Holidays are Here Again!

Alright, so I have not posted anything in a while but I have good reason: I have been so busy with the holidays and just the general craziness that comes with this time of year, I really have not had a moment to breathe. But now, I am sitting at my computer, and wanting to share some of the good times.

For Thanksgiving, I headed off to Atlanta to spend time with my brother, his partner, and the baby, Jonathan. My parents and my aunt drove up along with my two cousins. It was a good time in general and I really needed to spend the time with my family. I forget sometimes how much my family grounds me and after all the craziness of the last few months, I was so happy to just talk to my parents about everything that has been going on and that I am thinking - moving to England, leaving school at the end of the semester, the whole dating Tony fiasco, being depressed - and realizing that my parents just want to support me in whatever I decide.
It was also great to hang out with my little nephew. He makes me realize that I really want to have kids, but that right now, I am not ready for all the responsibility. From the funnny incidents (hmm, aunty Marisa drawing a bath for Jonathan and then forgetting to plug the tub so after about five minutes, there was no more water....). Yeah, I am so not ready for certain things in life. But still, there is something to be said about watching this little person grow and change in front of you and realizing how much fuller a house seems with family in it.

Unfortunately, along with all the love that my nephew gave me, he also seems to have passed along his cold to me. And I am still suffering three weeks later. The first week back was the worst, especially with all the grading and end of semester things that needed to be done but I could not get to for the sheer want of sleep and being hopped up on cold meds (by the way, not a good combination with all the other crap I was taking at that time). I have been getting better but it seems if I push myself, I tend to develop a hacking cough (think smoker's cough except I have never smoked!).

Add the wonderfully brisk weather that we had for the last week and a half ( I think Cel may remember me saying that I could not wait for it to WARM UP to the thirties! yep, thirties was considered warm!) and now the warmer-than-usual week we have been having so far (fifties in the day time - I have actually been going out without a coat! How crazy for this time of year!)....

Ok, promise to send more news of the holidays as I am here in Chicago for Christmas and New Yea's. Feel free to give me a call or drop me a line to let me know what you are doing..

Recovery

hey kids, in the vein of revealing all and just keeping you up with how things are going, I headed out on the town (for the first time in a long time!) last Friday night. I had been staying in because dating Tony long distance made having extra cash hard (the phone bills were horrendous!) and I used to enjoy staying in and getting a chance to talk with him sometime over the weekend. So, I gradually stopped hanging out other than the occasional dinner with friends and for a while, even that had stopped.

But, of course, with things the way they are now, it was high time to go have some fun. In that light, I had planned a fun night of bar hopping and talking with two of my girlfriends on Thursday night (it was all free, by the by) but they both had to cancel for various reasons. I was bummed but figured other opportunities would arise. So, open on Friday evening. It is cold, pouring rain, and just generally a night to stay home. Even the traditional late walk with the dog was postponed until it had stopped raining as heavily and even when it was a little better, we were out for about five minutes and then I dragged her home. As I am laying on my couch, my friend Patty calls me to say that she really wants to head out that night.

Well, I was in the mood to stay in (did the way I described the night give you guys any clues?) so I put a limit on how long we would be out and said I definitely wanted to be home by twelve as well as wanting to do something low key. So, we agreed to head to this neighbourhood bar that has pool tables in the back so we could just hang out and play. Well, by nine thirty, I was out of my house and waiting to go. Kind of excited about a night out but not expecting much. I should have known better.....

First off, I end up talking to some random guy in my building as I was downstairs waiting for Patty to show (I actually saw him twice more that weekend and met him - his name is Kelley(? not sure on the spelling)). Patty shows and a friend of ours, Sandhya, is in the car. So fun, girls' night out. Patty was a little disappointed that both Sandhya and I wanted to bail early but she was okay with leaving by about midnight. Just in case though, she had called a couple of our good time guy friends just to see if they were interested in hanging out and possibly closing some places down.

We get to the neighbourhood bar (called Gingerman's) and it had a decent crowd but was not overly busy. Plus, a pool table freed up in about twenty minutes or so. Karl (one of the good time guys) also ended up showing and we decided to play teams: one good player, one kinda-ok-on-a-lucky day player. I got Karl (who is the good player - guess what that makes me??? smile) and we started off. We played pool for maybe five hours straight and just had a blast. I actually ended up being a semi-decent player and I think the reason was that unlike other times before, I was not drinking (not exactly true: I ordered a - as in one - Johnny Walker black with a twist and half way through I was shit faced - antidepressants give alcohol that extra bang for the buck!)......

