Weird milestones

When my first husband was recovering from his massive brain injury, the doctors wouldn't give his family an official prognosis until he hit the 2 year mark.

Apparently it takes at least 2 years for the brain to even out after a big blow like that, so it's around month 24 when the medical community would start conjecturing on whether his physical and cognitive side effects were permanent.

We threw a party for Scott's 2 year anniversary.

We rented a big cabin at his favorite gun club south of the Twin Cities and we BBQd for everyone he'd ever met. His brother, friends, hunting buddies...everyone came to celebrate the fact that had he survived the accident, he had re-learned how to walk, he was able to start working again, and he'd gotten most of the movement back on the left side of his body.

He was different in so many ways, but he wasn't in a wheelchair. He wasn't paralyzed, and he certainly wasn't dead.

Yet his personality was a caricature of his former self - exaggerated and childish, all in a gruesomely humorous way.

Pre-TBI, he was loud and cocky with a hair trigger temper.

Post-TBI, he called me at work 50 times a day, like an endless buzzing in my ear. He clung to people he knew and tried too hard to make friends with those he didn't. And his temper morphed from violent into petulant and violent.

I remember that he was adamant about manning the grill at his 2 year Celebration, but when he was inevitably distracted by the well-wishers who fawned over him, the hamburger buns were lost to the charcoal flames, and Shit. Hit. The. Fan.

He stormed through the cabin, screaming and slamming his fists on vertical surfaces, lit from within with the fiery injustice of the uneven temperature of the charcoal grill, positive that I was somehow to blame for the lost buns. He spit curses at me as his brother and friend talked him down from the ledge.

He never said thank you for my planning the massive event. Or paying for it.

I just realized that today *might* be my 2 year anniversary of my own TBI, but I can't remember for sure.

I began thinking about what my caricaturized self looks like.

Pre-TBI, I was obsessed with being perfect in every way that every person needed me to be. I was in the habit of taking care of the people in my life, from doing the ironing, cleaning and cooking for Scott and his father when his mother was at the Mayo clinic for an extended chemo treatment, to getting married when I knew it was a bad idea so that people wouldn't be disappointed by me.

Post-TBI, I'm still in the habit of assuming the mothering role, but instead of feeling good about it, I resent the hell out of the people I mother.

So while I survived 2 years ago, I'm still not really living for myself. And I have only myself to blame.

This is all very different.

Every once in a while, someone says, "You should blog about that!" and my reaction is less, "Hell yeah!" than, "Meh."

I'm different than I used to be. And words...they aren't as important to me anymore. I don't really like reading. It's frustrating to me, how slowly the stories unfold. I never feel the urge to write.

Something has changed.

I think it's been happening for a while, really. I think I've been hoping I wasn't morphing into someone else. But I've seen what head trauma does to other people. I should have known I wouldn't be exempt.

I camped this weekend, in a tent, for the first time since my fall in October 2010. Being in the tent is different. Being in a tent now gives me what I refer to as The Spins.

Until now, The Spins has only happened from the direct result of ear drum crystals being knocked loose so they migrate through my ear canals and convince my eyeballs that I'm on a Tilt-O-Whirl. Sometimes it happens when I'm driving and I turn to look over my shoulder before changing lanes.

But all weekend long, morning or night, when I was in the tent, I Spun for no reason. It was alarming. When I crawled out of the tent and stood up, I walked four feet directly to my right as a direct result of my intention to walk four steps forward.

My brain chemistry is different now. My perception of the world is different: more immediate.

And because I no longer have 5 senses, only 3, when my eyes and ears abandon me, I feel very much like a floating balloon.

Perhaps this somehow explains why I no longer write, but mostly I just don't enjoy it anymore.

My friends have changed. More specifically, a combination of my actions and my disinterest in socializing has resulted in a very limited number of people involved in my life. And I like it this way.

I was exhausted before, keeping up with people. I have enough of my own interests, problems, stories...I don't have the patience for anyone else's. If I have a story to tell, I talk to Daylow.

At the end of the week, all I want to do is pull weeds from my garden and drink a beer before noon and watch my dogs fling their own tennis balls in the air.

