just be.

the world is a confusing place.

you know how people always say don't put anything in an email you wouldn't want the world to read? i blew it tonight.

using twitterific, i feel like my mother-in-law: i love the benefits of the newfangled technology, but i don't always get it. the differences between direct replies and general tweets are not always (okay, almost never) clear to me. and that's where disaster entered the picture today.

my friend katie and i had been having a conversation on the facebook about who would play us in a movie (i can't remember how it started, but there it is). we have never met in person, and i'm not even sure we've ever seen photos of each other—we met on ravelry and continued our friendship in email and fb. anyway, i declared that i pictured helen hunt or julia louis-dreyfus. she sent me a direct tweet saying, "can't remember her name, but I picture you played by Best in Show trainer." (that is one of my favorite movies, so that endears me to her, of course.) so i tweeted back, "Omg. She very dykey, but he is hilarious. The one who hooks up with jennifer Coolidge and starts bitch magazine?"

now. if you know me, you know that i'm using "dykey" ironically (and you're as shocked as i am that someone i've never met in person nails my persona so accurately. i talk way more like jane lynch than like helen or julia, though i'm nowhere near as willowy and pretty as any of them). but i am *mortified* that i sent the message out. without the context of what we had said before the tweet, it sounds like (a) i'm using "dykey" as a slur and (b) either i'm talking about some guy or i'm talking about the same woman and saying that she can't be dykey and hilarious. or something. i have been shaking and sick to my stomach ever since i hit send and realized that i'd sent it to all my twitter followers—some of whom know me but many of whom don't—and not just katie.

so i'm apologizing for any pain or confusion i may have caused anyone who read it, out in public like my words were. i hope that putting it into context alleviates any concerns, but really i'm just sorry i said it and humbly ask for forgiveness. it's not the worst thing i've ever said and wished i could swallow—but those are stories for another day. and yes, i know that putting it here on the blog opens it to a way wider audience than my twitter followers, but i'd be terrible at apologizing in 140-character snips, and i believe that an apology should be given as publicly as the wrong involved. so here it is on the blog.

and i'm getting rid of twitterific in search of an app that is a little more my speed. (speed 16.)

and now to the headlines:

• dick cheney continues to astound me with his awfulness.
• i wish i were half the wife nancy reagan was—and continues to be—to ronald.
• lawrence o'donnell was better when he was less rabid, less rude, and used fewer of his words to call people names than to state principles.
• you don't have to be a racist to oppose someone of a different race from yours.
• someone who attempts to glue your locks—twice—and who cuts the lines for your surveillance system and who drills holes in your roof is not committing vandalism. that person is preparing your location for a crime that he or she does not want you to escape and does not want watched or recorded for evidence. a crime like, say, using explosives or gas to kill everyone inside. we knew this 15 years ago when i interned with the national clinic access project. these are not new techniques or ideas. nor are they secrets. they are well-documented, widely published, nationally known methods used by a sick, misguided, sad segment of our society that is smaller than, but not qualitatively different from, any loose coalition of terrorists motivated by political or religious rationales. so let me give you a little tip for them, in case you see them: political voices can and should be expressed by voting and free speech. religious voices can and should be heard through free speech and free exercise of religion. spread the word. seems the message (and the methods) aren't making it around to everyone.

no pithy headline tonight.

• killing someone for doing something legal within his or her profession is not legal, no matter how abhorrent that something is to you. it is not self-defense.
• it is really, really cool to see a space shuttle piggybacked on a jet.
• fish should not be 15 feet long.

a little editorializing:

i have three friends who i know have had an abortion. i'm sure there are more—those are just the ones who've told me. two were single teens, one of whom had a child already and did not want to increase her family while she tried to put herself through school and lived partly on public assistance. another was married and had children already and was already overwhelmed.

abortion is heartbreaking, to me. i do believe that life begins at conception—that is, life in the sense that any organism is alive. when the one friend i knew while she was wrestling with this wrenching decision was agonizing over it, i asked her whether i could adopt the child if she carried it to term. (my husband and i do not intend to have children biologically or through adoption, and i have had my tubes tied for 11 years.) when she decided to terminate the pregnancy, i mourned the loss of a child with genes contributed by this wonderful woman and her amazing husband, a sibling for her other children.

