Admittedly it's only a few hours since I discovered her, but I'm still wrapped up in this sledgehammer of depression.  I live my life centered around...what?  The internet?  My god.  This is why I usually drink when I'm depressed, but i don't have my car yet and thus can't go buy liquor.  I went and looked at it today in the shop where it's being fixed, and it looked fine. I'm supposed to get it back in a few days, it's been a few days for about a week now, and MAMA WANTS A DRINK.

I'm not sure why I self-reference as mama.  Mama who?  My rat babies are dead.

Drinking vodka like it's water, which should contextualize the otherwise vomit of bitter events of the last few days.  Actually, not all bitter and not all to be defamed.  First up. My car got stolen from outside a friend's house, and I've been crying on my dear girlfriend's shoulder and worried I may never drive LA's fair freeways again.  It really struck home when I couldn't leave the house to get a bottle, as we live all the way up on a hill, and I felt like such a teenage loser, or a mentally disabled adult in depends, unable to get my whiskey fix.

I pull the ring off. It itches.  I pull it on again.  I am in love.

Again and again there have been these moments that make me wish I wrote my blog entries in amicable word documents, only released when they were perfect.  No, this flies out raw from the vodka maw, which is to say, unusable and likely embarassing.

But ANYWAY.  I was turned away from the reading at Beyond Baroque this weekend as neither I nor my cohorts had the $5 necessary for entry.  We had driven miles out to Venice, in Stephen's car, I had parked my car at his house, from whence it was to be robbed.  I was so full of anticipation - Christine Wertheim puts on an amazing show! But alas, there was a cover.  I was overdrawn at the time, my finances are never good and often truly humiliating for a woman of 33.  I'm not exactly a functional adult if you hadn't guessed that yet.  The Disability check comes and it goes to rent, bills, vodka, and  that's about it, maybe a drugstore eyeliner if I'm feeling especially plush.  I did get my food stamp card today.

But anyway.  My feeling at the time was that I had too much dignity to spell out my long sad sob story to the long-haired teens at the register, I couldn't and wouldn't sneak in, and so Katie and Stephen and I made our way out and to a party in Orange County.

Oh blog.  Oh coffee.  Oh Tuesday.  I am finally pulling out of a deep depression, which is why I haven't been writing.  There is something obscenely whiny about writing about depression while depressed, it makes me squirm with its raw desperation.  Claw claw out of bed.  It was a matter of getting the car tire, the ativan, the food stamps, all straightened out.  Today I am feeling victorious as those things are done.  I can move forwards.

So many readings happen that I want to go to, and so many things come up that get in the way.  I have a policy that I won't go out when Katie is depressed and needs me, even if she is asleep.  I don't want to abandon her and gallavant around.  The Collaborations reading looked super-swell, and I'm right next to downtown now...but...didn't make it.

The treehouse has a certain cozy enclosure.  When I am here it is hard for me to leave. We are bracketed by Alvarado with its traffic bottleneck, and the lake.  Unlike Waco, the cottage so small that I was always pulling outwards, to silverlake sunset for coffee and window shopping, now I've been slow to explore.

Sitting in downbeat cafe, Katie and I decided to draw each others' former selves.

 

Katie envisioned mid-nineties me.

I went for general cuteness.

This post is brought to you by margaritas, thanks to Myke.  I am trying an experiment in, well, not drunkblogging, but tipsyblogging.  Katie is finishing up her homework, and I am bemoaning the fact that the Washington Blvd Concert blog seems to have been eaten by spam and shut down by the blogger gods.  While this is perhaps a tempest in an innertubes teapot, the concert long-over, it just seems a pity that all of that interesting documentation is erased.

The negative factors currently at play

1. I have a flat tire
2. I really can't put off the food stamp office any longer
3. I have to make an appointment at the free clinic to find out if I have face cancer.  wheee!!!
4. My grandmother told me she didn't approve of gay marriage....I'm engaged to a lady.

