Like father, like daughter.

My father died from a heart attack at 34. I was 7; now I'm 32. In my father's family, only his mother made it past 40. Most of his family suffered a stroke or heart attack with record high cholesterol levels. The story goes as follows... My mom got a call from my father's doctor. His doctor wanted my father to have his cholesterol rechecked. The original numbers were so high that the doctor thought they were a mistake. My father, who had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, wasn't interested in the doctor's concerns and frequently boasted that he didn't want to live a long life anyway. Almost a year later, while he was unloading produce from his delivery truck, he had a severe heart attack, fell off the back of the truck, and died.

Tuesday, I had blood drawn to get my own lipid profile. The numbers came back early Wednesday. My doctor was alarmed, to say the least. I have placed the values considered within the normal range in parentheses.

Total Cholesterol: 319 (<200)
HDL, a.k.a. good cholesterol: 46 (40-60)
LDL, a.k.a bad cholesterol: 254 (<100)

I didn't want a long life, anyway.

Laughter through Tears

Laughter through tears is by far my favorite and most powerful emotion. It makes me feel human again. So in honor of that feeling, I will tell you a very short story about what an idiot my ex-husband was and is.

In the first year of that marriage, I was scanning the charges on our credit card bill. One line in particular caught my attention. It was a charge for $20 and I definitely did not recognize the vendor. It was a website called lunarembassy.com. Initially I thought that it was either an error or that someone had gotten ahold of our credit card number. Later that day, I asked then-husband about it. His face lit up when I mentioned it. He claimed it as his own purchase, and proceeded to tell me what our $20 had earned us. He had purchased a piece of the moon. That's right, we were the proud owners of a specific parcel of land on the moon. He was clearly proud of his shrewd buying activities. I was in shock while he rattled off the benefits of getting in on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Despite his excitement and the fact that we were first time landowners, I got on the phone with the Lunar Embassy, and told them that "my son" had gotten ahold of my credit card and made the purchase without my permission. The woman was very kind and agreed to issue a credit to my credit card. It was the first time in that marriage that I realized I didn't have a husband, I had a teenage son. Sheesh.

St. Patty's Day Tumble

I meant to write this on St. Patrick's Day, but my energy level is so low that I don't do anything when I would like to do it. In 1998, on St. Patrick's Day, I took up a labmate's invitation to go snowboarding that night. The local ski resort was having a special night rate for the holiday and it included a free beer. It was a startlingly cold day, but there hadn't been fresh snow in over a week. I was desperate to assert my independence from then-husband, and show that I could go places without him, including snowboarding on my own.

However, that day, there wasn't a whole lot of snow, but plenty of ice. I am an intermediate level boarder, but had never been on my board without my husband until that point. So, Mitch picked me up and we made the 20 minute drive to the hill. Now, it is important to understand that it is possible to ski on ice, which is what Mitch was doing that night, but it is really quite inadvisable to snowboard on ice. Snowboarding requires that you be able to lean into the mountain and edge your board into the snow to maintain some control. It's likely that an expert would have been able to do it, but I was NOT an expert.

After a few sketchy runs down an intermediate run, I was feeling quite confident. Mitch was on another run, doing moguls I think. So, I was alone. On about my 4th run down that same path, I went full force, with incredible speed. Amazing how fast one can go on a virtually frictionless surface like ice. The problem is that without an ability to use your edge to slow down, you simply can't slow down without significant experience. Of course, the adrenaline I had going kept me from even considering the laws of physics. About 2/3 of the way down the hill, on the steepest part, I threw my back end around to grab the hill and slow down a bit. Well, the edge definitely caught, in fact it wedged itself in and I went literally head over heels, cart wheels down the mountain. Mind you, it's night, it's dark, and there was no one else on that run. Apparently I knocked myself unconscious for probably 5 minutes, not exactly sure though.

Eventually, I pulled myself up and snowboarded very carefully down the rest of mountain to the lodge. At that point, I couldn't really stand up straight because I was in so much pain in my upper body. I ripped the bindings off, threw the board against the wall of the lodge, and headed up for what I believed was a well deserved St. Patty's Day beer. After finishing my free beer, I promptly got up and threw up the entire pint in the bathroom. From there, I waited at the bottom of Mitch's run, until he showed up for his own beer. Just one glance at me convinced him I was done and ready to go. Sadly, when I went to retrieve my board, it was gone. Someone had stolen my board because I had failed to lock it up. Fuck.

