Whoever Dances is One with the Universe

Got my Yuletide assignment yesterday. It's pretty cool and I think there is a lot of potential in it, and I think I also can do a good job with it -- certain elements of it weird me out, but the prompter gave me a lot to work with so I think I leave some things out while still giving them what they want. So I am excited!

I go home to-day for Thanksgiving, so I'll be scarce for the next week.

Linkspam!:

A presenter in my cog psych class used this page about art by autistic people in his presentation, and I thought that was pretty neat, so here is the link. It is pretty cool from both an art and a mental shenanigans standpoint. (I also ended up talking about the gender issues surrounding autism with the professor after class, which was pretty neat -- she agreed with mhari and said that autism is generally viewed as a "boy's disorder" and not something girls are supposed to get.)

Octopodes can go on land and that is totally awesome. Plus also super cute.

Although we already knew that, Ann Coulter is a maniac and I don't understaaaand, Jesus. I don't want to live on this planet any more? Liz said I should move to Canada, but I feel it is my duty to model sane Christianity for people in America.

I am currently using this programme to try and manage my issues with computer light = migraines; I've only had it downloaded for a day, so I haven't got a real clear idea of how well it works yet, but it's an interesting idea.

This tumblr exists and it is pretty pro -- Ugly Renaissance Babies.

A really interesting essay/article on why "born this way" is a bad argument for queerness.

This guy is my hero -- a devout Muslim whose faith led him to try to save the man who shot him. I heard an interview with him on NPR on Sunday -- he was really incredible. Warning: Article contains pictures of headshot.

For your webcomic organising needs, piperka is a great site for tracking updates and keeping stuff neat.

Finally, when you have just delivered a good Caruso zinger, the instant CSI. Yeahhhhh!

Update:

1. Wahhhh it's still hot I can't focus blah blah I hate hot weather I am currently sleeping on my parents' floor because they bought a small air conditioner for their room because it's HOT. Also the floor is not very comfy, trufax.

2. Wahhh I have been working for the last seven days straight and I will be working to-morrow as well, but Tuesday is my day off and I am going to spend ALL. DAY. in my parents' room watching Twin Peaks in the A/C. Unless I take myself out for lunch, but that will still be to an air-conditioned diner. AND THEN I WILL BE WORKING AGAIN ON WEDNESDAY. I-- yeah. I know some of y'all on my flist work a lot harder than I do, but this whole eight-days-in-a-row-8-hour-shifts-plus-one-12-hour-one thing is killing me. A lot. I just want some time to myself to fool around and take care of my keets and my poults and my fish and my hermit crabs!

3. Twin Peaks is really awesome, though. So great. I really want to read the T.V. Tropes page, but I refuse to spoil it for myself ahead of time. Which... I am the kind of person who reads the last page of murder mysteries first, so I am really feelin' it on this series.

4. Country music. Maaaan, I do like country music. Anyway, I just wanted to remark, apropos of country music, that "Hyundai" is not. pronounced. "hunday". FTLOG. Anyway, they keep playing my favourites on my way to work -- Thompson Square and Josh Turner and Blake Shelton and Reba McEntire -- and I just want to state for the record that I'm not ashamed of enjoying it. I mean, I'm not always in the mood for country, but I do think it makes really good commute music. I can listen to pretentious indie stuff at night while I'm writing poetry.

Also, regarding country music, raanve, I found old!Lanselos' song. It's Toby Keith's "I Ain't As Good as I Once Was". Just check it out. :D

5. I am having ~feelings~ about some stuff, but I think that belongs in a locked post because a) ~feelings~ and b) boring introspection is boring. However, I will say that I tend to forget just how... mental illness phobic?... people can be, and it's very jarring to be reminded sometimes.

6. Thursday = surgery day! Woo! That means I get the day off! Now I just need it to stop being so goddamn hot, and we're good.

Dear mhari, raanve, and pax_morgana: for some reason, my im client is on strike to-day. >_> Which I don't approve of, especially since yesterday Mama was on call again (somebody quit at her workplace and someone is on vacation, so she's been picking up a lot of on-call shifts; she had to go out yesterday at 1 a.m. and the day before at 3 to pronounce somebody). She'll be doing that again Friday. >_<

In the meantime, if any of you have any ideas (I don't think I can convince gtalk to work on this computer, although maybe if I go and try it on her laptop~~

Soooo at my one client's house the t.v. was on, and there was an ad going for some weight-loss programme. It started out fairly inoffensively: middle-aged, stocky woman going "yay now I am not quite as heavy I can do more!" which is a reasonable approach, really; and the fact that she wasn't skinny made it seem much more like a "I'm just wanting to be healthier, this isn't about the beauty standard" kind of thing. So far so good.

