Qualms About Nothing

There's something people often say to me that annoys me. They're always talking about how much they enjoy, "turning off their brain".  What does that mean? No really, what does that mean? Have I been unaware that there's an off switch for my brain? If you had told teenage me, or twenty-something me that there was an off switch, I would have flipped it a million times. Sit through a few hours of graduation? Flip. Breaking up with a boyfriend who's not taking it well? Flip. Customers? FLIP. Boss who's trying to tell me about their personal life when I really couldn't care less? Flip.

Depression? Flip but only after I got some kind of artistic value out of it on my blog.

During completely mundane moments in life I find myself asking, "Will I remember this later? Is this tiny moment of nothing going to come back to me? Or will something more noticeable take up it's space?" You can not imagine the amount of time I've held in a deep breath while nothing is happening, trying to burn the moment into my memory. The most recent one was as I rode in my husband's convertible (don't get me started on how I really feel about convertible vehicles). We were waiting under an overpass, and it was possibly the first time I had been in an open top vehicle while under an over pass. Across the road on the other side were two kids all punked out. They looked like the British punk scene. I looked up to the concrete and I felt like I was floating. I took in a deep breath and held it while we drove through. The sunlight hit my face and I let the air go. It was like the sunlight pushed me back into the seat and the air I let go was helping the moment write itself into my mind. Air as ink, that seems pretty useless.

I'm not someone who wants to be able to turn off my mind. I think of all the terrible painful times in my life and no matter how bad it was, I don't want it to not be there. When I have a terrible day, when I'm incredibly frustrated and feel like I can't possible handle thinking anymore, I grab a book. My brain doesnt want to turn off. It wants MORE. The simple wants just as much of my attention as the complex. I really don't have the best memory when it comes down to it. Yet I find myself wanting to experience every second I get. Not in the tacky, "Live life like every minute is your last." way, but in a liquid all around me way. I want my life to press up against me, surround me like I'm in a Bacta-Tank.

 I want to be a cold, calculating bitch that has no qualms about using the word qualm. - That isn't going anywhere for now, but I wrote it and liked it.

Wine. Chocolate. and Charlie.

One of the best parts about being an adult who is rediscovering blogging is that I can drink. Legally. A lot. Also I'm an adult who understand that "a lot" is two words and not one, so that's a vast improvement over the last time I was on this journey.

With that in mind I am currently on my second glass of wine and now eating comfort chocolate. The wine is to fortify my forced social interaction I will be making here in an hour and a half. The comfort chocolate is because I need an excuse to take in extra calories. Not that my adult waist line needs it. If I could tell teenage blogger me that I'd weigh more than I ever imagined I would, I'd tell her to suck it up and learn to enjoy running. Or get a breast reduction because someone our height doesn't need much to work with anyway.

Is this where this post is going? Ugh. I should have gone straight to the gin. How about we go for the cheap and easy points? Let's talk about the things I do like.

As the url might have hinted at, I like gin and tonics. I like books and I even run my own book club that I'm trying to dodge tonight because I'm feeling extremely anti social. I enjoy the road less traveled because there's less people on it, obviously. Big fan of Star Wars. My joke is always, "Ask me about Star Wars!" but the truth is that you should NEVER ask me about Star Wars unless you want a rant about something, usually about how unfair the hatred towards 'Attack of the Clones' is (Fight me).
Cacti and pineapples are my spirit botanicals. I really enjoy 'The Flash' both the comics and the CW tv show. (Grant Gustin is MY Flash)

At this point if you're still reading WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? I am not funny. I am not interesting. I'm skeptical about every friend who's ever given me that "LOL" face react on Facebook. Yes, I am judging my life from my Facebook reacts.

Segway into Honesty Paragraph:

All I've ever wanted is to either be left alone, or be the absolute most stunningly funny and entertaining person in the world. I wanted to have the same gravitas as the character Charlie in 'High Fidelity'. Magnetic. The truth about Charlie is that she's an unoriginal hack of a human who's just banking on her good looks to distract everyone from noticing she's a fake with no real opinions at all. A Charlie is a person who read a single article on an subject and adopted it's view to sound like she had come up with her own singular guiding principal on what ever topic was hot. Fuck Charlie. She is the most self centered, pretentious bitch of them all.


So here I am with a keyboard, a now empty glass of wine and a half eaten chocolate bar. What did we learn today? Being me sucks, but it's better than being anyone else at this point. Really that's not such a bad thought to keep.

Your Flight Will Go On Without You

So in the past week I got on four different planes to go visit a friend in another state with my husband. The seemingly mundane task of sitting at the airport each time had an impact on me that hadn't happened in the last couple of times I had been on an airplane. For some reason these few times caught me.

The week before my sister died, our mom got on an airplane for the first time to go visit my dad in Maryland where he was working at the time. We were so excited for her! Natalie and I thought of a few little gifts to get her for her flight and the day of I took my mom to the airport. My sister was supposed to take her but she had been having fainting spells (a warning sign the doctor's wrote off) so we decided it'd be best for me to take our mom so Natalie didn't have to drive.