The positive factors:

1.  Katie is amazingly beautiful
2. Vanessa Place reviewed the poetic duo in The Constant Critic
3.  Hot glue-gunned myself some new typewriter-key earrings
4. Omar is back from London
5. Disability check arrives tomorrow
6. Don't have to do taxes this year

And the other most up and down factor is that I seem to have put on quite a few extra pounds in the last few months.  I'm considering going back on wellbutrin (as opposed to lexapro, my current anti-depressant), as it made me super-thin.  Curses to these beauty standards and all that, but, really, I can't help remembering little cocaine-addled size zero me, and considering that I'm now a size 12.  I would like a healthy avenue to being somewhere in between there.

Fun and good will.  Today we went to the animal shelter and looked for a bunny, "giblets" will be his name. We had a moment of femme-femme mall girldom and cruised the makeup counter, where I managed to trade 6 empty MAC containers for a free lipstick.  Nifty little program, that.

Various hi-jinx:

Here we have, Katie at Disneyland, Ama's birthday blacklight mini-golf, and Fag Football drag show at Akbar.

But, okay, back to the MAC thing.  I used to be obsessed with their makeup, obsessed, I say.  Obsessed the way Katie is obsessed with Degrassi Jr. High.  The fact that I've been through the "Give back to MAC" trade-in thing twice will profess to this.  However, this magical thing happened called the recession, and called me getting older and going on disability and having substantially less disposable income to throw around on things like $16 eyebrow pencils, and I downgraded.

And really, it was fine.  Not as painful as I would have thought.  Here I used to spend my the last $15 from my unemployment check on eyebrow waxes, and now I am pretty happy with drugstore makeup.  Beautiful shimmers, irridescence and glitzy packaging, well...it's all fine and dandy until someone loses an eye and I end up at the free clinic for a potentially cancerous melanoma.

Oooooo, segue.  Yes, there is a blot on my face MY FACE.  And it could be C-A-N-C-E-R.  So today I traded in the six empty compacts I had been carrying around for months for a matte red.

Is that fourth-wave feminism?  It's not that bullshit ribbon pink.  If it is cancer, which I don't know if the Hollywood free clinic will be able to ascertain, I am probably going to find something stronger that tinted whale blubber and probably involving high octane grain alcohol.

I am so very sad. Waco, our compound, is breaking up.  It is a beautiful house, with a nifty back house, and we have lived here only six months. K and I were so sweetly settled in this little house, it felt like a home, more than anything.

I am not looking forward to moving, not the expense, the work, the finding of a new place, not one bit of it.

I have decided that it might be wiser to stop looking for the cameras all the time.

All of this anxious paranoia came to a head on Saturday, after a really lovely week of perhaps-manic partying and the like:

Monday: Bunny funeral, sadness and vodka.
Tuesday: Stephen and I went to wildness, met some nice people and danced, it ended up surprisingly fun.
Wednesday: Cozy times with Katie
Thursday: Alex Castle came over, and he, Stephen, Katie and I drank and played the ungame.  At some point I put on the romper and romped.
Friday: Woke up with a nasty cold sore, but then Jonathan came to visit, we hung out with him and Rob and Stephen, did tarot readings, ate pupusas, had a lovely day into the evening, when Stephen's friend Mario came over and we all did interpretive dancing in the kitchen.

Whew.  I am not usually quite this social.  Problem is, somewhere along this lovely trail of amusing funtimes, I ran out of ativan/lorazepam.  Took the last one on Friday, and work up Saturday with an ungodly case of the withdrawals.

So, no make-up, just a bloody pusing cold sore (lovely!). I work up early after a restless sleep, rife with nightmares of voices outside, the police stalking me, my creditors investigating me, my parents, even, whom I know are way too busy to stand outside my bedroom window.

I woke up around six and decided a booster shot of espresso was necessary.  Had four shots from the machine, then read the wikipedia article on surveillance.  This is probably the worst thing I could have done.  I had taken my usual pillsies that morning (abilify, lamictal, lexapro, but no ativan) and read a little bit of The Peep Diaries, so by that point my paranoid psychosis was in full swing.  Armed with Katie's big black hoodie and peering anxiously out of the curtain, I decided that there must be someone out there watching me.

