Category Archives: anxiety

The world didn’t end so I guess I have to write more blog posts.

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Well, here we are, so I suppose the world didn’t end.  Again. The most hilarious part to me is that the wing-nuts who make these predictions don’t ever seem all that embarrassed that they continue to be wrong. It’s almost like a lottery drawing, you know?

“Aww, SO CLOSE, only one number away from the End Times! Sorry, Revered Wing-Nut Steve…better luck next time!”

 

Time for another stamp!

Anyway – it’s been a busy week here around HBCIG Headquarters. I guess. I mean, that would explain the sink overflowing with dirty dishes and the living room floor strewn with socks, right?

Actually, that’s pretty much business as usual around here:

Notice the desperation of the stuffed alligator stage left, and the "who, me?" look on the small white demon in the upper right.

You thought I was joking. Look at the dog’s face. He’s like, “This shit is GDFR, folks”.

It HAS been busy, though. Since the world didn’t end on Wednesday, my super awesome husband reserved me a space in a cooking class at our favorite local restaurant. I’ve been to four or five classes there and it’s always interesting. It’s demo-style, so it’s not like Chef is letting us have knives or anything. It’s really more “edu-tainment” than education, but I’ve definitely learned from every class I’ve gone to. Plus, there’s something to be said for spending time in a place where you feel like you belong, and for me, that’s kitchens. And, you know, I’m not ever going to bitch about anywhere that not only actually WANTS me to drink wine, but keeps bringing it to me when my glass mysteriously empties.

Thursday was full of fuckery, plain and simple. There was work fuckery that had me feeling like I embarrassed myself, which is always good fodder for a subsequent round of self-loathing. There was also small appliance fuckery in the form of the crock pot refusing to turn on for me after I had peeled, cored and sliced seven pounds of apples in preparation for making apple butter. In the crock pot. That wouldn’t turn on. After a mild panic about what my options were for dealing with a huge pile of peeled apples at 9pm, (for context: I’m usually in bed by 9, so the idea of trying to fuck around and make pie crust or even wait for the apples to cook down into sauce at 9pm was like, nearly cause for crying. Hormones may have also played a part), and some especially creative and descriptive cursing, the crock pot finally deigned to turn on for me. I loaded that sumbitch with apples, brown sugar and a boatload of spices and was rewarded in the morning with this:

Wow, so brown, much apple.

Wow, so brown, much apple.

It actually didn’t look like that at first – that was after a judicious thrashing with the stick blender. I can’t lie to you – this shit tastes amazing. It’s like the inside of apple pie but without the chunks to get in the way, basically. I had a couple spoonfuls of it mixed into some plain 2% Fage greek yogurt for lunch just now and it was like eating all the non-pastry parts of an apple danish but without all the weird feelings that may or may not bring up…

And, finally and most terrifyingly, Friday I applied for spring semester at my local community college. It’s not that I’m afraid of being rejected – it’s a community college, for fuck’s sake. I don’t think they’re actually ALLOWED to not accept anyone who wants to take classes. No, the terror is more along the lines of, “shit, why am I volunteering to write essays again?!”. I always liked school in that my friends could be found there, there was usually chocolate milk available at some point and music class was pretty awesome, but I could never quite get the hang of writing essays. Funny from someone who likes to write, I know, but notice how most of my posts just ramble on and contain a lot of cursing and made-up words and I don’t usually have a point or the ability to edit myself? Yeah. That approach doesn’t really work for school essays, and that’s…the only approach I have, basically. The upside is, I’ll be studying accounting so hopefully there won’t be too much call for essay writing. I’m also harboring the hope that, since I’ve been doing accounting and bookkeeping professionally for more than ten years now, I might actually be able to test out of a bunch of classes. That would save me a lot of time, money and sleepless nights staring at a blank computer screen.

if the world is going to end, I need to tell you some things

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Crazy people think the world is ending tomorrow.  They’ve never been right before, but I figure, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to tell secrets and air grievances, right?  RIGHT. So pour yourself an adult beverage and let’s begin. Try not to judge me too harshly, ok?

