Author: pookiebear

reverb

Those few hours between when I had ended my last entry and went to my shrinks were the longest in my life. Or so it felt. Once I had gotten into her office, I started bawling and I couldn’t stop. I had no idea what was wrong or what was wrong with me and why I could not stop crying.
What had partially happened medically is that I had started a new birth control pill called yasmin and had slowly started weaning myself off of Effexor. Dr. B. thinks it was a combination of the pill and the weaning of the Effexor that made me, um, lose control (if you want to call it that). She immediately gave me a low dose of Effexor and had me check back in with her Wednesday to do follow up.
On Wednesday I felt a bit more in control of myself when I went to see her, more composed and more willing to talk. She prescribed a lithium derivative (600mgs) so that my daily pill intake is now:

  • 1 birth control pill
  • 1 37.5mg of Effexor
  • 2 150mg of Serzone
  • 2 300mg of lithobid
  • 1 multivitamin

I stare at all the pills in my hand and just wonder what the fuck I’ve done to get this far in life. A shelf in one of the kitchen cabinets looks like a pharmacy as I keep all my meds and vitamins (and for some reason, a bottle of hair dye — can you NOT see the irony with that one?) with half open bottles of various prescriptions I’ve had over the last few years. The good drugs, such as klonopin, are kept in my purse for ’emergancies’. The fucked up thing with klonopin is that when I was having panic attacks left and right last week, I popped the full pill and it didn’t seem to do anything. Which was odd because in the past, 1/4 of the pill was fine. That bothered me.
Even with all the goddamn drugs I’m on, I’m STILL having panic attacks. Had one today when I was playing video games with Alisha and my heart started racing (160bpm — I counted) and I excused myself to the bathroom. When I had gotten an EKG back in January, the on-call doctor had shown me a few tricks to slow my heart rate down, and one of the tricks is to ‘push down’ like you are taking a shit, which I was doing er well attempting while I was sitting down next to Alisha but I just excused myself and went to the bathroom any ways. I had this feeling my face looked like I was constipated. I went into the bathroom, and did the exercise for a few moments and my heart rate slowed down to less than half of what it was. I don’t think Alisha ever knew.

