Procrastination Nation

I ran into a problem where I had many things to do last night (like feed myself and wash dishes) but I had no desire to go do them. So instead I sat on the internet writing blogs and used pillows to turn myself into a clam:

Finally I got around to doing one of the things I was supposed to do just as Aaron got back from class. I confessed my absolute inability to pull myself away from doing things that were fun to do things that weren't and then continued to procrastinate about feeding myself for an additional two hours. Until I got so hungry I finally caved and made a sandwich.

Normally Aaron masterfully crafts for us a delicious homemade dinner. Artichoke heart lasagna, herb baked chicken with seasoned potato wedges, breaded pork chops with mashed potatoes and caramelized onions, butternut squash gnocchi, seared Ahi with rice and peas, spaghetti with garlic bread, etc., etc. Even 'quick' meals are far from shabby. Pot-stickers with rice and sugar snap peas, Porkbuns, and fish tacos come to mind. Aaron is an amazing cook.

Then there is me. I could burn a boiling pot of water. Somehow. So when Aaron has class in the evening and I have to feed myself one of four things happens. Corndogs, pizza rolls, a sandwich, or mac n' cheese. Two of those involve using the oven. One of those involves the stove. So what usually happens is that I eat a lot of sandwiches. For instance on Wednesday night I had a peanut butter and jam sandwich. On Thursday night I had a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Luckily I freaking love sandwiches. Especially if they contain honey or jam.

But now that means I have to do all of those things I was supposed to do yesterday, today -- and feed myself breakfast. Aaron made coffee before leaving for class though, so at least I can zip around coffee in one hand cleaning with the other.

Concerning Last Night

Dear Stomach,

Why did you wake me up at 3:36 AM for no reason? To my knowledge I did nothing to upset you. Your heartburn came without warning and interrupted a really cool dream I was having, just so you know. To make matters worse, you kept me awake until 4:00 AM. This is unacceptable considering I wake up at 7:00 AM. If you could please just tell me what I did to make you angry, I promise not to do it again. I'm sorry!

Sincerely,
Inari

_______________________________________________________________________


Dear Tums,

Thank you for being not only tasty but also magnificently effective at solving interpersonal disputes with my stomach. I don't understand that guy or why he gets so angry all the time over seemingly nothing -- but you always step in and calm him down. You're a real life saver.

Thanks again,
Inari

P.S. Please don't tell him I said that he gets angry over practically nothing. It would make him angry.

September 11, 2001

Ten years ago today I was getting ready for a doctor's appointment. They were going to pay me for being a medical experiment; also known as a participant in a clinical trial. I was excited about it and had woken up early. Perhaps through this research doctors would find a way to help people like me all around the world.

Just as I was about to hop into the shower my mother called and told me not to bother. She told me to turn on the TV instead. I vividly remember being obstinate about it. To the point where she had to proclaim, "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!" for me to finally obey. In all honesty I figured she was just having a mom-like over reaction to something minor.

Disgruntled by the vague yet insistent phone conversation, I grabbed the remote and flipped on the TV. I recall asking her what channel she wanted me to go to before realizing it didn't matter. The action movie I thought was on TV was real life. I had managed to turn it on right as the second plane struck. My brain couldn't put two and two together fast enough. My confusion exited my body in the form of, "Wait... what?"

I don't even remember sitting down on the sofa, I think it was an automatic natural reaction to what I was witnessing. I didn't move from that spot for hours, though it seemed like seconds. I didn't know what else to do with myself.

Immediately all of the nearby major cities went into lock down. This meant all of my loved ones were stuck at work or school unable to go home. Phone lines became sketchy at best from the sudden traffic overload making it hard for the people stranded at work or school to call their families to let them know they were okay. All of this was followed by a media black hole of shock and awe footage for 48 hours before anything actually relevant was disclosed.

I, like many others, had friends or family in all three affected locations and no way to reach them. It would be hours before cities would finally let people come or go. It would be days before the media would start releasing names. Names of both those who survived as well as those who did not. Until then it was little more than a 24/7 news reel that showed us nothing but the same few clips of planes crashing and the chaos left behind, over and over again. As if we needed the point driven home further.

It took us a matter of days to determine that my aunt, who worked in the Pentagon, was in fact a missing person. Weeks would become months before they had finally retrieved all of the bodies from the rubble. Some miraculously clinging to life, others who had died on impact. My aunt's funeral would be closed-casket. Not because what was inside was simply too unbearable to look upon, but because the casket was empty. Her body had never been found.

