Some Candid Answers to Common Interview Questions

Q: What would you say is your strongest quality?
A: My ability to bullshit on the fly

Q: What would you say is your biggest weakness?
A: This hole in my foot.

Q: What methods would you use to priortize tasks?
A: I would sort them by color and shoot them.

Q: Do you have any questions for me?
A: What kind of cheap ass has a benefit start date of 90 days after hire?

Q: Where do you see yourself in five years?
A: Drinking the blood of my enemies.

I Have a HOLE in my FOOT

So, I went in to see the podiatrist yesterday to have this callous on my toe checked out. I first noticed it last year just before I went into the hospital, and since then, I've been frantically looking up horrific pictures of diabetic foot ulcers, worrying that this was going to turn into something gangrenous that would eat my whole foot off (warning: none of these are happy pictures).

It was, thus, with much trepadation that I finally went in to have my foot looked at. Why now, you may ask? Because it felt like so much had gone wrong this year that this would just turn out to be the icing on the cake. It would just figure.

After a long wait at an understaffed office (I really should think about going into the healthcare field. God knows every single office is understaffed), I settled up on the podiatrist's chair, waited some more, and he came in, took one look at my toe and said, "Oh, that's a wart."

"Oh, thank God," I said.

But can you blame me for being extra paranoid these days?

We chatted about diabetes. He wanted to know how they'd figured I was a type 1 and not a type 2. Did they do a test?

"Uh, well," I said, "I was brought into the hospital in a coma."

"What did they say triggered it?"

This question didn't surprise me, because the "cause" of type one is still apparently a really contentious thing. You'll hear different things, but what my doctor told me, and what sounds right as far as my experience goes is, I was already predisposed to be a type 1 (my dad and his cousins in France are type 2s, and if you have diabetics of any kind in your family, you're going to have a bigger chance of having t1 or t2) and then I got some kind of virus. The virus triggered my body's immune response, but instead of just killing the virus, it caused my body to turn on the beta cells in my pancreas. The reason I didn't get t1 sooner is because whatever it was that triggered the response didn't happen until I was 25. It could have happened at 5 months, 5 years, 15... or 25. It just so happened mine got triggered at 25 (I then spent a year getting progressively sicker until I went into a coma).

The podiatrist said he's always interested to know the sugar # for a type 1 who was brought in to the hospital for the first time. I told him I was a 680, which I used to think was pretty impressive, but Anne Rice apparently had something closer to 1100, and the podiatrist insisted he had a guy come in who said he'd gone into the hospital fully conscious with a 1300 number.

I'm not so sure I believe that one, but it sure does put my little 680 to shame. I was comatose for a whole day at 680? Sheesh!

I asked him what a "real" foot ulcer would look like in the first stages, and he said it would start out with some red swelling and then look more like a blood blister, not a callous.

OK, I'll keep that in mind for next time...

The med assistant brought me into the room with the little laser thing to zap the wart, and asked me why I'd been diagnosed with type 1 instead of type 2. I realized that at this particular clinic, which is in an upper-middle class neighborhood full of older people, they probably hadn't seen a lot of type 1s. Still, dude, you've worked here EIGHT YEARS. Treating DIABETIC FEET. You should know these things.

"Uh," I said, "it's not that I produce too little insulin or that it's not absorbed well. I don't produce any insulin at all. My body ate all of my beta cells, which is what produces insulin."

"No shit?" she said (she was a very entertaining, gruff, and disillusioned med assistant).

So they shot me up with some anasthetic and the doctor lasered out a GIANT HOLE in my foot.

I was astounded at its giantness this morning when I took off the dressing. And here I'd gone into the podatrist to AVOID giant holes in my feet.

Ah well. I have a follow-up in two weeks to make sure I don't get an infection and get a REAL foot ulcer, and in the meantime, I have super antibiotic cream and band aids.

Oh, and an interview today.

The excitement never stops, I'm TELLING you.

Someday I Will Learn...

That it is OK to ask for help.

But, still hard.

Medieval Map of Empires

What I love most about this interactive medieval map of the rise, spread and fall of empires during the period is the fact that the soundtrack is from the movie Conan.

Boy, I Had to Work For That Number

This morning's number: 92

This is supposed to be a *normal* morning number for me. It shouldn't take effort to get there, just routine. Not having a routine is probably what's ruining it for me.

