Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Surprise at the Pharmacy

I dropped off the prescriptions yesterday, and it turns out that the one they had to order was the amoebic dysentery medicine. Not the diamox. I really thought that diamox would present the largest problem, but CVS had it in stock.

In other preventive medicine news, the site of my flu shot is sore today. It keeps taking me by surprise because the rest of my arm is fine, so I forget about it and then lean onto or rub the injection site, and it hurts. I woke up several times in the night because I'd rolled onto it.

Ouchie.

Romance Is In The Air...

... or something. People occasionally ask me if Sandy and Bindy have sex with each other, and sometimes they refuse to accept it when I say no. I thought it was odd too, given that they are a M/F pair and each the only cat the other ever sees. If you put people in that position, I'll bet it wouldn't even matter whether they were M/F pairs. I consulted the internet and learned that neutered cats usually don't have sex, because it robs them of the urge.

The situation may be changing now. I don't know what started it, but Sandy tried twice over the past three days to have sex with Bindy. Both times, he aborted the attempt before he really got anywhere. But he got far enough that I could tell what he was about. At first, I thought he was burying her because he kept trying to straddle her with his front legs. Even though he is an obsessive burier of food, vomit, and excrement, it was out-of-character for him to try to bury something alive. Then he got his back legs into the action and his intentions became totally clear.

I thought his intentions were totally clear, but Josh remains in denial. I don't blame him. I don't want to be walking in on these animals doing it all over the house, and I really don't want to have to overhear it.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Words Are Keeping Me Awake At Night

The era of weird and upsetting nightmares seems to be over, or at least on hiatus. Now my dreams are back to being just plain weird. Three nights ago, I was asleep and the word "mercredi" popped into my head. I knew that it meant "Wednesday," but in my sleep I couldn't figure out if it was French, Spanish, or Italian. It became important for me to get it straight, so I thought of the other words for Wednesday, miercoles and mercoledi, and then figured out which was which. Then I got obsessed with properly naming all of the days of the week, and I got so twisted up about it in my sleep that I had to wake up in order to put everything in the proper order. I fell into a deep and relaxed sleep afterwards, so taking the long view, it was a useless exercise but ultimately worth it.

Tons

Josh, Karl, and I went hiking in Catoctin two weeks ago. The trail we took was littered with downed trees along one portion. The ranger at the park entrance warned us about it because it was a bit hard to find the trail under all of that wood. When we actually saw it, though, I was surprised and remarked, "There are a ton of downed trees over here!" I meant that there was a large quantity of trees on the ground, but once I got to thinking about it, I realized that there was far more than one ton of trees on the ground. Then I thought about how the word "ton" is really a reference to weight, but that we use it just as often to denote quantity. I couldn't think of any other words that straddle the same gap.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Things I Realized Today

1. Josh and I have the least glamourous lives of anyone in our complex. Every time we go to an open house in our development, we see pictures of the owners posing with presidents, or framed holiday cards sent to the owners by presidents, or original Warhols, or something else along those lines. Today, I went to three open houses and saw that one of them, a unit that is the same style as ours only in a corner building, is occupied by someone with the most impressive collection of ID badges ever. World Bank, UN, Congress, shit in several different foreign languages, Pimlico... you name it, he had been cleared to get into it.

2. If I wanted to have a date with a 40 year old Latin American man, I'd have a good selection from which to choose. It used to be that 40 year old Jewish men seemed to find their way to me, but not anymore. Something about me must have changed and now I have a new target demographic.

3. There was a period of time today when I thought for the first time in my life that maybe I could train to run a marathon one day. This period of time was very short lived. I ran for 90 minutes today, and somewhere in the middle of it, I felt so good that I thought that a marathon finish might be within my reach. Then I increased my pace and soon wanted to cry for my mother. By the time minute 90 rolled around, my knees were tired and achy and I was very happy about the prospect of stopping.

