the wrong side of the bed

i have received 2 cards for the anniversary of my diagnosis! careyoke and joshie sent me a hand drawn note (drawn by careyoke, i suspect). my dad sent me a birthday card for a one year old. it had baby muppets (but not muppet babies) on it. thanks!

this is the kind of thing that makes me really wish that i had been diagnosed with something other than anxiety when i was in college. this story is pretty much what happened to me. i was out of my gourd when i would drink while on paxil. it felt awesome, but caused my friends great deal of concern. and i wanted to drink a lot.

this thursday, the 29th, is the anniversary of my diagnosis with epilepsy. i am happy about this because it was the day that i was put on medication to stop my seizures and the day that i finally was put on the path to kicking effexor. i wasn't allowed to stop taking it until they were sure that i was going to tolerate the lamictal. they didn't want to get me all screwy with my body chemistry, i guess. so, it probably took me 6 months to actually be rid of the stuff. i think i might have been taking something else, too.

i just remembered that i started seeing a counselor when i was in high school. i remember begging my mother, even though she agreed readily. i thought she was going to say no. i'd been hinting around at it for a couple of months and she had even said that there must be something wrong with me.* i wanted to go because i was having those weird episodes that i assumed were anxiety. i would get really confused in class and i complained of having deja vu** all of the time. i even complained about feelings of unreality and that the light would get really strange and that i couldn't see properly.*** i probably could have been diagnosed properly in high school. anyway, i will stop being all cranky and bitter. instead i am planning to treat thursday as a celebration of sorts. so yay for me! i told some of my friends that i am expecting greeting cards.

* okay, probably some of what is wrong with me is anxiety and depression. my mom had previously mentioned that i seemed like i had problems with both at earlier times in my life, but i don't remember having seizures before high school. i mean, maybe i was having seizures, but they were milder or something. anyway, the first time my mom suggested that i might need some sort of therapy was when i was five. i cried a lot and had insomnia when i was little. my mom said that if i didn't cheer up, she was going to send me to a psychiatrist. i don't know.

** feelings of deja vu are common for people with temporal lobe epilepsy. it is "classic". i wonder if a doctor would have caught this.

*** unreality and mild hallucination are also common. i remeber that it always got lighter when i had a seizure (in the early days). i would get weirded out because everything would get really bright but washed out looking. some people have visual hallucinations and some people smell things that aren't there. some people can have full on hallucinations, but i am not so lucky. that would probably be scary, but so much more impressive. i just lose all sense of place. dang, i am so boring.

Labels: childhood, epilepsy, happy?, mom, things are relative

i don't know about boys. a kid* from my high school called me at 3:55 in the morning last night. yeah. we had a class together my freshman or sophmore year, i can't really remember. he was a nice boy, but very odd. we sat in the corner with a girl named julie. we all used to write funny little poems about history because the class** was so boring. i used to think steven had a crush on me, maybe. once he started telling me how great i was and i told him there was a wall between us (that is actually what i said). honestly, he was a pretty nice guy. anyway, he called out of the blue at 3:55 AM. he told me that he is in madison, passing through to milwaukee to see a sick relative. it was an odd conversation. as soon as i picked up the phone, he said he was sorry for waking me up and i probably had to worked tomorrow. yes, i said, i gotta make a living.

anyway, the conversation was quite odd. he mentioned some friends of mine that he had seen after we graduated from high school, but they were all references to events immediately after high school. he also asked me if i remembered working at randall's***, which of course i did. after all, i am the one who worked there, and he is the one who did not. i said that i hated ironing my uniform before i would go to work. he said he likes a crisp collar.

he told me he was applying for an assistant manager position at one of those horrible check cashing places*, and i said they were evil. he said if he got the job, he would stay in madison, but otherwise he was just passing through. he also said that he had worked in houston for a while for "internet companies" but that he left town on bad terms and that there were people angry with him. he said he had gone to school in indiana and that he had been in the navy.

it was quite odd. at the end of the conversation, i said, "well, don't stalk me." he said, "what?!" i said, "don't stalk me." he said, "you are allowed to call one friend from high school at 4:00 in the morning." i said, "don't stalk me."