about a girl

i was crying this morning while i was making coffee.
Considering that i had scratched and punched Paul on Saturday, that is somewhat of an improvement.
let me backtrack:
For the last few weeks, mentally, something had not been going right inside my head. I started coming home from work, eating dinner and almost promptly going to bed. Stuff like school, writing, NaNoWriMo, my journal, etc all went out the window. I felt like I was being dragged down into this cesspit of despair but nothing externally had changed. Paul and i were still, well Paul and I, my mother still hadn’t gotten her SSI yet and I was still supporting her and everything else gosh darn remained the same.
But then stupid little incidents started setting me off. Customers who were dumber than a box of rocks (nothing new, however, I seemed to be taking a new path on how to deal with them which wasn’t good), people on mailing lists I would blow up on and use this foul language that bothered even me. The woman who ran me off the side of the road on Saturday, every little slight against me sent me into this fury that pissed me off so much I was shaking physically. I was/am spinning out of control and I do not know how to stop it.
On Saturday, I was sitting at my computer all nonchalant like when Paul asked me to fix the printer. He was prepping the list for us to go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner and I just blew up at him. My movement was so fluid, that I had no time to think or to react. I got up, and started punching and scratching Paul. I threatened to stab him with something. All the while he is looking at me like “What the fuck are you doing?” I started screaming at him about why couldn’t he fix the printer himself and i tried to force open said printer when he started yelling at me I was doing it all wrong. Once I got the printer opened, I took the color cartridge out of its place and shook it all over him, leaving drops of blue and red ink on his white T-shirt. I just did not give a flying fuck. At some point, I went and laid down, to help calm down, and that did not seem to help either. All I kept thinking about was sliding a knife down my arm vertically and just fucking ending it all. Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck my mother and my family, fuck work and most especially fuck Paul.
But I didn’t grab a knife, I just laid down and slept for a few hours hoping that the monsters would go away.
They of course, did not.
Sunday morning, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and went to the massage therapist. All the work my chiropractor had done on me for the last year had gone to hell in a handbasket as all the pain i started suffering came rushing back within the last month or so. I can’t sleep, I’m angsty and i feel like stabbing someone. really. Charisma (yes, really, that is her name) started working on me and i felt myself tense up and eventually relax. By the time I had left her an hour later, my body was like rubber. However, later on that day, I was back to being pent up, angsty, angry Lisa. Nothing was working. Not massage, not going to the chiropractor, not drugs, not relaxing, nothing. zip. nada.
I’ve never thought of myself as a cutter and have prided myself on being ‘too smart’ to follow through with cutting myself or attempting suicide, but, I’m telling you, the idea felt warm and safe in my head Saturday and this morning, the fact that all this frustration and anger came welling to the top, I’m this close to wanting to hurt myself. I’m literally hanging on by a thread.
in over a year of being with my therapist, not once can i honestly say that i wanted to hurt myself until recently. Oh, i had bouts when on new drugs that the idea seemed to be golden, but, i rationally knew it was the drugs not how i felt consciously. My family, genetically, seems to dispel drugs like there is no tomorrow. My mother had been on various anti-whatevers for the last year and she would get to the point where she would be okay, she would be almost maniac but not quiet and then BOOM, she would fall. With me, it is almost the same. Prozac, paxil, Effexor, zolotf, now Serzone all seem to have the same effects one me — fine for awhile, then the drug does not work anymore. I’m tired of feeling out of control and like my life is spinning 180 degrees. I fought so fucking hard to not be where I was five years ago only to find that it seems worthless. I feel worthless and I feel like my life is not worth it.
My eyes are welling up with tears again, like they have been for the last few weeks or so. Everything, everything is setting me off. I feel so fucking helpless, because i AM seeing a therapist, i AM taking anti-whatever drugs, i AM going to a chiropractor, i AM seeing a massage therapist. NOTHING IS WORKING. I’m so fucking pissed because I’m doing all the ‘right’ things, and yet i feel I’m back where i started over a year ago. That fuels my anger even more and i want to hurt myself or someone around me.
I just got done making breakfast as I decided it was in the best interest that I not go in today. I’m lucky, in that, half my department is fucking loony toons and that they know my history that I can call in ‘sick’ and tell them really why i was ‘sick’.
I sat there chopping up onions and green peppers thinking I can make this omelette (which, I of course burn) and the thought of slicing my skin is still there. I watch the omelette burn and I have this special omelette pan in which when I flipped it over, a plastic part of the pan starts burning stinking up my kitchen. I toss the whole mess into a regular frying pan and end up making scrambled eggs with potatoes, onions, and green peppers.
My life could be described just like that: it’s a mess so i transfer it over to something else. I’m tired, oh so tired of fighting to stay alive. I keep myself in check all these years, busting my ass to do the right things, and to make up for all the things i feel I’ve done to slight people and myself and I can not catch up. I just can’t do it anymore.
For a long time, I wanted to be crazy, like really crazy , mental hospital crazy, but my mom’s experience this summer showed that what i saw in movies and what was real were wildly different things. I still want to be crazy, I feel worthless enough because I cannot accomplish anything feasible. Everything feels like this huge burden that I cannot even begin to touch.
You’re a child, and you are told from day one that you are special and worthwhile and bright and gifted. You are told you can do anything you want, that the world is your oyster and you cannot fail at anything.
Then the chemistry changes and at the age of nine you are seeing a therapist because “you’ve been a bad girl,” and your mother keeps yelling at you how everything is your fault, and you are grounded not for days or weeks but for months and years. You run and escape into books and feel paranoid. You feel like everyone is out to get you and you can’t understand why at the age of 9,10,11 why you don’t have friends like other people have friends. You’ve spent so much of your young life being grounded that you miss out on birthday parties and events with other kids. You don’t have friends. The people who say there are your friends only use you because you are stupid enough or naive enough to think they like you. But they don’t, not really. Kids are cruel creatures.
