In which I babble on about nothing, then get down to the point, which is – and I’m sorry if it’s overly pedestrian – to thine own self be true. Or something.
I’m pretty much obsessed with my current read, Imajica. It’s occupying most of my attention. God how I love a good book. I’m in love with the mystif, Pie ‘oh’ Pah.
I haven’t failed to notice that we’ve bypassed Spring and gone straight into air-conditioning season, though.
Tonight I have to do laundry for my Vail trip, which begins right after work on Thursday. I’ll be hopping into a van with two musicians and heading Colorado-wards. We’ll be stopping after 5 or 6 hours of driving and overnighting in some random motel. Friday we’ll be picking another band member up at the airport in Denver and then continuing up to Vail. The gig itself is Saturday night. I’m wondering if there will be enough room in the van for me to bring my knitting bag.
I had an IM conversation this morning with someone about panic attacks, and then promptly started having one myself. It’s a mild one, but annoying. (They’ve been decreasing in frequency and intensity since I left The Ex, and I can now go weeks and weeks without having any symptoms at all.) I think today’s little episode is a combination of thinking about it too much and my recent fairly high caffeine intake.
I had a mini-episode yesterday or the day before that consisted of having a fleeting strange sensation in my chest followed by a whole-body heating rush of adrenaline, and then an hour or so of The Fear. As soon as I get occupied with something I forget I’m having an attack and it goes away, but when I’m sitting at a desk, hardly moving, they linger because I can keep a portion of my awareness too focused on my symptoms.
I’ll be glad to get out of town this weekend. I guess need a bit of a head change.
~+~+~
A couple of readers have mentioned in comments or emails that I haven’t posted about panic in awhile. They did the math and came up with the same thing I did: the end of the marriage appeared to correspond with the end of the panic disorder.
Well, yes and no. Mainly yes. It seems one trains the body for a new set of responses in the depths of a panic disorder, and the symptoms do linger, but I haven’t suffered the kinds of multi-hour horrors I once did. I would characterize myself these days as being pretty much panic-free.
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In which it’s so sweet, the weather is!
This morning (and by ‘morning,’ you should understand that I mean ‘early afternoon’), I went to the gas station and bought the Sunday Des Moines Register. Then I came home and, in my Indian cotton wrap-around skirt and purple built-in bra tank top that AmmZon gave me as a hand-me-down yesterday, I sat on the porch and read it. The breeze was blowing, it was nearing 80 degrees, and all the neighborhood folks were out.
Bindu met the next-door neighbor dogs, a Lapso Apso and a Shih-tzu, and we – Bindu and I and our roommates Truck & AmmZon – met the next-door neighbor people, who had a flat tire. Folks rode bikes and walked down the street. Others drove, peering at the garbage pickup piles for treasure.
I took a nice fat nap in the middle of the day.
Later, I sat on the porch and chatted with The Ex and my roommates while Bindu stretched out in the yard trying to get cool.
Such a lovely day!
In which I tell you about my lunch break.
I went home for lunch because I have no cash. I passed The Ex and Truck on the way down 2nd street as they were going the other way in the Big Black Truck.
Truck called me and said, “Your brake light is out again. I know I said I’d do it, but will you remind me when I get home tonight to fix that for you?”
“Sure,” I said, walking up the driveway.
I made falafel (in a pita, with hummus, tahini, lettuce, onion, and avocado – yum!) and had a big glass of lemonade. Bindu ate kibbles while I cooked.
AmmZon called and said, “I want to take the empties back. Can I use the jeep?”
“Sure,” I said, and told her she could come pick it up from me at work in 20 minutes or so.
Then I sat on the back deck in the sunshine and ate my food. The end.
In which overdoing it is good.
I recently asked my brother Jayrob Jethro Cutlet Clampett Morgan Smith the Third (FEE!), as we were chatting about his new job via Gtalk, if he had any Pat Metheny I could have, as I’d been having a hankerin’ to listen to some Metheny.
He said maybe.
I said he should maybe upload me some tasty stuff to my server.
He wondered if he still had the usr/pwd.
I said they hadn’t changed.
He said okay, he’d upload me some jazz and stuff.
I said way cool, dude, thanks.
Today I logged into goblinbox via FTP and looked into the folder I’d told him to use. He’d uploaded 476.6 MB of music for me! That’s 476.6 MB while still zipped, bitches!
On the subject of DRM – which we weren’t on, but whatever – you know what’s stupid? What’s stupid is that if he, my brother, Jayrob, took his lawfully store-bought CDs and duped them and mailed them to me it would be legal, but giving me the same content in this format? Is probably illegal.
The mind utterly fucking boggles.
Anyway, man I love my brother, that fucker.
In which I’m doing a lovely meme.
Vuboq did a meme and now I’m doing it too because I follow Vuboq everywhere. (Yes, dad, even off cliffs.)
Here are the questions Vuboq wrote just especially for me:
1. Why are you still in Iowa?
Because it’s easy to live here. It’s cheap. It’s safe. It’s uncomplicated. I have good friends here.
Moving cross country with a pet is stressful and expensive. People often move in with family when relocating; no one in my family lives anywhere I want to live.
To move, I’d have to really want to be somewhere in particular; leaving simply to leave isn’t my style and I am not currently drawn to any place in particular (other than NYC. I might move there for a stint at some point).
2. If you could ask any famous person (living or dead) one question, what would it be and why?
I’m not particularly curious in this way. There are people I’d like to converse with, sure, but one question?
