Coffee house and parking lot conversations

john curry makes the save (no, really) :: pens @ wolfpack, hartford, ct :: november 19, 2009

This post has been brewing in the background since a chat at a Dunkin’ Donuts got the idea percolating. (HA!) I just haven’t been sure where the line between real life & interweb life should be drawn. I never used to censor myself but this is a highly publicized blog and some highly personal/private stuff, so I’m going to be super vague. Sorry!

Anyhoo, a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to catch up with some old friends. Like elementary school friends. There were some things said that were interesting, but it took the general mindset of “I’m not ready to go home / I never see you / where the hell is there a 24 hour Dunkin’ Donuts?!” to really drive some things home. Sitting in the DD, my oldest and bestest friend EVAR was telling me how she doesn’t have any drama in her life. I completely (unfairly?) unloaded on her. Oh yeah. Can you say I have drama? There’s a lot of stuff going on and I’m not sure why the hell my personal life is shitting the bed the way it has been lately. It seems like I’m just struggling to deal with people and the impact (or lack thereof) they’re all having on my life.

It’s pretty weird to be me right now… I’ve always been the uber-introvert and having a small number of friends has been perfect. Suddenly, I have a large circle of friends and it’s just, well, shitting the bed is pretty descriptive.  I’m not saying that as a complaint. I’ve worked hard to get comfortable in larger groups of people and I do enjoy their company, but for every two decent people I let in, it seems that an asshole will sneak in. I blame the interwebs because I’m on so many different radar screens now because of the blog, Twitter, Facebook, social circles… It’s just not a good place for me. I’m toying with privacy measures, defriending / blocking people, but it just seems so mean. (Me. Worried about being mean. I know! STOP LAUGHING!)

There was one sentence that just stuck in my craw. “They’re just jealous of [x].” Seriously, that particular thing ain’t worth being jealous of. It’s not something I set out to do. It’s not something that I’m trying to rub in people’s faces. It’s just the way it is. All things considered? I probably would have chosen a much different direction when faced with the whole “Do I? Don’t I?” thing. Of course, life would have been different… but sometimes I wonder if it would have been better. I would love to have my cake and eat it, too but nope. I made my choice and I’ve stuck by it ever since.  (I know there are a lot of you who THINK you know what [x] is. Trust me, ya’ll are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong, wrong, WRONG.)

I’d been puzzling over my NaNoWriMo at that point, too. I knew where I wanted to go with the story. I just wasn’t sure how… art was imitating life which was imitating art, and it was just beyond weird. My male main character has been a pain since the pre-NaNo brainstorms. He just isn’t playing nice and I’m still trying to decide how to send him to the Sporky Pit of Death.  While he and I were arguing the finer points of accidental vs unplanned pregnancies (I prefer “unplanned” for a variety of reasons), why being on the road all the time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and why soulmates were a sh’load more trouble than they are worth, he said something that stuck in my craw as well.  He said, “You’re thinking too much about it. She and I, we just don’t know how to be friends anymore. But. I’m not letting her go.”  (Yes, my overactive imagination often leads me to having conversations with my NaNo characters during quiet times.) It’s helped me rewrite a particularly icky bit, but he needs to let her go, or he’s getting abducted by aliens or something. I’m running out of time and I don’t want him horking up the plot anymore.

So… I’ve had this, this, STUFF in my head and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Situation [x] is not something that can be shared with just anyone, so it just sits there but at least, now I have a way to frame a particularly hard “break-up” I’m going through - we just don’t know how to be friends anymore. We just can’t give each other what the other needs… some things are unforgivable. Some things you just can’t get past no matter how much you try to fool yourself.

Fast forward to last night.

I journeyed into Hartford - for a hockey game this time. Former BU players, John Curry and Brian (Can’t Stand Up) Strait are playing for the Baby Pens and this was their only trip up to Hartford.  I ended up going with a girl I knew in high school. We weren’t really friends, but we knew each other. We’ve (re?)connected via Facebook because we’re complete hockey nuts. Now that I’ve changed loyalties (yes, I’m a Rangers fan now… at least for as long as Matty’s there), we have a little more in common. Heading down for the game though, I really thought hockey was the only thing we had in common.

I. Was. So. Wrong.

I had made the comment a while back about how sometimes you have no idea what your friends’ boundaries are, but you can pick up on a complete stranger’s…Granted, she’s not a complete stranger to me, but it’s not like we were friends on a level that would kind of give me an idea of where her boundaries are - especially after the time that has passed since I last saw her in person.

