Navigation for other things I've written

Star Trek posts
This is your brain on JJ Abrams- "Call me Jim"
I Forgive JJ Abrams
Star Trek Into Darkness movie review- SPOILERS

My movie reviews on NerdMovie
Lexx
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Cube Trilogy

John Carter (2012)

Mystery Men (1999)

My own recipes
blueberry buttermilk applejacks
restaurant quality alfredo sauce

really good chicken soup
Italian Chicken Fingers
Loca Chili Bake
Campfire Scrambled Eggs
Old Fashioned Chicken Stock
Stargate Pie


This is a work in progress.

I apologize for this weird blog entry, but I'm not in the mood to shell out more money at this point (after the big Xanga migration kickstarter, of which I am a top supporter) just to change my link colors on my new WordPress blog so they won't disappear maddeningly into invisibility. I love creating workarounds anyway, very cathartic for this aspie. So while Xanga is still busy rebuilding their command structure in the new servers after moving millions of blogs over, I'm combing through my scattered  content and creating a new index for easier perusal.

Aspie Overload

o.m.g.

I'm not one to whine online. I know I really hate being dragged down by other people's whining. I'm not talking about genuine emotionally healthy and good writing skills sharing of the suckiness, more like when there is no point except a full blown pity party fishing for validation and pats on the head. You have no idea how many times I've actually heard that. "I just want validation." "I just want someone to pat me on the head so I'll feel better." I personally don't feel validated when people in comments assuage me with dysfunctionally chain yanked sympathy, and I hate being patted on the head, even metaphorically.

But I gotta whine. ~omg I gotta whine~

After going through another stupid reaction to another medication (of all things this time, TYLENOL) and finally getting to a real allergist, my growing list in my health history now includes what boils down to 'autoimmune reaction disorder'. Sweeeeet. 'Splains all the food reactions, med reactions, stress reactions... I've spent the last couple of weeks sludging along on more zyrtec than the bottle says to take (doctor insisted) and NOT taking a single thing to alleviate pain, discomfort, depression, whatever.

I don't drink. I got off Xanax in 2012, took two years to get off that stuff and I never want to go back on benzo meds. According to a cousin of mine who has successfully conquered meth addiction (that is very very rare), getting off Xanax is comparable to getting off meth. I believe him. I stopped taking muscle relaxers because they mess with my head. Skelaxin has me weeping, Flexeril has me wanting to pick up a real knife and really stab people the first hour after taking it. I can't even joke about it. Ever since a severe illness in 2007-08 a number of meds get me so weird that I don't dare walk out on my deck in case I might think it would be cool to jump off and float around. Lyrica sends me into psychotropic bizarro land. My med list was finally whittled down to half a Norco twice a day. Seriously. I couldn't handle more than that, but at least I had *something* to get through the hardest parts of my day. And this kind of stuff is crucial because I'm allergic to ibuprofen, which is basically everything that's not Tylenol.

So yeah, that's gone now, too.

I'm actually doing fantastic. Decades of lupus and fibromyalgia flares and handfuls of medications and years of illness, this last year has been phenomenal, probably the best year I've had in my entire adult life. I'm not pain free but I'm slowly decreasing the pain levels and increasing mobility and energy with lots of physical therapy and regular workouts, a very nutritious carb restricted diet (I'm also diabetic and can't take the meds), good hydration (no sweet drinks or alcohol), and quality rest, even when I don't sleep well.

PILLS DID NOT FIX ME. I DIDN'T GET BETTER ON MEDICATIONS.

But I want something so bad I can hardly stand it.

I'm dealing with the depression head on and my psychologist is so pleased with my progress. My doctors are so pleased with my physical improvements, even when they seem incremental. My family is so pleased that I'm more capable of taking care of myself, even on my worst days when I can barely think straight. I am able to stay on track with daily planning now. I struggled with that for years.

My shining glory in all this is Asperger's. I can try to hide it but I usually glow like neon before too long. One thing I've noticed during all the medication lowering is how difficult it's getting to hide or suppress my behaviors. I've been practicing on social interaction for years and I'm getting better and better at it, but that only means I'm self monitoring well, and I'm doing that amidst all that other stuff going on with me. IT'S HARD.

Today is one of those days where I'm worn out. Too many things have been happening for too long, and I feel like it's piled up on me. Today I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm on my face in a ditch because I suck at handling everything, and I've mostly been hiding in my cave, not interacting much. It's crucial I not go back to that. I've spent years at a time reclused away from the public, and for me it's just not healthy.

