me and let me know if i was dying at a faster rate than usual or not) aaaand it turns out that i do have lyme disease. so there's that. i'm gonna be on these stupid antibiotics (that i've been taking wrong oops) for a month and i'm already sick of them. i am really bad with taking medicine daily. i will stick with it for a week or so perfectly and then i slowly start to forget and mess up and stop caring. having to take medicine twice daily is just preposterous.

[two] on a happier note, the government shutdown that has thousands of people sitting at home without pay means that the metro was super empty today. like, ridiculously empty. not only did i get a seat from the minute i hopped on (during rush hour!) but there were only a handful of people on the car with me. the amount of people that usually fill up one car were probably spread out over the entire train. i'm not gonna lie, it was pretty awesome. and though i really do feel for the people who suddenly find themselves momentarily jobless because congress can't play nice, i really, really, really like the metro being empty. it's not that i can get used to this, it's that i already am.

[three] on a less happy note, i did really well on the exam that i took last week. the professor thinks i'm a really good writer and liked the bad example that i used when i couldn't think of anything better and thinks i have nice handwriting (*shrugs*). he gave me an A, which sounds just dandy, but then he mentioned that i have good ideas and should share them in class. i do not share things in class. i do not participate regularly unless there are less than five people in the class and i really, really have to. (i have a twenty-three year streak of this, i'm not about to blow it now) this class has twenty-five people in it and i don't have to. except now my professor is trying to force me to. like, he volunteered me to present next week and keeps trying to direct questions at me and if i wanted to participate then i would. but you know what? challenge accepted, dude.

and i know that this is not part two, but i have freaking lyme disease and thought i should record that on my blog for posterity's sake. also, updates are easier to write. 

well i believe i'm just plain tired

can we talk about how my week has been going so far?

monday was spent as usual alternating between the readings for my online class and meetings with my mentees. all i really remember was trying to get in my response to my online class at night, being tired, and thinking about how i would have to wake up super early the next morning.

tuesday i woke up early, went to my weekly breakfast with my dad, went to my weekly pottery class with my mom, and then everything went south. i had a doctor's appointment at one:thirty. (backstory: a little over two weeks ago, my ankle/foot was a little sore. a day or so later i noticed a small bump on my ankle. a day or so after that my ankle was three times its normal size and there was redness covering most of the top of my foot. after a week and a bit of it not going back to normal, i called my doctor and made an appointment. the day or so leading up to the appointment, the swelling went down some and i could actually move my foot again. (it was probably just because it was too fat, but previously i could barely move my ankle half a centimeter in any direction.) i decided to go to the appointment anyway (mainly because my parents told me to) and now you are all caught up.) i don't even remember the last time i went to my doctor's office and they weren't running ridiculously behind schedule. i showed up at the office at one:ten and wasn't seen until two:fifty. the nurse asked me questions and did some tests (like telling me to stand up on my toes) to make me think that i wasn't just moved from waiting in the waiting room to waiting in the patient-seeing-room whatever it's called. when the doctor finally came in, she looked at my foot for like half a second before saying that it was obviously an infection and possibly/likely freaking lyme disease. she takes a million gallons of my blood for tests (or three vials, but it's practically the same thing) as i start to get worried. the nurse tried to reassure me by saying it's only serious if they don't catch it and treat it early (and i'm still not convinced two weeks in is early) and they put me on antibiotics just in case. (as my doctor said, i'll have to be on antibiotics anyway for whatever infection it is so may as well do the lyme disease one until i get the results back. according to her it's totally safe cause it's the same drug they give for acne and that makes no sense to me but i'm not the one that went to med school so i'll try and believe her.) so now i guess i have to wait to see if i was infected, and if the results come back negative i need to be retested in three weeks because sometimes it takes a while to show. and i really do not have time for lyme disease.

then yesterday i had an exam. i could not think of an example to support my idea for one question so i made up some really stupid thing, and then as i walked to the metro i thought of the best example ever but it was too late and that's still bugging me. then the train broke down one stop away from where i needed to get off, and we had to wait twenty minutes for a new train. then i missed the shuttle to take me to campus where my car was and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one. then i got stuck in crazy traffic on the way home. grr.

and then today i was grading papers which is not so bad, but i emailed the professor i work for some questions and he responded with "thanks Sarah Michelle free pass" and i have no idea what that means. i have no idea who michelle is. and so i just graded the papers without taking off for lateness which i'm assuming was what the "free pass" means since that was one of my questions.

but i just... i'm so over this week.

