cloud gate, millennium park, chicago

cloud gate, millennium park, chicago
Originally uploaded by vrgrrl.

the bean, they say, and this was taken last winter when c and i went to chicago and my students laughed last week when i said that chicago was a stranger to me and that c-u was what i knew of illinois and how has it been so many years since i last moved and i've noticed myself checking travel sites several times a day wondering if i should go to iceland for a third time since it's on sale now...

prozac 20mg

prozac 20mg
Originally uploaded by vrgrrl.

it's a brave new world and i remember saying that to l&m about the salon personals at that thai restaurant in the "new town" that's appeared in the dc 'burbs that used to be wasteland but is now littered with swank storefronts and i haven't decided how i feel yet about the town i grew up in looking different and more distant every time i return and i told c that it was like i never grew up here at all, that the dc i knew now only exists in my mind that's been cluttered for years now with the wares of eli lilly and other beasts...and all things go...all things go.

years ago...

depressed in las vegas
Originally uploaded by vrgrrl.

on the floor of a room at the bellagio hotel...so depressed i wonder if my heart might stop in my sleep, maybe hoping it would so that i wouldn't have to drag myself out of it...something about nevada...the lost people...

so, yeah, a new template for a new year. i mean it's almost the 5 year anniversary of this thing so what the hell. also the comments thing now works but you have to log on to leave comments so i don't get 956 viagra and house refinancing ads an hour on my blog.

ipod and laptop on and i'm trying to power through all this nasty crap i have to do and i hate hate hate all the administrative shit you have to do when the semester starts. i'm getting faster at it though...basically by locking myself in my freezing office and just getting it done.

what else to do tonight? well, after the 9th survey administration in trelease (3 more to go...) i then have to complete an irb amendment and write a draft of my e3 proposal...figure out where the fuck i put the info about the amsterdam conference...and, what the hell, maybe i'll have time for a little dissertation work? maybe...i have a meeting with chip on tuesday so i'd better sit my ass down and get the rework done on my document.

and, oh yeah, i have to break up with my old thesis chair.

so a switch of captain's after yesterday and i'm wondering why i hung on so long, waiting and hoping that something would change...and now i guess i was just sick of it so i finally did something about it. so chip's in charge now and the planets have aligned it seems.

and now an opportunity out of nowhere has come about where i'll be helping the displaced new orleanians in an online massively multiplayer world and who knows why that's entered the scheme of things but, hey, cool...and it matches up with my dissertation topic...so how can i say no?

2006. thank fucking god.

hmm...it seems like it's always the end of month when i remember that i haven't made a posting in forever...or at least in a month. just got through watching goodbye lenin for the 90th time and i remember getting into an argument the first time i saw it, saying yes the mother WAS looking at her son and had realized what he had done the whole friggin' time...and i remember the weird pride from the same person about etre et avoir who missed the whole point of the whole thing...arguing in the streets of london, arguing or shaking my head in disbelief...

chris gets here tomorrow afternoon and then.

and then i don't know.

but anyway, i've started realizing how cyclical my dissertation cycle is and it's mind boggling and how much else in my life is that way exactly and can i line it all up and see? and if i did and if it was...how do i start to end it? nameless and faceless, who am i?

the semester is over and i'm going to dc tomorrow via detroit and chris will join me there on the 28th...then we'll fly back on the 2nd. ah holidays. seems more calm so far than it has been over the last few years. so far.

tired.

ok, too few posts lately, i know. i'm not sure where the time has been going. no, scratch that. i know. i think i'm finally getting out of the funk of the week before thanksgiving when everything seemed so random and out of control and i didn't know if i had the strength to do what was right...which drove me madder than i already am, trying to figure out if i had the strength to not fall, not fail, and end up doing what was just easy...just pass things off.

but who else would have been there? i don't know if i was the best person, given my penchant for dark humor during desperate times...i do it to help myself through it, to try not to break down...but i don't know if it's the best course of action for everyone else exactly...

as dr b said earlier in the week...we're smart people...but we aren't perfect people. and, damn, i was far, far from perfect during the time we were figuring out what exactly that t-shirt would say as the original shift came back to work, assaulted by memories of everything i've been through in this life...and i was there to protect my charges as best as i could, protect them from some of the insanity of spending time in hospitals, without trying to hide the reality of, the severity of the situation in a whole showboat down denial river...not just in egypt, you know...

so tomorrow's my writing day at my secret writing cove, which really isn't that secret as in a "stealth location where no one could find me" but it pretty good. i feel like bursting into tears over it, especially when i see a dissertation from some other place that looks like, wow, someone really had a committee that worked with them and encouraged them and, fuck, does this look like a portfolio? where are the research questions, the methods, etc. it's just 6 papers all jammed together and i think...just like i have thought 100000000 BILLION TIMES already...this place, this illinois...this was NOT THE RIGHT PLACE FOR ME. obviously people are out there in the world, doing the things i want to do but are at places that dare to let people out of the boxes and walls of "correct" academic writing.

