I have spent most of today feeling kind of quietly hysterical. You know, calm, soft-spoken, but gibbering on the inside. It makes me laugh at myself.

When I was a kid, I really loved dollhouses. Not so much the precious, twee girlie ones. I thought Barbie's Dream House was lame. I liked the cunning ones that had real craftsmanship behind them. My father had some appreciation for this passion, as he was really into model trains. We liked the miniatures, he and I.

So when I was about nine or so, my big Christmas gift was a dollhouse. It hadn't been put together yet, it was the frame and cut out wood bits and base and whatnot. The plan was that my father would build it and I would help do things like the shingles on the roof and shutters and stuff. I was really excited about it. See, my father is brilliant. I guess that is part of what makes everything so fucking sad. There were times when he was sober and kept his hands to himself, he was brilliant and fascinating and he taught me so much about history, politics, art. It's all the could-have-beens that kill me. But I was really excited that my father and I had a Project and he would be Spending Time With Me and it would be fun.

Only, it didn't happen. He got as far as staining the wood and trimming down some pieces and then he stopped. I would ask him and ask him if we could do stuff with it, put it together, and there was always a reason he couldn't. A lot of times the reason was, "Not today," or "I don't feel like it right now." Or he would just be too plastered to do anything but drink some more. When we went to the miniatures store I bought little tiny pieces of furniture and stuff to play with and I hoped it would go in the house when it was finally done. One of the things I bought was a little bunkbed with yellow pillows.

I graduated high school at 16. That tiny bunkbed was still sitting on my bookshelves when I went away to college. I asked my mother once if I could have the dollhouse. I thought that maybe I could try and put it together, even though I suck at that kind of thing. She laughed and said no, that someday her grandchildren would want to have things to play with when they went to visit grandma. I thought it then, and I think it now: If I ever manage to have children, they aren't going to ever meet their grandparents. Ever. My parents won't even know my children's names.

Everyone I have ever loved has broken their promises to me. I wish that they wouldn't make those promises in the first place. Hope is the cruelest thing there is.

It really sucks to have friends who never, ever contact me. I always have to seek them out. It's humiliating and I don't need any more embarrassment in my life. It makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with me, and we all know I could spend several days listing all of that.

I am pretty sure that no one who reads this falls into that category so don't go getting upset.

Okay. Last post edited due to bad behavior on my part.

I don't know how any of you folks can put up with me, because I think I'm pretty intolerable.

Today is my father's birthday. Sixty-one years old. My father is an old man. It seems wrong, somehow. That he's old, I mean.

I spent so many years trying to split my father into two people. It makes perfect sense. I dissociate, so why don't I try and do the same thing to him, right? I tried to tell myself I had two fathers. One was the drunk, the other was my real daddy, the one I loved. The one who loved me. Only, it isn't real. They're the same person. And I want to stop feeling so sickhearted at the thought of hurting his feelings. I want to stop loving him. To never talk to him again.

I sent him a birthday card. My neck and back are so tight I can hardly move them. I wish I could stop. The pain is pretty bad.


I went to the doctor today. Now I have a steroid inhaler. I am very, very uneasy about it. But I am more uneasy about fainting from lack of air.

I used to believe in stuff. A lot of stuff. It was all very important to me. And now I'm half-hearted about everything. Quarter-hearted. No-hearted. Nothing feels good anymore. Nothing is interesting. I have a whole stack of books I wanted to read, ever since December. They'll probably be in the same stack a year from now. Two years from now. I have a lot of time ahead of me and I can't find anything to fill it but work. There are no goals because there is nothing I want to do. There's just no end in sight.

I've kept my apartment pretty clean though, much to my amazement. Since my antihistimines were upped, I can wash dishes and floors and counters and my hands don't break out in hives unless I really, really over-do it. It's something I can do that has a distinct beginning and end and gives immediate visible results. That never soothed me before, but what the hell. It does now. I can't vacuum though, without breaking out in hives. Fucking hell.

All these nights are really long.

He told me that I was worth loving. I wouldn't love me, though. What is so lovable about someone who is sad all the time, hour after hour, day after day? That shit is tedious.

My cats really enjoy it when I change the bedsheets. I leave the blankets off for awhile and they both hop up on the bed and luxuriate. It's bizarre, but I'll do all sorts of crazy shit to make my cats happy.

