Like A Hover-Craft Diaphragm

How to Kill a Spider in Ten Easy Steps

ailingmaokitty — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:39:56 +0000

Lie in bed as Spider runs across the keyboard of your laptop. Jump up, wiggle your arms around and stifle a scream as to not wake up the other five people in your house. Pick up one leg at a time and add one jump on each side and alternating knee lifts. Think about maintaining composure and don’t panic when Spider can’t be located.
Spend a few hours flirting online with a married man herein referred to as Married Man. Think about the Spider and Married Man, respectively.
Think about the Spider some more. Look for it. Move your blankets, sheets, mattress and the cat. The cat who didn’t see the Spider in the first place. Consider using cat as bait to lure Spider from it’s lair.
Drive Married Man up the wall, examine the feeling Guilt and consider the reasons it doesn’t always apply.
Locate Spider the corner. Shake your finger at Spider and give it stern looks. Tell it telepathically that if it stays in it’s corner and doesn’t bother anyone you will be forever grateful. When Spider does not respond because it is sleeping and you get a Zzzzzz response telepathically get a shoe ready, you can never trust a spider, asleep or otherwise.
Respond positively to Married Man’s invitation to sister-in-laws birthday, wonder why the fuck you would do that. Hope this is not his wife’s sister, hope that it is his brother’s wife. Hope a lot.
Question Spider gently about it’s intentions. Remain calm when Spider opens one eye and smirks at you. Consider the possibility that Spider is actually punishment for Married Man.
Think about Catholicism.
Grab mop, still sealed in plastic and repeat aerobics in step #1. Squash Spider as he tries to run for your closet. Immediately before contact realize you may have to maintain high denial level of any innuendo during subsequent in-person viewing with Married Man. Compare squashing Spider to Squashing your bad habits. Realize you are quite poor at both.
When Spider’s very large dead body refuses to be squished into a pulp and falls instead onto a pile of clothes use the other end of the mop to remove the clothes to a secure location, preferably any place that does not currently contain You.

No College Baking

ailingmaokitty — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:09:11 +0000

I’m beginning to feel like I know The Shins. I’ve been in a lyrical reference mood lately* and a lot of their songs seem to be about the same thing.

From New Slang
New slang when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries.
Hope it’s right when you die, old and bony.
Dawn breaks like a bull through the hall,
Never should have called
But my head’s to the wall and i’m lonely.

I don’t even know where to begin with Turn on Me

You had to know that I was fond of you,
Fond of Y-O-U
So I took your licks at the time

I don’t know, maybe it’s just those two that sound so similar. I know when big things are happening I am looking for meaning in everything. You think I would’ve learned by now that I have NO BRAIN SPACE for meaning in fucking songs.

*beats so big I’m steppin on leprechauns, anyone?

Reluctant Revelation

ailingmaokitty — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:19:53 +0000

What is getting out of bed and what kind of person must ask themselves this question? After many years of ignorance I’ve realized that this Getting Out of Bed is relative. At the worst of times there are only two things that will do it, doing something for my sisters that I said I would do (which is a recent development) and vodka. When I am slightly better than my worst, shopping will also work. So while I do exit my bedroom (sometimes) I avoid exiting the house at all costs. If I have to be in public I wear sunglasses, inside and out…and headphones. I am resisting over-stimulation but just saw it as not wanting to talk to people. I think it’s something I stumbled onto a long time ago and it works much the same way shivering to mimic exercise to create heat does. It’s a slippery slope that I have no control over.

Yeah, Deep in the Night

ailingmaokitty — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:18:20 +0000

I am in a small Georgia town on a normal February night. I have only 8 hours left of an 18 hour drive, my uncle has already insisted that I let him drive some of tomorrows journey. I will never give up the resistance!

