not sure what's going on so far today...it's l's wedding day and i'm not sure what the "game plan" is...i'm supposed to get my hair pulled and tugged into place in about an hour and a half...

lost in the same music from before combined with the music from then and i'm forming my dissertation soundtrack music and i think that i need to rip down everything down from my walls before i go insane.

it could...it could be franky. or glasses or contacts. or it could be. it could be frank.

what the hell am i about now? hives out of the blue today and i imagine that it's from too much going on at the exact same time...and i have a strange feeling of...of what? of what?

benedryl?

so i was so enraged by the salon article ncramping my style by lynn harris (a.k.a breakupgirl) that i wrote the following letter to salon:I've been a Salon Premium member for many years now and this
is the first time I've felt really insulted by an article --
and it happens to be in my new "favorite" column "object
lust." While I'm glad that the author has found a solution
to her menstrual cramps by using portable heating pads,
there are many of us out there who have cramps so bad that
it lands us in the emergency room getting rough reactions
from ER staffers: "aw, your period is too much for you? try
having 'real' pain and then come back and see us."

Too many articles such as this one suggest that menstrual
pain is just a heating pad away from complete comfort. I,
unfortunately, suffer from endometriosis, which causes
debilitating cramps every month resulting in my having to
completely schedule my entire life around my period -- one
week out of every month I become a pain filled, completely
useless human being. To give an example of the level of
pain, consider having abdominal surgery without anesthesia
and then you are coming pretty close to understanding what
I'm talking about.

While I agree that a heating pad, if it works, is better
than "handfuls of advil," there are many of us out there for
whom this kind of advice ends up slapping us in the face and
makes our fight that much harder as it results in confirming
the old "oh, it's just in your head" myth of menstrual pain.
After having had surgery, referrals to every kind of doctor
under the sun, and trying every option on the market outside
of a hysterectomy (which I don't want to have but things are
looking grim these days) my doctor can't even look me in the
eye as she says "there's no solution for people like you and
I'm so sorry."

Salon -- please be careful when you print flip articles that
act as if menstrual pain was nothing but a little bit
of "hysteria" for "poor, weak women who can't handle a
little pain."now let's see if they put it online...

note: this post is also posted at my weekly donationcoder column

the technology of periods...

yep. this week's column is about bleeding. the bleeding that comes every month for those of us grrrrls who aren't pregnant, children, post menopausal, or have some other sort of reason why they don't get their periods. my boyfriend's sister called last week when my period was just starting and i said "oh, you know, it's that 'lucky' time of the month." and she said "well, depending on your point of view, it is 'lucky'." and while i know what she meant...i wouldn't mind if this whole monthly business just went away...

yeah, it could. i could have a radical surgery that takes all my female inside parts away for good and submit to years of hormonal treatments, worrying about my bones breaking, mood swings (like i don't already have a hard time handling those as is), etc. i could also get a shot of lupron that would put me into menopause without the surgery bit...and risk migraines galore, more mood swings (more on this in a future column)...and no way to reverse the shot, left with just "waiting it out" which is not such a keen option. i could also take the pill continously like all these lovely commercials promise and "be free" of my period, only having it once every few months...which i have tried, only to instead get my period every single day and turn suicidal. then, finally, the depo provera shots that promise to work better than the continuously pill taking but brings with it that 3 months of "could be" hell.

oh poor me. what? am i worried that i can't wear white pants every day (as if)? oh no. brace yourself boys. this is a lesson for you all to learn, and learn well. for some of us? our periods are hell on earth. imagine having your "male parts" ripped off you, slowly, without any anesthesia while being knifed continuously in the stomach and back. that's the only equivalent i can think of to describe the complete hell that i go through, like clockwork, every month.

as i write this...a commercial for a birth control pill has just come on tv. oh why do they torment me with options that aren't open to me? see? i'm between a rock and a hard place -- if i take the pill, i risk getting tia's, which are better known as pre-strokes of a sort. yes, i'm one of those people who has those "warning signs" when they take the pill.

this morning i read this new "object lust" column in salon.com about these 'magical' heating pads that you put on your abdomin and, according to the author, has been such a miracle that she no longer needs to take advil. halle-fucking-lujah. i mean that's great for her. but if a heating pad can substitute for taking some advil? she has no problem with cramps. me? i'm in the er for shots of demerol, looking like a drug addict because i'm so insane from pain. my doctor last month? just folded her hands into her lap and, not looking in my eyes, just simply said "there's really nothing we can do for people like you."

yes, this column has a point. i'm one of those unlucky grrrls who have endometriosis -- this thing that causes insane, insane pain that comes with limited options with regard to what to do with the pain. wow. so thanks to a complete fuck up of nature, i'm stuck with having to run my life around my period because when those days come? i'm useless. i'm threatening to jump off of the tops of buildings just to get away from the pain.