And then the last line of the commercial is her saying "Thank you [name of product] for letting me be pretty one last time".

What. the actual fuck.

So yeah, I thought you all might like to know what's wrong with the world.

So I'm sure everyone is desperately interested in hearing the continuation of the Saga of the Insurance Company from Hell (yes, you are).

Yesterday my doctor told me that she had called the insurance company again and faxed them being all URGENT URGENT MY PATIENT IS DYING PLZ SEND HER HER MEDS, and she assured me, when I phoned, that they had told her I would be authorised to have them within twenty-four hours. So this morning I ran to the pharmacy, because I'm out again.

Where the pharmacist told me, as nicely as possible, that the insurance company had NOT authorised my scrip and everyone was now out for the weekend, so it was unlikely I would be authorised until Tuesday. He also suggested that I call the insurance company and grovel to them on Tuesday. In the meantime, I could buy some meds out of pocket.

Now, because the pill I'm taking does not come in 225 mg caps, which is the dose I take, I have to take three 75 mg caps every day. Which means in order to get by until Tuesday, I had to buy twelve caps instead of four. And because Mama is broke right now, I paid for them with my birthday money. ;___; Which is just a minor complaint, honestly, because at least I have money, but I am whinging because I wanted to get art supplies with it.

So my plan is to call the insurance company on Tuesday. Yayyy! In the meantime, I have incredibly expensive medication, and a twelve-hour shift at work to-morrow.

On the PLUS SIDE, Maria and Mama and I went clothes shopping to-day and I managed to find two pairs of jeans that fit, as well as a really cute denim skirt and even a pair of shorts (which is disguised to look like a skirt, which suits me just fine). Which is great, since usually the fact that I am shaped exactly like a hobbit makes clothes shopping a fairly traumatic experience. I also made cupcakes for a party to-morrow that I will not get to go to, but they turned out really nicely! Even though I burnt my hands, bleh.

Yeah. If it weren't for this insurance thing, my life would be going pretty nicely overall.

Meeting with the Asst. Dean inconclusive. Definitely going home this weekend, though.

On an entirely different note, our school's production of The Vagina Monologues was cancelled because, according to the person doing the organising, it isn't inclusive enough: it doesn't let males help out or participate. So instead she's putting together a pro-woman show of some kind that anyone can participate in. I politely declined to be involved because I am mildly bothered by this decision. Somehow it seems like it's missing the point.

I like the new LJ header.

One paper done, one bibliography done; three papers left. Two of them are due to-morrow. Ha, ha, ha.

Dear GOD I am tired. Stress comes with insomnia, as always.

basically, rundown, I have one exam and four finals, one more therapy appointment, one more prescription to fill, four more classes to attend, one lovecraftian horror in Comm, one magnificent disaster in ConRes (is it a paper? is it an in-class exercise? WHO KNOWS? certainly not me, because I slept through one class and missed the other last week), and one excruciating confrontation in IntroSosh. And ALL THE BODY DYSMORPHIA IN THE WORLLLLD.

Also I screwed up my knee and it doesn't bend. >_>

On the plus side, dreamer_easy made me a Mycroft creeping icon, which I love. Now I just need moar. Actually, I need icons for Sherlock, X-Men, and probably Iron Man, as long as I just got more iconspace and I have new fandoms to attend to.

AND NOW TO FAIL MY INTROPSYCH EXAM. I am so ready for this.

We are a family adept at attracting disaster, such that we are always equipped to deal with something going completely wrong in the least anticipatable way, and nobody is ever really surprised when it does, in fact, go wrong. But even taking that into consideration this trip was a pretty amazing failure.

For instance, we were an hour from home when the kayaks attempted to escape from the roof rack. We stopped, re-secured them, adjusted for the fact that we had filled them with supplies like the charcoal, the cereals, and the bags of chips. Things seemed basically okay. We have had things try to escape from the roof rack before (once I drove all the way to Altoona with my bicycle re-enacting Escape From Alcatraz off the top of Supercar), so no big deal.

Three hours from home, the Cape Cod potato chips flew out of the double kayak like a crunchy tasty missile, launching themselves into the unknowns of I-81.

This proved to be a good thing, however, as when we started to pull off the road to determine what exactly had gone flying (we were unable to tell at the time) the roof rack itself made a go at escape. THE ROOF RACK ITSELF. Bearing both kayaks and all the food supplies in them, as well as Maria’s banjo.

