Heidi Aphrodite

So lately, I’ve been eating oranges, apples, cottage cheese, or yogurt for breakfast. This has resulted in comments at work such as, “Oh, look how good you are!” or “Wow, so healthy!” Yyyyyeah. A, I refuse to assign values to myself based on what I eat, and B, I’m not actively trying to show people up by how healthy I am.

See, the thing is, I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had TIME to cook breakfast, let alone eat it at home. The scenario lately is that after I finish getting dressed, I have roughly two minutes to get to my car and out the driveway without being late for work. So what do I do? I open the fridge, scope out any leftovers or foods that are easily tossed into a little Rubbermaid and could resemble a breakfast-like meal, and throw them into my bag. Sometimes I make an official declaration that tiny ham sandwiches leftover from a party the previous night are now a breakfast food. Sometimes I eat three pumpkin cookies because pumpkin is good for you. Sometimes I grab some yogurt, some cottage cheese, and an orange. Sometimes it’s a plastic-wrapped stack of pancakes from two days ago that I eat cold in the car on the way to work.

I’m not showing off when I eat my orange at my desk. I’m just hungry it was the first thing I saw as I ran out the door. Believe you me, I’d be eating breakfast casserole every day if I could.

It’s been three months since I’ve blogged.  Partly it’s because I’m all paranoid that people are Trying To Find Me and Read Things about my life.  Like people at work.  I try really hard to keep my work life and my personal life separate, but there will be some crossover.  It’s inevitable.  Unless I make this a password-only blog, right?

Anyway.

Quick update:

Finished a show in October, started rehearsals for another show which opens in 2 weeks, going Elsewhere for Christmas, looking forward to Thanksgiving, overwhelmed with the number of skirts I have and the irrational need to keep buying them, counted my shoes (don’t ask how many because it is alarming), rearranged my room slightly for CLOSET DOORS (you’ve no idea how exciting that is until you’ve lived without them for nigh on 10 years), days got shorter, vowed to cut my hair off in January, bought sock garters to keep my over-the-knee and thigh-high socks from scootching down so much.  You know, the usual stuff.

Today I thought I’d talk a little bit about my internet-induced ADD.  Now, I’m an advocate for the mentally ill and I understand that real ADD/ADHD is no picnic and can be very difficult to deal with on a daily basis.  Perhaps a better term would be internet-induced inability to stay on one topic for more than 20 seconds.  Today, I posted something on Facebook about food from the past I’d read about in Reader.  That reminded me to check Reader, and I came across a post about organizing a craft room.   I read that post until I got to the paragraph about storing yarn, and then I remembered that I wanted to find a hat pattern for some lovely yarn I bought recently so I skipped over to Lion Brand Yarn to see if they had any patterns I might like, so as to avoid getting sucked into the creative, colorful vortex that is Ravelry.  Then I remembered that I’d never actually finished reading the organizing post, so I went back to that window and checked Facebook instead.  Then I checked Twitter.  Then someone posted something on Twitter about something that reminded me to check my other gmail account.  I decided it was a good idea to go through my spam just to see if there was anything that had accidentally gotten in there.  In my spam, I found a message from someone named David with a subject line of “Good luck” and a body that began with, “Hall0 darling I am a pretty girl.”  I HAD to put it on Facebook with my response:  “Yes you are, David.  The prettiest girl at the prom.  Good luck to YOU!”  While I was checking that other gmail, I checked my inbox and saw my Eddie Bauer ad with a sweater sale and clicked over to see if there was anything I could even remotely afford.

And then I remembered that I had started this blog post while looking at graduate programs, checking Pinterest, searching for the pilot of “New Girl” to see if I might like that show, and chatting with someone on Google Chat.

Insanity, I tell you.

Also, I need to drink more water.

me: There were mosquitoes waiting to get into the temple this morning.

Zach: Did they have recommends?

me: They were hanging out above the outside doors. I don’t think they had recommends. I think drinking blood is against the Word of Wisdom.

Zach: Nah, that’s the old Mosaic law.

