The Little Man Behind the Curtain
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I know it only shows my naivete that I continue to be shocked by Shrub's decisions.  I just can't see how a man who thinks of himself as a good guy can make wrong moves over and over without batting an eye.  (Actually, he does bat an eye - he blinks altogether too frequently, which makes me trust him even less....)  He makes his own rules, doesn't feel accountable to anyone, and is so out of touch. 

My personal feelings about the man aside, I feel he truly did the country - and the world - a disservice today when he used his first veto ever to stop Congress's bill to increase federal funding for stem cell research. 

Thankfully, Congress can override the veto.  You can contact your members of congress directly or add your name to the following petition to encourage the nation's lawmakers to stick to their guns:

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/action/stemcellresearch/?sc=e.20060719

Anyone who truly respects Life, as the President says he does, should understand that stem cell research offers Life and Hope and improved Quality of Life for thousands and thousands of people.  Before he died, Christopher Reeve was such an advocate for the need for this research.  I'm relieved he's not around to be disappointed again by this administration's short-sightedness, but my heart breaks for all the other families who are waiting for the kinds of miracles this research might one day deliver.

Detox
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I'm in my fourth caffeine-free day, my head is splitting, and I'm cranky!!  It usually takes three days of detox for me to get the chemical balance in my body restored so I can be pleasant and hopeful.  It's a little scary, therefore, that I still feel like this on Day Four.  On Saturday I ended up giving the last 18 cans of caffeinated Mountain Dew I had to my neighbors.  I've been drinking nothing but ice water since, but today I am indulging in caffeine-free Mountain Dew as a booster to get me through what I hope is the final push. 

I have to remember I don't have the self-control to use caffeine in moderation and my body can't tolerate caffeine at the level I really like to use!  No more experimentation needed....

Two Reasons Why I Like My Job
Mood:  happy
Topic: Daily Eruptions

Variety and Creativity!  

On Wednesday, I was able to show Sudie the dress I bought for Chad's wedding and get her opinion.  She thought it was a little too Junior League for me and that I needed to give it a little more edge to match my personality.  (I love that she and Hans think I have spunk and an edge.  I see myself as so plain and boring most days.  And my neighbors think I'm a total weirdo!)  So we discussed belts (au courant), and wraps (sturdy material of a single color to give my shoulders more structure) and jewelry (very long earrings I'm going to design and make myself) and hair (sleek, shiny ponytail vs. curly and piled on top of my head) and shoes (colorful and very high with a wide heel so I don't sink into the ground every step).  Very fun!

And this morning, my to-do list has included Internet research on Red Howler Monkeys (alouatta seniculus) and comforting a 140-lb. Great Dane who's been in the house less than 24 hours.  Sudie is adopting him from Mid Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League, http://www.magdrl.org/.  Luckily, he has not been abused, but in his less than two years of life, he has lived in at least three different homes and was finally surrendered because his last owner couldn't handle him.  He has not been housebroken or leash trained, but he is the sweetest, gentlest thing!  He's huge, even though he's a little too skinny around the hips and middle, but he doesn't seem to use that power.  He'll eat the smallest pieces of dehydrated chicken strips from your hand without you ever feeling his teeth or tongue.  Sudie is crate training him to start so her other two Great Danes will have a chance to get used to him and he'll learn some house rules.  I'm supposed to leave him crated whenever Sudie is gone, but this morning he seemed so lonely and upset while Sudie was out.  I laid on the floor by his crate for awhile and petted him though the metal bars, which he seemed to like, but he wouldn't lie down and he was breathing hard.  Then I went back into the office to work, and Sudie's three year old Dane got him worked up again.  When I went back out, he had scrunched up the padding from the floor of the crate into a  little ball and was standing on only the metal pan.  I couldn't leave him that way, so I (bravely!) opened the door and crawled into the crate with him and lifted his legs one at a time until I had stretched the padding back out.  Then I sat in the open door and he laid down and put his head in my lap and let me stroke his ears and the top of his head.  This seemed to relax him, and that's all it took.  He's stolen my heart!  Unfortunately, I know from experience that probably means I'm in for heartbreak somewhere down the line.  But for now, just looking at him makes me happy.

Sometimes You Don't Get the Results You Expect...
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Daily Eruptions

...and sometimes you do. The caffeine experiment, predictably, is turning out badly. The idea was to have one 12 oz. fully caffeinated Mountain Dew each day around 11:00 a.m. to see if I can tolerate a small amount and see what benefits I receive. My experience has been that a small amount of caffeine in the late morning can help me focus and get through the heart of my day. I think somedays I also feel happier when I have caffeine in my system. The problem is that having Mountain Dew in the house, and having caffeine in my body, makes drinking only one can per day difficult. I end up wanting one with dinner and then one doesn't "feel" like enough because the soda industry has trained me to expect 20 oz. or more now, not a mere 12, so I end up drinking three a day instead of one. This adds 510 calories (from high fructose corn syrup - a substance the human body does not know how to process) to my diet and then makes it difficult to sleep. And, if I get too much caffeine build up, I get free-floating guilt attacks and sometimes even anxiety attacks.