i've tried to come up with new ways of thinking about my period. humor always works, right? like these tampons called dittie that have "empowering messages" on the wrapper. unfortunately my pain is so bad that i can't stand to have a tampon in most months. i appreciate the gesture and more power to them for going up against the tampax and playtex monopolies. i did buy some just to support them and on the off chance that one month i can stand using tampons and can, therefore, use them.

then mouser pointed out a funny little link yesterday, which sounds completely disgusting, but did make me laugh a lot. seems that earth-friendly types are now making their own washable menstrual pads. yeah. i just can't picture it. although maybe it will be featured in a future art piece of mine...

ok. that's enough for now, boys. thanks for reading. if you've read this far.

one of these days i'll get around to coming up with a new template for this thing but not right now...too much to do. it's cece's bday today and steve's bday tomorrow and, ugh, i don't even want to think about our collective ages...we don't, after all, look a day over 87.

listening to music that i downloaded onto my iTunes and remembering, slightly nostagically i might add, writing my master's thesis, uh, a long fucking time ago while listening to cds i'd put into my cd-rom drive in my old powermac and thinking that it was pretty cool and, god, those were the days...you know, back when burning your own cd still seemed like a crazy and exotic idea...back when videostores still had a pretty good selection of vhs tapes to rent? before the dvd craze?

i'm actually citing (or trying to get away with citing) this blog in my dissertation. an entry from the old microsoft days...back when this whole crazy idea came to life...back before everything turned to black? me, laughing hysterically earlier in the day, on the therapist's couch...thinking about how exactly to describe my dissertation, the evolution of the idea, the review of the idea...how i could go into insane detail..."dear diary, today i can't lift myself off the ground so i'm going to just lie here in the fetal position for, maybe, the next week or so. then i'll see how i feel."

it's nearly 2am and here i am on my desktop computer, trying to hammer out a few paragraphs, some explanation about how the fuck i came up with this dissertation idea and feeling too scared to sleep right now, feeling too tired to really make any sense of anything anymore...too sick of arguing over nothing, yelling about how either they are the devil or i am...either or. if it's not them...then it must be me.

7/7 is the new 9/11 and this world is so fucked up and it's hard to know how to feel...my head's spinning and i feel that helplessness i felt years back -- has it really been that long -- when all those candles lit up the night in seattle...the stillness, the...blankness? if only i had confidence in any government on this earth...if only i had confidence that we really could stop all this killing...on all sides...if only, if only, if only...

and i don't care for the game of golf, thanks.

this is a copy of this week's blog column at donationcoder

curious about life after death? this is what happens when you die:From: __________ <____@_____> Add To Address Book
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Wednesday July 6th: SPECIAL EVENT!
To: <______>

It is with great sorrow and sadness that we report to you that ______, the head of the ______, passed away on the morning of July 5, 2005. The family has asked that any communication be directed to the _______ at ______. Thank you."out of office"? damn. that's a hell of a way to find out that someone you know just died...

fuck cancer.

so this week's blog entry is dedicated to those who have "moved on" in the more perminent sense...in this life, anyway. the email that got "autoreplied" to me started me thinking about what IS the best way to tell people via email or any other electronic means that the person they just emailed...just died. certainly "out of office" just doesn't seem to be the right way to do things. i mean, wow, what if i had called? what would the equivalent be? a recording of some sort telling me "the person you are trying to reach has been disconnected" before patching me over to voicemail?

ok, i'm sorry if this sounds callous in any way. i don't mean it to be. the thing is, my friend is the latest in a whole bunch of friends to, uh, get cancer and die. so all i know at this point is sarcastic humor that serves as my defense mechanism for dealing with shit like this. i mean there are articles all over the internet on how to notify family and friends about death (example one, example two). the thing is? they say do not call, tell them in person. but now what do we do in this age of "autoreply"?

i googled death notification via email. i came up with this page written by someone who recieved an email about the death of an internet friend who they'd never met in person. is the pain any less great? looking further, i found this article on the baltimore city paper's website called ghosts in the machines: what happens to your online self when you die? in that article there's a link to died online which "will be back shortly" apparently. did they, too, die online? then another called my last email - "preparing today for tomorrow" - also not currently active. who knows if these companies will be back online. i suspect that during there first run attempts, some things went very, very wrong. i can't imagine that creating an automatic death notification system is any less, uh, troubling than setting up an "out of office autoreply."

i certainly don't have any answers as to how to handle death in this so-called "information age." all i know? the whole death thing just sucks.

american cancer society

bye my friend.