I don't care about anything election-related. This is no change, however, from previous years. At least something stays the same.

I go to the doctor tomorrow for a physical and to try and deal with these fucking asthma meds. I predict tears.

My therapist is out of her office this week, traveling.

I still feel super strung out. My hands are shaking nonstop and I have a constant flutter in my chest.

I'm frustrated with myself. Just when I think I'm going to feel something, I immediately start to cut it off. It's that thing where I can feel it all shutting down in the back of my neck, my jaw, my shoulders. It's a reflex and I can't seem to stop it. And now I don't know if I'm maybe doing a little better or if I'm just more able to suppress everything.

A time when I was happy: I was with some older guy friends who actually never fucked with me. They were all good people. I was sixteen. We climbed a bridge over the Ohio River. There were catwalks just below it and we ran all over them. Then we found the a spot to sit and look down at the river. Two of them climbed out onto some of the beams. I could have stayed on that bridge forever. When I was too short to reach the handholds to get back up, they lifted me until I could grasp them.

I think the anti-depressants are working. I am still horribly depressed, but it's not at the level it was for the past couple of months. I feel a little more functional. Who knows? I may be eating these words in a couple of days. Sunday and I are mutual enemies. And I wish that small tasks didn't seem so overwhelming. It's really hard to take that first step to start doing something.

So I went off my asthma meds for a few days because I felt like I was strung out on meth or something. Then I couldn't breathe, and that wasn't really acceptable either. I was starting to feel faint pretty much all the time. I wasn't blacking out, but kind of greying out. So now I'm taking them again and I feel strung out. I can't win. But I go to the dr. next week and I can deal with a few more days of feeling cracked out. Exhausted and hyper-alert at the same time.

Now this inhaler for my asthma is fucking me up, too. My resting heart rate is about 110-120 and I am shaking like a leaf. I have that horrible dry cough that hasn't gone away since November, only it's worse now. Eight days until I see the doctor. My body is telling me that I'm terrified, only I'm not. I can't catch my breath. I want to crawl out of my skin. My brain is vibrating inside my skull. My heart is pounding so hard that I lurch forward a little with each beat. This fucking sucks so much. I'm so frustrated. I'm trying to be calm and to ask myself what my body is trying to tell me, but right now all I can think my body is saying is "FUCK THIS INHALER SHIT IN THE NOSE."

Sunday night is always bleak and full of want. I want to hit my head against the wall just to have a different kind of hurt. I won't, so don't comment telling me not to. But Jesus fuck, it feels like every nerve in my body is jangling. You know that sound phones used to make when you left them off the hook? That's what I sound like to me, in my head, right here and now. I need it to stop. Eight days until I can see the doctor. But I am afraid they will say they don't know what to do for me. That they'll just prescribe inhaler after inhaler until there aren't any more left to prescribe and I can't afford any more fucking meds anyway. This is the nature of psychosomatic illnesses. Nothing works. I can't stop tormenting myself, I just can't stop.

Spring break is coming up soon and I don't know what the fuck I am going to do when I have eleven days of emptiness. It's like eleven Sundays in a row. I wish I could sleep through it all.

There is really nothing to say tonight. I've started and deleted like five times now. It's cold and it's been storming all day. My bed is really empty and I am full of want. I feel starved and it makes my hands ache with grasping.

I woke up this morning at 7am (yeah, on a Saturday) and immediately started crying. I have no idea what that was all about. I don't remember any dreams.

Everyone who knows me knows that I am a person whose world view is defined by stark, extreme dichotomies. I just don't know if they realize how painfully aware of that fact I am. I hate it. Thinking about it sends me into wanting to make some rather extreme statements about myself. But I don't know how else to be. I was programmed this way.

But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, not hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. Rev. 3:16

That's the verse I was raised on. There was no room for ambiguity. God was an old man who swung between sort of jolly (if still distant) and extremely fucking pissed off while wielding magical powers. That was pretty much how I saw my grandfather, too. He was a Pentecostal minister who founded the church my mother, brother, and I attended while my father lived in the basement and drank Falls City beer. My Sunday school teacher used to reduce me to tears, making pointed comments about unbelievers and their eventual fate. Everyone knew my father was an unbeliever. Only, when I got just a little bit older, I knew without any doubt in my heart that when the Rapture came (and it would be soon, it's always soon with them), I would be left behind, alone with my father. I didn't care about the plagues of locusts and rivers of blood so much as I was afraid of what would happen if Jesus took away what little bit of resistance that stood between me and my father's free reign.

