short update

today was very adventures in psychotherapy! in a madcap, bullshit sort of way.

they gave me some ativan. if course, i'm so keyed up that it took an hour to kick in. right now though, i feel okay. (tired.) i will give you the full update tomorrow, when i've had some sleep. lots of parts of today were a cluster-fuck, and there was a moment when i felt like collapsing in a sobbing heap in my car and just going home where i could cry in peace, but i will admit i did more than i thought i could today.

your emails have been so nice. i can't believe the support i've recieved, some of it from practically strangers. i feel really lucky, and thankful. i hope i've written you all back, and if you're a friend and i haven't talked to you on the phone, it's because i sort of can't stop crying. i'm hoping that part goes away along with the sleeplessness. cross your fingers.

the worst thing about this: becker re-runs are now oddly appealing.

less than 24 hours

today was long, like i thought it would be, but i got through it. when i got home i fell apart a little, but i think that might have been because i kept expecting it to happen, so then, duh, it did.

lately i keep thinking about whether or not i'll be put back on medication. for a few years i did indeed take an ssri, but earlier this year i went off them. it was actually about eight months ago. i was at a point in my life when i didn't think i needed them, and you know i was busy changing everything about my life so i kind of thought, "why not one more thing?" at the time, being off the medication felt like a real accomplishment, like i'd cured something all by myself. the past few months though, i've realized that maybe my brain just doesn't work the way it should. it's not that far-fetched an idea, as i'm not the only person in my family who has some issues and some of it might be heredity. taking the pills everyday was sort of a drag, and i hated it when people referred to them as "happy pills," because they don't make me happy they just keep me from being so goddamn sad and freaked out, and there was always the hiding it so no one would think i was nuts. at the same time, this is who i am. and if i need to take a little pill every day so i don't burst into tears or have panic attacks that wake me up in the middle of the night, then okay. i've tried the happy holistic things, the vitamins and the deep breathing and the working out, and while some of it helps, i just might not be the kind of person who can only do that. i know right now i need some help, and i probably need the chemical kind, and so okay. anything has to be better than this.

also, while i did not particularily enjoy the first pirates of the carribean (i didn't even watch the whole thing, i got kind of bored), i will gladly sit through an hour or more of boring shit for a big kraken. just so you know.

one more day

i only have to get through one more day of work before i finally see a doctor. i have an appointment for friday morning. i had to finish the intake today, sign some papers, and make the appointment. the program i'm using is great for people who don't have insurance, but i kind of wish i'd done this part before i felt so shitty. then again, i was pretty sure everything was fine! or rather, i was trying really hard to convince myself everything was fine, that i didn't need anyone's help, that if i wished hard enough it would all go away. um, that might have been a little crazy. it feels like this is taking too long to see a doctor, but in reality, it's taken four days from the first day i went into the walk-in clinic. four of the longest days of my life. physically i'm tired, emotionally i'm more tired. the next twenty four hours will be long too, i'm sure, but it's so nice to know you don't think i'm bat-shit crazy.

i'm going to go eat some toast and go back to bed. it's hard not to anticipate tomorrow sucking royally, but i'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt. it's the last day i have to do this alone, without the benefit of a professional's help. that's something to look forward to.

thanks

i'm totally overwhelmed with how nice you all have been. i pretty much burst into tears when the first few comments rolled in.

in general though, i have been totally overwhelmed for weeks. yesterday morning i finally went to a walk-in clinic and admitted that i have been freaking out, don't have health insurance, and could use a good night's sleep. the sleeping pills are not working anymore. i wake up hours before i should, and while i get more sleep with them than i do with them than i do without them, i'm just exhausted. i can't shut my brain off. i feel panicked just about 24 hours a day. when i'm not convinced i'm having a heart attack and dying, i'm extremely upset and crying at the drop of a hat. everyday human interactions are excruciating for me because i'm sure i'm going to freak out in front of someone and they'll know how crazy i am. knowing what my new plan is, having said it out loud is helping (i told my family when i got home from texas), but i don't think i can do this alone. it's too much. i haven't said anything to anyone about this for months, and it's taken a toll. i have never been good at telling the people close to me, "hey i feel really awful," because i always feel like a jerk who's unloading, which is how years ago i figured out a few sessions with a therapist was good for me. talking to a stranger who gets paid to listen to me is infinitely easier for me.

