14
January

It Goes All Around My Throat

Even though people on “the interwebz” know some of the most personal things about me, most folks don’t know very much else about me. In fact, there are a lot of things that I do NOT talk about on here that people might like to know. So, I’m going to try to post more often and post about the different things that people probably don’t know about me.

Let’s see…where to begin?

I don’t know that my family remembers my first words. I know I don’t remember ever liking to talk. Talking for me was always something that was extremely difficult. I’m extremely quiet. If you don’t believe me, I recommend checking my youtube videos. That voice you can barely hear is the voice that people in life have gotten extremely frustrated over. People have accused me, at times, of trying to be inaudible, but it generally isn’t something that I am trying to do. With the exception of whispering, I don’t generally try to go unheard–it just happens. Speaking is something that I don’t ever remember being good at. Singing, on the other hand, was always something that I felt more secure in.

My mom taught me the first song that I ever sang, “Tomorrow” from Annie. I would eventually learn every song from the musical, which I obsessively watched a video of as a child because of my love for the music and my fascination with one of the few redheads I ever really saw on television or in movies. (When you grow up in a group that only makes up 1-2% of the entire global population, you search for someone who looks like you that you can truly respect or admire.) I would move on from just singing along to Annie to learning all of the songs of Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Janet Jackson, and Paula Abdul. I accidentally stumbled upon the “Like a Prayer” video on MTV, a channel which I wasn’t allowed to watch by myself until I was a teenager, and became fascinated by the song and the video. I remember watching that video before quickly flipping my television onto BET, which I was allowed to watch anytime and go to sleep to when I was small.

I absorbed music like sponges absorb water. It was something I needed to survive. It was something that was necessary for me to understand humanity. It was never a thing where I just randomly listened to music that was popular or had a good beat or anything. It was something where I needed to find music that was interesting or inspiring or just left me feeling like I needed more of it. I listened to lyrics and tried to understand them, even if I didn’t completely understand some of the lyrics until I was much older. Music was communication for me.

Even though it was communication, it wasn’t a very open form of communication for me. There were the occasional times when I would perform “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” for one of my preschool teachers, but usually the only people who heard me sing were my parents. I didn’t sing around most of my relatives. I didn’t usually sing at school in elementary school. Part of it was that I was extremely shy. The other part was my ever-present self-esteem issues crap. It didn’t help that when I sang for one of my friends in third grade that she told me that I had a “weak voice” and that I shouldn’t sing. It also didn’t help when I would volunteer to sing for assemblies and would get skipped in favor of some of my other friends. The answer was generally, “That’s okay, we already have [insert the name of one or two of my friends during that time] so you don’t have to.” It felt like a confirmation of that inner voice that said I was awful at everything. It made me feel like I was somehow “less than” other folks. Actually, it just reinforced that already-present feeling.

When I was in middle school and high school, I was in choir. It surprised everyone but me. My parents figured I would pick band, since I’d done well on the band’s music aptitude test. I wasn’t interested in band as much I was interested in singing. I needed to sing. I needed to learn to feel good about singing.

In sixth grade, the middle school choir had about 79 people total. Our director was on her first year at the school, and she just wasn’t going to have a choir that was so itty bitty. After the ensemble I was in got a Superior (a “1″) at State Competition and earned a medal, she used us a lot to recruit new members for the choir. We performed at the orientation for incoming sixth graders. We were also the group she used at a concert at a local health food store. When the 30 or so eighth graders moved on to high school, the choir didn’t lose any memebers. It didn’t stay at around the same number. It more than doubled. By eighth grade, around half of the school’s 650 students were in choir. (The other half were in band, with a few seventh and eighth graders participating in both.) Partly because of our excellence in recruiting, our teacher decided we needed to have special choir trip for the eighth grade (plus a few select seventh graders), so we ended up going to Chicago, instead of the normal trip to Atlanta. Actually, I ended up going on both trips that year. (My mom was the treasurer during the last 2 years, and had to do the trip planning, checking in of the choirs, and prep work, so I got to do all the activities.) So, choir in middle school was, for the most part, something I enjoyed.

If I hadn’t been so competitive and wanted to earn every single medal possible, it would have probably been a lot more fun. I always wanted a medal. I think earning medals was a way for me to prove to myself (and other people) that I was more than just the girl who you could depend on for the answers in class. I felt validated when I would get medals. I felt validated when I got into choirs like All-City choir. It felt like all those bad things that I had always heard from people or that I had thought about myself weren’t true. The only time that I ever really craved attention and real approval was when I was performing. I wanted to have something that people respected me for, because I always believed (and still do) that there was something fundamentally wrong or broken about me.