The next day, I hobbled into a meeting with my advisor, determined to show my recent results. I couldn't sit up straight or move my head from side to side, but damn it I had science to do. The most senior grad student in my lab called the health center and made an appointment for me, whether I liked it or not. That afternoon after a series of x-rays and a CT scan it was determined that I had myself a fractured vertebrae. Really it's not as bad as it sounds. For your anatomy buffs out there, I broke my C7 spinus process. It was a stable fracture, so all of my movement didn't threaten my spinal cord. Regardless, when a bone breaks, your muscles freeze up to protect the fracture. I couldn't move my head around on my neck and my head felt so heavy. To add to the fun, I had a severe ice burn and scrape down one side of my face and post-concussive syndrome.

I spent the next 2 months on the couch waiting for my muscles to free up my neck again. I should mention that the first week, then-husband went on a week long snowboarding trip in Vermont, leaving me alone to fend for myself but unable to get off the couch for more than a minute or two. Good one, huh? Yeah, my family and friends were pretty impressed with him too. I should also mention that I drove myself to the hospital for the CT scan and every single physical therapy appointment. I am so glad that I upgraded.

Top 5 things I will never say to my child

As a kid, I learned to be good under threat of grievous bodily harm. Dad's statements of consequences were more promises than threats, whereas Mom's statements were generally idle threats. But in the brain of a 7 year old, they elicited vivid images of the actions they described. I am deeply terrified that I will become my parents in this sense. I really don't want my child to fear me the way that I feared my parents. So I have compiled a short list of the statements I heard as a kid and promise never, ever, to say to my child.

1. If you don't (fill in blank), I will break every bone in your body.
2. Stop that crying, or I will give you something to cry about.
3. Go get my belt.
4. Just wait until your father gets home, then you will get it again.
5. I beat you because I love you.

Never, ever, ever. This I promise you, Pooter.

Can do.

When I saw these on the back of my friend's toilet, I knew I had to have some too. Partly because dry toilet paper doesn't always do the job, if you know what I mean, but mainly because there is a picture of a frog wiping his arse, right on the box. Who could pass up the opportunity to adorn their lavatory with frogs practicing proper hygiene? Certainly not me. So I bought not one, but two boxes, plus refills. They even have a lovely cucumber melon scent. No more fishy odor for me, it's all fruit and vegetables down there from now on. To top it off, every time I use one, I can be heard singing in the bathroom from outside the house. It's a simple song, something like, "Caaaaaaannnn dooooooo, caaaaaannnn dooooo, (repeat about 10 times over)." Have I finally lost my mind? Oh yeah, but that happened long ago. I may be the only woman without kids that owns these things. What can I say? I am young at heart.

Since I don't feel like battering all of you, again, with my tales of whimpering woe, I will tell you a story instead. Gotta give you all a break every once in awhile.

When I first met The Ass (aka first husband who doesn't really deserve the title of husband) at the ripe age of 19, he told me that his last girl friend had dumped him. Believing him, we started dating. A few weeks into our relationship, we decided to camp out over night in front of B10ck.buster so we could get tickets to the P1nk Fl0yd concert. By the way, the concert was on April 20th. For those in the know, I think you will find that date ironic, for those who are not please don't ask, because it's not appropriate blog conversation, even on this blog.

Any hoo, we spent a freezing night on the sidewalk, not sleeping. I had to work at 10am the next morning, so around 9am I headed to his house where I was staying for a few days because of a terrible fight with my college roommates. When I came in the door, I saw that my underwear were dispersed about the living room, with a trail leading to the bedroom where my duffel bag was. His dog, Sierra, was not as big on eating underwear as my current dog, but every once in awhile she would express herself by eating the crotches out of my underwear, you know, just for shits and giggles. So as I picked up my crotchless undies, I scolded her and tried to reason with her regarding her behavior. Usually, she slinks away, wagging her tail in an apology, but that morning she just looked confused.

