Broken Nose

Campus froze its funds, I'm not sure when I get paid / reimbursed next. I'm working because

My bosses treat people like disposable crap

Nebraska starts to unravel, despite his paycheck is fine (noting that existential dread, versus situational, it gets on my fucking nerves)

My sister is gravely silent

My youngest is homesick somewhere in Kentucky



... ...

I broke my nose

It hurts!

before/after

I gotta stop looking at the news. West Virginia, last state without the plague. So. Cabinporning instead of more news...

Wow.

Update: nope. (Duh.)

I live prepared for the worst. As I breathe, inhale (brace for it) exhale (accept it). Probably always have by half, and it has been incurable since Trainwreck. It is my brainchemical reality. How did FPH put it? "Injuries don't just fade in midlife." So weirdly, I feel kinda FINE right now, like in synch for a change with the world, which is now also feeling dread and like staying home.

Somewhere, Train is cleaning his guns, chain/sneak smoking, feeling right with the world also, in emergencymode.  He perfected my tuning to harmonize with catastrophe, though my response is RETREAT versus put the sirens on. I'd be packing large lunches for him if we were together now, while at work his adrenal glands would be confusing his brains for his balls, him bonding with some co-worker broad in the heat of crisis. I hope his kid(s) are healthy. But also, I hope Whitegirlrapper bitches him out and is best friends with his mother ft lets her own mother be camped on his couch constantly - gigglegiggle - just thinking that the world is coughing on him while he tries to be all EMT-y about it and she's ladling boring-harpy like existential-gravy all over him gives me the giggles. C'mon, that's fair. And funny.

Meanwhile, Nebraska is blessedly in Nebraska. He was supposed to fly here, but No. Then he wanted to drive, NO. Finally I have to say: I wanted the world to stop. And now it has. 

I am going to curl up here in my girlcave. Lacking only for a song.

it's like everyone with my genetics is singing the praises of staying home w stockpiled pasta 

Play me a song?

"dance moves"

hahahaha

"YA YA", aka the slightly scary smirking bitch at the center of Reality

I thought the end of the world would be cooler than Wal-Mart with my mom

I bought another house. I am too emersed in life to want to write about it much. In my kids, my job, warily letting a man near me while holding him at bay also, life upon life upon life. The surgery worked. But I am worse for wear, heavy still in my mind especially from the months of being pinned down. So I do what I always do when desperate and I need to stand back up - I go balls out at Doing.

But it feels different. It feels like a hat trick that I know I can't keep pulling forever. It makes me quiet. As if to ration my remaining energy more carefully.

The house is an investment. I won't live there. But. She will more than live there. Glow. She will grow up there.

I look down. I always looked down when I was small like her, watching my legs move to hold me up and move me around. I was in love with my own short sturdy brown legs, some of my earliest wordless memories. I stand in the empty house, mine for an hour, I look down at the stained red scratched bald old floor and notice the inlay underneath the years of crud and gobbed on red semi translucent whatever was fashionable in circa 1940. I text the convict ripped neck tattoo floor guy. Remember me? Seconds later: Yes, I do. Good. Because I might just go down that block, buying her neighbors, who would be my sons now that The Girl is settled. Well, my son, living near my daughter, and my youngest - a They, a multifarious blessing.

The virus spreads and everyone braces themselves. Shaken. It feels as if the world just caught what I've been feeling for God knows how long now. A year? Since 2014? Welcome to the party of battening down hatches. I have a year's worth of toilet paper and bear mace, for whatever that's worth. You probably have hand sanitizer. It isn't worth much. Like most things you believed in, once upon a time

public health faculty helped me test it

(don't) play me a song (?)

Play me a song?

It's Over - The Smiths

Play me a song?