After yesterday's appalling numbers (178 196 152), I broke out my aggressive testing/dosing strategy that I used to curb my numbers after I got back from Spain.

I made sure I had a reasonable number (100) before bed at 10pm, then set my alarm for 2am. Woke up at 2 with a 145, took 2.5 units. Woke up again at 6:30 am for my Lantus shot and tested at 140 (!!?? Yeah, that's how I know my body's just fucking out of wack), took 2.5 more units. And now, finally, at 10:30 am, I'm at 92.

Fucking sugar.

Thought for the Day

"The majority of people aren’t sad because there is something wrong with their brain. They are sad because their lives suck."

Other Cultures Are Icky

Hannah had a post up a while back discussing Megan Lindholm's short story "Cut," which is about a girl speaking to her grandmother about her decision to be circumcised because, bascially, "all the kids are doing it these days."

This one stirred up a lot of complex feelings for me (I read it when it first came out several years ago and again recently), and today I figured out one of the things it got me thinking about. Female mutilation is a hot button topic. I have a violent aversion to the idea of circumcision; I'm not big on the whole mutilation thing. I like all my parts where they are. I think other boys and girls should keep theirs too.

Now, I know this ain't Somalia (thank God), but things aren't perfect here. We've got some questionable practices, and there's nothing more annoying than somebody yelling at feminists to be grateful because, "You know, in Saudi Arabia, women can't even drive."

There are a couple of things that can happen when you present another culture's "beauty" practices to a Western reader (the big reason given for the continuation of female castration is that any girl who isn't circumcised will never marry any sort of decent, respectable man. Sound familiar at all? How about "If only my breasts were bigger, boys would like me!" No? Moving on, then). Talking about it can raise awareness about the practice and break the silence, which is great, but it can also lead to that whole "holier-than-thou" reader reaction. It can lead to cozy fiction that lets us marvel at the brutal exoticism of of some "backward" country and reinforce our feelings of superiority.

If it's just, "Those crazy Africans are MONSTERS. How could ANYONE mutilate ANYBODY???" and that's the central message of the story, then you end up with some jacked-up piece of uneducated drivel like this whose basic message is ALL MUSLIMS HATE WOMEN. ISN'T IT GREAT WE'RE NOT LIKE THAT????

Instead, you want to do something a little more like what Lindholm does, which is put that practice that we see as "barbaric" into proper context right there alongside equally barbaric practices we ourselves engage in. That's how you use SF to get people to think about current practices, accepted ideas, and challenge them.

It's easy to criticize the Other. It's a hell of a lot harder to turn the mirror back on yourself.

Because then you might end up with something like this.

This May Not Cheer You Up, But it Cheers ME Up, So Really...

Husky puppies! In Alaska!

The Cold Equations

Having a rough night tonight, basically because I've got some medical stuff I want to take care of (like the callous on the bottom of my toe that's going to get me my foot chopped off if I don't get it scraped someday this century, and I'm down to my last bottle of Lantus and Novolog, and I need to buy another 2 bottles of testing strips), and weekly groceries to buy, and thinking about money makes me think about my bank account, and when I total it all up, it doesn't work.

I can make it about 3-4 weeks out here. More like 3. That doesn't include buying any backup insulin. What I have is what I've got. The podiatrist will have to go on the credit card. Which I can't afford to pay the minimum payment on next month unless something changes.

This means that I'll need to move out of Dayton right after Wiscon unless I can pick up some work somewhere. As said, I'll spend this weekend and next week looking at food service jobs. I've got to have something soon, because as much as I try to keep upbeat and not talk about bad stuff and impending doom, you know, things aren't exactly rosy on the financial front. Which means stuff like eating and living is in jeopardy.

The last option, which I didn't take before this one cause it really is a last resort, is to move back home. My parents can help with food and meds. I'm screwed as far as credit card payments and student loan payments go, but there are also way more jobs that will pay me far more money in the Portland/Vancouver area than in depressed Dayton. Problem is that means I'll eventually be paying for gas, too, which I can't afford. My parents will have to front that, too, until I can. Then there's insurance to consider, and etc, and you know, my parents aren't exactly rich. They have enough trouble paying their own bills.

So that's the last-ditch option, and just looking at the way the numbers add up, it may in fact be something I have to do very soon. Not exactly looking forward to it, but it beats dying.