i had a chance. for a little while. to do an electronic deposit. but that was all during seattle-gate...back when it seemed quite possible that i was just about finished. it doesn't matter. this is a different story i tell right now. nothing's quite the same.

so i surrendered the last piece of evidence i had that said i was not from here at the dmv after taking the state's written exam (i passed...90%...no sweat) and the lady at the counter asked me how i liked illinois and i said it was alright and she flipped through my passport and said, oh, you've been all over the place...and, yeah, now? i'm living here.

it was vidodin time earlier in the week and to top it all off i got a head cold to add to the cramps so i've been in a very weird and snippy mood all week and it's c's bday on sunday and i need to order the cake still. and click. click. click. smile. and click.

and nano starts tuesday -- should i do it again? should i view it as the time to just get a shitload of writing done? it's hard not to view everything as completely imploding right now and, yeah, the world's gone mad and i ask "when, exactly, will i need to take a rollercoaster coast to coast? have rollercoasters suddenly become a viable means of transportation?"

so yesterday a motely crew of 9 wimse-iers came with me to the children's museum and it was a lot of fun. most (all?) had never really walked around downtown so that was cool to visit a few places there with them...and laugh at honorary reo speedwagon way...it *is* really funny.

i'm really tired today and i'm sick of this weather. i just can't get motivated to give much of a crap about my *wardrobe* choices when it's in the 90s. i should never live in the deep south. ever.

and speaking of, i read on salon.com yesterday a story about a former playboy club bunny from the early 70s who spent a decade in new orleans and it was actually quite good. the city, as it was all those summers ago, is gone. i hope that they can rebuild but it's hard to hear about the destruction and to now envisage all the places i knew and loved being treated as *storage houses* for the displaced...no one should be treated the way they were treated, not in this so-called rich country of ours...their inhumane treatment in those early days after the hurricaine is only worsened by the heartbreak of hearing about separations from their pets...i can't even watch...

me, walking around with vrboy and sleepless and others after drinking way too much on the quarter...scenesters at underground afterparties...back in our young days...the steam and the sin and the spying off the balconies...jazz and drink...and tellers on the square and she told me it'd all work out and it wasn't until last night that it dawned on me...that maybe it has and it's spooky the way it all worked out...when i'd forgotten that part of the dream...

at kopi downtown this afternoon and i wonder if i have any dignity left at all these days and i started crying, sitting at the table while the counter girls made fun of the midlife crisis outside asking for bread crumbs to encourage the birds...crying because i overheard a guy at a table talking to two people who didn't know each other or him and he says "i'm just starting my graduate school career" and nonono never use that word, never use that word career because you just might end up as me, sitting at a table at a coffee shop with tears in your eyes as you think about your failing career and all the years and you think about leaving.

but to not move forward...would mean losing everything i've built up. but moving forward...may mean having to leave everything i have now.

to get to the core, i must dig deeply and trust the man behind the curtain with the very thing that will make him leave...or me leave...because i won't need...

because everyone leaves.
even me.
eventually.

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.

it's 3000 million degrees in the city but the good news is that i finally found makeup that matches my paler than pale skin. there are all these products with "double white" and "pale freshness" in the title and that's a little nutty but cool for me. meanwhile pepperage farm cookies are everywhere and i guess that's the big import snack for them from the us.

an earthquake -- 6.0 -- was last night and it's the most popular talk at the conference -- everyone has a popular earthquake story to tell.

onward to chicago then taipei in the morning and i'm sure people will be getting postcards as a way of hearing from me for the first time this year and now i'm heading to asia for the first time with pre-made cards to hand to taxi drivers to tell them where to drive me to and god an 18 hour flight (including a touch down in tokyo) ahead what do you do on a plane for nearly a day hopefully i'll have an aisle seat or i may have to tell the person in the aisle seat that if they dont get up they'll throw a blood clot and die and meanwhile i still haven't said anything about the j.o.b. but maybe i'll go get some kind of enlightenment in taiwan you never know you never know, right?

from the e3 website: as a precautionary measure, bomb dogs will be on-site.

shit.

bright lights, sad city

vegas strip, the traffic at night...i need to go where the night has no end because it seems that the sun burns more and more lately...

you know what? i think they've found the blog. i mean one week and complete silence...makes me wonder...

so some ex-people in my life have been spotted on the scene calling themselves "artists" and it's ab-so-fucking-lutely pissing me off. so you once used the word "photograph" in conversation and now you're an artist. so you once walked into a gallery to use the bathroom? artist! you knew someone once who had a sister who had a friend who played the cello? artist! i am so sick of these pomo shitheads making the scene and it makes me want to scream in their faces...that is if i could stand seeing them face to face...i mean, fuck. so, ok, if i ran around saying i was the queen of england, i'd be locked up in a second. how 'bout these fuckers? KARMA POLICE! AFTER THEM!