that's not an easy thing for me to admit. in general i do not believe in talking about my experiences with mental health professionals in public. at the same time, that makes me a total hypocrite. i would never tell one of my friends not to see a therapist/shrink, i would never ever in a million years make fun of someone for getting help when they need it, but i have this total double standard with myself. it's perfectly okay for you to be crazy, but me? no. even i realize this is unfair. i'm having some trouble right now, and i don't want it to get worse. i want to be able to get up every morning and go to work and do a good job, i want to feel better, but that's not going to happen down here in my bedroom. i can't tell you how hard writing this paragraph has been. i've struggled with anxiety and depression for years, but have this feeling that it's my fault. that if i were better somehow i wouldn't freak out, that if i were stronger i could control it. i feel like this is a problem that i have because i'm weak, that it's all in my head. which i guess, in a way, it is. in other ways, though, it's not that different from any other illness.

i'm telling you this because i don't think it's right to hide it. because odds are you or somone you know have been through the same thing. maybe i'm telling you so i don't feel so alone. i don't know anymore.

okay, i think i'm done

no statement has ever made me feel more relieved and embarrassed: i'm moving home. not for a few months, but i'm done with colorado. instead of moving out of this apartment and into another one, i'm going to pack all my stuff back up and move it back west when my roommates move out. right now i'm trying to figure out how to do it a bit cheaper than the first time; i think i'm going to get a hitch for my car and rent a trailer. i also forsee a lot of mac & cheese and ramen in my future, as well as a lot less netflix and cds. i'm more than a bit concerned with how much it's going to cost, having to get a new job and a new place to live, but relieved knowing that i don't have to do this anymore if i don't want to.

i've struggled with this decision a lot the past few weeks. i had this idea in my head that making this move was semi-permanent, that i couldn't go home until after a year was up. i really felt like i couldn't even think about going home until after a year. going to texas kind of sealed the deal for me, though. i was more at home in a state i've never been to than in a state i've spent seven months in. this isn't to say i hate colorado, but it just doesn't feel like home. it never really has.

if i'd never come here i would have always wondered what i was missing. it's good to know i can do something like this, but i just don't want to anymore. i was sick of seattle when i left, felt like i was in a rut that i was having a hard time busting out of, and honestly worried that i was going to end up a crazy cat lady in a basement apartment. this move is the most revolutionary thing i've ever done, and it hasn't come without it's share of pressure. admitting that i don't like it here, that i haven't settled in and made friends basically makes me feel like a failure. at this point i can't tell which would have been worse; always wondering if i could have survived out of state, or feeling like a total loser for not adapting very well.

what it comes right down to is that i might very well be a loser, but i'm not going to make myself miserable making some point about how independent i am. i'm going home.

mildly annoyed

did i tell you that tomorrow is my day off but i have to get up early to go to another training? and that i don't get another day off until this weekend? and that the girl who makes the schedule is great to go have beers with but that lately i am sick to death of being scheduled to come in on my days off?

i probably didn't tell you, because i didn't want to bore you with my whining. oh wait, too late! jokes on you, suckers!

i slept for ten hours last night

it was awesome.

other than that, i got nothing. i'm going to try to sleep just as long tonight. i'm wasting all my time awake!