90 minutes is a pretty long time to run, so I thought it might be interesting for me to record all of the things I thought about today to motivate myself. I sent these thoughts around in my mind like a loop, because I bet that if I dwell on any one thing for too long, I will eventually stop caring about it and then feel that much closer to stopping mid-run. Anyway, I first thought about how I was probably jarring my skeleton around sufficiently for it to add more bone mass, hopefully building up my calcium reserves against the onset of osteoporosis. Then I thought about what I would eat when I finished running. Then I thought about how I wanted my abs to look tighter. Then I thought about how I wanted my butt to look better. Then I thought about being able to climb the mountains that I want to climb. Then I thought about my bones again, and it occurred to me that, as with so much in life, it's just not possible to do everything right. If you do enough high-impact exercise to spur your skeletal system on to new levels of density, you're at greater risk for joint injuries. And if you do lots of exercise of any kind, you'll need to eat more and therefore decrease your chance at a long life. The most reliably long-lived are the people on 1300 calories a day. Finally, I thought about how it's probably best to do what you enjoy, because that's about the only thing you can be sure of getting right.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Pierced Lip Preview

That thing on my lip became worse before it got better. At its worst, it was just a big, round, white ball that gave me a decent idea of how I'd look with a pierced lower lip. It's still not good, mind you, but I went out in public today and no one ran away screaming. It burst this morning in the shower and was a bloody mess for most of the morning, but had begun to look healed by the afternoon. Josh said that it was a mark of his love for me that he allowed me into the car with JJ today; according to him, if he didn't love me, he would've been too embarrassed by my disfigurement to let anyone see me. He's very sweet. Of course, if he hadn't let me in the car, there wouldn't have been anyone to take the car home again from the airport.

I've been licking the bloody spot tonight. I ate a veggie turkey sub at Susan's, and got some of the hot peppers on my lip, and the irritation got me started on licking it.

Do These Pants Make My Butt Look Big?

Yes. Yes, these pants do make my butt look big. I bought these pants about two months ago, but hadn't worn them yet because they're velour and therefore far too warm for summer use here. They fit nicely two months ago. I bought them because I thought they made my butt look good.

Today when I put these pants on, they were too small. Not ridiculously too small, but too-small-enough that they felt weird. And my butt looked big.

My. Butt. Looked. Big.

Are you getting this?! My butt looked big! My butt is big. I'm so excited. I've never had a noteworthy butt before. I've often found my lack of butt to be surprising, given my ancestry and the fact that most of the other women in my family have a problem keeping the junk out of the trunk. Apparently, my DNA needed only to be encouraged with mountaineering training.

The other thing about this training is that I have gained weight. At last weigh-in, I clocked in at 131 pounds, which is the heaviest that I've ever been in my life. It's good, because I am sure that I'll lose some weight in Ecuador. Also, it will help me to be able to carry a bit of a heavier pack.

One thing I've noticed about these 8 extra pounds is that they require a lot of metabolic upkeep. I can't seem to eat enough these days. Last night, I ate Chipotle for dinner and felt hungry afterwards, which has to be some kind of record.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

The Irresistible Pain

I find that there are two categories of pain, mostly. First, there's the kind that's bad and that lets you know unequivocally that you should stop doing whatever caused the pain. The other kind, which is what I'm facing at the moment, stops just over the border into the painful side of itching. You can push that pain further along until it becomes the bad kind, but there's a long road between here and there that I often can't resist playing in.

The most common way that this starts for me is when I absent-mindedly push a folded piece of paper or flattened straw against my gumline. I push more and more until it bleeds, and somehow, the pain is satisfying. Today, I have a pimple growing under the skin just at the bottom center of my lower lip. Actually, it's slightly to the right of center. I cannot stop biting and scratching at that sucker. The pain from it crosses rather quickly into the bad area, but I still can't leave it alone. Part of the reason that I'm being so dogged is that I want it to develop and come out already, but part of it is also the few seconds of satisfying pain.