The competitiveness continued into high school, but it wasn’t as easy to get medals or go on trips or do the stuff that was so überfun because the directors in high school weren’t apt to take hundreds of kids to competitions or trips. The only trip I remember was a trip to Decatur, where we (oddly) stayed the night between Alabama Honor Choir rehearsals. (It was odd because Decatur is literally 40-50 minutes from my house. It was also odd because the trip was one I’d done in middle school and not had to stay the night.) The only competition I remember participating in during high school was District/State Solo/Ensemble Festival in tenth grade. It was memorable because I broke down after receiving news that I had gotten a 3 on my solo, while every other soloist from my school had gotten a 1. Even people (from other schools) who were utterly tone deaf were given at least a 2. I was given a 3 and one of the reasons listed was that I mispronounced 1 word (virgine) in the song “Ave Verum Corpus” and that mispronunciation was so horrible (a jih [like jib] instead of gee) that it knocked me down quite a bit. The two other people in the room with me, my voice teacher and my choir director, were floored by the other flaw he found in my performance: he said I was repeatedly off-key. According to them, I missed 1 note in the two songs I did. (The other song was “Art is Calling for Me” and he’d heard it the week before by a college student, who’d apparently done a magnificent job.) I was crying when I got the results, and was comforted by many of the choir students from my school, including one who I didn’t even think liked me. She said that she had been standing outside (they all had) and had heard me sing and that the judge was an idiot. This was something that people told me repeatedly that day, which (if I remember correctly) was the same day as my 16th birthday party. The next week other people, including ones who had never heard me sing, told me that the judge was an idiot. So, though I was utterly devastated by the result of that one competition, I did receive a little bit of a confidence boost from my friends. That made it easier on me when my tape failed to play Mariah Carey’s “Can’t Take That Away” in my eleventh grade English class and I ended up having to sing it a capella with no rehearsal. It is one of the only times I ever remember performing for an audience with my glasses on (I would always taken them off so that I didn’t get nervous) and being able to see the entire room. It was also one of the only times I ever felt completely safe performing.

When I quit high school and started going into my deeply depressive spells on a more frequent basis, I pretty much quit singing. I didn’t have the spark that singing needed in me anymore. So, I quit. And when I tried to sing along to a song on the radio a few years later, it felt like my voice had shrivled up on me. It felt like a voice that I had been using for years decided to quit working after I quit using it. I started giving myself voice lessons again and trying to strengthen my voice. It isn’t as strong as it once was, but it is a lot stronger than it was between 2004 and 2007. I now know that I don’t ever want to lose it, so I always try to remember to sing when I can. Just a little singing seems to keep it strong enough to stick around.

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29
December

Let Her Cry

I’m not exactly sure how to structure this post because there are so many things I want to talk about, so if it is a little more flighty than usual, then I apologize.

I guess first of all, I should talk about Christmas.  My parents and I had our Christmas meal with Nana on Christmas Eve so that my aunt didn’t have to see me or threaten violence against me.  I cried almost the entire three or four hours that my parents and I were there.  I managed to almost have an asthma attack because of the crying and I messed up my internal system by getting so worked up.  (My temperature shot up, I started getting sick, etc.)  So, it wasn’t all that pleasant.  I felt bad for my grandmother because she’s almost 80 and she’s got a lot of health issues going on, so having to have separate Christmases was tough on her physically and mentally.  (She has a lot of anxiety issues, so this whole situation has upset her quite a bit.)  I also felt bad that I couldn’t even fake a smile or a good mood while we were there.

When my mom talked to Nana about how Christmas Day went with my aunt, uncle, cousin, cousin-in-law, and cousin’s son, she said that it wasn’t a really festive occasion.  Apparently, my cousin’s son went through Nana’s house looking for me and was sad that I wasn’t there to play with him.  I almost cried when my mom told me this.  I missed him, too.  He’s the one person that I have missed every second of this whole non-communication between my aunt and me thing.  He’s just so awesome and thinks differently and is so smart and creative, so being around him is always fun.  I feel like he’s a kindred spirit.