Looking for the camera, looking for the camera.

And then...the withdrawals began to escalate.  I had chills, shaking, shaking so hard I thought I was heading into another seizure.  Voices whispering watching.  I kept throwing up first coffee, then bile, then water, then mucous, more bile, forget eating anything today.

Katie woke up and we decided I should go to the ER.  This is the sort of decision I had been fearing for along time, because I fear being locked up in the psych ward again, of course, and I'm not so keen on the huge bills.
But, ativan withdrawals can be fatal, and I knew my immune system was way down.

The hospital ended up being not that bad, not at all as bad as I had anticipated and feared.  There was no one else in the Emergency Room except for an old couple and a young women crying hysterically into a salad bowl.  I got in fairly quickly, and after telling my story several times, showing them my prescription bottles and
talking to a social worker who thought the cold sore indicated domestic abuse....soon I was sitting there on the stretcher with a pill of subcutanious ativan dissolving under my tongue.

All the jitters and the voices and the seizure-fear shaking gushed into a warm pile of loopy-loos.  I felt normal again.  I felt happy and silly and calm.  Soon Katie and I were joking about what the devices on the wall must be for, and all was well.

So after that experience, I've decided I must be more careful, both with allocating my prescriptions (I have a pill wheel), and with doing things that aggravate my anxiety.  The night after getting out of the hospital, I watched Lawrence Welk with Katie and Stephen, and drank chicken broth and popsicles.  Slept for the entire next day and night after that.

Now it's Monday, and time to think and work again, if I can.  I'm on my third cup of coffee, and it must stop here, I think, no more caffeine.  Katie-dear is still sleeping.  I have been thinking about what I can do to not feed the paranoid anxiety, and that means:

• not going to things like the Psychiatry Museum of Death
• not researching surveillance and especially not on dubious internet sources
• not rereading The Peep Diaries, as much as I would like to
• taking one mg in the morning and one at night, as opposed to both in the am.
• Stop looking for the cameras.  Sure, they're there, there were several in the ER, even in the room I was in, but it just validates the paranoia to keep spotting them.
  

poverty is not a moral failing.

I am trying to tell myself this.

My phone is about to be shut off, and I am about to default on my student loans.

I just saw Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A love story."

Very thought-provoking.  Perhaps a little heavy handed, but, really, as the film wore on I was shocked by how calculated the whole financial apparatus was.  Citibank owns my student loans.  My minimum payment is something to the tune of $4,000.  That's really interesting.

Anyway. I probably shouldn't whine about my financial woes on the internet, I suppose that's tacky.  I am lucky enough to have a roof over my head and all that.  I can't say I was ever a capitalist, but by this point, I'm definitely a socialist.

So, yesterday was my birthday.  Today is the party.  I awoke at 8:30 this morning, as I tend to do, I'm not sure why.  There is a knot of anxiety in my stomach - I hope it's fun, I hope people come.  It should be small, yet cute.

The anxiety is also due to stress about money, my former roommate is refusing to pay her share of the bills, so I have collections agencies calling me, and of course the student loan peeps.  My social security check is going to be late this month, and the motherfuckers at Wells Fargo won't let me advance any of it.  So I'm in the minus for however long, probably until the 14th.

This is what I hate - sanctimonious bank clerks who act as if it's my moral failing that I'm overdrawn.  You try living off of a disability check and see how well you fare.  For some reason the female ones tend to take a more bitchy-self-righteous attitude.  Did anyone see Drag Me to Hell?  A blonde self-righteous bank clerk wrongs the wrong gypsy.  It was soooo satisfying.

I even looked into monetizing the blog, but then - realized I wouldn't make any real money at that.

Someone, I believe it was Stephen's dad, said something about banks robbing the customers.

Anyway, rant over.