Today is not a good day for me to make good impressions on the people that I meet out in public.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

My Current Fears

Part of the reason that I like working out is that it provides my brain with a good level of white noise, behind which my subconscious thoughts have a chance to rise to the surface. I'm counting, or timing, or doing math in my head, or keeping track of my heart rate. Those things occupy my consciousness, but aren't so taxing that I turn off to my subconscious completely. I find that it's actually a very fertile environment for getting unobtrusive thoughts into sharper focus.

Last night, the theme seemed to be my fears about Ecuador. When I first started having that bad series of nightmares (the break-in that wasn't, the leukemia baby, and the bipolar episodes), I assumed that they represented my general issues with loss of control (unemployment = inability to do anything). After last night, I started to think that maybe my fears about losing control are coming to a head now because of Ecuador.

What if I have claustrophobic freak outs in the huts? I'm not going to want to take xanax, given the altitude and the fact that I will have to be functional on a timetable. It's easier to trust my muscles; they do a good job every day and even when things are difficult, I can envision muscle remedies. But my stupid brain... it fucks up all the time. And fighting with claustrophobia is so tiring. What if I just can't get myself to rest?

Perhaps even worse, I have noticed that higher altitudes make me more vulnerable to panic attacks anyway. I have a pretty good record of controlling them mentally, but again, it's exhausting. I wish that I could just abandon myself to rest like a normal person. In an open environment and at sea level, I'm a champion rester. I don't know why I can't replicate my results when I'm confined in a sleeping bag and up high.

And then what happens if I have a serious bad physical reaction to altitude? Of all the bad possibilities, I think that I wish for that the least. That's totally out of my control; I can only do so much to encourage my body to adapt. Beyond that, it's up to parts of me that I can't control. And I'd rather that if I meet with failure, that it be because of something under my control.

Knowing that I have these problems makes me want to test myself to see if I can overcome them. It also makes me feel more stress leading up to the events. I can't imagine a life wherein I don't challenge myself, and I think that most people seem to feel that way. Maybe they aren't drawn to mountaineering, but they get it out in whatever way appeals to them (physically, intellectually, emotionally, whatever). I wonder sometimes what thoughts would go through my head if I sustained a serious injury. Supposing that I could never walk again: Would I think that I had been a daredevil with poor judgment? I just don't know. On one hand, living too insulated a life doesn't really feel like living, and how happy would I be if I never pushed myself? I might, in some sense, be as crippled as I'd be if I couldn't walk. But you probably don't notice that interior kind of crippled in the same way just because it doesn't affect everyday life. You don't have to move to an apartment with an elevator just because you've died a little inside.

On the other hand, I always want to return to regular life with all of my abilities intact. I want to challenge myself, but within the realm of safety. I guess what I'm saying is that if I did something stupid that caused my injury, I'd have a harder time dealing with that.

I'm also not sure that the "died a little inside" theory holds much water. Given my skepticism about religion, gods, and all of that stuff, I'm just not sure how much it matters that any one individual lives a full life. It might be sad to others, but really, the only thing that matters is how the individual feels about it. And if someone is content with what appears to someone else as a superficial existence, I guess that could be ok.

Plus, there's always the chance of getting hit by a bus.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Want to Buy a LEMEN?

On Saturday night when Josh and I walked to dinner (Sette), we passed a car and noticed that the little silver letters on its back spelled out the following name: LEMEN. We had a discussion about how LEMEN was a terrible name for a car, and I had a vague idea (that I'm not sure whether I voiced) that it must be something not sold in English-speaking markets. Tonight as we walked to the gym, we saw something that looked remarkably like the LEMEN, so I pointed it out to Josh. He said, "That's not the LEMEN, that's a Honda Element." And then I realized: LEMEN is nothing more exotic than a vandalized eLEMENt.

