Show and Tell

My new story, "Show and Tell,"  will be the death of me.  I really like it.  I really do.  But it just WON'T END.  I thought, when I started it, that it would be a short story.  Like "December" or "Five".  To give you some perspective of what I'm talking about here, "December" is 5,277 words.  "Five" is quite a bit longer at 11,487 words. 

"Show and Tell" is, at the moment, 21,619 words.  

Much, much, too long to be a short story.  Not long enough to be a novel.  A novella, maybe, but not a novel.  And I thought I was almost done with it a couple days ago.  About 1,000 words ago, that would be.  Ugh.  I know how it's going to end, but getting there is taking forever.  I haven't worked on "Cai" in weeks because of this story.  I haven't made any of the MASSIVE changes to "Shades of Grey" because of this story.  It's taking all of my focus at the moment, and that's kind of irritating.  Even hanging out with friends, a part of my mind is in that school with my characters, figuring the best way to finish or start the next scene.  (The story is about a school that goes on lockdown after a man comes in with a gun.)  A part of my mind is always thinking about it.  It's been a long time since something has had its hooks in me like this.  And for all I know, the story is going to turn out to be complete crap.  I'm trying a lot of things stylistically that I've never done before, so that makes me nervous.  Excited, but nervous.

I don't know.  I don't think anyone actually reads this blog anymore, and I'm completely okay with that.  I've been thinking about deleting it.  I just wanted to write down how frustrated this story is making me since it's 2:20 am and Rachel's out of town and my friends have gone home and no one else will be awake.  

So yeah.

I love Stephen King

"This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time.  Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time.  If you write books, you go on one page at a time.  We turn from all we know and all we fear.  We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T.  We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things--fish and unicorns and men on horseback--but they are really only clouds.  Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next page.  

This is how we go on."

I love this song

Wow

 Holy crap this is hilarious.  Another winner from Dan Savage's team over at the Seattle Stranger...this is a link to a particularly funny entry in today's SLOG:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/02/03/your_psychic_friends_are_back


It's a must-read.

I think I see a light at the end of the...no, never mind. That's a train.

SPLAT.

Today was horrendous.  My scar popped open on one side, they won't sew it back up, so now it's gonna heal like that.  They had to scrub--SCRUB--my open wound with the cleansing stuff, so that hurt like a...well, let's just say it was very, very, painful.  They wouldn't give me good pain medication because they probably thought I was going to sell it or some such thing, and by the time I got the fuck out of there, all the pharmacies were closed.  So I have an open scar which has been thoroughly messed with all day, I'm in serious pain but have no pain medication.

All that being said...I'm smiling right now.  Six hours ago I was ready to drive my car off a cliff, but I'm okay now.

What shifted my attitude from looking for the nearest cliff to smiling?  Honestly, and however cliche and lame this sounds...it was Rachel.  That's pretty much it.  Tonight I really remember why we're friends, why we work so well together.  I remember why I missed her so much in France.  Just talking, hanging out, playing games, making fun of each other, supporting each other by making fun of each other...  I just kind of remembered that...well, we're....

Rachel, if you're reading this, you'll appreciate this:

WE'RE AWESOME.

;-)

Maybe

I have an ultrasound scheduled for Wednesday.  There's a chance--a small one, but a chance nonetheless--that this isn't PCOS.  I'll find out after the ultrasound, probably sometime the week after.  

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Here's the thing...I'm having a real problem with this whole thing.  And I finally figured out that I don't think it's even any of the minute annoying little details of the "disease."  (I use quotes because I fucking hate that word).  I think it's just because this is SOMETHING ELSE.  Something else to put on the list of things to deal with in what was already a pretty busy dealing-with schedule.  I think this just kind of tipped the scales.  And all those little details suck, yeah, okay, right.  But I really think the reason I'm driving myself into two-a-day panic attacks is because I just can't deal with it.  After last winter's cancer scare, panic attacks, my second elbow surgery, continuing insomnia, increased iron deficiency, and my scar reconstruction (that is, by the way, still infected), it's just too much.  (And that's only covering the last year and a half.)

Just...too much.  Really seems like it, anyway.  

And this is where my parents would say "Others have it worse, much worse.  You're lucky, really.  To be living where you're living, with the resources you have...." And i know they're right.  All of those things are true.  But that doesn't make this any easier.

As a very wise person recently quoted to me, "Just because other people are drowning in shit doesn't make what's surrounding your neck chocolate pudding."

At least that makes me smile right now, which has been pretty hard to do in the past couple of days.

Waiting

Waiting for the doctor's office to call is like waiting for Godot to show up.  (Hopefully some of you will get that).  

This is ridiculous. 

Just freaking CALL already!

Chuck Palahniuk = effing genius

For some reason this strikes me as disturbingly beautiful, and it comes (unsurprisingly) from one of my favorite authors, Chuck Palahniuk:

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

I don't do the quote-of-the-day thing, but i might start sharing random bits of awesomeness from Mr. Amazing Himself.

If I can ever, EVER, be...like...an eighth as good as he is, I'd be happy.

Paperweight

Been up all night, staring at you

wondering what's on your mind.

I've been this way with so many before

but this feels like the first time.

You want the sunrise to go back to bed

I wanna make you laugh.

Mess up my bed with me

kick off the covers and wade in

Every word you say I think I should write down

Don't want to forget come daylight

Happy to lay here, just happy to be here

I'm happy to know you

Play me a song, your newest one

please leave your taste on my tongue

Paperweight, on my back

cover me like a blanket

Mess up my bed with me

kick off the covers and wade in

Every word you say I think I should write down

Don't want to forget come daylight

And no need to worry, that's wasting time

And no need to wonder what's been on my mind

It's you

it's you

it's you

Every word you say, I think I should write

don't want to forget come daylight

I give up, I let you win

you win 'cause I'm not counting 

You made it back to sleep again

I wonder what you're dreaming

So Funny!