thing is, he must have known i lived in wisconsin. probably found me on the internet. was coming through town and thought he would find my phone number and call me in the middle of the night. don't you think that is sketchy?

the other weird thing is that i mentioned chip, the kid from infinite eruption, who i wrote about in my last post. i said that i had just found him on the internet. it turns out that steven didn't know him. he said something about how i must have liked chip in high school. i didn't, i just knew chip from elementary school through 12th grade. and i thought the name of his band was freaking hilarious. at one point i think my friend clare and i were going to pretend to be groupies. i guess i am a bit weird, too, as i googled chip just the day before. who doesn't google old friends? i guess the difference is that i don't call them at 3:55 in the morning.
* he is a kid in my head, but i suppose he has actually aged at the same rate that i have.

** another boy in that class started out as my friend, but then he took to calling me a feminazi all the time. what the fuck?

*** a grocery store owned by mormons. they wouldn't sell alcohol or cigarettes. it was explained that this was because they were a mormon owned store. they did, however, sell caffeinated beverages.

**** at the cash store, you are cash-worthy with us.

Labels: childhood, fucked up, really really weird

not that i forgot these, but today i remembered some things from my childhood.

the first is from elementary school. there were kids, mostly boys, who would find a social pariah of some sort, mostly ugly girls, and sneak up behind them to deliver a message from on high. a tap on the shoulder. "i love you," they would say, "in god's way." meaning that, though hideous and unpopular, they were forced to love you, but only the way that god might, in that he loved all of his children. needless to say, i was loved quite well by my elementary school classmates.

the second is not scaring, but funny. there were two music groups from my high school. one was a duo, a year ahead of me, who played folk music and called themselves the "peyote siblings." the other was a band made up of boys i had been in school with since elementary school. they were called "infinite eruption." i saw both groups perform at various events, but one stands out. at a party for high school kids in the park near my house, chip*, lead singer for "infinite eruption", performed wearing green lipstick. needless to say, his hairy was stringy.

* shit! i had chip's last name in this post, but then i googled him and found him on the internet. i don't want him to stumble on this post. anyway, google tells me that chip is in grad school now, pursuing an MFA in creative writing.

Labels: childhood, music, texas

i was thinking about my relationship with my older sister last night.* specifically, i was thinking about how much i wanted to be like her when i was a kid. it was just a passing thought, but it came up again at lunch today when my co-worker was talking about her daughters. her girls are 7 or 8 years apart in age. my sister and i were 4.5 years apart. when christie was in high school and i was in middle/jr. high school, i thought she was the bees knees. same with my co-worker's daughters. often my sister and i were good friends, but sometimes she would get so pissed off at me for being a younger sister. same with my co-worker's kids. the funny thing is that my sister and i got to be friends a bit more because we were closer in age. as a little sister, i feel bad for riley, the younger one, and less sympathy for the older one.

* i was thinking about the many times my sister would go to the mall, buy herself a beatles t-shirt (she loved the beatles), and give it to me. i later found out that she really wanted the shirts for herself but felt to guilty about purchasing them. she'd always give them to me when she got home. i just thought she was a great older sister. every once in a while, though, she would flip out on me when i wore one of the shirts and accuse me of being a copy-cat and not having my own personality. what a meanie!

Labels: children, family

i was at a party this weekend where people were playing drinking games (something called "flippy cup"). i was talking to two boys. i don't really remember how it got to the point that i was arguing with them because i hadn't intended to be arguing. when i am drunk i do tend to give boys a hard time because i feel less inclined to put up with bullshit. so, this is probably what was happening. i was probably asking too many questions about the rules of "flippy cup", but i don't know for sure. all of a sudden one of the boys said, "you like to argue." i said, "i guess, but i was just asking about the rules of flippy cup." one of the boys tried to get me to just play flippy cup but i said that i didn't want to play until i knew the rules.

anyway, next thing i know, one of the boys said, "whatever, hillary clinton."

Labels: fuck off, gender