I really suck at NaBloPoMo this year.

Today was a big, long day of waiting.  Moving from room to room, moments of anxiety and then many more monents spent waiting.  All day waiting.  It’s surprising how a day of waiting can be more tiring the a day at work.  But, got good news, well the best the circumstances could offer, and lots of people watching.  Cops?  Mostly hot.  Boys in ties?  Nearly always hot.  People waiting in the same rooms we were?  FREAKS.  Downtown Phoenix covered in ballsy birds?  Quite panic inducing.

Then I stuffed my poor stomach with as many oysters and shrimp as it could handle.

Now I’m studying.

Next I watch Dancing with the Stars.  (Maksim?  HOT!)

Lastly I cram until I literally fall asleep on the books.

Isn’t life interesting when all I do is study?  (There is no right or wrong answer to that question strangely enough.)

Tonight my parents had an improptu slide night.  Dad had cleaned out the storage unit and found the old school projector and box of slides.  Let’s review this stroll down memory lane, shall we? 

Majority of people I don’t recognize.   Most are hippies.

Multiply family members in overalls.

Two stories of unexpected family members doing drugs.

Number of times my mother turned to me and asked “Wasn’t your dad hot?”  Lost count, however ONE is TOO MANY!

One baby cow name Herbie.  That my parents RAISED and then ATE.

Final Tally:  Six bongs.  Two bags of pot.  Two boxes of pot on tables.  One slide of father holding large mushroom.  Two slides mother admits she is not sober.

One GIANT horse dong.  Three weiners, two on babies, one on a FULL GROWN MAN.  (Please warn me when we get to the nude beach slides, kthxbye.)

One picture of father in black mesh tank top.

90% of the shots of my father he is in short shorts.  Except for the one where he’s naked.

One incident of me screaming “I do not want to see my parents genitals, put the special box away or I won’t come back inside!”

So, an eventful night.  Their only excuse?  It was the seventies.  Can’t be too hard on them, someday when my kids find my stash of photos from the past three  years I’ll have some explaining to do as well!

Yesterday I accidently told my very best friend a secret I’ve been keeping from him for our entire eleven year relationship.  Any guilt I should have felt for keeping a secret from the person who understands me the most on this planet was wiped away because this secret was to protect him.  The last thing I ever want to do to him is cause him pain, to make him worry, to take him back to one of the worst times in his life.  And last night I blew that out of the water.

The instant it was too late to take back that rambling text I knew I’d made a huge mistake.  I hoped that he would breeze right over those two words and take in the whole of the text:  I’m trying.  He didn’t, those words jumped out at him, as they would for any person who’d lived it before.  I’d give anything to take back that misstep and leave him believing that it’s not that bad.  He says it’s okay, he says it’s different this time because I am trying.  I know that he has to tell himself that.  I hope that he believes me when I say I am trying, I’m fighting this battle with everything I have left.  He’s my inspiration to never, ever let this go further.

I’ve protected him from this for eleven years…  I can only hope that he’s not worrying about the rest of our lives now.

*****Notes*****

I’m pretty irked at myself for already messing up NaBloPoMo.  Day three?  I miss day three!  I never realized how busy a person could be when they never leave their house.  Yesterday was phone calls, and reassuring people, and not even being able to finish one movie because of the worry I am causing people.  Not only do I not want to leave my house any more, but I want to stop talking about the changes I am currently going through.  Spoken from the Queen of Worrying:  Stop worrying about me.  It is a waste of your time and energy and it makes me feel like a leper. 

I know that this is annoyingly defensive, and I apologize for that.  My writing has always been on the vague side, I’m not good with opening up.  Just know those two words I mentioned above have nothing to do with hurting myself so there is ZERO need for people to worry about me at this point.  I know that it comes out of love, and I appreciate that, but there’s no reason for other people to fall down the worry hole.  Trust me, I’ve got that covered.