They told us that demon-possessed people were everywhere. They found some element of Satanism in just about everything. Hippie peace symbols were Satanic because, obviously, they were broken crosses turned upside down! Certain movies and bands were off-limits because they had a "cult following." I'm not kidding, they were incapable of comprehending the whole "figure of speech" thing. They were incapable of any kind of subtlety.

I was part of that church until I was 14.

I am so blank right now. I feel like there is a disconnect between thought and feeling, and it's jarring. Usually this means I'll be having another meltdown soon. So I'm bracing myself.

I can't deal with any of this tonight. It's burying me and I can't breathe.

The scariest thing is that I don't remember everything. All the things I have replaying in my head over and over, and there's still more. It surfaces sometimes in moments that feel like an earthquake. Why does there have to be more?

I didn't tell anyone in the cult much of anything about it, no matter how close I was to them. The philosophy said, ultimately, that karma ruled all, that I had experienced what I did because in a previous life I had inflicted all of those things on someone else. That breaks down to "I deserved it." I always thought I deserved it. I didn't need the cult to give it a philosophical backbone.

There is no god. If there were, he'd be a fucking asshole who didn't merit any further consideration. Once upon a time I was a Pentecostal child who believed with all my heart and prayed and suffered and cried night after night for help and all I ever got was silence. There was no lack of faith. There was a lack of a god. There is nothing in the sky but more sky. And there is nothing in my heart but blood and hurt. There is no great loving, mighty Father and there is no blue-skinned, lotus-eyed boy who plays a flute and dances. I wasted so much time. I should have just prayed to the wall, because at least you can lay your palm on that and feel it solid under your skin.

I didn't use my inhaler today. PRO: I am not trembling and I don't feel like self-injuring. CON: I am constantly out of breath and coughing, to the point where it's making teaching harder. And it makes me feel tired.

My mother sent me a Valentine's Day card, which makes me feel pathetic and angry. Inside, she wrote "[my name], I really miss you! What is going on in your world?" I wonder if she has any idea how much I wanted to hear those words when I was 10. 13. 16. 19. I was begging for her to ask me what was going on. I needed it so much.

Dear Mom,

When your daughter suddenly stops smiling, something is wrong. I have seen our family photo album with its pictures of me. Once I hit 9, I didn't smile anymore. I didn't stand near any of you anymore, or touch you. When your child elects to go clothes shopping rather than stay home alone with one parent, something is wrong. When your outgoing child is suddenly fearful and inhibited, something is wrong. Also, I should not have to be telling you that when your husband pulls out a gun from the closet and threatens to shoot himself with it, the correct course of action is not to wait until he wanders off to drink some more and then aim it at the wall and attempt to fire several times it to see if it's loaded. You especially should not do this in front of your two children. They might not understand what you are doing and could quite possibly think you are going to shoot everyone in the house. Your daughter is never old enough to be your confidant about her father's alcoholism. Your daughter should not have to witness you packing a suitcase, especially if you don't fucking intend to actually use it to get her out of there. I don't care if you were afraid or hurting or any of those things. When it was over you could have gotten us help and you didn't. You never did. At your mother's funeral, you turned to me and cried and said, "I had the best mother." Do you know why I cried then? It wasn't because I was sad about her. It was because I knew that when you die, I will never be able to turn to anyone and say that about you. You should have had an abortion, finished college, and moved the fuck away from West Virginia and my father.

I feel like hell.

I can't stop trembling. My fingertips are vibrating over the keys as I type. The medication also makes me want to rock back and forth, which is how I tend to react to stimulant type drugs. I go to the doctor again in two weeks. I don't think I have ever wanted to go to the fucking doctor so badly as I do now.

I feel blank. Really blank. But there is a tremor right above my diaphragm. And my body is tense. My neck is full of concrete. My jaw is tight as all hell and my TMJ bullshit is bad. I feel like there is something waiting to be released and I'm afraid of it.