longest day ever

this whole "not actually knowing what day it is and having to do days over and over again" thing is getting old. today was so fucking long. just horrible and awful and long and even though i got out of work late, there were no customers that last hour so whatever. it was just me and M counting money and putting things up and arguing about which newspaper was the best to read. personally, i do not like usa today. he thinks i'm a snob because i like the ny times (i only read it on-line though, unless it's sunday). we agree that the denver post sucks ass.

i got the new gnarls barkley album today. it is super good. it's great, actually. i could listen to cee-lo all day, and i had no idea. his voice is so pretty. how did a man that huge and meaty get such a butterfly of a voice? and danger mouse, he's genius as always. the album sounds both retro and futuristic all at once. after today, the longest day on earth, i kind of thought i deserved a little present.

also, there is a good chance i drunk-texted you last night. oops! be glad i didn't make you get up and talk.

gnarls barkley:cee-lo:danger mouse:newspaper

i have to do friday all over again

because all day today i thought it was friday, but it's only thursday. thursday. ack. having to do a day twice sucks.

ack. who am i, cathy? jesus. i think i just aged forty years. next i'll be kvetching about dieting and "swimsuit season." oh wait, i think i did do that this month. oh god. if i do this again, you'll shoot me, right?

sometimes when i post three times in a row in one single day, then i am boring the following day. sorry, joel.

it's a good thing i get to do friday all over again.

oh wait! i forgot to tell you that i think i love afi. that davey got himself an asymetrical haircut, and he's just so damn cute. dear duran duran and david bowie, i think you've ruined me. i hope this means i'm not totally cathy-fied.

i know, i know, three posts in one day

there's this moment after you take an ambien, when you should be asleep, but sometimes i stay awake for a few minutes after that. you can't stay up very long after that moment, but it's amazing. i was going to say it's like being on drugs, but then i realize, um, hi, you are on drugs what that moment hits. it's a crazy, spaced, slowed down feeling, like right after you wake up but don't realize you are awake. that moment comes last night while i was lying in bed, listening to my mp3 player like i do just about every night, when i looked over thinking "i should shut that off, it's time to sleep," but instead thought, "damn, that's pretty." somehow i got out of bed and found my camera in the dark, and took a bunch of photos. i forgot all about them until this afternoon, when i went to take pictures of something else and thought, "what?"

okay, enough with the whine

i love love love andrew brandou. one of my favorite websites ever is howdy pardner, which has all his great art on it. they also used to have this section that i think was called "the creek" or maybe "crick?" where you scrolled through pages, and the scenes were idyllic and the music was hypnotic. it was an odd part of the site, and if you looked you found little parts where you clicked and came upon something new, or something in the picture changed. whenever i was having a bad day, i could spend a little time over there and feel better. today over on boing boing, i saw this article about a show he's having in NY. it made me so happy. if i had money*, i would by this painting. and then decorate my whole house around it.

*i say this sometimes about art and then correct myself to think "when i have money." while i don't ever want to be rich, someday i plan on having enough money to buy art i love.

andrew brandou

cottonwood sucks

i think my allergies are trying to kill me. last night i was kind of miserable, and my roommate actually said, "i'm sorry your allergies are acting up, that must suck." i told her that in colorado they aren't as bad as home, so whatever. a couple of days miserable is no big deal.

except today they got worse, and my eyeballs feel the size of softballs, i've taken three different kinds of allergy medication, i'm still itchy and sneezy and can't breathe (making me a mouth breather! whoo!), and i looked like a winner at work. ugh. i'm going to go neti and lie around feeling sorry for myself.

allergies:neti

a little lesson

chad called while i was at dinner and wanted to know how i do the stem stitch. stem stitch is an embroidery stitch that looks very cool, is also a teensy bit complicated to learn (by "complicated" i mean it takes five minutes to figure out, it just looks hard and is a bit daunting at first), but once you get it, you never really use any other stitch. split stitch is cute too, and what would i be without french knots? but stem gives a cool, ropey look. it's really the main stitch i use.

