I’ve spent much of the past several hours at Apple Discussions – iTunes for Windows digging through the posts for info on how to make my downloading life easier. The FAQs I read today imply that iPods can’t happily sync with two copies of iTunes, so I guess downloading purchased material at work will always mean I have to bring the files home and import them before I can get them on the damn iPod.

Earlier today, I bought about 10 random tracks from iTunes – mostly old R&B/soul and jazz stuff I used to have on vinyl way back in the day and couldn’t not buy the minute I saw it: Tell Me Something Good (Rufus & Chaka Khan), I’ll Be Around (The Spinners), Skylark (George Benson), It’s Your Thing (The Isley Brothers), You’re Still A Young Man (Tower Of Power). And so on.

Anyway. It’s icy out, so my phone line’s pissed off and I’m connected at 26.4 Kbps. It takes a LONG damn time to download an entire song at 26.4 Kbps. The reason I’m trolling the boards at Apple is simply so that that I’m sitting here and I know the instant I get disconnected.

Sigh.

Brett and Joe are downstairs playing GTA and saying foul things to each other. (They talk SO dirty to each other, it’s all penis stuff I try not to listen to. If I didn’t know for an Absolute Fact that they both like girls I’d seriously wonder! I mean, really, how much can you talk about someone else’s dick? I don’t believe I’ve ever threatened to smack a girlfriend’s… nether region… with a flyswatter during the course of normal Sunday afternoon banter!) They’re drinking Budweisers and Joe’s been eating the leftover holiday fudge from a tupperware in the fridge.

Around noon, I made those red headed boys some breakfast. Steak and eggs. No biggie, eh? Apparently I created a culinary MASTERPIECE and had the great satisfaction and joy of listening to them both moan and carry on about HOW FUCKING GOOD this STEAK IS!!! for about ten minutes. (I sauteed, over high heat, a whole sliced onion in butter, then threw in two steaks covered in salt & pepper and slapped a lid on. Later I turned the steaks. Finally I threw in a quarter cup of cheap-ass salted cooking wine and let the liquid boil off, and served this miracle of dead flesh with hash browns and eggs sunnyside up.) You’d think I was the goddess of breakfast steaks! They BOTH offered me a bite so I’d know what I’d made them!

How fucking cute is that? Seriously. Dude.

Ooh, Skylark is almost downloaded. I should be able to listen to it, oh, FORTY MINUTES or so. *rolling eyes*

I think I’m gonna abandon my watch on the ol’ dial-up connection and go see what there is to make those boys for dinner.
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Joe: Daphne told me Adie’s blog is a fuckin’ riot but I haven’t been reading blogs lately.

Me: Yeah, basically it’s all yer ex-bitches. Dude, I really like most of your exes, on the Internet anyway!

Joe: It’s embarrasing. At least there isn’t a board—

Me: I’ll make one! I’ll add a “JOE’S EX-BITCHES” section to Rants—

Joe: —no, no, no! I’ll die!

Me: —and we can all hang out there and NOT TALK ABOUT YOU! *laugh*

Joe: *groan* Don’t you dare.

Me: We’ll have to find more girls though—

Joe: —maybe I can find some new ones. *pause* Yeah right.

Me: As long as they’re board-worthy—

If you, like me, can’t run iTunes on, say, your WORK COMPUTER, but you need to get to yer tunes, then check it: iPod Music Liberator 2.7 byZelek Software. Meep!

I may be slow, but I just noticed that my iTunes software knows what color my iPod mini is!

This is, like, the fucking CUTEST little programming detail ever.

I bet it would know if I plugged in a pink iPod mini. (Just thinking about it makes me all geeked out!) It knows what color my iPod is! GOD I MISS MY NEWTON. (No offence, dear little Toshiba e400. I love you.)

…When I got home from work tonight and was taking crap out of my bag, I noticed that I now carry more computing power on a daily basis (cell phone, PPC, iPod, thumb drive) than MULTIVAC possessed. And it only weighs a few ounces.

If you haven’t eaten peanuts in a very long time, you might have forgotten how weird they are. Some peanuts are perfect examples of peanuthood, and they look just like an infinity sign and they have two perfect nuts inside.

Other peanuts make you wonder if you shouldn’t stop eating all this obviously genetically-damaged material: the seeds are stunted and tiny, one end is bigger than the other, there are three seeds. So much can go wrong in peanuthood!

And that’s why they SOAK THEM IN SALT! Because as soon as that salty wonder gets anywhere near your mouth, you stop wondering about how hard it apparently is to grow up to be a beautiful example of peanuthood, and instead find yourself at work sucking nosily on salty peanut shells at your desk.

I love everybody who reads my blog.

I love everybody who posts sweet nothings to me in the comments.

I love that half of you are almost as whacked as I’ve become; it makes me feel like less of a total freak and more like I’m quasi-normal.

I mostly want to say, “I’m not worthy.”

It’s amazing how helpful it is to read, “I know what you mean, that’s happened to me before.”

I think I am so self-involved that it truly amazes me that the things that happen to me have happened to other people before and I never even knew it.

Smootches!

I just had an hour-long panic attack, right here in my own office. IN THE MORNING. (I usually enjoy adrenaline hell in the evening, in the privacy of my own home.)