If someone says, "I don't love my parents because they constantly humiliated me," she will immediately hear the same advice from all sides: She must change her attitude if she wants to become truly adult, she must not live with hatred bottled up inside herself if she wants to stay healthy, she can free herself of that hatred only if she forgives her parents, there is no such thing as ideal parents-- all parents sometimes make mistakes, and this is something we have to put up with, and we can learn to do so once we are truly adult.

[...] It is not true that forgiveness will free us from hatred. It merely helps to cover it up and hence to reinforce it (in our unconscious minds). It is not true that tolerance grows with age, On the contrary. Children will tolerate their parents' absurdities because they think they normal and have no way of defending themselves against them. Not until adulthood do we actively suffer from this lack of freedom and these constraints. [...] As adults, we will hate only if we remain trapped in a situation in which we cannot give free expression to our feelings. It is this dependency that makes us start to hate. - Alice Miller

I talked to the dr.'s office today. They told me to stop one of the meds for a couple of days, but to stay with the others. I'm randomly bursting into tears, but who knows what the fuck is up with that.

I need more reasons than I have right now. In every sense. I'm trying to find them, but I can't see anything. I just can't.

I woke up every two hours or so last night. Please don't let tonight be like last night. I don't know what I am going to do if I keep having those nights. This is why people drink themselves into oblivion and I can't even do that right now. And I can't find any alternative. So I do nothing. I write here and imagine the people who read this rolling their eyes and I wonder if that's just another symptom or something. I can't separate me from the symptoms.

I had the school nurse take my pulse rate today. 106 beats per minute. My inhaler is making me feel like a rubber band stretched extra taut. I keep having to remind myself that I'm not afraid, because stimulants give me all those fear-like symptoms. And, clearly, this is exactly what I needed. But the nurse said I should adjust to the meds soon. Until then, frankly, I feel extra crazy. She told me not to stop them, though, because she listened to my lungs and it doesn't sound good. All day, my hands have been shaking and I'm having trouble with those fine motor skills. That, my friends, was a poorly written English sentence.

My mother emailed me today, after exactly one month of me being silent. She said hello, remember me, I'm your mother and sometimes I like hearing from my daughter! I didn't write back what I wanted. So I'll do it here: Hello, remember the time you told me I used to be so confident and self-assured and then all the sudden I really, really wasn't? Do you remember those words? Think about them long and hard. And when you're ready to listen (which you won't ever be), I'll tell you why I don't want to talk to you. You have exactly one chance to acknowledge everything and if you don't, then I will never respond to you again. I don't even believe in ultimatums, but this is all you get.

Except, I didn't write anything like that. I stayed with safe things. Work. Health. I should have thrown in something about the weather.

I have hardly ever been so exhausted and so painfully keyed up, all at the same time. I feel like my dial is cranked up to eleven and all I'm producing is static. My head is pounding. I took ibuprofen. Or something like that. There is no rest, but I'll try to find it anyway.

It's Sunday night again and I've tried to do the things I should do this weekend. I saw people. I did stuff. But it isn't enough. It never is. Why does a hug from a friend make me feel like I'm about to start crying? The easy answer is everything else makes me cry, so why not this, too? The real answer is that it gives me permission to feel. And then, just as quickly, I deny myself that permission. Seeing a pair of hands outstretched, reaching out to me, it makes me seize up and I can feel it in my neck again at the base of my skull.

Why am I so ruthless with myself? How many more ways can I practice self-injury without actually picking up a blade?

I have defended my parents so many times. One emotion towards them that is so staggeringly not present is anger. I have a huge blank space there. I try to look for it and all I can find is sadness and defensiveness. And that leads to another round of disgust with myself. It's not that I can't feel any anger towards my abusers. The sadist I dated in high school, my first husband-- I have a whole world of hate for both of them. They both richly deserve every bit of hatred and contempt that I can muster. The attachments I had to them lingered, then fell away suddenly and I could admit what they'd done to me, I could be outraged and indignant and angry. But the anger with my parents comes in the shortest bursts, stomped out almost immediately. Especially when it's directed at my father.

