<< - >>

#257 - the lowdown
02/05/02 @ 5:14 pm

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've updated. I was trying to at least update once a week, and had Sunday in my head as last week's cutoff, but our internet connection went down Friday morning, and was out all weekend. In fact, when I left for work this morning, it was *still* out. I'm feeling generally pissy because of it. Anyway, here are some general updates:

Relationships
My husband and I are still getting along wonderfully, having lots of fun together. Having sex about once a week lately - it's about all we can fit in with our schedules. I have not heard from my mother since the last time I mentioned it here, nor my sister. Despite making an offer that she could stay with us for awhile. Did I mention that? She said she'd think about it, but had a job interview, so if that panned out, obviously she wouldn't want to move. I haven't heard from JP since we went over there to celebrate my birthday. It makes me sad that I don't have any friends anymore other than her, since we only get together about once a month, if I'm lucky.

Pop Culture
My husband went to a Superbowl party, leaving me at home to admit to myself that I actually like the Superbowl, & don't just watch it because I'm using my computer and he has it on in the background. Actually, I pretty much watch it for the commercials. But the game was really amazing, since as usual I was routing for the underdogs, and they stomped all over the favorites. Weird, huh? Did anyone watch the half-time show? When I found out hubby & co. watched the Playboy Fear Factor instead, I got so pissed. Because U2 was incredible. And the giant curtain displaying everyone's names from 9/11 was so moving, it made me cry. Yes, the Superbowl made me cry. Then again, I have been known to tear up during certain Kodak or Coca-Cola commercials, so biggie there.

I am quite happy with the way things are going on my favorite TV shows. Namely, the romances. On The West Wing, Josh brought Tahiti to his girl, sealing their relationship. On Friends, Joey has his best story line ever: developing feelings for Rachel. Although, of course, I *need* Ross & Rachel to get back together, so they better be careful how this shit turns out. On Angel last night, Cordelia and Angel got their kiss on, as well as some other dangerous moves. It was exciting, but I'm so happy Cordie's Grussalog (?sp) is on the scene, because once Cordie & Angel are together, Buffy is out of the picture. Cordie has become too good of a person to throw aside for Buffy. And of course Buffy and Angel belong together, even if their producers swear there will be no more crossovers. And on Buffy, despite discovering that I like Spike with Buffy, I really don't like Buffy with Spike. Mostly because of the last episode, and the look on Buffy's face when her and Spike were having sex. It was very sad, to see that even now, all it is to Buffy is sex. That relationship is a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen. And I've heard that Riley is coming back in the Spring. RILEY??? Barf!!!

I also watched some interesting movies before the Superbowl on Sunday. I saw "Roman Holiday" for the first time! Audrey Hepburn was so beautiful. I love her so much! The movie was kind of "eh" though. I think I don't care too much for Gregory Peck. But the guy who played Irving was charming, and it was very odd when I realized that I recognized him, but I couldn't place him from where. IMDB tells me his name is Eddie Albert, and the reason why I couldn't place him is because he's had about a thousand different roles! Including the voice of the Narrator in Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. How cool is that?

Anyway, then I watched 3/4 of "An Affair To Remember". I discovered this movie a few years ago because it was talked about so much in "Sleepless in Seattle" (ugh), so I watched it one day on AMC. It is the most amazing old movie I've ever seen. Audrey Hepburn has always stolen my heart, so until then My Fair Lady was always my favorite old movie. But watching Deborah Kerr is just magical. Just watch the first 1/2 to 3/4 of the movie, especially if you're a guy. The magic is in the first half, as Nickie & Terry fall in love. It's romantic and funny and charming. And then they disembark from the ship to meet Nickie's grandmother. Boring, right? Just wait for her to start playing piano. Don't pay attention to the music. Watch their faces. Everyone in this movie is so damn expressive with their faces. It's not the words that prove their love, it's the way they look at each other. My 2nd favorite moment in the movie is when the boat horn calls a 2nd time, and the camera is up close on the Grandmother, and her falls falls a little slowly, but quite dramatically, and you feel such a sense of loss. It's an incredibly moving moment. My favorite moment in the film, despite all the funny & charming moments between them onboard, is as Terry & Nickie disembark at New York. She's hugging her fiance, and he's being led away by his fiance. He kisses his fingers and presses them to the back of his beloved's gloved hand. She gets this look in her eye, like somehow she knew he kissed those fingers, despite being unable to see him. She disengages from the man in her arms, and presses her glove to her mouth, her nostrils, and tears fill her eyes. She is so beautiful, and despite the moment being so short, it gets me every time!

