When it rains…

Just a quickie.

While we were in intermission…..

I wrote a long letter to my landlord begging, in a very polite, controlled adult way for him to change his mind about letting us have a kitten. It did not read like begging, but let me tell you… it was. So, after seven years, this cat person without a cat now has cat.

Meet Mojo.

Little did I know just how much I would need her.

Shortly after Mojo came into our lives, an old friend left them.

On May 1st we lost a very close friend of ours to cancer. On Wednesday evening we attended her memorial. She deserves more than a few moments in this post, and I’m sure to write a better one about her soon… Sometimes putting words together is just… hard.

Our transmission blew up the day after Deb passed. So we’ve been carless.  And don’t even ask about the computer issues. All these things in a short little compact bit of time.

I guess if you’ve been following me for a bit, you can see why I’m having a problem with words for all of these things. I think thats exactly why I’m back here, scribbling. So I don’t go back into lockdown like last summer, where it hurt too much to breathe.  Now, everything still hurts but, I’d rather keep scribbling than living inside my head with all that foam and fragments.

 

 

Corned beef…….

I was going to actually write a post post, but for now… a snippet….

You might be staring into your fridge forlornly thinking of how fast that Corned Beef is disappearing.

You might only have one kind of cheese for a sliver/scrap CB sammich…

“But Fresh Mootz doesn’t go with Corned beef!” You might say.

(caps intended – Fresh Mootz is important.)

Let me assure you – Corned Beef, a slab of Mozzarella on an onion roll? Heaven.
This is the kind of thing you sit with – eating slowly and then sitting sad and awed all at the same time, because it was so delicious – and then the mourning…. because said sammich is gone and is now only a memory of amazing.

-sighs-

 

(Edited) Ninja Chicken

Only I would somehow manage to cut myself on a chicken.

Yeah.

I just read that, and it happened like an hour ago, and I am still re-reading that and shaking my head at myself in disbelief.

A CHICKEN. THE CHICKEN CUT ME.

Side knuckle, middle finger, left hand.

F*ck you too, Chicken.

 

 

edited: I don’t care, and thats okay.

I’m editing  I edited (adding bitching bitched more)  this – you should probably come back in a little while to read it, and tell me what food you hate, and we can grumpyface together. Or something.
————-

It’s cold.

It’s cold, it’s not even snowing lately, but it’s cold.
Yes, I know, I live in Connecticut. We have winter. If I don’t like it I should move. Blah blah blah. I’m allowed to be tired of winter. Winter is like half the year here. Its annoying.

Most of my RSS following is about food. How to mangle it, heat it, combine this with that and make food matter stuff for the eating of.  Or something. 98% of the blogs I follow? Food.

Oh look, Waffles, bacon and muffins. Meats.. a plethora of fantastic meats roasted/stewed/braised and Oh look – Gravies and soups and…… pie and cake…. and …

I love food. But we have a major economical problem that is forcing me to eat entirely way too much pasta. Did you know that I pretty much hate pasta? No? I do. I associate it with desperation, hunger and “I-had-too-many-carbs-without-protein” sickness.

The only time I enjoy pasta is when its coated in ingredients that I can’t really afford at the moment.

So. Pasta hate.

I think I might need to adjust my feed to exclude all the foodie blogs for a while lest I have bouts of ugly crying.

Also – Why is Pandora insistent on telling me I need anti-depressants and why is it forcing me to listen to break up music? (I think its a PLOT)

I blame the pasta. I should just break up with Pasta. Its you, its totally not me. I want to see other foods.

I SAY that I don’t care about the food posts, and then I saw bread pudding with salted caramel over on Smitten Kitchen.. so.. I’m lying. I totally care about food posts. I really, really care. They are just picking fights with me and turning me into a crazy, cynical brat today.

I’m trying to be okay with this. I am learning that it’s okay to forgive someone and totally not want them in your life for a little while. That you don’t have to save all the wounded little birds that come careening into your windows again and again.

Boy am I a magnet for wounded little birds.

Maybe if I start throwing the birds in with the pasta they will stop that.

 

And it started like this….

“Blah blah Middle School, Gold House. How may I help you today?”

“Um, Yes…. I am Kenny (somethingsomething’s) mother? I just wanted to call and give a heads up to his teachers this morning…”

(Everyone knows who Kenny somethingsomething is, Most days he is impossible not to love, he’s funny, kind, caring, etc. Not this morning.)

