All in.

Can you say brain freeze? Writers block? Creative death?

There has been so much going on lately, but the thing is, I think the only thing that's really been going on has been going on inside of me. What makes a girl decide that she's no longer a child, but an adult? Maybe it was when I bought a truck, when I started paying rent, when I became a workaholic. Maybe when I decided that I deserved more in a relationship. I think maybe it's more likely to be the point where I resigned myself to the fact that there's no going back, that I've got what I've got now. That the things I hold on to in order to keep me sane and allow me a minor amount of escapism are things like work and alcohol and sleep.

As hard and unhealthy as all of that is, though, maybe it's a good thing. I think I really have given up on knights in shining armor, in the lottery, in luck really. And that's sad, and that's the worst break up ever, breaking up from your shining, romantic, expectations, but I've got no one to save me but myself.

So here I go.

Man Without A Face.

Everybody's seen the man without a face.
He's not really just without a face.
He's without everything, and that black mass of dark matter is what haunts us.

Everybody's seen him.
JK Rowling called him a dementor.
Stephen King called him Randall Flagg.
He's there for everybody, but our minds imprint images on top of him to help us better understand.

I've been having dreams about the faceless man for a long time. The first one I remember was when I was very young, and having a rash of night terrors. I remember him standing next to my bed, and even though he was right there, I could not see his face. He was at least 8 foot tall, even though our house probably only hit around 7 foot. All of a sudden my door was closed despite me having gone to sleep with it open and all the lights blazing. And when my mom woke me up from being backed up against the wall screaming, the door was open and lights blazing once again.

I've had another one recently. The man is chasing me, but I'm pregnant and ready to pop and am way too slow. He's not really chasing me, he's just toying with me. He finally gets bored of the game, and catches me as I trip. He sits on my chest and even though he is entirely weightless, I cannot breathe. I've completely forgotten how. And as he sits on my chest, he cuts open my swollen belly and takes my baby.

So that's my personal demon. The one who doesn't have a face or a body or an existence, but haunts me nonetheless. The dark matter that superimposes over him to help me cope is thick and staticky despite its nonexistance.

This Week's Timeline.

So, it seems things have been a tad eventful.
In chronological order:
1. I am obsessed with Hard by Rihanna.

2. The tortoises are very happy with their new home, and understanding who their new mommy is. Zeus is always excited to see me with a big old leaf of lettuce for him, and lets me take him outside when its warm without cowering in his shell. Doc is a little too adventurous for his own good, and knows that I'll always save his hide. He recently fell on to his back trying to climb out of his box, and chirped until I came to save him.

3. I've been chosen to work on a new project at work. I spent two entirely boring days in training, and felt completely overwhelmed when I took calls again today. My whole profile was changed, giving me different access levels, and it was just too much. I ended up leaving work early so I could study...for work. Basically, I get to now sell just as much as I do customer service. AT&T launched U-Verse 3 years ago, and now we get to sell it. It's a really awesome bit of fiber optic technology that allows you to consolidate your home phone, tv, and internet all into one quick, efficent network. Now that I've figured out the pros and cons to things like Voice Over IP and what fiber optics means in the realm of internet, I'm really excited.

4. So yesterday I took the beau to the doctor. He had a spot on his back that hurt really badly, like a pimple that hasn't broken the skin yet, except bigger and redder and hot to the touch. We were thinking that it was a spider bite or a boil, something that the doctor could cut open and just send us home. Turns out beaus got ulcerative colitis. Those bumps are cysts, basically a tunnel from his colon into his skin, which means those cysts are dumping all his waste back into his system. Right now he is on a regiment of broad scale antibiotics and we are doing a mostly liquid diet together, augmented with absolutely no meat or dairy. We'll go back to the doctor in 10 days to get a referral to a surgeon. You think thats the sucky part? Come to find out, beau doesn't have health insurance where we work. He's never really needed it until now, so we're looking between 10 and 15 thousand for the anesthesia, surgery, and hospital stay. Payment plans, here we come.

5. When I came home early from work today, the roomies let me know that they replaced every single light bulb in the house with energy efficient bulbs. Reducing our power bill (which I pay) significantly by reducing our wattage output from 600 to 105.

6. Seconds after they told me that, Roomie #1 got a phone call from his mom. His autistic sister is sick and in the hospital. For some currently unknown reason, her liver is failing. They start dialysis tomorrow.

Life is never boring.

terrapins, islands, and crazies.

So switch things around a bit. Got a job and a significant other and two tortoises (lovingly dubbed Doc and Zeus), but no car. So...yeah. Still surprisingly happy. The moodiness hasn't gone away, but anyone who knows me will never expect such things.