People who lost someone that day do not need a day of the year to remember. They remember every day. Every time they notice the empty place setting at the dinner table. Every time they look through the collection of family photos. Every holiday thereafter that that sole person wasn't there for. They're reminded constantly. The hype surrounding this day of the year, particularly as thrown-in-your-face as the media makes it, is disrespectful. We know. Everyone knows. They do not need to remind us. We do not need to see the burning buildings and screaming masses trying to flee to remember.

The media treats it like an excuse to collect ad revenue and more coverage time. Politicians treat it as an excuse to be reelected while simultaneously refusing to render government aid to first-responders from that day. Companies use it as an excuse to sell you 9/11 related trinkets. It is absurd and it is insulting. A national tragedy should never be used as an excuse to make money or push your own agenda. It is a day of remembrance. It should be treated as such.

Fly your flags at half mast. Say a prayer if that's your thing. Write about it sincerely. Observe a moment of silence. Light candles. Visit the graves of those you've lost. But for the love of humanity, do not buy any 9/11 memorabilia, do not tune in to the 24 hour news feeds, and definitely do not cast votes for any politician using the event as a crutch for actual politics -- especially if they voted against helping 9/11 first responders (even if they later changed their mind).

I Hate Septembers

Every year about mid-August I start to experience anxiety over the fact that September is fast approaching. I do my best to stomach the feeling and not let it be known, but it is there, gnawing at me from the inside. You have to understand something to understand this at all: almost every bad thing that I have ever gone through has happened in the month of September. So much so that this time of year, every year, I just start waiting for something devastating to happen to me.

"That's extremely unlikely," you're probably thinking, but it is really not. So where do we begin? How about the first thing I can think of, once I was old enough to know what month it was.

When I was probably about 7 or 8, my mother was diagnosed with Leukemia. School had just started back up again. It was the first few weeks of September. To make matters worse, the man she was married to at the time was such a supreme asshole that while she was in the hospital for treatment, he told us she was going to die. I had no idea what to do with this information. I was 7, my mom was supposed to be with me until I could take care of myself! Luckily she did not die and has been healthy since, but I will never forget that September.

The next thing I can think of was when I had my first boyfriend over summer break. I couldn't have been older than 11 or so and I wanted to be his girlfriend solely because he was a good friend and I wanted to hang out more often. It was never about holding hands or kissing, for me. In that regard boys were still undeniably icky. He however was a troubled child, and he did want those things. Things I was nowhere near ready for.

So when he tried to make me kiss him one too many times, I broke up with him. In September, right before 7th grade started. Under normal 6th grader circumstances, that would mean he goes home now and I go play on my SNES. What actually happened was that he tried to physically attack me and I had to run into my house and lock the doors. Fighting to close them as he tried forcibly to get inside. I did not have the foresight to shut any of the windows however.

Thirty minutes or so passed and while I knew he was still outside, I was safe behind my locked doors. While out there seething in his crazy rage, he turned on the hose and began dousing the insides of our home with water. This ruined several pieces of furniture and destroyed our IBM. I ran around the house desperately closing and locking windows, trying to save what little I could. Afterward I called my mom at work, still panting and frantic. She came home immediately and the boy fled in fear of her wrath.

Her fury was not sated by his departure though, and she called his mother threatening to sue for damages done to our property. This got the boy in all manner of trouble he never saw coming and to get back at me he did something unthinkable. As if being physically attacked and having thousands of dollars worth of damage done to our belongings was not enough, he drown my cat. To get back at me. Anyone who knew me knew that cat (despite a plethora of human friends) was my best friend. This is probably why I didn't date again until I was 17.

Not long after, while I was auditioning for a part in Donny And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, opening in Detroit, my dog died unexpectedly from bone cancer. I had never known life without that dog, she was adopted into our family the year I was born. The sudden lack of her constant presence was crushing. I had no idea how to cope with two tragedies so soon and came to the epiphany that anyone I know and love could be gone at any moment. I spent the next few years expecting everyone I knew to die. Little did I know the situation would actually be opposite. Everyone else would be fine and I would almost die.

Just before 8th grade I would contract a super rare virus while at the zoo that attacks the liver and spleen. While I contracted the virus sometime in late August, I would not actually become violently ill until September. I was rushed to the hospital for an emergency surgery to remove my spleen but upon arrival the ultrasound revealed that the swollen organ was actually my liver. I spent weeks in the hospital as it attempted to fail and kill me several times. I would not make a full recovery until my 8th grade school year was nearly complete. Thankfully the school was understanding and allowed me to finish the school year and not hold me back. My liver now only functions at 70%.

I had reprieve a few consecutive Septembers after that until in my sophomore year of high school I unwittingly, by being kind to someone, gained a stalker. At first I hung out with him despite his obvious OCD, because he had no one else to hang out with and I felt bad. He wanted more than friendship though and after trying to coerce me into situations I was uncomfortable with I told him we couldn't be friends anymore. He lived a town away and I figured he'd just move on and forget all about me but that isn't what happened and given previous experiences I'm not sure why I thought he would be reasonable.