in any case, i tried to make a tutorial over on flickr so maybe that will help him. if you check it out, let me know if it makes sense, okay? it was sort of hard to write it down.

embroidery:stem stitch

ha! snot!

today my allergies were bad enough that i dug out the flonase that i haven't had to use once since i moved, what with colorado being arid and stuff*, and tonight i shot some up my nose and wandered off to do something else only i hadn't really blown my nose that well before i shot it up there and lo and behold, a big dribble of snotty-flonase flew out of my nose and onto the shirt i was wearing that was clean but now isn't. i yelled "ha!" and then stood there like a dork, thinking about how now i had to wash this shirt again, and how i really should make sure that i have clear nasal passages before shooting anything up there.

*as much as the arid-dry-altitude stuff bugs me sometimes, i have to say my allergies here are almost non-existent.

snot

how i spent yesterday

i painted a bunch of pictures. none of them are great, but spending a day painting and goofing off is a good way to spend a day. made me less bitter.

p.s. remember how i made a big stink about not joining flickr groups? i didn't just make a bit stink here, but i made on one on my little profile too. then i found a group that i really liked, sort of on accident, and i joined. i am such a hypocrite! if you have a rock in your hand, feel free to throw it.

p.p.s let's all go get kraken tattoos!

watercolor:painting:tentacles

myspace, yourspace, ourspace!

dude. i think we've discussed this before, but i have a myspace page. it's great for keeping in touch with friends who are out of state, but because i have a blog, i don't actually do a lot there. in fact, sometimes i go weeks without checking in. this last week, though, the myspace friend requests have gone through the fucking roof. what the hell? suddenly people i don't know want to be my friend, and this weirds me out. it's bad enough getting band-spam (which is what i call the messages that you get from someone asking you to "check out" their myspace page, almost inevitably bringing you to some bluegrass page. what is it with bluegrass and hippies? i think bluegrass is the new jam band.), but what's with people wanting to add people they don't even know in real life to their friend page? i don't have that many friends in the real world, and i have a feeling having imaginary internet friends isn't going to boost my self-esteem any. and why am i so popular all of a sudden? this makes me suspicious. woody allen said it best in annie hall when he said

The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."

you want to be my internet friend? having only seen a crappy photo of me and seen some pap i wrote in the "about me" section of myspace? i doubt it.

myspace:woody allen:annie hall

small streak

i have a small streak of hip-hop in me. i dated a boy who was seriously into it when i was in college (he was impossibly sweet and impossibly messed up, so we didn't last long), and one of my absolute favorite memories is of eating bananas in bed and listening to hip-hop records and massive amounts of john coltrane. the best thing about him was he would let me listen to coltrane's "my favorite things" over and over again without complaining. his apartment was one big room, overlooking this big office building. we'd get up late and watch the people in the office work like ants in an ant farm. being young and unemployed and happy made us feel so superior to them. we'd spend hours making fun of them and listening to music, making cocktails out of coconut rum and going out late for coffee.

in any case, without this certain sweet boyfriend i wouldn't have known i liked hip-hop. until that point i had doggystyle, but who didn't? if you graduated from high school in the 90's you had that album. he introduced me to a million more hip-hop groups, made me great mix tapes, and never made me feel like a dork for not knowing something. some people who are really into music love to make you feel retarded for not knowing about something or not liking something, and he wasn't like that at all. i went out today to try to find the new danger mouse album, but instead ran into lucy ford, an album that i have on an old crappy tape, which i can't even listen to anymore. i was so happy when i found it, remembering that summer in bellingham, that great apartment he had, and wandering around town late late late at night with him, holding hands and crawling onto roofs to look at the stars.