I am differnt, but I don't think I'm done changing.

While more stable than six months ago, I am in a state of flux. I'm still processing the mistakes I've made in the last year. I'm still coming to terms with the changes I've inflicted upon myself and others. I am getting used to my new body, the twenty extra pounds and (FINALLY) some shoulder-length hair.

And I'm astounded that the biggest mistakes of my life have led me to this place of relative calm. The kind of calm where I (FINALLY) love my job. Where I (FINALLY) am *almost* financially secure-ish. Where I (FINALLY) don't care about pleasing anyone else.

And this state of calm is the antithesis of interesting blog material.

I swear to god the only thing I'm on at the moment is coffee. Cold coffee.

Thursday night, when my car was snatched (very politely and by a guy who looked a little like Santa, and with minimal tears on my part), I found myself in a bit of a tailspin.

Friday was a tough day for my ego, and then I realized that I needed help. Help was offered. And I, the endlessly prideful dumb ass that I am, turned down the help. For real.

I've always liked the idea of not needing monetary help from anyone, and went most of my adult life without asking for much of it, but I did get a loan from a loved one to help buy my house. This house is the best place I've found so far, and I don't mean house-wise exactly, because it needs a lot of work, but this is where I belong for some reason. I don't ever want to leave this property, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make that reality.

Unless I change my mind, but you know...I'm impulsive like that.

After my tough day on Friday, Daylow and I made our semi-regular trek to out little dive bar in town, and we talked quite a bit, as we are wont to do, and I noticed a very interesting pattern unravelling.

The situations when I've desperately needed help from other people, thus far, were difficult to swallow, but when I finally prostrated my ego enough to accept offered help, those debts resulted in some of the best things that have ever happened to me.

The loan for my house started a huge snowball of life-changing events that brought me here.

Where's here?

Home. Finally home.
In the place where I broke my skull and knocked every spec of responsibility out of my fibers.
This is the place I love most in the state despite all of the painful things that have happened here.
Finally accepting help from someone gave me a home.

The snowball blew through 2011 and knocked everyone aside, including Gray, and along the way, that snowball brought people into my life that made other changes explode like really grizzly fireworks. Half was a good show, half was like a slap in the face with a stray limb.

I've never been more alone than I am right now. I've never been more financially desperate than I am right now. I have never been more scared than I am. Right now.

But that fucking snowball, despite all the carnage it scattered through my world, also brought me Daylow. He's the best, most unexpected present I've ever received*.

Along with Daylow came months of unemployment, and not the "I deserve a tiny violin" kind of unemployment, but the "holy fuck, that chick is retarded" kind of unemployment.

Unemployment brought be the most fun, least profitable job I've ever had, and it also made an odd network connection (courtesy of meeting one of those limb-in-the-face people from the snowball) that resulted in me finding my new job. The job that I love. With a company I can dig. And a paycheck that will allow me to pay for my home. And my vodka.

All of the mistakes that I've made recently, all of the ways that I've fallen into a very deep hole, the fact that I'm pretty much scraping rock bottom in every way right now...these things brought me the happiest Minnesota winter I've ever survived.

Well, those mistakes and the fact that it's been warm and snowless all year.

Now I'm seeing the pattern repeat, because I desperately need help to crawl out of my self-fashioned hole, and also because someone has again offered to help.

I realized that I had to change my RSVP from "thank you for the offer, but I'm too proud to accept your help" to "FUCK YEAH, thank you very much."

It might just bring another good thing my way.


*Thanks Dale. And Pat. And the futon.

FOR SALE: Toro snowblower, pretty much brand new, expensive, fancy, and sprays magic (instead of snow) out of its blade thingys

$8.15

No joke, this snow blower propels itself, shoots really high in the air, and the snow it disburses is like a sparkly rainbow of unicorn farts and angel kisses falling from heaven.

I'm asking the price of a quarter tank of gas for this beauty, basically because I'm that desperate at the moment, and in exchange, this Fancy Toro *Expensive Model* can be yours.