I had to leave my desk and walk around the block. I poured out almost a whole latte and filled my water bottle instead. While I interacted normally with everyone who came to my desk, I was experiencing a hidden fear that THIS one would indeed become a REAL heart attack.

My nervous system has totally gone to shit. Fuck this noise.

Panic Attacks and Anxiety is a good article (even though a paragraph about actual fibrillation made me have to get up and walk around the office for a bit because I was overcome with a wave of intense fear) and the doctor’s understanding of how people can resist thinking they’re “just” having panic attacks is heartening:

“People often resist or deny a diagnosis of panic attack. Some people cling to their physical symptoms, convinced that they are pointing to a heart problem or something similar. They have trouble believing that it’s actually the nervous system that is causing the symptoms. They may feel that there’s a stigma attached to the diagnosis of panic attack, as there often is to mental illness — that it’s somehow humiliating or implies cowardice, moral failure, or weakness of character. They’re afraid I’m telling them that it’s all in their mind.”

(That’s because there’s lotsa literature out there that says, “It’s all in your mind.” !!! In fact, there’s an amazing amount of shit on the web that says it’s from bad parenting or the stress of living in the city. Total bullshit. It may start as a mental disease for some, but for most I think it’s a learned fear reaction to a suddenly and very fucked-up nervous system.)

“But it’s not really like mental illness or delusion — it’s as if your whole body were being jolted with electricity, with nervous impulses gone out of control in a kind of short circuit or feedback loop. It’s like an involuntary discharge of the autonomic nervous system — a strictly physiological response that is not subject to your mental control or caused by your thinking process. In fact, people sometimes say that they were feeling very calm before an attack, or not thinking about anything particularly stressful or emotionally jarring. Sometimes they protest that it can’t be “nerves” because they weren’t really under stress that day. But it doesn’t necessarily take a stressful incident to set off a panic attack. Rather, stress to the nervous system builds up gradually, over a long time, and finally reaches a limit and spills over in a sudden overload.

“A similar thing can happen in some people with heart problems — a nerve network in the heart muscle can suddenly start to generate amplified signals, in a kind of neurological feedback loop. This can go haywire and cause fibrillation: the heart stops beating rhythmically and just vibrates.

“Panic attack is a true physiological syndrome, which people should accept and take constructive steps to correct.”

Constructive steps, sadly, include becoming a total roo: cut the toxins, period. Caffeine, sugar, alcohol. NICOTINE. Junk food.

I know you all know this already, but I don’t want to know it. I come from a loooong line of drinkin’, smokin’ rednecks, and I don’t want to be a delicate goddamned flower. I don’t want to be afraid that going to the bar on New Year’s Eve will give me complete neuro-chemical meltdown, I don’t want to eat at Noodle House (the food SUCKS!), or wear Arctic-rated coats in April because I’m weak and timid and so c-c-cold, I don’t want to pop suppliments every day because there’s something wrong with me, and I don’t want to be one of those people that people like me look at and think, ‘she should have a damned drink and relax already!’
Continue reading So I've Officially Diagnosed Myself →

You’ve often wondered how spoiled I am. The answer is: “rotten.” Behold my Christmas gift list!

– iPod
– light blue jammies
– 4 pairs of wool/angora socks
– a groovy cheese tray with a glass dome
– 2 salsa dishes with little feet, like at restaurants
– a spatula
– 2 whisks
– a big squishy brown blanket
– 2 pictures of Miss Parker, my new and only niece
– a killer wool sweater
– a Nissan thermos
– beaded picture frame
– coffee mug and “red hat” figurine
– yummy hot chocolate mix with mini-mallows
– $50

Like, damn, right? Whee!
——–

FOR THE HELL OF IT, laughing heartily after reading the comments on the previous post, I googled the string “fuck Daryl Hall” to see if I could find some other 30-something woman’s blog entry on that oh-so-fine blond subject, but instead I found a fairly interesting article on Tupac and generation gap in terms of how “kids” relate to music and rap… and there was this amazing quote at the bottom:

“If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak to your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”
– Lester Bangs, August 29, 1977

(from: Bad Subjects magazine: Pour Out a Little Liquor For Tupac)

Today sucked.

Today my body stopped being in crisis mode from blood loss, and decided it was time to acknowledge pregnancy loss. AF is here and with her comes all her attending CRAP. I’m a big purple bruise emotionally. I really need a fucking shower. And… and… and I just feel bad.

Oh, and my fucking hormones decided I was perimenopausal again, so I had my own special brand of almost-panic attack: rapid and uneven heartbeat, adrenaline, sweating, temperature swings from fever to freezing, and fear. Fear. FEAR. Fear for my fucking LIFE.

And it went on for four or five hours. Because clearly I haven’t had a bad enough week and need to be punished additionally. Bah!

That I know these fits are ‘merely’ chemical, and not truly the Big Bad Wolf come to EAT MY ENTRAILS WHILE I LIVE, doesn’t make them much easier to bear. The knowledge that it’s ‘just’ some hormonal/glandular/chemical malfunction simply makes me feel shittier, somehow.

There would be so much more grace in actually being at death’s door. I could be theatrical, at the very least, and command satisfying attention.
Continue reading Recovery Ain't For Pussies →