Sometimes I try too hard to be stubborn, to try and do stuff on my own, and then I end up in these really desparate situations where I wait until the last minute when I've blown through my other options, and then it's almost too late. I should have jumped at the opportunity to move out a long time ago, but I had other committments. And this is where I've ended up.

Deep breath. It's OK. It's not over yet, and then even when I've blown through this option, I have one final fall back.

Deep breath.

Take a Tylenol PM.

Go to sleep.

Tomorrow will be better.

Did Someone Say Something?

"I'm ashamed to be seen with such a skinny gamer!"

Ah, Wii.

Sugar Sugar

Before bed test revealed!

232

Blast that damned barista!

According to spreadsheet, I'd correct a 232 with 8 units of insulin, but that's only if I'm going to eat something beforehand, and it's also bedtime, so I subtract 2 units.

But I know that if I take 6 units I'm likely in for a nighttime low, unless my sugar's doing that weird nighttime jump that it did all last week, so I take the 6 anyway.

2 hours later, I'm lying awake in bed. I start to feel lightheaded.

This is the signal to get up and test.

44

Trudge to the kitchen, measure out 8 ounces of orange juice. About 20 carbs.

Try to get back to bed.

Feel too cold. Put on sweater

Start to shake and sweat.

Take off sweater.

Throw off comforter.

Still hot and shaky.

OK, that didn't do it.

Test again.

35.

Still dropping.

Back to the kitchen for a granola bar (yes, I keep lifesavers and jelly beans by my bed for emergencies, but if I can make it to the kitchen, I prefer the variety). Another 20 carbs.

Back to bed. Sweat some more. Shaking increases, but heartrate levels out.

Get up to write blog post about how much I love low sugar episodes.

Shake some more.

Shaking begins to subside.

Finally feeling a bit sleepy. Must be coming back up, cause lord knows I can't fucking sleep when my sugar goes low (a blessing, really).

So I guess this means I take 4 next time instead of 6.

This is what it is: trial and error, trial and error, until you get something that works well, except when it doesn't.

It's all estimates, never an exact science.

But at least it's not the year 1900.

Bed now.

Thinner Than Thou

In the not-so-distant future, worshipping God not only goes out of vogue, but becomes illegal, and worship of the body takes center stage.

Too fat? Too thin? Too old? Too ugly? If you don't look like Ken or Barbie, it's all right to rejoice, because gyms, spas, lipo and face-lift clinics have become places of worship. You can have a cookie cutter body forever... almost.

But if you don't want to get fixed... then heaven help you.

I've been meaning to read Thinner Than Thou since it first came out a couple of years ago, but that first chapter is a bitch to get through. The prose is set out in blocks, and for snappy teeny-bopper dialogue gosh-bang stuff, it needed Chuck Palahniuk-like breaks. I found the teenage protagonists annoying (as many non-loner/non-geek teenage protagonists tend to be - it's always tough to sympathize with physically perfect people who don't have anything interesting going for them except physical perfection).

It gets better as it goes along, because you get some more interesting characters: an overweight executive who signs up for a "however long it takes" fat-camp run by the Reverend Earl, who's cult of thin dominates the country's economy, and the mother of an anorectic teenager who realizes that she's let her obsession with her looks overtake her concern about her daughter's health, as well as the locked-up, spunky anorexic herself.

There's good worldbuilding in here, and plenty of stabs at our current obsession with the body. There are the infomercial/"religious" programs put on by the Reverend Earl admonishing fat people, telling them they're disgusting, telling them they can achieve "success through sacrifice." Telling them. Telling us.

The world outside is one long superhighway of fast food joints and food advertising but inside, among and between is the cult of thin that's grown up around it. The 24 hour gyms, the face lift clinics, and the seedier sorts of places, the places inbetween. Because porn is about everything forbidden, the fatter you are, the more deviant, the more fetishized. A lot of this book ends up being about food porn, and sadly, along with that we end up with this sort of hyper-satirized stereotype of a fat person, these enormous, insatiable people who are so fat they can't walk, who can't stop eating, or thinking about eating. They just can't help stuffing themselves. I mean, aren't all fat people like that? I don't even bother with utensils!!

Eh.