He began stalking me, hanging around outside of my high school so that he could intercept me before I got on the bus. If I snuck out the back and got a ride with another student he would be waiting on my front porch when I got home. If I managed to get inside before he got there or before he could stop me, he would sit on the porch for hours, pounding on the door yelling about how he knew I was in there. When he was actually at home he would call our house relentlessly. When we wouldn't answer he would leave crazy 30+ minute long answering machine messages. To the point of 9 or 10 per day. When I was at a friend's house, he would take pictures of me through the windows then email them to me to ask if I was having fun at that specific moment.

Freaking bat shit insane.

Eventually we moved and had our number changed and stricken from all public records. The police issued a restraining order, just in case. After receiving a police escort away from our driveway one afternoon, he finally gave up and we could all move on with our lives. I have no idea what became of him, but I'm guessing prison. It was really only a matter of time before he latched on to some other poor girl and who knows how that turned out?

Things settled down for another year until the next September when one of my long-term and very close friends committed suicide. To make it worse, even after not seeing him for a couple of years I was officially addressed in his suicide note. Unbeknown to me, I was not only his best friend, but apparently his only friend. For months afterward his parents would call and drive all the way down to see me, not wanting to let go of what little they felt they had left of their son. While it was helpful to them, it wasn't helpful for me, because every time they showed up it was like tearing off a scab and reopening the wound anew. Eventually my mother had to intervene and ask them not to drop by anymore. While undoubtedly hurt, they at least understood why.

The next year, on September 11th, a plane would crash into the Pentagon and kill my aunt. Her body would never be recovered. In her grave lies an empty casket.

A few days later I would be robbed in my own backyard at knife-point. By a stranger. The only reason the police suspect that I was not stabbed, is because my brother pulled into the driveway and went into the house, scaring the attacker off. My assailant would never be found. No longer feeling safe at home, we'd uproot our lives once again and move.

It was four years ago this Wednesday that I received the news that a friend of mine, a boy I've known for over ten years, was killed in action in Iraq. On his birthday, no less. He had never even gotten to legally buy his own alcohol and he died serving his country.

Now, this isn't a, "look how crappy and tragic my life has been," blog where I get to mope and wallow in self pity. My life, on average, is actually pretty great. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the whole wide world. It's just when it comes to September, I would really rather sleep through if it were possible and I feel obligated to make you understand why. Since it's not possible to hibernate for a month, I just suffer through it on the verge of a panic attack until October. Which may inevitably be why October is my favorite month out of the year -- it puts September behind me and I can relax again.

I've never confessed any of this to anyone and I'm kind of nervous to do so. As if letting it out will somehow cause a bad event to take place... but at the same time letting it out is also kind of a relief. Like I can just be anxious now whether you know it or not, I don't have to hide from it.

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Have you ever been such good friends with someone that you find yourselves knowingly finishing one another's sentences; since you can accurately predict what it was they were going to say and it's all very surreal and reassuring because it makes you feel loved and understood? This is actually nothing like that.

Google has recently decided to start guessing what I'm going to search for. Its guesses are based on no clear pattern I can identify. It certainly is not using previous search inquiries or things I like, such as octopodes or tulips or robots. With every letter I input it just randomly starts adding letters of its own. Sometimes even whole sentence fragments. Like a terrible game of charades or hang-man or some other game based completely on guessing at random (Wheel of Fortune, I'm looking at you).

This makes even the simplest of searches unnecessarily complicated as I spazz out in a desperate attempt to backspace so that my completely innocent intent to look up, "manatees bumping into things," (you're welcome) doesn't spiral out of control into a search for, "man eats himself one bite at a time." Or something equally unrelated and probably bad.

I know there are settings I can go into to turn this feature off, but here's the problem: it never stays off. It turns itself back on out of the blue all of the time. Not simply if I restart or close the tab or crash my browser. No. All the time. I can turn it off as I'm searching and it will turn back on as soon as I begin to type again. Just to %#@& with me.

This is what happened to me earlier today when Aaron asked me if I would mind if he turned my corpse into a diamond if I died first (the answer was no, I don't mind). Then out of curiosity I wanted to find out how big of a diamond a human body could make. Bigger than a breadbox? I don't god damned know because Google hijacked my search and I looked up this instead:
.

What the hell?

How many women die in childbirth carbon? That doesn't even make sense! What makes even less sense is that two of the returned results are purple, suggesting that I have been to them before. Apparently on the 31st of last month. But I haven't. I'm not even sure how one would come up with the idea of looking up, "how many women die in childbirth carbon" all on their own, had Google not forced it upon them. The only logical conclusion is that Google is an emergent A.I. and we aren't long for this world.