but in no way do i believe that it is my place—or my government's place—to force any of these women, or anyone else, to carry a child to term if that woman does not believe that she can do so. it is not my place to tell her that (fill in the blank) is not a good enough reason to end her pregnancy or to make any other determination about her physical or mental health. that is up to her and her doctor, perhaps with the help and guidance of some spiritual authority or her partner or both. but it is never up to me, and it shouldn't be. my belief that the thing inside her is alive is not the same as believing that it is a person in the same sense that she is a person.

it certainly is not the same as believing that a medical professional who performs a procedure on her—a legal procedure, with her informed consent—is a murderer. and it is not the same as believing that vigilante punishment or vengeance against such professionals or their clients, families, or associates is in any way acceptable, let alone laudable. shame on randall terry and his ilk.

thinking of my favorite veteran

i think of jerry often and try to remember him as he was when healthier, telling great stories and full of creativity and life. alzheimer's disease has gutted him, but he'll always be my favorite veteran—a real hero.

(at my wedding, september 2005; photo by lisa kyle)

just the fax, ma'am.

so, today's avoided-too-long to-do is to send verification information to my flexible spending account (fsa) provider, triad. why is this an avoided-too-long to-do? it's not like i don't *have* the information—i downloaded most of it from drugstore.com, which generates these reports on demand in seconds, and the rest my doctor's office mailed to me.

it's an avoided-too-long to-do because triad requires that i FAX THE INFORMATION to it. fax? who faxes? it's 2009, people. 2009 *and a half*, almost. requiring me to fax you something is like snail-mailing me a 78-rpm vinyl record that contains instructions to climb to the highest peak on the continent and hammer out the details in morse code using a pair of rocks shaped like dodo birds. fax? dude. get with the millennium.

the league of extraordinary discipline.

looks like i need to hitch my wagon to the league of extraordinary discipline and quit worshiping the league of extraordinary hedonism. my headaches seem to be getting better (i wish that i could shout and sing that with choirs of angels opening the heavens with beams of light streaming down on you straight from god, but just the word "hallelujah!" is going to have to do for now), which means that i can finally start exercising, i hope, without fear of migraine knocking me out for a couple of days. my body was so sick of junk food when i got back from maryland sheep and wool on sunday that i was craving brown rice and vegetables monday for lunch, even in the face of plenty of available naughtiness in the house. and my wallet has been reduced to a smoking pile of ashes after a tear through the world of yarn and getting ready for summer vacations. oh, and that yarn and an equally large tear through the world of patterns means that i have a universe of projects surrounding me in virtually every room of my house (which is a lot—it's a big old house).

when i want to be self-disciplined, i can really kick it. it's that whole deciding to be my best self that holds me back. today, i'm hoping that that best self shows itself with a ferocity that scares away the self-indulgence for a while.

why, yes, thank you, i *am* feeling better.

as lisa and i have long said, everything is better once you've been to the bathroom. and, paraphrasing that, once you've had a little smackerel of something.

(okay, it also took some scolding of my knitting and starting a new project using some needles that i never use but love, but still. the food helped a LOT.)

so does seeing my boyfriend (aka president obama) on the teevee. i heart him so hard.

i made my shopping list for tuesday, which i'm trying to make my regular grocery-shopping day. i have appointments outside the house more often on tuesdays than on any other day of the week, plus it's not a terribly crowded time—middayish—to be at whole foods (and who isn't happier surrounded by the friendliest, most knowledgeable, and most helpful staff in all of grocering? and the most gorgeous produce and meat ever?). and best of all, it's one of the days on which i can see anna at the store, which combines two things that make me *very* happy: anna-banana + knitting.

