January 28, 2008 · 11:51 pm

When it rains…

Just a short post tonight, as I’m currently working on a borrowed computer and I don’t know when my brother will want it back for his pressing vital purposes. Vivid.com can’t visit itself, you know. So, here’s what’s happening…

Re: my eye…I survived my three hour odyssey at the specialist’s office last week, and without any Valium, even though at one point there was a Q-tip in my eye. Yeah, my eye was numb, but goddammit I knew it was there. I’ve been back on steroid eye drops every waking hour since. I go back on Thursday morning first the first of a series of steroid injections. Said injections to be administered into my eyelid. There will be drugs.

This doc also ordered some blood tests to rule out some known causes of this type of eye disease: sarcoidosis, some rare genetic thing, TB, and syphilis. Fantastic. I haven’t had sex since the Clinton administration, and there I was today at the local lab getting tested for an STI. Of course, if I’ve had the syph–for a decade–that might go a long way toward explaining my particular brand of nuttiness.

So today I had to go out (in the cold, shitty rain), wait in line for the pleasure of having a big needle jabbed into my arm (twice, because once would have been too easy), then go drop off my beloved laptop, Ms. Thang, for a return visit with the Nerd Herders. She needs a little professional attention, since she yesterday took on all the useful characteristics of a small, but colorful, boat anchor. Looks like there’s some major surgery in Ms. Thang’s future, and the cost of a new hard drive in mine.

Oh, and the joy of reconstructing all my files from a month-old backup, the excitement of going to get a TB skin test, and the giddy antici…pation of HAVING A NEEDLE STUCK INTO MY FUCKING EYE. And I just remembered that I get to babysit tomorrow for two very sweet, but extremely annoying kids. So, to summarize and in closing, GAH…

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January 20, 2008 · 10:30 pm

Up-dating (it’s the only kind of dating I ever get to do)…

So I’m still seriously freaked out about tomorrow, but I think my vision is a little better than it was yesterday. Also, I got in touch with my family doctor just before his office closed on Friday and he called in a prescription for a couple of Valium to get me through the day. I love him.

Also, I discovered that a large part of my super-toxic mood on Friday was likely the result of the early arrival of my period. Thanks, hormones…that’s just what I needed! Where the hell is that early menopause I ordered?

I see little Tommy Terrific’s team won today, in spite of him. Dandy. Still the most occupationally fortunate man since Ringo Starr. I can hardly wait for the next two weeks of Hoodie Hype.

I’m having a little love affair with this guy. Don’t tell the twins–they’re jealous little beasts.

A little required reading…

Aaaaand the New York Giants are going to the Super Bowl! If I had told you that two months ago you’d have had me fitted for hard restraints. The best thing about it is that Manning haters across the nation have begun planning their ritual suicides.

Time for all good little crippled girls to sign off and take some Tylenol P.M. Assuming I survive tomorrow’s gauntlet, I’ll be updating again. After I allow myself a little Sephora splurge. I’m thinking this in Pomegranate. Or Peony?

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January 18, 2008 · 6:21 pm

Floaters…

I’m a mess. I am the kind of nervous/apprehensive/distracted/under-performing mess that many psychiatric drugs have gone down my gullet specifically to prevent. All the pharmacological assistance in the world isn’t helping with this problem, though.

So, I went back to my ophthalmologist yesterday, thinking that I was having yet another recurrence of iritis in my right eye. I convinced myself of this despite the fact that none of the symptoms were the same, but it was the same eye so it must be the same thing, right, and so I’ll wait a week before going to the doctor, and she’ll just click her tongue and hand me eye drops and everythingwillbefine…but I have to go see this guy on Monday morning for what I’m told will be a one to three hour appointment. As is common, I have issues…