Awolnation - The Best

[Warning: Poetry alert! If you prefer your horoscopes to be exclusively composed of practical, hyper-rational advice, stop reading now!] Happy Valentine Daze, Virgo! I hope there's someone in your life to whom you can give a note like the one I'll offer at the end of this oracle. If there's not, I trust you will locate that person in the next six months. Feel free to alter the note as you see fit. Here it is. "When you and I are together, it's as if we have been reborn into luckier lives; as if we can breathe deeper breaths that fill our bodies with richer sunlight; as if we see all of the world's beauty that alone we were blind to; as if the secrets of our souls' codes are no longer secret."


How about, "When you and I are together, it's good to see you again." ?

Not very romantic, I know.

"Math"

I make 81 cents on the dollar of a man doing my same job. Supposedly. But I know LOTS of men making 2-3× at least. Who are fuckturds couldn't do my job if their balls were on fire otherwise.

But ok. 81 cents. Fine. That's 19 cents worth of resentment. By ratio. As a constant.

Save 19 cents with compounded interest for 50 years. What? It's roughly $126.

So for every dollar your white male privilege earns, it also earns $126 worth of FUCK YOU from me.

Imagine how black women feel about you! What you owe.

That's my problem. With this guy or that. It's the compounding interest on FUCK YOU over time naturally. It's nothing personal.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). If you believe you don't know what you're doing and then get evidence that supports that belief, frustration sets in. This is the point when many would give up. Not you. All of this can be figured out, if only you don't quit.

Mark, best in soul. Like, really good.
Didn't work.

EX, best partner match. Like, perfect on paper.
Didn't work.

FPH, brought out the good in me.
Didn't (even try to make it) work.

Trainwreck, best sex. As in intimacy.
Didn't work.

Nebraska. Excellent match on paper, highly motivated. Everything says it should work. Like, as a math problem. Every night I go to sleep working this problem, having talked to him on the phone and dodged as much lovetalk as humanly possible - it's like talking to my dad and trying to avoid triggering subjects. (Sigh.)

Every day, I wake up and work the problem of my job / kids / life. Alone.

All evidence suggests I do not know what I'm doing. Except (remember?) this.

Prove it.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). When things get a little tense, it might help to think of this as an adventure, or the movie you're starring in. If you take a moment to sense it, you'll get the feeling there's an invisible audience out there rooting for you.

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

you're just crimping my style 

I've been nominated to move up (again). This time, up and AWAY.

I keep thinking: disappear.

If you keep thinking a thing, about a thing, it comes to you. In one form or another. smib

I am not telling anybody where I am going. I'm just going to Get Gone.

Alone.

"Understand why it agitates me,  talking of trips and island cabins. I don't want to talk about a fantasy future. And I don't want to try to relive your glorious traveled past, as if looking at vacation slides....Follow your first wife, or first your mistress, to hell in a cruise ship!"

New strategy. He reads not nearly as much as I do. So I can "quote" messages that I wish existed for me to quote, author and title invented, and for all his ivy league pedigree, he doesn't catch me. But hopefully he catches the DRIFTs

"Eat me raw mister!", The Liars Club, Mary Karr

I got approved for a sabbatical today. I could abuptly disappear from June 1 - Jan 15.  It's kind of career suicide at this moment to lean out, after all I've built and accomplished in titles and raises, Big Work. But. I feel suffocated as fuck. By kids, work, and boyfriend. They all want more from me than I have, in every way.

I love my kids.
My job is enviable.
My boyfriend adores me.

Heavy.
Heavy.
Heavy.
That's how all three feel to me.

I want the kids to get jobs. I mean if they have to grow up, which bums me out frankly, then grow up. Don't just get big and too cool to hang out with me while also costing me a fortune.  I want my job to have about 100% less corporate culture  bulllllshiiiit in it, and I don't even have that much, but still, I have NO TOLERANCE. And I want to I dunno what about the wonderful boyfriend whose adoration is suffocating as fuck - if he tells me one more time that he wants to be a "good partner", I'm going to castrate him. BLECH. As completely illogical as it is, the dude who adores me and tries in every way to make my life easier is the most suffocating thing on the list. If he DID all the same things but just SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT, he'd be great, but he never shuts up.

