Latest God's War revisions are done (again).
I get the feeling I'm going to be saying that a lot this year.

Monday, November 12, 2007
Round 85
In Which the Protagonist Has a Small Heart Attack
Went into the pharmacy today to fill my med subscription. I'd been putting off refilling my insulin until I had my insurance card, so needless to say I was down to half a pen of Novolog and my last Lantus pen.
So I walk in and get just one thing of testing strips on top of that because I don't have the prescription refill on me cause I see my endo this week, and my last insurance company didn't cover the strips unless I had the RX.
But you can imagine my shock when the pharmacist aid said, "That'll be $342."
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"Three hundred forty-two dollars," she repeated.
"That can't be right. I have a $100 deductible, and then everything is free. They cover 100%."
She called over the pharmacist, who looked rather surprised at the slip. "Oh!" he exclaimed, "I never look at that part!"
Well, of course. Why would a pharmacist care how much we're all paying for the drugs that keep us alive.
Dude. My company is paying thousands of dollars a month so I can have this wicked-good health care and you're fucking me over.
"I can't afford this," I said, knowing full well I wasn't going to leave the pharmacy without the drugs. Because without the drugs, I will die.
So I pulled out my credit card, which now has over $12,000 on it. For just this reason.
I was so angry I couldn't speak. I wanted to scream and rage and knock something over. I was literally shaking as I left the pharmacy, I was so fucking angry. Here were all the old memories again, of being unemployed and spending putting $350 on the credit card every month that I didn't have, just so I could fucking live, digging a deeper hole just to postpone the invevitable.
And I fucking hate that feeling. I hate that dependency. I hate that my ability to fucking live could be fucked at any time by somebody fucking up their paperwork. I hate that I'll never be able to fucking work for myself because I'll always have to have employer-sponsored health insurance. I hate drugs in general and insurance companies in particular and I hate everything that has to do with anything.
Most of all, I fucking hate being poor.
NOTE: restrained phone call to the insurance company confirms that I am covered - but I must pay the first 1K out of pocket and submit my receipts to be reimbursed. I wonder if they will reimburse me for the finance charges on my credit card as well... no?
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Note to Self:
Too much sex. Not enough writing.
But really, how often do we all get to say that?
Why I Travel
Because it really comes in handy when you're sitting down to explain the smell, feel, geographical layout, and logistics of fantastical foreign cities.
Seriously.
Can I write all these trips off now?
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Reasons to be a little crazy...
When was the last time I wrote new material? Not summaries and revisions, but new material?
Ah, yes.
Thing is, I'm doing so much writing at work that it doesn't *feel* like I haven't been writing. I feel like I've been... well, writing every day. And I certainly *open up* my actual writing files at least once a day. Now I need to find the headspace to get cracking again.
Working on my new writing schedule tonight. Let's start with 500 words a day and see where that gets us. I've got a long way to go to get back on track.
Gaaaaah!
Yes, sometimes you are crazy.
"My boyfriend is Type 1. Before I met him almost 4 years ago, I knew next to nothing about diabetes. He has always insisted that he can feel when his blood glucose is high or low, and that he doesn't need to test that often. He limits his sugar intake and takes insulin twice a day, so I assumed he had it under control.
Our relationship is a very close one, but once in a while he will have these mood swings out of nowhere. He gets depressed, just wants to be left alone, feels like everything and everyone is against him. During these mood swings, he often tells me he has a feeling that I don't love him anymore or that I'm seeing someone behind his back. He feels his life is a mess and that everything is going wrong.
Then, just as suddenly as it came on, the depression will lift and everything is fine again. I never understood what was happening. I knew he loved me, but I didn't understand how he could go from the perfect boyfriend to someone who couldn't even stand to be in the same room as me (or anyone else for that matter), with no warning and seemingly for no reason." Read the rest here.
OK, all you diabetics out there? Please don't do this to your partners. Trust me when I say that you're just crazy, and when you even out, life is beautiful again. The girlfriend, in this instance, had to do all the work and research about t1 in order to get this guy back under control, which also explained and controlled the mood swings when they occurred (yes, they were low sugar episodes - not terribly surprising).
If you won't get your sugar shit together for yourself, you need to do it for the people who put up with you, cause nobody deserves to go through that crap. Learn to recognize it, and make it really clear it's not the other person's fault.
If anybody speaks to me during a low, the first thing I say is "I'm a little low; I'll be OK in a minute." That way, if it turns out I can't shut the fuck up (I usually can, but not always), then they know that if I'm snappy it's not about them, it's all about me.
Please look out for the people who care about you. I caused a lot of havoc the six months before and after I was diagnosed; I was learning what was me and what was just the sugar. When you can distinguish this for yourself, you can make it a lot easier for the other people in your life to distinguish it, too.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Rhino
Somebody should tell that Rhino she's fine just the way she is. Also, I love me some pretty unicorns, but at the end of the day, the rhino's gonna win in a rumble.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
No Christmas for You
I can get tickets home for the holidays for just under $700, or just under $800 if I want to avoid Chicago and Denver and get out at a reasonable hour. I used to think getting home from Chicago for just under $600 was a raw deal.
