august

click pic if you'd like to download full size

A lot of people think stuff like that field across the road from my house looks messy. I think it looks beautiful. It's not exactly native prairie, but at least it's fairly indigenous nowadays since it's been neglected so long.

I finally wrapped my head around school shopping. I've decided that this year I need to fix up my bug out bag with a mobile med kit in one of those plastic pencil boxes (I'm always needing alcohol wipes and latex free bandaids or a nail clipper), a mobile post office (cards, stamps, address labels, birthday confetti, address book, colored pens), and possibly several other organized kits. It's silly being caught flatfooted so often. I thought about mailing out a birthday card to my sister 3 different times, and I finally sent it off today and it's going to be late. Anyway, I've also been anxiously checking for my college to show up in the back to school stuff, and there we go, today there was suddenly a whole bunch. And of course, Bunny has corrupted me, I found adult sized Shopkins sox, so I'm ready for back to school now.

I saw my neurologist today for 6 month follow up. I've been going every 6 months for several years. I've had 2 full needle workups making sure my nervous system is still working ok, and he coaches me into physical therapy and meds here and there. He's rather insisting that I try to ramp back up and hold at 300 mg of gabapentin 3x a day again. (I've tried it 3 times now, I keep coming back down to 200 3x.) The ultimate goal is to keep me moving as much as possible, particularly now that I have 'frozen shoulder' coming on, which is when the entire shoulder area gets so difficult to lift that you finally just can't, and the muscles 'freeze' up as they harden with scar tissue. Between the ancient car accident and subsequent years of fibromyalgia, and now arthritis starting to show up with the documented nerve impingement, I'm on my way to losing that arm if I don't keep using it as much as I possibly can. The last round of therapy last spring was brutal, but I am still retaining full range of motion even though the pain is pretty sharp and it's hard to keep moving through it. And by sharp I mean like someone stabbing me hard with a long needle into the nerve that runs over the top of my shoulder. I've been working on this arm since 2015. It was so bad in 2015 that I could barely use that arm at all, and I was close to losing the use of my fingers. I remember my mom's arms and hands finally just curling up until her hands were just fists. Aging doesn't have to be that horrible, but it takes a bit of effort to slow that down if you've got aggressive illnesses like diabetes and/or arthritis.

I'm already hearing stories about knee surgeries, lol. Scott's coworker said whatever I do, do NOT skip the pain med coming off the anesthesia. He said that was about the worst pain he ever went through till the med could kick in again. Personally, I've been through so much pain I kinda doubt I would think it's the worst, but I sincerely don't want to feel it, no.

Today's blood pressure in the office was 151/94, so it's going up again, and obviously both pain and diet related. Even with cutting calories, I'm still getting too much salt. I totally felt that yesterday. I ate an ounce of Cabot seriously sharp cheddar with a normal portion of bite sized Tostitos corn chips and wowzers, talk about a nasty headache. I'm getting so salt sensitive it's unbelievable. I started looking up diets for hypertension and ran into the DASH diet, which is part monitored fasting and mostly very restricted processed animal proteins and lots more fruits and veg. Since my diabetes is already well controlled through diet, now I've gotta control sodium. I obviously can't eat the amount of grains that DASH recommends (too carby), and I can't do the nuts and legumes (allergies), but I can definitely eat more veggies and substitute yogurt for cheese. I'm also going to cautiously try some fasting, but more like how you calorie restrict before a digestive system procedure and you have to empty your whole gut. They make sure you still get 500 calories of clear liquid, but if I do that I'll have to be smart about it, because it can get dangerous on a busy day. I'm not very good at powering through a headache, and I tend to get goofy and make poor decisions anyway, so I'll save that for days nothing is going on.

Oopsie, got lost in youtube. Time to move along.

brokeded

click for humer 😁

Busy day, long week coming up, camping out in the part of my head that keeps me floating above it all so I can stay focused and sane and hopefully sweet.

undrowning in my own house, or, just eat the cheese already

snips are from cards over the years

Exactly 5 months until Christmas Eve, the biggest holiday of the year that periodically mocks my life. I'm currently 2 days into my 5-day crisis management plan, the crisis being that every day of my life is governed by the continual crises of other people, the management being taking back my house, dagnabit.