We ended the night by trying to find a decent wings place at two in the morning which is actually harder to do. We drove down to my neck of the woods because we knew Yakzies (a decent wing place) was open til four but there was a line - a long one - which meant standing in the pouring, freezing rain. Thankfully, being my neighbourhood, I knew a 24 hour diner that was open and close by. We went, we ordered pretty much every appetizer on the menu, talked about our darkest secrets, had a good time til about three-thirty. I called it a night at that point, went home, went out with the doggie, showered, and then stared into space unable to sleep until about five.

The "busted at ten part"? My mom calls me at ten in the morning to check in and make sure I am doing ok (she knows that I am taking meds for depression) and had that secret smile voice when she asked if I was still sleeping. I think she knew that I would be okay if I was getting back into my old routines of going out once in a while and living it up. And maybe I will be okay. No, no maybe. I will be.

Shennigans

hey kids, you may have thought I took a hiatus or that I was actually hard at work with my prelim/dissertation but you might be wrong if you thought that. the most time intensive and fun thing I have done recently is to host a dinner party last week with a competitive slant that involved reminiscing about the eighties.....

so, here is how the whole idea shaped up: I was home, looking around my apartment and realizing that I had let the whole cleanliness next to godliness thing slide. I figured if I was going to clean, I might as well have something to show for it. So I sent off an impromptu email inviting about a dozen or so of my friends over Friday night for food. Then, to entice them further, or at least keep the crazies at bay (HA!), told them we would be playing "Totally Eighties Trivial Pursuit" for prizes.

Well, my friends brought their game faces and empty stomachs. I had a great time - Cel inspired me to do an all Italian theme (and after spending two days cleaning the apartment, I wanted some quick and easy cooking). Everything turned out really well except for the completely full tray of stuffed Manicotti left back( I cook to feed an army, even if only two people come over) and over half of the chocolate-cream-strawberry layered cake (I am not complaining about the latter - just trying to incite a bit of salivation in my readers).......

Then it progressed to the competitive part of the evening and the questions were both hard to answer and annoying as hell to read. Think Yoda trying to sound educated - who writes the phrasing of the questions? It also did not help that the team I was on was trailing behind every other team for about 3/4 of the game. But lo and behold, we rallied, got a slew of answers right and then managed to pull of the game winning question which asked about what movie the theme "Rodents of Unusual Size" came from (hint: talk to Cel and you certainly know).

All in all, it was a great evening reminding me that I know some very good people who know how to make a good time of anything. It also reminds me how much I love to cook and why being motivated to do chores for the enjoyment of others is more fun than just for your own sake. So, since I am in Chicago all winter (no Christmas plans to go home), the next one will be in mid-December featuring my famous three-alarm chili, corn bread, and home made apple pie! If you want to fly up (or down) to enjoy some home style cooking as well as possibly lots of cold, windy, snowy weather, it is an open invitation to all.....

Dealing

You know, I have tried to not be angry or hurt during the last month dealing with my break up with the person I was dating. I have even tried to talk about what both of us need to do to remain friends but the thing is, I have reached my limit at this point. Because I seem to be doing all the compromising and talking and all I have gotten from him were rather empty, pointless promises.

You see, what I don't understand is how someone who loved me, someone who claimed that they had been planning their life around me was able to find another "sweetie" in less than a month after we broke up? Yes, as he is quick to point out, I broke up with him. But to have watched his relationship with a new friend progress online, to see them flirting, and to have seen this before we even broke up. Well, yes, I am angry and I have my limits. And I believe these are it.

Hear me out: I am not expecting that he has to stay single for ever or that he should not be able to find love (or like or whatever you want to call it) where ever it lays for him. But maybe the most hurtful thing about this is that he is being so open, in front of all his friends.

And the openess in front of me, while somewhat similar to a slap on the face, is more so hurtful because he refused to tell those closest to him that he was dating me; that he even had a girlfriend. He constantly denied it to friends who asked if there was someone special and when I talked it over with him, he always had some diffuse date in the future to let others know.