*Tired - Matchbox 20

perhaps she'll die

so first week of school (i would say my last semester of classes, but i said that last time and look where it got me) is over, but it feels like i haven't started yet. last week was full of hanging out with my sister and nephews and friends and getting the house ready for my parents and family to come home to (today!) and really long phone calls to various family members and not having any computer or tv time, and school was just kind of thrown in there a couple of times as a break from socializing. with an entire semester ahead of me, i'm sure you'll all hear plenty about my classes, so i'm not going to go into that today. i will say that i have this underlying sense of panic and a part of that is that i have so many school related responsibilities that i did not get to this first week and now i'm wondering if i'll have time for them at all during this semester. another part of it is that my sister is leaving in a week and i have that sense that i have to spend every waking second with them or i'm wasting it because i probably won't see her or her family for at least a year after this. and my friends are leaving on the same day and i feel like i need to spend more time with them, too, but there is just no time. for anything. and that is panic inducing.

you know what a great thing to do when you're already feeling slightly on edge the whole time is? (i think it is important to point out that by great i really mean kind of stupid and you totally should not do it, but i did it anyway.) wake up in the middle of the night, start googling symptoms on your smart phone, and convince yourself that you have cancer. hodgkins lymphoma to be more precise.

while searching for what to do when a swollen lymph node is making it really hard to find a comfortable position to go back to sleep in after waking up to use the bathroom because it is causing your whole neck to ache (heat? ice?) i ended up reading people's stories on a health forum (because internet black holes are not limited to computers). anyway, one person mentioned that she'd had a swollen lymph node for a while, but since she wasn't having night sweats and a loss of appetite, her doctor had ruled out hodgkins. of course, my brain immediately went to I HAVE NIGHT SWEATS! I HAVE A LOSS OF APPETITE! (it forgot to remember that the night sweats are probably caused by the fact that our bedroom is rarely the same temperature as the rest of the apartment and we usually forget to turn down the AC before going to bed. i mean, i don't really think that cancer induced night sweats is the probable reason that two different people in the same bed are hot. it also forgot to remember that i have been both sick and fasting recently and both of those things tend to make my appetite a little wonky.)

but anyway. while my brain was busy forgetting, my fingers started looking up symptoms of hodgkins lymphoma and things just got worse. fatigue! oh no! i went into bed close to nine last night with the intention of reading but was too tired to do anything but look at instagram and play candy crush saga until it reached a respectable time to fall asleep. a swollen lymph node! oh no! that's my whole problem! (the fact that every single site said that the lump had to be painless to be cancer and that my whole issue was that it was painful and thereby obviously caused by some infection or other was irrelevant obviously.) there was no denying it. i had cancer.

just as i was about to wake up my husband and tell him the bad news, i realized that it wasn't even five in the morning yet and i should probably let him have a few more hours of peaceful sleep before burdening him with this kind of news. because that's just the kind of person that i am.

when i woke back up two hours later, i realized that i was probably just being stupid.

*There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

i think that i'm sick

being sick is miserable. being sick when you don't have time to be sick, though, is even worse. for the past couple of days, i have been sick. the kind of sick where my muscles are half a second away from collapsing and my entire body just really wants to lie down in bed and never move again. the kind of sick where my throat is so sore and swollen that not only is it a torturous pain to swallow, but even my neck hurts from it. the kind of pain where i feel like i have medicine head despite not taking any cold medicine and chills even outside in the miserably hot and muggy weather. (unfortunately the chills do not let me mistake the heat for some form of coolness.) but despite feeling like crap for the past couple of days, i have had things that i needed to do (like meetings and giving campus tours) and things that i wanted to do (like sister days and dinners with family and hanging out with my nephews) and i just had no time for anything else.

but today is going to be different. i am dedicating this entire morning to being sick. i will bundle up in blankets (and then push them off in annoyance because they make me too hot) with my computer and a good chick lit (probably on the couch because i'm a little sick of my bed. one of the problems of being sick and busy is that i will go to bed at eight:thirty because i am achey and tired and cold, but then i will wake up at one:thirty thinking i should get up and after forcing myself to go back to sleep for the next several hours, i will finally get out of bed at eight with a too-much-sleep heavy head and a feeling of wanting to be as far away from my bed as possible). i will drink mug after mug after mug of honey lemon tea. (does it count as tea if no leaves are being steeped in the water?) i will moan to the animals that i do not feel good, because they are the only ones around to hear me. i will take a bunch of medicine that absolutely does not help anything in any way but that i feel that i should take anyway. i may watch some tv.

and then, once afternoon hits (or maybe early evening), i will get up, take a shower, and declare myself over being sick. i will take a deep breath and ignore all my symptoms until they go away. and maybe i will make a few of the phone calls that i refuse to do this morning and then go hang out with my nephews. for now, though, i am off to curl up with my book (that i started days ago but haven't had the chance to pick up since the first day) and my mug and wallow in the fact that i don't feel good. i'm starting to feel better already.