Though I realized that a lot of Reed's plot hinged on the whole "unable to be satiated" thing (as this is also part of the Reverend's plan: make it so that people are always hungry, always fat, and yet always yearning to be thin), there's only one anorexic in the book, and she's not shown as wild, ridiculous, and out of control as the fat characters are. In fact, there are no fat main characters in the book (one of the POVs starts out heavy, but goes to a fat camp and slims down by his second chapter). The fat secondary fat characters are all these gross stereotypes, the women who steal food, gorge themselves on Hershey's bars (not occasional binge. Gorge. All. The. Time) and those who become the Reverend's "Queens" - the women he feeds in order to get them fat (the term for this suddenly escapes me) so that he can get off on watching them eat and then revel in their fatness.

The obesity's all about women, about uncontrollable women, uncontrollable desires, and OK, yeah, that's traditional and all, but I get kind of bored seeing the fat female body as a symbol of out-of-control rebellion, even in this book where the rebellion is "good." Not only was fat forbidden, but it was then linked to sexual desire, and then, in every case, linked to the desire for a fat female body. So fat, boundless, overstimulated, insatiable women. Gee, that's a new one.

But that's just on reflection. It doesn't become really crude in its obviousness until the end.

One of our primary characters is an anorectic teenage girl whose parents, horrified that she's too thin and sickly to look the part of the perfect teen, sign her away to a hard-core hospital/spa/nunnery where a bunch of "Dedicated Sisters" preach to her about food and body image and coax her to eat. Her brother and sister and boyfriend go off on a big cross-country roadtrip in order to find her. Her mother leaves their father and goes off on her own to search for her, too. When the "Deds" get a hold of you, they don't tell you where they're taking your daughter.

The book starts to unravel toward the end, as all of the disparate characters come together in an attempt to topple the Reverend. The thing is, this book was a satire from the start. It's supposed to hit close to home and then go over the top, so I shouldn't have been surprised. It reminded me a lot of Egalia's Daughters, in that respect, though this was vastly better written. Both were difficult to take seriously, especially toward the end, even knowing it was *supposed* to be over the top and it wasn't really serious because it was... serious.

Because there's beautiful stuff in here, as when the army of "big" people who don't fit the Reverend's ideal go on the March (and again, when we see the massive "army" they're all "big" people. These mysterious anorexics and others who don't fit the mold [I'd assume being too tall or too short or otherwise "malformed" would count, too, but no, it's really all about those out-of-control fat people] are no where in sight).

And the army declares:

We are tired of it. We are just plain sick and tired of it. Why should we slave and suffer and waste our lives trying to please you? We are done smiling and pretending that we eat like birds just because you say normal people do. We are fed up with dieting and suffering in gyms because you think we should look like you. We are fed up to here with you and your impossible standards. Who put you in charge of standards anything?

All nice rah-rah stuff, but again, here's an army of fat people saying, "we just pretend to eat like birds!" and it clunks into that stereotype of the-out-of-control fat person, the one who must eat piles and piles and piles in order to gain that twenty extra pounds that makes them imperfect, and that's the most annoying stereotype. The difference between a "normal" (ie BMI blah blah whatever) weight and overweight person is about a 100 calories a day.

An extra three tablespoonds of peanut butter does not make somebody a wild, crazy, insatiable pig. The thing is, in the cult of thin, it's not just about people who weigh 800 pounds. There just aren't going to be enough of those people to fuel your dieting industry. It's about the people who are 140 and want to be 120. It's about dying for "perfection."

But anyway.

So after the anthem-march comes the convergence of everybody to bring down the cult of the body, and it's a little silly and over the top, as the anthem is, as the book is, but...

I think there are places where Reed might be writing from her own fat prejudice, and that comes out in some of the language and the big-fat-slob stereotypes (and the fact that NONE of the main viewpoint characters are these uber-monster fat people this society so fears), but well, you know, there was enough in here to get me thinking about the cult of thin, and how far we're willing to take it. It does what a lot of SF and satire like to do, which is take what we've come to see as "normal" out of its everyday context and blow it up, bright and shiny and ridiculous, and slap it over a new background so it shows up in stark relief, and we can look at it in horror and tried to figure out how the hell we could think of any of that behavior as "normal."

Interesting experiment, but not a grand slam.

Bedtime Sugar Check Reveals...

Mmmmmm nothing more annoying than when the barista puts in regular syrup instead of sugarfree, except maybe not realizing that until four hours later.

Dear American Idol,

Africa is a continent. Not a country.

That is all.

Grindhouse

Like everything I've seen of Tarantino's, Grindhouse is a rollicking good ride, but a disturbing, uncomfortable one that remixes cliches and then one-ups them by taking everything just that much further than anybody else does.