Today has certainly been a day.

First up: therapy. all seems well.

Then I went home and found that the air conditioner was broken, and it was 90 degrees in the dear little back house.  The rats were lying there panting out their little ratty lives, and it was a panicky inferno.

Walked to the end of the block...considered buying a bottle.  Walked back and worked in the front house.

Then...I discovered that my external hard drive, with all of my information, since I recently switched computers, was broken.   All my pictures, all my music, the novel drafts, the bits and pieces for the new one...gone.

At this point vodka seemed inevitable, and it was.

Now it's three in the morning and I'm watching the occasional cockroach, the moths and the ants, by golly, there is so much nature here.  Those cockroaches are incredibly fast.  The rats, luckily, survived the heat wave.

I am considering the possibility that my monitor and/or waffle maker brought the cockroaches from my old apartment.  I'm about to spray a circle of Raid around myself and keep typing.

Anyhow, on the good news end of things, Jet Set Desolate is now available on Amazon.  I'm tremendously happy about that.  The new Lamictal seems to be helping with my depression, and has an intense sedating effect that is rather convenient.  I have trouble sleeping.

Now to the endless to do list.

That felt really good. Really good. I was looking back over this and realized that a few entries ago I was on bliss farm. It's called Ativan. It's a great medication. Every month I run out of it, and the real weight (I can't bring myself to say weight of the world, It's the CalArts talking) I don't know, I crash really badly and hear voices for a bit and get really cranky. This time I accidentally took too many when I was going to my grandmother's funeral, which involved a lot of extended parent time, including a 10 hour car ride with them on the way back home.

Here's a few others for the list, it's really satisfying to complain right now, and I'm awake, so why not. These are more trivial. They are also less obvious. Wow, that's obvious.

1. Blogs with ads all over the sidebars.

2. The fact that my mental health office is so overwhelmed that they have 400 people and two psychiatrists, so I see him for 10 minutes every 2-4 months. During which time he throws pills at me (thanks!!!) and is notably absent if they backfire.

3. The fact that I'm so overwhelmed by living (and the clutter in my apartment, which is getting really gross) and a number of other things that it's immobilizing, and instead I pop pills and complain.

4. Lights going out in my apartment. Wow, it's darker. And I wonder why I can't/don't read books anymore and instead read internettery obsessively.

5. I was thinking about all of this overwhelmed feeling, my difficulty with cleaning or sometimes leaving my apartment, and traced some of it back to my parent's impossibly high expectations of me. From youth through high school, I excelled, gifted program, lala, straight As, won awards, driven, all that, blew it out early, and then I went to college and had a nervous breakdown. All that schizophrenia and bipolar in the family, that has popped up all over since, came bursting out. Now, a decade later, I've actually accomplished some of the big things I wanted to do, but somehow for them it's not enough.

My father's father (schizophrenic) used to sit him on his knee and say, "don't end up like me, get an education, get ahead in life." And so he'll sit down and check off how many children of our generation have doctorates. It was his big dream to have his daughters get married, have kids, get PhDs, have great jobs, etc.. etc...

Well, I'm never going to do those things. There would be absolutely no point to me getting in more student loan debt. I'm fundamentally unemployable. I don't play well in groups. The economy is in free-fall. I barely made it through my masters. I'm done.

Anyway, he projects onto me his wishes and expectations for the life he wanted me to have, and he's a good and kind man and all that, but...it's so unrealistic. My mother, too, she's great, but she has this whole idea for how I was supposed to turn out, and I didn't. And they love reminding me of how I'm failing.

Anyway, Ativan is great. It really helped me get through that car ride. Thinking about my parents expectations is really depressing. I should probably save it for therapy. But wait...I'm not in therapy.

For some reason I've had a lot of trouble getting myself to sit down and write. Anything. To the point that I feel ridiculous calling myself a writer. It feels so pretentious, really, but it's a nicer catch-all identity than eccentric deadbeat who has given up on life and needs a kick in the ass to... to... do any number of things. Finally today I sat down and made a list of things that had been bothering me that felt so obvious they were not recognizable to someone.

