It's been a long day. We really did talk for hours. It was amazing. That we still have that many things to say to each other. He told me about work and I told him about social media. We talked about the trip to get Boomer. We talked about Boomer and Chewy's love affair. We listened to xmas carols not sung by Bono (Doc teases me about my love for Bono constantly, calls him Bone-o). We ate pie and hamburgers. It was a great day.
I was a bit off, though. I told him a few hours after I took my day meds that I felt like I hadn't taken my meds at all. I'm out of pot until our crop comes up and we clean it and cure it. So I'm not the most put together. My memory, we are discovering, is actually better on pot. I think it's the Seroquel that affects my memory. I'll have to look that up tonight. Doc wants me to try Ginko. I'll try anything. I gave in on the exercise thing and get out to walk the dog every day. Now I'm relenting on the memory thing.
It's so frustrating.
I talked to Doc about something really important to me. If, in the unlikely event that I trip into fame and/or fortune, I want he and Kelli to be my conservators. Yes, I WANT to be under conservatorship, should I have assets that need to be protected. I absolutely do not trust myself to take care of my best interests. There is no impending threat of any of that being needed, I just wanted to make it clear to him, just in case. Because if something happens, I know I won't be of sound mind to decide then. I get too caught up in shit.
I am more than my illness.
I can't even type that with a straight face. I feel like my illness is my skeleton, take it away and I'm just a pile of flesh, hair and goo. Doc wondered aloud to me today if my shrink was studying me. After all, we've owed him money consistently since I started seeing him five years ago, and he still bends over backwards to see me, treat me, help me. When I said I was looking into a medical marijuana card, he said he would provide all of my records, he just couldn't prescribe it. We have another doctor for the script, it was the records I was worried about, but he had no objection. Maybe I'm his mascot.
Why all the xmas on tv all of a sudden? for piss' sake, save something for December. I feel like another piece of pie. Pumpkin, or chocolate silk? it will take some time to suss that out.
I have worked out that Simon and Lelu, my last two wet food hold-outs, are crazy for Boomer's dry food, Purina's Pro Plan. So I need to do some pricing research tonight online and see if we can afford to switch to it and give up this soft food habit of theirs. It's not good for Simon's teeth. Lelu doesn't have any teeth, but this stuff is small enough for her to swallow whole. I watched her gobble up a bunch of it last night.
Boomer was out for quite a while today. I closed all the doors again and opened hers. She came out at Chewy's prodding and made her way to the living room and found a place in the dining room to hide under a chair. She stayed there for a while, then did some exploring. That wore her out so she went back to her room and climbed into the cabinet for an extended cat nap. She hisses at all the other cats, still. But it's only day two.
David Bowie just put out a double CD this year or late last year (which is great, has some retro sound to it), and now he has some huge box set out? Calm down, David. I can only collect promotional pictures so fast.
Here's a great thing I should work on tonight, Bollux, the laptop, refuses to let me access the data on Blue Max, my external hard drive. It will show me the data listed, but won't let me access it. I am slightly disconcerted by this. I need to dismantle the clusterfuck of a USB hub I have going tonight and then put it all back together. And plug Blue Max directly into Bollux. I'm not even going to consider it not working out to my advantage. I refuse to think of that. Because Blue Max contains the last 14 years of my computing. I have most of what's on there on various DVDs and CDs and flash drives, but Blue Max is the whole collection of everything I've been able to hold on to over the years of computer crashes.
I know it hasn't been hacked, because when all that weird stuff was going on with my computer that made me think someone might be cruising around inside Bollux, Blue Max wasn't connected. I tend to plug him in only when I'm using him.
Doc is talking about getting a new laptop, but he wants nothing to do with Windows 8. So I'm not sure what we're going to do. My copy of Windows 7 is embedded deeply in a collection of restoration CDs from Acer, so it's no good to us. My model was obsolete about 6 months after I bought it. I had to get the restore disk set from a cached page, there were no active links to it. Good old Google.
Oh, I see, Play List, your point. It's going to be a Pat Benetar/David Bowie/Joan Jett kind of night. I can live with that. Wow, it's six already. Doc went to sleep at 4 something.
Kelli amazes me. The amount of fucks she gives about the Mike Brown/Darren Wilson/Ferguson thing is below zero. Honestly. I want to get to that place, but will I lose my humanity? Kelli still has hers. She isn't a sociopath. She's just a "how does it affect me?" kind of person. All the time, about everything. But that isn't to say she's selfish. She's just particular about what she spends her brain power and stress on. She's very discerning in what she does give a fuck about. I am one of those things she does give a fuck about. So I'm not going to complain. And she lets me talk about it, though I know it bores her.
My coffee is cold. But the song is coming to a climax and I don't want to interrupt it . . . it's "Gold Dust Woman". Okay, now it's over. I can interrupt "Secret Agent Man". The Brian Setzer Orchestra will always wait.
Doc has some weird hang-up (how retro of me to say) about me wearing hats in the house. I put on my skull cap type beanie hat thing to take the dog out to walk and just left it on when I got home. After a while, and I knew it was coming, Doc asks me to take the hat off. I say no. He asks why. I tell him because it's keeping me warm. He say is your head cold? I just looked at him. Sometimes I'm just the 15 year old Kristin with a giant chip on her shoulder.