The spotty wi-fi in this hotel allows me to talk with my pseudo boyfriend in one screen and watch my hero, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. narrate a genealogy show in another. While he talks to Kristi Yamaguchi about interment camps I think about my grandfather’s uncle Frank who worked in an internment camp in the 1940’s. I wonder how my grandfather felt about it as a teenager when his uncle went to go work in California. I wonder how he felt about it as a soldier himself in 1948 in Korea. As he lies in a hospice facility, does he still know this part of his family’s history? Is he thinking of all the non-catholic behavior demonstrated by some of our family’s lesser know tormented souls? Is his mother calling for him to come home, his father begging for forgiveness while I selfishly wish for him to wait for me? I am on my way to go see my grandfather, the be all end all, by default and I wonder if he even knew he was creating a three stooges utopia. It is a very unwittingly traditional family filled with tragedy, denial and sadness but coupled with the greatest love of music and the motto, “The only thing funnier than someone falling down is death.”

Like Sands through the Hourglass

ailingmaokitty — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:55:49 +0000

Disappointment, I guess, is part of life. The part where I’ve spent so much of my life trying to talk myself out of worse case scenarios. The last few days have been a never ending parade of disappointing men. I guess UPS has also been a little disappointing but I think of them as The Man, so they qualify for this complaint.

I am trying to think of times where I have not come through for others. I am sure there have been some times, but I can’t come up with anything.

I’ll get over it, it’s just another thing I could do without.

Merit in the 70′s

ailingmaokitty — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 03:32:00 +0000

It is Friday night and I’m thinking I should just call this day quits and try again tomorrow. I updated my sleep playlist with Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl), Time After Time, Linger and Sweet Jane. I was listening to Brandy, which I have heard only a thousand times and for the first time heard all these amazing things. All of this background that I was never aware of. I am always confused and astounded when this happens. Anyway, that’s what my weekend entertainment has come to; the musical integrity of Looking Glass.

Bea’s Song (River Trilogy Part II)

ailingmaokitty — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:23:05 +0000

Track 9 on the Cowboy Junkies 1996 album, Lay It Down.

Speed River at my feet running low and flat

I’m sitting here burning daylight thinking about the past

And that distance out there where the earth meets the sky

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s sitting on firmer ground

John says I look at the moon and the stars these days more often than I look into his eyes

And I can’t disagree

so I don’t say nothing

I just stare on past his face at Venus rising,

Like a shining speck of hope hanging over the horizon

With each passing year that I sit here that horizon seems to inch just that much nearer

And all that appears on it seems as clear as spit

But if there’s on thing in my life that these years have taught

It’s that you can always see it coming

But you can never stop it
Speed River at my feet running low and flat

I’m sitting here burning daylight thinking about the past

And that distance out there where the earth meets the sky

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s not noticing that I’m drowning

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s not noticing that I’m drowning

My So Called Anxiety

ailingmaokitty — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:02:45 +0000

I am doing a smidge of research tonight, mostly about Asperger’s. I am hoping that if I can better understand my nephew maybe I can be a productive, proactive part of his life instead of someone who wants to scream at him, which is what I want to do now.

Diagnostic Criteria is a blast but there seems to be a lot of documentation on the lack of differences between the symptoms HFA, Autism in general and Asperger’s. So I skip the deep research for now, this is not what I’m after anyway.

Comorbidity is what I’m really after, neurologically and psychologically. I can’t find much about anxiety on it’s own but the occurrence of bipolar in people and relatives of people who meet the diagnostic criteria for a PDD is, more often than not, higher than in the normal population. Interesting and not shocking. It dawns on me that I don’t know anything about the rates of comorbidity between anxiety and bipolar disorder. Trying to look that up just gives me the symptom run around. Data is telling me that most people who are bipolar have anxiety disorders but whether the anxiety is it’s own disorder or a symptom of the bipolar is up for grabs. Thanks for nothing.