I was reading my dear friend Emily’s latest blog about self-actualizing, and I got inspired.  So inspired, in fact, that for 8 of the last 9 days, I have made my bed before leaving for work or church.  I have worn mascara and eyeshadow liner for 7 of the last 9 days.  I have worn clothes I really truly like.  I have decided to cut my hair off, just for fun.  I have determined to not be bothered by people who don’t like what I like.  As she said, I LIKE myself, and it’s time I started acting like it.

Today, even though I didn’t wake up at 6 like I’d planned, I was awake and out of bed by 6:30.  By 6:45, I was in the family room, on the bike, watching the last 20 minutes or so of “Alphas” that I’d missed earlier in the week.  I only biked for 15 or 20 minutes, but I DID something.  I feel good.

When Zach and Kathleen and the kids were here and I was sleeping in my sister’s office downstairs, I got in the habit of waking up with just my phone alarm.  If that’s the only sound to wake me up, it’s so very annoying that I’ll get up instead of letting the dulcet tones of KSL Radio waft over my dreams.  I’ve even had a couple of days when my home computer doesn’t even get turned on.  I’ve gone for a walk or so, I’ve looked at the garden, I’ve helped plan my sister’s open house in September.  I even made some pajama pants and cut out a couple of patterns!  I feel like I’m Doing Things instead of sitting like a lump.

However, I still have to do some alterations for friends and lots of crafty things to do for Bethani’s open house.  Progress is progress, though.  I feel motivated to plow through a lot of stuff!

Bruceton can lure elks to dance a solstice polka by playing the panpipes, which he made himself from ancient bamboo given to him by the Dalai Lama.

Or, at least, that’s the reason I give for the slowness (despite my best efforts to be REALLY hydrated) at which blood comes out my vein and into a lovely pint bag for someone else to use should they need it.  Really–the first time I gave blood (last June) it took the tech five minutes to find a vein and then it took 11 or so minutes to get a pint out of me.  Kind of funny, because I certainly wasn’t expecting it to take that long, but I wasn’t entirely surprised.  After all, I’ve had similar experiences getting my blood drawn for medical tests (all three times).  The next time I donated, last December, it once again took about five minutes to find a vein and about 12 to get a pint.  In March during a campus blood drive, it took at least five minutes AND three techs to confirm a viable vein; I only got poked once (thank goodness) and the blood started to flow v e r y s l o w l y.  The techs kept checking on me and minutely adjusting my arm because I was having some needle pain, and it still took 14 minutes to get a pint.  14!!  The tech joked that it was a new record, and we had a good laugh.  I’d warned them.

Friday was our stake’s blood drive.  It became an adventure!

I’ve been taking the bus lately to save gas, and the one that goes closest to my house leaves campus at 4:55 or 5:30.  I RARELY leave work early but on Friday my lovely part-timer covered the desk so I could get home faster.  I got home about 5:30 and a little after that my mom and I decided to walk to our church building and get the process started since we had nebulous “after six” appointment times.  Everything went smoothly despite the wait–my hemoglobin and blood pressure and pulse were all terribly normal and I brought a book (Appointment With Death by Agatha Christie).  I got in the chair and said “good luck” to the tech, who found a vein the first time (dang!).  The needle was poking me a little, though, and made me a little nauseated, but the tech and I figured out a way to hold my arm so that it didn’t hurt.  The blood was flowing, which meant he hadn’t gone through the vein, so we carried on!  I was flowing between a 2 and a 4, but I was pretty darn hydrated (approximately 3 liters of water coursing, more or less, through my body).  I held my wrist in an awkward position and read my book while my blood filled up the bag.  It’s really fascinating to me to watch the blood come out and feel the warmth of it flowing through the tube.  So, so interesting and even awe-inspiring.  This stuff that I can spare will help someone else live–amazing.