depressed in las vegas

almost translucent, stuck in las vegas. so depressed that i wonder if my heart might stop in my sleep, maybe hoping it would...lost, confused...lying still, staring up at the ground for what seemed like years...what ended up being years...i'd find you a month later...i'd be ready to find you a month after that...i'm glad you were still on board...

chicago's cloud gate

c and i took a trip to see the lights festival along michigan avenue last november. one night we walked through millennium park...this picture is of the weirdly cool cloud gate.

more of my pix...

posting and posting and posting on flickr and i'll soon be posting more pictures on my blog but i'm too wired and weird and winded to do any of that right now and my contacts hurt my eyes and i'm trying to lose all that thyroid weight before the conference in taipei and sometimes i really have to ask myself why the fuck i get myself into these situations in the first place?

i'm trying to find some peace in this world that right now doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. i'm angry at how bureaucracy creeps in to people's sense of humanity...fuck...to the point that they just become unthinking and unfeeling machines and i can't tell you how many times "ok computer" has marched through my brain today. people fear that there will be a time where computers become too human. but fuck, something's gotta act human, right? i mean it's fucking women's month and all i am getting is women pushing away from the situation...HELLO WTF WHAT IF THIS WAS YOUR DAUGHTER????

in the dorm, last night, slices of humanity in those who are younger...and i want to hug them all and tell them that they are worthwhile, that they are doing good jobs, and to never stop caring, never stop thinking, never stop.

as long as the sky exists
and as long as there are sentient beings
may I remain to help
relieve them of all their pain

(shantideva)

i'm a gdc star. lol.

no surprise here but i have to say this anyway, that the world fucking sucks some days...without a doubt. i mean how can someone with as much shit on their record as our secret friend keep getting passed forward, into my turf, again and again and again. our secret friend is one of those sociopath types who sends a chill down your spine every time you have to interact with them. and you feel that you've failed because they are still there. you beat yourself up, feeling like javert did in not understanding that people can change. but unlike valjean...the secret friend is out there to do harm. the secret friend is evil in its purest form. the secret friend is a sociopath and the game is not turning out in humanity's favor.

my monthly curse is here and it's worse than it's been in the last few months but at least it's better than the alternative that i thought might have been true and, you know, i'm all for generic brands but when it comes to things like that...something about the brand you know helps ease your mind.

cold, rainy, and a screaming girl landed at my door, hurt, wet, muddy, drunk, hair missing due to chemo she said...chemo but not for cancer, just chemo...and i could hardly understand what was happening but i drove her home, gave her a coat and a towel, and i hope she's going to be ok...

it's spring break -- woot -- which means i get a week to do some of my own shit for a change and that's especially nice after all the fallout from nightmare campus drinkfest 2k5 a few weeks ago. so for break i have a list about 3 pages long of things "to do." yeah, it's completely and overly ambitious but whatever.

i overdid it today at the gym -- i knew i was going to do that one of these days. something about catching a bit of dr. 90210 on tv and watching fat being removed from some woman's legs inspired me to run like hell on the treadmill because it seemed to me a less painful, less gross option than lipo...

back from gdc and i'm groggy but glad to be home, even if i did leave everything in a total mess before i left...

i'm...so....tired. gdc 2005 is coming to an end tomorrow...more when i've had some sleep...

wow. so this is a new one on me. hfg it's march, by the way. so the uni has this unoffical st. patrick's day so that the bars can make money on st. patrick's day, which usually falls over spring break (or at least when the undergrads have started leaving for spring break). i'm a ta for a class that meets on friday afternoon. "unofficials was today, a friday. bars opened at 8am.

ok. so what. i did shit like that when i was their age. the catch was...today was the day that their group projects were due...and i couldn't reschedule it because it's a multisection class and the schedule was set by the lecturer, not me. well, i knew it was coming up, i told my class to please hold off in drinking until after their presentations. and they didn't. and boy...boy, they didn't. 3/4 were completely drunk. they might think that they were able to pull it off, that maybe i wouldn't notice how loud they were talking, the slurred speech, the incoherent statements, the way their eyes glazed over. but they would be wrong. who better to tell than someone who knows all the signs because they've done it themselves? i guess.

oh...if only they hadn't put me into this position...fuck.

so what would you do if you were in my position? there's a girl that i supervise who is in serious trouble, the kind of serious trouble that i know all to well and too personally. so far she's been talking to all kinds of people in the uni cya manditory sense but no one that can really really identify with her situation, no one who has been there before. so do i do what my heart aches to do? cross that line and reach out to her? am i ready for that kind of group therapy? am i sane enough, healthy enough to walk forward with her? do i dare? do i dare.

woot! check out the latest issue (feb 2005) of game developers magazine, available at most borders bookstores but also online (for a fee you can download the mag). my game developers conference session at next month's conference in san fran is mentioned as an editor's choice session!!! omg wtf. woot!