I haven't checked the forecast yet, but I'm assuming it might snow again this year, maybe once or twice, definitely in March and DEFINITELY after we've washed our cars, so it's probably a matter of life or death, whether or not you own my magical unicorn snow cone maker.

Call me. Buy this. I NEED GAS MONEY.

Except that...wait, NO I DON'T.

Why don't I need gasoline after all, you ask?

That's right, I almost forgot.

I thought I was acting out my perfectly normal routine of riding to work in Daylow's car and, once there, being stranded even though I didn't need to go anywhere,  going to Arby's for lunch with a co-worker because I think he felt bad that he couldn't drive me around like a princess so, instead, he drove me to Arby's (which I didn't used to like, but now that I can't taste...I guess I actually do, and then working almost two hours later than I've recently been accustomed to working, but it seeming longer because it was dark when I left, the building was empty, and I'd gotten there at my regular time this morning, so it was a longer day in general, and then riding home (again, a passenger) by another  very  compassionate co-worker, and unlocking my front door to go inside, and having to explain to my very confused dog why I was entering from the wrong end of the house, did that mean she needed to get up and greet me, or was I planning to go around back and come in the correct way?

Except, as you can imagine, THAT IS NOT A NORMAL DAY FOR ME.

My car. It has been...returned to it's maker, shall we say, and is going to auction if I don't come up with a lotta cash soon.

So PLEASE call me. And buy my magical unicorn fan, and I'll only charge you the cost of a repo.

IF YOU DON'T PUT THE WORD "crustacean" in the subject line, I'll now your spam.

I'm also awesome at sleeping

Well.

Today was my first day at a "real" job in about 3 months. CULTURE SHOCK. By 2:00, I had a pounding headache and a very serious disdain for the fluorescent lighting.

Interestingly enough, although a bit overwhelming, it was a really fun day. I met a ton of people whose names I'll try desperately to remember tomorrow, and all of them were very nice and welcoming. After one day of training, though, it's obvious that I am completely fucking clueless about how to do my job. But my entire department is in the same boat, so we're going to learn together.

I came straight home after work to check on Scary, who is now eating enough bread for me to get her meds in her belly. She seems to be feeling a little better today. Good news for good pups.

Unfortunately, after work I had to address an issue between myself and a friend, and it was incredibly unpleasant, as such things usually are. It seems my habit of broadcasting EVERYTHING to the internet (including my preference in vibrators and the epic shits I take) has come yet again at the cost of hurting others.

Inadvertent? Yes.

Icky, guilt-induced belly feeling? Double yes.

It seems, yet again, that I am a complete failure at life.

But on the plus side, I'm still awesome at ruining everything.

BlogHer '11 or bust. Or bust in general.

So.

My hotel bed sheets are all...leaky. Black and ishy.

Probably should back up and explain that.

I um...well, I don't know what I was expecting from the conference this year, but it wasn't even close to what I was expecting, whatever that was. I got here on Thursday afternoon and I spent about two hours at the conference. Then Friday I went to twenty minutes of one workshop.

And I was done.

I left the convention center and walked around downtown, got some lunch and drank some beers, then went back to my hotel and waited for my cousin to show up. When he did, we drove around through Balboa Park and then went to somewhere (La Mesa?).

And then these happened:

I only cried a *little* around hour forty-million of the needles.

Then we crashed at my cousin's house, played with his crazy fucking kitten, and then came back to the hotel where I got hit on by a bum, met Jessie James, learned how to open beer with a lighter, and fell asleep for houuuuuurs.

I never returned to the conference, not even for the parties. I only used one of the ten drink tickets they gave me. Hell, if I were expecting something from this trip, it's probably that I would have been hung over AT LEAST half of the time, but no. Not even once.

And now I'm packing all my shit up for the return trip to Minnesota, where I've never been so happy to live at the moment.

Did you know that chicks here in San Diego are, like, BLINDINGLY gorgeous? It's kinda painful to look at. And then it makes looking in mirrors just that much more awful.

Airplanes are my best friend now, apparently. If they kill me, I'm so going to unfriend them on facebook.