So you grow up, your family moves, and you start a new school where no one knows you. You think that you can be anything you want to be, but your attempts at making friends is feeble and you spend most of your lunch periods reading or writing, always alone. Your 13. Your body changes and you suddenly develop breasts and lose some of the baby fat, and suddenly guys want to date you. You still feel like this insecure be-speckled person you were when you were nine and 10. Fat, worthless, pointless. You don’t know what changed but now people want to be your friend, but they are they wrong type of friends. They are the ‘bad kids’, but you don’t care because someone finally pays attention to you and you feel happy because now you have ‘friends’, and that’s all you wanted. Everything becomes this big blur as you enter high school and everyone leaves you alone because they either don’t know you or assume you are a transferring senior when really you’re just a 5’10 150lb freshman. You still think you were so fat. Then you go on the special school trip where your class of AP students travel to Kentucky. You get lured into and locked into a cabin with the swim team where they get this bright idea to gang rape you. You fight and claw and run screaming into the bathroom and a friend saves you. But no one is told. Not the parents, not the guardians, no one. You sit through the going away party glaring at the boys who had tried to harm you and they act nothing is going on. Back to school, everything changes and suddenly rumors are spreading and the same boys who grabbed you are leering at you and making comments. Kids are so cruel, they didn’t mean it.
You start getting older, 14, 15 and things remain the same. You now feel like two people instead of one. One who doesn’t give a fuck and the one who does. She (me/i/her) still hangs out with the ‘bad kids’ and the other half goes and starts studying for the LSAT. The two worlds cannot reconcile themselves and the fighting at home becomes worse and your mother keeps taking you to separate therapists where you confess just what an awful child you are. You start a new habit of breaking things. You get angry and start breaking anything made of china or glass. Your friends get used to it and you laugh it off and your mother gets angry for breaking all the dish ware in the house. You had as a child taken a point of where you used to sew your fingers together with needle and thread, through the upper layers of your skin. You would sew and sew and then rip it out gingerly and start over again. You used to pull huge clumps of hair out. At 16,17 and 18, nothing has changed. You lose your virginity to someone you don’t love only to have him dump you four days later for a whore. You sleep with whoever and you don’t care, thinking your this badass who can deal with it and you know they are jerks and won’t call you again. You spend a lot of time hiding under your desk when on the phone, as if the wrath of your family is just that bad, but your family consists of a younger brother and a mother and how can it be so bad?
Anyone who was seriously into you, and I mean seriously into you, leaves because they can’t deal with the mania and the depression that follows. Sometimes you forget to eat and when you do eat, you gain weight. Except now you are cycling, between the mania and the depression. You move again and again with your mother and move to Toronto when your 18, only to find that the lessons you had learned as a child are still with you. You come back having only made a few friends, didn’t leave the house and nothing changed for you. It was still the same.
Then it cycles faster.
And as you get older, you notice that the so-called ‘adults’ you are supposed to be, still have the same tenacity as the children you knew. No one is interested in being ‘real’ or friends with you, they would rather lie, cheat and steal. Instead of hair pulling or sewing, you cry and don’t leave your room for days. Friends call and want to go out, and you have panic attacks thinking about leaving the house. Then a few days later everything is ‘fine’ and you pretend nothing happens.
Your world has become disjointed and you tell yourself you’ll pull out of this bullshit and move on. But you can’t reconcile the differences between reality and fantasy. Reality is much too fucking painful to deal with. Either that or your sense of reality is too fucking painful. You don’t see happiness or warmth in anything, it’s all gray and dark and dismal.
Memories keep shooting up to the forefront and you still cry. You cry when your mother left you with cast up to your thigh on the Christmas you were 22 and your 16 year old brother was with you to help you use the port-a-potty because you could not walk the 50′ to the bathroom. Your brother helps you up the stairs and you really bathe for the first time in a week and your next door neighbors come over on Christmas day and help you hobble over to their house for dinner. THEN the police show up at your door because your father is worried you were being mistreated (22, no phone in the house, no food and your mother and her husband are gone for the holidays). The following Christmas your mother gives you a bottle of washer fluid for your car, and you sit there crying. Your brother and you start a tradition where you go to blockbuster and grab burger king for dinner. You hate Christmas and all the fake cheer that is associated with it.
Now you are 29. Next year you’ll be 30. All through the years you’ve kept a pretty good handle on the monsters. You’ve kept them at bay and worked to not let them interfere with your life on day to day basis, but you know that is a lie of sorts. If you really kept them at bay, you would not be suffering this pseudo-breakdown you are today. You feel embarrassed and guilty for bringing it up, and the non-stop headaches you have lately does not dissipate with bringing all this information forward.
Part of you, a good chunk of you, has given up. It’s easier to automate your life and work on that than to work on what’s really bothering you, but even you don’t know what’s bothering you anymore. Everything seems so trivial and of a lesser extent than when you make it real. But if there were true, there would be no fucking reason why you would be fucking crying at Harry Potter or any other movie that shows some sort of goodness to the heart.
The other part of you, albeit seemingly feeling small and unimportant is hanging on for dear life. Sheer will is keeping you together as your body is trained to handle certain things, but, sheer will is losing out fairly quickly. Rationally you know that you won’t necessarily do anything to harm yourself, but that is fast running low against the monster that wants to hurt you.
The irony of the saying “god only gives you what you can handle” which has been drilled in your head since your Catholic school days is fast losing its hilarity.
———–
I’ve got a 3:30pm appointment today with my shrink.
x0x0x
lisa