WTF???

1. Obviously...Scientology is a creepy cult! I went walking in Hollywood today, and, like anywhere else in LA, there was a giant, ridiculously opulent Scientology building.

2. O...hai, i'z in yr list.

3. Obviously...private student loans, I'm the wrong person to prop up your collapsing economy, I have a degenerative brain disorder. I'm mentally ill. I don't know where that money is going to come from. This one because I realize now that it's become my hobby, getting mouthy and overly personal with student loan people, namely those that call about the ridiculously desperate private loan I took out to go to CalArts. The federal people, bless-em, have this wonderful ability to defer endlessly, but this bank...wow, you only have a year's deferment...wow, I have to fill out a form that explains how it's all going to change in a year...I owe you ungodly thousands of dollars...DEGENERATIVE BRAIN DISORDER!!! It makes me feel like one of those lonely elderly people that get all excited when someone calls them, and then get all chatty with the telemarketers. It's in fact, very much the same. But, in a sense, I don't know what else to say. This brings up all these issues of making bipolar disorder my identity...my mother would say "leaning on it." But, then again, I'm on disability, I'm living on a very tight budget right now, and, really, I feel amazingly lucky that I still have my apartment, I will live on crackers to keep it, but, WTF CITIBANK???

Oh, by the way, thanks for the amazing education. I now plan to sit on it and let my brain turn to slush.

4. Obviously...website + rats (does not equal) small business. It used to be amusing when I got these sales calls. It's not anymore. No, I don't want to promote my small business. No, my employees don't need anything. They eat birdseed. Okay.

5. Obviously...guy that chased us off that mall-ish courtyard by the Kodak theatre today. No, I'm not impressed by you sticking your face in the fountain. Please stop chasing me. This sort of shenanigans makes me so glad that I'm the sort of orderly mentally ill person that does not harass strangers on the street. Take away my funding and the vault of pills...might get there. I love making idle threats to the internet.

6. Obviously...Seagrams has all the gross vodka flavors. Wild grape? Espresso? (this is sort of like caffeinated Cisco...danger) Blackberry? Is Nyquil far behind? Did you play tennis with the guy from Smirnoff and lose?

7. Obviously...Tegretol is not helpful. I'm not making foolish manic decisions, but it's yet another Faustian bargain, of taking it before I go to bed and waking up in cold sweats of four foot tall cockroaches chasing me as I vomit sardines and wake up in a sweater dress caked with my own feces, only to wake up again and realize...yes, this happens every time I take it before bed... Or, alternately, taking it in the midafternoon and feeling like I've been lobotomized and being socially retarded for the rest of the evening, only to realize, well, it's an anticonvulsant, so if I go off of it, I'll have seizures. Fantastic.

8. Obviously...cockroach problem is not eliminated.

hysteria...here's an interesting op-ed piece about the US's financial collapse, from the LA Times.

When I got out of grad school, I thought I would be a teacher. I went on SSI. It was the summer of sangria and cards, of serotonin sanitaria sangria schizophrenia. It was the summer I decided my life was over. It was the summer I got a book deal and lost the will to live. It was the summer I got a blue rat baby and regained it.

Summer. I read the philosophy of Andy Warhol every morning and felt blank.

It's another Monday night. A Monday that was a vacation weekend, in which I spent every night alone because I don't have a car and all of the fun parties in L.A. I know about, well, I had no ride and was too proud to ask.

Besides, it doesn't matter, I'm meant to spend my nights alone, anyway. It allows me more time to refine my writing, sewing, self-pity and hatred. I'll just sit here and recall all of my past failed relationships and write about them in my novel: Jet Set Desolate, or, 101 drug stories. Certainly seems like a good use of next semester to me.

