So You Have a Swollen Lymph Node on the Side of Your Neck

Day 1: Beginnings

You wake up in the morning. You wash your face. You wash your neck and everything is going great until, omigod, there is a GIANT PAINFUL LUMP under the left side of your jaw. Your throat is sore, but only on the left side. You remember saying yesterday that you felt a sore throat coming on, so you pass the day as usual. That night as you try to sleep, you have to adjust your positions to accommodate the new swollen friend who lives on your neck. The seeds of worry are planted in your mind.

Day 2: Maturation

The next morning you awake and immediately check the mirror. OK. It’s still there. Your throat is still sore (still on the one side). You show no other discernible symptoms of illness. You spend the day gently prodding the mass to see if you can discover it’s point of origin. You begin googling remedies for a sore throat. The fact that this is all occurring on one side of your neck begins to cause you some alarm. You go home and take some Advil and sleep the sound sleep of someone not harboring a tumor on their neck.

Day 3: Nosedive into Complete Nervous Breakdown

You wake up on Day 3. It’s still there, mocking you. Your throat is still sore. You have absolutely, unequivocally, zero other symptoms of sickness to speak of. You become greatly distressed. You begin googling things like “giant swollen lymph node on one side of neck.”

The first thing you learn, of presumably utmost importance, is that you should be able to tell whether the node is “squishy and moveable” vs. “hard and immobile”, as this is what separates “common cold” from “probably cancer”. Your desperation increases exponentially as you poke and move your lump, as it seems to be both squishy and hard, and it moves a little but not that much. Googling “degree of lymph node squishyness/moveability” does not yield any desired results and you become pretty sure that you do in fact have cancer because your node isn’t as squishy as it should be. And now it hurts more.

Is your node painful or not painful, be careful to note that NOT PAINFUL MEANS CANCER! Well, mine is definitely painful! Excruciating, now, actually. Yay! Did it appear suddenly as if from nowhere or did it grow slowly and steadily over time because SLOW AND STEADY MEANS CANCER. Why yes, it did appear suddenly! I am in the clear! Is it enlarged to over one inch? Because this is a cause for concern. Oh my god, I’m dying, I’m dying, YES it is bigger than one inch. I probably have days to live. Become greatly concerned.

You know what, just start flat out googling “lymphoma” and “how treatable is lymphoma” and images of lymphoma and images of other enlarged lymph nodes and “what is wrong with me” and “why is it only on one side” and “how do I get rid of it” and “why, just why”.

Go on your lunch break. Realize that you are probably blowing this whole cancer thing out of proportion. Remember that it could be a million other things, like a cold! Or the flu! Or maybe strep, or mono, or tonsillitis, or an abscessed tooth, or an ear infection, or a drainage problem,  or lymes disease, or Hodgkins Lymphoma. Or maybe just a tumor. Utterly fail at cheering yourself up, and also everything else, ever.

Come home from work. Talk to boyfriend. Take Emergen-C. Gargle with salt water until the inside of your mouth becomes like the skin of a lizard. Take some advil. Gargle again. Go to sleep.

Gargle again.

When this is all over and your lymph node has receded to normal size, remember for the next time this happens that a.) you are completely insane and b.) you should not have access to Google, because it will ruin your life.

My Last Horcrux Has Been Destroyed

This is just a quick note to say that my life is over and everything is stupid.

I might post in more depth about the end of the Harry Potter movies at later time, like a time when I’m not in the throes of grief, mourning, and (self diagnosed) depression.

For now, I’ll just say that this was me last night :

not even an exaggeration.

Sigh.

First Impressions

Within the first three days of living in our new apartment, we became acquainted with two of our neighbors. The man who lives upstairs to our right is named Len. He is a middle aged ex-boxer who has, obviously, trauma-induced brain damage and a nose that’s clearly been broken at least five times. We’ve learned that we will probably have to introduce ourselves every time we see him. He is the quintessential guy who sits on a plastic chair in front of the apartment complex drinking beer and waiting for people to walk by so he can trap them into endless conversation. But, he likes our cat, so he’s OK in our book.

The other neighbors we’ve met are not, I repeat, VERY NOT OK in our book. They pretty much had violent sex with our book, loudly, for four hours. The fact that they, too, like our cat cannot save them now. Yea. We live under those people.

We are coping with our trauma by fantasizing about the many ways they might not actually deafen us with their sex every night for the next year that we live here. I had a longer list, but since I’ve had some time to think about it I’ve become rather cynical about the whole situation and am now left with only one possible solution:

1.) Maybe one of them is dying. I mean, one of them will probably die. Like, either of natural causes or in a slightly less natural way, like from me killing them.