When I think about all the effort I put into reestablishing my relationship with my parents after I left the cult, I feel kind of sick. But maybe I wasn't quite such a moron. I didn't try to move near them or anything like that. But I listened to them like they've never listened to me. I called them almost every week to talk to them. Since I left their house, my parents have called me maybe four times. In fourteen years. Would it have been so hard to pick up the phone and say I missed you, I was thinking of you, tell me about your life? So why am I still defending them? Why am I still protecting them from my own accusations? Why can't I pick up the phone myself and say Hey, you need to help me pay for my approximately a gazillion medications and therapy because IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT?

My father has acknowledged his abuse of me exactly once. I think I was fourteen or so, and he was not long out of in-patient treatment for his alcoholism. I guess he was doing that twelve step thing where you go around and apologize to everyone you ever looked at funny or whatever. He was very vague in referring to it all, but he said that none of it was my fault. I remember exactly what his voice sounded like. Strangled. I couldn't look at him while he spoke. Or respond. So he left. I was playing a game on our Commodore 64 computer, and I just kept on with it. Nothing was ever said again. He could have told on himself. He could have got help for me. Instead, he said he was sorry and I felt like I was supposed to forgive him. I mean, that's what you do, right? Wasn't he so brave for acknowledging what he did and telling me it wasn't my fault? When you are a kid and someone offends you, the adults make them say they are sorry and then you have to say okay and move on. If you don't, then you're the one who is bad. I imagined that he felt tortured by what he'd done. Did he? Does he? Or has he magnanimously decided that what's in the past is done and that he should just move on? And I want to know who hurt him when he was small. I want to excuse it all. I want him to be a victim, too. I want to stand in solidarity with him against the really bad people and I refuse to see his face amongst their numbers. Because I know where all of this is leading. It's leading to the place where I can't love him anymore. It's all leading to the place where I would rather kill him than lay eyes on him again.

Until then, I'll keep sending him birthday presents that consist of books about Appalachian music or language or any of those things. I'll keep remembering the time I got really sick on Christmas and had to go to the hospital and he carried me to the car. I'll keep seeing him in my nose, the color of my eyes, the shape of my face. I'll keep longing for him to tell me his stories, to talk to me, to notice me, to spend time with me. But I won't pick up the phone. I won't.

We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us, we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gaze attracts sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring.

We binge, purge, sleep around. We drink too much and get too high, anything to blot out the past. We accept and endure beatings and humiliations because our fathers, our uncles, and our mothers' twisted boyfriends said they loved us, too, right before they broke our bones and tore our flesh, right before they made us receive them. - Laura Weiss, Such a Pretty Girl

The ache starts in my chest and spreads through my veins. The abuse I can handle; it's the happiness that cripples me. - Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl

. I was preschool aged and wearing footy pyjamas. It was almost Christmas and the tree was in our tiny house. It was the yellow house then. The tree was resting in a red base and I got to help change the water. When we decorated the tree I had the important job of hanging the star. It was plastic and yellow, with a blond angel on top. The wings were more like fairy wings and had blue netting covering them. I dearly loved that star. I loved stars. Daddy put me up on his shoulders so I could reach the treetop and Mommy took a picture for the big, blue album.

. During the summer, when school let out, Friday was mall day, which meant Friday was book day. Daddy went to the bank to deposit his paycheck and I got to go to Waldenbooks and pick one book for me. He would go to the hobby store and look at trains while I got to browse the books as I pleased. I was allowed to buy any book, from any section. Sometimes we would go and eat at Eli's, a real sit-down restaurant with dark, heavy wooden chairs and tables. They had spaghetti and I loved it. After we ate, they had a bowl of Dumdum suckers by the door and I got to pick one. Always red for me. I liked watermelon.

. He played math games with me, taught me how to figure it all out in my head, taught me the short-cuts and patterns. It caused me trouble in school because I usually couldn't "show my work," but I was proud of having such a smart Daddy.

. She took me to see David Lynch's Dune in the theater. He gave me all the books.

. He took me to see The Empire Strikes Back. Twice. And the Muppet movies. He was just as excited as I was.

. Since he worked midnights, she let me sleep in her bed a lot when I was small. We would make a tent with the pink and yellow quilt by lifting our knees up under it. Every night I was in there with her, she would sing songs to me and I can still remember how they go. Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch...