Went and saw Shutter Island the other day. I really enjoyed it, have a cookie Scorsese. So for those of you who are like me and don't have tv, here it is in a nutshell: Leo DiCaprio heads to an island full of crazies. People are disappearing, oh wait, they never existed, yadda yadda yadda, lets get to the point here. Is Leo crazy? Will he get lobotomized? Does mental deficiency always equal insanity?

I honestly don't know, most likely, and...I don't think so. It was a great highlight to the movie, I kind of think that was the point. We took the scenic view to get there, but thats ok. But think about it. Ever see A Beautiful Mind? Brilliant+schizophrenic guy, lots of movie stuff, ends up NOT taking his medication, but being able to seperate what is reality and what isn't. Now, to me, that's not crazy. That's about as sane as it gets. Maybe this guy has a chemical imbalance, but he's not insane.

My meandering monologue brings us here: as highly subjective and open to interpretation reality is, I think insanity is when you stop becoming a part of it. When your reality and another's reality don't even have the same shadow, and YOU DON'T KNOW IT.

That's some crazy shit.

Blue Man?

every now and then, you get those random fantasies. Some of em are about living on the road, some of em are about having kids, and some of them are about random shit. The kind of stuff you see on movies and tv or hear about on the radio.

So I've got this fantasy about a proposal. I imagine being at the Blue Man Group show in Las Vegas. (Have you seen it? It's PHENOMENAL.) Yeah, thats right, I want to be proposed to in Vegas. At a cheesy Vegas show. Probably with some cheesy Vegas drink.

So they always pull people up on the stage, right? SO maybe I get pulled up on the stage, and as the music crescendos....

Ink.

My mom hated the idea of me getting a tattoo. She never understood why I needed one. When it came down to getting my first tattoo though, she didn't try to dissuade me. Her attitude was to suggest places where I could alternately hide it or show it, and to remind me that tattoos are forever...so it better damn well mean something.

It's been a couple years since I got my first tat, and I don't regret it. It meant a lot to me, and it was well thought out. Sometimes I tell people that I have a sparrow because sparrows can always find their way home, sometimes I don't. It was originally a sailor's tattoo, and my mark as a wanderer is personal. Such descriptions or explanations are subject to my mood, which is mercurial at best.

What neither my mother nor I expected was the significance growing with time. My tat is an integral part of my story and the sparrow is a character that keeps showing up.

When my friend was diagnosed with a brain tumor, his family started a blog to catalogue his journey through sickness and health. they stopped the blog not long after he died, but there was one last entry on the day of the funeral. It was written by his father, who woke up not knowing how he was going to get thorugh the day, not knowing how he could bury his son. He wronte that he heard a chirpy little bird outside his window, a sparrow's spring call in the middle of February. He said he knew then that was Daniel's parting gift, and that he would be able to go on.

So yes, my tattoos mean something. Every day they mean more than the day before.

Fort Hood

A couple days ago, at work, a group of my coworkers were discussing what happened at Fort Hood. A man that normally I like very much made this statement: it was just some Muslim that went off the deep end.

I was so furious. I felt like so many things were wrong about that statement. First of all, "just"? Thirteen people being gunned down because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time is not "just" some guy going crazy. It is a massacre. My heart is broken for the families that were shattered, for the mothers and wives and children that now sleep with a night light. Tragedy is bad enough, but senseless tragedy...

I do have to say though, PEOPLE WERE AT FAULT. This massacre was a direct result of America's cruel and ignorant attitude towards Middle Easterners and Muslims. The shooter was American born, and wanted to serve his country. Even as he gained rank, he was met by prejudice and harrassment, and then was basically told to deal with it. Would that fly in your workplace? It wouldn't fly in the McDonalds that my first job was in, and it wouldn't fly in my current workplace.

If certain soldiers hadn't been so cruel, so ignorant, or so idiotic, the soldiers that died wouldn't have become victims. You take a quiet, God-fearing man who listens to everyone's insanities, and compound the situation with direct prejudice because of a damn belief system, and then you tell me that you're surprised that a ticking time bomb went off.

Let me throw something your way to think about. Muslims did not attack America. Fanatical terrorists with an agenda did. It doesn't matter that they were Middle Eastern. It doesn't matter that they were Muslim. Last year, a Christian group flew to Reno, NV to protest Briana Denison's funeral, a girl who had been raped and murdered. They said she deserved to die, that she was kidnapped from her own home and would never see her family again because God just hated Reno. But you don't see white Christian folks being harrassed for being white or Christian.

He killed thirteen people. We helped.