Until any such determination is made, we will make ourselves feel better by leaving DVD menus playing at top volume all day long.

On Weather and Darkness

I am not an all-weather person. My comfort zone is somewhere around 75-80 degrees and sunny, which is unsurprising as it is pretty much the standard for a perfect day. That being said, living in New Jersey has forced me to broadened my horizons, almost as if New Jersey said to me, “No. You will rarely have two days of perfect weather to string together. Nut up.”As such, I am familiar with all manner of less-than-ideal weather situations, including but not limited to unending weeks of torrential downpours, summers hotter and more humid than should be allowed by science, and bitterly cold, eternal winters that stretch on into April.

My propensity for complaining is well-oiled during these less than pleasant times, but I am also not immune to persuasion. Most Weather could even cajole me into enjoying it, if only it gussied itself up a bit.

Obviously, snow is inconvenient. It’s wrath is felt even before the first flake falls when every local news channel reports on our fast-approaching doom ad nauseum for at least a week if not longer (Remember Snowpocalypse? It means “snow apocalypse”, and it also means that we were all going to die. Remember? Remember when it snowed during winter??). Within moments of the first falling flake, everyone loses the ability to make rational decisions while driving, and we are all plunged into a world of chaos and uncertainty.

In a shocking twist, I actually don’t mind snow so much, and that is 100% due to it’s aesthetic beauty. When I look outside and it’s snowing, I’m all “It’s a winter wonderland!” and forget instantly about how I won’t be able to get anywhere/do anything for the foreseeable future.

Basically it’s the opposite of how I feel on days like today, when I would rather pluck out my own eyes than go outside or even be in a room that has a window in it.

You won't find me doing this, probably ever.

How pretty it looks outside almost always improves my ability to cope with the weather, and today has absolutely nothing to offer in that department. Cold weather is made better by snow (and not filthy disgusting rain. You hear me, Today?!), snow is improved by there being lots of it, and none of it matters much anyway since it gets dark at 4:00 and you won’t be able to see it after that.

Seriously Winter, could the days be any shorter? The time you have allotted for daylight is completely insufficient, and it totally fucks with my life. How am I supposed to do anything after 4:00, when the sun sets and I feel the overpowering urge to just go home and get ready for bed, which admittedly is nine hours away, but that’s OK because at least I’ll be ready for it?

Listen to me you bastard, I don’t care about earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun. I have my own life, and in order to live it successfully, I need more sunlight than you can give me!

What?

I’m being irrational? YOU’RE BEING IRRATIONAL!!

Things I Hate For No Reason

Volume 1: Grocery Shopping.

After a few embarrassing and nettlesome attempts at splitting the cost of the weekly grocery shopping down the middle, Eric and I decided to alternate weeks. One week he would do the shopping, the next week was my week, and so on. This arrangement commenced and was met with some early self-congratulations on our part for our immense capacity for compromise. Things progressed successfully for approximately three weeks, when out of nowhere, it was my turn to go grocery shopping on Sunday night.

Eric: Remember to get peanut butter when you go shopping today.

Me: It’s your turn to shop.

Eric: No, I went last week. It’s your turn.

Me: …I’ll go tomorrow.

Eric: We need food to eat.

Me: ……But I HATE. GROCERY. SHOPPING.

Eric: I don’t wanna die!

It’s not so much the buying of food to keep us alive that I hate. My ire lies mostly in the going aspect. It all starts with the list, which we write to lure ourselves into a false sense of security. “With this list, I’ll be able to expertly navigate the deliberately over-stimulating and confusing aisles to get what I need and ONLY what I need! I’ll be done in no time!”

I will not be done in no time. A list always turns out to be only slightly more efficient than going in blindfolded, in that I do actually get everything on the list very quickly. Then, with the perceived extra time that I have, I go through each aisle and its items, practically one at a time, to make sure I didn’t forget anything that wasn’t on the list, but should have been. Like Rotini pasta.  It’s never on the list, but I always buy it, which is why we have four bags of unopened Rotini pasta.

And then there’s the special kind of pressure that a person with only a vague understanding of the principles of nutrition can appreciate.  I read labels, but that is where all reason and rationality ends. “So, this one can of soup has 60% of the recommended daily allotment of sodium. I could buy it, but only if I eat absolutely NOTHING with salt in it for the rest of that day. How do I know how much salt is in the other things that I eat? Is salt that bad for you? I love salt. You can’t tell me how much salt to eat, Nutrition Facts! Fuck it.” Now it’s in the cart, and soup wasn’t even on the list.