Yesterday I drank three cans. On top of that, I bought a dress for Chad and La Toya's wedding. My OCD kicked in and I was awake until 2:45 a.m. buzzing on caffeine and obsessing about jewelry and shoes and make up and worrying about whether I should spend two months trying to learn to do something with my long, straight hair on my own or try to find a hairdresser to put it up for me on the day of the wedding. Then, I obsessed about the dress iteself, worrying about whether an ankle-length dress is appropriate for an afternoon wedding and worrying that, even though it is a very simple, straight, spaghetti strap design, the length or material might look as though I'm trying too hard, or worse, might look as though I think I'm part of the wedding party, and I definitely am not.

The worst part is that after getting hardly any sleep, I wasn't willing to drag myself out of bed at 5:00 to walk before work. So yesterday's mistakes are lingering and diminishing my effectiveness today. Isn't that always the way?

Aging Well?
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I got carded yesterday!

I was buying a case of Mountain Dew, which I have never let myself do before (a six-pack is my usual limit), and the cashier, glimpsing it out of the corner of her eye while she rang up my Kleenex, mistook it for alcohol and said, "You don't look quite 27. I need to see some I.D." At first I was confused, then happy! Considering my 20-year high school reunion is happening next month, being carded was a huge rush! Of course, one could argue that getting carded by a woman who mistook Mountain Dew for beer is no great accomplishment. Or, you could take Hans's view and argue that the cashier carded me because I had such a guilty look on my face for buying so much caffeine. (I counter that by saying that the caffeine is an Experiment - with a capital "E" - in ADHD management, and so I had no reason to look guilty.) I was asked a few months ago by a cashier at Lowes Foods if I were a student at Elon College, so I'm sticking with the story that I am simply aging well.

The last time I bought alcohol was a single wine cooler that I didn't finish eight years ago at a bar in Sandusky. The Big Ride was passing through there and I dragged Ron, Randy, Cindy, and an under the weather Zoi downtown the night we arrived. (We were saving the roller coasters for the next day!) Of the group, I was the only one who got carded, maybe because I looked out of my element in a bar. The rotten bartender looked at my driver's license and said, "Man, you're even older than me!" So much for his tip....

Now all I need to do is convince RealAge.com that I'm still young enough to be carded!

July Already??
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Apparently May and June are black hole months for me at work. In 2005 and 2006, both of those months just got completely swallowed up in tech issues and small details and I feel like I went to bed at the end of April and woke up in July. I can hardly remember the events of the past two months. Part of it is that in both my professional and personal lives a great deal of the work was internal, so there's very little "evidence" of change or growth or progress of any kind.

Luckily, I survived and have managed finally to set up both new computers in both of my offices at work. I still have to figure out how I'm going to update each of them on a weekly basis without their being networked and I have to find a printer/scanner for the studio, but those issues feel like small potatoes after the struggles I had just to get the machines up and running. I don't know what it is about me and PCs. My Apples and I have always gotten along great, but PCs are simply not intuitive for me. James says I have a lack of knowledge and familiarity with PCs because of my job path, and I'm sure he's right. If I had gone straight into the business world, rather than playing around in the nonprofit world for so long, I would have gained PC experience and expertise much more quickly. I considered buying two new Macs to work on at Sudie's, but her tech guy knows nothing about Macs and I want her to have support on her technology for the life of the computers, regardless of whether I am here or not, so I decided to go with her tech guy's recommendations. The computers are faster and much cooler than the old, clunky laptop I've been working on for the last year and a half, so I think I'll be happy once I get used to the new machines.

