Category Archives: paranoia

happy appendicitiversary

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A year ago yesterday, I was sitting in the ER waiting on a CT scan to see what might be wrong with my guts. I hadn’t felt great the night before but had blamed it on some really greasy pizza I’d eaten. My main symptoms were bloating (omg, so much bloating) and discomfort in my lower right quadrant, but nothing so bad that it made me feel like it was any kind of emergency. I had taken some Gas-X and walked about 50 laps around the house to try and get the bloat to shift, took some tylenol for the gut pain, and had given up and gone to bed. I was uncomfortable all night, especially since I normally slept on my right side.

I should note here that appendicitis was always one of my greatest fears. It’s such a common thing that can go Big Wrong so quickly, and cause so much pain, and you hardly ever hear anyone telling stories about how their appendicitis was no big deal, you know? I think years and years of hearing all those stories just compounded with my already rampant control issues centered especially around my health (or lack there-of), and boom: appendicitis became my own personal medical boogey-man. So that night and early the next day, I was doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and avoid the reality that what was happening was probably appendicitis and I was probably headed for emergency surgery.

After a whole day sitting around waiting on tests, a nice doctor came in and confirmed that it was in fact my appendix causing the issues. They gave me the option of going home with a whole heap of antibiotics to see if that would calm things down, but at that point it sort of just felt like kicking the can down the road, you know? Like, even if the antibiotics had worked, who’s to say that the appendix wouldn’t eventually get inflamed again, possibly even worse? As it was, I was super lucky because my appendicitis really WASN’T that big of a deal, comparatively. I never got sick, I never had a fever, and while I had some pain, it was certainly nowhere near the worst thing I’d ever felt. So, rather than put off surgery and then always be wondering even more than I already did whether or not every pang and pain in my lower right quadrant was my appendix fixing to try and kill me, I said we might as well just take it out. 

I waited for the doctor to leave and then I had a pretty thorough breakdown while my sweet husband tried to comfort me. I’d had abdominal surgery before (to remove a similarly cranky gallbladder many years ago) and even with the magic of laparoscopic technology, it’s not a super fun ride. Plus, I think anesthesia freaks out even those of us without major control issues. And those of us WITH control issues? Well. The idea of someone forcibly putting you to sleep with no guarantee that you’ll wake up is pretty fucking dicey to say the least. 

Realizing that I was probably going to be waiting around a good long while for surgery, and knowing that Mark would eventually have to leave to go home and feed the dog and himself, I finally wised up and asked the nurse for something to help with the anxiety. I can’t remember the name of the stuff she gave me but it was definitely helpful. I went from like an 8.5 on my personal panic scale to about a 3. Which, given that my baseline is what most normal people would probably consider like a 4, that wasn’t too shabby. 

Mark did end up having to leave, I think around 8:30 or 9pm. They eventually got rolling on surgery prep after 10pm, and I apparently spent a couple extra hours in recovery because they didn’t have a room to put me in for a while afterward. When I woke up in the morning, I realized that the room I was in looked SUPER familiar but I couldn’t figure out why for a few minutes, then it dawned on me: it was a room in the cardiac care unit that my mom had spent quite a lot of time in a few years before when she’d had some heart problems. Like, the exact room, the same side of the room, even. Waking up there and realizing that, before anyone explained the room shortages, was pretty nerve-wracking. I kept feeling around my chest to make sure I didn’t have all the actual cardiac monitors on me, and there was no small amount of concern that perhaps my own heart issues had cropped up while I was under anesthesia. I must have looked kind of deer-in-the-headlights when the nurse finally came in, because her eyebrows shot up and she immediately asked if I was ok. I asked why I was in the CCU and she said, “oh yeah, sorry about that! We got you because they had nowhere to put you after recovery last night. That’s the only reason, I promise.” So that was quite a relief. 