Nana said that my aunt asked how we handled Christmas without them.  When Nana told her that I cried almost the whole time, my aunt said that that was good because I hadn’t made any effort to apologize to her.  Okay, that isn’t true.  First of all, I actually did write a “letter” via Google Docs and sent it through my uncle’s email address with a note for him to please give it to her.  While the apology isn’t a complete acceptance of the alleged wrongs that I’ve been accused of committing, it is an apology for what I did do; a request that she cease this anti-Janet “campaign”; a request that she learn a little bit more about the physical and mental health problems affecting my mom, Nana, and me so that she could understand the context of the posts I write; and questions about why she made comments to my mom suggesting that I should be kicked out of my house, that I was a bad daughter, etc.   Anyway, the apology is the best that she is going to get.  I would’ve sent it to her personally on Facebook but  she blocked me from sending her messages after I sent the message chastising her for not contacting her sister (my mom) after the June 2011 hospitalization or any of the hospitalizations/surgeries.  I can’t do it via the phone (fear/anxiety issues), face-to-face is out of the question, I don’t have her personal email address, and I just don’t think sending a letter is practical.   I would post the apology letter on here, but she doesn’t actually read this site, so it wouldn’t do any good.

On Christmas, I wasn’t just upset about the downfall of that particular relationship.  I was also upset that my maternal grandfather’s only surviving sibling had unfriended me on Facebook, as had one of his kids.  These were two of my favorite people in the family, so being unfriended saddened me.  And part of me wondered if my aunt had anything to do with it.  I hate being paranoid, but it was weird how they unfriended me shortly after she had posted something on each of their walls.  That thought/paranoia, plus the knowledge that she keeps badmouthing me to Nana and (when my mom calls her) my mother, made me very frustrated because some of the key issues with being Borderline are the fear of abandonment/rejection and intense and unstable relationships.  I think anyone who knows me in any way, shape or form could cite any number of examples that I will go to a near breakdown state whenever things change, relationships end or near an end, I start feeling unappreciated, and when I feel alone, unloved, or unwanted. So, when I was crying on Christmas Eve, I was thinking about the familial implosion, possibly killing myself over it, and how I was somehow a horrible human being.  That’s not the kind of thinking that one should have at any time, but it is especially bad during the holidays.  And that thought process and the pain that it caused makes it harder for me to come up with a way to apologize over any of this or keep quiet about how I feel.  I don’t want to excuse my (sometimes) bad behavior, but I want my family to understand where it comes from.

(BTW – When my aunt tried to lay all the blame on me for this, Nana wouldn’t have any of that.  She told her that she [my aunt] was to blame, as well, and that she was the one who wanted the family split up. She’d also told her off on the 23rd when Nana mentioned that she had to fix the table for our lunch and my aunt told her not to worry about it with us because we “weren’t used to eating at a table” anyway. )

Aside from the Christmas tear-fest, I was going to share whatever the results were from my MRI and EEG.  I went to the neurologist’s office yesterday, but (after waiting an hour and a half) I was told that the neurologist had just left to attend to an emergency at one of the hospitals.  In a small way, I was upset over not finding out the answers, but I would rather not know what was wrong with me than know that my neurologist might have wasted time with me that he could’ve spent on someone who was truly in need of his help at that moment.  (And I know that neurologists are not exactly doctors who have soft-fluffy-type emergencies.)  Anyway, my neurologist was supposed to call me sometime later in the day yesterday.  He didn’t.  He still hasn’t called.  I could call them, I guess.  The only thing I do know from the appointment yesterday is that I had lost another 6 pounds, in addition to the ~50 that I’d lost in the last year.

Oh, I finally had my T4, TSH, LH, and FSH tests done yesterday afternoon, over a month after they were originally ordered.  The woman who did the test asked me if that was my husband in the waiting room.  I silently gagged and told her that that was my father.  She told me she was glad because she had been mad when she thought he was my husband because he should know better than to be with someone so young.  In a way, I understood what she meant, but it was kind of weird to have someone say that kind of stuff.  I mean, she doesn’t know me, so what was she going to say if she had been my husband?  How would she have gotten around her disgust?  And is saying that kind of thing a good idea when you’re sticking a needle into someone?  (It could cause someone to tense up and cause veins to ‘disappear’ in someone who, like me, is a hard-stick.)