It's hard to get those little silver letters off, so we assumed that it must have been purposeful on the part of the car's owner. I hope that I see the LEMEN again.

Yesterday's Incidental Workout

Josh, Karl, and I went hiking on Saturday and had a great time. Josh and I went to bed that night with grand plans for exercise on Sunday: a little gym time, some weight lifting, light cardio. We were going to get the week off to a good start. And then somehow, when Sunday actually rolled around, we just never... talked about it. It was as though we had both grown reluctant to exert ourselves and both decided that the best way to avoid accidentally motivating one another was to keep oddly silent about the gym all day. Our denial produced a much-needed and great amount of cleaning up, trash removal, and gear purchasing. But we didn't get to the gym.

On one of my many trips to the trash room, I saw that someone had thrown out a healthy-looking small tree. Knowing that our deck is currently barren of living plant life, and knowing that a tree of that size would cost upwards of $100, I decided that it would be a good idea to carry the tree from the trash room to our front door, up three flights of stairs, and plant it in one of the empty pots out on our deck. I thought that such an established tree might be strong enough to withstand the rigors of direct sunlight and reflected heat that seems to kill everything else we plant out there.

Let me tell you that even a small tree is still a heavy tree. Carrying that thing upstairs was weight lifting enough for upper and lower body, complete with an abdominal workout. I was temporarily thwarted in my planting efforts by the fact that both of our really enormous pots were still taken up with dead bushes, but I rallied and got the green one cleaned out. The tree actually looks quite steady and good up there. I hope that it survives.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Race and Distrust in Whole Foods

Josh and I went to Whole Foods yesterday, and while I was waiting for him to come to some decisions in the tea aisle (he was trying earnestly to replace some tea for Suzanne because he'd consumed all of hers, only he wasn't sure exactly which type of tea it had been), I overheard an interesting exchange. I had my back turned the entire time.

Man: You see a black man coming toward you and you zip up your purse... that's racism. It's ok, but that's racism.
Woman: I did not!

My impression before she spoke was that they knew each other, and that he was teasing a friend. His tone was very mild. I also could not imagine someone feeling threatened in the middle of a crowded grocery store, and futhermore couldn't imagine that someone who did feel so threatened would respond to it by zipping her purse. Grabbing her purse and thrusting it under the outside arm, sure. But zipping it? That's like a nothing response, given that it's probably just as easy to steal an entire purse as it is to reach into a unzipped purse that's sitting inches in front of its owner in order to remove a wallet.

I turned around. Both man and woman were middle aged. The man was standing next to a Whole Foods employee who also happened to be black, and he commented to him that some people are fearful of black men.

I wish that I had seen the offending purse-zip. Because I didn't see it, I have no idea what actually happened. One of the two of them was paranoid. I just don't know which of them it was.

It's sad that we distrust each other so much and live with so much fear in our society. How much human potential gets lost in the racist shuffle? It's depressing. It's additionally depressing that we are so rarely open and honest about it.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Behold, the Power of Beets

I ate one beet at dinner three nights ago and two beets at lunch the following day, and my, uh, outputs are still beet-colored. I had a red pee yesterday at Susan's apartment and considered leaving it there as a surprise, but didn't because that's gross. Let me clarify: I would not like to come home to find Susan's pee in my toilet, no matter the color. But if I came home to find that she put, say, red food dye in my toilet water, I'd be delighted.

Damn You, Trojan.Adwaheck and W32.Sinnaka.A

The trusty computer was attacked recently by worms and adware. I'm not even sure what started it. One day, I fired up the computer for my breakfast email check and found that there already a wrench in the works. We spent a combined... 16 hours (?) attempting to patch things up and nearly going insane before we met with a moderate success.

