i got obsessed recently with getting our cds in order. I knew for a long time paul and I had duplicates of the same cds, but thankfully it wasn’t that many. We found a 500 cd holder at freaking tower for under a 100 bucks, so we bought home and let my compulsive/obsessive nature shine through.
May I present you with the complete cd collection of lisa and paul.
Since Paul keeps asking me what CDs we own and he was bitching that i was not incorporating his CDs in with mine, i finally gave up and did this little project.
The case, despite being absurdly cheap, is actually pretty nice looking. We were using those standard 300 cd cases that you can buy at walmart for like 20 bucks, but every time you touched it, it almost fell over. Some of the 500 and 1000 cases I’ve been looking at were pricing at several hundred bucks. Who knew Tower would have something I needed? I usually despise that store for being so overpriced and full of wanna be trendoids. Majority of the time when I do buy cds, i buy them online now a days, but then again, who doesn’t buy shit online?
I’ve gotten hooked on yahoo — in more ways than one. I found out you can add all your checking, savings and credit card accounts on one page without having to look them up separately.
I’m so excited i could have cream my panties.
Btw, I’m looking for a new spades partner to play on pogo.com. come help a sistah out.
i have cramps.
x0x0x
lisa
Month: September 2000
autumn in virginia
fall has officially fallen upon us.
i can see a joke somewhere in there but I’m too tired to really think about it right now.
i love fall. when i see girls in sweaters and jeans i want to rush home and put on sweaters and jeans too. i love the way the air is crisp and how surreal the world looks against everything. i love the feeling of the wind against my cheeks and how my hands tingle when they get cold. i love the cravings i get for soup, hot cocoa and for chili.
tomorrow i go back to the shrink to start my therapy.
for the last few days I’ve been trying to reconcile things inside me i have not liked nor wanted to admit. many of them too personal for me to even begin to discuss to anyone let alone a public journal. perhaps i am afraid of the outcome, i do not know. i do know that i had gotten myself all riled up on the way home from work today that I sat on the toilet and cried while Paul looked concerned from the shower (naked and wet pauly, mmm).
My life, as we all know it in these last few years, has gone topsy turvy. i keep thinking back to the fall of 1994 when I was entering college for the second time — this time as a full time student. When I made the commitment to myself that this was something I was willing to do, I found that i loved what I was doing. I took the step and joined the paper, I excelled in school and I had friends all over the place. Then things change. And they kept changing.
Does anyone realize how hard being open and honest is. That choices need to be made to make you happy and that you need to make those choices to make yourself happy. But you don’t feel like you are being human, what choices do you have to begin with. Sometimes life is like a shell to me. You go through these emotions day in and day out — but they are not even really emotions, they are just motions. Putting on a brave face pretending to be something you aren’t. Why do people feel like they are so unhappy? Sometimes I wish I knew.
Sometimes I think I watch too much Felicity.
love,
Decadence Tackycake
this is my story and i’m sticking to it
paul got fired.
from his job.
apparently what had happened, was that VA Linux (after the merger with Andover) went through and fired 30 of the 100 employees — who were all top management/CXX something or another. While paul was technically a senior programmer, he was listed as director of e- commerce (at 20! go beat that!).
Pauls in better spirits than I am. i hate rejection. I hate not knowing what’s going to happen (on the flip side, every time I’ve gotten fired, I’ve always known I’d get another job).
Paul is the exact same way. Since he found out yesterday afternoon, he has been on the phone scheduling interviews and sending out his resume. He’s fast asleep snoring right now from doing more work in the last two days looking for a damn job than he has in a long time (so I feel). 😉
I’m teasing, of course.
Vandover was gracious enough to give him a months severance plus his two week vacation time PLUS he still has one month on his health insurance (unlike me when I was frog marched out of Slip.Net).
The silver lining is that I got a bonus and a raise and can call myself a “Senior” systems engineer at UUnet. whoopee.
Or something.
Plus I got a new boss — so I’m mucho happy. I like my new boss. She’s nifty.