pickled herring aisle

pickled herring aisle uploaded by vrgrrl.




joensuu finland, that damn town located somewhere between bored and panicked and me in a grocery taking hundreds of crazy photos...these are mediocre times and people are losing hope...

waiting to hear word, probably swear words, about the chapters i sent via email yesterday...so tired from being too anal about the whole class prep thing...so much so that i ended up completely feeling like a fuck up but whatever. i think i have pink eye anyway.

at espresso waiting for e and it's my office hours and i don't think my section believes me when i say that it's at the coffee shop across the street but oh well. whatever. totally different vibe with today's class than yesterday's and i wonder why, so strange.

flickr is going through some kind of upgrade but when they come back you should see a photo stream of mine in the bottom left corner (scroll down!) of this blog. i'll probably move it further up the page soon but for now...

anyway, i started teaching this week and it wasn't without some bizarreness but what else is new, huh? meanwhile it's freezing cold out and windy and snowing and, bleh, it's winter. i'm trying not to take any narcotics this weekend...it's that time of the month and i'm wondering if this new med that i'm on is going to help or not. so i'm just on advil for now...this could prove to be a giant mistake in a few hours.

cold, cold. but i joined a gym today and therefore got off my ass...at least for one day...in the hopes that it will make the pain...

ny resolution is to find what it is that keeps me in this game...then go with that.

nye and i'm at my parent's house because i've been too sick to leave, had to rearrange my flight back for tomorrow from last wednesday...period pain gone but now the spirokeets have moved in and my sweet guy called earlier and i miss him so much...hny.

create your own visited country map.

cool. still. only 7% (17 countries) of the world i have seen. damn. yoda-style post.

i'm going to stab myself in the abdomen. repeatedly. until i can get to amsterdam. seriously...wtf, wtf, wtf is wrong with us?????????

oy...period, migraine...all early and all killing me and the phone keeps ringing and ringing here and the phones are all set to ring at "high" and now i remember why i turn the ringer off on my phone in c-u...waiting on my doctor at northwestern to call in a prescription, he's in surgery right now, i'm dying, i'm dying, i'm dying.

so this morning i ask my dad "so where's stevie" (the cat) and he's like oh, i thought she was in the basement in the workroom, mom hasn't even seen her yet. so we go looking around for her in the basement and my dad is panicking "oh great, i've lost her...this is not good." finally we find her in the spare bedroom in the basement and all is well. the psycho family twist on this is that it's her ashes that my dad had misplaced after bringing them home from the crematorium (sp?) and we were trying to find her before her birthday tomorrow. ah, sweet memories of xmas eve.

d.c.

alexandria, va, really. no luggage. home, yet not. did i really ever live here?

ok it's been over a month since my last post, which is the official version of "falling off the face of the earth" by many people's standards but i assure you that i can be handle much longer stints than that. leaving for dc wednesday afternoon and returning the following wednesday or thursday or something like that, i don't really care and i haven't really been paying any attention. the fall from my manic kingdom hit quickly this month, which i *medicate* with anti-psy's and either nyquil or tylenol pm...depends on my mood at the moment. i really shouldn't mess with the nyquil especially after last month when it put me into a coma fog and also downloaded a trojan horse onto my computer and i realize that, hey, uh the semester is over huh?

more neurotransmitters being hit and so even better living through chemistry as they say but the thing is that everyone seems to be talking in some dialect that i can't quite understand and some days i'm afraid of something that i can't quite identify and so that makes me feel.

telling an audience of unknowns about the thing is a lot easier than telling the people that you know, that you are related to...why now, why this venue was all that people could say a few years back...back when i was going to debut my life, a part of my life on the stage...the only place i've really felt totally comfortable opening up...a blacked out audience...you tell your stories to the light and it feels like you must be talking to god or some kind of higher power...or maybe the police or some terrorist organization...you can't make me talk.

lights...shining in my eyes, on the floor of my kitchen, light in my brain, flashing and flooding angry light and the next thing you know i'm telling the whole story...some of the story at least...and then i wait. i wait for the audience to respond, i wait for the reviews. why didn't you say something before when we could have prosecuted the guilty? who was that? me? you? the nameless, faceless other?

oh snap. snap. snap. snap. please have compassion, please have compassion and call back and maybe we can erase this from our minds, you know, because we can't change the past. why do you tell us such ugly stories, we are completely disturbed and we are completely devistated and can't you see how much that thing that hurt you hurt us how can you do that to us...

there never is a right time to say some things, is there? the more bothersome thing is that i have no fucking idea what to say about it now that it's been said. my stomach's in knots though and my eyes feel itchy and cloudy and all i can do is compulsively print things out...