Holy crap. For me, everything was just effortless. That doesn’t happen that often in my life. I’m not good with “new” people.

We shared. We overshared. We bonded on a level that I didn’t think I was capable of… We share some pretty intense experiences and have the same opinions about them. She and I, we exist in a whole world that other people don’t understand. It’s really a “you need to experience it” thing. We’ve been there.  We were talking about how [y] attracts [y] and that how, even when we have friends that say they ‘get’ us, we know they don’t. They just can’t. They’re not wired for it. For me, it was an unexpected Good Thing. I’m looking forward to future chats and hockey games.

I had a long drive home, made longer by freaking construction, and plenty of time to think about everything that’s been in my head for the past few weeks in addition to what had happened at the game.

While I’m not even at 50% closure on so many of the things that have been bothering me, I feel better about how things are going to work out.

Some times, the universe gives you what you need just when you really need it the most.

Thank you, vets

dad’s dog tag

I found my father’s dog tag about a year ago when we were giving the house a good top-to-bottom cleaning. I hardly ever take it off.

I don’t quite remember when I received it but at that point, I had no interest in wearing it - I just wanted it because it was his.

Because he went to Vietnam and survived.

I know there aren’t a lot of people who can say that.

I think about that a lot… especially now that this little piece of metal sits next to my skin every day.

I don’t need the calendar to tell me to thank those that are willing to give or have given their lives to protect me. On a day like today, the outpouring of support is touching, but it’s fleeting… and it’s just a shame that not ALL the vets get recognized.

I always take it hard when I find out that good friends are suicidal / have actually succeeded in their attempts. Some affect me more than others…

Five years ago, on November 5th, my friend, Pelkey, put a bullet in his chest. I think he has a right to be recognized for his efforts as a member of the military and to be declared a casualty of war. I’m not alone—his wife has been working tirelessly to get vets with PTSD the help they so badly need, the help that Pelkey couldn’t get in time.

From the Iraq War Heroes website (emphasis mine): Mrs. Pelkey’s husband, Captain Michael Jon Pelkey, died on November 5, 2004 from a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the chest after being diagnosed with PTSD. Pelkey wants to tell her story to help the many soldiers who are suffering from this disorder, and to request that her husband be declared a casualty of war… “I don’t want my Michael to have died in vain. He had a purpose in this life and that was to watch over his soldiers. I intend to keep helping him do so by spreading our story. My husband died of wounds sustained in battle. That is the bottom line. The war does not end when they come home.”

So thank the living vets and casualties of wars all you want, I will too… but don’t forget those that suffer / suffered from PTSD. They deserve to be recognized for their service to this country, too.

 

Decisions, decisions

striped convertible mittens :: knitpicks pattern :: november 8, 2009

I’ve just started the foot on a pair of ‘retro rib’ socks, I’ve got the back, a quarter of the front and half a sleeve of the ‘star’ sweater done, and now I’m starting a pair of convertible mittens. (Those are the fingerless gloves with the mitten top that flips over.)

Honestly, I need a new knitting project like I need a hole in my head. Especially one where the color changes every five rows and changes in random spots, like increase rows. (I hate that!) But I’m addicted to the mittens, especially now that it’s closing in on winter and my hands are already freezing at work.

 

<.sarcasm>I really need a new knitting project that I’m addicted to while I’m in the middle of NaNoWriMo, too.<./sarcasm>

Granted, I’m “cheating” on my NaNo and writing the sequal to last year’s suckfest, but I’m struggling with it. The characters just don’t want to play nice. One of them won’t stay out of the story despite my best efforts to get rid of him. I may have to kill him, but then I’ll have to deal with his ghost. Maybe I can have him abducted by aliens and come back with his memory erased. (Yup. I’m talking about aliens… it’s that bad already.) I don’t know what to do with him, but he’s screwing up the nice and neat plot I was rocking and rolling on. *sigh* He’s just continuing to prove my theory that teh boys, they are teh st00pid. Even the fictional ones in my life suck.