i base my shopping list on my dr. phil food plan (mine comes from his book, but it's much the same as this online resource). the more closely i follow this plan, the better i feel, in every way. this week's plan presents some challenges: salmon, king crab, shrimp, and tuna steak. if you have ever planned a meal with me or been out to a restaurant with me, you know that i am an embarrassingly picky eater and that i cannot stand seafood. (i do not count a tuna-fish sandwich with mayo and, preferably, crunchies like minced onions and celery.) i have long wanted to make myself like seafood, so i googled "salmon for people who don't like fish" and read a few message boards. one suggestion that made plenty of sense to me was that you try seafood at a good restaurant, well prepared. another was that you learn to like seafood much like you learned to like vegetables. these rang particularly true for me in that i adore a good restaurant meal and in that there really aren't many vegetables that i dislike and i love them as simply prepared as possible—something that was not true when i was a child. so i asked smartboy—who LOVES seafood—what the best salmon is that he's had in town. this was a harder question for him to answer than i anticipated, since he gets salmon virtually any time we order in or eat at a restaurant. we talked a bit about my goals and my options, and we decided that we would go out to a seafood restaurant this week for those meals and see whether i could like any of them. we talked about mccormick and schmick's on the south side and legal sea foods downtown, but i know that i'll be more likely to make time for this if we try mitchell's at the waterfront, since i can combine an errand or two as well. so we'll start with mitchell's and see what happens thereafter.

i initially thought i should try to stick with the healthiest preparations possible, but i am going to give myself permission to ignore health considerations for these meals. after all, i probably learned to like zucchini after eating fried zucchini, broccoli after eating it with cheese sauce, and so on. and now i love just steamed or roasted vegetables best of all. so mitchell's has some interesting-looking preparations, including its shang hai preparation: the catch of the day steamed with fresh ginger (one of my three favorite flavors in the world, so hey!) and scallions and served with sticky rice, spinach, and rice-wine soy sauce. i'll try maybe some tuna with that. they also do a blue-crab and jumbo-shrimp penne with alfredo cream sauce (how do you go wrong with that?), and beer-battered jumbo gulf shrimp with sea-salt french fries, hush puppies, and cole slaw (the latter i will skip, thankyouverymuch). or maybe the chesapeake bay jumbo lump crab cakes with scallion mashed potatoes and sweet-corn saute. or the ginger-crusted atlantic salmon with sticky rice, stir-fried veggies, and orange-ginger butter sauce. the point is that, if i focus on the preparation and the sides, i can at least taste some of these things and try to learn to like them. i won't lose weight doing it, but eventually it'll be possible, i hope, to order them in healthier  ways. wish me luck.

and now i shall return to knitting. much more soothing than thinking about seafood.

brain chemistry SUCKS.

a long, long time ago, in a doctor's office not that far away, my primary-care physician thought that a low dose of paxil would help with my migraines, along with a host of big fat stressers in my life at the time. it did.

after a few years, i began seeing my neurologist at the headache center. he moved me from the paxil to effexor, if memory serves, also at a low dose. these were far from the first prophylactic treatments i'd tried for my migraines over the years (i've had them for almost 35 years now, so there's not much i haven't tried).

a few years later, we tried switching from effexor to cymbalta, which i stayed on for a few more years.

i've run out of medications from time to time over all those years, and withdrawal from these things is NO FUN AT ALL. usually, i experience a noticeable change in mood and demeanor within a day of stopping the meds—LOTS of crying (like, i cry a lot already in normal life, but this is like crazytime crying, like i have stock in kleenex or something) and major irritability. there's also usually a feeling of overall malaise that is hard to explain: like a constantly nervous stomach? that's oversimplifying, but that's the general sensation. like i'm nervous all the time. butterflies.

the other symptom that has always accompanied withdrawal, the one that universally sends me back to my doctor for help, is this weird sensation that i have just this instant learned has a name and is not uncommon. people call it brain zaps or brain shivers, and those are so apt. i have tried to describe it to smartboy in the past like this: you know the sensation you get when you twinge a nerve like your funny-bone nerve? how it sort of shoots this weird twingy sensation throughout a lot of your body, not just the elbow? it's like that, but in the head and maybe a little in the neck and shoulder. like you've pinched a nerve, except that it doesn't *hurt*, just feels buzzy. and it also feels like my brain and everything else just STOPS. for a split second, but it stops. like being dizzy and then someone snaps the pause button. and then when they hit play again, everything that had paused now has to catch up.