don't we move our clocks back an hour today? that is...a half hour from now? no, jesse says it's on halloween. weird. i'm in my office, avoiding the end of the shining because i hate the part where the nice old caretaker gets axed. as far as days have been going these last few weeks, today was a pretty good day for me, mood-wise. i feel like i've been brought to you by the following pharamceutical companies...

wouldn't you like to know?

ah yes...art quilts have made quite the statement in the more "traditional" quilt world but it seems that the traditionalists still just can't stand it when people try and address "real" issues...take this piece, the l word, that was pulled from a show from a guild in the northern part of illinois. i shutter to think what will happen to my "pill" piece...

ok, so i'm back on my feet, lalala...well, that's not really true. right now i'm sitting on my ass writing this. my office smells like some kind of perfume/aftershave bizarreness and i'm wondering what the hell happened in here last night after i left. better not to ask, better not to know i'm sure. and it's raining out. and it's friday. and i got up way too early. and c was confused at the role reversal. and there's another debate on tonight. and what can i say really?

so the funny thing about the fentanyl the speed in which it knocks you to z-land. i mean i don't even remember counting backwards before the surgery. but i remember everything about waking up, including the fact that i JUST COULDN'T SEEM TO SHUT THE FUCK UP no matter what i was saying, how annoyed the hospital staff was getting, and how many other post-op patients were getting up thanks to my encouraging them to wake up, join the party. dr b says "ah you're a funny drunk." mmm. something along those lines. but anyway you know that reality show on a&e, i think, called american casino? turns out some guy on that show died of a fentanyl od, apparently taking it for recreational reasons and when i learned that i was like, what, did you think you might have random surgery that night? and i know that's not nice, bad me, bad me...but seriously...i almost said "well, i guess he's stronger than me because that stuff completely knocked me out for surgery, i can't imagine taking it for FUN..." and then i remembered...oh yeah...i guess it knocked him out too.

ok, ok. it's endometriosis. read up about it. i'm still recovering.

4am and i couldn't breathe from some respiratory thing i picked up after surgery and poor chris has got to be completely panicked by now and he's been so sweet and so good to me and i hope you all get to meet him soon.

amazingly tired feeling and my head is spinning and i feel like i have some advanced kind of jet lag...and i can hardly keep my eyes open to type this but just wanted to say that i'm alright, everything went well...and that i'm going to sleep now.

i mean he's like really old, he's like 22...

stop treating me like you're my mother, i'm a grown woman...

these and other comments swirling around my office, down the hall, round and round again...am i just remembering having said that once...or did i just say that because it feels like it can't be true that i've come full circle, that i'm hearing what i once spewed out, that these girls are both me and not me and that i need to be careful of overlaying my memories, the memories flooding back, on top of their own...

even though i asked the doc with no personality to remove my uterus right then and there, we're going with the regular surgery on the 28th...and i'm home for the second day in a row because i'm in too much pain to leave (read: amongst other things) and sweet chris bought and cooked me a steak last night and even though he said "well, it wasn't hard" it still meant more to me than anything else i could imagine at the moment...

so my period arrived a week early...just like i told the doctor it might...and despite the fact that he lectured me last month about how if it did come early he'd have to reschedule the surgery...it still came a week early...go figure that i couldn't comply with the doctor's orders on that...

so i'm sitting at my office at the dorm and my head's killing me and i feel like throwing up and if i have to take this damn medicine anyway...and i had nightmares all weekend about what if i do report the mess with everyone's number one fan...what happens then...and just thinking about it all makes my blood run cold...

fuck fucking fuck fuck fuck...i HATE when there's a computer crash and my post didn't get saved. anyway, in sum...i'm trying to stay awake so that i don't miss my flight to champaign...i'm at o'hare now...blah blah american businessmen...my team outperformed, outsourced, out, out, out....i just sent out ten emails to the team in california while i've been sitting on the ground...bush will win, they say, thank god for our business and i want to scream in their faces...baaaaaahhhhhhh baaaaaaaahhhhh

god...and to think i was missing hearing a voice that spoke english...what i meant was that i missed hearing a voice that i could stand hearing speak english.

protests all over the country and it seems that it's the best time to be leaving although i'll miss this city that is both beauty and ugly all wrapped up into one and the view from the 13th floor of the sovetskaya and the apartment house that looks amazing from across the water...

day of national mourning which means no tv, tons of places are closed and it's dark and gloomy out...although i'm not sure the russian government had control over that. still...it's a monday and the metro was so crowded that it took me three tries to get onto a train...and when i did it was only because i shoved my way in like the russians were doing.

meanwhile back at home...i've lost my tuition waiver thanks to departmental budget cuts and i'm really looking forward to figuring out how that's all going to work out when i get back. so no time to rest up after this! ooohh...i hate how thoughts of crap back home starts coming back into your consciousness as a trip winds down.

haha. good to know that russia is on top of the scene and anything can be had...for a price. well, except photo sqares...or photo corners. no one has those. but stockmann's in finland did...but not at the branch here in st. petersburg.