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11
December

I Think I Should Know

I feel like a little kid with her first headache. I want to whine and whimper about the pain. I feel like I should be acting pitiful, which is crazy since I’ve had headaches for over 2 decades now. I should be able to suck it up and deal with it. Of course, I wasn’t able to do that in 2000, when I had such bad “tension” headaches that I would spend long periods of time in my room with no lights on at all and nothing touching certain parts of my head. That was also when I had them to such a degree that even the school counselor thought I needed to be resting. The “tension” headaches then were one of the only physical issues that contributed to my dropping out of high school. The headaches that I’m having now are just as bad, and sometimes worse.

I think my neurologist appointment is this week. That should help me some. I hope he’ll have some ideas for what causes these awful headaches. I get migraines and even they aren’t this bad. I don’t think they’re tension headaches because, from what I’ve learned about them, tension headaches aren’t crippling. (I also think the tension diagnosis was crap back in 2000.)

The headache probably isn’t helped by the fact that I forgot to finish my (already late) dinner.  I had only eaten once yesterday before I started my dinner at almost midnight.  Then, I didn’t really like what I was eating (imitation crab salad with crackers), so I put it aside so that I could eat it once I got hungry enough to not care what I was shoving down my throat.  Well, I forgot to shove it down my throat until four o’clock, which was about 21 hours since I had actually had a legitimate meal.  I had been nauseous the entire time, but by four, I had started shaking, twitching, palpitating (it’s a word), and just feeling like shit.  My muscles felt weaker and I was almost in one of those moods where my body was either going to shut down or start making me sound like someone who’d been drinking for about 10 hours straight.  It was not pleasant and it was getting less pleasant by the minute.  So, I ate the rest of my dinner quickly, shoved some other high-carb crap down, and basically tried to swig anything that had even a slight amount of sugar.

My sugar doesn’t feel so low now.  Actually, it feels like I overcompensated.  So, instead of having the typical nausea of hunger, I am now having the gagging feeling that I assume children get on Halloween when they toss their twenty pounds of candy in their mouths without thinking.  Yeah, it’s that unpleasant feeling that was described in the episode “The Almost People” from Doctor Who:

I expect chocolate for breakfast. If you don’t feel sick by mid-morning you’re not doing it right.

Of course, mine isn’t from jumping on the bed on my birthday or eating chocolate for “breakfast” so it isn’t exactly the same, but it is pretty close to what happened, so it’ll do. And I guess it serves me right because I know better than to completely or almost completely skip eating meals. I’ve had low sugar issues for almost as long as I’ve had headaches, so I should know how how to not abuse my body in such severe ways.

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10
December

Pick A Day Already

It is almost Christmas, just two more weeks now, and I still don’t know when my parents and I get to go see Nana.  Apparently, my Aunt has yet to pick her day.  And since we can’t have Christmas together like a normal dysfunctional family and since, according to her, we “picked” Thanksgiving Day to spend with Nana, we can’t pick Christmas as well.

I don’t get how we picked Thanksgiving.  There is one day to celebrate Thanksgiving on and that’s Thanksgiving.  We didn’t say we wouldn’t eat with them.  That was my aunt’s decision.  And since all that we do on holidays is eat together, because they always seem like they’re ready to be somewhere else, I don’t get why we couldn’t stick food in our mouths at the same time and in the same place.  They would leave right after anyway, so I just don’t see why they can’t be grown-ups and bottle their hostilities towards us for an hour or so on two days this year.  I mean, I’ve been bottling it up (obviously) for years and they want me to continue bottling it up publicly, so why can’t they do it for two out of the 8760 hours in the year?  Apparently, that’s too much to expect.

And if we have to have separate holidays, then I think that we should get to pick Christmas.  Last year, we got snowed in on Christmas and they chose to eat lunch and open presents at my grandmother’s house on Christmas, without us.  And, according to Nana, the cousin-in-law was none-too-pleased that my parents and I weren’t willing to drive over an icy bridge, up and down an ice-and-snow-covered mountain, and down some country roads to get there in a car that’s 12 years old and didn’t even have much get-up-and-go when it was purchased, doesn’t have 4 wheel drive, and doesn’t have any winter weather gear (because this is Alabama) to celebrate Christmas with them.  Oh, and the drive would’ve been without the dogs because we haven’t been allowed to have them around this particular family member since we first got Xander.  (Odd, since they have a dog of their own now.)  So, we would’ve been leaving 5 dogs at home, without food, with a limited supply of water, and (for Willow) without their medicine.  We also would’ve had to take all of our medicine and some extra clothes with us, in case we got snowed in there.  So, I’m not exactly sure why she was upset at our not coming last year and I’m not sure how it is that they got to choose when they celebrated Christmas with Nana last year and how they get to choose it again this year.  Of course, they picked the day the family celebrated Christmas during the first few years that my cousin and his wife were married, thus leading to some issues for my family with regards to Christmas.  So, it’s always been them who gets to choose that day.  It kind of makes me feel like my family has never really been appreciated by their family.  And that’s not exactly the warm, fuzzy feeling that one should have on Christmas or at any time of the year.