it's like that. it's not pleasant, not even a little. and it happens ALL.THE.TIME. and if i'm walking and it happens, it's all the fun of a dizzy spell and disorientation for that fleeting second as well. i hate it. hatehatehate it.

well, thanks to my insurance company and drugstore.com, i am completely out of cymbalta. i ran out last week. drugstore.com says, "oh, we've filled that and it's already in the mail!" then i get another email from it saying, "sorry, but your insurance company won't let you have more than a 30-day supply." or "thanks for doing business with drugstore.com. as you've requested, we've canceled your autorefill on your prescription. we hope you'll come back!" and other, equally nonsensical, alice-in-wonderland painting-the-roses-red messages that just pepper my inbox like an automatic weapon. my doctor's office tried to call in new scrips to my local walgreens, and walgreens ran into the same crap with drugstore.com and my insurance company: i can't have any more because drugstore.com just shipped some and the insurance company won't refill it until 30 days after that. or whatever. you get the point: i ran out of drugs more than a week ago, but nobody seems to be able to get me more.

the first couple of days i ran out, i was stunned at how good i felt. remember my post after having had the craniosacral massage? i felt so good that day i couldn't believe it was me inside. but the next day and every day since, i have felt worse and worse. today, i am making myself not cry at the stupidest things: as i'm researching this whole brain zap thing, for example, i'm reading that it can go on forever, that it can cause permanent damage (!), that i may have to get back on drugs and stay on them for the rest of my life (!!), and so on, and i just start to cry. yes, it's upsetting to think that i could have to take meds for the rest of my life or risk feeling like this, but crying over it? wtf? get a grip, lis. i had really, really hoped that i could just stay off the cymbalta now, just maybe start taking some supplements—omegas, resveratrol, lots of water, you know. stuff that is supposed to be good for me, not just filling some kind of void that my broken brain can't fill for itself. (i know: drama queen alert! it's the withdrawal talking, honest.)

anyway, i'm just here to bitch about the brain zaps and the other withdrawal symptoms and hope that tomorrow i can reach someone at my neuro's office who can help me figure out what to do. i hate this and i really want it to stop. and "it" here includes reliance on medication. i'm okay having to take imitrex every time i have a migraine, but i'd really, really like not to have to take some kind of broken-brain-filler-upper for the rest of my freaking life.

(wow. this post does not feel like it sounds like me, not the me i think i am inside. i apologize in advance for the weirditude. i'm now going to return to my previously scheduled knitting. WHICH i screwed up yesterday enough that i believe that i will have to frog the.whole.thing and start again. this does not make me less prone to weeping. or irritability.) (maybe dinner will help. seeing zuzu wag her flippy tail when she hears smartboy come downstairs certainly cheers me up. thank goodness for pets. srsly.)

whew.

you would not know, from the fact that i just woke up from a 21-hour sleep, that i had a great time with anna on sunday at the pittsburgh knit and crochet festival. it really needs to be called a fiber festival or something, because there was weaving, roving, and all kinds of other fiber- but not knit- or crochet-related stuff. i bought a lot of yarn from creatively dyed yarn, of which i'd bought one beautiful, squooshy skein in michigan this christmas at threadbear but hadn't seen anywhere else before, plus a bunch of brooks farm and knitting notions stuff (including a smooth-as-glass cherrywood nostepinne that i cannot wait to try out), and some all-alpaca sock yarn that is going to be on my feet a lot, i predict. and some beautiful chunky/bulky yarn from cosy, who continues to be irresponsibly adorable. i also picked up a lovely sweater pin from the nicest woman in the world and some small accessories from glory-ous knits.

no photos, but this is easy: just picture lots and lots of blue—medium blues, mostly, and with a dusty grey quality—in every kind of yarn possible. some fingering, some aran, some worsted, mostly sport, with lots of sheen and squoosh. you will be picturing it all correctly.