internet cafe -- huge internet cafe -- is where i'm at now on the nevsky prospekt. i saw the church on spilled blood...fucking amazing. fucking amazing. and the canals? omg. i took a little water taxi all over and it was...damn. cool.

ok, it's still insane here but it's mostly due to the GIANT amount of tourists out and about at this hotel that's making it so crazy. this place is hard to describe so far, this st. petersburg. i told chris that the metro was like new york...only soviet. that's the best way to describe it really. then...there's the show, big brother...russian style. damn where are the subtitles? and in case you were wondering? there's no forgetting about not drinking the water...something about the fact that it is brownish and smells like iron...yeah, hard to forget that rule!

btw, i'm now yet another hour forward...although they kept saying on the train that moscow time was one hour ahead of finish time...and? how about st. petersburg? the train isn't going to moscow and it sure as fuck ain't spring.

seriously, though, shit the russian people are good about helping completely lost people. say...like me! :)

dear expedia.com, you suck. you will all go to hell.

maybe the tip off should have been when the blonde russian woman asked me on the metro "uh, why the sovetskaya?" oh well. at least there's lots of ruins around of old soviet times. but let me tell you...the st. petersburg metro? i have no idea how i got here. thank god the gypsy woman saved me from the hard line lady guarding the station gates or i'd never have gotten my suitcase/backpack through. the most surreal moment was the ride on metro 1 when the little boys came by playing "hello" by lionel ritchie on accordian...of course getting of the train with the russia national anthem piped into the station was a little bizarre too...

greetings from cafe neo -- yeah like neo from the matrix...cheese -- an actual fucking internet cafe in tallinn estonia of all places. im here for another couple hours...not the cafe, the city...and im having trouble finding the apostrophe on this keyboard that is half in cyrillic and half in roman letters. 20 estonia crowns...about 1.50 us.

im getting closer...the nevsky cathedral...the dismantled bricked over kgb building...a manhole cover from 1971...and it was hard to tell the feelings of the restaurant owner who had cnn international on right as the russians went into the school...but come on...these are children, surely no one wants anything bad to happen to them...even if they do seem to hate the russians here.

god damn it's hot in this hotel lobby but here's the fucked up thing...for the past two days i've seen finnish soldiers everywhere and it seems...that they have collection cans. finally i go up to one and ask what's up? they are collecting money for the finnish war in iraq. man...how fucked up we've made the world...soldiers from other countries are now begging for money for the war on the streets?

the train back from joensuu was like a party train and somehow the australian woman and i figured out how to give an old woman who spoke only finnish directions to her train car (6) and the guy from west indies who only wanted to talk about cricket learned how to play baseball and basketball on a ps2 and, anyway, i'm back in helsinki and god knows how i found the hotel but somehow i knew it would be a stop on tram two öäåäöåäöåäöåäöåä ok i'll stop that now.

€€€€€€€€€€€€

alt gr gets you to useless symbols like @ and yes, i'm tired. thanks lucia and loria for the russia info -- at this hotel they have cnn international so i was able to catch up and it sounds like, yeah, all the trouble is down south (isn't that always the case?) so i should be ok but it is a little weird going into the craziness.

tomorrow i'll ferry over to tallinn estonia for the day, you know, check it out. then on saturday...russia. a strange feeling of homesickness caught up with me yesterday...a €60 bill awaited me this morning...

hfg september. hair = dark brown with red chunks, bored in joensuu, shocked the hell out of some new zealanders that i met at the conference and we'll see how the greek judge weighs in later today. for those of you back in the states? you won't be shocked...it's not that crazy. but...my hair REALLY needed the cut though...interesting souvenir.

um, can someone tell me what's happening in russia, you know with all the bombings and hostage situations? 'cause, you know, i'm going there in three days? for some reason cnn is blocked on this computer...go figure...and all the news on tv is in finnish.

god fucking dammit...ok i found a wired computer in the civic center. ridiculous. i had hope that there was an actual internet cafe here but no...seems that they just didn't take in finland...not unlike the us. out of business.

i'm dying for us news...i see protesting on tv...i tried looking on cnn but i couldn't bring it up on this terminal. people keep asking me if we are going to get rid of bush finally. god i hope so is all i can say.

tip: if you go to a small town on an excursion this time of the year...be warned...summer is over and winter isn't here yet so everything is closed...and hotel spa in the same small town called ilomentsi where they are the only game in town for a lunch is code for hospice and hospice dining hall. oy...which means 'company' in finnish. you see it after most business names. oy.

attention organizers of international conferences -- if you are going to make a printed proceedings, DO NOT GIVE IT TO US AT THE FUCKING CONFERENCE IF IT IS TWO INCHES THICK. fuck. now i'm going to have to mail it to myself cause i'm not dragging it with me for the next 9 days. i mean shit...it's almost as heavy as my damn suitcase. that's insane.