You want blood and gore? Oh, indeed, there will be blood! Buckets! Cheesy dialogue? You bet! Strippers with hearts of gold? Loads! Sharpshooting hero with the Mysterious Past? (I never miss!!!) Of course!

The first feature on offer is "Planet Terror," which runs after a couple of previews for "upcoming attractions," including "Machete," an action movie about a machete-wielding Mexican assassin hired to kill a Senator who's pro-immigration. Yes. It's this sort of movie.

So, Planet Terror is a bloody, slapstick zombie flick complete with Iraqi scientist Naveen Andrews, who I'm sure some people actually do think is Iraqi cause he plays one on tv. But anyway. So Naveen is dealing with some ex US soldiers who were exposed to this zombifying gas. Now the only thing that keeps them from zombifying is small amounts of the gas. But the deal goes bad, there's some castration (you know how it goes), and then the gas gets loose in small town Austin and... Planet Terror ensues!

Anyway, the "plot," such as it is, really isn't all that important.

Iraqis and zombie gas, OK?

In the meantime, Rose McGowan opens the film with a gratuitous go-go dance ("It's go go, not cry-cry." heh heh. Sorry, the dialogue is just great). Rose McGowan is pretty buff. And the dance is pretty gratuitous. Which is the point. Everything in this SF spoof blood bath zombie terror homage flick thing is supposed to be about 800 times crazier than in a "regular" movie.


So maybe that's what made the whole camera-devouring-half-naked-McGowan thing so uncomfortable for me. I really want to love all of of the cliche-fucking stuff, the over the top blood and gore and SF ridiculousness and hyper-masculinity and silly femme fatales and their lesbian lovers, and mostly I do, but...

You know, I was reading one of Patrick's posts where he pointed out to a board commenter that both male and female characters in Jade Empire are dressed in rather revealing clothing, and he argued that if you complain about one character's dress being provocative, you have to admit that the other one's is, too.

Though I don't personally think either character's poses and clothing choices are terribly provocative or objectifying as gaming characters go (they were pretty tame, really), male skin is still treated differently than female skin, usually in the posing. Not only are the guys already being presented as, well, men and so have that whole male priviledge thing going on, coming from a place of relative power over women, socially, but when a guy takes his shirt off and strikes a pose, it's never the pose of someone being looked at but somebody who's looking. Or posing to intimidate, not to sexually excite. Taking off his shirt isn't an invitation to be sexually ravished, it's an invitation to size him up for a fight. If he was posed the way women usually are, it'd look something more like this. But probably more skin. I'm thinking thongs and assless chaps.

So the hyper-cliches in the movie really do a lot to show off the sexism inherenent in the cliche standards themselves. You can let it go in Casino Royale, but during the sex scene where our Hero takes off his shirt, and the camera spends all of its time lovingly licking over McGowan's body, not the Hero's, it's tougher to pretend that it's all just good fun and totally normal. One of the things that happens when you turn up the dial on movie cliches in these sorts of movies is that it forces you to look some of the absurdist sexist crap in a real stark light, too. It doesn't get glossed over as "Well, you know, action movie, whatever."

Anyway, McGowan does in fact lose her leg to zombies at one point. For better or worse, this is the highlight of the show, cause her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) retrofits her with a machine gun in place of her leg, and so she gets to weild bloody revenge on the zombie hordes. And though her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) may not make it, he does of course, Go On. Cause he Never Misses. The Holy Womb allows him to carry on.

But I really didn't care, cause she had a machine gun for a leg. I'll forgive a lot.

Most people (including me) liked Planet Terror better than the second offering, Death Proof, though this was the one that made the most of the cliche-fucking. Unfortunately, Tarantino takes his own sweet time getting there, and after all the blood and gore and suspense and booty-shaking in the last movie, you're not really sure what to make of this one until, like, the last ten minutes.


This one was a tough one to watch. Kurt Russell stalks a bunch of women who are out having a night on the town. Tarantino spends a lot of time letting you get to know the women, their relationships, careers, gets you to at least sympathize with them if not like them, and talking, talking talking while they're stalked by this guy in a big black car. Rose McGowan shows up again, getting hit on by the stalker and eventually going home with him.

She doesn't make it home, of course. He has a stunt car with a closed-off passenger seat, and straps himself in while allowing her to go unbelted, then kills her with some fancy driving. It's bloody and stupid, especially after you just watched McGowan machine gun a bunch of zombies in Planet Terror with her machine-gun leg and lead a colony of survivors in Mexico. I mean, really.