*Disease - Matchbox 20

i don't feel the way i've ever felt, i know

my headaches have been acting up again lately, and refusing to respond to any medicine, even the ones that used to work. think really, really bad headaches that force me to bed at eleven because it's dark and semi-quiet in the bedroom, but don't let me sleep because it's too painful to close my eyes. (i never understood this. shouldn't closing my eyes be the less painful of the two? i mean, isn't closed its default position and open when they actually have to work?) think headaches that make you want to throw up from how bad they are, only you don't because the last time you threw up was something like seven years ago and you don't want to break the streak.

in short, it's miserable.

my contacts used to give me headaches, so i stopped wearing them. the headaches are still here. i think it might be because of this cough that won't go away because my head almost explodes at every cough, but i can't seem to medicate the cough away either.

but that's not really what i wanted to say. in the spirit of confessions, here's another one. there's a little part of me (don't worry, this is not the part that really has any control of what i do. yet.) that doesn't want the headaches to go away. this part rejoices at every failed attempt to medicate them. it revels in the memory of the way the prescription medicine my doctor gave me closed up my throat so i could barely breathe. it's throwing a party in its little apartment in my brain, celebrating and exacerbating the headaches.

remember how i mentioned i was going through an identity crisis? i still haven't gone into much detail about it, but suffice it to say that it's pretty extensive, stretching into most aspects of my life. you know what part of me hasn't changed? what part i'm still 100% sure is me? my headaches. i was, am, and probably will always be the girl with the headaches. not as cool as a dragon tattoo, but it's me. it's what i know, and with so many other things uncertain, with so many other foundations shaken, well, part of me wants to hold on to the only stable thing about me right now.

i do realize that that sounds messed up.

*Pain - Jimmy Eat World

sail away, kill off the hours, you belong somewhere you feel free

i really want to write. or bake. or paint. or cook. or basically do anything that can be considered even slightly creative. i have that itch that makes me not want to turn into a fat blob of boringness. unfortunately, my body decided to have a civil war and there's a battle raging in my throat at the moment and someone's cannon keeps misfiring and sending shots to my head. also, my apartment has taken the change of weather as inspiration to start a new career. he's trying his luck as a refrigerator right now. i'm not sure if the chills and goosebumps are because of the war or the refusal to warm up, but any longer like this and i might as well give up my human card and turn into a full fledged bird. hey, at least they get to leave when it gets cold. (though chilly fall days and cold winter ones are usually some of my favorite days of the year.)

i think baking chocolate chip cookies would help the soldiers agree on a peace treaty and the apartment realize that refrigerators never get to smell like fresh baked cookies and pretty much make the world a better place, but i can't drag myself off this couch and out from under this blanket, and it's very sad. especially because i've been wanting to bake cookies for a very long time, and there's always something that comes up to stop me.

i also woke up to find that snow white was not keeping a very good eye on her dwarfs and that grumpy (who was always my favorite) has decided to possess me. yup, he's living inside my head at this very moment. he'd say hi, but he doesn't really like you all that much. and grumpy people just do not go around baking cookies and whistling while they work. (do any of you remember what book it was that had snow white really fat and evil and the dwarfs were pretty much her slaves? was that the book of lost things? does anyone know? i'm usually the person people come to with these kinds of questions. it's annoying me that i don't know.)

anyway, i'm going to continue listlessly flipping through web pages and hoping that i suddenly decide to get up and bake.

oh, and as for the title, tom petty's widlflowers has been stuck in my head lately. i have no idea why since i really haven't listened to it since the summer.