12 minutes and 13 seconds later, approximately, I headed over to the canteen for my orange juice and cookies (no Fig Newtons!  Sad!) and sat next to a couple of women from another ward.  One of them is involved in their ward’s YW program, and we got to talking about girls camp (our beloved Camp Shalom is still pretty snow-covered, so it’s a no-go and all the wards need to find alternate options) and what they’d been able to figure out.  In the middle of the conversation, one of the women (Chelsea) stopped talking, looked straight ahead, and slowly slid off her chair.  Her eyes were wide open and dilated and she went really pale, and the other woman and I saw what was happening at the same time, and she caught Chelsea’s head while I got on the floor and put Chelsea’s feet in my lap.  The tech who was in charge saw what happened and came over with a pillow, and the coordinator (Terril) noticed the commotion and brought a chair over to put Chelsea’s feet on.  As we were adjusting her feet, she sat straight up and said “I’m ok!  Did I faint?”  We told her what had happened and made her lie down until her color returned.  I’d gotten on the floor so fast that I started to feel light-headed and nauseated, so the Tech In Charge told me to stay down, just in case.  “Monkey see, monkey do,” she said, and although I’ve never fainted in my life, I wasn’t about to add to the body count, so I stayed down and drank my juice while Chelsea’s friend fed her Nutter Butters one by one.  After about five minutes, Chelsea’s color returned and she wasn’t as nauseated, so she and her friend left after Chelsea handed over her car keys and texted her husband that she was fine.  Really nice women and I’m glad I met them, but I wish it hadn’t been because Chelsea passed out.

I guess it’s a good thing that my first reaction was to help someone else without thinking about what it might do to me, but man, that was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.  I’ve seen people pass out, but never with their eyes wide open like that.  I’m glad she was ok!  Also, I’m glad that my 0+ blood, while slow, is good strong blood and that I can donate it every 8 weeks.  I feel like I’m helping.

Ok, that title has nothing to do with what I’m actually writing, but I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that I DON’T have a hover-car like they said I would back in the 50s.

I stayed home from work today because I have a cold.  I could feel it  yesterday morning when I woke up.  It crept through my system during work yesterday, bringing crankiness with it.  I hate being sick.  Staying in bed is the worst when you have an old mattress.  Occasional feline visits help, but they can’t take away the fact that my mattress is at least 15 years old and really needs to be replaced.

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie and dozing (while sitting up because I am so paranoid about ear infections that I’ll sleep uncomfortably to avoid them) and thinking about shoes (I do that a lot–have you any IDEA how hard it is to find a pair of pink heels that don’t look like hooker shoes?  HAVE YOU?) and wandering around the house trying to remember the last time I put Zicam up my nose.  Speaking of Zicam, did you know their “virtually tasteless” individual spoon cold/flu medicine is not at all tasteless?  blech.  It tastes like NyQuil but without the pleasant cherry flavor, which is saying a lot.

Because I have the consumption, I’m more easily irritated at the small stripy cat named Gidget.  I think I’ll change her name to Irritron or something.  She’s cute and everything, but good heavens sometimes she doesn’t leave me alone.  At least she’s stopped insisting on jumping to the top of my book case and biting the feathers on my mask.  Bless her little evil heart.

I had planned to get a lot done this weekend but if I’m going to be stuck with this cold, I just have to make my peace with not accomplishing everything on my mental list.  If I’m feeling better tomorrow, I’ll go to the pharmacy and the ATM and call it good for the day.

• My brother is driving from Ohio to Utah Thursday (yesterday?) and Friday (tomorrow?) and then continuing to Seattle.  I’ve been worried about that, but he’ll be fine.
• Work schmork.  Not looking forward to January.
• I has a melancholy.
• I’m so tired I’m dizzy.
• I miss my friends.
• I miss being social.
• My feet are cold.
• My shoulder is weirdly painful.
• I have nowhere to go tomorrow night, which I suppose is good considering the weather lately.
• Closet O’ Sparkly Things is begging to be worn, but see above.
• It’s not that I don’t want to go to baby/bridal showers, it’s just that I’m so tired of them.
• “I’m getting off this merry-go-round!”  “Plexiglass.  Had it installed last week.”
• My stomach hates me.
• I need size 7 double-pointed knitting needles, but these roads are yucky and people forgot how to drive in snow and ice in a mere 7 months.  Freaks.
• My feet are cold.

Off to bed, I think, lest my melancholy get the better of me.  I will jump on the bandwagon and write a list about 2010, but I think I’ll make it a List of Awesome Things lest I get discouraged by my life.