I decided to change my clothes and put on my jeans for work. As I put one leg in, I realized that my leg went through, but not into a pant leg. Staring down, I realized that my leg went through a gigantic hole in the crotch of my relatively new jeans. Again, I scolded Sierra. So I picked up a different pair of pants, and the exact same thing occurred. Then I realized, every pair of underwear and pants were missing the critical crotch component. Where the hell did all my crotches go? Upon closer examination, I realized that this was not the haphazard work of a bitter dog. Instead it appeared to be the careful work of a bitch, of the human species, wielding a sharp pair of scissors. After some investigation, I discovered that his girlfriend, who still lived with him, had come in during the night, when she knew we would be out, and removed all of the crotches from my clothing.

That should have been the first sign that The Ass was a two timing basturd. But, let's face it, I was 19, and I was clueless. Maybe even really dumb.

What did The Ass do when I told him what his supposed ex-girlfriend had done? He vomited right there in the B10ck.buster parking lot. Yep, back then, I really knew how to pick'em.

Touching insanity, the conclusion

And now the conclusion to my hospital story from yesterday...

Not long after I overheard the conversation at the nurses' station, the nurses began issuing the medications to the patients for the evening. Still sobbing, I stood in a line waiting for the dispensary nurse to give me two paper cups. One with my pills and one with water. By the way they were the exact same pills I brought with me from home. Here I am, locked away, theoretically protected from myself, all so that I can have a safe place to be while they tweak my meds. I had been there about 6 hours, and was still on the same meds. It didn't occur to anyone to ask me if I would need a sleeping pill, and in my near catatonic state, it didn't occur to me to request it.

At lights out, I found myself in a little twin bed, in a room by myself, with about 4 other empty beds. Bars, placed on the inside, protected the small window which afforded a cheery view of a gray cinder block wall. Next to the door of the room (which I was told never to close), there was a one inch deep sink. So I guess drowning myself in the sink was out. My room had a single toilet, and I was intensely grateful for the full door that granted privacy to its user. Apparently, we were trusted not to drown ourselves in the toilet water. I guess even suicidal patients have their standards after all. We weren't so lucky in terms of a mirror. Now, you know why mental patients always have fucked up hair do's. It can't be helped.

They did allow me to have my blankie. I had gotten the then-husband to resurrect my childhood blankie from storage and pack it with my pajamas and clothes. They did not, however, give me the books he packed for me. Now, I'm a fairly creative person, but I don't think even I could make paper cuts an effective method of suicide.

In the absence of sleeping pills, there was no sleep in sight. There were no clocks in my room, so I am not exactly sure how long I laid there listening to the silence. At some point, I must have finally fallen asleep because of what happened next.

Even sleep brought no peace or rest. My real life nightmare followed me into slumberland. In the dream, I was locked in the psych ward of a public hospital (OK, so in my dreams, I'm not that creative). I was in bed and a large male orderly walked toward me. He lunged at me, clawing at my blankets and pajamas; I was convinced that I was about to be raped. I can still feel his fingers around my throat. The next thing I remember is trying to scream. Suddenly, my screams became real and so loud that I woke myself up. I continued to scream, at the top of my lungs, until I realized it was just a dream. No one came to check on me. What I am guessing was about a half hour later, a man who looked surprisingly like the man in my dream peaked into my room shining a flashlight on my face. Petrified, sobbing, and shaking, I decided right then, that this had gone on long enough.

Just before the nurses changed shifts, a female technician came into my room with a male orderly to draw blood. She had the kindest face, but the pity she exuded for me was palpable. I did my best to look like a "regular" patient though. I even attempted some light banter with her in my efforts to appear normal. In the early morning hours, I had decided that the only way out was to feign normalcy and sanity. Hard to tell whether my mood really did swing up at that point or if this was me in crisis mode. Suddenly, I felt smarter than everyone else within a 30 mile radius. I was convinced that I could outsmart the doctor, if one showed up, and anyone else who got in my way. The crying was over.

There was no way I was going to spend another night there, so I started analyzing my options. First, I examined all of the eating utensils and decided that if need be, I could kill myself with a straw. And since no one seemed to need their plastic sporks (you need to be more than crazy to eat that food), I was collecting those as well. Then, I coerced a nurse to let me have a pencil. I did a quick inventory of the vital arteries that could be skewered with a pencil, and felt comforted by the potential of my new tool. While the other patients busied themselves with their attempts to kill themselves slowly with tobacco, I was making big plans.