atmosphere:ex boyfriend:bellingham

my soul is more dead than yours

i'm pretty bitter at having to be up and at work at 7:30 this morning. we had a training that lasted two hours that could have been cut down to half an hour, or better yet, we could have just all gotten a goddamn pamphlet with the same information. it was great to have donuts and have my boss harangue me for being "tired looking" all morning though. there's nothing better than hearing repeatedly, "i'm such a morning person, you're not are you?" um, no. i'm not. the more you point that out, the more i want to shove something sharp between your ribs! that would totally make being up this early worth it! i'm fairly sure there's nothing worse than having someone who claims to be a "morning person" point it out every thirty seconds. i might be more of a morning person if, you know, i slept. being told that i could just come home and take a nap bothered me even more. if i can't sleep at night, how the hell am i going to sleep during the day?

from now on i'm only making friends with insomniacs.

insomnia:work

grrrr

before i went on vacation, i was pretty fed up with colorado. i had this idea that going on vacation would help. it didn't. i'm still sort of sick of it here. granted, it's not as deathly hot at texas is right now, but it feels really far away from basically everyone i want to hang out with. i'm right in the middle of the country, far, far away from my friends and family. it's also really far away from hom bao and a decent asian grocery. for me, that is basically like being seperated from someone fun to make out with.

maybe i would like it more here if i didn't come home to six days of work in a row, and the world's stupidest training session on my day off. maybe if i made more of an effort i would like it here more. maybe if i could get a day or two of rain i would calm down. as it is, right now all i want to do is tell colorado to kiss my ass and go home.

colorado:texas:homesick

inconvenient

i went to the movies tonight and saw an inconvenient truth, the new al gore movie about global warming. if you've read much about global warming you'll be fairly familiar with the bulk of the film, which isn't to say it isn't good or interesting. it was. at the same time, it was a little dry, and there were these parts that got into why al gore is so passionate about the environment and global warming that i sort of wish had been a bit longer. it was totally worth my $8, though.

leaving i saw two kids between the ages of 9 and 12 with their mom, and felt so sorry for them. what a crappy way for a kid to spend a friday night. nacho libre* came out today! what kid would rather see al gore than jack black?

like i was saying, the movie was pretty good. i liked how there was a big empashis on what you can actually do on an individual level to help reduce carbon emissions. i also liked the part that showed you how fast this is actually happening, because it's easy to think this is something that won't affect us for quite a while, when in reality the proverbial shit could hit the fan in the next couple of decades. however, i did not like the crowd i saw the movie with. it was the sort of smug, self-congratulatory hippy/yuppies that i want to punch. the kind of jerks that make all liberals look like assholes, the kind that makes me so ashamed of my hippy tendencies. the extra-loud laughing at al's lame jokes aimed at republicans, the clapping at the end, the way no one seemed upset by melissa ethridge's completely horrible theme song (with lyrics so obvious and banal it was painful. oh sure, incorporate the movie's title into the song! that's great.), and how everyone was just so full of rightousness it made me want to barf. everyone sat through all the credits like the film was so important we had to see who the caterer was. in a way i'm glad to know there are other people who feel the same way i do, who believe in deodorant sans aluminum and buying organic produce, but i get upset with the smugness of it all sometimes, and the movie theater felt very full of smug tonight.

the point the film made was a good one, but it's shit like this that makes me think only people who are already somewhat aware of the problem will see it. it's all very preaching-to-the-choir, which makes me sad. will anyone else see it other than people who respect al gore? do you think anyone who voted for bush or is for drilling for oil in alaska will see it? i doubt it, which is unfortunate because regardless of your politics, global warming is going to affect you. it's going to affect everyone. that kind of depresses me. the movie, it is not uplifting. it doesn't exactly make you want to die the same way say, sophie's choice or the weatherman does, but it does kind of make you feel overwhelmed.

*a movie i am totally and completely opposed to, by the way. i mean, it looks retarded, and the idea of jack black doing that bad accent makes me uncomfortable. i can't help but feel like this film isn't intentionally racist, but i kind of think a film like this should have been made by someone who is actually mexican.

an inconvenient truth:al gore:nacho libre:jack black