Hint: once you get to the scene with a bunch of small children about to sing, just change the channel. They're singing makes me cringe every time, and you know how the movie ends. (Duh, it's an old romantic comedy! Hello!) If you time it just right, go ahead and switch it back for the last scene, which is very engrossing, watching their pain, but quite ridiculous, because they never should have been apart in the first place. Men may want to skip that one altogether.

I read 2 books in 3 days over the weekend, astonishing my slow-reader self. The first was Greg Bear's "Vitals". He is the most amazing writer! He writes the most amazing thrillers, with so much science, and it always makes your head spin. And the relationships between people, the thought-processes of the main characters, are always so great to get involved in. This book made me think of the last book I read of his, "Darwin's Radio", which affected me so much that I had a dream about it and wrote some of it out to turn it into a story. So thinking about that, I spent some time over the weekend writing in it. Not too much, and it's pretty lame, background stuff, but it was nice to write again.

The other book was by Nancy Kress and titled "Probability Moon". It was no "Beggars in Spain", probably the most important book I've ever read (which you should all know if you've been reading my diary for awhile), but it was fascinating, the way she created a completely alien culture. That's why I love SciFi so much: I love the idea of new, alien cultures to learn about, to wish I could experience for myself. I did want to be an anthropologist for a short while in high school and college...

The book ended, and I left the house to immediately go buy the next one, and fucking Barnes and Noble didn't have it. And the woman I asked about it was lame & kind of rude. Poop. I would have gone to Amazon.com, but, of course, NO FUCKING INTERNET. Grrrrrrrrr!!!!

Physical
Not doing so good. I keep telling myself I need to go back to the gym, that that's the only thing I can do to really help myself. I can't remember the last time I went to the gym. But at least I'm doing pretty good with the diet. I didn't cheat last week, and I haven't cheated yet this week. Although, with my quick sugar-crashes, there have been alot of mini-snickers making an appearance to calm my shakes. I'm still having them, and they're still just as frightening, despite the doctors finding nothing wrong with me.

This morning was very bad. I accidentally fell back to sleep instead of getting up. Not that big of a deal, not that long of extra sleep, but because I went deep enough to dream, I was exhausted when I woke up. That was my #1 problem last week - I was exhausted EVERY day, and it was horrible. Last night I got good sleep, yet I felt horrible this morning. It turned into a migraine. And my back hurt. So I laid down on the floor to fix my spine, and it didn't help anything. So I did my back exercises instead, and they were the most painful they've ever been. Even when I was first diagnosed and having pain almost constantly, my back never hurt like this - it was always my leg. So I quite the exercises and just laid down and tried to remember how to breathe. The pain was very bad. And then I went to get dressed and hurt myself again, this amazingly intense pain, it brought tears to my eyes. Walking out of the house, just *walking*, I experienced it again. Worse, each time it happened, my migraine flared. I paced in the garage for awhile to see if I could walk without pain. I could. I went to work. Took drugs, felt about 90% better, but decided to do some exercises anyway, y'know, to stretch out and improve my mobility, etc. Instantly, the pain flared, triggering my headache to come back with a vengeance. It was actually quite scarey.

I keep telling myself to go exercise, and I keep not. Maybe I actually will this week now. Except the immediate thing that's causing it isn't lack of exercise, it's our bed and my sleeping habits. No matter how much I try, I always end up sleeping on my stomach, which messes up my spine. And now that the bed is old enough to sag, it's becoming worse. We only bought a new bed about 3 years ago. And I've been asking for a new one for almost a year now. Beds are expensive. Sweetie won't be pleased. But I don't know what else to do at this point. This morning has been really scary.

Mental
My mental state hasn't been too good lately, despite being happy with my Sweetie. Sometimes, I convince myself that if I could just quit my job and stay at home, I would be so happy. But that's no true, because sometimes depression sucks me in there too. And the thing is, I like my job again. In fact, I love it. But things have just been adding up lately, making me wish I could just stay home & never deal with anything but my sweetie anymore.