I was sore but didn’t feel super bad after surgery, which had also been my experience after my gallbladder eviction. And, as with the gallbladder surgery, things took a real nosedive once I got home and the good drugs wore off. I was pretty miserable for about a week, and I kept crying to Mark about how the recovery pain was so much worse than the actual sickness had been and why didn’t I just take the antibiotics instead, etc. Core strength and mobility are so easy to take for granted. You don’t realize just how much you rely on specific muscles to do, well, everything, until those muscles are no longer available to use or really hurt when you use them. Also, I’m one of those people who doesn’t get physically sick from anesthesia but it does a fucking number on me mentally. Like, super big sads and hopelessness. Being unable to move easily and having your brain trying to eat you at the same time is not a good combo. Zero stars, do not recommend. But, as is usually the case, I got better bit by bit, day by day, and a month later we managed to go on a trip we had planned to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (Mark won the trip through his work. Trust me, those are not places we would be able to afford to vacation in otherwise) with a minimum of woe on my part. 

Today all I have to show for the whole thing are three tiny scars, each less than half an inch long, on my lower belly. One is actually right in my belly button and is hard to even see unless you know where to look. And while, like I said, I’d give the whole experience a zero out of 10 on the fun scale, at least I no longer have to worry about every pang in my lower right abdomen being my appendix anymore! 

A piece of ginger root in a jar was the closest thing I could find in my house to non-grossly represent a human appendix. I didn’t get to see mine so I don’t really know what it actually looked like, but I’m going to assume this rendering is way, way off base. Please don’t email or DM me images of actual human appendices, infected or otherwise. Neither of us needs that.

lemon aid

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Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?

white noise

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I am the type of person who can’t sleep without some kind of white noise. I mean, half the time I can’t sleep anyway because my brain is a dick, but still. With the white noise, sleep may happen. Without the white noise, sleep will definitely NOT happen.

The source of the white noise isn’t super important. A fan blowing, the A/C unit running, even a white noise track playing over headphones will usually work if I’m travelling.

In our bedroom, we have one of those round twist-top white noise machines like what you often see used for noise cancellation in doctor’s offices. We’ve had it for many years. It has two speeds (white and…whiter, I guess?) and you can twist the top to change the size of the openings the air comes out of, thus changing the tone slightly (regular white, off-white, ecru…ok, the joke wasn’t great to begin with and I’ve now officially ruined it). I am so in the habit of turning the white noise machine on at bedtime that I still turn it on even when we run the A/C at night. I literally cannot hear the white noise machine over the A/C, but turning it on is muscle memory at this point.

Taking that into account, you can then imagine that when I woke up yesterday morning after the A/C shut off and there was no white noise machine going, I noticed immediately. I figured I must have just been out of it when I went to bed the night before and somehow forgot to turn on the white noise even though, like I said, it’s muscle memory at this point. Last night when I went to bed, I was very deliberate in my turning on of the white noise machine and my acknowledgement that it was, in fact, ON. I turned it on before the A/C, even. I KNOW that sucker was on when I got into bed.

So, why was it not running again this morning when I woke up? Did my husband shut it off, maybe?

Me: “Hey, did you shut the white noise machine off in the night last night?”

Him: “Nope. I noticed it wasn’t on this morning, too. I figured you just didn’t turn it on last night.”

Me: “No, I definitely turned it on. I made extra sure I did, because it was off when I woke up yesterday morning too, and I figured I must have just forgotten it the night before.”

Him: “Hunh. Weird.”

And for him that was the end of it, because he is not insane. My brain, on the other hand, immediately took the How Did The White Noise Machine Shut Off By Itself torch and RAN with it. My first three thoughts were exactly as follows:

1. Maybe someone has crept ultra-silently into our bedroom the last two nights and shut the white noise machine off while we sleep. Nevermind that I have the world’s most attentive watch-dog, who can hear mice farting in walls three houses away, who can smell traces of the last podokesaurus who stomped through proto-New-England 145 million years ago, and whose most favorite thing ON THIS VAST GREEN EARTH is to bark, specifically at strangers.

2. Maybe a mouse was on the desk that the white noise machine sits on, and maybe they walked by and brushed against the power switch, thus shutting the machine off. We’ve never had mice inside this house. Also, see above references to dog who hears / smells everything ever and would raise the unholiest of rackets immediately if a rodent was present. He wouldn’t chase and kill the rodent because he’s not useful a savage, mind you. But he’d sure as shit let us know it was there in no uncertain terms.