Furthermore, those statistics are kind of frightening. A woman dies in childbirth every minute? FFS, we can clone eachother and walk around on the moon, why are we still dying having babies?

P.S. I do not live in North Highlands, CA. I do not know why Google thinks I do.

P.P.S. Seems like the max size for a human-diamond is 1.5ct.

Friendly Reminder About Being Human

Everyone knows that being the moderator of a website is a thankless job. In fact, it's often the opposite of thankful. Forum denizens are caustic assholes, more often than not, and the fact that you have the audacity to make them adhere to any sort of rules which prevent them from being just that makes them angry. When it's for a gaming website, the potential for nerd rage grows exponentially.

I'd say, compared to my peers, I get relatively few hate mails about my modding. That said, I also don't get many love mails either. My inbox is often filled with random people posturing to try to get on my good side, a few honestly friendly individuals, and the rest are all people confused about something or another.

This is why I rarely bring it up. Everyone knows that the internet is like The Crow; where there are 3 or 4 good guys and everyone else is for some reason a malicious sadist if they aren't completely oblivious. The bad guys are numerous but they aren't actually evil, they're just assholes.

When I post on the forum I moderate, I act like any other user. Despite that I can lock your thread, or have you banned. Why? Well, because even though I can do those things when needed, I am just another member of the community. And since it's my duty to at least have a look into every thread posted, every now and then I encounter someone who could really, truly use my help.

I say that loosely. They could use anyone's help, certainly. But getting sincere help from another human on the internet isn't easy to do. Most people will either jokingly tell you to kill yourself or regurgitate memes until their fingertips are raw. No one likes to acknowledge, for one reason or another, that the people they're talking to online are actual people. People with lives that may or may not be crappier than their own.

This is why no matter how unlikely the case may be when it presents itself, I always, always respond constructively. You know, actually try to help someone in need. Whether it may just be a cry for attention or not. People cry out for attention for a reason afterall. After losing a friend to suicide, I can say with all certainty that they won't always seek help from someone they know face-to-face.

It's to that end I bring you this story. Some time ago, a member of the GT community came to me seeking advice. Their life was in a bad place at the time and they didn't know what to do. I offered them advice, as I would anyone else seeking it, and proceeded to corresponded with them a few times over the next couple of weeks. When things seemed alright, I walked away and almost had forgotten all about it. Even knowing what I know about anonymity and an audience, I didn't consider what I did anything out of the ordinary.

Today, after having not logged on in over 3 months (RL gets in the way of moderating sometimes), I had a message in my inbox. The name wasn't immediately familiar. When I opened it, I was shocked. But in a good way. I'd apparently done more than I even knew, and I wasn't even aware of the magnitude of their situation. I was just doing something unheard of on the internet: being nice.

Holy Potatoes! Did You Hear That?

As someone who hears on average, less than 30% of the sounds one normally hears in their day, I am often startled by hearing something I didn't think I'd be able to. Which makes me look like a weirdo to onlookers who either do not know I'm deaf to begin with, or for some reason believe that hearing aids cure deafness. They do in fact not cure deafness. I'm not sure why people seem to think they do, but they do not. Just had to take a moment of time to clear that up for everyone.

My hearing aid improves my environmental awareness, certainly,  and I hear a lot more than I otherwise would without it, but I still do not hear everything. Without my hearing aid I'd say I can faintly hear about 5% of the sounds one normally hears in their day. With it I hear about +25% more sounds, granted some of them are still indecipherable. It more or less gives me a greater sense of where a sound may be coming from. Making it less likely I will get hit by a car... or a train.

So when I am walking along and suddenly an eagle cries out from above me (something you don't hear often to begin with), I may jump -- startled. Not because I have a strange fear of eagles but because I had not anticipated the sound. Even if I see something I know will make a sound should I step on it (crunchy leaf), or bump into it (tall hedges), or even simply pass it by (unruly dog), I'm still startled when it makes a sound and I hear it. Because I am used to the world being a very quiet place.

So this morning, when I bumped a paper bag which had fallen under my desk with my foot and it made a sound, I recoiled in fear. Not because paper bags are terrifying but because first of all, I didn't even know it was down there and second of all I rarely ever hear paper make a sound anymore. Which had to look funny and/or retarded because Aaron was like, "What the hell?" and giving me a weird look. Then I had to explain to him what had happened and why it had happened, even though I'm pretty sure he understands, just to placate my own mind about why I overreacted to a paper bag.

This gave me the idea to just explain it to everyone simultaneously, so that I do not feel obligated to explain it to you when it undoubtedly happens again at some point in your presence. I am not scared of mundane objects. I promise!