Around noon, the 7 or so patients assembled in a small room for a group session. Excellent. This is not the place for people who resort to being caregivers in place of taking care of themselves. Group session was where I completed my transformation from crazy grad school patient to knowledgeable, compassionate, empathetic caregiver. When I can't deal with my own problems, I like to work on other people's. I think the nurses may have figured out my plan of conversion from that, because about a half hour later I was whisked into another locked office. A psychiatrist appeared. Before I even had a chance to tell him that I would be signing myself out and how I knew my rights, he was trying to convince me why I couldn't be released to the public at large. Not for one moment would he concede that I could leave voluntarily. I knew better. One thing I did manage to do in the night was read, and reread over and over again, the patient's rights statement given to me upon admission.

Next, they hauled in my husband to let him know I was trying to leave. He later confessed that the doctor tried to get him to convince me to stay. Little did they know, this guy was spineless and rarely contradicted me to my face. In the meantime, I tootled around ministering to the other patients like I worked there. I should mention that my husband had a meeting with the doctor for over an hour. I saw the doctor for a grand total of 5 minutes.

I finally walked through those locked doors in the late evening. I walked away and vowed never to return. It was over, for now.

I would like only to reiterate one fact, this is MY story. Each experience of hospitalization, for whatever reason, is unique. Perhaps if I had stayed, I would have eventually met with a good doctor for a meaningful period of time. I will never know. What I do know is that I would have found a way to escape, whether they released me or not.

Touching insanity

This is the post I was writing last Thursday. It's a real downer, just to warn you. But I needed to share it, because I don't talk about this at all with anyone except Husband. It's too painful and shameful to share with anyone but you all.

I've been reading a lot of birth stories in the blogosphere lately. I don't have a birth story of my own, but I do have a hospital story that I need to tell.

In my depressed state, I have been doing a lot of thinking about hospitalization. As all of my doctors know, I am 100% against being hospitalized. I am sure that somewhere out there, someone has had a good experience with hospitalization for depression or mania, but I am certainly NOT one of those people. I would rather be tied down to my couch and force fed Vegemite, than be hospitalized, again. One sure way to convince me to kill myself would be to put me in a hospital's mental health ward.

DISCLAIMER: As a bipolar blogger, I have a reader or two who also suffers from a mental illness. I don't want to deter anyone from choosing to be hospitalized, it is a wise choice. But, this is the story of MY experience, and is NOT the experience of all.

So here's the story of my hospitalization...

In April during my 1st year of the 1st marriage, I was in the depths of depression, completely incapacitated. I only left the house to go to my therapists office. I had not yet been properly diagnosed with bipolar, so the docs were still trying standard antidepressants on me. I was on my 5th med, and nothing was working. (Coincidentally, it's the same antidepressant I am using right now, hmmm.) By then, I had already made one weak attempt. My then husband caught me in the act though, and I cried for hours from the embarrassment. Still in grad school, I couldn't bare the thought of not finishing my degree just because I couldn't drag myself out of bed. I felt trapped and saw no way out, just like so many others before me.

On my big outing to the therapists I revealed that I just couldn't hack it any longer. I had a plan and I was going to put it into action while my husband was at school, an hour away. My therapist refused to let me go home while she made arrangements for hospitalization. Her experience told her that our local hospital was not a good place for mental health, so she put me in a hospital about a half hour away.

In the meantime, I felt some misguided peace at being taken care of. Thus, I walked to a really nice restaurant, a tapas style dining establishment, to have lunch while she made the arrangements. I kept thinking of it as my last meal, and now that I look back at it, that meal was the first thing I had enjoyed in months. Sitting in the restaurant, I kept thinking about how all of the other diners had no idea that I was certifiable and about to go to a hospital ward where they lock the door behind you. There was something very amusing about this scenario and it was all I could do not to laugh hysterically while I ate my lunch. (That definitely would have clued them in to my situation.)

By late afternoon, Therapist got my husband to come get me and drive me to the hospital. I quietly wept as he drove, otherwise we were silent. Admission is through the ER and that's where you get to justify why you should be put away. It was the only time I would get to see a kind medical professional during my stay. The good doc questioned me for about 30 minutes before an orderly showed up to escort me to the proper ward. I clung to my husband for dear life. I wanted out of this whole plan, and yet, that no longer seemed to be a choice. All of my decisions were being made for me at that point.