3. Maybe one of the rather large wolf spiders recently spotted in our basement (OH GODS WHY) came up the stairs (ACK), got into our room (PANIC-FLAIL), and hit the button with one of its extra long, extra hairy, EXTRA FUCKING CREEPY AND WRONG spider legs. I am convinced that at this point, my brain was just taking the piss, just trying to see if it could send me into an actual nervous breakdown, because I am super, SUPER anti-spider. I mean, in the house, anyway. Outside? Fine. Spider on with your bad self. Build all the webs, eat all the bugs. And honestly, small spiders in the house aren’t generally a problem either as long as they don’t do dumb shit like TOUCH ME. Big spiders in the house, though? No. Big spiders in the house make me want to move out…preferably without packing a damned thing, because fuck only knows where those hairy bastards are hiding at this point and OMG WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS, UGH.

Basically, my brain now won’t stop coming up with increasingly disturbing and/or convoluted ways in which the white noise machine may have gotten shut off in the night. At one point I was even wondering if maybe I had started sleep-walking and had shut it off then. Our bedroom is kind of cramped though, and I am large and klutzy, so I feel like even if I WAS sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the white noise machine without tripping over something and waking myself up, or bashing into something and doing myself noticable harm. But as far as I know I’ve never sleep-walked, so maybe that’s not how that works.

So, I guess there’s only one thing for it: we have to set up a night-vision camera pointed at the white noise machine and see what’s going on. Except I can’t do that either because I’ve watched one too many episodes of Ghost Hunters (read: I’ve watched exactly one episode. Not even a whole episode. I watched like ten minutes of it once, eight years ago), and I know that all the poltergeists show up as weird flashes and blobs on night vision in the middle of the night while you’re asleep. IT’S SCIENCE, BRENDA. You can’t argue with science.

And I’ll tell you what: finding out that there are poltergeists flitting around my bedroom all damned night isn’t going to help my sleep issues AT ALL.

“Hello, PETA? Yes, this is Keppo. Again, yes. Could you please send Sarah McLachlan to come pick me up? My human has finally lost it for real. Also, they haven’t fed me in weeks. MONTHS, even. Maybe years. I’m a dog, time works differently for me. But seriously, could you…hello? HELLO? Man, maybe the poltergeists got into the phone, too.”

hanger-on

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(Disclaimer: this post is mildly gross. Proceed at your own risk.)

Bodies are disgusting.

I mean, sure, they’re amazing and magical and whatever, but they also do some truly disgusting stuff…usually in the name of keeping us alive.

For instance: did you know that your tonsils can produce stones? Yep! When shit (well, presumably not actual shit, otherwise you’ve probably got bigger issues to contend with), builds up in your throat, bits of it often get stuck to / in your tonsils. The upside is that this keeps the shit (or whatever) from making it down your throat into your lungs! The downside is, your tonsils gotta do something with that stuff. Sometimes you just cough it out. Sometimes you swallow something that dislodges the junk and sends it down into your stomach to be blasted by digestion.

But, sometimes whatever is back there can’t be dislodged and it starts collecting more junk. You know, because being a gross little chunk of crap in someone’s throat is…lonely? Anyway, point being, the crap builds up in one of the little pockets or wrinkles on your tonsil, calcifies, and then you have yourself a tonsil stone. Or a tonsillolith, if you’re fancy.

Tonsilloliths are very common and lots of people have them without ever even knowing because the stones are situated back / down far enough that they’re not visible. So don’t judge. You may well have tonsil rocks you’ve never met.

I’ve always had stupidly big tonsils. Like, the kind of tonsils where every doctor who has ever looked down my throat has said something along the lines of “geez, those are monstrous, how do you even breathe?”. To which I have given up trying to reply snarkily and instead say some version of “I know. What do I have to do to get them taken out?”. The answer is usually that if I want insurance to cover it, I have to wait until it’s ‘medically necessary’ to have them removed. Which of course is doctor-ese for ‘they have to make you super sick’. And to their credit (the tonsils, not the doctors), they really haven’t done so yet….so I guess I’m stuck with them.

Anyway. Back to the stone.

I had a cold last week, which came with all the typical grossness. I also suffer from year-round allergies, so I have kind of a constant background level of cacky junk traveling between my sinuses and throat. There’s been no shortage of mank hanging around my tonsils the last week or so. So the other day when I looked down my throat with the flashlight (normal people do that on a regular basis, right? RIIIIIGHT.), I wasn’t especially shocked to see a little white spot on my left tonsil. I’ve had them before, usually right in that same spot. In the past I’ve been able to dislodge them with a little bit of semi-aggressive salt water gargling. In one VERY memorable case, I actually reached back with my toothbrush and managed to knock a stone loose with the bristles…but then my gag reflex took over and I booted up my breakfast. So nobody REALLY won that round.

