the wrong side of the bed

tonight my friend penny* and i were discussing our friend anne. i commented that i had called her on saturday but never heard back even though i thought she was planning to. i have tried to get in touch with anne a few times since then, too. i remarked to penny that she could easily be dead. penny noted that if we were going by the last time she had spoken to anne, she could have been dead since may. we wondered if anne were actually dead we would hear about it. would anne's parents know how to reach us or even if they should try? i think they would put some effort into finding me, but maybe not. i know that if penny were to die i would hear about it through my friend david. likewise, if i were to die, david would tell penny.



after penny, i talked to my mother. she was agitated when i told her this. she doesn't know how to get in touch with my friends. if something awful happened to me she wouldn't know what to do. if i died, she wouldn't know who to invite to the party. she also wouldn't know who to call if i fell ill with spinal meningitis and needed to be taken care of. when we were kids, she had a folder that she wrote information on. somethings were in the folder, but a lot of it was actually on the folder.** contact information for families, friends, and neighbors. my mom doesn't have that for me anymore and she needs it.



if you want on the list, please let me know. i will send your information to my mom. you will not be invited to my funeral otherwise. anne, you do not need to email because 1) you never email, 2) i assume you would want to know, and 3) you are already dead and it isn't like someone is going to drag your corpse to the funeral. but i hope you aren't dead because that would make me look like a real asshole.



* not real names



** on the phone earlier, my mom called it the orange folder, even though i am fairly sure it is green and has always been green, even though it is not the original green folder. sometimes i almost believe my mother when she says she is color blind. the only problem is that it has always been a green folder and she should just learn to call it that even if she can't distinguish the two colors apart.

Labels: death, friends, mom

when i was a kid, my sister and i loved to watch "little house on the prairie." it came on before dinner time, and my mother was always cooking when it was on. she would watch a few minutes here and there. even watching a third of the show at the most, she would still cry every time.

i have been watching episodes of "ugly betty" online. i cried at one of the episodes just now. i don't care what you think or i wouldn't have told you.

Labels: mom, tv

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