Said stalker then bashes his car into the car carrying the four women you've spent half an hour getting to know, and they all die a bloody, horrible, dismembered death. There's sex and drugs in there, too, which is another of the reason's he's able to get away with vehicular homicide.

So, movie keeps going, and now he's stalking another group of women. I'm really uncomfortable by this point. I hate stupid bloody needless stalker violence against women. Probably for personal reasons. I mean, getting killed by nerve-gas zombies is one thing, but killed by crazy stalker hits a nerve.

Anyway, so here are four more women you're getting ready to watch die horrible, bloody, needless deaths because they're out having too much fun instead of staying home sucking cock in the kitchen.

But these women are a little different.

This *is* the same guy who wrote Kill Bill. The first one was good, anyway.

One of the women, Kim, is a smart-talking stunt woman who carries a gun. Zoe is another stunt woman with "cat-like" agility who's a gearhead New Zealander. There's an actress cheerleader type tagging along for variety and Rosario Dawson, who is some sort of cameraperson or something.

Anyway, this bunch wants to con a car out of guy and go stunt riding with it cause Zoe's always wanted to stunt ride on this certain kind of car (no, I'm not a gearhead. White thunderbird? Some car. Anyway). So Zoe, Kim, and Rosario Dawson leave the cheerleader behind to entertain the car owner and take the car out, attach their belts to the window frames of the car, and Zoe lies down on her back on the hood, hanging onto the belts on either side, and Kim drives like a bat out of hell down the back roads of Austin with Zoe freeriding on the hood.

Kurt Russell the stalker is in pursuit.

It's got all of the elements for Gory Female Death. Independent-minded women in tight clothes who talk about sex and con a guy out of something - ie act like bad girls - and go out joy riding and having a good time while being stalked by crazy white guy.

In movie cliche terms, They Have It Coming.

I kind of wanted to leave just then, cause if this was all Tarantino had to offer me, I'd call Planet Terror worth my $7 and leave it at that.

But it turns out these women have guts, and when he finally runs them off the road, Kim pulls out her gun and shoots him. He's injured, but manages to drive away.

All the women - still alive, miraculously - hop back into the car and gleefully decide to go after him.

And the hunter becomes the hunted.

It was a fun little reversal, and being a rah-rah women need to be strong and fearless and defend themselves sort of person, I thought it was a cool money-shot there at the end, but I don't think the preceding 80 minutes of the movie were really worth the ten minutes at the end. I was also concerned about that whole potential message of the, "Well, if women fought back they wouldn't be raped/killed so if they are, it's their fault," thing, which does come up in a conversation among the heroines before the stalking. Kim - the gun carrier - insists that it's her right to do her goddamn laundry whenever she feels like it, and she's not going to avoid her building's basement at midnight cause she's scared of getting raped. She'd rather pack a gun.

I'd rather guys just didn't rape and murder people. But you know. You do what you gotta do until we live in a culture where that's not OK. I'll keep lifting my weights and going back to boxing lessons as soon as I'm employed.

To sum up, there was good stuff here that entertained and even got me thinking about how fucking stupid the whole "bad guys rape women!" cliche is, and how tired I am of seeing go-go dancers without machine guns for legs, and stuff like that. I learned that Indians are Hollywood's best stand-in for Iraqis, and I take Rosario Dawson much more seriously when costume designers don't dress her like a fourteen year old.

Also, I still like blood and gore and women beating people up, which is a fine substitute for being bloody and beating people up in real life. It's very cathartic.

Also, if I lose my leg to diabetes when I'm 100, I want a machine gun for a leg.

I'm just sayin'.

Creativity and Education

"If you're afraid to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

Math is Hard

One of the toughest things I've been dealing with the last month - aside from (and relating to) negotiating personal relationships - is depression. It's not bad enough that I can't function, but the longer I go without a job, the worse my health gets, the less money I have for stuff like meds and food, the more down on myself I get.

There have been good days. My recent depression is related to stuff in addition to all of that, but no matter the cause, it's something I deal with. Chronic illness, starting three relationships and ending two in a year, losing one of my best friends, getting laid off, dealing with a crazy homelife while coming to terms with the chronic illness stuff (physical and emotional), and a sudden and rapid move to another state without the benefit of moving here with... well, with anything to do but keep going (no job prospects, living on the good graces of friends)... it gets to me.