Only I

So I hazarded my first attempt at a top secret "friend of the family" recipe called Hot Chicken. I really wish I'd learned to make this BEFORE I lost the ability to know if something is seasoned correctly or, instead, tastes like an old shoe. Because seriously, I cannot tell the difference.

Unfortunately, I became privy to this recipe a few months ago which, in Cat's Terms of Memory, may as well have been fourteen thousand years and a few dozen liters of vodka ago. Because all I remembered were most of the ingredients and that the end result is yummy. So I faked it the best I could and reasoned that if nothing else, this would be spicy, and spicy is just about all I have left in this world.

12 jalapenos and 2 habaneras later 1 habanera later, I decided, after I tasted one with the tip of my tongue and it was blissfully painful, ought to have been enough to make this truly "HOT" chicken.

But it wasn't. It was more...mildly intolerable chicken.

To me, it was "meh."

But on Saturday, I prepped everything and shoved it into the crock pot and then headed out on foot (thanks to a flat bike tire) to find a quiet spot to get some writing done. We're a few blocks away from the Minnesota River, which happens to be one of my favorite places for walking, crying and brooding, so I figured it might work for writing, too. That I've never tested the theory goes to show you just how long I've been out of commission.

I was armed with a notebook full of helpful man thoughts from a crew of (apparently) drunken comrades, and I was curious to give these ideas a shot. I'm still working on that, but as it turns out, I am TERRIBLE at being a man.

A bug flew directly into my eyeball, and though I saw it coming and reacted by slamming shut my eyelid, it was too late. It was unfortunate for me that I stuck my jalapeno and habenera fingers in after the bug to fish it out. Let's just say I was blind for several minutes and considered turning around and heading home.

Once at the river, I started along the path (because who would ever do such a thing as walk in the grass?) and I stumbled upon a scruffy middle-aged man who, from a distance, appeared to be sporting a shirt pocket of cigarettes and a fist full of some hideous, silver-canned beer. Turns out it was only a travel mug of what I presume was coffee, but this guy was a character, I could tell just by glancing.

He had with him a dog who was off leash and well behaved, and he paid no attention to me as I approached. The dog was busy tramping through the water and weeds, looking for anything that moved.

As I am wont to do, I asked the man what kind of dog he had, and he answered that it was "hard to say," or something the like. Again, with my memory. I noted that the dog looked like he had tiger markings, and the man commented that was his brindle. Happily ready to prove that I am a Dog Person, I noted that Gray once had a boxer named Tyson who shared the same tiger-looking brindle as this dog, and the man exclaimed, "Yes, exactly!"

We started walking together, dog talking, of course, and he asked if I was just out hiking.

Ha, exercise. Not likely.

I told him I was trying to find a quiet spot to write, that our neighbors were installing a fence and there was a jack hammer involved, that there are kids all over the park by the river, so that I was following the trail looking for a better spot.

"Come with me."

Normally, I don't go around following strange men who say "come with me," but this guy wasn't setting off any alarms and plus, he had a dog.

I am powerless against the charms of the canine species.

Turns out to be a lucky thing I followed the guy because he led me to a marina and then out onto a secluded peninsula so near the river, and so level with its surface, that I felt I was sliding right along with it. He pulled up a chair for me and one for him, we smoked a bit, and then he left me to my writing, but not before we became friends.

I told him I considered this an open invitation to return and he didn't disapprove, so now I have a new place that is perfectly peaceful and serene where I can retreat in just a few short minutes whenever I need to write, which (apparently) should be all the damn time.

Next time, remind me to take the bug spray. I'm half-mosquito today.

The trouble with...

...getting out of bed in the morning is that it means I am likely to accidentally do things.

And have any of you ever noticed how I tend to...how do I say this...OBFUCKINGSESS about those things that I do?

Yeah, I'm doing it again.

Now that I've started writing, it's like I can't turn it off, and I've found myself with 7 new drafts in my blogger dashboard and countless tiny, indecipherable, middle-of-the-night notebook scribbles, all of which is good I guess, but it's also frustrating because none of them are "publishable" in even the loosest "hit publish button on blog that nobody even reads" sense, and all of them are completely fucking different topics and ideas, but I have this suspicion that they're all related in some way, and so I'm starting to see a pattern and a way that they can go together to make an entire readable thing, but the problem now is that I have to actually make that happen, and holy shit, ya'll.