I love this...you have to push the little arrow towards the bottom right to watch it in fullscreen.  the whole video wouldn't fit in this tiny window, so watch it full screen.  or just click on it and it'll link you to the original.

Sooooo funny.

Love This Song

I love these lyrics from the Whedon brothers about the writer's strike:

Spoken:  Dateline, September 2007, things are looking grim in the negotiations between the writers and the studios.  AMPTP spokesman Nicholas Counter says quote, "I will grind the Writer's Guild into a fine paste, snort it up my nose, and cut it with baby powder and sell it to underprivileged kids on coke."

The writers: 

That's not fair!

When you start negotiations

with integrity and patience

and they just cry "Battle stations!"

what's to like?

When you ask a small amount and

then encounter counter's counter

and the deal is tantamount to 

"Take a hike!"

You can't sit around with your head in the sand

you pull it out, and you stand up and

you strike

When you hear their lawyers talking

saying our behavior's shocking

it's convincing as a cockney

Dick Van Dyke

When they leave the town unstable 

then they come back to the table

and say "Now we should be able--

Kidding!  Psych!"

We ask them for bread and get "Let them eat cake,"

They figure a stomach ache will break

the strike

So strike

for all the writers

Strike

for a living wage

until these wrongs are righted

we won't write another page

Wipe off that smile--the style is bile

and rage is all the rage

As the fall turns into winter

there appears a bunch of splinter groups

who wonder what this internet is like

While the tide is turning tepid

and the town is feeling trepidatious

time for us to step up to the mic

We've got all these dynamite plots to use

it's time to light to fuse or lose

the strike

And lose we did

Impressively

Slunk back to our offices

declaring victory

If you need your residual

why did you all agree?

I'm proud I walked the line

with writers, fans and friends of mine

but now I ask what was it finally about

And years from now I'll tell my tyke

just what it feels like to strike

OUT!

Okay then

Second day was definitely better than the first.  Partly because of this:

And partly because of this:

Yummy.

What the hell?

First day of classes, woo-hoo, whatever, blah blah blah.

It sucked.

Not my classes themselves.  Those were actually okay.  It was just the rest of the day that was terrible; I mean, other than my scar killing me, my elbow throbbing (wtf, mate?), and my comically unexpected panic attack, the day was just fucking fantastic.

I say "comically unexpected" because I completely should have expected it.  The day didn't start out well; I got very little sleep and was almost late for my first class of the quarter.  (Thank you, Rachel, for not letting me do that.)  Then I had two classes, came home, and in my infinite wisdom, didn't eat anything.  "I'm not hungry," I reasoned with myself.  "I only have one more class, and it only goes until five.  I'll be fine until then, and then I can eat something good and hearty when I get back."

No.  Huh-uh.  My 3-5 Criminal Justice class looks really cool, and I was really excited about it, but about a quarter of the way through the class I started getting this weird tingling in my fingers.  (This is one of my warning signs of a panic attack.)  I could have gotten up then and gotten something to drink, walked a little bit, and probably the attack would have gone away.  But no.  I didn't believe it could be an attack, because it had been so long since I'd had one, especially in class!!  "This isn't what I think it is," I reasoned (again in my infinite wisdom).  "This is something else, I'm just hungry or tired or something."

But that was the problem.  I was hungry, I was tired, but I was also definitely having a panic attack.  By then it was too late to get up and walk the halls.  Getting up and immediately falling on my ass was a real possibility.  So I sat exactly where I was and struggled to focus on the professor, who was busy lecturing (on the first day of class, btw...who does that?  Mean.)  So I sat there.  It passed, like it always does, but because I was already so tired and hungry it just depleted every last ounce of energy in my body.  

When I finally got home (after spending 400$ on textbooks), I was not only tired, hungry, and shaky from the attack, but now I was in a terrible mood.  Rachel called me on it, which is completely fair, and she told me that she "could read me," and even when I tried to hide it from her, she could tell I was feeling bitchy.  I'm almost proud that she only saw the bitchiness...she didn't see the shaky-leftover-panic-attack mess that was me.  She can read me, hell yes she can, but I'm not as bad an actor as all that.

The only one of those feelings that's been rectified was "hungry."  I ate a peanut butter sandwich because I sure as hell didn't feel like cooking.  Dinner of champions.  Don't judge.

But the others persisted.  Even as I'm writing this, at 1:15am, my hands are shaking.  I'm tired (exhausted wouldn't be an exaggeration here), but I'm not sleepy.  Anyone with insomnia will tell you there is a cruel difference.

And, as you can tell, I'm still not in the best of moods.  But believe me, this is a massive elevation compared to earlier.  My scar is still killing me, and just to make things 1000 times better, I banged my elbow in the shower.  Yeah, I'm awesome at life.  I know it.

So there it is.  That was my day.

How was yours?

Oh my

1.  My elbow is worrying me.  My fingers have been tingling again, because I've been writing long-hand again.  I start classes tomorrow.  I hope there aren't many notes involved.  I DO NOT want to do anything else with my elbow surgery-wise, fuck that.  If there's something wrong with the nerve, AGAIN, there's got to be another way around it.

2.  I just heard Neil Patrick Harris make a "Schadenfreude" reference, and it just about made my day.

3.  I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO CLASS TOMORROW

Oh, Wow

Okay.  That was probably the most fun (aside from Wicked, bien sur) I've had in, like, years.  That was fantastic.  I love my friends.

YAY!