I should note here: the stone in question doesn’t hurt at all. In fact, it’s still new enough that it probably hasn’t even calcified into stone form. It’s probably just a little pocket filled with grody smeg back there. A pocket of grody smeg that I happen to be able to see every single time I open my mouth in front of a mirror. It’s not like this is a matter of urgency, to get this junk off of my tonsil. It would be highly improbably that this spot morphed into something that made me ill in any way. It is literally just grossing me out every time I (far too frequently) see it and so I want it gone.

I want it gone so much, in fact, that while I was in the bathroom at work looking at it earlier, I decided to take action.

Did I go warm up some water, dump some salt in it, and have a nice soothing gargle?

No.

Did I give myself a pep-talk about how some bodily functions really are best saved to be dealt with at home?

Oh no.

What I did was grab a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, twist them around my index finger, and reach back to try and manually scrape my tonsil with them.

As I’m sure you’ve already figured out, this move was unwise in several ways.

The first was that I made a total rookie mistake and didn’t wet the paper towel first, so it kind of stuck a bit when it made contact with my tonsil. The second was that, in my fervor, I forgot how strong my gag reflex is (it’s dry-heave-when-I-try-to-brush-my-tongue strong, for the record). The combination of these two very stupid things did NOT result in vomit, thankfully…but what it DID result in was a loud and somewhat confused choking, squawking animal noise issuing forth from my rightfully angry throat as I tried to fight said gag reflex long enough to knock the stone loose.

Several seconds later, when the stars in my vision had finally cleared and my tongue had returned to its normal position rather than trying to forcibly remove itself from my body, I shone my cell phone flashlight into my mouth to survey my work.

The stone hadn’t even budged.

I’ve learned my lesson at this point, I swear. I’m not going to try to mess with it any more until I get home and can have a good long gargle.

But I’ll be perfectly honest with you here, friends. There’s a drawer full of leftover take-out chopsticks in the break room that are going to be calling my name all afternoon.

a5stalactite

I’m sorry for sullying your lovely photo with such a base discussion of bodily grossness, Fritz. I hope you can someday forgive me.

what’s the password

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My job is very password-intensive. There are a bunch of different websites and databases I need to access. At last count, my list of work-related passwords had 39 entries.

Of that 39 passwords, there are about a dozen that I use on an almost daily basis. Most of the sites I use have extra ridiculous security rules when it comes to setting up login info (for instance, at least two of them require a 15 character password minimum, plus a number, plus a capital letter, plus a special character, but your password also cannot contain more than four consecutive alpha or numeric characters, no repeating numeric characters, you need to provide exactly 6 mL of tear drops that fall within the personal salinity tolerance levels of your specific body every 90 days in order to keep the system from suspending your account, etc). Most of these websites and databases also require changing your log-in information every few months. Just when you get used to one, you can kiss it goodbye and spend the next 15 minutes trying to come up with a new one.

It’s a gigantic pain in the ass…especially when, like me, you have the short-term memory of a recently clubbed seal.

I was going to insert a picture of a cute baby seal here but frankly, I already feel bad about making the joke to begin with, and adding a picture would just make things worse. I’m a monster, undeserving of love or happiness.

ANYWAY.

Because of security concerns and the nature of the work I do, I’m not allowed to let my browser just remember all my passwords for me, so I have to keep a list stashed away in the bowels of my computer (which isn’t exactly a secure way of doing it either, but it’s at least a little better than just loading everything into Firefox and hoping for the best). This method has worked pretty effectively for going on 11 years now.

Except…there are times when, for whatever reason, my brain goes rogue and decides FUCK THAT LIST, I CAN REMEMBER THINGS GOD DAMN IT. I’ll sit there typing in password after password until the site eventually locks me out due to too many failed log-in attempts. For some sites, that’s like three attempts…but for others it’s like…15. And I still get locked out. Because I’m too fucking stubborn to look at THE LIST that has ALL THE APPLICABLE INFORMATION right on it.