Being in such a poor place physically, and things being slow at work, I feel this large desire to flee in the mornings. It's not even fight or flight anymore, just flight. Somehow, when I have lots to do, it's great, if not stressful. But not knowing what I'm going to find to do my occupy myself for the whole day, it gets me kind of freaked out, and then I want to flee! It's very frustrating. But when I felt it this morning, it was more than frustrating, it was horrible. I wanted to cry, feeling like a failure. Like I shouldn't be employed here. They should fire me for being such a horrible employee. I start feeling like I shouldn't be here, in the working world at all. Like I'm one moment, one decision from losing it and running out the front door to my car. I wonder why I'm here at times like that, and why they keep me employed. Am I lying to them for staying? They know I *try*, but do they know I'm trying this hard? That sometimes I'm just a moment away from quitting? Other days, or in the evening, or just later that same day, I feel differently. I've wet my toes. I've been productive. I've helped someone. I've mellowed. I want to plan for tomorrow. For the future. I want to go to bed early so tomorrow will be better, easier. And yet, lately almost every day has had these horrible starts.

Dreams
I am definitely in the middle of a "weird dream cycle". Most of the time, I dream strange, involved, long dreams that I remember large portions of the next day. Every night. Usually, after a few weeks or so, I'll have a few nights of not remembering, or not very interesting dreams. And then I hit a cycle again pretty quickly.

Except that last week, they were all bad dreams, and it was getting to me. I developed this theory in high school when I got a new bed, that new beds cause nightmares. Each time I slept on a new bed, I had a nightmare. Each time a boyfriend stayed over for the first time, he had a nightmare. Plus, I've heard that some people refuse to eat spicey foods for dinner or too close to bedtime, because they *know* they'll have nightmares. I guess from heartburn? I think it all adds together with me having bad back pain lately to one conclusion: if you sleep badly, you're more likely to have bad dreams. I want a new bed, dammit!

Anyway, here is a dream I had at the end of last week, which I was going to incorporate into an entry about wacky dreams. But now I can't remember the other wacky dreams from last week. And I never got to finishing writing down the whole dream, so the ending is missing. But it was always going to be like that, kind of. I remember thinking how odd it was that I remembered the beginning of the dream much better than the end. Y'know, coz that's the part closer to waking up. Anyway, here it is. Hope I get to update again this week. IF THE FUCKING INTERNET IS BACK UP!!!

I woke up in a prison with my comrades. I think it was supposed to be Guantanamo Bay, and we were Afghanis. The leader asked for his cell phone and his gun. The one he asked said that they couldn't turn on the cell phone, because then it would call out to the network and "they" would know we had a cell phone. I remember my outside self, the one watching all of this, being frightened that they could so easily bring in a gun with them.

They immediately escaped to menace the world. I stayed inside for awhile. I'm not sure why, but it wasn't long. Then I went after them. They had been busy. Right outside of the camp was a large grassy area with lots of people milling around, like a park, and there was shooting and grenades going off everywhere, people screaming. I watched as the last members of my party were shot down. I remember thinking that there was something special about me, maybe that I was a girl, that no one would suspect that I was with them. So behind everyone's backs, I picked up a grenade and tried to figure out how to use it.

And that's when another grenade landed at my feet. I picked it up and tried to get rid of it, but like all bad movies, it waited to explode until I picked it up, but did not wait until after I could throw it. It exploded in my hand.

And that was just the beginning. Like a prologue to a movie or something. Because it turned out that the "something special" about me wasn't just that I was a girl. It was that I was a little girl. And 20 years later, the movie started up again with me as a woman. A woman with one hand missing. And I was being played by this actress whose name I don't know. But she was the woman in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels". And this other movie, "Making Mr. Right" or "Finding Mr. Right", the one with John Malkovich as a scientist who makes a robot that looks just like him. Anyway, she's the woman who sleeps with the robot, discovering that he's "fully functional", until his head pops off, that is.

Yes, that was just the beginning of weirdness.

The beginning of the grown up part was more like the beginning of a sitcom or something, with a catchy theme song and smiling pretty people. Except I was the lady with only one hand. I guess that was the gimmick: lady with one hand trying to make it on her own in the big city. Of course, there had to be a romantic angle: I had a roommate that was a man, we were just friends, but of course we secretly were each attracted to each other. Yes, it was a bad sitcom.

After the sitcom introduction though, it got more and more serious. I don't remember alot. Except that I was really supposed to be in this orphanage/institution that I had grown up in, because I was Not Well. Not only did I have one arm missing, but apparently I was pretty fucked up in the head. So me and my sidekick, who began as my roommate that I was attracted to, and turned into someone that looked and seemed vaguely like my big little brother, we kind of took over the orphanage. And wreaked havoc. And I think shot some people up. It's been awhile now, four days since I had the dream, but I get the impression in my mind that although I didn't want to be *too* bad, it didn't really bother me to kill some people. And I'm pretty sure I killed at least one.

last - next