11.13.01

Seven months from today I’ll be 30.
Last night Paul and I watched some tivo’d episodes of “AB Fab” and the one episode where Paul felt would be reflective of me is when Edina turns 40. He says her attitude is very reminiscent of what I’ll be like when I turn 30, or maybe when I do turn 40.
Rob and I had met for lunch yesterday at a Mexican place close to the vet, which timed out very well since I had go pick up Pugsley yesterday afternoon. I love our vet, even if they are nearly 1/2 hour away, they are open on the weekend for neuters. Pugsley returned home minus his balls and five teeth, and I returned home stuffed on Mexican food.
The talk turned to NaNoWriMo and my writing of the novel. Rob got very serious about literary criticism which wholly made me doubt what I had written. So last night for a few hours I went over what I had written and denounced it as such crap, I plan on re-writing it. I had this lovely idea in my head on what I wanted only to discover that I couldn’t finish it at the current state it was going through.
Last night in bed I half-awake mused that if I rewrote the first three chapters and pounded out 5k a words a night, I could finish the novel in 10 days, leaving me nine days of freedom.
Don’t think I won’t do this.
x0x0x

6290

is how many words I have so far.
I’m feeling really good about the story but, I”m finding I’m losing concentration some times because I keep jumping around. I have to take a break and get away from my lead character because she’s screaming to get out.
Tonight I’ll probably do homework and work on the story later. Decisions decisions.

pro·crash·ti·na·tion. not a choice but a lifestyle.

it’s early Saturday afternoon and I’ve been up since 7:30. There is no humidity in the house and my skin feels like sandpaper. No matter how much moisturizer that I stick on my body and face, I still feel like my face will crack if I change facial expressions.
I’m in a strange mood. partially because I finished balancing my checkbook (that always causes me joy!) and because I got my first paper back from my lit class. I got a B- which pissed me off but the prof has great comments to say on it.
I’m neglecting everything recently and I’m finding I’m taking on way too much. several projects for the web that I wanted to complete are not done yet, I haven’t been writing for NaNoWriMo like I should and I’ve also been and it seems I spend more time responding to the yahoo club and talking to people ABOUT nano than writing. So that obviously has to change.
my shrink changed my drug prescription because I have racing thoughts and cannot concentrate. basically I’m feeling like wonder woman and getting everything on paper and actually writing nothing but crap.
this must change.