Most sites I get locked out of then require that I call them, give them all my personal info, tell them half my life story, answer a series of archaic riddles, and promise them my first-born child (haha, joke’s on you, motherfuckers, I’m not procreating), before they will reset my login info. Many of them also require that I use a temporary password to log in and reset a new password, blah blah blah. The whole process ends up taking tens of minutes. It’s objectively far more of a pain in the ass than just pulling up the list and finding the correct information to begin with.

And yet, I continue to do this to myself on a regular basis. Something in my clubbed-seal brain keeps telling me that I’m above using the list, that at 38 years old I should still have the mental dexterity to remember a handful of god damned passwords.

In case you hadn’t guessed yet, I’ve written this post while waiting for a database manager to call me back about resetting my access because I just got myself locked out. Again.

password

Is that the red, or the white?

ants

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There are times, like this morning, when I can’t sit still. It’s a physical feeling: the proverbial ants in my pants. I don’t feel the sensation of actual bugs on my skin though (thankfully, because that kind of shit is pretty high on my Not Cool list). It’s more like kind of a low-level buzz under my skin, but not quite IN my muscles. Like in my fascia, I guess? I don’t know. I’m not a frigging doctor, Janet.

Sometimes I only feel it in one or two spots. That’s the best case scenario, because that often means I can find a way to shake it out. When it’s in my lower legs I might be able to clear it up with a bout of the classic leg-bouncing-under-the-desk, or as my mom refers to it, ‘jigging’. If it’s in my thighs or hips, doing squats may help. Shoulder and back twitchy-ness often responds well to wall yoga poses and stretches.

When the twitch hits everywhere all at once, it’s not quite so easy to manage. I usually start out fighting it, doing my best to stay in my chair and get my work done. It’s a fight I don’t often win though, because it almost never goes away on its own. Sometimes a trip downstairs to fill my water bottle or get a cup of coffee will help. Sometimes I walk laps around the conference room table, or go down to the shipping room two floors away and count the rolls of packing tape we have in stock. I have a convertible workstation and can pull my desk up to work from a standing position, but trying to stand still is often almost as bad as trying to sit still. I’ve been standing for almost an hour as I type this, and I’ve been alternating between knee bends, shuffling my feet back and forth, and stretching pretty much the whole time. Between the constant movement and making myself write this post (thus giving my hamster brain a new wheel to spin in for a while), the twitch is finally starting to calm down a little bit.

It’s all in my head. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that. The twitch is the physical manifestation of the anxiety my ADHD causes.

It’s the spill-over from when the always-brimming-full cup of word soup that wobbles precariously in my skull gets nudged and sloshes over the side.

It’s my body reminding me that the more I fight this faulty wiring in my head rather than trying to find ways to make it work for me, the harder I make things for myself.

 

ants

lizard brain

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Apparently I slept in a way last night that caused a muscle or nerve in the back of my neck to seize up. Not hugely uncommon for me – I tend to carry all my tension in my neck and shoulders, plus I type eight hours a day and have relatively poor posture while doing so.

The muscle or nerve in my neck that’s unhappy happens to be right near the base of my skull, so every time I move just right, it sends this pain up into my head and my lizard brain is like ‘WAAAAH, MENINGITIS! WAAAAH, STROKE! WAAAAH, TUMOR! WAAAAH, PARASITIC AMOEBAS EATING MY BRAIN!’

Ten years ago I was a pretty much full-blown hypochondriac and wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking that I was sitting here slowly bleeding out into my brain pan or something. I would have eventually worked myself into such a panic that I’d have made myself physically ill. Nowadays I can identify that lizard brain is the culprit when I start thinking a random ache or pain is Something More Serious. I can’t put lizard brain totally on mute, but I’ve gotten a lot better at not letting it control me.

Or maybe that’s just what the parasitic amoebas want me to think…

 

ancient-aliens-guy

Amoeba aliens. In my brain.

When in doubt, apply otters.

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There are big blocks of time that it feels like I don’t remember.

I say “feels like” because I know that in reality, you can’t ever remember everything that’s happened to you because that’s not how the brain works. Long-term memory kind of acts like a card catalog in a library. You go to the catalog with a subject in mind – ie: “summer camp”, and that’s like giving your brain-meats the Dewey Decimal Number for what you’re trying to remember. Your brain-meat then acts as librarian, taking that card and running up and down its stacks at lightening speed (or slightly slower for some of us…heh), pulling memories of that thing from the shelves for you to inspect.