I remember trying so hard, in the beginning, when I was first diagnosed, to just get up and brush myself off and carry on. But that became impossible as I began to feel terrified and constricted in my personal life and started making all sorts of crazy decisions in order to set back the clock to my pre-illness days. But you can't erase a year's worth of pain that you've put other people through while thinking you were doing the absolutely most rational thing in the whole world. And that all took a toll on me, and on other people in my life.

If somebody cares about me, I haven't exactly been a fun person to be around for the last year, because when I'm in a high stress situation, what I want, more than anything, is to be left alone. Something that I've realized the more I've dealt with the diabetes stuff is just how wacked out I can be when my sugar's off. Overly anxious, sometimes hysterical, so *certain* that my hyper-crazy feelings are totally *right on.* Panicky. Cloudy. I've learned to shut up when I'm feeling this way. It's best just not to talk to me when I feel like crap, because if I start getting all sorts of questions, I'm likely to explode.

Which means, something innocent like, "Are you OK? Are you sure you're OK? Do you still like me? Do you hate me? Are you sure you're OK? Is there something I can do? Why aren't you talking right now? What's wrong with you? Is it me?"

Is likely to get a response like, "NO I'M NOT OK I FUCKING HATE YOU AND I NEVER WANT TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN," and at the time, that feels like a totally valid response.

I've gotten a lot better with just saying, "It's not you. I just don't feel well," or "I just have low sugar, so I'm over anxious," or "I can't talk right now, I have high sugar and I'm fucking pissy," but it's taken me a lot of experience and a lot of effort to get there. One of the great things about living with Ian and Stephanie is that they don't ask a lot of questions, they give me a lot of space, and there isn't somebody hovering over me asking me all the time if I'm all right.

Frankly, if I had to answer that question, half the time no, I wouldn't be all right, and then talking about how not all right I was would make me feel worse, and then I'd get really depressed, and then I'd start resenting whoever it was who was pulling all this bad feeling out of me.

And around and around.

I've been putting on weight again, which, once again, is an issue because I can't afford to buy new clothes, so I'm giving up some things that I've come to use as a crutch - particularly stuff like candied nuts, which aren't great for my sugar anyway. The upping of my food consumption directly cooresponds to my decreasing bank account. The more I spend, the more I want to buy more food, the more I eat, the less money is in my bank account...

So I'm cutting out some of that stuff. I need to wean myself back off that crutch. Including all those morning pancakes. I've had a couple of bad weeks out here, and my initial couple weeks were just getting settled in. Back to weights *every* morning, 6 days a week of cardio instead of just 4, that sort of thing.

You know, it's a funny thing. People are always asking skinny people how they stay skinny. They're not asking heavier people how *they* stay in shape. I don't think anybody looks at me and goes, wow, she's only 200! She could be 270, but she takes care of herself! How *does* she stay at 200 pounds!!???

Cause yeah, you let it go for four weeks, and whoa boy, time to get back on track. It's something you have to be aware of all the time, if you want to have cool biceps. And feel less doughy. And keep your pants on. This is what it's like to have no metabolsm. The diabetes doesn't help. Reasonable eating and exercise just doesn't cut it. It's 6 days a week, and no peanuts. And that's just to keep me in pants.

In the meantime, yeah, my sugar could be better. I keep vaccillating between 16 and 18 u a day of Lantus, my long-lasting insulin. I don't want to go all the way back up to 18 cause back when I was working all day in a high rise and biking to work, I got away with 14 u a day, and that was pretty sexy. Going back up to 18 feels like a defeat.

The solution would be 2 workouts a day. Or, you know, just taking 18 units of Lantus.

Blast.

Anyway, this post isn't really about anything at all, except to say that boo-hoo, life is hard, and I'm sick of giving myself shots, and I'm going to miss my cinnamon almonds, and I need sexier shoulders, and I have enough money for about 3-4 more weeks of groceries, and some days life really sucks and boo-hoo math is hard.

I'm sure tomorrow will be better. It usually is.

Not Much Worse...

... than wacky sugar numbers and the resulting cognitive fuzz that makes you just not care.

So tired.

Minimum Credit Card Payments for April:

$410.00

Yup, that's the last time I can pay those without being employed.

If nothing comes up next week, I'll pick up those food service applications. I'm not going to make it, otherwise.