  1. I can barely make it through a regular eye exam without freaking-the-fuck out. I was fantasizing about punching my doctor yesterday, and that was just for holding my eyelid open and shining her brightest light in it (I think I may have seen God, though. He said hi, and bet on the Patriots). Click around on that specialist’s website. They throw around words like angiography in relation to eyes, for shit’s sake! There is no way I’m going to live through this.
  2. Since everything below my neck is some form of fubar and/or lost to me, I tend to be over-protective of what is left intact (i.e., my head). So, giving me three whole days to think about the prospect of permanently losing some of the vision in my eye is not. cool. Also not cool–Googling various diseases and conditions you might possibly conceivably have in a worst-case scenario. Wondering if waiting that few days to go to the doc will make a difference. Thinking maybe it’s a sign of some hidden chronic or auto-immune disease I don’t even know I have yet. Pointing out that it’s damned hard to drive a power wheelchair in a crowd without peripheral vision on one side.
  3. These are the things I do to distract myself: read, watch tv, internet, eat. Currently: foggy and floater-filled vision in one eye makes it hard to focus on pages/computer screen, television overrun by strike-induced storm of unwatchable crap, appetite in fine shape. Did you know Sam’s Club makes delicious cookies in their bakery, and they come assorted in big packages? Also, they’re excellent for breakfast.
  4. I am, as always, not allowed to cry, because it upsets my family. My default reaction to frustration, anger, and fear is tears. Therefore, I am carrying enough pressure inside my head that it is possible I might geyser steam if stuck with a tack.
  5. The thing that pisses me off the most about myself is the tendency I have to let things go, to float through life on a cloud of unfinished should do’s, until something goes awry and bites me in the ass.  Then I hate myself for a while and bust ass to make sure everything on my To Do list is done before I fall asleep at night.  Times passes, and rinse, repeat.  And so, here I am again.
  6. My appointment on Monday is at 9:45.  Yes, A.M.  The doctor’s office is a half-hour drive from my house.  It takes me two hours to get my crippled ass ready to go.  My natural sleep pattern is from 1:00 to 10:00 a.m., and the Packers/Giants game kicks off sometime after 6:30 Sunday night.  That’s some scary math.

On the bright side, I have the douchebag/pretty boy QB battle to look forward to on Sunday afternoon.

Jesus.  I may be crazier than Britney by Monday afternoon…

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January 8, 2008 · 2:10 pm

Bugs…

Obviously, I’m not doing so well with the writing. Actually, I’m not making much of a dent in anything, other than my mattress. It’s not me, I swear–it’s what’s bugging me.

I have yet another UTI featuring the bacterial equivalent of John Travolta’s career–no matter how much ridiculous shit hits it, it just won’t die. In the last two months I’ve been on five different antibiotics: septra, cipro (twice), levoquin (ten days), 2 1/2 days of macrobid (made me sicker than Battlefield Earth), and now a week of doxycyclene. I can’t say for sure that it’s working, but I do know that it has been two whole days since I last pissed on myself, and that’s progress. In the meantime, all that medication has left me with all the energy, drive, and charm of Perfect. I’m a real peach.

Adding to my pleasure, my laptop has also decided to bug out. I’ve seen more error messages and blue screens in the past two weeks than I ever feared existed. I’ve done every repair I can myself, up to and including reformatting the hard drive and rebuilding the whole damned thing from scratch, and I’m back to weird-ass errors and bad clusters. So tomorrow it’s off to visit the Nerd Herd for some professional therapy–assuming I can let go of it without the assistance of hostage negotiators. Stay tuned…

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December 24, 2007 · 9:32 pm

Christmas at Kel’s…

Only with more profanity. And less jelly.

Whatever you celebrate, however you celebrate it–here’s hoping it’s happy! Love one another. Imagine peace.

Pass the Tylenol.

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December 23, 2007 · 9:11 pm

And just where in the hell have you been?

I kid, of course. “You” have been busy, I imagine, getting along just fine in my absence. In contrast, my life since my last (shallow and girly) post on Halloween has been an epic tale of illness, anxiety, work, depression, triumph, and sloth.