Today I want to pop a pill. I want a brandy. I want chocolate and coffee and loads of sugar. I want to go blow $1000 shopping and I want to curl up and go to sleep all day and I want to get angry and say it's not fair.

But I'm going to do something else. I'm going to ask myself where I will be a year from now. I asked myself that 5 years ago when I was very sick, so sick I thought I might even die, and I never dreamed I'd get this much better and be able to do stuff again. Last year I asked myself that and made a plan of where I WANT to be in a year. I've surpassed that plan so well I still can't believe how much I've accomplished with my health and my daily life and my goals. So I'm asking myself today- where will I be in a year? In 5 years? Where do I WANT to be?

I want to see Ireland with my own eyes. Considering how difficult it's been for me to travel, that's a pretty big goal. And I'm not going to get there with a pill today. I'm not going to get there if I distract myself with immediate gratification and short term feel good stuff. I'm going to get there because I made it through a rough day, over and over and over. I'm going to get there because I want to.

The rest of my day can suck it. So I lost a day to pissy depression, so what. At least I didn't cave to medical validation and a metaphorical pat on the head. I may be caving to chocolate though. I need chocolate. See ya.

Mother's Day, 25 years later

Every Mother's Day has been bad for me since my little girl was about 5 years old. That was the year I made some poor choices and got very sick and had an abortion right around Mother's Day. I wrote about it on my bluejacky blog several years ago before bluejacky morphed into my hard hitting silly survey site. It was the 20th anniversary of that abortion and suddenly hit me hard. My little girl was 25 when I wrote it. Mother's Day

Last year about a month before Mother's Day, I went through a severe hormone crash, and doubly so. My body started going all wonky, so my gynecologist pulled me off birth control pills, which was enough of a crash, but that in turn threw my thyroid hormone way outa whack because supplementing with estrogen for years can cause a requirement for extra thryoid hormone uptake. So when I stopped the birth control, I zoomed into hyperthyroidism, with full blown anxiety attacks and insanely high blood pressure. My endocrinologist had to crash me down to a much lower dose. The next 8 weeks were a nightmare, and all the jokes and stories you hear about menopause making women crazy suddenly became bizarrely real for me. The world bubbled out into multiple floaty realities, and I could never be sure which one I was in, although I was in all of them and it was all real and I did just fine with it, according to my psychologist. As my body figured itself out and readjusted to its own new default hormone levels, my mind coalesced back into 'me', and everything seems to be fine now.

During that weird couple of months I slid back into my past and exploded with abrupt honesty. That Mother's Day post I wrote in 2008 left out some glaring details, one of them being that I was 'escorted' to that clinic by two men in a car that wasn't mine. Even though they weren't cruel to me, the pressure was immense, and my psychologist very simply calls this a forced abortion. Read the other post if you feel inclined to argue with me- they literally stood guard at the clinic door, and I was restrained during the procedure. Since I was already trying to justify it away in my head, I didn't realize how much like a rape that would affect me, and I never got over the death of that child. My psychologist says this is a pretty common thing when women go through menopause, they go back through all the emotions they stifled from earlier losses. It's so common to keep women on some kind of hormone replacement or antidepressants through menopause nowadays that I didn't have anyone I could talk to about it, having to wing it without meds for other reasons.

This year my little girl is 30, and she popped my first grandchild out the day before Mother's Day. My nerves have been pretty shot. I'm at the age now where I'm experiencing the deaths of loved ones more and more, and having already lost a niece and my own mother in the last decade took a pretty big chunk out of my soul. I didn't want to tell anyone how nervous I was about the possibility of things going wrong during this birth, so I sucked it up and bit my tongue, because it's so much more important to be positive for the new mommy. The relief afterward has been overwhelming. I spent another Mother's Day crying.

I watched the world blab out happy mother's day greetings on twitter and facebook and other places, and didn't really say much. I know there are a lot of very sad women out there who have a very hard time getting through Mother's Day. My own mother's birthday is a month after Mother's Day, so this time of year feels weird since she died a little over 3 years ago. My sister has been going through it without her oldest daughter for nearly 10 years. And every year all I can think about is the kid I never had, and how old and smart and handsome he'd be now. I know it's so very sweet that my daughter had a little baby right on top of Mother's Day, and you'd think that would make it all better for me. But it's weird. She had to leave her baby at the hospital when she came home (nothing terribly serious) and spent her night crying. And I know that's a horrible feeling and felt so sad for her, and I cried too. We know it's going to be ok, but it's still hard.

Mother's Day is over for another year, but we still need hugs. All of us. You, too. And you don't have to technically qualify as a mother to deserve a hug.