As for my personal life: I started the first steps of a lifestyle management program I'm hoping will help with the ADHD, including a moderate dose of a medication from which I am seeing only the subtlest of results. Hans and I had a major eruption in our marriage that, while extremely scary at the time, seems to have gone a long way toward smoothing things out for our future. I did a face plant and sprained my right ankle in a big way while I was out "celebrating" the solstice last month by running a wooded trail I had never been on before. I'm learning that medication won't prioritize my to-do list for me or even help me make sure I'm working on priority tasks once I've categorized them - translation: medication is not discipline in pill form. I'm learning that I need to make a plan for reevaluating my strategies every time I adopt a new strategy so that I don't find myself reevaluating only a few days after adoption and too soon for me to see any results. I'm learning that I need to set aside time every day with a clearly defined start and end in which I can obsess and worry and second-guess - and then I need to get on with my day and follow through on whatever schedule or plan I have created. I'm learning that my time really is my own but that it is finite and I have to impose limits, whether I like it or not, on what I attempt to accomplish if I want to see results. (Although, my most recent One Spirit catalog listed a book about how to do everything you want...Refuse to Choose! by Barbara Sher, but, as a perfectionist and a procrastinator who already thinks she can do more than she really can, I'm a little too scared to read that right now.) Most surprising, I'm learning that I still have a lot of work to do to learn to trust myself. I seriously thought I'd tackled that issue already. Wasn't that what college and the early nineties were all about? Academic probation and suicidal impulses and therapy and losing Ken (and Marc, and John, and Aaron's friendship) and learning to be without a boyfriend and surviving PIRG and surviving weekly critique workshops in a master's writing program in Los Angeles and awful, awful, sexist, ageist Ned at ACMG in Seattle - weren't all of those experiences designed to teach me to trust myself? Can't I be done with that lesson now? Maybe all of those were successful lessons and I did learn to trust myself then, but have somehow forgotten everything I learned in the years since? I knew how to trust myself for six weeks in 1998 when I was on a cross-country bike trip, but, psychologically, I crashed immediately after and maybe I still haven't recovered. Distressing, but what is there to do except face it, and get going?

Silent Visitor
Mood:  sad
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had another dream this morning of Ken. He's visited me in my dreams every six months or so since I wrote to him via Classmates.com, but he doesn't speak. This morning he knocked at the door of a house I was living in and we went outside to a small trailer I seemed to be using as a writing studio. Then he was gone and I had the urge to email him at home, but even in the dream I restrained myself from doing that because I know it's against the "rules" he and his wife must have.

I woke up feeling more frustrated by this visit than any of the others because I couldn't sense any emotion or reason behind it. Once, he showed me his children and once he just sat with me and I woke up feeling peaceful, but this morning he just appeared and disappeared.

When I got to work this morning, a small, cornflower blue butterfly blocked my path for a few moments by flitting back and forth in front of my feet. Of course, this, too, reminded me of Ken because when we were breaking up I had recently heard about the butterfly effect for the first time and in one of his letters he asked me if I still felt him moving in my life even though I no longer saw him. So butterflies remind me of a man I haven't seen in seventeen years - how crazy does that make me?

I think he's on my mind because the class of 1986 is having its 20-year reunion next month and I don't think I'm going to go. I can't really justify the expense of going all the way to Michigan for it because I have to go (and WANT to go) to Chad and LaToya's wedding in Michigan only three weeks later and two trips in one month is beyond our budget. Plus, most of the people I really care about seeing are already in contact with me, many are from a different class, and most will be at Chad's wedding. I might like to see Brian and Paul and a few other people, but since I've reconnected with Scott in San Francisco, I've pretty well caught up again with the people who left a void. The thing that's still pulling me to go is Ken (and Tad whom I bugged for months to save the date before I knew Chad's wedding was happening and whom, of course, I would love to see). But, there is a chance Ken won't go to any of the reunion activities, and even if he did, he'd probably take Christine and I wouldn't have a chance to talk to him, anyway. There's also a chance that my being there might keep him away. I talked to Scott in S. F. about this (because the sweet man called me on a Sunday evening out of the blue!), and he wondered what I could possibly have to say to Ken now. Of course this is a reasonable question to which there probably is no reasonable answer, but it's one that still haunts me.

Bouncing Brain and Dragging Body
Topic: Daily Eruptions
It's been more than a month since I returned from my vacation, and I finally feel like I'm beginning to recover! While I was in line to see the Country Bears at Disney World, my doctor's nurse called to say that when I returned home I needed to see a hematologist at the nearby cancer center regarding my persistently elevated white blood cell count. Just what I wanted to hear when I was at the happiest place on earth! Stress from that, on top of the overactive schedule I maintained from February through April, led me to a bronchial infection and another course of antibiotics. I saw the hematologist, and, despite taking several vials of blood, he wasn't able to tell me why my white cell count was high. He did tell me that I have had mononucleosis - and may have it now, but determining that would take an additional test - and that if my cell count was still high in two months, he'd test me for leukemia. Oh, joy.

In other news, I started seeing a therapist to deal with my body issues, and have come to see that the food issues, intermittent depression, low self-esteem, and goal hopping I've experienced since my senior year in high school might all be related to ADHD. I don't seem to have the hyperactivity component, but just about everything else about the diagnosis, going back to childhood, makes sense to me.