I’m not handling pauls firing as well as he is. I’ve gone through more chocolate and eating binges than you can shake a stick at. Paul’s happy because basically with his mad skillz he knows that he can find another job fairly quickly and the extra money is just that — extra money. But technically, I’m the breadwinner in the household, and I’m scared. because what if he DOESN’T find another job (unlikely) and then the obsession starts again.
I’ve repeated myself here haven’t i?
blame ciannait for starting on the obsession.
no really.
Another obsession I’ve found is the tv show “angel”. okay you can stop laughing now. I’m being serious.
I was BORED BORED BORED tonight (paul was redoing his resume –again to make it perfect) and i was tired from having gone to the chiropractor earlier in the morning to be aligned. all i wanted to do was rest and watch teevee.
we have 145 channels and NOTHING IS EVER ON. finally i realize the only thing that is on worth watching is “Buffy” and “Angel” afterwards. Buffy, was at best, okay. Angel was much better and I enjoyed wasting 60 minutes on fluff. Plus Angel is a damn hottie. So now that I’ve gotten this new obsession, I’ve been combing the web looking for information about the previous season. This whole fanfic thing scares me. People are damn crazy.
kmart is just so goff
it’s weird being on this laptop after not having used it for nearly three months. It was my main machine of choice once my old desktop went up to become the file server/firewall/router for our little home network.
Little.
Heh.
Paul and I combined have 5 desktops and three latops.
Plus we are looking at getting me an imac in the future with an almost even split between windows/mac/linux boxes.
I’m attempting to upgrade the desktop i currently use right now to winME final version, however, it’s not working properly and I’m going to have to bitch someone soon.
Our “server” room is a mess. a 14×12 room that is technically a bedroom that has two 8′ tables for desks. two good size bookcases and two 300 each cd racks.
and it’s a mess. Along with boxes of old computer crap we picked up from Signe. I would dare say I’m the only one in America with a cisco 2501 router sitting underneath the sink in their bathroom.
plus i know how to use it.
i love my job.
i’m a star baby
an idiot that i know (who, even though i have him banned on aol IM, icq and generally toss his emails — he’s *likes* the abuse) did email me about a clever site that ranks journals/blogs into proper order. so i put mine in and became a star! baby! yah!
it’s silly. i got the most hits and the lowest rating. hahaha.
that just cracks me the fuck up.
are you shrunk yet?
i actually got up on time.
this is a major shock to me, my dog and paul as i rolled out of bed at 7 to get ready to head to the shrinks office. i was nervous. i chain smoked and checked my bank account [ob: to prove how much of a procrastinator i am, i will get up at 8, sit in front of my computer till 8:30 checking email and my online bank account, jump in the shower at 8:30 and leave at 9. I have to be to work at 9. Apparently, my yo-yo of a bank balance is more important than work.], surfed for a few minutes. Left somewhat on time (i thought 7:45, i left at 8:05. Appointment was at 8:45].
I was scared.
I lied. I hate shrinks because I’m afraid I’m going to admit something i don’t want to admit. pauls the best thing that has happened to me in a long time and i don’t need some scholar to tear down this relationship because he is 8 years younger than me. i fidgeted in traffic. i called my mother and spoke to her for 20 minutes as i weaved my way around the beltway. i park and walk in the office and fill out paperwork and she brought me into her office at 9.
I broke down.
This was the consultation to determine if i needed counseling. I cried. I cried when talking about my mother, the passing of my father and my very fragmented life. I cried for the first time in a long time (okay, not that long time) but I cried because I finally felt the relief that I was going to be okay.
Dr. Buyse wasn’t that bad. In all honesty she was really nice and I could easily speak with her. My mouth did drop open when she asked me about Paul and I’s sex life (something I had not expected, though Paul and I had made light of it the night before). We spoke and touch on so many issues, it really was a wonder that I hadn’t pursued this before.
I didn’t feel like the big bad bitch anymore.
I felt so good after the session that I had immediately gone to starbucks and gotten my usual raspberry mocha frap and a few cookies since I had skipped breakfast. But I felt motivated for the first time in a long time. Motivated to get work done on issues and to finally start putting my life in place.