We were able to save everything except the chips: stuffed all the other supplies in around our feet, leaving Maria on top of the charcoal, Daddy on top of the stack of watermelons, the banjo between us in the backseat, remaining chips stuffed in amongst my pile of books. At this point, we decided we had probably weathered the worst of the disasters that our family was by nature going to attract.

Ha. Ha.

Of little significance is the moment when the painter tying the kayaks to the car snapped, prompting another frantic side-of-the-road scurry. Equally insignificant is the realisation, shortly after lunch, that the cereals we had left in the kayaks were about to pop out, spewing bread, Chex, and cinnamon buns all over the highway.

No, the truly amazing moment was when we ran out of gas on the side of the road in the middle of New York nowhere. The farmer’s house we petitioned for house kindly informed us that there was a gas station four miles down the road, and we could make it by coasting in neutral.

And you know what? We did.

But in the three hours left between us and our destination, we ended up having to borrow rope and secure the kayaks to the roof by wrapping the rope all the way around and through the windows of the car, where we hung on said ropes to hold said kayaks in place while I read stories by Bailey White aloud and we tried not to utter the last ominous words that would secure our miserable fates for good and ensure we never made it to our destination:

"Well, it probably can’t get worse."

This evening I decided, for reasons unclear, that the way to be a stellar houseguest would be to have a major OCD meltdown all over mhari's room. The only reason we are still friends is because she has a remarkable lot of patience and because her mother threw me out when the room was only about fifty percent cleaned.

On the other hand, we went to the beach on Monday, where I found this lovely specimen of crabhood and sat around in tidepools.

I'm feeling kind of weird--I'm not really sure where I am, mentally. I feel very lonely, in a way, like I'm terrified of everyone forgetting about me over the summer while I'm not around (for example Liz, and the_chloroplast), and also people online, especially people who I want to be good friends with but am for-ever having anxiety over (like tulipmonster, who I want to like me but who I am convinced sits around wondering when I will die already). I feel like I could be in a better state of mind, but on the other hand I'm not depressed, so--idk, be grateful for what I have? In the general scheme of things, anxiety is easier to deal with than depression (for me).

I'm also having a lot of anxiety nightmares and a lot of just random like--lying awake at night thinking of all the things that could potentially go disastrously wrong. Like I sit in my bed and think about all the ways my father could die (I think this is being triggered by Nana and Granddad just dying, and by mhari's father dying, because he was pretty much my second dad, and it's made my anxious self hypersensitive to the possibility, I think?), or how I don't want to drive any more because I'm afraid I'll hit one of the cats, or how if I pick up Perci I could drop him and he's so delicate he'd just shatter. I will run through a good twenty or so of these scenarios just while I'm trying to fall asleep, and then I'll have even more anxiety because I'm worrying about whether worrying about stuff will make it come true. And not all of it is stuff that's grounded in reality, either--I think about how the house could collapse or I start to wonder whether I left the stove on and the house is going to burn down in the night or-- And so on, ad finitum, pretty much constantly. And any little noise or anything of that sort jerks me wide awake because I immediately connect it with one of the scenarios I've been worrying about and then I have to calm myself down until I can relax enough to sleep, and it's driving me crazy.

I've also started getting the daily headaches again, and that whole mess has been going off and on for over a year now, of terrible headaches in this icky swimmy place between a normal headache and a migraine (I've only had like two true migraines, and these are definitely not that bad), which last all day and cannot be chased off by painkillers. The problem with them is that I end up taking a lot more aspirin than is good for my system in an attempt to dull them at least. I'm starting to think that I should talk to a doctor possibly. <--and this of course is triggering my anxiety even further (what if I have a brain tumour? what if I have encephalitis? &c &c &c).

tl;dr my anxiety is worse than usual and my head hurts. Also, I like to whine.

But I do like it here, and I'm sorry I have to go home on Thursday. mhari is pretty much my favourite person ever.

There is a LOT of healthy white male[1] privilege happening in my philosophy class right now. Like, a LOT. I'm starting to feel a little squicky.

Seriously, one of the guys just said that Darwin would endorse removing black people from the gene pool because their IQs aren't as high as those of white people. And the word 'retard' is getting bandied about quite a lot, as well.

I honestly think that when you start talking about social fitness and social Darwinism and people who 'should' be removed from the gene pool you are edging dangerously close to a certain twentieth century view held by a Very Bad Man.

I kind of want to duct tape a lot of people's mouths shut right now.

[1]none of the girls are talking, they may have healthy white privilege too, don't ask me.