Ah, the joys of living in Ohio.
I'll get home for the holidays, sure, but nobody's getting presents this year.
Tra-la!
Looking Back
When archaeologists look back at something like this, what will they see? A religious complex? A city built to honor some god? A complex created to flee the mainland? A high-tech leper colony?
When I look at some of the gradiose projects we put together in our time for the amusement of the wealthy, I can't help but think that everything we assume about the cities and monuments of the past is dead wrong.
Sleepless Nights
Malaysia's Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent cleric said.
Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, said he wanted to speak about the "emotional abuse" that men face because it is seldom discussed, the party reported on its Web site Wednesday.
"We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen," Nik Abdul Aziz said. "Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed."
I have this problem all the time, let me tell you. I mean, there are bare-armed, bare-legged men walking around my bedroom all night long. I've even seen men wear short sleeves at church, without shame.
Hookers.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Sugar
1/4 piece of a Killer Brownie from Dorothy Lane Market eaten at today's workadoo holiday potluck + 1 spoonful gooey macaroni + dollop of oreo cream puddy pie =
OMFG.
I never fucking eat this stuff any more.
There's this moment of loss and longing, after you eat it, realizing that you're just never going to eat the way you used to, ever again.
Yeah yeah, eating to excess is bad, blah blah blah, but you know what? I liked my holiday indugences. I liked being able to eat a whole bag of potato chips if I felt like it. I liked eating three bagels in an afternoon on occasion. I liked sitting around eating chocolates and watching mindless tv.
I didn't used to do these things all the time, obviously, but if I *wanted* to, the option was there. Sure, I still *could* eat a whole bag of potato chips, but I'll have a headache for an hour, my whole body will slow down to a crawl, and it'll send my sugar into a low/high rollercoaster that'll take me a week to get back under control.
The sense of joy and delight associated with eating really good food to excess just isn't there anymore.
Some other life.
Fear & Longing
I started plugging in dates to price tickets for going home for the holidays, and I realized that one of the reasons (besides the price) that I've been putting it off is because I'm really going to miss my boyfriend when I'm gone (insert vomiting noise here, yeah).
It's stupid, lame, and, I suppose, a fleeting feeling. We've been going out less than two months (we were friends for a couple months before that as well). *Everything* looks better at the beginning. Eventually, you get sick of each other, or he stops saying "I miss you" and he dumps you cause it's too serious or you dump him (or her) because the idea of an entire future together is just too terrifyingly permanent, like death.
The thing is, everybody tells you how to fall in love. There are tons of movies and songs and media sobfests and bitchsessions all about how to start up a whirlwind romance. It's hot and fun and you laugh and have a great time.
You start a lot of romances in your lifetime, but nobody ever teaches you how to *stay* in love. Nobody teaches you how to stay together.
It's like a writer who never finishes a book. You've got all these great beginnings. You're great at writing beginnings. But slogging through the middle? Wrapping up the end? You've got no experience with that.
Falling is easy, sticking is hard.
At least in the case of writers, we have lots of more or less successful examples to look at to teach us how. But in real life? How many really loving, successful relationships do you see? Relationships where people stayed together for some reason other than "well, I can't do better" or "we can't afford to break up" or "I guess it would hurt the kids if we split."
And maybe that's the thing - at one time or another, what kept some longterm couples together was just that one thing. Some fatalistic thing, and they pushed through it, and things were better (as Steph once half-jokingly said to me "Me and the Old Man got engaged because we needed more than love to keep us together"). But man, you know, my fear of getting stuck in a relationship that's ALL that - that's based on two people sticking together out of something other than wanting, something less than mutual respect and friendship... that's hard to swallow.
The problem with constantly waiting and worrying over the ending of a relationship is that you lose all the good stuff in-between. You miss the missing; you fail to enjoy the laughter, the amazing sex, the verbal sparring, the pancakes in the morning, because you're always waiting for that moment when you lose it.
Thing is, I guess, I already lost this particular boyfriend once for one miserable week where we both looked and felt like death. We came back to it, because being miserable sucked goats, and we laugh a whole hell of a lot more together than apart, but how long does that last? How long until the next time? Until one of us flips out again or we get bored with each other? Maybe once we're bored with each other, the break won't be as painful, or as hard. We can hope.
Thing is, you know, I'm tired of being afraid of everything and living through something expecting it to end. I'm tired of writing hot beginnings whose tough middles I can't make it through. I want an ending hotter than my beginning, and a middle that's hotter than both. I just don't have a roadmap on how to do that.
People talk a lot about the sort of courage it takes to be a writer, to put yourself out there. It takes a lot of courage to live fully, too, to put your heart out there. It's going to hurt either way. Sometimes it's pretty scary not knowing where you're going. Exhilarating, terrifying, beautiful. An adventure. But fucking scary.
We lose everybody, in the end. If not to a breakup then to death or disaster. The ending always comes, whether or not we're prepared for it. Unlike fiction, there's no putting it off or setting it aside.
I want to find out how this one is going to end, no matter how much it scares the hell out of me. Because I wouldn't trade this beginning for anything, even if it's going nowhere; even if it ends tomorrow.