I knew though, from her comments, she regarded me as a pet project. Who wouldn’t with a cornucopia of crap bubbling inside of me (anxiety, depression, alcoholism, child abuse, suicide, divorced family, etc). I’m a freaking field day for any day doctor worth their salt. She calmed my fears about klonopin, the drug I’m on now. Turns out it’s the *least* addictive of the somethingoranothers family it’s part of. My taking .25mg a day (the period is not a typo) is like, for some people, having a cup of cawfee a day. it’s my crutch, and i know it, but it helps.
I’m frustrated by the utter lack of support and information about anxiety available on the web. I’m frustrated by how often it is misdiagnosed and how often (from reading) that anxiety brings out other problems. I’m frustrated by some of the doctors I’ve read about who have a carefree attitude about it.
it’s a disease. it makes my life hell and has been for the last 15 years (if you go back to when i had my first attack at 13). it’s misunderstood, misdiagnosed and mistreated. I do not have a heart problem, depression, thyroid problem or anything else. My name is lisa m. rabey and i have anxiety disorder.
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
it’s going on 11pm and I’m already thumbing my nose at the shrink.
you see, in approximately 9.5 hours, I’ll be sitting down with one Dr. Buyse to discuss my issues.
At 250 bucks an hour, she better be good.
But i have issues with going to the shrink.
It’s long been suggested to me that I see a shrink. in fact I’ve been in and out of therapy since i was NINE. but no, I’m too strong to see someone. why do i need a shrink? i mean, most of them are full of crock pot theories and BS anyway. I’ve been to so many doctors, *I* should have the Phd, not the other way around. according to them, i have seasonal depression, manic depression, obsessive/compulsive disorder, anxiety issues, separation issues, first child issues. need i go on? I’m not making this up, if in all honesty i were really that sick, i would be locked up somewhere banging my head against the wall.
but i digress.
so I’m sitting here wasting time instead of writing this new journal because I’m trying not to think about why I’m having issues about some woman whose as expensive as a Vegas hooker (i have “woman” issues as well it seems).
see, it’s really really simple:
a couple of months ago, when it all came down to the wire with my health and i was having panic attacks on an HOURLY basis, my doc suggested i see someone. so i said fine and i made an appointment. I make the appointment through Kaiser’s “behavioral health” clinic, where i pay my cheap ass co-pay to some person who is not a specialist but an overall therapist and that freaked me out. Because it freaked me out so much, I started doing some research on social and general anxiety disorders and came across some website for the such and such anxiety disorder group of America. i checked out Virginia and got a list of some shrinks in my area and call them to get more information.
Dr Buyse was the ONLY one who called me back.
which stands to reason, if you are serious shrink, why would you not call someone back — even to tell them you caseload was full? what if you had obsessive/compulsive disorder — you’d be sitting there having issues about it left and right.
right?
right.
so for the last month we’ve been playing phone tag. i call her, she calls me back. i call her back.
you get the drift.
A few weeks back, i go into work on a monday morning and get a message she had left me the night before. she called me at work. on. a. Sunday. Her voicemail explains she has an opening coming up and wants me to give her a call back. Since monday’s are ultra busy, I didn’t call her back that day. Tuesday I was out and Wednesday I was in back to back meetings. I call her early Thursday and leave her a voicemail. again.
she calls me back *at home* that night and attempts to chastise me. she proceeds to tell me her time is valuable and she gets TEN new referrals a WEEK. that the cost and time of such anxiety behavior is not beneficial to anyone if one is not making responsible decisions and especially when one is wasting her time (ie not calling her back on HER schedule).
I wanted to tell her “then why do you leave me voicemails on Sunday at my WORK number if it is so freaking important. Why didn’t you call me at home?”
but i didn’t. so I’ve been obsessing about not telling her that. I’ve been replying my conversations with her over and over in my head for the last week, because i was pissed off that here was a potential patient she was speaking with (me) and she’s basically putting the smack down on me for not calling her back on her schedule, which I was not aware of to begin with! When the conversation ended I asked her coldly what was the appropriate call back period when she left a message. She said “end of business day”.
I had been mulling this all over all week when she calls and leaves me a voicemail on my home machine the past Sunday that she had a monday appointment available at 8:30am. I call her back and leave her another voicemail telling her that I cannot make it, thank you for the offer and please call me back.