Sunday October 2nd 2016 my sister died from a pulmonary embolism. Basically that's a blood clot that forms somewhere in your veins (usually your legs) and dislodges it's self until it gets physically stuck. Once's it's stuck it limits the flow of blood. Sometimes causing numbness in the area it's at, coldness of the limb it's at and cutting off blood supply. If that clot dislodges and makes it way to you heart the odds of survival aren't in your favor. Your body becomes deprived of oxygenated blood. If that happens for too long you die. It's a tricky thought experiment to think of how science hasn't figured out a way around the human dependency for blood.

Looking back the warning signs of that time bomb in her veins are all over the last few weeks with her. By no means am I a medical professional. But after years of dealing with my sister having major operations and having a shared love of weird medical cases and medical dramas.... well I should have been paying more attention. The great irony for me is that a week after we got the autopsy report, I started re-watching "Grey's Anatomy". My sister had spent years watching reruns of the show. Honestly she should have been writing for it she knew so many weird medical cases, she herself was one weird medical case after another! If you ever stopped by to visit my sister at home while she was in too much pain to live a normal life, you'd join her watching the show. I too had seen the show extensively but no where near her replay count. Here's the ironic bit that Shonda Rhimes herself couldn't have written(Even though she did write the episode, she didn't know how it'd impact one of her biggest fans): Episode one of the entire series has their main character, Meredith Grey, diagnose a pulmonary embolism that would have killed the patient because the doctor on the case was too lazy and stubborn to test everything they should have. I think my sister would have found that morbidly funny. Why? Because after years in an out of the hospital you learn to laugh at some things that terrify you.

My mom was supposed to board a plane to come home the next evening. Instead after a few very painful phone calls from myself and my brother-in-law, her and my dad got in his truck and drove all the way from Maryland to south Texas because they just couldn't sit still. They stopped only for gas and made it back in record time.

So here I am in three different airports over a few days, six different times between the trip to and from home. At any given time someone is missing their flight. The airline employees are doing their best to get the attention of the missing passenger to let him or her know their flight is boarding. Final call, your flight is boarded. The doors will be closing by the end of this message. Please come to our counter to get assistance rebooking a flight. This is your final call. Flight #---- has left.

I kept thinking of my mom's name being said over those intercoms to board her flight. How many times did they ask her to get to the gate to take her seat? How many people got on that flight she missed and wondered what happened to the women who didn't make it on? Did the airline employee making the announcement wonder where she was, what could have kept her from getting on the plane?

It's a tiny moment in time that takes you away. It sucks the air out of the room and creates an ache in your chest that takes much too long to loosen. Here's a tacky thought: the ripples of our lives reach further than expected.

I had some other drama I wanted to dissect when I got home but my mom's name over an intercom hadn't left my mind. It's strange how life changes how you react to other's. My sister's death hasn't stopped having this weird ripple effect on my life. Small waves that hit me when I don't expect it change a moment in time to something more. Surely this must be what the sentiment, "They'll always be with you." means.

Do I Have the Patience?

Fifteen years ago there was a girl who lived in a small town. Everything about her was unremarkable despite the teenage attempts at expressing herself. So she found her home online with the other outcast. Between dodging the heavy handed ban hammer moderators of the MSN days, and wielding her keyboard in overly worded journal entries, she found a safe haven. As with all homes, she out grew her space and left her online home. For years her palms itched to say something, anything about her life. But the truth was she had become even more reserved. Her words, once an ocean of nonsense, had become small and puddled up only to dry out. Fifteen years later that girl realized she'd been placing one hundred - forty character bandages on her wounds.

Alright here we go. Blai Starker returns! 2008..... wait, I mean 2018. This is going to be one hell of a process for me. The real question is though, do I have the patience?

I am now thirty years old and a lot has changed since I spent endless hours with the Hybrid Theory album on repeat while tending to my Neopets. (Please no one call the internet police on me. That Aisha lived a posh life full of fairy food and games. The fact that I let her fade into useless internet code should be evidence of my inability for emotional attachment. More on that later.) I am somehow married. If you survived my teenage online journal days, you'd be just as impressed by that fact as I am. We own a house and live a pretty typically, socially accepted life. Aside from me working on cars as a profession and being a feminist that has a huge hatred for gender identification and the social implications it's forced on us all who doesn't want to deal with  each social political tide turning is just not worth the meh I'd have to give.... are you still breathing? Me either. That's one of the points I wanted to make about me having the patience.

I tire my damn self out just being myself. Where once writing gave me an out, it now gives me complications. I feel like as an adult I really want to impress people more than I did as a teenager. However I have an avoidance personality so instead of making the attempt I just shimmy my way off stage. Where as once I'd be making up my own dance to Billy Jean in the grocery store as my mom pretended to be a random shopper who's really interested in that package of noodles. May someone's god bless my mother for putting up with my mood swings. See? I'm deflecting. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid and try to think of something that might be funny.

So do I have the patience to make myself sit down and talk about it?  The answer is really simple when it came down to it. I have to do it. I have to do this. I have to start talking again. Even if it's into the void of the internet. Because if I don't I might just die of writing dehydration. I'm not sure that has any profound medical studies attached to it, but for the sake of this blog thing, we're going to pretend Shonda Rimes covered it in a Private Practice episode. I can say that because I haven't watched Private Practice so I can life my lie happily.

Welcome back alter ego who's doing a bad job of altering my ego. It's time we become friends again even if it means being totally annoyed with ourself. Nobody use the words "Borderline personality disorder" in the comments.