I’m in the stairwell of a parking garage.  I’ve been missing Chinese food something fierce and we decide to risk P.F. Chang’s to satiate me.  We’d just had one of the most unsatisfying meals of my life.  They’re allowed to call that Chinese food?

We stop dead in our tracks on the landing between floors as he destroys my world with four words.  I stand frozen, white knuckling the hand rail, as reality tries to break through.

BOOM!  He tricked me.

BOOM!  I won’t stay here.

BOOM!  I’ll have to do this alone.

BOOM!  My future is over.

And then it’s done, it’s just over.  It’s like a cease fire without the discussion.  There’s nothing but silence.  We spend days with no words, unscheduled solo trips to Williamsburg, and opposing work schedules.  If I don’t acknowledge this it simply is not happening.

Three years later a boy asks me on a date.  I’m already trying to think of ways to dodge it when he offers to take me to P.F. Chang’s.  Of all places!  It wasn’t difficult to turn that down, I’ll never eat there again.  I will never relive that again.  Though I have wondered, would it be any different if the food had been good?

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The realization hit me like a truck:  I have to write today!  Ok, just breathe, this is totally manageable.  I can do this.  Yes, I’m 34 times crazier then when I did this last year, which was painful, but I can do this.  I won’t be the first person to spew crazy all over the internet.

Let’s get a few things clear though, mostly to the members of my awesome family that happen to read this site.  I need to write.  I need to be able to write openly, honestly and freely without worrying that I’m worrying you.  Yes, the writing lately has been a bit depressing.  That’s because I’m struggling.  It’s also a bit difficult to write interesting blog posts about happy things.  Add in the fact that the happiest things about my day were nephews in costume and a Kit Kat bar and we venture far into the land of BORING.  I am struggling.  I’ve admitted that to myself and it really is time for the people in my life (And all the strangers on the internet, hello!) to start accepting that.  I can’t censor myself here because it worries the people that love me.  Love me enough to know that I have to get through this and sometimes that means spilling my guts all over the interweb.  Just view it as an interesting personality quirk.

Ok, now that we’ve opened that can of worms let’s just brace ourselves for the month ahead.  I tried desperately to think of a theme for this month, basically an easy cheat to get 30 days of posts out of.  I thought of three half themes and I’ll probably dabble in each.  Some are happy and some are sad and some are just stories that I have no emotion for but feel like telling.  In no particular order of course.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride here the next 30 days, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to getting back behind this dashboard.

I’m taking the next month off from this website.  How is that any different from the last months of ignoring this website you ask?  This month I’m not going to feel guilty about it.  I just can’t write right now and that’s finally okay with me.

For me there’s a delicate balance between being too crazy and too happy to write.  I’ve not mastered that balance lately and when you add in a splash of barely having time to sleep you end up with this place.  I’m taking a month off to figure out what the hell I’m doing here*. 

However, in the spirit of fairness after a month off I’m going to do a month of full throttle.  I’ll be killing myself over NaBloPoMo again.  Thirty straight days of posting… it doesn’t even seem like a good idea right now, I can’t imagine how ugly it’s going to get.  And that’s the point.

Maybe at the end of the next two months I’ll be able to decide whether to kill this site or not.  Leave it to me to find a bipolar approach to dealing with this elephant on my desktop.

*Here meaning more of what I’m doing on this planet.  All I ever do here is babble.  Relax, I’m not having an existential blog crisis.  I’m not that crazy.

Maybe it’s the weather.

I definitely think it could be the pills.  I’m so sick of the pills.

I realized almost a month in advance that the hardest day of the year is coming.  I don’t even remember how I handled it last year, how can it be this hard this year?  How can it still be this hard seven years later?

I miss my brothers.  I need my neighbor parents around more.  My heart breaks that I don’t get to watch two of my nephews grow up.

I can’t even explain this one:  I feel trapped in this state.

If I ignore the emails can I pretend that he’s still a few miles up the road and not on his way to another continent?

This budget of mine is definitely a thorn in the side.