It’s not like it should matter to me when we celebrate Christmas.  There are no presents to open in my immediate family, so it’s not like there will actually even be a Christmas here.  At least, not a materialistic type Christmas.  And Nana doesn’t buy presents anymore, so there won’t be anything like that from her.  So by not getting Christmas with her (again) I’m just missing out on one of the two days a year when I don’t (generally) have to cook.  Basically, I’m not getting one of my days off because some members of my family can’t put their big kid underwear on and deal with us for an hour or so.  Way to go, them.

I could easily end this by apologizing, but the more ridiculous they get with their behavior, the less I think I should.  Besides, like I’ve said many times (online and off), I haven’t said anything that I should really have to apologize for.  They’ve used the same language in conversations about other people.  Why do I have to apologize because my “conversation” is available for lots of people to read?  Their conversations are a lot more likely to be overheard by someone that could take offense than my posts are to be read by someone who would get upset.  Maybe I’m not completely competent about social mores, but how is their behavior any better than or my acceptable than mine?  How is it okay to insult or degrade people about their lives behind their backs if you’re doing it vocally, but it isn’t okay to rant about my own feelings about what goes on in my life on a website that I pay for?  Why is that okay?  Maybe whoever is reading my blog on their behalf (’cause I know they are) will be willing to have my aunt or uncle or cousin or even the in-law send me an email or something explaining that.

Sometimes I wish that I had a truly boring life.  One where my family got along and everything could be considered normal.  Then I realize that wishing for a different life won’t do any good because I’m stuck with this one.  I’m stuck in a family where our relationships are basically based on some antiquated caste system with the “better than” members not wanting to talk to or spend time with the “less than” members, where it is normal to have third parties read blog entries to find negative words and then report back about how “this” or “that” was said even when it wasn’t, where it was okay to give R-rated movies to me when I was 15 but the second I mentioned being suicidal or psychotic I started getting gifts most families would consider to be okay for a little girl, where censorship is okay when I judge but they’re allowed to spew whatever crap they want, where my dad has to get “groomed” (haircut and extra shaving) to keep them from calling him names behind his back, and where I’m told not to talk about them, but they get to lie to my only living grandparent about what I say so that maybe, just maybe she might decide to quit talking to me or loving me or something.  Yeah, that’s the family I get to have.  I should just accept it and move on.

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28
November

The Worst Month of the Year

I think that in the last 30 days or so, I have been seriously frustrated by some things that have gone on.  I’m not really sure why this month seems to have sucked more than usual.  Oh, wait.  I know exactly why it sucked, but I don’t really get why it all had to happen in one month.

First, there was the whole iTunes account hacked issue, leading to me getting charged for an app that I didn’t purchase.  I did get that taken care of, but I ended up having to delete my PayPal account (since it was the funding source and I felt like it might have also been compromised) and put a fraud alert on my credit report.  I had to change all of my passwords everywhere, but apparently missed a few, as I would find out a few weeks later.

After the iTunes issue, my laptop decided to take a break.  My external hard drive’s enclosure was also on a break.  The new enclosure came first, but I couldn’t see if it still worked until the laptop came back.  When it did come, I had to format the external hard drive’s drive again.  Now I’m working on getting everything back on the drive.

Meanwhile, I go to log-in on likesototally.me’s WordPress and find that it has been hacked.  I figured out what was hacked–the .htaccess.  I decided to download files from it that I knew were safe and not located elsewhere before trashing everything else.  The deletion finally got done last night.  I changed the domain’s username’s password before I decided that I needed to change the username as well.  So, that was fun.

