Saturday, July 6, 2013

The Blood-Loss Diet, Back-Up Beeper Induced Insanity, and Your Crap vs. My Stuff

I’ve calmed down a little bit this week. The life-ruiners who were trying ruin my life decided not to, it seems--although it’s still unclear exactly what their next move is, so exciting life-ruining potential still remains. I got my haircut. I got my brows waxed. I gave blood. I think I lost a whole pound just by doing those three things. Oh! I’m going to write a bestseller: The Haircut-Waxing-Blood-Loss Diet. Ka-ching!

When I give blood, I’m always unreasonably woozy for days afterwards, but it also provides the welcome side effect of soothing my mental hyperactivity. The next day, I was weak, but very focused and relaxed. Apparently, I didn’t have enough red blood cells in me for my brain to expend energy on being anxious. I loved that sense of calm and equanimity while it lasted. Is that how normal people walk around feeling? If so, they are so lucky! In my twenties, I went through nine different anti-depressants before I gave up on medication entirely because each one made me sick and/or didn’t work. And to think, the whole time all I needed to do was figure out a way to lose a pint of blood every few days! It feels fantastic. And there’s that whole saving-lives thing, too. *pats self on back with glow of self-righteousness*

In other less corporeal news, I’m very close to finishing “Cheesehead” (there was a delay because I had to completely re-write the ending and the whole thing was becoming a 12,000-word behemoth.) But it’s been a fun writing experiment, and a nice way to blow off steam by writing from the point of view of someone with no sense of self-reflection whatsoever. I can see why people stop trying to be humans and just completely give over to id-driven narcissism. It’s fun! It’s painless! And for a while, before everyone gets sick of you, it’s even a bit charming.

I gripe about Seattle’s not-even-that-hot heat all of the time, but by far, the worst thing about summer—besides the fact that any heat is gross and I burn easily—is the noise, the infernal racket, that I have listen to because we keep the windows open to cool the apartment and we live in a fish sound-bowl and they are gutting the building next to us and all day long, they keep backing up a giant dump truck with the concurrent BEEP! BEEP!! BEEEEEEEEEP!!!!! back-up alarm going off incessantly until I feel that I shall go mad! WHY must they have a back-up beeper? Why? If some idiot is stupid enough to stand behind a moving dump truck, he should be removed from the gene pool anyway. Stop it already! It’s bad enough with the demolition noise and the bellowing men and the dust that makes me sneeze violently and scare the cats. I don’t need to be woken up at 4:00 a.m. on a weekend with a back-up alarm screeching under my window. Hand to God, I’m going to hot-wire that dump truck and drive it off a damn cliff. (If they ask, I never said a thing about it, okay? *wink*)

 Speaking of dust and debris, today Mr. Typist explained to me very patiently that when I (I) clean out our apartment storage unit this summer, I need to be thinking at all times about “my crap” versus “his things.” If something belongs to him, he reasoned, then I need to ask myself where I shall find room to store it in the apartment. If it belongs to me, I need to think about when I’m going to take that crap to Goodwill. After watching my freshly-waxed eyebrows raise until they practically tumbled off my forehead, he finally admitted that he emptied out two complete boxes of old computer guts today and promised to reduce one by “half”. Nice save, hoarder!

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