Alll of it, my whole damn life, is on my fucking nerves.

Is this PMS? Hard to tell now. My uterus is microwaved / my hormone panel is the same, ie FUCKING CRABBY. And Nebraska says, 'You said that you might be experiencing PMS, can you tell me more?" That is annoying as HELL. (Right??)

I think I'll probably take that sabbatical. And disappear.

Yoga twice. In front of classroom 4 times. The house is clean. I inch back.

Sunshine was born in the falls, classic birth defects such as kidney malformation. She's going for surgery too soon. After working right up to the day of, for the money. Robotic surgery. I remember what that means. (grimsigh)

Dog spooning with sweater sniffing dogtoybutt:

Plotting: tattoo, another healing magic type deal; hair cut oft opposite side re arm tattoo; and
...what? I need one more thing, the power of three

Sunday. One week out from hysteroscopy, myomectomies, and endometrial ablation. Managed the first week of classes, almost every project is on timeline, I booked travel to the first couple conferences coming up, I completed all inspections and filed all necessary paperwork to buy that duplex, all chores got done if just barely. I also slept at least 12 hours of every 24 and haven't exercised in a month, too sick before and now so sluggish. I feel like a spoonful of mashed potatoes. When can I go back to normal?, I asked. "A week or two, just no baths, no sex, and don't do anything too crazy."

🤔 shit

So. New Orleans level escapades are definitely out. What about getting tattoos? No nearly having sex on the ground in the middle of Lewiston, obviously, and it's too cold for that anyway...

The wounds take up to month to heal completely, my body is a bag of fluids weeping from of a gut full of blisters. I have to be patient with it. But. As I feel better each day, and start to imagine being Perfectly Fine, trouble brews naturally in my heart of hearts. So, can I do Bikram??, cz thats how I keep my crazy on a leash. If I call and ask, Hey can I pull my leg over my head in a 108 degree room?, methinks the answer will be NO

🤔

I am back home and already in the least amount of pain I've been in for many months.

My face is the color of concrete.

No song.

One more day. And then MAYBE relief.  After years of increasing pain, months and months of relentless tests to "rule out" every fucking thing from colon cancer to pregnancy (multiple times, seriously), with results missing for weeks, forms sent to the wrong address (but the medical bills arrive just fine), fuckhead doctor stupid saying shit like "anxious? you've got tenure!", my heart racing every night, anemic dull ache eyes light going out in the mirror. Bleeding bleeding bleeding. And through it all, I work, work and work, worry and raise hard kids, dragging my ass upright day in and out. Buying houses, making decisions, staring the risks of monumental failures in the face, faking fine as well as you can actually BE fine.

When I finally got approved for surgery (you have to get approved for pain relief if you're a woman, you are not ENTITLED to it), and I had to tell people I'd be out a while, then I heard: every other woman I work with is sick. If they have what I have, they suffered too long untreated in most cases and wound up with a hysterectomy. If they're sick with something else, anxiety for instance, they either changed doctors umpteen times before anyone gave a shit or they self medicate with the xanax or klonopin of a friend who does have a doctor or they drink. They are told "try yoga" for EVERYTHING, sexist and culturally incompetent bullshit.

We are dying. Bleeding to death. Anemic. Panic ridden. Working on our feet against medical advice if we do have doctors worth a damn, which most of us don't.

I am furious. And it occurs to me as I lie here, feeling fury pulse through my panicked heart, that I might actually get better again. I'll still be dying because we are all dying, but meanwhile I'll be well again. I will have the full FORCE of my health. What might I do with that kind of power again? And this rage.

Words do matter.

I bought a duplex. Well, I have an accepted offer on one, though it's not mine til the ink is dry. Wanna see?

passenger - hearts on fire

8 more days til surgery..

I am so so sick of being sick...