We talked about that today. The separation between Kristin and Cydniey. It's not a split personality, or multiple personality thing. Cydniey is the woman who was built with the shattered pieces of Kristin and some spare parts. Think of Iron Man, if Tony Stark were a real pain in the ass, weak thing. The suit is his strength. Cydniey is that suit, carefully holding the Kristin pieces together, while protecting the world from the bitterness and hatred that the Kristin bathes in. So we're not so interested in healing Kristin as we are in keeping Cydniey shiny and in working order. Because without the Cydniey-suit, everything goes to hell surprisingly quick. Cydniey is a construct that I created for myself to escape the weak and battered Kristin who seemed beyond saving. I created her in Junior year of high school, in the girl's locker room after gym, when out of nowhere, I referred to my best friend as Johnny (as in Rotten) and she responded, without missing a beat, by calling me Cydniey. I went with it and took it as far as I could. It's done me well.
When I go to the looney bin, they don't call me Cydniey. They have a no nick-name policy at my hospital. So I'm Kristin at my most vulnerable moments in the hospital. It seems fitting.
I had Kristin beaten down for a long time. Ten she roared to the surface a few years ago and made mine and doc's life a living hell. She comes out every so often now, and usually not for very long before I catch myself and try to undo the damage she's done. That happened today with Doc. one minute we're having a conversation, the next, I am 15, with a huge chip on my shoulder and everyone is my enemy and I have to fight. So I lashed out at him. Bad. Bad. Bad. I went out and had a cigarette and slapped my brain around a little for a few minutes and then came in and offered him a very teary apology. Which I never expect him to accept anymore. He takes so much abuse from the 15 year old.
One of his roles with me is Fatherly. Yeah, it's complicated. And it brings out Kristin. and then there's mess. And then there's clean-up. I'm trying to learn that his way of thinking and dealing with things is much more productive and healthy. But he doesn't always live what he speaks and it confuses me. I have him so so so high up on a pedestal, that when he has a human failing, it trips me up and makes me mad. I have to remember that I made him superhuman, he didn't ask to be. He's doing the best he can. And it's more than anyone, including my parents, has ever done for me to make me better.
I'm glad I made every bad choice I did in my life because each one brought me closer to that night that he walked into my cafe and interrupted my quiche making to ask about coffee recommendations. I didn't know it at the time (I am oblivious) that he was chatting me up. We had a cup of freshly brewed hazelnut together and the rest, as they say, is history.
For the first 4 months that we were together, whenever someone at the restaurant I also worked at mentioned his name, I giggled hysterically and turned bright red. I mean it, 4 full months of that behavior. I was so mocked on the line. At the toast station or the egg station, they would wait until i was in the weeds and struggling to concentrate on what the head chef was trying to teach me and what the sous chef was ordering from me, someone would ask if Doc was picking me up from work. Then the giggles would start as I'm assembling 5 eggs benedict or buttering ten pieces of toast with five waitresses yelling at me that they need rye. I don't think the stupid grin ever left my face. Yes, Virginia, in a busy breakfast kitchens, there is a station devoted purely to toast. I was popular in that station because I softened the butter before the shift and butter the toast to the edges. It is one of my biggest pet peeves when I order toast at a restaurant and it comes to me with a shmear of butter in the center surrounded by arid toasted bread. So I excelled at toast.
The thing that's weird, I held that job, which was technically salad station, and head chef/only chef at the cafe, full time, both. With no meds. I faked my way through them. And my next job, Sous Chef of Pantry for a very white, very elitist catering company. I got promoted after the wedding season to head chef of pantry, but for only a quarter more an hour. I told them to stick it. I wasn't taking over a department as huge as Pantry and being responsible for running off site events by myself for a quarter more and hour. Fuck that. Bummer, too. We could have been good together. I took out my lip ring for those ingrates.
Then I started having mini breakdowns at work. One day a husband of one of the immigrants who worked there and fired two shots into the ceiling and my PTSD flared up. I couldn't even wait for Chef Peter to call Doc to come get me, I just closed and locked my tool box and started walking home. Another time I got an email from my sister that my uncle had died and I just lost it at work. Eventually I stopped going. Just fell off the radar.
Then I started working in offices. Then I started having really spectacular breakdowns. At work. One time it was because I had worked for 6 months and excelled, when suddenly they assigned some really uptight ladder climber to be in charge of me. And she didn't believe in the autonomy I had. She pestered me constantly and when I got snippy she would lecture me about how she was my superior and blah blah blah. I could only take it so long. The I lost it, completely freaked out on my manager and the head of the department inside the glass office of the department head. Yeah, I quit that job.
The next job I got, I got them to hire Doc as well. And that job was cake. It was only after finding out they were closing our office that I had an episode. But in this case, I was surrounded by friends and it worked out. I got let go three days before the office closed for unrelated reasons. But all this time, I wasn't seeing a doctor and I wasn't on medication. And I could hold my shit together for about 6 months at a time.
I thought when we moved here the call of the strip would drag my fearful ass out of the house and onto the town. but with my parents taking us on a ride through hell three weeks after we moved here, and then with them living 5 minutes away, I was worse than ever. I became a full-on agoraphobic. It wasn't long before I was sent to the looney bin. On my second visit, the social worker, who had dug up my eastern psychiatric records told me I could qualify for SSI, and put the paperwork through. I don't remember the interviews with them or any of that. I don't know where the paperwork is. But it was a life saver. It gave me an income so Doc didn't have to fully support me and could quit his horrid delivery job.
I don't know what started all of this. I've been purging in here like I haven't in a long time. I guess so I can say to people, you want to know about me, read my online journal, I don't feel like talking about it.