Writing is hard.

All of this is compounded by a few things, like that I called in a refill for my crazy meds last week but didn't realize it needed a refill authorization from my doctor, so I ended up having to miss a couple days of medication, then the pharmacy forgot to call and tell me the Rx was ready, and then I forgot that I needed to call the pharmacy to see if the Rx was ready, but finally I remembered to check on the website and saw that it WAS ready, so then I forgot to go pick it up. For two days.

Needless to say after my recent behavior, I can report that I am absolutely confident that I should be medicated. AT ALL TIMES. And by any means necessary. Which reminds me, I need to order this medication in the anal tablet form so that in the event I accidentally staple my mouth to someones couch, I can still get my absolutely vital daily dose. Ya'll, I lost track of the number of times I sobbed over things like the color of Lily's sad eyes and that the dishwasher was full of dishes, but those were clean and I had nothing to replace them with, so the poor dishwasher was going to be lonely.

And has anyone noticed that "breaking up" with a friend is really fucking awful? I've had to do that a couple of times in the recent past, and it's honestly more painful (for crazy lil ole me) to lose a friend than it was when I got divorced from my first husband.

Both times this has happened, it was due to both a parting of interests which make continued friendship more harmful than awesome, and also to my BIG. FUCKING. MOUTH. that I cannot seem to ever stop from running around naked while metaphorically flipping people the bird in between swallows of Svedka.

Between my lack of medication, the overwhelming inadequacy and pressure I feel when I'm trying to produce actual words with actual meaning, and the social turmoil of the week behind me, I can honestly say that I plan to get so motherfucking drunk tonight that I will not wake up until Monday, and when I do, I probably won't be able to locate either my pants or my face.

PS - I will need a ride home on Monday. Any takers?

Well now.

So I have this friend who's an actor and a playwright (both in reality and in aspirations) and he's been giving me a lot of shit because I haven't been writing myself lately.

Technically, I HAVE been writing, here on this blog and over at The Metropolitan News, but in the grander scheme of literary ambitions (I can't deny my English major and creative writing minor without confronting a large stack of thereby-pointless student loans), I know that this blog is bullshit. It's all fluff and shock and awe without much content, especially since my brain pain.

In years past, I was featured many times on the really kick ass blog Five Star Friday for posts that one of my readers connected with in some way, and none of those posts were particularly blog-centric. Instead they were creative non-fiction or fiction itself, like this and this.

I haven't been nominated in a long time and I realize that's because I haven't written anything worth a damn.

Funny? Fuck yeah.

Therapeutic? Sometimes. More than not, really.

Disgusting? Always.

But literary? No. Not even a little bit. In fact, my writers group is probably getting a little sick of my lame excuses for why when they show up for a meeting, they have pages for us to review and all I have is a bowl of popcorn and a compulsion to bum a cigarette from them. But they're too consumed by their own creative drive and their awesome works in progress to really spend any time kicking my ass over..how lazy I am.

I could blame not having a laptop, but my actor friend vetoed that excuse. Something about a pen and paper. What the hell are those? I didn't really understand, either.

I could blame my lack of being in school, but that's kind of, oh, one hundred percent my fault, and anyway I don't want to be in school for the rest of my life, so at some point I'll have to man up and make myself write even if I don't have an assignment deadline. Hell, if I get what I REALLY want, all I WILL have is deadlines, and I hear publishers are even less forgiving than college professors in that regard.

I could blame my wedding last summer, but...that was last summer.

I could blame my head injury, but that was only a valid excuse for the amount of time it took me to be able to shower without vomiting or using a shower chair. I'm lucky as fuck that my brain wasn't permanently damaged so that I was no longer able to write creatively - or at all. I should be taking advantage of my second chance at creativity.

When I break down all the excuses, I find that I'm just tired. And scared (hey writers, feel me?). And out of practice. And lazy. And I watch too much television and I drink too many beers and I adopt too many dogs.