In terms of non-tech related bad things, I had thought the disintegration of my extended family on my mom’s side was the worst possible thing in the world that was going on, until we got a nice little letter from ALFA (our insurance agency) letting us know that we would be dropped from our homeowner’s policy in February.  Apparently, insuring us was “too risky” and wasn’t worth continuing the (at least) 26 years of business with my family.  Well, technically, they’ll still be doing business with us because the life insurance policies for my dad and for me are under them, but my parents are planning on moving the car insurance when they find a new insurer.

I felt like it was my fault that the insurance got dropped.  First of all, ALFA is the employer of certain members of my family that I am not really on speaking terms with and their position in the company is fairly high, so my first thought went to that ongoing crap.  Even though they don’t want to be around us, I figured out that they wouldn’t do something that petty in order to punish me for talking about them on here.

After realizing that they were probably not behind the dropping of coverage, I thought that maybe my dad had decided not to pay the (staunchly conservative) PAC  ”contribution” when he paid the membership dues for the farm bureau.  (You have to belong to the bureau in order to get insurance and it is requested that your membership payment include a “voluntary” contribution to the PAC.)   But they say that you don’t have to pay into the PAC, and I don’t know if the company would really drop people because you choose not to contribute to it.  Somehow, I’m not sure if that decision might keep us from being insured.

The other possibility is that because of the continuing issue with the grass, this house might be considered too unsightly for them to insure.  Their standards are pretty high, and my mom suggested (at one point) that they may have been doing some of the reporting to the city about the grass and the stuff on the porch.  Of course, that makes me even more paranoid.  The idea that you can lose your insurance and get threatened with jail time because of grass and because of other random crap is just something that causes me intense anxiety.

And, as per the norm for me, I have felt worse lately.  I’ve had bouts with dizziness, pain, fever, sinus crap, and (of course) the heavy period that came around for a week and a half, and is currently on hiatus again. And I got a call from my family doctor about wanting to do blood work, which is always torture for me, so that has me kind of apprehensive.  Then, of course, there was the depression, mood swings, and generally nuttiness that I usually deal with and that usually gets worse this time of year.  It’s just been the rotten cherry on top of a melted sundae.

So, yeah, this past month has really, really sucked.  I’m hoping that December will be better.  I’m guessing that it won’t, though.  That’s not me being pessimistic or anything.  I’m being completely realistic.  And realizing that the most joyous time of the year is probably going to be suck-filled is awful.

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15
November

Come On Now

My mom decided to call her sister on Saturday to find out why exactly her sister’s family won’t be at Thanksgiving. It was, of course, my fault. Apparently, she is upset because she had been told that I called her an evil bitch. I didn’t remember doing this, so I decided to do a search. In the ten years that I have had this site, I have used the phrase “evil bitch” 3 times.

  • The most recent was in 2010. I referred to a psychiatrist as an evil bitch after she told me I smelled bad, even though I had showered, put on nice smelling clothes, etc. Valid use of the phrase, no?
  • The next most recent was in 2005. It was a reference to the furthest back entry where I had called a psychiatric nurse at the Mental Health Center the “Evil Bitch Monger from Hell”.

Clearly, since my aunt is not a psychiatrist or a psychiatric nurse, I didn’t call her an evil bitch.

I decided to try just evil next.

As for various forms of the word “bitch”, I said others described her decision about the separate Thanksgivings as bitchy, I described someone from the other side of the family as saying things that distressed me and led to me making bitchy responses, I mentioned an argument between my mom and me (later in the argument, my mom began talking about how awful I was vs. her sister, which led to sarcasm from me), I called myself bitchy, I called my eighth grade history teacher a bitchy person and said she was a misogynist, I described the call from my aunt’s daughter-in-law as being done to bitch me out, I described my mom’s mood swings as “incessant bitchiness” right before I first mentioned how frustrated I was about the video on the news, talking about nother bitchy psych nurse, a reference to myself, my mom calling me a bitch, saying my dad was bitchy about Farmville and Facebook, my being pissed at a former family friend, me mentioning a philosophy teacher that I felt was bitchy, and talking about the evil psychiatrist. That’s pretty much it when it comes to calling people bitchy or bitches or anything of the sort. So, technically, I didn’t call my aunt a bitch. I also didn’t call her evil.

She also said that I said that she made my life a living hell. I did accuse her of that as part of a meme I was participating in April. I spelled out my reasons for it, too, which I think she should read since apparently she has never read the actual entry. Other than that, my comments about her have been relatively mild. They have all been based on the same things that were discussed in the other post, which makes sense because we, as a family, have not dealt with the cause behind the feelings. Until we do that, the words will continue to be something that probably comes up. That isn’t a threat. It’s just part of what goes on until some kind of resolution happens.