So her brusque receptionist calls me back a few days later and tells me that she does have an appointment on Friday at 8:30 am and that would i like it?
Which fucking ate into my chiropractor appointment at 10am.
So do I finally go see this woman or do I go get relief by having my back cracked. The chiropractor was getting irritated because I keep canceling and changing appointments around. I was getting irritated with the shrink.
Someone hates me up there.
I opted for the shrink appointment to finally get it over with. Telling this woman off, even at 250 dollars an hour, will make me feel better. Plus, I do have an appointment with the cheap (10 dollar) shrink later on next week.
How many people actually shop for shrinks?
In all honesty, I’m beginning not to care who i talk to as long as i talk to someone. i need to get some issues resolved and I’ve been putting it off for a long time. but there are a lot of things I’m sure she’ll tell me is not healthy (such as having a relationship with someone 8 years my junior) or what not. stuff i really do want to hear.
maybe I’m just projecting.
domainslut dot org
a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
i got an email the other day from someone who wanted to congratulate me on writing such a strong first journal. i had to start laughing, because in all my efforts to shed certain personas i had finally gotten it right and someone who was unaware of nearly four years of archives from TLC was sitting mere hops away from where he is.
but it made me feel good in some sort of loved way as well.
but in case you haven’t figured it out, modgirl.net now points to the same ip as modgirl.net. I had moe just change the ips to point to modgirl’s so that there would be no more redirects. In essence, anyone who had bookmarked modgirl.net will not have to update them. However, this is not the lisa chronicles. but I still do suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch.
the archives and a new site design will be coming in the future. I’ve been concentrating on content and not visual beauty.
schwa.
i had something else important.
oh yah. i got a promotion.
woofuckingwoo.
or something.
Excuse me for being in a dry wit mood. lately it seems that’s the only mood I’ve been in.
i prefer for it to be called bitter and cynical, but I’m sure someone will point out I’m having issues again.
x0x0x0x
lisa
pink grapefruit
“Sweet and tart at the same time, you’re bursting with sun-kissed goodness. If you were a song, you’d be “It’s a Sunshine Day” by the Brady Bunch — you’re just that perky and refreshing. That’s not to say that you don’t have an edge — quite the contrary. In fact, a little bit of sugar (aka gifts, praise, and other goodies) can always bring out your naturally sweet flavor. But when it comes down to it, you prefer folks who can match you in strength and independence. Luckily, that kind of attitude is appealing, so you always have ’em wanting more. Citrusy, tangy, and a little exotic, you’re a truly tasty treat.” — from What’s your flavor?.
insomnia strikes again
it’s apparently 2:33am and I’ve spent the better part of these early hours whittling down my email inbox from close to 60 personal emails to below 20. Some of you may think this is nothing — but — some of these go back over six months ago. I’m horrid, I know. So what happens when I whittle down my email? Inbound mail is spool’d and Moe is sleeping so I can’t kick him to unspool it. Murphy’s law #1.
As many of you may have noticed, modgirl.net is now up and running. however, while the main page looks okay, the archives and everything else i was salvaging from modgirl.net hasn’t been moved over yet. I’ve updated a few things on the premise that when i do the site redesign sometime this week, I’ll have everything up and clean. fresh start. what is even funnier is that modgirl.net is still getting massive hits but very few are trickling over here. which is fine by me i guess — i was getting disturbed by how people were finding me via my entries. what was interesting to note was that the NUMBER ONE THING for keyword that brought people to my site was “obsessive/compulsive/anxiety”. oh of course, sex ranked up there in the top 5, but i was just astounded by how many of my hits were coming from my cryptic discussions on the above diseases.
i am doing — okay.
that is about the only word i can describe at 2:37 in the morning right now. I’m on this mania high. my goal was to return all the email my cousins had sent me after my father had died (which i never did) and all the personal email in my inbox that i had not replied to in eons. one person (who thankfully has three email accounts) had his email bounce back to me twice (from two of those accounts). i was sitting there adding my “rings” to my brand spanking new yahoo id! (gotta love creativity — i refuse to have any “name” with numbers, underscores, hyphens or any other alphanumeric in it).