I'm giving myself every reason in the world not to write.

And so I guess I'm going to do what any self-respecting woman would and just fucking write already.

All of this to say that some of the things I post here might not be my standard blog fodder. I may not tell as many awesome poop stories for a while, and I probably won't discuss cervical mucus (unless I have a really awesome chunk of it myself someday). I'm going to make myself post shit that came from somewhere a little further in my head than a bad penis joke.

And I'm exhausted just from finding a pencil.

Booze baby, burning blood

Okay, so @NamelessFriend didn't get a tattoo after all and she didn't even BOTHER to run it by me first. I haven't actually spoken to her yet, so I don't know if she totally changed her mind or if she just had to postpone the ink because she was too drunk, but either way, I am reporting her for underage consumption.

Why? Because, Christine...you are turning twenty...your eyes are getting heavy...when I snap my fingers, you will bestow upon my your (what do most kids drink these days?) Mike's Hard Lemonade (which I will spike with actual alcohol when I get home) and you won't remember a thing...oh, and throw in those white heels while you're at it...

I spent my weekend in the sun so I'm a bit pink today, which is awesome because, at least with my skin, the burn kind of sneaks up like a cat stalking a sparrow, which is to say that I don't hear the burn coming until it's too late, and when I wake up decapitated in heaven, it feels like the sun tossed me around and then bit me a little bit. The feeling gets stronger as the color of my skin changes, so now that it's been a full 12ish hours since I retreated inside, my thighs may as well be on fire.

Right vicinity, wrong unit.

I did have to take a break from skin-cancering myself to drive all the way to a non-puppy-selling pet store to pick up more fucking DIAPERS for Lily, who is still "in heat" which means that if she is non-diapered for any moment of time, then she leaves a trail of bloody drips behind her. It's easier to find her, sure, but THERE IS DOGGY UTERUS ON MY FLOOR and also Gray says she smells like a fat lady, which I know from experience is not a good thing.

Um, and the other morning, Gray and I may have been baby-making (is it odd that my dog and I are ovulating together?) and I glanced down to see Lily sitting at attention, big grin on her face, tail slapping the wall like my head into the headboard. I'm pretty sure she was rooting for Gray, but part of me wonders if she thought she'd be next.

I would pay to see those puppies.

She also sits on the deck or at the door and instead of whining softly at the appearance of a person, she moans and howls loudly at the appearance of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, which translated from dog language means FUCK ME, BOYS.

Tell me something...are diapers for humans this expensive? Because if so, I *maybe* just decided that I don't want kids after all.

Zipbag of Virgins

HI CHRISTINE!

So I have this friend who shall remain nameless, except for the part above where I say her name, just forget about that and go on about your lives thinking this friend is anonymous.

So Nameless Friend makes me feel quite advanced in years because she does things like glue colored feathers into her hair and wear her bangs chopped sideways like an a-line skirt and actually buy clothes instead of inheriting them from her grandmother.

And she's turning 21 next week. Which means not only will she not remember this post by July, but she also won't remember her birthday by next weekend, so I have a plan.

I will convince her she's only 20 and she got arrested for underage consumption (after she blacked out on her birthday) so she'd better hurry up and hide all her booze, but don't worry because I am WAY over age and will happily dispose of every drop of alcohol, even the Boone's Farm. And I won't even charge her.

That will be my birthday gift to her.

Until today, Christine she was a virgin to this blog, which means she still thinks I'm relatively normal. Things are boutsta change up in heeya.

I happen to know that at this moment, my nameless friend is reading this post from a chair (presumably) in a dingy garage (possibly) on her sister's Ipad (definitely) while her cousin stabs her with a needle over and over and over and over, but not just because it's fun as hell, but also because he's putting a tattoo of the word "believe" on the top of her foot, and all of this to say HI CHRISTINE NAMELESS FRIEND! How ya feelin? You hurting right now? PAIN-SIES?

Ouchsies.

Also, Nameless Friend, here's something you may have already considered, but most people ALREADY believe that their feet exist.

You might want to get some counseling for that.