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah… you see – this morning he is really in rare form, I haven’t seen him like this in a really long time. He’s upset about the weather and was very angry… yelling, muttering, he slammed the door on me and then was yelling at me from the front yard that he was really sorry…….”

“Oh… Oh yes, I’ll tell them.”

    I’m not sure if you remember, but Ken has Autism.  This means sometimes he is just not capable of letting things go. For the most part I can try to deflect his frustration and calm him down a bit or distract him to cheer him up. Sometimes I shamelessly bribe him. This morning nothing was working. He refused to eat breakfast, Every article of clothing he had to put on became an argument.

When the bus got here, he yelled at me, slammed the door so hard that the lamp fell over, then he ran up the stairs and out the front door to yell at me.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” like a really cold teenaged Marlon Brando… only… its freezing out, and obviously my name is not Stella.

So.. That was my morning. I’m sitting here hoping he didn’t wake anyone in the house up and that he goes to school and …. and the school just called, and they have managed to calm him down and gave him a granola bar.

Phew.

 

 

 

“And then at long last…. Blue.”

I have been missing. I am sorry.

I could predictably tell you that everything went awry. Ha.

It did, I wouldn’t be lying. Lots of crappy stuff happened, I was spread too thin, I was depressed and overwhelmed.

And I was hungry.  To look at me, you wouldn’t know it, but I am hungry … a good percent of the time.

Right now I want to tell you I am ok.

Right now, I want to tell you that I am doing better.

Right now, I want to tell you that I have been hiding out and gathering myself together after giving too much of myself away for too long a period of time.

Pastel and Charcoal on Canson paper

And… I started creating art for the sake of itself again in the real world.
Just because.
I will tell you more when I can gather together the words, but right now – I wanted to say Hello.

 

The Self-Cleaning oven

I am sitting in my living room running a fan by my head in the window – blowing cold 43F air in.
In the kitchen, I have put bath towels along the bottom of the door and after awkwardly climbing up onto the sink counter, have managed to put an exhaust fan in the window back there.

On high.

On the stove – I have cinnamon and cloves bubbling away in plain water, and on my desk a rather gloriously potent Fraser fir candle flickering away.

The oven door is still in lock down mode, eventually it will allow me to unlock the door and open it again.

I knew better. I totally ignored the inner voice that said…

“You know – you should have run the self-cleaner when it was warmer…..”
“You should really put the fans in the window before you run the self-cleaner… “

Yep. Shoulda.

Why does the self-clean cycle always reek so terribly even if you do it often?
(My inner finger pointer would like me to tell you that I have NOT run it since early spring.)

 

In other news, I did try to contact someone and am now having more problems finding anyone that accepts my insurance than anything else. On the whole, I am doing quite a bit better than I was, having knocked out three deadlines that were really close together and causing a good deal of ridiculous stress. 

I can do deadlines, that usually isn’t the problem. I think the problem is mostly that it depends on who they are for that causes my anxiety to skyrocket.

 

And then.. I’m not sure what happened.

It wasn’t/isn’t good.

I woke up the other night repeatedly crying in my sleep.

And then I was ok, but then I wasn’t.

And then yesterday, the crying just wouldn’t stop. 

I told my husband that I think I need to get help, but I don’t even know what kind of help I need.

I saw a friend, and there was more crying. 

And then I felt better – for a little while.

And today I have felt even more drained, burned out and completely tapped than I have in a very long time.
And I am scaring people, but frankly, I’m kinda freaked out myself, because I have apparently reached my limit. 
I don’t want to/ cant really talk about whatever it is, because I don’t even know what it is – other than it is so much stress, over so long a period of time that I just seem to be out of any reserves. I don’t even have the reserves to CHAT about whatever this is, and the idea of making smalltalk is more daunting than climbing mountains.

Things I normally would use to de-stress aren’t working. 
Part of me wants to just hand the reins over to someone else. Like I don’t want to be responsible for anything for a few days. I am mustering the energy to work, and get out of bed, that sort of thing, and as far as I’m concerned, if the universe wants me to do anything else, I don’t think I’m their girl right now.

Usually I am able to go through tons of stuff and pick myself up and dust myself off and just take care of anything I need to take care of, but it doesn’t seem to be working today. I think that I’ve been doing this very thing for so long that its biting me on the ass.

 

Partially disabling the filters

Yesterday was kinda cool… In fact, yesterday was as cool as the other day was hard.

