That Isn’t Helping.

Remember a while ago when I revealed that our new apartment was located directly beneath the seemingly constant and deafening lovemaking of the people above us? While we’ve since learned that our upstairs neighbors are nice people who do, in fact, come up for air once in a while, we have also learned that our downstairs neighbors, the washer and drier, sound the same as our upstairs neighbors do when they’re getting down with their bad selves. They are nigh indistinguishable from one another, which has led to some confusing feelings about laundry. So when the timing is just right and you are trying to, say, face plant into the quiet solitude of your bedroom as soon as you walk in the door after work, you might instead be treated to the cacophonous sounds of the spin cycle beneath you and a different kind of spin cycle above you.

I’m looking forward to the day that my brain becomes numb to all rhythmic thumping sounds, but it probably won’t be soon enough for me to take a quiet nap in my apartment.

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.

How to stay happy even though you’re insanely broke

1.) Fantasize about selling your cats into slavery.

2.) Win tickets to see your favorite band at a local outdoor music festival. Think about how much gas will cost to get there. Consider selling those tickets. Do not sell those tickets.

3.) Make a list of all of your marketable skills. Cry into a pillow for an hour. Revise list.

4.) Make a list of all of the things in your apartment you can sell. Threaten your cats with a menacing glare as you do so.

5.) Assign a monetary value to absolutely every aspect of/object in your life.

6.) Pick up a cheap hobby to keep your mind off of your budget. Realize you don’t really have enough money to buy the supplies for said hobby. Buy supplies anyway. Forego food shopping for one week.

7.) Google “reasonable monthly food budget for two people” three times a week.

8.) Google “how dangerous can selling drugs actually be”.

9.) Think about a time when you were able to buy a coffee without agonizing for half an hour over whether or not to buy that coffee. Hold on to that memory. That memory is all you have.

10.) Absolutely under no circumstances eat anything but pasta for exactly one month. Repeat as necessary. (Which is always).

11.) Self-medicate with beer that you initially felt guilty about buying but then realized that you need it to keep yourself from googling yet another budget article.

12.) Absolutely under no circumstances write down your monthly income minus all of your bills and living expenses. Do not spend an hour staring at the number that results. Do not cry.

13.) Start writing a blog post about how you won tickets to see your favorite band but then quickly lose focus and spiral into a self indulgent list about how broke you are. Have some reservations about posting it. Proceed anyway.

**MOST IMPORTANTLY**

12.) Never. Never EVER. NEVER EVER EVER ABSOLUTELY NEVER EVER PLEASE DO NOT EVER LOOK AT THE OUTSTANDING BALANCE OF YOUR STUDENT LOANS. DO NOT TAKE NOTE OF HOW MUCH OF YOUR MONTHLY PAYMENTS IS GOING TO INTEREST. Be a good monkey and pay your monthly payment for the next 30 years of your life and one day, maybe after your dead, but not definitely, your education will be paid for.

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.

I make people uncomfortable

With my exuberance and/or creepy list-making.

In my desperation to have any kind of human contact in Portland, I emailed the writer of one of the Portland blogs I’ve been reading a lot of. I spent a long time composing my email, artfully combining serious inquiry with hilarious joke-making. At one point this happened, and I thought “Yea, totally awesome.”

Sent.

When I didn’t hear a response right away, I re-read the email. Where could I have possibly gone wrong? Did I sound stupid? Was it the list I made of things we have in common? Did I make a lot of grammar mistakes? Wait. It was probably the list I made of things we have in common. Where I said “I noticed you fell down your stairs.” ……………………………..

It all worked out in the end, since she eventually did write back and we now email back and forth on occasion, but sometimes I really wonder what is wrong with me and how I survive in the world. Let me tell you, I was this close to making a “masturbator” joke after I typed “master baker”. This. Close.

My Creativity

Is directly proportional to the quantity/importance of tasks I need to accomplish. This equation gets squared when there is an impending deadline in the painfully near future. Cube it if the deadline is tomorrow and/or my whole life depends on it. Also, math humor somehow gets involved, even though no one asked it to and it’s none of it’s business.

Add to this (!!!) the fact that Eric is on Reddit right next to me and I can see every hilarious thing he is looking at, and I’m pretty much checked out for the rest of the night.

Right now, I should be finishing my newest batch of cover letters and sending them on their merry way into the abyss. You know, that place where all of your hopes and dreams go when you are in the middle of a lengthy job search. Wow, that sounded bleak. Maybe if my attitude wasn’t so cynical I would have less of a problem powering through the last of these letters, but alas, people are slow to change.

So. Facebook. Good? Bad? Sexy? I’ll go with all of the above, so as not to be too inflammatory. I’ll say this, I do think it’s making me a more worthless human being. Sometimes I catch myself scrolling through my newsfeed, mouth literally agape, just shy of drooling on myself. Why, Facebook? Why do I need you so? I don’t even like you, yet I am powerless to stop myself from checking you every five minutes. You make me feel weird inside when I realize that I’ve spent thirty entire minutes stalking one person. You’re kind of like a poison rotting me from the inside out. WHY CAN’T I QUIT YOU.

Like just now, as I was typing the above paragraph, I went and checked Facebook. I have it open in a tab right now. God, I hate myself.

I think I’ll go finish my cover letters now.