After they took away everything I but the clothes I was wearing, showed me around, and issued my bed, they told my husband he had to leave. And that's where I lost it. I was intensely attached to my husband back then. So I watched him walk away that day and heard the door click behind him. I am sure he could hear my sobs from the other side of the hospital and in the parking lot. I was alone.

Now, perhaps you are thinking, that there were plenty of medical professionals to facilitate my transition. Nope, not a single one. No nurses, therapists, doctors, friends, technicians, or orderlies. No one. Another common misconception is that mental patients wear pajamas and robes all day. Nope, not even close. At this hospital, they require all of their mental patients to wear their day clothes and to be active. The other weird part was the other mental patients on the ward. They stared at me like I had two heads, like I was the only crazy person there.

Perhaps I was, but I was still terrified of the other patients. Two adult middle-aged males were trying to manage schizophrenia and addiction. The other 4 patients were female and either teenage or much much older than me. They were dealing with addiction, depression, and anorexia. Quite a mixed bag.

Until lights out, I just paced up and down the hall, sobbing into a wad of tissue. During one of my marches past the nurses' station, I overheard a conversation between two of the nurses. They were talking about me...

"Did you see the new girl in here?"
"Oh yeah, I hear she's even a graduate student from *** Uni.vers.ity! Interesting, huh?"
"She must be really, really messed up then."

I was mortified that they were talking about me like I was a specimen. And what the hell does being a graduate student have to do with anything? What the fuck? I was already painfully ashamed of where and who I was, and this little conversation didn't help matters.

I will continue this story in another post, as this has become too long as it is...

Details

A few days ago, I posted about the fun I am having searching for a summer job. It seems that leaving out the details, to maintain some anonymity, resulted in unecessary confusion. Since then, I've done a lot of thinking about whether it's really so important to keep my identity hidden. As I have discussed in another post titled Outting Myself, I am especially concerned that a potential employer, fellow student, or university staff or faculty will stumble upon my blog and connect the dots to figure out that it's me. While I'm not ashamed of my mental health issues, I am not convinced that the "typical" person is capable of separating my diagnosis from my person. Despite this possibility, I think I will go ahead and include more details. Otherwise, I'll never get the most out of my blog. I need to be completely honest, somewhere. Strangely, even though I've never met most of the people who comment on my blog, I implicitly trust them, I trust you. Yes, my nightmare may actually happen, but I think I need to trust myself to deal with it and overcome the potential discriminations or assumptions.

Therefore, here's some more details about me that may or may not be relevant...

As I have mentioned, I am a student, specifically, I am a la stoodent (think leegle), full time theoretically. Hopefully you can figure out what I mean even with the camouflage spelling to deter googlers. Also, I'm hoping you won't hold that fact against me. My undergraduate degree in biologie, specifically plants, is from a UC school. I moved to upstate NY from Northern California to get my next degree, a Ph.Duh. in molekular biologie. After I finished that degree, I knew that research wasn't for me anymore. Sadly, while I no longer enjoyed the work, I wasn't too bad at it and still loved science. So while sticking around for a postdoc, I did some serious soul searching to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. In the meantime, I went through my divorce with my first husband which nearly took everything I had in me.

I finally settled on my current field of interest. Ultimately, I want to be in intellektual property (pa.tents, copyrite and the like) for biotek. While I thoroughly enjoy studying this stuff, I have been unable to unlock the secret to success on the exams, of which there's only one per semester and it is the only thing your grade is based upon.

In this professional area, there is a very set way of applying for jobs. The summer after your 2nd year is crucial for future employment. Most students secure a high paying firm job in their favorite city for the summer, and that usually turns into a job offer for after you graduate. We all began the process at the end of Summer 2006. Then, most travelled all over the country during the Fall for the "call back" interview, after the initial screening interview. I landed 6 call backs; this was lucky since I was only applying to the few firms in my area (not a big city) and in my narrow field of interest. I was thrilled with my prospects and had, what I thought to be, great interviews.

And that's where I was wrong. Actually, I have no idea where I failed in this process, the list of possibilities is too daunting.

So now, I am in the no man's land of leegle employment. It's ugly and evil. The little firms will hire once they know their summer needs, but that doesn't happen for a few months yet. I have been scrambling to come up with options, choices. Now, I am looking at in-house counsel for biotek companies, not-for-profit resurch organizations, etc. I am totally alone, as I don't know any other student who failed their Fall employment search as I did. Depressing.