So yesterday I went to the dentist and had the most traumatizing visit of my life. I hadn't gone in about five years (don't ask, no health insurance), and so the cleaning was, well, can we say supersonic ultrasonix spike-hooked electrical devices? There was so much blood that the tech had to change her gloves halfway through. And the sight of your own blood is never cool. When they put in that suck-the-saliva device in my mouth, I just kept seeing this rising tube of blood. And it hurt! And then they told me that I was going to have to come back in a couple of days and do it again, and I made up (partially true) an excuse about going back to school immanently.

I don't know if there's ever a pleasant way to go to the dentist. But this was brutal. I think it's going to be another five years. And no, I think I'll just hold off on kissing anyone until 2012.

Portland, I miss you!

Two days after valentine's day, after the tearless acceptance of office "secret valentine" trinkets had safely passed, I though I had survived. It was the slow and subtle approach, the "wait until she thinks she's in the clear and lets her guard down" approach - that frosting of self-loathing on the good old cupcake of, well cupcakitude.

I don't know, it's a cupcake. When I think of cupcakes I think of snot-faced drooly toddlers smearing said frosting all over themselves. No, I do not like children. No, I did not especially enjoy my childhood, unless I was in complete isolation with a battalion of fairy dolls. They would stage elaborate invasions and torture the barbies, and thus I passed my life until I was able to move away and have sex.

With that said, have you seen those Bratz dolls they have nowadays? Lordy Lordy. When I was a wee tot we had to cut the Barbie's hair into mowhawks ourselves, and stick pins into their foreheads to show the anger of the forest creatures (stuffed animals), yet it was DIY. We were creating the violence in a world of sweetness and light. These Bratz dolls, they are little sluts! They have plaid schoolgirl kilts and thigh-highs and razored bangs, red lipstick, DJ boyfriend dolls with little plastic records and plastic sideburns - they even have a Bratz limosine that they "party" in. That's what it said on the box. I think I know what partying in the back of a limosine entails, and it's not something that you want your eight-year old to be part of.

Well, perhaps its good to give these little demons some idea of what the world is really about. If there are princesses (and there are), they don't cooperate in song and they don't always get what they dream of (although they will cut ahead of you in the elevator). Perhaps little Susie, after hours spent practicing with her DJ Matteo playset, will finally figure out how to get him to stop sleeping with 19-year-olds and...no, it'll never happen. Get yourself some Legos.

Tonight I was going to go to Cafe Bassam and attempt to be approachable through careful wielding of mid-drift and manuscript, but instead I lost my nerve and am home, with some vanilla smirnoff trying to deal. Shyness is an intense propensity - when one has been steeped in it for so long, it becomes harder and harder to go out. It is just so easy to stay here where I am comfortable and safe and can listen to music and write and curl up in my pedicure chair with a down comforter and generally veg.

I mean, really, I work all day, I wake up at 7:30 and go to a non-profit where they pay me nothing and I research customs regulations and why someone lost a package of "The L Word" dvds they were trying to ship to our field office in Honduras. WTF? You can't track the USPS! I don't know what happened to your goddam dvds, I mean, if I'd had the presence of mind to FedEx them this wouldn't have happened, but I'm told to cut corners and be cheap so we can feed more babies in Ethiopia, so I sent it priority mail and they completely vanished off the face of this earth. I'm sorry. Stop calling me about it, I need to get my eyebrows done. And, no, I don't know if the hotel in Malawi has a view.

Anyway. Sorry, work stories are boring. So I'm stressed out, the same as everyone else in this world that hates their job and feels trapped. I applied to a million grad schools (well, 7, it felt interminable) this winter, and hopefully one of them will rescue me and take me off to a place where I just have to produce vivacious text about my sordid life and live in a garret with a twin bed somewhere...

I need to get out of here...

There are so many ways to feel completely horrendous. I have the flu today, I am feeling nauseous, I am...(delves into list of ailments, all too peculiar and disgusting.) So I'm sitting here trying to appear somehow interesting...okay, take a deep breath, that's enough.

Take two. Okay. Water. Water is a good thing. Manicures are a good thing. raindrops on roses and whispers on kittens...