It’s Time to Get Serious About Christmas

Like, really fucking serious. As in, I am going to kick Christmas’s ass, and then make it my bitch/slave. Christmas will be like, “‘Tis the season!” and I’ll be all, “SHUT UP CHRISTMAS, I WILL KILL YOU!” And then Christmas will go back to vacuuming the stairs because I hate vacuuming stairs.

Every November, and I mean every November, I think to myself, “I am going to kick SO much Christmas ASS this year”, and not in the hostile, violent way that I meant it in the previous paragraph. I always start out with every intention of decorating whatever living space I reside in, writing lists, getting everyone’s presents early, wrapping them in a stress-free environment, and maybe even sending out Christmas cards with all the extra time I have. Just so I can be like, “Yea, you’re getting a Christmas card from me because I was that prepared and awesome. Oh, and happy holidays.”

Instead, what happens is this: The month of November tricks me into thinking that Christmas is a ways away, and that I have tons of time to get everything done. Then I get caught up in all of the Thanksgiving frivolity, and before I can have leftovers for the 10th time, it’s December.

But it’s only the beginning of December, and Christmas is at the end, which is sooo far away! Like, weeks and weeks!

Then one day I’ll be at work, making appointments for a patient, and they’re like, “OK so I have next weeks appointments, and then the week after that is Christmas…” HOLD THE PHONE, Sir. The week after next is most certainly not Christmas, because I have prepared exactly nothing, and that can’t be right. Unless…no, wait. It is. God. Damn it.

And that is when the two-week anxiety period begins.

I’ll start out by making some cursory attempts at online shopping during work, like you saw a couple days ago. When this fails because I am flying by the seat of my pants and can’t commit to a decision/budget/Amazon account, I’ll start writing lists of who exactly I need to buy for and what I should get them. I’ll come up with a few awesome, unexpected gift ideas for a select few people, and hope that the rest just come to me in my sleep or something.

Inevitably, two or more of the awesome present ideas I had willfall through due to lack of money, time, or both, and I will have to resort to hand-making the present. My thought process is “Everyone likes something handmade!” but I am lying to myself, because that’s really only if the gift-giver is under the age of 9 and/or possesses a talent worthy of being given as a gift. Like a painting or some kind of pottery.  Not an origami crane mobile, which is the best and possibly only thing I can come up.

Mine would definitely turn out worse than this.

–If you like what you see, I can totally make you an origami crane mobile for Christmas this year!– Also, don’t be sad if you get an origami crane mobile from me this year. Remember all the intent I had earlier? Such wonderful intent…–

Before I know it, it’s three days before Christmas and I am still waiting for all of the presents that I ordered to come in. I have two half-finished origami crane mobiles, and no way to wrap them. Forget about Christmas cards, because as it turns out, I am not that awesome.

What I’m trying to say is GOD DAMN YOU CHRISTMAS. This might not be your fault in any conceivable way, but I am making it your fault! Vacuum under the couch. RIGHT NOW!

Happy Doppleganger Month!

At least twice a week for the last, oh, ten years of my life, I have been told by friends, acquaintances, but mostly utter strangers that I look “familiar”. Or that “I met your doppleganger!” Or have been asked “Have we met before?” Or “Were you ever in a production of Riverdance?” or “Were you in the play I saw last night?” or “Are you Nancy?” Understandably, this has become a significant pet peeve of mine. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Number 1: 95% of the time, I literally have never seen the people asking me these questions before in my whole life. No, we’ve never met. Yes, I’m sure. No, I’m not Nancy.

Number 2: What is it about me that makes everyone think that they’ve met me before? Am I some sort of prototype for females with brown hair and light eyes? Was I used in a cloning experiment? I mean, I don’t know what Nancy looks like, but could we really be so similar that it had to be asked if I was, in fact, Nancy? It all has a surprisingly detrimental effect on one’s sense of individuality, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Like, I’m supposed to be a beautiful flower unlike any other flower, right? So, what’s with all the questions? To add another element to the situation, I never think that anyone looks like anyone else that I’ve met. Certainly not enough to ask a total stranger if I’ve met them before. And I definitely don’t see people who I think look like me walking around. You’d think I would, seeing as we’re all out in the open and ripe for the plucking.  Maybe I just have a kick ass memory (which I kind of do) and can distinguish the people I have met from the people I haven’t met.  It’s a unique talent, I know.

So, I don’t know. If someone could enlighten me as to the reason behind this phenomenon, that would be great. I’ve always been curious, but have generally been too peeved to ask the assailants why they thought I was in Riverdance.

have you seen this face a million times before?

Oh, and I’ll deal with the slew of celebrity Dopplegangers in another post, I promise.

Very sincerely looking forward to the day when doppleganger goes back to being a relatively infrequently used word,

Sam

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.

Mother Nature, thou art cruel.

I woke up this morning and did a triple take at the view from my window. Wha-wha-WHAAAT? Snow?? Where was the 48 hours of news coverage? Where was the panic and sense of impending doom? I feel thoroughly let down by meteorology and all those who ascribe to it.

I was supposed to be on my way to Noah’s Ark Animal Shelter to begin my life as a volunteer cat cuddler. I was going to write a post being all “Wish me luck! Let’s hope I come back with only one box-full of animals instead of three!” But nooooo. Snow. Now we can’t go for a walk in the woods adjacent to the shelter. Hmmph. I suppose that’s what rescheduling is for.

In view of this morning’s events, I feel I deserve a sausage and egg sandwich from Mountain Lake Bagel. Indeed.