in joensuu now, small uni town. walking sticks and roller blading sticks are everywhere...that explains a lot. anyway, i'm presenting in less than an hour, internet access sucks in finland so you may not hear from me again for a few days...until i find a better, stronger, faster connection back in helsinki...not that access is easily found there either...since it is in finland and all.

this hotel's like a disco and it's raining outside and saunas are weird and helsinki is a very small city and my luggage didn't come with me from london but i have it now and i had a coffee at the oldest helsinki cafe only i didn't know it until a few minutes ago and there are tons of boycott american products signs and posters and stickers plastered all over the city and i'm like great, what now, and i'm leaving for joensuu in east central finland, which hopefully doesn't look like east central illinois (somehow i doubt that it does) and the olympics are almost over and i've had way too many toffee candies and i think i'm going to have a drink at the hotel lobby bar because my feet hurt from walking around all day and i got my train tickets to russia this morning and...

please kill me...i'm so fucking tired. i haven't slept in days and now i'm at heathrow where it's raining, well not inside the terminal, but i'm still waiting for them to announce which of 500 gates my flight will be leaving from and it's, oh say, 20 minutes until the flight leaves but they say oh don't worry it will be posted so ok here i am on the friggin' web and i really think i need my eyes examined when i get back because i can only see the flight board if i really squint my eyes but then again i just got off a 7 hour flight and i'm tired and not looking forward to getting on the next plane because who knows what trouble i'll cause there; i nearly clocked the same british woman 3 times on the way here with (1) my bag (2) my sweater (3) my sweater again. i mean there must be something wrong if the sleeping pill my doctor gave me for the flight didn't work on me at all. hey doc if that was a real pill versus a placebo...it didn't fucking work!!!!!!! and well, if it was a placebo then it didn't work either.

hey there's a new magazine called expatriate. coooool. us politics overseas report: a french mag has bush on the cover saying (in french) i regret nothing (although i'm sure he didn't say it in french originally). stay tuned to this channel for olympics and rnc coverage euro style.

ok...so the guy hauled away my dead washer/drier and, actually, it was really only the washer part but, you know, they were together as a stackable so both went out the door. so i'm going to the laundromat because, well, what else could i do? click. loading the laundry into the car. click. throw the keys into the front seat. click. shut the door...uh oh, front door won't unlock. oh. that was what that clicking noise was. the laundry hit the door lock button. well, ok, i guess i'll go inside...damn, keys inside car. well i'll call chris using my cell...that's inside my car. definitely the start of a beautiful week.

kafka is now in bal'more and sleepless is still in seattle and what can i say about anything and everything other than...i don't know. what can i say? change, maybe, i guess...too many nights lately, though, of tossing and turning and trying to...

whoa! a lomo tips blog...cooool.

phone message just left for diane: hey, i looked at my calendar and realized it was august, which means it's been, like, four months since you called so i thought i'd better call back.

that sums up the black hole void that has been at the core of my "communications strategy" for the last six months or so. feel the synergy. synergy. that's so 90s.

so starting next tuesday, 135 freshman girls (don't get any "fix up" ideas, weirdos) will be under my watch in the living/learning community at the u that i've suddenly found myself at the helm of and that's pretty friggin' hilarious if you think back to how i was when i was their age. wait...how i still am? am i any less random than i was back then?

anyway, i think that i'm going to get my hair cut this weekend. and, no, that has nothing to do with anything else i've said in this posting. not really. i think. ok, maybe the connection will come to me later. eat more fiber. or at least look at the box for the kashi cereal "good friends" that claims to have "tastier twigs!" twigs? finally granola food with a sense of humor. brill.

oh yeah...if you were also a teenaged girl in the 80s, watch 13 going on 30. i know it sounds insane but just trust me on this. it just came out on dvd this week. the thriller and love is a battlefield scenes are worth the watch alone.

first off, kinkos still does and always will suck. but more importantly, my passport came back today with the russian visa inside in that is half "very old school soviet official looking complete with my name in the cyrillic alphabet pasted onto one page" and half "some kid messing around with a copier that stapled another piece of paper in there with something that probably says 'kick me' in russian." so now all there is to do is, uh, go. i guess?

so let's see...every time i get my god damn inbox down to just under 60 messages, it goes back up to 346 messages, all of which must be dealt with now, now, now, now. well, except for the 60 i haven't yet replied to because i want to send an actual reply and not just a "hey, i'm lame, shoot me please" message. so something is clearly fucked up that i can't reply to the 60 because i'm spending too much time trying to keep the rest at bay. some day i will catch up and reply to you all unless the email kills me first.

movie rec: the village. you will love the village. you will love the village. if you do not love the village you aren't trying hard enough.

hfg. august. so what's up with yet another friendster social network thingee, this orkut crap..."orkusphere" as pomo freaks with faux british accents summering in some delusional place in their own narcissistic fantasies like to refer to their "network" of "friends" as. oh did that sound insane? so sorry.