My calendar… damn my calendar is just boxes filled with anxiety.  Why can’t I say no?  When I do say no why can’t I spend the time on myself instead of collapsing into a ball of immobility on my couch?

Migraine out of left field, that has definitely thrown a wrench in the works.  Add “blacking out” twice in front of near strangers, not a good thing.  Am I falling apart again?

I have the most ridiculous case of writers block ever.  How can you even get writers block when all you write about are your thoughts? 

And then the answer hits me:  I’m hiding.  How many times in one day do I have to start crying simply because I sat still long enough to actually hear the thoughts in my head?  I can list all day and it doesn’t stop the fact that I am stuffing things so far down that all I can feel is that nagging unbalanced whine of something not being quite right.  It’s not writers block when you have fifteen post it notes scribbled hastily because your voice was screaming too loudly to ignore.  It’s HIDING when those post its lay in a pile on the desk for weeks because actually running with them would mean thinking.  Thinking would mean I’d have to admit that I’m sad that I’m not where I want to be, that my family isn’t all here, that my friends are moving apart.  It would mean acknowledging that I am losing my shit and I have no idea how to stop it because I’ve let it build and build until it’s so much bigger then even I know.

I used to be much better at repressing.  I’m losing my edge.

These are a few of the Post Its I found while cleaning off my desk today.  I do this, scribble furiously when a snippet comes to me, tuck it way to be expounded on later.  I’m not in the mood to expound and to be honest the stories behind each are probably better left untold.  The theme in the pile I gathered today appears to be boys.  These are three very different boys, and I have to love them for very different reasons.

• He told me this was a night I would never forget.  I knew he was right.  Sometimes you have these moments, even as you’re living them you know they’ll never fade.  Years later and I still know there was a twin bed, The Dreaming Tree, and an earthquake we didn’t feel because we were too busy falling in love.

• How I Know That You Love Me:  When I crawl back onto the couch we’ve been forced to share I’m shivering.  You know I’m always cold.   Without a word you pull the extra blanket off the back of the couch tightly around me.  You settle in next to me to wait for morning and mash your warm feet on top of my ice cold ones. 

• When the phone rings I think I know exactly what he’s going to say.  Boys are forever surprising me.  Why is he apologizing?  He’s right, things did get a bit inappropriate, but I’m not bothered by it.  Isn’t that his point?  He accepts that he doesn’t need to apologize for my sake and still offers to be “better” next time.  We both laugh trying to picture what “better” is going to look like from him.

I have finally finished transferring the archives into wordpress!  Holy crap ya’ll!  It only took two months to get this done, and I am so glad I don’t have this project on my to do list anymore.  (Currently ignoring the three other projects related to this switch to wordpress.  Let me celebrate!)

I would like to thank (or strangle, what ever) Killer for suddenly developing an anxiety** problem and spending all the money I had saved up for my trip to Vegas this weekend.  Without your special brand of crazy I would have had the cash flow to be drinking my face off this weekend instead of staying home to work.  I would also like to aknowledge the poor planning skills that went into us deciding that this weekend, the weekend of 07/07/07, could be the weekend for my first Vegas experience.  Without the lack of forethought we would have been able to find a hotel room!  And finally, big thanks go out to Mug Rootbeer, this last push of archive transfer hell was fueled by your caffeine free but sugary goodness.

*I don’t know why I called you dude.  There are so few people that I’m comfortable calling dude (Um, really?  Just Lindsey.) and I’m pretty sure you’re not one of them.

**Seriously, my cat has anxiety now apparently.  “Changes in her home life” have stressed her out so much that the vet wants her on anti-anxiety medication.  The day that my cat is on anxiety medication before I am?  Well that’s a strange day indeed.  I know she isn’t happy with the amount of time I spend away from home, and when I am here I’m working.  (Killer is needy, have you not met her?)  Look cat, I’m not happy about the schedule either but you don’t see me peeing in the corner of the office, do you?