*Wildflowers - Tom Petty

and i've been guessin', but i coulda been guessin' wrong

a lot of people i know fall victim to the hypochondria that can so easily arise when you look at sites like webmd. a stuffy nose can suddenly be a symptom of meningitis instead of just the common cold. a stomach ache is a form of cancer, and a sore throat a sure sign that they have only days to live. i barely ever look at medical sites. i hardly give any sickness i might have a second thought. i try my best to just ignore any symptoms i may have until they go away. unless i have a cold, then i fill myself with alka seltzer plus because that is a miracle medicine.

but moving on, yesterday i did what i had sworn never to do. i caved and looked at webmd and emedicine and all the rest of those, and oh my god i was far sicker than i had originally thought. i did not just have cramps anymore, i was going to need to head to my doctor immediately and get prepped for surgery. a surgery that was sure to leave me paralyzed on half of my body which would surely lead to other diseases. this was not just a migraine that i had gotten and ignored millions of times over the past few years. (except for that time when i got prescription medicine from the doctor and my throat closed up the first time i took it and i could barely breathe and the migraine didn't go away. that was fun.) this was a tumor that they would not be able to remove without making me brain dead. that is, if i didn't die of a heart attack first which was what the pain in my jaw meant i was heading for. what was the point of going to a doctor, anyway, when i was sure not to make it to the end of this month. 

convinced as i was that i was dying, i knew that i had to make every day count. live them all to the fullest because there were so few of them left. i first thought of all the delicious food i had yet to eat and the restaurants i kept saying i would try but never did. (i was fasting... it's perfectly normal for the first thought to enter my head be food.) but since i couldn't eat until sundown, i pushed the thought out of my mind as quickly as i could. then i thought fleetingly of all the things i had yet to see and all the places i haven't been that i always wanted to visit. but those would all require getting dressed, and i mean, i was dying. you can't expect someone practically on their death bed to get dressed and go outside. so that was out. 

i ended up reading barrie's peter pan and playing online scrabble. i was just reading about wendy, john, and michael learning to fly - they hadn't even run away yet - when i decided that having just days to live put too much pressure on a person, and i think i'd prefer to just drop dead suddenly in the middle of eating a bowl of clam chowder with no expectations than to sit around and wait for my symptoms to kill me. and then and there i gave up my brief life as a hypochondriac. i have no idea how people can do it. 

*Mad Season - Matchbox 20

how do you do when i'm not around?

i have had a killer headache since last night. it hit really bad out of nowhere and just won't. go. away. it's bad. like bad enough to keep waking me up at night. it's a strange mixture between throbbing headache and medicine head, though i don't have a cold and haven't taken any medicine. anyway, it's really starting to annoy me. i am not a happy camper.

moving on.

you know what i miss about my old house? my ability to people watch. i had some pretty interesting neighbors, from the couple that never took their child out of the house (though the mom would stand with her/him in front of the window occasionally) to the family that would form an assembly to bring their groceries one by one into their house. there was always something interesting going on right outside my window, even if it was just a congregation of squirrels or crows. here, i don't see anyone. it's like our apartment is in a little twilight zone of its own where no one exists besides us. i need to know what is happening in my [old] neighbors' lives. i'm just nosy like that.

also, i have taken to watching the food channel and travel channel all the time. i think i've watched more episodes of diners, drive-ins, and dives and man vs food in the past couple of weeks than most people watch in a lifetime. and all of those competitions like iron chef and chopped and whatever else. anyway, i watch them. all the time. and now they're infiltrating my dreams and i'm not sure how i feel about that. it's one thing when a book or movie will weasel its way into my subconscious, at least those actually have a plot. i don't remember much about my dream last night, but i can say pretty confidently that it wasn't the most thrilling dream i've ever had. though that could be because it was interrupted every three point seven seconds.

*How Do You Do - Foo Fighters

i really am so stupid

there are times when my stupidity just astounds me.

a couple of weeks ago i couldn't do anything because of a herniated disk in my lower back. i could barely walk or move and i couldn't sit at all. the only time it didn't hurt was when i was laying on my stomach and the second i got up it would go back to torturing me for not taking better care of myself or something. anyway, i went a few days really doing nothing and then spent a couple more slowly easing back into normal stuff. if i sat for too long or twisted the wrong way, it would hurt, but for the most part it was pretty much better. or at least not hurting anymore. i was happy.

today, i finish packing my bag. i didn't particularly feel like moving on to the next thing on my to-do list so i thought that i'd weigh my bag just to see if it was too heavy even though i knew it wasnt. so i go to pick up my suitcase and my back gives me a warning. i ignore it and take it to the scale. halfway back from the scale my back decides that it's had enough and i can barely stand.

now, i am back to stage one. i can't sit, i can barely walk, and i cant turn without shooting pains. guess who has a twelve hour airplane ride to sit through day after tomorrow?

so yeah, my stupidity astounds me.