For the most part, I am not a materialistic person. I watched confliction pull my mom apart from her own more materialistically oriented family (the kind of quiet wealth where she knew of at least one person a generation back who had a luxuriously golden bathroom, yes, real gold), and although it's nice to have nice things and look nice and be nice people, it's also very disturbing to see how ugly some people can be behind those very nice things.

Sorry if this is hard to read.

When I was a little girl I was told "Pretty is as pretty does", and I grew up noticing how hard people try to hide how ugly they really act when they are trying their best to be pretty people with pretty houses. It made no sense to me that my mom was her ugliest on Sundays, when she was under pressure to get four children to church. Incongruity is one of my favorite words, because I thought about it so much.

Christians being racist make me physically nauseous, thanks to my beautifully ugly grandmother cutting her own son off from her life. I cannot even imagine rejecting my own grandchildren, and would never dream of turning a child of mine away from my house, and that very much includes a step child. She is mine. I raised her, I love her, I will never not care deeply for her and her child. I try to imagine sometimes going back in time and having a discussion with my grandmother, with her at this age I am.

My own life in this house feels like insane hilarity and jocularity in a sort of cosmic joke kind of way, where whenever I even attempt to pretend I come from nice and pretty people, everything around me explodes apart into crisis after crisis until I am so beaten down that simply falling on my face as gracefully as possible for the millionth time is wearing me out badly enough that I can barely function emotionally. I have to switch everything inside of me off to make everything else around me ok, and usually everything around me is so chaotic that all I see is other people flailing through their lives. They may think they're holding it together, but what they're really doing is flailing from one crisis to the next in pretty clothes.

I have very real PTSD over the compulsion to look our best. Both my sisters had eating disorders in high school, I was a chain smoking alcoholic when I looked my prettiest (skinniest), and I know other psychological disorders very well, thanks to extended friends and family with a variety of challenges, so I recognize that my own life is about surviving other people's crises all around me in my own home. I am surviving poor coping skills, a host of displacement behaviors, all kinds of fallout originally intended to fix the happiness factor that can't possibly be maintained, and I'm the one drowning.

I'm drowning in materialism. I'm drowning in things. I'm drowning in products that promise beauty and happiness and better living. My house is so full of junk continually coming into it that I can't walk through a single part of it and not see it. I can't escape it, I can't make it stop, I can't put it anywhere that it will stay. The funniest part is that I'm the one home all day long with all this stuff.

I could be an ugly person and draw big ugly boundaries so that I have a beautiful house, or I can choose to be a pretty person and allow spillways of people I love splashing through my life and have a beautiful home. Because of the emotional traumas I saw and went through growing up, I will never make a material object worth more to me than another person's feelings. I want to be happy to see the faces of the people I love, not angry because they messed up something material.

But I really need my bedroom back. I need to stop feeling like I'm swimming through my own house. I need a safe place to hide. Maybe it's time to make a boundary.

I could go on, but I don't want to be an ugly person. Being walked in on without knocking (not talking about the child) is better than not being spoken to. Sharing space with people is better than being alone.

These are the other people I wish I could see.
It's been years again.

Like I finally said out loud for the first time in my life the other day, though- I've been cleaning up after people since I was seven years old. That's how old I was when I started folding laundry, doing dishes, cooking, cleaning the house, and helping my dad with the chores outside. Come October I will have spent 50 years of my life cleaning up after other people and their animals with no pay or reward back except that I get to live in a house I didn't pay for. My biggest challenge lately is not feeling peevish. I think about all the women all over the world over thousands of years who could probably say the same thing. There is no escape or relief, there is nothing that can ever repay us, and our only reward is seeing our people thrive because we worked so hard behind them.

It's lately come to my attention that I've been keeping up all this time with a bone chip from my thigh bone migrating around the band of tissue holding my knee together. "There is a focal full-thickness chondral defect present involving the central weightbearing portion of the lateral femoral condyle measuring 0.6 x 0.7 cm in the transverse and AP dimensions with a mild degree of underlying reactive edema-like marrow signal abnormality. A similar sized chondral body is present within the lateral compartment adjacent to the posterior aspect of the lateral femoral condyle. Intermediate grade chondromalacia is present involving the patellofemoral compartment with surface irregularity and partial-thickness fissuring."

I went out to pic clover and zucchini for BunBun and felt sorry for the maters.