Finally, there’s the problem with what I call “age-appropriate food shopping”. I’m 24 years old. I should be able to successfully combine food items to make meals for myself, without it involving packets of flavoring and microwaved noodle water. I know the things that are horrible for you. I avoid those things. I also know the components of a healthy meal, so I buy those, but what I end up with is so distressingly random that no cohesive meal could possibly come of it. Ever. Like tonight, fully intent on making dinner, I bought a single orange pepper, broccoli, and a block of cheese.

Never one to learn from past mistakes, I do this repeatedly, which is why we have an eggplant and one butternut squash rotting in the back of our fridge right now. Such good intentions…such sad defeat. I guess we always hope that we’ll magically see order in the chaos of it all, or that maybe Jesus will tell us how to whip up a delicious, nutritious dinner for two. And what kind of conditioner he uses.  Why are you holding out, Jesus?

At the end of the day, food shopping probably isn’t the worst thing ever. It’s just that I, for the above reasons, walk out of Shop-Rite with both my groceries and feelings of shame and bewilderment. Is eating really worth the emotional stress? The self-doubt and guilt? Is it?

The things you learn when your iPod is broken

(that you never wanted to learn in the first place, which is why you originally bought an iPod)

#1-10. The words to every song on played on Z-100 in the span of roughly 60 to 90 minutes. Twelve songs don’t take long to learn. (Fucking god damn ke$ha!!)

#11. You’re car sounds awful . I mean, it never sounded all that great to begin with, but now…now, there are new and more terrifying sounds coming from an exciting array of different places in your car. Do you even have a muffler anymore? Did it dislodge itself at some point when you had a working iPod and had the volume turned up? How much do mufflers cost…

#12. Taylor Swift. You want to hate her, you really do. But damn. She writes her music from the heart.

#13. Rollin’ up to the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru with Adam Lambert blasting (to drown out the sound of your dyer need for a muffler, obviously) in your 1995 Honda Accord isn’t as cool as you thought it would be, and you were pretty damn sure it would be uncool to begin with.

#14. You’re grandpa’s opera tapes which are still in the glove compartment (since 1995) are starting to seem like a swell alternative…

#15. You need to suck it up and buy a new iPod.

#15b. Your life sucks.

*

Is it so very wrong to even consider moving this blog back to tumblr solely for the more customizable theme options? You’re killing me, WordPress.

Stress Inducers

Sometimes I think there is just nothing prettier in this world than a strawberry.

And other times, I think there is no worse experience than getting lost 15 minutes away from your own damn hometown.

Over the weekend, I had my very own mind-fuckingly frustrating driving experience. Apparently, navigating ones way to the dog park from Boonton is a vastly different experience than driving from Rockaway. Needless to say, my Google Maps directions failed me and I ended up in Harding Township at the mercy of my shitty ass Verizon Navigator GPS directions. Sure, it eventually got me back on the right route, but not before telling me to do five U-turns on the road (it turned out) my destination was on and THEN just flat out refusing to calculate the directions at all.  My relationship with my phone has thusly taken a drastic turn for the worse.

Ohhh and my iPod broke en route. It was truly a joyous car ride! The day (Sunday) was eventually salvaged by manicures, coffee, Veggie Heaven, and ice-cream. My stress and cranky levels decreased to manageable levels which saved my laptop from getting thrown against the car window along with its electronic brethren, who shall remain nameless. Because they’re naughty.

Today was a typically uneventful Monday, during the course of which I:

Ate strawberry shortcake.

Wore my underwear inside out for the entire day without noticing.

Watched a PBS show about the Donner party. (You’ll be shocked to hear this, but it was damn depressing.)

Gave my diabetic cat his shot of insulin for the first time!

So, not so uneventful after all. Look at all those events!

Request for Revision of Title: WE’s "Bridezillas"

If you are female, gay, or otherwise inexplicably drawn to women’s television, you have heard the term “bridezilla” before. The expression indicates a woman of average temperament who, in dealing with the pressures of planning her upcoming nuptials, experiences a temporary albeit terrifying break with reality/sanity. A clever compound of the words “bride” and “Godzilla”, the idea is that the bride-to-be transforms into a scary bitch monster in the name of achieving the wedding of her dreams and having everything go according to plan. One assumes that these women, “bridezillas”, return to their previous state of emotional equilibrium after the wedding is over, and that the whole episode is fondly remembered as “that time our wedding drove you to the edges of madness”. And that’s kind of sweet.