In other words, long-term memory isn’t a constant loop of all the moments of your life being played over and over again, just waiting for you to hit “pause” on the one you want to access at that particular moment.

Think what life would be like if that WAS how it worked, by the way. I imagine it would be like the worst possible case of ADHD ever. You’d never be able to get anything done because your brain would constantly be like “Hey remember that one time, at band camp? And Aunt Mildred’s dog? And Easter morning, 1978? And the day you were born, and the 47th time you skinned your knee falling off your bike, and the drive to the cemetery when Grandpa died, and the smell of the lake at night and how your first kiss felt and smoking weed behind the gym between classes and the words to that song from 3rd grade music class and and and…”, but multiplied by literally all the moments of your entire life.

That sounds kind of horrible. I’m pretty glad it doesn’t work that way, now that I think about it.

I should probably take this opportunity to point out that I’m an accountant, by the way, NOT a neurologist. This may actually not be AT ALL how memory works. I didn’t even finish college and I’m also prone to making shit up, so…probably don’t use me as an academic citation on your fancy brain science term paper or whatever. Show-off.

ANYWAY.

So, it feels like there are these chunks of time that I can’t remember, and sometimes it bothers me. When it bothers me, I start actively trying to recall things from my childhood in order to prove to myself that no, I was NOT in fact just beamed down from the Mothership. Except, then I start worrying about how maybe aliens have the technology to basically pre-populate our brains with just enough memories to make us think that yes, we DID in fact have childhoods and that the idea of being beamed down from the Mothership is preposterous, now be a good drone, keep incubating those trillions of bacteria and stop questioning reality. And really, THAT’S a can of worms I can’t even really handle on a GOOD day, so that’s when I usually start just looking up pictures of baby otters online instead. Two or three good baby otter video clips will put me right back on track.

otters

I would literally pay for this experience.

Well, as on-track as I ever get, anyway.

Pocket Trap

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A few weeks back, I went shopping for some summer clothes. I bought, among other things, a pair of white twill capri pants. I have no business owning light-colored pants (or any other light-colored clothing, for that matter) to begin with, but these capri pants wouldn’t quit calling my name while I was wandering around the store (possibly because they actually fit my epic ass, which is a momentous thing. The fitting, not the ass. Well, both actually, but I digress…), so I said fuck it and bought them.

I hung the pants in my closet (only new clothes get hung up. After the first washing it’s laundro-bed all the way), and basically forgot that I bought them until this morning when I realized I was out of clean jeans…aaaand pretty much every other work-appropriate bottom-half covering garment. My options were a) wear the skirt I’m always vaguely uncomfortable in, b) wear the white capri pants, or c) come up with an excuse to work from home so I could just give up on adulting completely and wear yoga pants all day. Since I knew I had a meeting this morning that I couldn’t reschedule, staying home was struck from the list immediately (and sadly. So, so sadly). Vaguely uncomfortable skirt was a total no-go on meeting day as well because I can’t concentrate for shit when I’m self-conscious. So, white capri pants won by default.

Everything was going swimmingly as I got dressed. I even remembered to wear light-colored underpants so that people weren’t pointing and laughing at my shadow-wedgie any time I walked by. ADULT WARDROBING POINTS FOR ME! The capris actually fit even better this morning than when I tried them on in the dressing room, so that was good for a little happy dance. After putting on my shirt, I grabbed my phone and slid it into my pocket.

Except the phone landed on the carpet with a thud.

Because these pants?

THEY HAVE NO POCKETS.

Actually, to put a finer point on it, these pants have something worse than no pockets: they have those bullshit totally non-functional faux pockets:

IMG_20160607_133232302

Looks like a pocket, doesn’t it? Well it’s NOT a pocket. IT’S A TRAP. A BULLSHIT TRAP.

Because the fashion industry, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that all women are obviously more concerned with smooth lines on their clothing than they are with ACTUAL FUNCTIONALITY.

So now, instead of a slightly misshapen hip (which was going to be covered by my shirt anyway, fashion police), I have a slightly misshapen TIT because the only place I have to stash my phone is in my FREAKING BRA.

