Annabelle Speaks

Oh, Hey, I Have a Blog!

Dear Internet,

I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while.  I’m also sorry I am resorting to writing fake-letters on my blog, but I just ate Cheetos and a chocolate cupcake for breakfast, so it is pretty clear that my decision-making skills are not currently up to par.  Also, I sort of feel like I’m going to throw up.  That couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my stellar breakfast choices, could it?

I haven’t written lately because my mind is just not producing anything very share-worthy.  I don’t know if it is the seasons changing or my recent entry into the last year of my 20s or my medications or upcoming changes in my treatment team set-up, but I am becoming all kinds of mopey and anti-social, to the point that I don’t even want to talk to the computer.  And I ALWAYS want to talk to the computer.  I love my digital friends and family!

I keep making notes of things I should write about, but then I never do, and that just gets added to the list of Things I Fail At.  I haven’t cooked and eaten a proper meal in weeks, I have resorted to pulling socks out of the dryer each morning because folding the whole load and putting it away is just too hard, and I spend pretty much every moment of every day counting down the hours until I can go back to bed.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I sleep for eight hours or for four hours; I am still exhausted and yawning every thirty seconds for the majority of my waking hours.

And yet there are bright spots!  I had a two hour dinner last night with my friend Monica, who is all kinds of fun to hang out with and talk to.  Last Thursday was the Best Birthday Ever, complete with people singing to me, cards and presents (including both a Wii Fit and Rock Band 2) and dinner with my friend Jennifer wherein I introduced her to the guilty pleasure that is deep-fried Twinkies.  I’ve read several good books lately, my most recent favorite being 8 by Amy Fusselman.  The weather has been perfect for sleeping, my cats are full of cuddles, my wife is made of awesome and did the grocery shopping for me this weekend, and all in all life is going well.  I just need to figure out how to absorb more of the positive and get myself out of this funk.  If I can just survive long enough to get to the weekend and 10 hours of sleep, I think I might make it.

With Much Love,

Anne

Swallowing Sharp Objects Never Sounded So Good

I have one of those colds that really should not be a big deal, but I am easily annoyed by colds.  Most frustratingly it is wimpy enough that I feel like a total tool complaining about it.  (Yet you will notice that fact has not stopped me from complaining about said cold on my blaaaawwwg.)  My throat doesn't so much hurt as sort of itch and feel like someone has a fan blowing against the back of my throat keeping it nice and dry and tickle-y.  The cough that came with the sore throat is equally unsatisfying and non-sympathy-gathering.  The cough doesn't even have the self-respect to become on of those honking-death-rattle chest coughs that hurt but are sort of satisfying in a gross, phlegm-y way.  No, it is a very lady-like soft cough that is totally unsatisfying and makes me sound like I'm faking it to get out of going to school on a day I have a biology test.  No really, Mom, I'm sick! *cough-cough* See?

 

So far the only thing that helps the lady-cough and the itchy, dry throat is to eat and/or drink constantly.  I am using this as an excuse for the 14 tootsie rolls that I ate for breakfast this morning.  Don't judge me!  It was either that or join the circus and take up sword-swallowing.  I did chase the tootsie rolls with orange juice, if that helps any.

 

In related news, this morning I awoke to find that I am in that spacey part of a cold where it doesn't even require cold medicine to make me feel high and I find myself regularly fascinated by things like the pattern of grass clippings on the edge of the sidewalk and robots in the crosswalk and suddenly I notice that I have mysteriously stopped walking across the street and that is not smart during rush hour in downtown Chicago and clearly that is proof that this cold might well kill me and you all should feel very sorry for me and make pudding for me.