I have read two books by Dr. Edward Hallowell about ADD, one called Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder, written with Dr. John J. Ratey, for people who have symptoms of ADD going back to childhood, and one called CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! for everyone else who, in the 21st Century, looks like they have ADD but don't have the childhood basis. Dr. Hallowell did such a great job of explaining the history of using stimulants to treat ADHD that I'm considering getting a full diagnosis and trying a prescription medication. He makes a great analogy between the treatment of ADHD and the treatment of poor eyesight: if you can't see, you get glasses - you don't say, I think I'll just try squinting harder for a year and see what that gets me. In his mind, medication is a first line of treatment for ADHD, but one that needs to be supplemented with diet, exercise, structure, and other behavioral changes. I'm hoping that if the medication works for me, it will give me the boost I need to be able to make all of those other changes....

Underground No Longer
Topic: Body Awareness
I've been underground for awhile. For a week I was trying to get things ready so I could go on vacation, then I was on vacation (again at Disney World with my favorite kids) for a week, and now I'm home but I've been in denial and avoiding responsibilities and contact with people and generally doing my agoraphobic re-entry thing that I sometimes do after I've been removed from my life long enough to actually relax.

I haven't done anything this week other than go to work, work on a 1,000-piece photomosaic puzzle that I'm going to frame and give to Dad for father's day, and draw. It has been years since I seriously tried to sketch anything. I think maybe the last time was when I was living in D. C. and drawing dolphins and whales because I needed a creative outlet but had lost my language. That's a little scary, because drawing then was my lifeline out of depression. I'm not depressed now, but I think the drawing is telling me that I'm really stressed and not ready to resume my life at the same stress level at which I left it two weeks ago. In any event, Hans had never seen me draw before, and we've been together twelve years now. I sketched a portrait of Wentworth Miller from an old TV Guide I dug out of the (overflowing) recycling bin. He has such an interesting mix of features with a wide nose and thin lips and great angles and shadows. It was the first portrait of a real person I've ever done. Way back, I used to try to follow directions in art books to reproduce drawings of faces that someone else had done, but I have never worked from a photograph or a live model. I surprised myself, and I got so much pleasure from the act of sitting there with a pencil! I returned to it over and over again in my mind yesterday while I was at work, still feeling the satisfaction of having drawn. I really surprised Hans. He had heard me refer to the fact that artistic talent runs in my family, but I don't think he believed I had any. He actually said, "I'm really impressed." I can't remember the last time Hans said I had impressed him. When I had done all I could with that piece, I started sketching a baby elephant that I still need to finish. I'm doing a full body sketch now, and I've lost interest in it. It just occurred to me that maybe I need to do a close-up on the face only. That might hold more interest for me. The new drawings are in an old sketchbook that I've had since I was about twelve. It still contains two drawings Ken did when he was visiting me in Farmington Hills when we were dating. One is a profile of a woman from one of my art books, and the other is of Hobbs, the tiger from the Calvin and Hobbs comic strip. The book was full, but Hans suggested that I could draw on the back of an already used page. It was a good idea. There was something comforting about adding these drawings at the age of 37 to drawings from when I was twelve, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-two.

In any event, there is much to do around the house and in my professional-but-not-work-related life, and it is time to come out of hiding. Time to get busy.

So today I took a step I've been considering for a year now, and finally made an appointment with a therapist to begin working on my eating disorder. I know that my life won't be what I need and want it to be until I get my body issues handled. And, I know that facing my body issues means finally growing up and becoming a responsible adult who takes care of herself. I can't fix my life without fixing my body, and I can't fix my body without fixing my life. Both require fixing my thinking and the actions that flow from my thoughts. In some ways I am feeling stronger than I ever have, more confident, more talented, more hopeful - ready to take on the world. But, in some ways, I feel just about as broken as I ever have. There are some basic mechanisms related to how I care for myself that are simply not functioning the way they should, and the hopeful, confident me is not going to move forward until I fix what's broken.

Now the work begins. Luckily, I'm in a place in my creative life where my skills are strong enough for me to be able to derive inspiration and productive satisfaction from the difficulty that is on the horizon. There are two books about to be born - one fiction, one non-fiction - and until I get to work on the real life issues, the writing can't happen.

Incensed by Incendiary Attack
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Daily Eruptions
In Florida, a 19 year-old woman set a snake on fire and the police failed to charge her with animal cruelty. The snake apparently "got away," but does that mean it merely managed to escape to someplace else before it died? The news report does not identify what kind of snake the woman confronted so there is no way to know whether she truly was in any danger from it, nor does it state whether she attempted to scare the snake off of her porch before she torched it - and her vinyl siding. Her first response, to call her apartment management company, was a good one, but people have to learn that they cannot simply kill animals because they look scary or dangerous. As we continue to destroy animal habitat at an alarming pace, encounters with wild animals are going to increase, and we need to educate ourselves in appropriate and humane ways of dealing with these encounters.