As if all that weren’t enough, I have this burning desire to bring a web project to fruition. It’s one that got started a while back and then died while I tried to work on other stuff. I’m giving myself a deadline of Dec 31st to get it done. I figure once I get it done, I can go after two other websites. I’d be doing them as a favor, but it’s a great way to rebuild my web portfolio. Yeah, I’m seriously thinking about reopening my little web design biz. I could use the new revenue stream. BUT, to further complicate matters, I am dying to learn WordPress. The only good news here is that WordPress won’t do what I want right out of the box for that first site, but my beloved ExpressionEngine will. However, now I’m obsessed with redesigning this site and moving it to WP. Even though it just (finally) got a long overdue overhaul of the backend.

I’m completely ADD lately… but at least it’s keeping my mind off of the stuff I don’t want to deal with.

Can’t get enough of me?

I’m keeping a blog over at posterous now, in addition to this one.

Its for stuff that I think is too short to require a true entry, although today’s entry about Bono is a little long.

Recovering

instrument @ mpmf :: cincinnati, ohio :: september 24, 2009

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks.

This is not a place where I feel I should discuss my bipolar and the havoc it can wreak on my life in great detail because I know discussing it can make people uncomfortable. BUT. In a nutshell, bipolar disorder is basically something that runs my life and defines who I am despite my best efforts to be “normal”. It lingers in the background - thanks to modern medicine - but when it makes its presence known, watch out.

I’d been deeply entrenched on the manic side for a bit. When I get that bad, I withdraw. The feeling of invincibility makes me reckless and I didn’t need to screw up certain friendships. That said, there were some people who got treated in ways they deserved, but that doesn’t excuse the behavior. In other cases, I didn’t talk to anyone because I knew certain things would set off a chain reaction and quite simply, I didn’t want to clean up the mess I was about to create. Knowing I need to pull away makes me angry, which fuels the manic fire, so I withdraw even deeper. If you didn’t know better and couldn’t see the subtle signs, you would think I was depressed.

Meds aren’t the answer to everything. A lot of it comes from my high levels of self-awareness and ability to know when to pull back. I joke a lot that the meds quiet the voices in my head (another reason I tend not to parade the bipolar in front of people I don’t know well - they don’t get that it’s a joke). At the same time, when it’s really bad, I also waste time I could be using to do productive things by sitting on the internet and playing games on Facebook or MSN’s Zone. Those quiet the voices better than the meds. There’s a pretty heavy cost to that and I tend to let people down by not living up to my promises. I’m currently dealing with the fallout from one of those failures. It’s actually quite upsetting to me, because it was something I believed in and something I really wanted to do. I dropped the ball big time and I’m not interested in continuing with the project simply because I know it may happen again. They don’t deserve to be the victim of my screwed up brain chemistry.

That failure, and feeling like I was being forced to choose one path over another by someone else, sent me spinning in the other direction.

Then, I got some news that I was expecting but didn’t want to hear. It’s not directly “my” problem, but it’s affecting people close to me and it’s dredging up things I thought I had buried. It’s stuff that’s hard for me to process on a good day. When I’m depressed… let’s put it this way, it’s very easy to give in to The Ick and move into The Bad Place. I withdraw further, hide deeper in my world, blow every one and every thing off. (See? If you couldn’t tell, you’d just think I was just depressed all the time. One of my shrinks did and it only made the bipolar worse. Yup. One day I hope they figure this shit out and stop using us as guinea pigs, poisoning us with the different cocktails in the hopes that something works to dull the mood swings. Until then, I keep taking my current cocktail and hope I don’t get immune to it.)

It’s taken some time, and its taken spilling the Very Bad News to certain people, to make me feel that I can start crawling out of the hole I’ve dug. I owe a huge debt to my favorite platypus for simply letting it be known that he’s there for me. I also owe a huge debt to someone else for not hesitating to DM me on Twitter and check in. To the friends and strangers that sent me virtual hugs, I thank you as well. There were two certain boys who make me feel appreciated all the time, and gave me a super awesome present, and they were also instrumental in helping me crawl out, even though there was no way they could know what it meant to me. (And oddly enough, the certain boys were not in instrument… I just couldn’t think of a better word!)

I’m feeling hopeful for the first time since this nonsense began that I will get past this and get stable again. The Very Bad News isn’t going away from what I can tell so far… although a part of me does hope that it resolves itself sooner rather than later. (Those of you in the know, I think you understand why a quicker resolution is better than dragging it out. I’m not trying to be cold, just realistic.) It’s that hope which is so much more important than the drugs when it comes to my “recovery”.

And recovering I am.

Again.