My last doctor was the first person who brought up my adult brain’s possible preoccupation with What If. I don’t recall giving him any specific examples, but of course I wouldn’t have since I didn’t realize it was a problem. At first, he just told me he was concerned about it. At no point after that (January 2007) did I ask any questions or do any research on it. There is a brief spell of medication research while I sift through a list of possible additions to my cocktail of Could This Make Me Look Any Fucking Crazier*. The two I researched the most were topiramate and gabapentin. They are highly effective treatments for the prevention of headaches (and the ones I have I think may kill me one day) and are prescribed off-label for bipolar disorder and off-off-label for anxiety and off-off-off label for depression. He also includes fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine and even my final choice, clonazepam.
I notice that everything on the list he has given me is used in the treatment of anxiety.

“Hmmm, ” I say to my retarded self. “I wonder if that’s a coincidence?”

I still didn’t discuss it any further with him, but I didn’t have to because my next appointment was an emergency of sorts wherein I was in a constant state of worry over what would happen when I reached peak dosage at my current medication. This turned into anxiety about anxiety.

“Maybe I should try minimizing the aggravating effects, like work and relationships. I think I need a less stressful job, but what job isn’t stressful? Perhaps I should quit my job and move into a cave and sleep all day, everyday. Why am I so worried about medication? Does that mean it’s already not working?” Pretty soon I am cleaning the kitchen floor with a tooth brush, singing, pacing and sewing for 10 hours straight while listening to the radio and watching tv. At night I am consuming mass quantities of Spanish red wine.

I think you see where this is going. I have my appointment with him and refuse any new drugs and instead up my dose of lamotrigine. I realize now that he wanted me to take additional medication to treat the anxiety. At the time I thought it didn’t make sense to add more drugs to treat bipolar. I go home and do well with the dose increase. Things are fine until this same thing plays itself out again and again. Finally it gets so severe, so quickly that I don’t have time to do the appointment dance and I have to call his nurse. It takes them approx. 1 nanosecond to prescribe a highly potent anxiolytic benzodiazepine. I do a quick read through of it’s side effects, drowsiness, short-term memory loss, dizziness, lack of motivation, liver damage, incontinence, loss of libido. Whatever. Is one of the side effects death? No? I’ll take it.

It works like a fucking charm.

* In treating mental illness it is not uncommon to take one drug that treats two different issues.

Possible Retroactive Categories

ailingmaokitty — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:59:46 +0000

Categories I thought of adding based on a review of crap I’ve written here:

I Suck at Dating
Jobs Everyone Thinks are Beneath Me but they are not Mentally Ill so Whatever
Sleeping with People You Work With Who You Have No Intention of Dating
My Consistency in Picking Inappropriate People to Have Relationships with
Prepositional Phrases
My So-Called Relationships
Moving to Another State for Reasons I Still Don’t Understand
Why is Every Corporation Trying to Rip Me Off
I Have Posted All the Lyrics in my Music Collection, This is a Repeat
HSV Sucks
HSV Saved Me
HSV, Having to Discuss It With Possible Partners and Realizing Sticking a Pencil in My Eye Would Be More Fun
Being Crazy, Rejection Because Of
HSV, Rejection Because Of
HSV, No One Gets Tested for It and That’s Kind of How I Wound Up With It
Things I Would Regret If I Regretted Things
People Who I Trusted That I Shouldn’t Have
Which Public School System Failed to Teach Me How To Spell
Which Parent Was Not a Good One
The Universe Gave Me The Worst Possible Odds
When My Medication Stops Working, Freaking Out Due to Possibility Of
I Wanna Be Sedated More Than I Already Am
I Hate Florida
I Love Florida
Are You My Mother?
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
Headache

Klonopin

ailingmaokitty — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:35:08 +0000

It is late and I’m prepared for my sleep. Soon I will take out my contacts and brush my teeth, then I will collapse into my bed and have a tremendous and stress free sleep. I am just waiting for the bathroom to be available. I thought I’D WORK ON MY BEJEWELED BLITZ SCORE but I see here that I’m using caps, sorry, too tired to change this. I thought I’d work on my bejeweled blitz score but I find that my coordination has become a joke, perhaps between god and…someone else. I was not in on the joke and that’s a little funny. Anyway, I am feeling better, good night.