*I Am So Stupid - Shakira

and i will try to fix you

during exams, chrome suddenly stopped working on joe. i was distraught, and not only because i realized just how i addicted i had gotten to this browser. i didnt have the time to really delve into the problem, though, so as a temporary fix i switched my non-school related stuff to firefox. (if you remember, i can't use one web browser for all of my things.) firefox is way too boxy and stuff for me to be creative in apparently, so it didnt really work out. and then, my security system stared telling me that it was stopping information from being sent to some weird ip address. great, i think, joe has been infected. again.

i swear this computer picks up more viruses than a (insert witty metaphor here).

suddenly, google is acting weird and i realize that i have the google redirect virus and some spyware, too. while my computer knew enough to stop the spyware from getting any information, it could not for the life of it find the spyware on the computer. i didnt have time to do anything so i turned off joe and started to just use junior. junior loved the attention, but joe was beginning to grow resentful of his newly assigned job as a shelf to hold grad gifts and other end of the school year related junk.

so today, since i finally had some free time, i set to work. after downloading three different malware detection things that couldnt find it, and going through the system files and dlls, i finally cured him without reformatting the stupid thing which i was two seconds away from doing. yay me.

this was a pointless post, i know, but i really had nothing else to write about. sorry people.

*Fix You - Coldplay

oh, it's just another overdose

senior year of high school i fell in love with tylenol. i'm not sure why exactly because it really doesnt do anything. at all. but i ate it like candy. and no, despite jokes that may point to the contrary, i was not suicidal. anyway, after one night spent lying on the kitchen floor wishing i could throw up (i didnt take enough to do anything but make me really really nauseous. like i said, i wasnt suicidal), i stopped taking the stuff. completely.

i havent put a pill in my mouth since then. you know, to give my liver a chance to detox.

anyway, because of stress, a family to whom the concept of an inside voice is foreign, and chronic migraines, i decided to take some excedrin because really, i couldnt ignore the headache anymore. and if you know me, that's really saying something. i have turned ignoring headaches into an art form. can i just ask, is it possible that four years later my body still has the drug in it? because i swear it feels like i took waaaay more than a few pills. i. dont. feel. good.

and i still have a migraine.

i have decided that medicine sucks.

*Pitiful - Sick Puppies

my bones ache, my skin feels cold

it seems that the forces of the universe are out to get me. or at least get me very frustrated.

first, remember that wonderfully stolen internet connection that i was so grateful for in my room?? yes well, it has recently developed this allergy to google. not just google.com, but anything and everything related to google. chrome, gmail, blogger... you get the picture. none of them work on that connection any more. lucky (?) for me, my dad got dsl a couple of weeks ago, so im not entirely internetless. however, the stolen connection seems to have claimed my room as its territory and the new connection is too much of a wimp to get in through the door. so to use the excellent dsl my dad got, i have to venture into the living room. now, this wouldnt be a problem except that when i leave the safety of my bedroom to take joe into the living room, i run into the parents and the brothers who seem to think that if i'm not in my room i'm free to use for their disposal. not that being in my room gets me complete protection, but i can barely log into my email in the living room without having to pause to talk or watch or do something.

so i figure, okay the universe is sending me a message. it is trying to tell me that there is this thing called a world outside of the 15 inches of my laptop screen. in this so called world, people have these things called lives. and these people (yes, real tangible people, the ones i'm apt to forget about when i enter the blogosphere) communicate with each other without typing. they use the spoken word and hand gestures and other such crazy stuff. i'm not one to shy away from a new experience, so i welcomed the chance to live internet-free with open arms (or at least with very minimal hair-pulling, tear-jerking, full scale temper tantrums).

and then the universe decides to be funny and i get sick. stomach stuff (which may or may not be the result of stuffing my face for two months straight). so i'm stuck in bed for a day. not a big problem. i may not be able to enter the "real world" or the virtual world for a bit, but i am not completely lost. there is still that lovely fictional world of literature that i loved way before i met joe. and with a complete series of books borrowed from my cousins (english books that i'm not sure they knew they had. they certainly had never read them) i'm set. and yes, they may be really old and slightly pointless stories, but they were books. so i was content.

and then, then the universe started to take things too far. just when i get over the stomach stuff, i sneeze and suddenly i have a full-fledged cold on my hands. no exaggeration, it was that sudden. and if suffering with the sore throat, congestion, and coughing isnt enough, i find out that i'm almost done with the book series. i have one and a half books left. how did that happen?? there were so many of them.

so now, i'm kicked to the curb by the three worlds that i know and am left with nothing better to do than ask why? and blow my nose.

*Open Your Eyes - Snow Patrol