Basically, I have this one week to rearrange my life so that I will be able to heal comfortably after surgery next month. I have a handful of days to do all the things for myself ahead of time that I know other people won't have the time to do for me later. After that everything will go wildly out of control again while I'm stuck healing, and as soon as I can get around, I will be swimming through more new (and used, thanks Goodwill!) things coming into my home.

I know a few people who will find it alarming that I've started matching up all my novelty sox in desperate effort to feel more organized. Yes, it's that bad.

*sigh*

Hang on, where's my just wonderful song?

maps, lists, schedules, and plans

I checked out Farscape, there are 88 eps because 22 per season for 4 seasons. I might map out a schedule for that. That could easily take a year. I know, right, that's just funny, considering my seeming severe lack of focus and motivation for my own fandom. Honestly, I've been planning this rewatch for years, and I seem to just never have the time for some reason. How do whole years just slip away like that?

My other list is mapped out and ready to execute. I will have 5 1/2 days of me time, or 'go' time. I don't foresee leaving the house. There's every chance I could fall into a funk and stare at the ceiling for hours. I've already told myself that if I wind up reiterating my fail list to myself, I'm not going to listen. I refuse to listen to that stupid fail list again. I have several youtube channels on standby in case that happens.

I guess I've processed through another feeling I had put onto a shelf for awhile because I didn't know what else to do with it. It's weird that the relief I thought I'd feel is actually just numb, like there's nothing there, which I know can't really be true, but it's all I feel. I pick it up, look at it, feel numb, put it back down, walk off, don't miss it, wander back later, notice it, pick it up, feel numb, put it down, nothing. Somewhere in my head someone keeps suggesting maybe I'm not seeing a little red flag popping up with "FEELINGS HERE" on it, but I see absolutely nothing. Do feelings just stop like that?

I remember in grade school, I was one of the innovative kids on the playground that would reorganize all the kids into focus groups, and then we'd wind up in trouble. In third grade it was Red Rover. I showed them how easily we could flip each other if we locked our arms, and everyone wanted to be flipped. All it took was one kid not understanding how the flip worked to get us disbanded. You can't just grab everyone's hair in the middle of a flip and then scream to a teacher that we all tried to kill you without it all sucking for the rest of us, and that's basically the way I view life in general. You wanna do stuff, then do stuff. If you have a problem with it, don't do it. But don't crash the entire party being lame about half-assing your own life, right? Learn how to do something, or at least learn how to have fun trying.

Of course, real life isn't that simplistic, and it takes years learning to embrace our own selves, much less how to let other people off the hook and stuff.

I guess I just wanted to feel something. It's a bit novel realizing for the first time in one's entire life that reciprocation falling flat (after awkwardly stumbling into a full out launch of tripping the wrong way) doesn't have to feel bad. It's funny that all it took was one wrong word to set me free.

I don't miss it hurting.

the other end of the rabbit hole

#lifegoals 😂

Confirmed last night my head is a *mess*. I triggered so easily over so little that I had to remove myself, took over an hour to get past it. After a lifetime of switching off while I deal, I'm aging into failing to switch and deal, so now I just pull myself into out of the way controlled meltdowns. I'm dreading the day they tell me I have Alzheimer's or something.

I know a lot of it is chemical from the med changes and the tick fever and the fatigue, so I'm not worrying about it that much.

In the meantime, part of my coping plan for the summer is regaining control over the one room in the house that should be at least half mine, so I've started cordoning off little patches of piles shoved together across my floor sadly going back to the 90s. I mean, not much of it is that ancient, but some of you know the ol' jinx on my house, the second I organize anything, the bigger some kind of bomb goes off in my immediate vicinity, so nothing is sacred in this house. HOWEVER. My people will be traveling during undisclosed days this month, and I will be here plowing out the tar pits that have been condensating while life continually goes on. It's time to put a few decades of 'important papers' through the ol' shredder kind of stuffs.

I kinda feel like I'm doing that inside my head, too. I'm not sure if it feels good because that spot is so numb I can't even feel it grinding up, but it's nice being able to see further now. Still can't tell if it's further inward or outward, but at this point I'm beginning to wonder if it was all the same in the first place.

My psychologist asked me two questions in my last two visits. My answers were yes, I'm using this person without guilt or conscience for mutual benefit because I am unable to feel anything else, and yes, I'm pretty sure this person knows I'm Janika/Pinky/Bluejacky because #pinkyblog has been doing #transparency and 'we' since January 2017.

no one ever screams that, be real

So. I ran off and stopped blogging, much. For all you guys know, I could have won the lottery and disappeared onto a yacht somewhere.