B-

I just got my first paper back for ENG303 that I’m taking at UofMaryland, and I got a b-.
I’m pissed.
But it’s my own damn fault.
I KNEW a month ahead of time when the paper was due. I knew what the paper was going to be about. So what did I do? I waited until the last day it was due, sat around futzing everywhere to write it and finally finished all 3000 words in a shot of glory at 3am Monday morning.
I didn’t edit it, didn’t proof-read it other than spell check and word count (heh) and handed it in. But one thing did make me happy:

Lisa,
You have many interesting ideas to share, and you have the wherewithal to become a good writer. Your vocabulary is strong, and your sentences aim at an admirable complexity. They do not, however, often reach that level, tending instead to break up on the shoals of awkward constructions that make the paper difficult to understand in places. With practice and closer attention to style and the grammatical niceties, you could really develop. For other comments, helpful ones, I hope, see the text of your essays.

SO.
On the rating scale of 1-5, I got fours (good) on everything other than ‘grammar’ and ‘communication’. feh. AND I GOT A B-. I’m grumpy. Maybe he’s a tough person — like they don’t get an ‘A’ other than being perfect. I am not perfect (here we go hitting oneself upside the head again).
I’ve been solely neglecting everything, wait I should say de- prioritizing what I should be doing. I need to get myself together and start maybe allocating time to say write the damn novel for NaNoWriMo and writing more here plus the few other blog spots I hang out. Geesh.
I’m off to do homework and write.
x0x0x
Lisa

tuesday

Received a call this morning from my OB/GYN in regards to my sonohysterogram that i had done a few weeks back.
This surprised me because i was ‘supposed’ to make an appointment right after i had it (and fuck, they are both in the same freaking building, i could have just walked upstairs after i had it done) but never got around to doing it. What surprised me about the call was that when I returned the call, the nurse sounded a bit, hectic to see me. As in “we need to see you right away” kind of voice. The voice that kind of made me “shit” and tell my bosses i had to leave work early this afternoon to go see the OB/GYN. I wasn’t nervous, afraid or really concerned. I just figured, well, whatever happens happens and I’ll take it as that.
Turns out my instincts (or feelings as it were) were correct. It was officially diagnosed today, October 30, 2001; that I have Polycystic Ovarian Disease (PCOD). Now the irony of this is that I self-diagnosed myself a few years back when I stumbled across a site that talked about the PCOD and it’s related symptoms (excessive body hair, missed periods, mood swings, being overweight, etc) and I said “god damnit! that is me to a T!” but the doctors I had been dealing with at Kaiser Permente have been like “well, you don’t overtly have the symptoms (seeing as my ‘excessive body hair’ was not like an ape, so i was okay according to them) and well your blood work came back normal, so, therefore you don’t have it.”
I was frustrated with KP because they seemed to take this kind of attitude with everything they do in regards to health care. It took prodding from my mother to get an ultra-sound and me going to see a highly recommended OB/GYN (and willing to shell out the 250 a visit that he charges for out of network costs) to get this resolved. But I’m HAPPY that it’s official, because now I don’t feel like I’m being psychosomatic with having these freaking issues with my period and ‘female problems’.
I went through three separate blood tests (one with KP when I was on the pill and two with the new doc before and after my period). I’m healthy as a horse. There is, chemically, nothing that indicates that I have PCOD (which was what KP was going by) and it took the sonohysterogram to prove that my ovaries were cystic to get the point across. Well bully for me for being healthy, considering I’m 80lbs overweight, I smoke and only recently have I been eating properly.
So the good doctor (who is cute to boot) is putting me on a new pill to help shed the lining of my uterus and to get everything under control. Getting a D&C is not really necessary in the future unless i don’t start shedding. I can have kids in the future (I still consider myself too young at 29 to be birthing them babies), but heck, at least i know i have the chance now, where as before, I didn’t think I could.
The other irony is that I had bounced a check, oh say a month or so ago, at the local salon where I go and get my nails done. No big deal to me, ShittyFucks is forever having problems with their “computers” (so they say). I don’t feel embarrassed to have bounced a check and I don’t think other people should feel that way either. So, anyway, I go in to get my nails filled and I tell the receptionist “I bounced a check two weeks ago, I just found out the other day via my bank and I see you have not resubmitted it yet. I can pay for it right now if you wish.” The receptionist looks at me like “Ohmygosh, I can’t believe you are publicly admitting that you are bouncing a check” and says out loud “Well, we don’t handle this ourselves, this is handled by our other office in Arlington.” And I was like “Fine, what should I do?” and she states wait till I hear from the main office.
So I waited.
I’ve been back to the salon TWICE since this (I go every two weeks to get the nails filled, I do) and I have yet to receive anything from them. So I come home today and check the mail and finally have something from the main office. Dated over a week ago — telling me “This is a serious manner and will not be taken lightly. If we do not receive payment within the time allotted, other collection actions may be taken.”
Now, if it were so damn important for them to receive the forty-one dollars from me, why did it take them nearly TWO months to let me know the check bounced? And why did they date it a week and a half ago and yet I only received it TODAY? And the best part! They are having me pay at the salon I bounced the damn check at.
Personally, I find this highly hilarious and I’m slightly pissed off. I’ve gone to this company and told them, every time I’ve gone in since the check bounced, that I have yet to receive word about said check. I value my credit and I honor my debts, and I’m a bit pissed at this letter. I don’t have a qualm paying for the bounced check, I have a qualm with thinly veiled threats when it took them two months to get back to me on this.
I think it’s the principle of the thing.
But then again it’s been said I’m weird.
——————————–
It’s 9:28pm and Paul is playing with our new sound system and I’m yawning as I have to go to bed for a 4am turn up in the morning. To get in the spirit of things, I went out and bought a cordless phone with a headset to work with customers. heh. I’m taking this on-call shit a bit too serious sometimes. But then again, a cordless phone with a headset isn’t a bad idea. God bless Radioshack.
x0x0x
Lisa
 