Sorry for all of the misspellings, but I am trying to trick the search engines, if that's possible with my limited knowledge of the web and computers. Also, so sorry for the boring nature of this post, but I needed to complete the story of my hunt for employment. Hope you survived it.

I forgot clumsy

6. Clumsy

I forgot "clumsy" on my list of themes from yesterday. Husband thought I should add it. I had never considered clumsy to be one of my life's themes, but he's right, let's face it, it is. I am forever clumsy. My father used to tuck my long hair into the back of my shirt so I wouldn't dip it into my food during meals. I was never allowed to eat or drink anything while on any carpeted surface of my parents home. I should own stock in Resolve for how much I buy the stuff. My husband's favorite clumsy story is the one about the first time we met. It's a classic example of my clumsy theme.

My husband and I met at a local festival here in town. There is no purported reason for the festival other than the interesting fact that it is usually held after all of the students leave for summer break. My town is a college town so the departure of the students can be bittersweet. For all intensive purposes, despite my current status as a student, I consider myself a "townie". Some use this term with derogative implications, but I wear the townie badge with pride. After all, this is the longest I have ever lived in one town and I tend to feel like I belong here. Anyway, it wasn't but a few months after my first husband and I separated when the festival occurred. So, I was doing just about anything to keep my mind off of the divorce. Thus, I took up a friend's offer to go to the festival for the day.

It was an up day for me at the time, in fact, looking back, I was probably hovering in the realm of hypomania. Nevertheless, I was having a great time and felt very energized by the street music, the arts, crafts, and herds of people. My friend and I saw a friend and her husband while they were listening to a local band perform. After some chatting, I finally noticed that the friend and her husband were towing behind them a friend of theirs. I had no idea who this guy was, and in my mood, I decided to find out, pronto. Oh, boy was this guy cute! The first thing to draw me to him was his necklace which consisted of brown wood beads of uniform size with the main bead being a ceramic fish. Then, his t-shirt caught my eye, a Phish t-shirt.

In the same way that you can tell certain things about a person when they have a Grateful Dead sticker on their car, you can read certain things into a person when they wear Phish paraphernalia. For those who don't know who the hell I am talking about, Phish is a music jam band with a similar following as the Grateful Dead. With my first husband, we used to follow Phish around on tour. We were never the cross country followers, but we did coincide our move from California to New York with Phish's tour along the same route. We also were one of the die-hards that sat in line in our car on a Florida highway for 12 hours just to get into the Phish concert for New Year's 2000. 12 hours to travel less than 30 miles! So, when I saw his t-shirt, I knew we had something in common, something fun. It would be my "in".

Somehow, we all agreed to meet later that evening at a local beer bar. Another link- he likes beer, I like beer. So far, so good. I was feeling especially sparky that day with my overalls on and a slightly tighter shirt than normal. When we all met at the bar, we were all feeling pretty lively from the day's festival. We all ordered beers. Now this is where the details become important. The bar is set up with benches and long tables and therefore, even if you aren't at the same table as another person, you can still be fairly close to the person sitting on the same bench or in the same row. In my high mood, I was busy telling stories to entertain my friends and this new guy. It should be noted that a full pint of beer was sitting in front of me on our table, and I am not sure whether I had already drank one or not, but I was definitely not inebriated. When I tell stories, I use my hands to an annoying degree. This tactic gets me in all sorts of trouble. So as I told the story with my hands, I inadvertently, clumsily, knocked the entire beer over, spilling the whole pint onto my overalls. I was soaked in beer. Because I do this kind of thing all of the time, I was prepared to laugh at myself.

Sitting there covered in beer, I am laughing with friends when the girl sitting diagonal from me at an adjacent table leans over to the friend across from me at our table. The girl asks my friend if she could try to keep me under control. Now this is where you have to picture a tiny waifish college girl foolishly telling a friend of mine to keep me under control. Oh boy. Apparently, some of the beer I spilled all over myself must have splashed up and dotted her table. Crisis. Once the three women at my table realized what this girl had just said, we just stared at each other while I schemed. I have to admit that the three of us are sizable women. While not fat, we were tall, large boned, sturdy women. I would like to think that most skinny, waif-like girls wouldn't risk picking a fight with three women of our stature, but apparently we were sitting near an exception to my assumption. One female friend finally leaned over to the waiflet to ask her to repeat what she had said. On that note, I promptly got up from the table, went into the bathroom, and unrolled a hefty number of paper towels. Upon my return to our table, I slammed down the paper towels on the waiflet's table and said, "Here you go", and then sat down at my table. The laughter was difficult to suppress, but we continued on with a rather fun night. And no, I didn't go home with Husband-to-be...