It has been a year since we first showed mutual interest and we dated (instigated on his insistance) for six months before I broke things off. And never once, did he seem to mention the relationship to anyone. Not even those who knew. You may wonder why I put up with things this way for so long and I have been asking myself that question as well. Truthfully, I loved him and I trusted him. I believed what he told me and I always had faith that he had his reasons, reasons that I tried to understand.

And now, when things are over, I find I have no more understanding. As I have said, I told him what needs to be done to remain friends and he seems to think it unimportant. So, I will start to treat this as unimportant as well. I have been moving forward, taking small strides to get myself to where I need to be, and I no longer have the inclination to extend the effort required to keep him in my life. I just want a friend who can meet me half way, a friend who shows me respect, and without that, I don't think I need to understand anything about that person anymore.

Desperately Seeking

Well, as you guys may know by all the posts and just seeing me around in general, the last month has not been that great for me. To the point where I decided to seek pharmacotherapeutic intervention. That is just a fancy way of saying I went to a doctor and got some antidepressants. So, as of this week, I have been taking a pill a day faithfully, hoping that sooner rather than later I get to see some change. But I wanted to just rant a little about the absurdness of medication in general and specifically, my experience with antidepressants.

For one thing, the package insert has numerous warnings about the fact that "this drug may cause mood change". I am sorry? That's a warning? I certainly was not thinking of taking an antidepressant to lower my cholesterol. Should mood change be so much a warning as a fact? I figure an antidepressants' whole raison d'etre was to change me from being depressed to euthymic. Hence, a mood change!

I also have to change my life style a bit. Right now, about an hour after popping an pill, I get incredibly loopy and tired. But while I am dead tired, I can't seem to fall asleep or stay asleep. I am averaging about four hours of sleep right now and I am not functioning too well. I actually got more sleep when I was depressed and unable to really move out of bed for any reason. When sleeping was the only option to stop my crying.

I have also noticed that I am starting to get light-headed and dizzy in the late afternoons which I dislike immensely. And my caffeine consumption, already exaggerated, is even higher now (these types of antidepressants tend to affect caffeine processing so you need more in order to get the same effects). Add to that my inability to down alcoholic beverages and you can see why I am feeling a bit more keyed up and on edge! smile.

Seriously though, in the end, this is all worth it as long as I am starting to feel even remotely normal. If I can get out of bed and function at 50%, then I would declare going back on this hated regimen a success. But I won't really know for weeks and until then, I have so many things to worry about and do and meet that I am not sure how to handle it all. But in the end, I hope I can and I know I will, with friends beside me

Lucid Dreams

I have had a kind of funny sad night last night. I have been having some pretty lucid dreams over the last couple of nights but luckily, I have been able to sleep better than I have in months. Maybe I have not slept fully through the night yet but I am finding it easier to fall asleep when I do wake up. Except for last night....

Last night, I woke up pretty much every hour or less and everytime I woke up, I had one thought: "my friend flies in today". And that temporary happiness was replaced by the realization that I must be amnesic because he was not coming in after all. I probably had that cycle repeat itself about ten or more times last night and everytime, it just seemed that more crushing when I remembered. Until I woke up at five and decided to just stay awake because there was no way I wanted a repeat.

It's funny because I have come to realize just how much I wanted him here and only after it was a sure thing that he could not come. I realized that I was looking forward to having someone here to distract me, I was looking forward to having a good friend with me during this somewhat trying time, and I was looking forward to just maybe reaching some resolutions or firm conclusions in the end. To stop uncertainity, to stop the hopes I hang on to, to end all the thinking I have been doing. But I am sitting here, with even more thoughts that I had before. And sitting here throwing myself a "pity party" as one of my friends would say

Memories

I have been telling a couple of my friends how I have had to avoid pop culture in the last couple of weeks. Why? Because it seems no matter where I look, I see my problems or thoughts being expressed for the world to see. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something but like an ostrich, I plan to hide my head in the sand for as long as I can.

What do I mean about the universe trying to show me something? Well, characters on television say the things that I have been longing to say to the person I dated. Their thoughts and situations seem to smack of things that I am currently going through. Except on television, their problems end within an hour while mine just keep hitting me again and again. There is no respite for me - no commericials to break the monotony.
So, I have turned to books. I have even stayed away from chick lit or other such fiction to give myself a break. So I start reading a gothic horror novel. I enjoyed it at first but in the end, it was not truly a gothic horror novel; it was all about love lost and being able to move onwards once it is lost. It was about hanging on and how we hang on to the idea that the person we loved must be trying to hurt us, trying to keep them in our lives in our own way, when truly the person who hurt us before has no such intentions any longer and has probably moved on. Feels nothing, means nothing towards us. Maybe it was a horror novel in its own way.