unfortunately, i went to bed sunday night with a bit of a migraine, my right temple stabbing, and i thought maybe i could just sleep it off. i went to bed at about 8:30–9, i think, and i should know better by now. i cannot sleep it off, and it will get worse. it did, until, by morning, i could not move my head off my pillow. smartboy very sweetly brought me some imitrex injections from my study, and i did one (ow) and slept until about 2, when i couldn't tolerate the still-stabbing pain any longer and did another injection (ow) and slept until after 6 p.m. and while i do appreciate the extremely creative and entertaining, intense dreams that my brain seems to bring me, i would gladly trade them and it for one that didn't give me crippling, blinding pain that lasts for days. it still hurts, but not enough to stay in bed. i needed to take my meds (yeah, like nine hours late), go to the bathroom (!), and eat something. smartboy made chili (gotta love a man who makes such good use of his day off), and it smells wonderful.

oh! and speaking of how wonderful smartboy is: valentine's day was off teh hook. i did work most of the day (which is good, seeing as i was not off today and couldn't even get up long enough to send an i'm-out-sick email), but in the evening, he made a fantastic filet mignon au poivre (his first-ever from-scratch meal, i think—he does a lot of chili from a hard times cafe mix and plenty of frozen foods and fresh pasta, but really, this was something to behold), finished off with some yummy tarts from costco. AND another tiffany–frank gehry necklace. he is a prize.

boycott stress.

from the time when i was old enough to buy gifts for people until probably 10 years ago, i was a regular martha. i planned and cooked every meal; had dinner, movie, and game parties every month; and bought gifts months in advance. (i was a lousy housekeeper, but we'll ignore that for the moment.)

when my first husband and i split up, i think i went through some kind of rebellion. for our nine years together, i'd been the organized one, the responsible one, the dependable one, the one who planned and took care of grown-up matters. turns out, i resented that. a lot. (i know. who could have seen *that* coming?) so when i was single again, i stopped straightening piles of magazines into perfectly aligned rectangles. i stopped planning months in advance for every little trip and life event. i stopped making grocery-shopping lists organized by the store's layout. i stopped categorizing and alphabetizing my books and cds.

it was so liberating. for the first time, i was accountable virtually to no one. i was in my third year of law school, so of course i was accountable for my work--though really, if i'd wanted to rebel *that* much, i could have just dropped out, i suppose. i had roommates, and i wanted to be a good housemate, so i tried not to intrude on the common spaces with all my crap. but in my room, in my life, i could be as messy, disorganized, and chaotic as i wanted.

i got past a lot of that and started planning again. and i tried to be organized, though i'm still working on reclaiming that--that's one of those things that is hard to get back once abandoned (just because you have to start by organizing what you already have). i still haven't gotten my cooking and entertaining mojo back. but i'm working on that and my housekeeping.

and this holiday season, i've worked hard to stop the things that stress me out at this time of year. for thanksgiving, i ordered all the sides from whole foods and just made an easy butterflied turkey. as a result, my week was way less stressful and busy than it has ever been at thanksgiving for me. at least since my teens.

and i'm trying to get back in the gift-planning groove. used to be, i'd have every scrap of holiday shopping finished by september or october. that hasn't happened in years, and some of it is, i think, because of knitting. i like making gifts for people, but i never have as much time as i think i will.

this year, i bought a lot of gifts at the handmade arcade, which is so going to become an annual ritual. i found great stuff, all handmade or recycled by individual folks trying to make a living at their chosen crafts. i figured that i'd make the rest of the gifts. i had a couple already finished, but a seemingly long list still awaited.

i've been trying. every time i have knitting time, i'm either knitting furiously away at some present or obsessing on ravelry about what i could be making with the yarn i have or what yarn i'd need to make some perfect gift for which i found a pattern.

stress is a huge migraine trigger for me. i get a lot of migraines at this time of the year. today, i was lying in bed, medicated and trying hard to get rid of the latest attack. i have to work hard not to worry when i'm in this state--i need to relax and let the medication do its work. so when i start thinking about anything that could stress me out, i try to force myself to think about something else.