enough

I got on the scale this morning and when I saw how much weight I was gaining back, I decided enough was enough.
Back in late April, a friend of mine and I went to Weight Watchers and where I had lost 20 lbs in nearly two months. I had kept the weight off for the most part of the summer and while I was gone to MIchigan for five weeks — and still kept it off up to about a month ago. The 20 lbs was just a drop in the bucket to the grand total, but I’ve noticed that my weight has slowly been creeping up again and I thought to myself “Self, time to take WW seriously again”.
Lately I’ve been feeling overrun with items mainly because of school and work. My mothers situation hasn’t been helping in the slightest and I’ve also been feeling the pressure to start too many effing projects only to not finish them. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and I’m letting the stress lead me to eat food and not think about what it’s doing to my body.
Plus my jeans are getting tight again and the irony of that is that I bought one size larger than I normally bought in the first place because finding jeans are so hard to fit. I know (and I’ve said this a million times before) that I’ll never be stick thin — and that’s fine. I like having a little bit of wiggle to my body but I want to not have so much wiggle to knock out a third world country.
heh.
So with that being said, I’m going to be working on ‘challenge’ with a few friends of mine within the next few weeks. Nanowrimo starts on Thursday and so I know for the month of November I’m going to be pretty effing busy.
I’m not awake yet.
x0x0x
Lisa