lately there has been this rash of “self-help” in the people who i know. everyone seems to be either sick, getting over themselves or making attempts to get better whether it’s physically, emotionally or just over all well-being. I’ve got five people using breathe-right strips after i told them it helped with me stop sleeping with my damn teeth grinding.
people are going to chiropractors, doing yoga and generally feeling more feisty.
the change in the weather has helped me calm down enormously. i no longer feel angry and when i do — it’s over something silly. I’m attempting to kid myself that I’ll wake up in three hours and be able to function.
but on the other hand, while i attempt to take a look at life and things around me (like noticing the sky the other night driving home and the sun filtering between the break in the clouds) or designs I’m seeing everywhere in nature, man-made and what not, slowly, very very very slowly; I’m starting to relax.
not much mind you.
but enough.
now only if i can stop eating Mickey d’s, my life would be complete.
x0x0x0x
lisa
some people collect thimbles, i collect domain names
I’ve bought 2 more domains.
if you are reading this now, you will now see that you are sitting at modgirl.net (or modgirl.org even though nothing points to that direction right now and probably will not in the future. however, for 10 dolla and fortytwo cents a year for registration, whose to bitch?).
the domain count is now: simunye.com, simunye.org, bitchasshoe.org, trippingonstars.org, geek-haus.org, novageeks.org, verbosity.org, modgirl.net, modgirl.net, modgirl.org.
i really really think I’m done now.
If you think that’s bad, I came up with a list of all the AIM names I’ve come up with (and registered) over the years:
in reverse chronological order:
LisaIsAModGirl
lisadefleurs
manicpanicangel
pr0nstah
litebritegirl
UUnetGrl
vixenchyk
sipgirl
linuxgurl
sarahphile
those are the ones i REMEMBER.
I’m sure I’ve also forgetting a few. probably. old age kicking in.
pauls also gone and finally gotten himself a home. of course, we had an argument on how to spell it.
if it were not for joker and a thesaurus, I’d be out of business.
any given monday
i realized, without realization, what and who i wanted to be. that image, so perfect and clean that had been eluding me these odd twenty-eight years (technically, anything over ten should be 10 such as twenty-eight should be 28. At least for newspaper journalism — MLA handbook). i began my daily ritual, which required me to open up and start writing only to get lost in all those words. a mere mention of “the sound of music” lent me to spending several hours searching about the family via various engines (mamma, hotbot, altavista, google, oh my!) only to find little to nothing on the family. disappointed i started reading various online journals (always the voyeur, never the participant) and lost several hours again.
I’m watching Wednesday chew on the “brides” magazine i had bought nearly a month ago and wonder where all the time has gone (magazine has gone unread as like the rest of my subscriptions to rolling stone, brills content, penthouse letters and nerve among others). a pile nearly 3 feet deep reigns on one my shelves of magazines waiting to be read — the kind you want to read on a Sunday afternoon when it’s raining. one does not go out to buy an inch edition of vanity fair featuring the slightly obsessive gwynnie paltrow when one has that kind of material lying around does one? yes, one certainly does.
I’ve have a big crush on maura. she’s so keen.
life often continues on this spiral I’ve noticed. dreams and wishes and things we want only to never really achieve them. magazines often feel like that kind of etherealness. i think gwynnie paltrow is the WORSE actress known to man (I’ve walked out on Shakespeare in love), but I’m obsessed by her and her life. the glam-carefee life of the social diva. vanity fair spoiled me for the next few days as i dream about what it would be like to have grown up on the upper west side of ny, to summer in the hamptons and to have gone to a private school so elite, your blood must be so blue that it’s black to get in.
it’s in times like this that i often think about my own family and my heritage, how i guffaw about my great-grandfather the booze runner in the 1920’s, my grandfather the bricklayer and my father who was taxi cab driver (as one of his many professions). i dream and wonder why i couldn’t have that kind of life — where money and prestige was something i could have been born to and not dream about.
I REALLY WANT THESE PANTS!.
Wednesday is chewing on my toes.