Okay, maybe not “epic” in the traditional sense. Or any other sense, really. But my family and I have been dealing with some serious shit, and I’ve been way too discombobulated to organize my thoughts into intelligent coherent um, words and stuff. It seems that life is returning to my twisted version of normalcy, though, so I’m giving this blogging thing another go.

Let’s get started with some quick updates:

My hair panic from my last post…my stylist ended up having an emergency C-section, followed by an infection of her incision and emergency surgery on the baby. They are all fine now, thank goodness, but obviously she couldn’t help me. One hour before going out that Saturday night, I snapped, and in my desperation I turned to <gulp> my mother. She cut it, and…it really looks cute. It’s a little too conventional for me–very minivan-with-a-Romney-sticker mom in the ‘burbs bob–but it’ll work until I can get some razor-layering done to funk it up…

My high school reunion…surprisingly fun. Most of my teenage BFF’s were there and we commandeered the back table (closest to the dessert table and bar, farthest from the dance floor and the display of photos from our production of “Horton Hatches the Egg”). Plenty of material from the evening to make for a post on its own, including my receiving a Major Award (Boy, do I wish it was a leg lamp). Stay tuned…

On my ongoing search for employment…I’ve been working for free for our family business for six months, with the understanding that I’d be getting paid starting in January. Slight change of plans: rather than growing and diversifying the company, my brother is selling it and Dad is retiring. So I’ve put away the promotional materials and have set about all the busywork of closing a business. Dad’s happy, brother’s happy, and I’m…still on the dole. And for my new (unpaid) life’s work, I get to teach my mother how to live on a budget.

Which might be my biggest challenge since I had to re-learn how to put on my makeup–and may involve just as much eye gouging…

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October 31, 2007 · 2:15 pm

Boo!

I am struggling with a serious dilemma. No, it’s not “serious” in the sense that any lives or anyone’s livelihood are in any danger or that any attention needs to be paid by anyone outside of–well, me. But dammit, it is deadly fucking serious to me in the way that ridiculous, trivial, superficial shit can truly strike fear into the soul of a woman. It concerns…my hair.

Until early this year, my hairstyle was best described by the words ‘short’ and ‘spiky.’ It was cut with a razor and clippers. I kept it that way mainly for practical purposes; since my mother has to wash and style my hair, I figured to keep it as simple as possible for her. She gave me her blessing, though, and so I started growing it out. Ten months later I have reached my goal–my formerly forehead-grazing bangs now get stuck in my lip gloss and the 2″ long layer at the crown has at least tripled in length. At this point, I tend to look like the crazy bag lady downtown who used to offer to sell me her empty coffee cup every morning. (And as a not insignificant aside, my eyebrows are taking on a Bert-like quality as they slowly meet in the middle). I need my stylist.

My stylist–and good friend–who comes to my house on her day off from the salon to cut my hair and wax what is becoming more and more of my face as odd little black bristles sprout in odd spots (aging is GREAT, yeah?), has been waiting patiently for me to call her when I was ready. She has also been waiting out her pregnancy, which is supposed to end sometime today with the birth of little Jackson. Good for her…bad for my head. My timing, as usual, is impeccable: I asked her last Wednesday if she was still working. Last Monday was her last day.

And so, my dilemma. Do I wait for her to go back to work, or do I trust a stranger with my ‘do? In my normal homebody/shut-in/Unibomber existence I wouldn’t feel any urgency to get it done, but I’m facing down an event that is even more frightening than the prospect of strange scissors giving me a new hair style: high. School. Reunion.
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I am a strong person. Seeing people I haven’t seen in 20+ years I can handle. Seeing those same people reacting in shock to the sight of crippled me and my overfed ass stuck in my wheelchair I can tackle. Taking my brother as my date to this thing I can tolerate. But as God is my witness, I will not travel crosstown to that judgment fest with bad, shaggy hair. I have my limits.