heroin is so passe

i swear, i must have ADD or ADHD or something. I got up at 4am to upgrade a customers bandwidth and thought to myself “Self! You have about 3 hours to work on email/website before you need to get ready to go to the therapists. Use that time wisely grasshoppa!” I responded back “Your right, I’ve been so busy lately that i haven’t had a chance to get caught up on the website or do email or anything”.
So I had these grandiose plans to do an entry this morning and god damnit, I WILL! I can type fast (80wpm) and hopefully I can get this done before I jet out of here before we er I go to the shrinks.
So news news news first:
Paul and I went to the couple therapist a few weeks back and that went okay. I came out of it sounding like a bitch on wheels and he sounded like a monster. I suppose that’s normal for couple therapy. I’ve never been with another person before, so this should be interesting. I think he and I are both afraid of the outcome because we’ve both been pretty passe about going back. But I’m determined to keep my end of the bargain and make us go to get our issues resolved for I am NOT marrying him or committing any further till I feel comfortable doing so. Our fighting has toned down quite a bit but to me, the issues don’t feel so resolved. I still have a lot on my mind but since we are at the point where the arguments become almost moot and I feel like we are spinning our wheels. He IS trying to make things better and I feel so am I, but we’ll see. We have another appointment tomorrow morning.
Work has been driving me nuts — and I asked for it since I was bored so I can’t complain. I’m in the process of re-writing some of our documentation for procedures since some of it is sorely out of date and it was pissing me off. I’ve also started a new project which requires me to carry a pager — starting November 1st I will be the “after-hours scheduled on-call person”. What this means, in short, is that if a customer wants to do a cut over or dns change or whatever after hours, the engineer asks his backup, if the backup declines, than he asks the group. If no one picks it up, I will. I am hoping to do this to defer the cost of my dsl (hahahah — fuckers won’t get me my t1 😮 ) and to help out cos I like doing that kind of stuff. I will be enforcing this like a sunofabitch because we have few engineers who will tell a customer “oh, just call in and someone will do this for you after hours” and this totally pisses me off to no end because it creates false expectations and we have strict after hours procedures since our install department is only open until 7pm EST. So yah, I’ll be doing that. For being on-call (sorta) they usually will install a t1 as “incentive” however since WCOM is being cheap fuckers, this is not happening in my case AND i have dsl (1.5down/384up). BUT! I don’t have static ips, I can’t do my own dns and I can’t get the business dsl from Verizon as they don’t offer static ips ANYWAY (and I’m ohh so close to the CO 😮 ). UUNet does NOT partner with Verizon so basically I carry a pager and they pay for existing dsl line and I can VPN to our network if I so choose.
Also, there was talking of finally giving me a raise in status to level 3 engineer — which means jack to you but it means a new pay for me. BUT since the damn hiring freeze, I’m not getting it and probably won’t get it till when the hiring freeze is over. fuckers.
School is also kicking my ass. I was slacking on the reading assignments for it and I was five weeks behind. But I started hitting the books right after I got home and have caught myself up. I have a paper due this weekend which I will be working on tonight or this weekend (he’s giving us a three day lap to turn it in). I’m taking ONE class right now, but I’m also taking a mid-semester class that starts this week and I’ve already started reading for that class — have to so I won’t fall so far behind.
All of my school work thus far is on-line via UMUC which offers online degrees in various subjects INCLUDING English — hot damn. I might finally get my BA/BS (they keep switching it at UMUC) at one point in my life.
My brother Jeff is trying out for the Grand Rapids Hoops a CBA/IBL professional basketball team this week. There are currently 10 spots open and I’m really confident that he’ll make it. You can read all about the Hoops on their website and cheer my brother on. Plus the mofo will finally start paying me back for all the freaking money I loaned him in the last few years.
November is gonna keep me really busy as I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. In short, the contest is to write a novel (50k words or more) from 11/1/2001 till 11/30/2001. I can see this is already going to take up the bulk of my time and I’m really excited as the very very very few times I’ve tried my hand at writing fiction, I’ve basically, well, sucked. But I’ve been sitting here drawing out plots and story lines and fleshing out the characters. The point is about quantity not quality but hey, i know this is not going to be the ‘Great American Novel’ that I wanted but fuck, it’ll be under my belt.
Because of this, you can watch my progress at NanNoNuts, which is a blog a few of us are using for support/etc during the writing process. I don’t know, honestly, how much time I’ll have to devote to the journal during the month of November, so at least you’ve been warned 🙂 I want to do more chronicling of what I’ll be doing during that time period, but we will see.
Lets see, what else. I’ll be heading back to MI in November for a few days to spend with my mom in Port Huron. I found out that the house I grew up in is for sale — don’t know the price but my mom said if saw the house I’d cry. We got the house in the late 1950’s and sold it in 1985 when we moved from Port Huron to Grand Rapids. One day I’ll write about it and I’ll include pictures of then and now. I’m afraid as my aunt Roberta said that the house is in total ruin. ugh.
It’s 7am and I gotta jet.
love you,
Lisa

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