That mug was perfect. I am the only person in this household history who has received an actual 4th of July present in a gift bag. The coffee I drank late in the day in that mug cured a nasty headache. I've decided this summer is not the time to cut my coffee down that drastically no matter how gradually I do it, and I was a fool for even thinking about doing that to myself. Pretty sure Kylo doesn't know how to use caffeine properly. I don't know about the rest of the movie, but that kid is the most perfect representation I've ever seen of psychotic Dark Side. The rest are all boring compared to his seething sullen rage. Too bad he's codependent on sane people around him to do his bidding, he could never have semi-conquered alone and then lost humiliatingly in front of everyone like that. Surely half his own fleet melted in his rage. I'm disappointed if the writers didn't even think of that.

We started catching up on the Lost in Space series on Netflix this week. I nearly bailed on the super slow start but we're good now. Made it through Will coaching Robot through personality alters, which seems over the top anthropomorphic yet still believable, and now I'm waiting for sulky Judy and bootstrap Don to get a believable magical moment. I'm glad they broke Maureen out of the space mom mold. Those of you too young to know this, the original June Lockhart was the stereotypical TV mom from Lassie onward. The Netflix incarnation is believably super flawed, but I'm so ready for John to stop whining, bit of overkill on his trying to live up to her emotionally punishing ways. I used to want to be the original Penny, so of course I'm identifying a bit with her again. They should have changed the Oreo packaging a little bit, but I can let that slide. Dr. Smith is perfect in every way. Every. Way. I could easily expect a mass murder out of her without anyone suspecting a thing.

I have successfully backed down on the gabapentin so the extra is over. I did about 3 months on a little extra coming through the shoulder nerve pinge therapy, but once amlodipine was tacked onto my blood pressure treatment during that, the edema showed up and those happen to be the top 2 meds for edema side effect. Sweet. Can only control one of those meds on my own, and I'm not stupid. I have bony ankles, so the goal is to keep them bony looking. I got a good grip on that and then it kinda went off track again, so I checked on amlopidine with diabetes and *bam*! Bad one. I went on a 3-day carb binge over the holiday and felt like my heart was beating out of my chest and doing 100 bpm. Welp, that's what happens when your blood glucose goes frickin up to bottle rocket level, everything in there goes a little wonky trying to deal. I hate that feeling. So I cinched the carb belt real tight again and had a very nice day yesterday, slept great. Gotta keep it paleo so that doesn't happen again. It's hard having to research and figure things out, but I refuse to go quietly sedated while my body bloats up from stupidity.

Short version- I can't be trusted with chocolate chips ever again. I did really well while I failed to keep them stocked up. Second I brought some home, uber fail straight into mocha cheesecake and beyond.

People who wanna wrecklessly go sliding into their graves like it's a blast being a crazy old person- you're all idiots. Most of you will drag your families through various hells watching you fumble awkwardly into lengthy drawn out expensive battles with impending death that you could have at least made easier with a glucose meter and some semblance of dietary dignity, but since my mom's insistence on noncompliancy in the hopes of swift salvation from this life (that backfired into life in a nursing home) is still fresh in my mind, I just can't follow her in all good conscience when I look at my own kids struggling with their own kids. I cannot be that burden that society says it's cool and fun for me to be.

click to get lost in pinterest

When doctors take one look and ask me how I'm doing something, like oh I dunno, WALKING, and this has happened over several things through my life, then you know I'm already skidding to my grave and I'd likely already be there if I hadn't changed a few things along the way. Like I've said before, I actually know people who say they'd rather die than give up something as silly as Pepsi, and dang if they don't go and actually do it. I outlived someone who said that. Seriously.

Back to today. Been a long long year already. Last few months have felt especially grueling, and I'm going to take the day off and figure the rest of the summer out. My entire summer calendar has been rescheduled 3 times already, and I haven't checked my bank or emails in ages. Not a clue what's going on with the gangs, no idea if and when I'll ever get back to work on the webs, but at least I can say I'm caught up with laundry.

Taking the day off means deep cleaning my house. Stand way back. Don't wanna get squirted in your eyeball with something through the monitor.