. Every Easter she hid my basket somewhere in the house. She made the most elaborate baskets with bizarrely cool stuff in them. I think he helped. Every Easter morning when I woke up I would tear around the house, looking for my basket. And my little brother sometimes would cry because he couldn't find his, so I would help him.

. Every Christmas he bought her a Lifesavers Storybook. It was a package that had different kinds of Lifesavers candies and the box looked like a storybook. He put them in her stocking. Every year she would pull them out and laugh and I would be happy because it was Christmas.

. I watched a Star Trek marathon with him. The Trouble With Tribbles was our all-time favorite.

See? I would tell myself. They were good to me. They loved me. I was lovable. There are no memories I have of my childhood that hurt more than these ones. They are what send my body into self-comfort mode, rocking back and forth and folding forward to ease the pain in my chest. I was their biggest fan. Every good thing they did was infinitely precious, every memory cupped in my hands and hoarded, replayed over and over. They kept me a prisoner with all those things. They gave me just enough to keep from telling on them, because I didn't want to lose those little things I had. All these things that made them human and made me have compassion for them. These memories that, even now, make me crave their love like I've wanted nothing else.

There was no mercy in that house. And now I am thirty years old and I have tattoos on my arms of two incarnations of mercy. But I have no mercy in my heart for me. All this remembering. I just want to call my mother and ask her to tell me about her garden. Sing me a song, Mommy. Sing the one about Valentine's Day.

Today I bought a box of tea at Whole Foods. I did it because it was tulsi tea (Rama tulsi AND Krishna tulsi varieties) and the sheer blasphemy of it felt good. And then I realized that there is no one left that I could tell this to who would have the faintest idea as to what I was talking about, even if I explained it. If my ex-husband weren't such a prick I'd call him just to laugh about it. Hell, I'd serve him a cup. But there's just no one who will get it. There won't ever be. Not even the, what, two or three people who bother reading this thing.

I went to the doctor today. I was engaged in doctorliness from approx. 9am until exactly 1:44 fucking PEE EM. I wish I could charge medical people by the hour. That would be excellent. Then I could pay for my SEVEN DAILY FUCKING MEDICATIONS I HAVE TO TAKE NOW.

I like lists:

1. I have developed asthma. someone give me a goddamn refund on this body because it's obviously defective. You know those soppy christians who should be killed because they love cooing "god doesn't make mistakes"? They should be killed twice. Because Something Is Clearly Wrong With Me.

1a. In my moments of better humor, I keep telling myself, "I am made of FAIL," and snickering.

1b. Is asthma psychosomatic too? Wait, don't tell me.

2. They doubled my anti-depressant dosage because I am extra crazy.

3. I had a panel of blood tests. everyone who has laid eyes upon me knows that I am not afeared of the needle. I have noserings and my arms are covered in tattoos. Also, I am not afraid of blood. ALSO, I tend to be a masochist, so I am not afraid of pain. However, I am very afraid of blood tests. This is because I have no veins. I found this out the hard, vomit-y way. Also, once they find what somewhat passes for a vein, it quickly collapses and ceases to bleed. This results in DIGGING IN MY ARM WITH THE NEEDLE which of course results in pukery. So I try to weasel my way out of bloodwork. When that fails, I inform the lab technician that I have no veins, and that they are to use child blood-drawing equipment, and will most likely have to do the blood draw from my hand. Furthermore, they must place a trashcan nearby for future instances of pukery. They always laugh until they realize that these are indeed truths and then they mope about having to stick my hand. Then they call for ice chips for me to suck on and tell me not to move.

3a. The phlebotomist and I had a very loud, giggly discussion about how sad it was that I could never take up a heroin habit, all this spoken as he was slapping my arms to find a vein. SMACK SMACK SMACK NO HEROIN FOR YOOOOOOU, LITTLE GIRL!

4. I had to have a chest x-ray to check if there are still pneumonias hiding in my accursed lungs. They also wished to investigate for TB. Oh, how ironic it would be if I were to have TB, considering that I managed to avoid getting it on the compound in hare krishna land when there were new Russian immigrants present who were actually infected.