Let’s start out with some easy ones:

  • I love canned whipped cream.  The actual whipped cream part, not the nitrous oxide, I swear. A can of whipped cream lasts maaaaaybe 36 hours in my house. MAYBE. I will continually wander over to the fridge, up-end the can and spray sugary processed white joy into my mouth with utter abandon. There is no bad time for canned whipped cream. Which is exactly why I don’t buy it except on rare occasions.
  • I would eat pizza once a day, every day, and twice a day on weekends, if I could. Standards apply, of course. I’m not talking like $3.99 frozen pizzas. But decent gas-station pizza? Oh, it’s ON.
  • I talk to my dog constantly. That in and of itself isn’t so bad, but I also do the dog’s part of the conversation back to me in dog-voice. If my husband and I are both home, we take turns doing dog-voice. If the dog ever grows thumbs, we’re totally done for.

Now, some less easy ones:

  • I’m pretty sure most people that say they like me really just feel sorry for me. I don’t feel like I’m a particularly pitiable case or anything, but for some reason I just can’t ever quite believe that most of my friends would actually want to talk to me or hang out with me if given another alternative.
  • I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m almost 36, so this one is starting to become kind of a problem.
  • I am super duper afraid that I’m wasting my life.  I struggle with feeling like nothing I do is ever enough to live up to the fact that this is IT, you know? This is the only time I’m going to get. Am I using it well enough? It’s a scary question, at least for me.

And finally, here’s a video of my dog licking almond butter off a spoon as a bit of a palate cleanser for anyone who made it this far:

how bad CAN it go?

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I just did a Google image search for “how bad can it go” and among a whole bunch of pseudo-inspirational bullshit memes about adjusting a bad attitude, there was this completely random picture of butter. I really like butter and I really like completely random things, so I am linking to this picture with much delight.

When I finally decided to bite the bullet and start a new blog, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name.  I wanted something clever and snazzy, something that was memorable and rolled off the tongue.  I’m generally neither clever nor snazzy, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be on the Internet, right?!  The names I came up with were weak at best, though.  Finally, I put the question to a group of my favorite knitter friends on Ravelry (shout out to my LSG ALA hoars), and the suggestion of “Eat Your Words” came up.  Since eating my words in the figurative sense is something I’m all too familiar with, and since I was coming off a long (if sporadic) stint as a self-styled food blogger, it felt like a perfect name.

The Internet, however, is full of thieving rat bastards who come up with good ideas WAY faster than I do, so “Eat Your Words” was already long gone on every blogging site I searched for it. Incidentally, so were “Eat My Words”, “Eat These Words” and “Eat Some Words”.

‘Ok, Internet, I FUCKING GET IT’, I thought to myself. I started to question whether or not I should even bother with the blog at all, and had a good 45 minute grump session where-in I detailed all my life failings to myself (the list is vast but I’m so well practiced that it tends to go very quickly once I start), before finally saying, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing this. How bad can it go?’

And then it dawned on me. If I was going to write about my mental struggles, my whacked-out sense of humor…if I was going to write about ME…then “How Bad Can It Go” was actually a far better name than the ones I had originally been looking for. It fits so well because not only is it something that I actually say ridiculously frequently (usually in a sarcastic manner), but it’s also a play on how my brain works.

When you’re an analytical person, you tend to be the type that thinks through many possible outcomes of every action. When you’re analytical by nature and also have an anxiety disorder, your ability to think through multiple outcomes and weigh various options can swiftly turn from a useful asset to a crippling liability. I am a person who often quite literally cannot stop thinking of all the ways anything and everything can go badly. You could point me to a scene of utter tranquility, ask “how bad can it go?”, and I’d be able to come up with at least three nightmare scenarios right off the top of my head. Granted, they would likely be far-fetched at best, but that’s one of the supreme ass-aches of an anxiety disorder – even when you know damn well that what you’re thinking is completely fucking ridiculous and far-fetched, you can’t not think it. You can’t shut off the part of your brain that is continually saying, “what if, what if, what if, whaaaaatttt iiiiiifffff”.

One of the ways I’ve learned to deal with my anxiety and depression is to try and find the funny in it. Even if it’s the type of terrible gallows humor that I can’t explain to anyone without making them grimace and back away slowly, it still helps. It’s a little bit harder to get stuck in a “what if” feedback loop when I’m coming up with the most ludicrous and unfeasible scenarios possible on purpose in the interest of making myself or other people laugh.

Like I’ve said before, I’m really good at starting things but pretty crap at finishing them, so this is the point in my little shit-show of an essay where I’m struggling to come up with something eloquent to sum everything up. So instead, I’ll just stop writing for now and wonder how bad it can go…