There may be ’80’s nostalgia aplenty at this shindig, but there’s no way in hell I’m attending with Brooke Shields’ eyebrows…

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October 13, 2007 · 9:37 pm

Somebody remind me…

For all my efficiency and hyper-organizational tendencies, I am a champion time killer. I procrastinate prodigiously. Fortunately I seem to work best under pressure–my best papers were printed out just as I was dashing out the door for class, and no work projects ever satisfy me quite as much as the ones that get wrapped up with mere minutes to spare. All of this begs the question, though: how in the hell did I waste time ten years ago?

1997: I lived alone in my studio apartment with no computer and (gah!) no cable television. In my office I was a daring revolutionary because I had starting using that “Web Thing” (in the words of the woman at the next desk) to do some research and book travel. Otherwise, my desktop was parked firmly in Word/Excel/Outlook land.

What did I ever do with myself? How did I ever procrastinate effectively without blogs to read, 182 channels to surf, Netflixed movies in my mailbox, an unbelievable backlog of programs waiting on my DVR, and the unbridled consumerist joy that is Sephora.com conveniently available for my window shopping needs at 1:30 a.m.? And how did I feed my dirty mind and masturbation habit without so much as a dial-up connection?

Thank goddess for progress; otherwise, I might have accomplished something productive this week instead of all this crap:

  • Obsessively checking my blog stats. I got Fleshbot-ted again, this time for my most recent entry. Sorry for all the sleep you lost over the years, former neighbors, but your insomnia got me lots of blog traffic–and the thrill of being read and recommended by the great and powerful Oz Jefferson.
  • Watching way too much television. The new season has been killing me, not because the volume of new shows I’m interested in is that great–there are only four (Chuck, Reaper, Dirty Sexy Money, and Pushing Daisies) that I have been watching so far–but because of the convergence of the new season with the baseball playoffs, football season, the tail end of a couple of cable series, and Ken Burns’ The War on PBS. If my DVR could talk it would beg me to consider radio. Or therapy.
  • Geeking out. Were you aware that today was the premiere of the 27th season of This Old House? I was shamefully excited when I woke up this morning.
  • Crushing on Tom Ford. For me, loving Tom Ford is an old habit, and comes so naturally: I love menswear and beautiful tailoring, I’m fascinated by human anatomy, I appreciate anyone who is so openly appreciative of sex, and ohbytheway–have you SEEN the man? Anyway, I love this new interview with him on Out.com. You must read it, and you must scroll through the pictures. That is one foine 46-year-old ass…and I’m pretty sure three hot men in a shower is a universal sign of good luck.
  • Hating baseball, then loving it. Fortunately, the hatred only lasted for about 30 minutes after my Cubbies finished gagging away their season. Once I took a deep breath, cursed a little on the exhale, and checked mlb.com for the start time of the next game, I was interested again. And by the time the Yankees got their goddamned doors blown off two days later, I had regained my will to live. That’s why I love the game–it’s a thirty-family soap opera; the season is so long and they play so many games that the plotlines are endless. Unfortunately, loving it hurts sometimes, and not in the good way. A prime example of which is…
  • Hating Dane Cook. I wholeheartedly agree with the writer of this article, with one exception: the cuddly, sensitive, conflicted, gay Satan from South Park would be an enormous upgrade from Cook. Can anyone tell me why he’s famous? He’s not funny, can’t act, isn’t especially smart or charming, and is at best only borderline generically handsome. The only reason I should be subjected to his picture is if he wins Celebrity Boxing or fucks Paris Hilton on camera and lives to tell about it. The sight of his face pisses me off almost as much as Dick Cheney’s. Great choice to center a multi-million dollar ad campaign around, folks…

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October 2, 2007 · 10:55 pm

Howdy, neighbor…

I have to (once again) thank the goddess Susie Bright for linking to this post: “31 things about the neighbor who fucks too much.” For starters, it is both funny and well-written–an oddity in blogland. It appeals to me aside from that, though, because whoooo boy, can I identify.