How is the threat of potentially short-circuiting my phone with boob sweat (or possibly more importantly, the idea of irradiating my boob with radio waves) a better idea than having pockets in these pants, fashion industry? I mean, granted, you’re not FORCING me to stash my phone in my cleavage. I COULD technically carry it around in my hand every time I get up and go do anything, thus rendering my hands half as useful as they’d be IF I HAD POCKETS.

And true, purses are technically an option that many ladies use. But I need my phone during the day. Do you know how idiotic it would be to have to carry a purse around the office all god damned day? PRETTY IDIOTIC. People would be side-eying me and saying stuff like “Geez, is she carrying coke around with her in that thing or something? And if she’s doing coke, why is she still so fat?”  And then I’d have to be like “bitch, who needs coke when there’s cheese“, which would a) answer the fatness question and b) confuse everyone, and I’d have to explain to them the article that I just linked, except out loud in my own words, which is WAY more difficult for me because I get easily sidetracked talking about stuff like marmots and existentialism and the pros and cons of different forms of magnesium supplements, and basically at that point everybody loses.

The moral of this story, I think, is that if having actual functioning clothing is important to you, then you need to either a) be a man, b) be willing to wear men’s pants (which I’d be totally fine with if I could find ones that actually fit but apparently my Jessica Rabbit-esque waist-to-hip ratio precludes me from having that option), or c) check for pockets BEFORE you buy new pants. And don’t just check that it LOOKS like there are pockets – make sure you can actually get your hand, phone, vial of coke, marmot, or whatever else it is you want to not have to stash in your bra, into said pocket.

Don’t fall for the bullshit faux pocket trap. Let my suffering be a lesson to you all.

 

rituals (and consequences)

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There are certain things that must be done. Rituals, if you will. Certain things have their places, certain activities have a specific order they’re best done in, and some steps on the way to a destination are non-negotiable.

For instance, I have a bedtime routine that involves checking the bed for spiders.

Part of it stems from the fact that I intensely dislike being personally near spiders. Notice I don’t say “I hate spiders”, because I don’t. I totally respect spiders’ places in the ecosystem and I admire their innate engineering instincts.

I just don’t want the creep little fuckers to touch me. Ever.

So, when I go to bed at night, one of my rituals is to check the bed for spiders. I flip the blankets and top sheet off the bed, I shake the pillows, I shake the blankets and sheet, then I put it all back together again. If my husband has already gotten into bed, I’m ok with assuming he’s already gone through this process for me. If I’m the first one to bed, though…everything gets shaken.

The other night, after having gone through the whole shake-and-make process and kind of laughing at myself the whole time, I pulled out my notebook to scribble down my thoughts about it so that I could remember to blog about it later on. The note went something like this:

“Must shake out pillows and blankets before getting into bed because spiders. Problem could be solved by just making bed in morning but what if the spiders get into the bed while I’m gone to work? Better to leave bed unmade then thoroughly check for spiders whilst making it right before getting into it. Fresh bed is safe bed.”

Then, because I realized just how incredibly bonkers it looked having been committed to paper, I actually wrote the following postscript:

spidercray

Yes Internet, I know I spelled Hughes wrong. It was late and dark and I’m nuts. Don’t judge.

Satisfied that I had effectively put things into context for anyone who might come across my notebook in the case of my untimely demise, I then put the notebook away, picked up my Kindle…

…and felt a disconcerting tickle on my left arm. Glancing down was like a slow motion horror movie and confirmed what I already instinctively knew:

SPIDER. ON. MY. ARM.

Making a sound somewhere between a steam whistle and a bagpipe, I flung my arm away from my body as though it wasn’t connected and I could somehow fling it and the spider riding on it across the room if I just put enough effort into it. The Kindle went flying, the dog jumped up and started barking, and somewhere along the way I managed to partially squash the spider.

Yes, sorry spider-lovers…a spider WAS harmed in the making of this story. It probably had a thousand creepy 8-legged babies before I killed it though, and they’ll probably all come to avenge its death some night when I least expect it (OH GOD NEVER SLEEPING AGAIN, JESUS FUCK).

After several seconds of hyperventilating I managed to regain control of my faculties and go back to reading my Kindle, but I’ve been rethinking my spider-checking ritual ever since. I mean, clearly either I wasn’t vigilant enough in my shake-and-make routine, or we’ve got some kind of special breed of ninja spiders of doom living in our apartment.

I bet they came in on the grapes.

SHIT.