I'm now convinced that some of these companies create spyware/adware/worm problems just so that they can create the only program capable of cleaning them off computers, and then charge people money for the use of it. It really sucked. Nothing worked, until Josh finally decided to try the one program that had been capable of delivering us from the evil of the Search Miracle Elite Bar several months ago. Incidentally, when I first ran Norton to combat the Adwaheck situation, it pointed up a few Search Miracle Elite Bar cookies that had apparently been lying dormant.

The end result is that the computer is mostly functional again, minus one nagging problem. The only new problem is that Norton, having been jolted into full function and updated out the wazoo, is now constantly alerting me to the fact that the computer detects another wireless network apart from our own. What I want to know is why the computer keeps getting distracted by this other network! It has a network all it's own, with a perfectly good signal. Why does Norton assume that I want to access the other? Why in the name of all that is holy was this fucking software created without an option in the drop down menu that lets me tell it to IGNORE THE OTHER FUCKING NETWORK?! Apparently, the beta tests did not involve any users who live in a city stacked on top of and alongside the wireless networks of their 50 closest neighbors.

I think that if the owners of the offending network would just bother to encrypt it a little, this problem would go away. I can see that other networks exist in my area, but the computer is obsessed with only the one.

The Joy of Typos

I forgot to mention that when Josh and I visited the Turks and Caicos Islands for my birthday in mid-August, we saw a particularly stunning typo on the menu at Mango Reef, the restaurant attached to our resort (the Royal West Indies Resort, to be precise). Instead of carpaccio, they offered "crapaccio." Raw crap, if I had to guess.

Aside from the one typo, Mango Reef was excellent. They, and every other restaurant we ate at on the island (Providenciales), had a wonderful way with frozen rum drinks. They'd make the drink normally and then pour in another shot of rum down over the top and into the top part of the straw. This means that they can't leave the white paper cover on the top of the straw to certify that it's clean. But I think that the disinfectant properties of alcohol are on the whole much better than a little bit of white paper cover. I prefer it, at least.

I was just thinking that I may already have written about the wonders of the extra shot of rum, in which case you can feel free to deduce that I have a one-track mind.

The food was delicious too.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

My Brain is Tired

I had a really strange nightmare two nights ago. Most of my dreams are fairly run-of-the-mill, but once in a while, something remarkable pops out of the hopper.

Witness my dream of two nights ago:
I was at home, but not my current home or any other home I've ever had, with two other people. One of them was my mother, and the third was an unidentified man. I was in the living room with my mother and heard someone coming down the stairs, so I looked up to say hello. It turned out to be two criminals who had broken in. They menaced us with weapons and told us that they were going to take all of our possessions. I was afraid and very upset, and knew that my only hope was to get to the phone before the criminals could hurt us. The criminals herded my mother and me away upstairs, and took the unidentified man outside. I hoped that he would have an opportunity to get to a phone to call for help, but I knew that I couldn't count on it.

My mother and I went into an upstairs room, where the criminals guarded us and threatened to hurt us if we tried to stop them from taking our things. I was afraid that they were going to hurt us anyway, so I snuck into the bathroom to use the phone. The phone was dead. I went for my mobile phone and set it to silent mode so that it wouldn't make any sounds and alert the criminals to the fact that I was trying to call for help. I knew that if they found out that I was trying to use the phone, they would kill me.

One of the criminals figured out that I was hiding in the bathroom and tried to get me to come out, but I hadn't yet made my phone call. I lied to him and said that I had my period and really needed to deal with it, and I chose to say that because I was hoping that he would leave me alone out of a desire to avoid looking at it. It worked; he left me alone in the bathroom. I successfully called 911, explained the situation in a whisper, and begged them to help us.

The 911 operator refused to help us at all, and when I asked why, he said that it was because there was no one in the house at all except for me, and that I only thought that there were criminals menacing me because I was crazy. I tried very hard to convince him that he was wrong and to help me, but it turned out that he was right. I was crazy and I had no ability to identify reality.

I woke up in a heart-racing panic. It was possibly the worst dream I've ever had in my life.