Part of it is because my friend stopped by, because she needed to talk to someone. Anytime I see her I am reminded of how much we need people, I mean physically need them.

She had heavy things to talk about but somehow after she left I felt lighter and had more of a recharge.

Not because my friend had something hard to go through, but because she is one of my persons. One of THE persons. She needed someone and she thought of me and she came here. I didn’t realize how much I just needed HER. I mean, I missed her terribly, but we just sat in the living room and chatted.

It’s nice to be needed. Just for who you are.

The other thing I tried to do yesterday was stop thinking. Something interesting happened.

Instead of being weird in my own head and keeping a tight reign on how I communicate…. I just.. stopped.

I let myself, instead actually communicate in some way.  It might have been a comment where I normally wouldn’t leave one. It might have been a post. It might have been a note to an artist earlier today – but something really cool happened and it wasn’t being sprayed with mace. I actually had some really neat conversations for the first time in .. years.

We knew social anxiety sucked. It just does.  But sometimes you are so wrapped up in how much it sucks that you forget that the real reason it sucks is that if it goes unchecked for too long? You forget what talking to people is really like when it goes well. You are too focused on all the garbage instead.

In other randomness…. Hospital dramas freak me out.

I have problems going to the doctor right… I have been saying every day that I am going to call the new doctors office and I am GOING TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT. And then I dont.

I cant tell why exactly. Lots of reasons I think, but none of them will get better if I don’t go.

I half watch Grey’s Anatomy. I cant watch the surgery bits and the “Look at this horrible thing!” parts. But last week they had a lady who was scared of the doctor and she had a horrible wound with bugs in it I think – because she was waiting for it to go away and it never did. So on one hand -that tells me that I need to go to the doctor and stop being afraid.

I don’t have an open wound with bugs in it. But I dont WANT one either.

But then I have to ask myself (yes, I know its TV) – Why are all these people having sex at the hospital? Why are they fighting over their personal problems over a patient in surgery? What is going on with Bailey and other countless surgeons where they pass the hell out with someone on the table?

These things terrify me, because too often random things happen to me.

And maybe this is why wait times are SO long, maybe they are all having way too many not-so-quickees in the broom closet while we are waiting in their offices in our knickers and socks.

 

Maybe I’m not stupid after all.

Yesterday made me pause for a few minutes.  Yesterday was particularly hard.

For the past few years I have been increasingly upset with and particularly rotten to myself. I have withdrawn more and more into everyday minutiae, effectively losing myself in morning rushes to get the kidlet off to school, the stress of deadlines, trying to make groceries stretch farther, keep bills paid and countless cups of coffee.

Yesterday I allowed myself to stop and think for a moment, what that kind of stress does to a person.  I noticed a while ago that I seemed unable to hold a thought in my head for long, that I would lose focus, that I seemed unable to have a conversation with another person. Overall lacking any sort of clarity but in rare moments. 

This year it has come to a head in a way. I know I have not always been scatterbrained to this degree, nor have I had such an astounding lack of confidence like I do now. I am sure there is a combination of things contributing to whatever has happened to me. I am sure that a good percentage of my problem is the stress of the last few years in particular; The constant lack of cash flow to create any sort of feeling of security, weight gain – all things that have also contributed to an overall withdrawing of myself. 

I have very much become a hermit crab. 

I am trying to change.

I am trying to be nicer and more forgiving to myself where I can be, in a very conscious and aware kind of way. 

You would not think that it would be so difficult to do so many little things, like saying hello to strangers. Leaving a comment on a blog, posting a response on a forum, asking for help if you need it, but it is.

Hi – I have crippling social anxiety. 
I have a strange sense of humor.
I can be obscenely inappropriate, if I am comfortable enough with you to be so.
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I don’t think I’ve found my calling yet. (I once thought it was archaeology. Then I thought it might be psychiatry – but then I realized I get way too emotionally involved with people and I’d be a wreck all of the time. Then I thought it might be as a pastry chef or baker, but I don’t like getting yelled at – so going into culinary wouldn’t work. Sometimes I think I could be an advice columnist. But how do those sort of careers even happen?  One thing is absolutely clear – I need counseling.)

In my quest to break these awful habits I’ve managed to create, I might sprinkle some of my awkwardness on you.
Please don’t be alarmed, its nothing a bit of hot water, bleach and rigorous scrubbing with some steel wool cant cure.