4a. Having TB could mean serious shit about my job. I mean, health, too. But having TB means NO TEACHIE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

5. Zyrtec is over the counter and available in generic now. There is some small ray of non-suckery. It would suck less, though, if I didn't have to take double the recommended dosage (by dr. order) every fucking day.

5a. I feel chronically dehydrated from the sheer amount of antihistimines in my system at all times. And I do not like drinking. I am like a feline in that i prefer wet foods to drinking liquids. I hate drinking water.

5b. One of my students knocked my SIGG bottle off my desk and broke the shit out of the cap.

5c. I hate everything.

6. Going to the dr. makes me cry. It just does. I know what you're thinking, if you've been reading this thing for awhile. Everything makes me cry. Which is absolutely true and you deserve a cookie. But going to the dr. makes me cry EXTRA. My entire adult life I have had chronic, largely untreatable health conditions. You knew that, too. Visiting the dr. is an episode of sheer, abject helplessness for me. When I left school and ran away to brainwashed zombie-land, I no longer had health coverage. Not that my parents especially supplied me with much medical care anyway, aside from my mother proclaiming she'd take me to the gynecologist so that he could check me "DOWN THERE" and tell her what wicked shenanigans I'd been up to. Anyway. I went without any kind of health coverage for an entire decade. When you don't have insurance, doctors and their cohorts are not very nice to you. When you go to a doctor in Town while you are a crazed cultist, they are super-extra-ultra not nice to you. They sneer and tell you that whatever you have is caused by the cult. They're probably right, but not in the way that they think. I went to the in Town dr. once at age 18 (I had to borrow money) with a massive allergic reaction to I have no idea what (perhaps I was allergic to arrogant swamis giving advice to miserable married couples). My mouth was swollen and covered in blisters. My hard and soft palate were blistered. He told me it was caused by a B12 deficiency because hare krishnas are vegetarian and then he threw (note: not figure of speech) a scrip at me for a steroid. He didn't tell me what it was or what the side effects were. Then he left the room. I'm sure it's no surprise that I have super-crazy reactions to oral steroids. They make me suicidal and kind of homicidal as well. Then there was the dr. that prescribed me a completely old-fashioned, notorious-for-bad-side-effects antihistimine that others have told me is utterly inappropriate as a first attempt at treatment for my Crazy-Induced Allergic Condition. Then there was the next doctor who prescribed me TWO antihistimines with tons of side effects. Then there was the dr. who did a stabbity, I mean biopsy of a mass in my breast to see if it was cancerous and completely missed the mass and took a biopsy of the wrong tissue and I had to go back for a second (even more expensive) biopsy and had a bizarre shaking and falling down reaction to the anesthetic. AND THEN there was the seemingly endless stream of doctors I have seen about everything else that is wrong with me and the end result is that all that can be done is to "make me comfortable" and feed me medication I am really starting to not be able to afford. And it's all in my head anyway. At least the doctors got nicer when I got insurance and give me samples. Why wouldn't they give me pharm samples when I was making a grand total of four figures annually? Did they think I would sell my Clarinex on the streets? Not that that shit works, anyway.

6a. On second thought, maybe the cost balances out. Some of my meds have an appetite-suppressing side effect. So I'll pay for my meds with the money I'm not spending on food. Top Serious Great Idea!

7. Speaking of steroids, one of my shiny new asthma meds has a steroid component too and I am wondering if the level of panic I feel about it is anywhere in the ballpark of semi-appropriate. The dr. told me that there were no side effects and it was really the best treatment for me. Only, that's what other doctors have told me about other meds that have had Significant Motherfucking Side Effects. Things like: "Oh, the only side effect this horrible antihistimine has is that it might make you a little sleepy, so take it at night." That one made me gain in excess of 40 lbs. in six weeks and had me sleeping more than twelve hours a day and feeling massively stoned 24/7. Jesus, people, my fear of doctors isn't entirely crazy. When I am extremely fucking reluctant to go to one for something, I don't think it's part of The Crazy. It's me weighing the risks (and hating to miss work, because who can go to the dr. with a teacher's schedule?) and what seem like dubious benefits.

7a. As I type, the shiny new asthma med is making my heart beat really fast, like caffeine does. If this shit gives me panic attacks, I am going to seriously lose it. But then, I've already seriously lost it, so what's the difference, at this point?

I think this list has run out of steam.