anyway, i'm off the hook again 'til mid september with the whole up and back to northwestern memorial thing. so it gives me time to practice not having my blood pressure go up to 3 trillion over -- well, whatever you get the joke -- and jumping off of tables threatening to cut any one that tries to come near me with an iv needle, speculum fresh out of the freezer, or insurance form...and i wonder to myself, and now to you, how do they get those things so damn cold...but not so cold that your cervix sticks to the speculum like your tongue on a frozen piece of playground equipment. seriously. how do they find that perfect temp?

oy...ok sorry, sorry, sorry. my cable modem bit it a week ago in that storm that had jesse and i stuck at meijers and caused all kinds of electronics to get fried in my apartment. and before that there were the weekly trips to chicago to northwestern for tests to figure out why i'm having 80 periods a month. ok, not really. and ok, too much information. and ok, it's just been two visits so far with two more, so far, to go. soooo...i'm lame! lame, lame, lame. but i'm back online again and it seems that i'm always in some kind of email/web catch up mode, huh?

blogging at borders with my new wireless card on my laptop, about to start madly typing away on my latests lit notes for my diss. wireless is amazing. my throat hurts like hell (hlh) but i survived teaching my first computers meets fiber art class today! it was so cool to see how excited they were at the end of the class, being able to walk out with their projects DONE and ready to be integrated into their other work...maybe i do like teaching...well...sometimes. :)

a neon blue spain, a dark and wooded iceland, a futuristic plane...and i have this sense that we are running out of time...

top latest search to find my blog: penguin patterns sewed. think about it.

fuck it's june isn't it? yeah, ok, i already knew that but fuck. still. anyway, i now have plane tix for the ieee conference in east bumfuck finland, where i'll have to take a train to from helsinki. and i've made up my mind and i'm voting yes. now to get my visa...no, not for finland. i think that you probably have a good idea for where though...if you think hard enough about it.

god it feels like it's 4000 degrees outside because of the humidity after our very brief downpour earlier today and you know how i hate that feeling especially when it's cramp time...and even when it's not. i should live in siberia.

so here i am dizzy and crampy and burning up and trying to do some reading and cleaning...but mostly i'm just in a lot of pain and i hate this, i really hate this. but everything isn't all bad. after all, i located a little bit of funding for the summer, i have a full committee again, things are going well with my textile art work...but still...that voice inside keeps repeating its mantra...don't fuck this up, don't fuck this up, don't fuck this up...

haha! the *found* tour is coming to champaign the day after my birthday...which means it's still a long way away. but it is coming!

"evil empire drinking emporium" is the search of the day and it's funny because i've been thinking about that place, or rather, those places while thinking about what the hell kind of summer job i'm going to be able to get because, damn, i need a summer job and i'm not sure what direction to start looking in...

i keep thinking that i need to start writing another book...

latest search query that has found my blog? "crayz german keyboard." seems like it's a worldwide craze. or something like that.

so it may have dawned on you that tuesday is the anniversary of my total breakdown. yeah, two years ago and it didn't hit me until about an hour ago but there you have it...and it's hard to face up to that, to own that fact...yes, i went completely completely insane and it was sad and awful and there were days that i couldn't face and nights i wondered if i would ever see the end of. but i'm still here. and i'm still here.

jesse once told me to look at these things in my life, in my past, to look at these events gone by as badges of honor, like medals given to those who have served in the war...and i remember so many years ago an old professor of mine telling me that as he faced down the ptsd he had after vietnam, he held on to those old army medals until one day he realized that he didn't need them anymore. is that what having survived means?

the scars fade more and more each day but they remain. and maybe they always will. but, still...they fade.

i'm back and completely exhausted and used to german keyboards so i keep almost typing z's instead of y's, etc...chris is already asleep and i won't be up much longer myself...it is, after all, 3:30 am central european time.

oh yeah...trying to eat at a restaurant around 5:30 in prague this past sunday? no! we don't open until 7, it's hockey time!!!! oh yeah. duh!

ack sorry about the posting hiatus -- internet access in prague was less easily found than in vienna with the bignet sites and...i was just too damn busy anyway. :) so the czech republic is now part of the eu as i said and there was a big celebration complete with some really, uh, odd music groups in the old town square. and as we left prague, there was a nice old man (ask me about his eyebrows!!!!) who was learning american english and was so excited to talk to us so that he could practice up for his upcoming visit to chicago for his son's wedding and by some miracle our train back to vienna didn't catch on fire like our other train did so we didn't have to switch to a super slow stop-by-stop train.

now it's our last full day here in europe before we head back to the states tomorrow morning and it's been a crazy wild ride and i feel super creatively inspired now so watch out!!!! talk to you all soon. hugs (loria - haha).

blogging from prague where our train here caught on fire, we were standing next to a guy chris knew, and the cz is now part of the eu...more later!