Over a period of twelve years, I lived in eight apartments, one shared house, and two dormitories. There have been plenty of thin walls in my life, then, and on occasion I too discovered a neighbor or roommate who fucked, if not necessarily too much, then a little too…loudly. Vociferously. For close-up urban living, anyway. At one time or another, I experienced the full range of noisy fucking neighbors: screamers (both male and female); the overly-agreeable (“YES! YES! YES!”); the insecure (“is that good baby? do you like that? huh?”); the drunk and/or clumsy (falling up the stairs, off the bed, against the wall…); the cheap furniture owners (with headboards that rhythmically go thump thump thumpthumpthump against the wall your bedrooms share); and my favorite–because it has always made me laugh so hysterically–the expressive but confused (“whose pussy is this?!?”). Seriously, dude, if you don’t know, I can’t help you.

I think I was pretty cool about those things, though. I never called the cops or complained to management about anything; the most serious problem I ever had was a neighbor who liked to swipe my Sunday newspaper…now that pissed me off. Otherwise, I just didn’t want to be that bitchy neighbor. And I had an ulterior motive.

The truth is that I was far more often “the neighbor who fucks too much.” My friends, lovers, and I kept odd and frequently drunken hours. There was much stumbling on stairs and slamming of doors accompanied by giggles and pitiful attempts at whispering. I dated one guy who couldn’t remember which house I lived in–in his defense, it was one of those Stepford subdivisions where every house is exactly the same–and so he continually knocked on the wrong door at all hours. My favorite fuckbuddy turned me on the night he threw stones at my second-floor window at 3:30 a.m., but I can’t imagine that the people downstairs appreciated it. There was quick, furtive sex under a camper shell on a pickup truck at midnight and al fresco fucking aplenty. My shower curtain rod crashed into the tub at six in the morning. I have to plead guilty to most of the annoying apartment behavior mentioned above–I never agreed with anyone that much about anything, though, and didn’t have a headboard–and I’m sure most of my neighbors over the years had fits of dirty laughter at the noises emanating from my various apartments. I’m excessively verbal and a little kinked, so I was never good at quiet sex, partnered or solo. It may have made me a little infamous in my building. I’m fine with that.

If any former neighbors were disturbed by my habits, they should take heart: I’ve more than paid for my sins. There has been no fucking in my life, other than that occurring between my ears (hello, Colin Farrell–thanks for Saturday night), for over nine years. And my mother sleeps in the next room…

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September 25, 2007 · 10:07 pm

Tasteless, party of one…

I begin tonight with my standard disclaimer: I generally avoid writing about the political here because I prefer to limit the number of outraged, misspelled, and semi-literate flames I receive to the bare minimum. I am making an exception to that rule to post links to two stories that I believe are of critical importance but most likely didn’t make the cut for your local news.

First up, the inspiration for our headline: Oh. My. Dog. This seemed like a good idea to–I don’t know–anyone? Not only is it a truly tasteless plan for a fundraiser (though apropos for a candidate whose entire campaign plan consists of repeating “9/11! 9/11!”), but the amount of money it will raise in relation to the potential public relations nightmare it may create for their guy is minuscule.

Said guy, by the way, could certainly put a stop to the whole misbegotten event with a one sentence press release: “While I appreciate the efforts of these young people and applaud their initiative to mobilize individual donors, the requested donation amount of $9.11 is a completely inappropriate politicization of our national nightmare; my campaign will not accept any donations from this event.” I can only imagine his shock and righteous indignation if any other New York politician allowed such a gathering to be held in her name.

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This woman is my new hero. Advocating for and caring for her husband is a full time job in itself; unfortunately, navigating the ridiculous bureaucracy that our returning wounded have to wade through to get proper care is another. This woman, though–and the many others like her–have somehow found the time, the will, and the energy to fight this larger battle. These are the struggles that truly “Support The Troops.”

They are also the stories we should be getting heavy doses of on our 24-hour “news” networks.  Maybe Mrs. Wade could get her story heard more widely if she decided to go barhopping with Britney sans panties…

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