HOWEVER, the WE show “Bridezillas” deals with an entirely different type of woman, which is why I think that they need to change the title to more accurately reflect the content of the show. It should really be called “Weddings for the Psychotically Unhinged”. The women on this show are not normal. They aren’t bridzillas at all; they’re sociopaths who happen to be walking down the aisle. Lets tune in and see what sort of wacky antics they get up to! I’m all for watching ladies in white gowns stomp on the wedding gifts they didn’t specifically request, or liquefy their cakes (with their fists!) because the icing was vanilla instead of butter cream, or shriek unintelligibly at their future husbands who I can only guess have a history of severe abuse because nothing else explains how or why they put up with the relentless tantrums from their blushing brides (and plan on doing so”’til death”. Or merciful suicide). But like I said in the paragraph above, referring to these women as “bridezillas” implies that they are normal women who are driven crazy by their weddings, whose afflictions begin with the planning and end with the actual wedding. This show features women who by all accounts have always been mentally unstable and, frankly, unfit for most kinds of human contact. They give real bridezillas a bad (worse?) name, and the whole thing probably has some kind of negative impact on the perception of women in general. Really I just want my reality television with the teeniest hint of accuracy, and if that’s too much to hope for, well, then I’ll just stick to my nightly “Golden Girls” marathons, thankyouverymuch.

Rain: What is it good for?

I’ll be totally honest with you guys: I’d rather be lit on fire than wake up to yet another day of torrential downpour. I don’t possess the mental facilities to deal with it properly, and I don’t think I’m alone here. IT’S MAY. I shouldn’t be worrying about things like which pair of shoes to wear based on which one is the least water-logged (easily solved, because they are all equal in their states of water log). You know those people that find the sound of rain on their roof soothing? One of these people I am not. There are few things more irritating than the the persistent sonification of my day being ruined. Again.

In my long list of pet peeves, the one that tops the list is when the bottoms of your pants get wet. And to answer my own question, rain is good for one thing: GETTING THINGS WET. There is nothing worse in this world than wet pant bottoms, and I’m not even exaggerating a little bit. THIS NEEDS TO END. Sure, some of you might be asking “Sam. Given your issues with all things wet and falling from the sky, why would you willingly choose to live in the UK for 6 months, commonly considered one of the rainiest places ever?” To this, I say this: Locations can change, time zones change, climates change, but some things will always remain constant: my passionate and fiery hatred of rain, and my love of complaining.

Trends That Should Go Ahead And Go Die: Hipster.

Good golly god am I sick of this word.It is easily recognized as the most recent incarnation of “emo”, which thank the sweet lord has all but vanished from everyday use. The problem with this type of blanket terminology is that, once you call one dude with long scraggly hair a hipster, are you then obliged to call everyone with that characteristic a hipster? Does my plaid shirt make me a hipster? A vast collection of flamboyant eyewear, an ironic mustache: hipsters only? We are living in a world where anything within pissing distance of “alt” is automatically filed under hipster, and this simply isn’t the case.

I want to say that the “hipster” people take issue with is really a state of mind, but the reality is that the purest state of hipsterdom is just the opposite: Hipsters are too hip to be bothered with ideology. As a group, sure they listen to similar music (the more obscure, the better). They’re vaguely liberal young people who probably claim to enjoy vintagey things, primarily records and/or record players. They have a penchant for hair dye and bangs and side parts, and blah blah blah blah BLAH. The point is this: anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that hipsters are in it solely for the fashion statement, and who can blame them? It’s a social movement (term used very loosely here) devoid of creed or responsibility! If you’re skinny, pale, like music, and want to be “different” while remaining part of a large and easily identifiable group, this is the trend for you. Hell, I love skinny jeans as much as the next gal, and lord knows I love my plaid! All I am saying is that by the time a trend trickles down to middle school children and younger, it’s time to close up shop and it’s fair to say we’ve reached that point and then some.

But the people I really take issue with are the people who CONSTANTLY TALK ABOUT HOW HARD HIPSTERS SUCK. “Could his pants BE any tighter?” “Ugh, yuck, hipster scum! Go take a shower!”. The hipster-haters are a vocal bunch and it is my belief that their rage is the result of a tragic combination of boredom and self-loathing (little known fact: most of them have deeply repressed the reality that they themselves are hipsters!). So guys, ease up a little bit. You’re hurting the hipsters’ feelings, as well as, outlined by the facts above, your own. Quit it.

So the outfits are silly, and yes, the hair and sunglasses are oftentimes ridiculous. Obvious signs of rampant drug use regardless of whether or not rampant drug use is actually occuring: a given. They are easy targets for the casualest of observers, but let us rise above it, shall we? Or for the love of all things you’re cooler than, use your noodle and come up with a different word! ANY WORD. The continued proliferation of the word “hipster” is destroying a generation, and more importantly, it’s destroying my soul. Seriously, when I think about how many times I just used the word “hipster” in this post, a piece of me dies.