I guess if I only got a single question I’d ask Harlan Ellison, “Why are you such a sanctimonious prick?”
3. How do you define yourself?
Uh…
I am lazy, under-motivated, selfish, and distant.
I am enthusiastic, selfless, motivating, and talented.I am a complete waste of resources and am contributing nothing of value.
I am intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting.I am left-handed.
I am a voracious reader.
I am not interested.
I am a creature who prefers her mental life to the real world more than is probably normal.
I am cute.4. Who was your best friend in 1st grade? Tell us about him/her.
I don’t remember. I think I remember what the playground looked like, and I think I remember that my first grade teacher was named Miss Dingle? I can’t remember any friends at all, though. (It was, after all, 33 years ago.)
5. How cute is VUBOQ?
On a scale of 1 to 10, Vuboq is one million cute.
Ah, hell. I have to run to the post office and buy stamps for the office. Ciao! Oh, and if you want to do the meme, leave a comment and I’ll email you your own five questions!
My participants:
Lady Wyvern, Only Me
In which some kinds of technology totally suck ass.
I’m trying to call a vendor to get an RMA so I can return a faulty piece of equipment – a little 8-port router with 3 bad ports. The system either doesn’t like my phone (a Polycom VoIP phone) or is not functioning properly.
For example, “If you blah blah blah or need an RMA, press 4.” After pressing 4 I hear, “Please note that this department can’t issue RMAs. If you need an RMA, please press pound.”
When I press pound, the system tells me it’s not a valid option. After I press it three times, it hangs up on me.
*bangs head on desk*
In which I’m day-dreaming.
A headhunter solicited me via email today. She’d found me through my Monster.com account. (At first I thought it was one of those work-at-home spam things, so I made fun of her last name – which is ‘Bedgood,’ and like you could have helped yourself in my situation – but apparently it’s a real job.) (Mouth? Have you met foot?)
So if I manage to get a 6-month contract software QA job in Des Moines making a nice fat hourly wage, can I live here while I do it?
Please? Pretty please? I mean, come on! It takes dogs!
(Yes, I realize how this entry contrasts with the previous one. Hello.)
In which I won’t die with the most toys, but I may just die with zero stress… and nothing to show for it.
The winner isn’t the one with the most toys, she’s the one who has what she values most. I don’t value stuff all that much, or fame, or any of those quantifiable things: I value feeling good. (And yes, I realize that means I can redefine success whenever I need to: I’m not stupid, people.) Feeling “good” to me means I’m not tired, I’m not angry, and I’m not frightened.
Perhaps it’s lame to define happiness in negatives (how not-frightened am I? and how not-tired?) but I doubt it. I mock folks who define happiness by their stuff: look at my house! My car! My trophy wife! My nice stuff!
In a conversation with Truck the other night, I heard myself saying, “I live here because this way I can stand the world. I must live in a world where people are more good than evil, more smart than stupid, more kind than cruel. If they’re not good, smart, and kind, then I need to be able to believe that it’s generally for a good – or at least understandable – reason.
“If I have to live in a world where everyone is an idiot, I just don’t see the point in doing anything at all.”
Living in this little town – population 9,500 – allows me to live a mentally comfortable life. I’m confronted with no overcrowding, no senseless crime, and none of the little painful cruelties of life in the big city: I don’t carry 4 lbs of keys everywhere I go; everything is within walking distance; I know everyone by sight. Nearly everyone here is from somewhere else, so people tend to be well-traveled, open-minded, and well-spoken.
I often wonder if I’ve taken the easy way out: my life here is a success because it’s nearly impossible to be unsuccessful here. The status quo is practically level. We all live in the same old buildings in the same old tax bracket and we all wear the same old Walmart clothes.
Avarice here is kept to a minimum because there’s nothing to want. Most people I know concentrate their buying on their hobby mainly, and all other purchases are made from necessity. We don’t wear chic clothes, we don’t drive chic cars. Functionality nearly always trumps style because the weather here sucks.
In other words, I’m not confronted with beautiful, expensive things I can’t have unless I travel.
So I live here, and my life is simple and clean. I have what I need and I’m grateful for those things. I’m grateful for the food I eat and the shelter I enjoy. I feel nearly smug when I consider how little I own these days: some clothes, some books, a guitar, a vehicle, and a knitting bag.
Hey, me? I’m not some conehead filling up space with crap. I’m an aesthetic!
I used to feel smug about my vegetarianism, until I realized it’s easy for me not to eat meat. I think the same just might be true about how lightly I live in the world: I’m not confronted with gorgeous crap I want, so I should hardly get points for not buying it.
They say it’s easier to be a renunciate than a householder. I suspect I’m beginning to understand why.
In which I’m anonymous.
I just went to the falafel place for dinner. While I was ordering, I noticed that someone had printed out my review of the restaurant and brought it in to them. It was sitting on the counter near the register.
All authorship had been stripped from the document, and only the photo and text remained. It appeared to have been printed by someone named ‘felix’ or something. I wonder who it was, and why they didn’t attribute it to me?
The bad news is that I ordered the falafel platter, and it didn’t satisfy. First, it didn’t come with a side salad like it did last time. Second, the tahini had changed to the normal store-bought variety and the kisir was bland. It seems the falafel place has succumbed to that most horrid disease: popularity. Third, it cost nearly nine dollars.
Oh well, the sandwich, fries and soup menu item still rocks.
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