Actually, it’s my grandma’s birthday today, and that’s always worth celebrating. Happy 87, Grandma!

In other news, I am in need of a job where I won’t feel self-conscious if I happen to wear striped sweater tights, but I wonder if there IS such a thing for a mid-30s woman anymore.  I am actually debating the sanity of trying to find a job that will let me work from home, or opening a dime-a-dozen Etsy shop, or going back to retail.  I’m just tired, I guess, of being so relatively staid.  What if I WANT to wear striped sweater tights?  What if I want to wear purple flats or red flats or blue heels?  What if I want to wear funky jewelry and cardigans and corduroy skirts?

I do want to wear those things, but I feel like I can’t at my current job–I worry that any sidestep away from conventionality will irritate my boss, but there’s only so much I can do with simple jewelry and brown shoes.

Also I need to get paid more.  It seems, though, that the only jobs I’m qualified for are the receptionist/assistant jobs, and they just don’t pay enough.  I have such a wide range of skills that it makes it hard to find something that doesn’t make me want to die inside; I’ve actually considered going back to retail, which WOULD make me want to die inside.  On the other hand, I do a lot of the same stuff in an office as I did in retail:  answer phones, fetch and carry, deal with rude people, organize supplies, work on projects.  The only appreciable difference is that I do a lot of that sitting down in front of a computer, which is nice.  It’s sometimes quiet and I don’t have to deal with Mall Muzak or extended holiday hours or working weekends.

I’m beginning to wonder if retail would really be a good compromise.  I could get paid more, if I get on full-time (that’s not a compromise) I’d have benefits, the hours are flexible…but it was such a relief to get an office job after years of retail.

Guh.  I don’t know.  All I know at this point is that I’m not getting paid NEARLY what I’m worth, the projects never actually get finished, I don’t want to spend another two years in school just to get a more marketable degree, and I’m tired of students.  What do I do now?

Sigh.

Let me tell you about my morning, whether you want to hear it or not.  This is going to help me find the humor in it all, I hope, because it sure was hard to find anything funny about it as I was crying, cursing technology, and apologizing to a cat not much more than 2 hours ago.

Here was my plan:

10:30 PM–study
11:30 PM–sleep
6:30 AM–wake up!
6:40 AM–shower!
6:55 AM–breakfast while printing papers and studying!
7:30 AM–leave for campus, giving myself plenty of time to navigate the slushy roads and find a parking spot!
8:00 AM–take my history final and do AWESOME!
8:30 AM–leave history feeling awesome!
8:32 AM–study for my psych final!
10:45 AM–take my psych final and do AWESOME!

Here’s what really happened:

Last night, Laresa and I watched “The Fashion Show”, cringing the while at the sun damage and bad plastic surgery of the “housewives” they had to design for this week.  I had mostly finished my history final paper (I know more about the Lollards now than I ever thought I would) by staying late at the office, and I was able to finish editing my footnotes and clarify some paragraphs in front of the TV after eating a delicious snack of pinnamon toast, sour cream and onion chips, and fudge.  I’m so healthy.

I finished a couple of things up after Laresa went to bed around 10:30 and decided to charge Nettie the Netbook while going over my history notes before going to sleep, figuring I’d just print my papers in the morning without a problem.  I got into bed at about 11 and started falling asleep in front of my notes while Gidget slept peacefully on the foot of the bed.  I left Nettie plugged in, said my prayers, and went to sleep for real just before midnight.  Gidget woke me up around 2:45 to go out, and just when I’d almost settled back to sleep, she started jumping up and grabbing the door handle, scrabbling with her back claws on the door to get leverage.  She did this about 3 times in a row, and let me tell you, it’s HIGHLY startling when she does that, plus I’m afraid she’ll get her collar stuck somehow and strangle or something awful.  I finally got out of bed to open the door and squirt her (I do this so erratically that it hasn’t stopped her from trying to open doors), but she looked at me with her cute little face and meowed, so I let her back in.  We both settle down for another hour when I booted her for real and went back to sleep until about 6:20 when my alarm went off.