or, occasionally, a brainstorm hits and pushes the cloud of worry away, letting the sunny solution shine through in a moment of clarity, relief, and major happiness. that's what happened today. my mind began to wander to all the gifts i needed to make. was the sock i was casting on going to fit its intended recipient? would i have enough yarn to fit over those damned huge feet that all the men in my family seem to have? would he like it? would he wear it? would he appreciate it? would i have time to finish it and the remaining four gifts i had left to make?

the clouds parted, and the clarity hit me: order the presents from etsy. i'd pledged to give all handmade gifts this christmas, and etsy is a lifesaver. i love etsy. (i think i've mentioned that a time or 12 here.) i started with its gift guide for dads and found a few things. i moved on to the gift guide for men and found more. i thought of some other ideas and searched for them. i looked at my favorited items and sellers and found the rest. in probably 30–45 minutes, i finished every last bit of holiday shopping, including some gift tags to accompany my handknits. i have two small projects left to finish—one for one of my nephews and another for my little brother—and i'll be finished.

the happiest part of this is that now i can get back to enjoying this time of year and my beloved hobby instead of combining the two of them in a giant cauldron of stress soup. i've already decided to frog the sock and turn it into a normal human's size. some of the things i make now will be gifts next year, but others will be for me. regardless, it is so freeing and happy-making to feel able to make the things i *want* to make, not like i have to make things on a deadline. deadlines are fine at work, but i don't need to impose more of them in my recreation.

a message to gsk

dear glaxosmithkline,
here's a little nugget of advice from one of your longtime customers: when designing packaging for migraine medication, pretend it's for someone with zero motor skills, zero strength, zero ability to see detail (let alone READ), and--now this one is important--zero PATIENCE. i've been using your migraine meds for--wow, decades, i think--and each package design is worse than the rest.

i used to think that the blister packs of imitrex tablets were bad. REALLY hard to push those pills through industrial-strength metal that you call "foil" and the barely perforated cardboard from hell. the nasal spray wasn't terribly packaged, actually--i should give you that one. nice compact little individual things, easy and quick to take. that was a good one. but the injection? ho-lee crap. first you open it pick up the syringe (bumpbump) then you force the cartridge open too (bumpbump).

but then you stop humming looney tunes songs and start to cry, because you've now got a plastic-caused cut on your hand from opening the stupid cartridge up in addition to your already-bad migraine. then you finally get the syringe put together and it WON'T INJECT. wtf?? because i want to have to try HARDER to inject my bruised-from-these-things hip with the fattest, stingingest needle this side of tetanus shots? yeah. that's fair. and two per cartridge? who are you kidding?

but now this new treximet packaging. (btw, for more than $22 per pill, i'd have expected a more creative name than just inverting the syllables of your existing meds. but that's another story.)

let me simplify this for you: when i have a migraine--especially one bad enough to finally *take* one of the $200-for-nine-pills meds you make--i am in NO MOOD to try to figure out how the goddamned box comes apart or to go looking for *scissors* because you couldn't be bothered--for TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS--to add a little perforation at which i could (albeit with some frustration--see "zero motor skills," above) tear open the plastic wrapping around the little round package. no. so i go find scissors (again, cut myself with either scissors or plastic wrapping or both?)--nay, there are no scissors whose location i can remember (see: migraine), so i use a pen, the sharpest thing handy, to poke a starter hole. i then get to listen to the deafening crackle of the plastic as i tear it off--yes, please! add some SOUND to the process! are you trying to make me more grateful for the drug once i get to it? that's got to be your plan, because i cannot IMAGINE that there's any other reason.

and then? it's a squeeze-here-just-so-and-the-lid-will-sort-of-pry-off-if-you-try-really-hard kind of lid? dude. you have GOT to be fucking kidding me. squeeze dot? there's no dot. oh, right. it's not a different COLOR from the rest of the package--it's a different TEXTURE. i hate you. i am seriously ready to sue. i cannot get to my pills. i may have to get a hammer.

ah, finally. i apparently found the dots and squeezed in just the right way. now i see my little cache of GIGANTIC blue pills that TASTE LIKE ASS. great. thanks so much, yo, for making my migraine experience that much better. every sense engaged. you satisfied with yourself? hm?

catch up with me when you get this shit right.
--the bitchy bee.