*Insert Title Here*

This whole student-loan thing is so awesome.  I just went online and checked my account and my tuition for the semester was already paid.  MAGIC!  I didn't have to give them money or anything!  It's possible I signed away my first-born somewhere in the paperwork involved, but I can always just have another kid.  This loan-magically-pays-tuition thing is like when I got my first credit card.  I was buying things at Target all "You mean I can walk out of the store with all this STUFF without giving you actual cash? REALLY?  It's like it is FREE or something!"  On the plus side the only spending-spree I can manage with my student loans is an excess of education, which is far less damaging than the debt I ran up on that damn credit card buying totally necessary things at Target like candles and books and new sheets and 382 storage shelves for my new STUFF.

 

In other news, my birthday is rapidly approaching and I am becoming even more of a pain to live with than usual.  It isn't that I care at all about getting older, I am just all about the GREED and what is going to happen on my BIG DAY.  I don't really care so much about the STUFF (I still have that credit card and access to Target, after all), but I do love Birthday Favors.  Not those kind of favors, perv.  My parents read this site!  Anyway, every 15 minutes I announce to my long-suffering wife something else she could do for my birthday, which is really just a list of shit I don't feel like doing.

 

"T!  Do you know what would be a good present for my birthday?  If you took this purse to the dry cleaner for me to get the zipper fixed!"

 

"T!  Do you know what would be a good present for my birthday?  If you sorted these boxes of pictures and scanned them into the computer!"

 

"T!  Do you know what would be a good present for my birthday?  If you dusted the blinds!"

 

Clearly what I really want for my birthday is a personal assistant/slave.  Hey T!  Do you know what would be a good present for my birthday? ...

Friday Feet!

One of my greatest talents is finding new ways to annoy my wife.  It is my way of testing to see if she really loves me, or if she is just using me for my paycheck/cooking/good looks.  You know, all my great qualities like how I leave 982,387 water bottles around the apartment and then complain that I can never find my water bottle. 

"No not that one.  The other water bottle!  The one I Just Had.  I think one of the cats took it.  Bastards."

What was I talking about?  Right, annoying my wife.  We are blessed with a TiVo (all hail the TiVo!) so we very rarely watch live television and thusly almost never see commercials.  When we do have to suffer through commercials I get very, very bored very, very quickly.  I tend to institute "Pay Attention to Anne" time, and when T is uncooperative (on the phone, reading, knitting) I do what I can to get her attention in the most obnoxious way possible.  Like sticking my feet in her face.

Note the awesome fuzzy bedhead.  Aren't you glad you don't live with me?

The Glass Isn't Even Half Full. It Is Totally Leaking. It'll Be Empty Soon, Just Wait.

My goodness, but am I a big ol' crankypants today.  Some days I am all cheery and motivated and full of energy to clean closets and get everything on my to-do list done by 10am, and then there are days like today where I can only seem to think of the things I haven't managed to do.  I need to get my windshield replaced, I need to get my oil changed, I need to take out the garbage I keep stacking by the back door, I need to get the last year worth of pictures off my camera, I need to bake cookies for my boss's return to work tomorrow, I need to bake cookies for my friend's birthday on Friday, I need to go to night class tonight and a reception tomorrow night, so I have no idea how I can bake without staying up much of the night to do so.  I need to write more here, and in my paper journal, and I have a half-dozen personal phone calls I've been putting off for no reason other than I just didn't have the right kind of energy for phone calls.  The hospital still thinks I owe them $1,500 that they double-billed me and I had the audacity to only pay once.  My financial aid refunded me $40 which was supposedly the amount by which my loan exceeded my tuition, and yet today I got a bill from school saying I still owe $50.  WTF, school? 

 

There are no less than a dozen typos in my last post here and I can't even bring myself to fix them; I just stare at them and berate myself for being such a sloppy writer.  One would think that being married to someone with two degrees in English would rub off on me, but one would be wrong.  T is much more capable of describing business transactions and their tax effects than I am at spelling or punctuation.

 

Also, I'm ugly and need a haircut, I need to lose weight, and that mole on the top of my head that no one can see really needs to go away because it pisses me off anyway.