So then I got out of bed, grabbed everything I needed, and hit the shower.  That all went fine.  I was done with all of that by 7:10 or so, leaving myself 20 good minutes of study and breakfast before heading to campus.  I started my car to warm it up, put some bread in the toaster, and turned on Dad’s computer so I could print my paper.  Simple and smooth, right?  BUT NO.  I got Dad’s computer started and tried to print my paper.  Even though the printer was ON, it wouldn’t print ANYTHING.  Time was running out and my toast was getting cold, so I ran downstairs to Mom’s computer, turned IT on, and plugged in my flash drive.

It gets even MORE fun!

Mom has MS Office 2003 on her computer, so I had to download a compatibility patch in order to even open my Office 2007 paper without messing up the formatting.  That took a while…when I finally got it up and ready to print, there was a paper jam.  I opened up the back cover of the printer, and discovered much to my dismay that Mom had put previously printed paper in the printer and my final history paper all about the Lollards had our family birthday calendar on the back of it.  FUN.  While I was trying to get the paper out of the jam and struggling to get the stupid back cover on the printer, Gidget chose at that time to jump on the counter and start walking on things–I picked her up and tossed her off and immediately felt bad, even though she was totally ok.  I had to cancel that job, steal paper (while holding a startled Gidget who needed to be told she really was loved even though she got tossed off the counter) from the other printer.

I got that all situated, and went to print it again, but accidentally printed a paper I’d already turned it.  I quickly canceled that on the printer, set my final paper and my psych journal entries to print, and checked the printer.  WHICH WAS PRINTING OUT THE JOB I’D CANCELED.  Oh, there was weeping and wailing and tearing of paper.  I believe the paper is still there.  On the floor.  Crumpled and torn.

And then I cried.  Because it was 7:40 and I hadn’t gotten anything studied because I’d been fighting with printers and impatient with a cat and hadn’t had enough sleep for most of the week and worried about choir practice this afternoon and when was I going to sleep and why didn’t I have any money for Christmas and my breakfast was lame and my car was still running and the roads were slippery and I was so stinking tired and so I sat down at the computer, holding Gidget, and cried.

I pulled it together, stapled my papers, put Mom’s flash drive back in her computer, said a prayer to calm down, went back upstairs to Dad’s computer to go over my history notes, and resigned myself to being late for my history final but ok with it because I knew it wouldn’t take me more than 30 minutes to actually take it.  While I was eating my toast and trying to remember all the Spanish monarchs, Dad’s printer started printing something!  It was the TEST SHEET I’d asked it to print HALF AN HOUR AGO.  I nearly stuffed my peanut butter toast into the printer.  It was either that or write “redrum” on the window and barricade myself in the house armed with cats and yarn.

Four printers in the house.  My computer is networked to three of them, but only one of those three actually recognizes my computer as networked, and that’s only half the time.  Four printers.  FOUR.  And it took me almost an hour to print a 10-page paper and a 5-page journal entry.  And THEN.  I get to class at 8:30, barely finding a parking spot in the unplowed (UNPLOWED) parking lot with 1/2 of freezing slush on it, get my final from my professor, and realize that there is nothing on the final about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, or the succession of Spanish rulers, which is really everything I remembered at that point.  Did I remember what happened on St. Bartholomew’s Day?  Not a bit.  But I sure remembered a lot about the witch craze in Germany and the debate between Sepulveda and de las Casas over whether Indians had souls!  Good thing, too, because those were two of the four essay questions I had to choose from.

Right now, I’m “studying” for my psych final, which we discovered (thanks to a friendly classmate who took it early) only has 10 questions on it, and only addresses Buddhist psychology, the motives of the four personalities in the Color Code, punishment/reinforcement, and the three personality disorder clusters.  I have 76% of my battery left, yogurt and an orange in my bag, and three hours of this semester to go.  I’m so glad I already have my degree, because if I were working full-time and going to school full-time, I can guarantee that there would be a lot more torn crumpled paper, cursing at printers, and crying my eyes out while holding a bewildered little gray cat.

Sorry about the mess, Mom…