So I sit and listen to music while working on my computer. But perhaps the choice of music could be better. I have sat there, listening to the lyrics of the song and wondering how I could have missed it. With words like "Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend" or "And I am not as pretty as those girls in magazines", my life is interpreted through song. And none of them have happy endings.

So, I have shut myself inside for now. I watch things that do not touch my soul, I read dry historical books and papers, the only songs are the ones I can not stop running through my head, and I am trying to immmerse myself in work. Because if I could stop seeing the meaning behind everything, then maybe I can stop feeling as though there is meaning to be had. In the end, there are somethings you are not meant to understand and there are somethings you perhaps are not meant to have or hold on to. But even so, sometimes you need to hold on a bit longer if only to save yourself from drowning no matter what the cost to yourself or others. Maybe some ideas are always meant to be salient and intrude upon our world because we recognize them as truth, even if we can not own them

Feeling Good

Whether it is because of the lack of sleep or the simple fact that I have been a bit down all day, my mind keeps circling around and around the questions that I have of myself and others. As you guys know, I broke up with someone a couple of weeks ago and since then I have been doing alot of talking and fighting and hurting, but in between all that, I have been trying to figure out the whole relationship. What was it for? Why did he want to be with me? Did he really love me? And if he really loved me, then how did things go so wrong? How did the little things escalate into insurmontable obstacles?

I can't say I have any answers to those questions. On days where I feel close to normal, I think he must have loved me. The way he spoke to me, the tone of his voice. But on days where everything is grey, when I cry because I am standing still, those are the days I feel thrown away. I let someone get closer to me than anyone has ever been, I really truly revealed the person I am, and he threw me away. Not in so many words - but in all the little things he did. Or failed to do.
"When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of your own worth and if that person throws you aside, you believe utterly and profoundly that you are worthless." This is how I feel. It has not been easy. My friends ask me questions of him and I truly do not know. My friends ask me about online flirtations he engages in and I ask myself those same questions. Am I so utterly removeable that in three weeks, I am all but forgotten. Replaced by someone else shinier, newer, better.

I am no saint; I have never claimed to be - a halo isn't meant to grace my head. But somewhere, I believe that I am a good enough person that I should deserve some happiness in life. But things happen and I wonder why I over reach; why I let myself believe in happy endings and forever. Because in my life, forever is not permanent. Forever is a way to pass away the time, to enjoy the scenery, and to move on when things have lost their novelty. I wish I had answers to questions instead of just loud musings and this ever present pain in my heart, but I don't. And maybe I never will. Maybe some things are never meant to be known.

As I Lay Me Down to Sleep

I wish I could say my life has not been especially crazy the last couple of weeks but it has been a doozie as most of you know. Between breaking up with the person I was dating and then waiting for him to show up here so we can actually sit down and talk to the normal crap that happens in grad school to dealing with alot of emotional baggage, I have been having a "fun" three weeks (yes, that would be biting sarcasm!).

Now add to that my current inability to sleep and the crappy sleep I have been getting in general, and I am a bit peeved. I miss sleep. I miss dreaming. I miss being blissfully rested when I wake up. Instead, I am cranky when I am awake or sad and unable to control the crying or else insanely happy for no good reason. Saying my affect has been labile the past few weeks would be an understatement. And I know sleep would help. Alot. But there is no sleep in sight or even a sandman to be seen.

So here I am, at almost five in the morning, pondering deep questions and writing about the mundane. There is so much I would just like to clear off my head and just not have it weigh me down anymore, and I can't. My sense of propriety and wariness in general prevents it. So, I am sitting here, struggling how best to move forward and not really sure. Does moving forward mean going back a couple of steps? Or should I be hanging on so keenly to what I have lost? For I have lost it. It being a myriad of things but I have lost it all. I know that. Perhaps I always have in a way and that is why I can't sleep or dream anymore. Dreams are hopes, wishes, fantasies that we allow our selves to have when our guard is down and our thoughts are free to wonder. And I no longer have hopes and dreams or even know where or what they are anymore. I seem to just have sorrow. And sorrow does not make for a happy bedfellow.