 

I suspect that a lot of this OMG EVERYTHING SUCKS attitude is coming from the fact that my birthday is rapidly approaching, and I am not a fan of my birthday.  I couldn't care less about getting older, as I am only going to be the Ripe Old Age of 29 and most of my friends are at least a decade older than me.  But birthdays...they are just not pleasant.  I both want people around me, wishing me happy birthday and going out to dinner or something, and I want to hide in my house and not have all those people LOOKING AT ME.  It's the same anxiety I had for months leading up to my wedding.  I was super excited, except for the part where I was 1/2 of the Center Of Attention for the weekend and that is really, really stressful.  It both feels good and keeps me hovering a hair below panic-attack the entire time.  Hell, I kept a baggie of Xanax in the pocket of my wedding dress just in case.  (Note:  How cool is it that I had an invisible hidden pocket in my wedding gown?).

 

Anyway, birthday = stress.  On the plus side, T and I are buying a Wii Fit for my birthday present and it is currently sitting behind me on my office floor, tempting me to run home and play with it.  Alas, I have to wait until the 24th.

Who Needs Sleep?

Can cats have nightmares?

Last night I was having trouble sleeping (SHOCKING, I know), and the last time I looked at the clock before finally falling asleep was 12:45.  Around 2:20 I awoke to Ricky-cat headbutting me in the face.  Now, I have three cats; I am used to a certain amount of middle-of-the-night-

shenanigans.  But Ricky-cat is the least crazy of our cats and is generally the one giving the stink-eye to whatever cat is tearing around the room (Maddy-cat), meow/whining (Maddy-cat), or knocking things off tables/shelves (MADDY-CAT) in the middle of the night.  My first thought was that he just wanted a little petting, but he was just not willing to settle for half-ass, half-asleep petting and kept up with the mewing and the head-butting.  Next I thought maybe the cats were out of food or water, so I went out to their bowls and he stayed within 2 inches of me, choosing to wrap himself around my legs and continue mewing at me instead of going to the bowls (which had plenty of food and water anyway).  Finally I just picked him up and snuggled him tights and made soft shushing noises at him as I rocked in the dark.  At least I have not yet started dressing him up in outfits and rolling him around in a stroller.

In other middle-of-the-night news I had a hell of a sleepless weekend cleaning closets.  We have a very closet-filled apartment for Chicago (five closets), and my cleaning strategy is generally "if it is in a closet and out of view, it doesn't count as messy".  As such, our closets were quite terrifying prior to my weekend cleaning-binge.  Now they are all Target-storage-solutions organized and pretty and man that was satisfying.  I even took all the shelves out of the fridge and washed them, once I ran out of closets to organize.

I am thinking of starting an overnight cleaning service for nights when I can't sleep.  I might as well use that time to my advantage, right?

And now I'm off to enjoy my last free night before I start my next grad school class.  Because a full time job just Isn't Enough Work.  Alas.

Feels Just Like I'm Falling For The 7,423rd Time

Last night I was walking to the vet to pick up my cat's anti-anxiety medication (oh, the crazy that lives in our house).  Being rush hour on the night of a Cubs home game the sidewalks were very crowded.  So of course it was in front of all these people that I tripped on air and fell on my ass in the middle of the sidewalk.  Actually I fell on my right palm, right knee, right hip, and my back.  It was quite an impressive fall, if I do say so myself.  I managed bruises on my hand and hip as well as two awesome bumps on my knee (so it looks as if the letter B is trying to escape from under my skin).  A big part of the impact was absorbed by my backpack, and if I hadn't been wearing that my head would have smashed into the pavement which would have been even more fun.

 

Today, however, is Grown-up Suit Day, and I do look rather smashing, if I say so myself.  Not smashing as in I'm smashing into things, either.  The good kind of smashing!  The kind where a nice gentleman on the elevator nearly got himself smooshed by the closing doors when he jumped (and half fell) trying to keep them from closing so I could get on his elevator.  The woman with him laughed telling me he never holds the elevator for anyone and usually leans on the 'close door' button.  She advised that I buy a lottery ticket, because it is clearly my lucky day.

 

Further falling-down updates as events warrant.