It’s weird how she is upset over the 5 or 6 that had any negative content about her in the past year, but doesn’t realize I’ve also posted 1 where I was genuinely concerned about her after she had eye surgery, quite a few posts after Thanksgiving last year gushing about her cooking the meal, the 3 or so in the last year where I talk about missing her in some way, etc. That’s out of around 100 posts total that I’ve made on fuzzypinkslippers.com in the Family category and the 152 on the site overall the beginning of 2011. Most of the posts in the Family category refer to my mom or my dad or both. There are  probably more posts from the last year about going to court over my grass than there are about my aunt. So, I think a littler perspective might be helpful.

Now, if she wants to claim that I’ve been more harsh about her daughter in law, then that might be a legitimate issue, but…I haven’t even called her a bitch or evil.  I did accuse her of being a catalyst in tearing apart our family and of having a double standard about medications, but I didn’t even get all that vicious on her.  So really,  they need to get over it.  If what I say is causing them so much anxiety, stress or anger, then they are old enough to know how to click the little x in the corner of the browser.  They are also old enough to not have surrogate blog monitors check out the site for them.  I think that if they would lay off on the familial pressure (via the monitoring and the accusations they make to my mom and grandmother) then things might get better.  I keep posting things related to them because their anxiety heightens my anxiety and my paranoia.  I really wouldn’t think that people who are related to me would want to cause me to either get so angry that I have severe headaches or so depressed that I cry for hours on end because I’ve heard yet again how horrible (in terms of actions) yet insignificant (in terms of importance to them) I am.  Honestly, the best way to end all of this drama is for them to back off.  They want to prove that I’m immature or wild or needing to be controlled by my parents*…that’s fine, but this all seems like a way to bait me, which doesn’t make them come off as being much more mature than me.

*Yes, my aunt actually told my mother that my mom should be able to exert some kind of parental control on me about what I blog about because she is my parent.  Yes, my aunt knows that in less than four months, I will be 28.  She also knows that I am a lot better behaved at 27 than my mom was during her teens and twenties.  So, again…perspective.

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15
November

Motherboard, May I?

My laptop is on vacation right now. It decided to quit working properly last Tuesday. At first, I thought it was just a monitor issue, but after going through the troubleshooting process (twice) I found out that there was also a motherboard problem. So, a technician was supposed to fix it about 12 hours ago. Even though he showed up a couple of hours late (he went to the wrong location), he tried to fix it but his efforts were unsuccessful.

I got to watch him (and listen to him) call the technician technical support line for Dell. He told them that it needed more work done, including that it probably needed a new cable for the monitor, a new backpanel (I hope they still have pink ones), a new palm rest, and a new base/underside. He told them that he had trouble getting the new (refurbished) monitor to fit properly, even though it was supposed to fit my particular model of XPS. The tech support dude had to verify with me that I was okay sending it to Texas to the Depot, and I told him that I was. He then told me that it would be back to me in about 10 days. I sighed and said that was okay. (Maybe I’ll have my external hard drive cover by the time it gets back.)

Then, the tech support line guy said I needed to back up my hard drive. Now, I may not know how to fix my laptop, but I’m pretty sure that I have been around computers long enough to know that backing up a hard drive is pretty damn near impossible if you can’t access it to copy it. I pointed that out to him, so he said to specify that I only wanted them to fix the hardware and that I didn’t want them to mess with the hard drive. (I don’t care if they mess with the drive, as long as they are able to back it up before messing with it.)

Anyway, I should have my laptop back in less than 2 weeks with its 3rd new motherboard, 3rd or 4th new monitor (assuming they put one in that fits), second or third palm rest, and second back and bottom panels. I think I’m going to mention on the form that I’ll be filling out in a few hours that I would like to have them check out the webcam, since it has had kind of a glowed effect ever since the newest webcam was installed.

Eventually, I think Dell is going to go nuts fixing this laptop. I swear, it has had more problems than every other computer I’ve ever had or regularly used combined. I know that it has had a hell of a lot more issues with the motherboard (and the monitor, for that matter) than any other computer that I’ve ever had. (I think that I’d never had motherboard issues before I got this laptop in 2009.)

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