...well, not that night anyway.

That was Husband's first impression of me. Good one huh? I am so smooth!

Just thought I'd share

FDA, finally, approves cloned food. Check out this one people. How nice of the FDA to join us here in the 21st century on something.

It's the end of 2006, thank god, and it's time to reflect upon all of the ludicrous things that I have seen and done this year. One main story comes to mind for the moment.

This tale is one about a fine sunny day in the Spring. I pulled up to my favorite coffee shop with an ice cream cone in hand and ready to pick up a paper as soon as I could find a parking spot. After a few crafty maneuvers at an adjacent parking lot, I pulled forward to take my position in the exit. A woman walking down the sidewalk stopped about 20 feet back from the driveway. An action I understood to mean she wanted me to go ahead, which I did. I proceeded to pull up to the same side of the street the woman had been walking (a one way street if you're trying to picture it). Since it was an unusually warm day, my passenger side window was down. While I fiddled around looking for change to feed the meter, the woman walking down the sidewalk stuck her head into my car through the passenger side window and just started screaming at me.

I just sat there in shock while she bobbed her head like a chicken inside my car, complete with all of the good descriptive expletives. Then she continued to walk down the street as if nothing had occured. Because I have absolutely zero self control, I jumped out of my car and ran after her. She had gained some ground by the time I was running in her direction. But, once the light turned green, I caught up with her on foot. Oh, I should mention that I was screaming at her all the while, "Come back here! What did you say to me, bitch?!!!?" Yup, screaming this at the top of my lungs in the middle of the street, in front of my favorite coffee shop. Lovely. I'm gonna make a great role model for my child.

Lunacy at its best.

If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me.

Love that quote from Steel Magnolias. I have desperately tried to memorize my favorite poems and philanthropic quotes but all I seem to be able to remember are lines from movies and TV shows I have seen hundreds of times, including Caddyshack, Fletch, Simpson's series, South Park, Monty Python's movies, all of the Vacation movies, and many other classics. Nothing ground breaking, only sarcastic remarks.

So, to stay with the theme, I will tell a tale of craziness contributed by my family. One of my mother's brothers, D (actually all of them start with the letter D but that's a whole other story entirely), has a lot of cats. So many cats, that there is never a current count that can be relied upon. D and his family are not of wealth in any arena except for pets. When D and his wife went away one weekend, they asked D's mother (my grandmother) to stay and watch their kids (4 in total). Despite the abundance of kids, their refrigerator is stocked with nothing but 2 liter Pepsi bottles. Grandma really didn't know what to feed the kids out of this well stocked fridge, so she resorted to the freezer to try and find something nutritious.

The freezer was well stocked with lots of foil wrapped things. After rummaging through its depths, she finally found what she was hoping would be a roast, it was the right size after all, what else could it be she thought. As the children stood around drooling, she carefully began to unwrap the item. At last, it revealed itself. It was not a roast, it was a frozen cat! The children looked unsurprised and just blinked at their grandmother as she screamed. The oldest one finally fessed up, "Well, grandma, what else are you supposed to do with a cat when it dies?" They ordered out that night and she never opened the freezer again.

Why was there a cat in the freezer? Well, the cat had died right before they left on vacation that weekend, and my uncle wanted to have it autopsied to discover the cause of death. So to preserve it for future discoveries, he wrapped it in foil and tossed it into the freezer until he could get to it and had the money to have the procedure done. Well, of course, that is a perfectly reasonable solution, after all, there wasn't any food in there anyway.

Pouting

I am pouting today because I am not getting what I want when I want it. Of course, pouting doesn't make anything any better, but that doesn't seem to stop me. Ovulation is on the horizon and I don't seem to be able to attract or entice my husband into the game. So frustrating. Just as my body started giving me the clues is when he seemed to lose interest. Granted, I am ultra-sensitive to rejection these days and I interpret it all to mean the worst.

Rejection throws me into flashbacks, but not the good kind. My first husband told me everything I wanted to hear, but his actions always betrayed his words. He reassured me over and over again that he wanted children with me and loved me more than anything in the world. With hindsight I can be thankful that he couldn't follow through on the conception of a baby part. His body just wouldn't play along. Took me awhile to figure out what it all meant. So now, everytime my current husband doesn't show absolute enthusiasm I think of the last one. My poor husband lives in the shadows of my insecurity. Unfortunately, I am not in a state of mind to feel too bad for him. For now, I am just pouting and trying to keep myself from a complete a total freak out. Let's just say that the last time I felt this way I launched into insanity and did a bit of carving. Focus, focus, focus...

Doing it anyway

And so the fun begins...

My history is not exactly that of your average 32 year old, at least where I live. Maybe if I lived in NY City, I wouldn't be able to say such a thing, but living in a city that claims to be the most enlightened city in the US allows me to claim abnormality. Perhaps, that's why I have started this blog. In my search through Google I couldn't find anyone else who was blogging or sharing an experience that even remotely matched my own. When I say that I am over-educated, I mean that I have gone to school for too many years and still don't have a decent job (OK, so that's not so unusual even in my town of enlightenment and too many universities). So, yes, I am still in school. A glutton for punishment you might say, or perhaps simply an insane masochist whose chosen torture involves swarms of preppy twenty-somethings who have trouble avoiding the word "like". Besides my age and my mental illness, my divorce sets me further apart from my peers. My first husband provided a lot of fun during my twenties, but he also had a tendency to fuck other women. Once he filled me in on that minor detail I got the divorce that I never, ever thought I would want or need.

Fast forward a few years, and I have married a man who endured the same adulterous insult from his first wife. A match made in... let's see...not heaven because I don't believe in all of that, but perhaps a match made right here in the real world where nothing goes as planned. After a couple of years watching me manage a somewhat unmanageable series of bipolar manic and depressive episodes, he is still here with me and as dedicated as ever. And, what do you know, he still wants to have kids with me. So we stopped looking for more old dogs to adopt and started the exciting and unpredictable process of reducing my medication.

I met with my psychiatrist first to tell her of my plan to conceive and she had such encouraging things to say. Her initial approach was to convince me to adopt a child instead. A fine idea, which I have every intention of exploring once I have $20,000 in the bank and a law degree to start the process. In the meantime, I figured I would start trying to have a baby the old-fashioned way, sex and lots of it. So once I told her adoption was not a current option, she reluctantly outlined the process for going off of my medications. This was going to be loads of fun, I could tell right away. I am what professionals consider "high risk". While we did finally find the right cocktail to keep me upright, it was a complicated journey. For now, I will spare us all the details of my illness until a later time. Let's just say that I have sampled most drugs, legal and not, to try to control the wild undulations of my mood. Once I convinced myself that the not so legal drugs weren't working and convinced my doctors that Zoloft wasn't quite cutting it either, we eventually got it right. My drug salad of choice included Depakote, Effexor, Seroquel, Topamax, and Klonopin. Oh, my medicine cabinet is fat and happy. This drug combo worked great for me, as long as I was compliant, but they don't work so well for a fetus, or even an embryo for that matter. So six months ago I started down the very long road to becoming drug free. It was somewhat similar to Disneyland's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Without the thought of a bouncing, smiling baby at the end, I surely would have disembarked way before the ride came to a complete stop.

Today, I am on a smidgen of Effexor and a bit of Seroquel, and I still don't feel the urge to put my husband's head through a wall. I consider the six months of drug weaning quite a success considering I didn't have even one suicide attempt and only experienced one cutting episode. Not bad, all things considered. So we are finally ready to start trying. The added bonus of going off all of the drugs is that my sex drive has returned better than ever. Thirty minutes to lift off is a thing of the past. Happy times are here again.

So the practicing has begun as we gear up for my calculated ovulation. We have a few days to go still, but I lay on my back afterwards for 30 minutes just in case. Honestly, I am terrified to know that it usually takes fertile women about a year to conceive. Given my mental history and need for mood regulating drugs, I really don't have that kind of time. I have been reading Julie's blog, "A little pregnant", to remind myself that things never go as planned and that I am not the only one operating under harried circumstances. Unfortunately this doesn't exactly make me feel any better, but it does give me perspective. At least while I am off the drugs, I am just crazy enough to try...