Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

A sequel to the last post was planned, but this ramble turned into me complaining for like an hour, so the sequel shall be saved for next time (sorry Kazehana!)..... 

I really should not be allowed near a computer after I've had a few drinks. Last night I deleted a load of people off Facebook and I don't remember who, and I'm pretty sure I labeled a few of them as "close friends" right before deleting them because I thought that the "close friend" button was like a "close window" button that would take me back to the page I was on before.

::epic blonde::

In other news...

Mich is not a happy camper.

To be perfectly honest with you all (because if I'm not, then what's the point of the blog, right?), I've been pretty struggly the last week or two with eating. My family keeps getting hit with one bad-news-bomb after another, and everything in general just seems to get worse and worse, and I think most of you know how that works: when everything else in your life feels chaotic and out of control, the one thing you CAN control is how much you eat.

Or how much you don't eat.

So I've been not eating kind of a lot, except for yesterday when I beasted my way through 2 and a half boxes of girl scout cookies and then got drunk, cried about my cat (I'll get to that in a sec), accidentally sliced my wrist open (it WAS actually an accident--I was cleaning the bowie knife, which turned out to be way sharper than it looked to my double vision), and then I fecked around on the internet, ate more girl scout cookies, and passed out at around 10.00 PM.

Other than that, my Sunday was actually pretty nice compared to the preceding week. My friend C and I drove up to High Point and hiked up to the tower, then tried to go trespassing in Fairy Tale Forest (but they've fenced it off now, so we couldn't), stopped to visit my brothers, picked up the girl scout cookies from Big Sis #2 (-___-), and had a nice dindin with Mum. Idk what happened later....

Yeah so my cat.

After spending over $700 at the vet's (T.T) for kitty to be diagnosed with what the vet already knew suspected she had, I have been medicating her with a cream for her hyperthyroid condition. She definitely has an increase in her appetite, but she seems kind of lethargic, and I've noticed that her heart arrhythmia is in fact pretty bad--like her heart is RACING all the time. The vet said the medication might help that, but he wasn't 100% sure.

Idk if it's the medicine bothering her, or if she's just still pissed that I was away house sitting for ten days, or what, but Callisto has started peeing all over the dining room again.

I know her incontinence is gross, but I love my cat. If I lived alone with my cat, I would probably just keep cleaning up her messes and deal, maybe bring the litter box up to the room in which she is peeing and see if that works, and if it doesn't then whatever. But I don't live alone. I live in Mum's house.

Callisto is now banished to the basement (mostly just when no one's home), which is perfectly understandable. I don't like shutting her down there at night though, so I drag her food and water and a litter box up to my room and shut her in there. When I first did this on Friday, Mum got all bent out of shape about it and started b*tching and accusing me of being mad at her and blah blah blah (because EVERYTHING is totally about YOU all the time, right mommy!?!? >:O) and I slammed my door like an angsty teenager and sliced up both of my legs.

I know that seems like an epic overreaction, but I've seriously been hanging by a thread where the cat is concerned. She's 14 now and having all these health problems and she just seems so weak and frail, and as a result I am constantly TERRIFIED that she's going to die. This means I'm on edge 24/7, which really doesn't help when you add in everything else that's been going on.

Last week, my Cousin C went into the hospital.

Some background--Cousin C was sick for a while, and her doctor kept saying she just had some kind of stomach flu. But any moron could tell you that a stomach flu shouldn't leave you vomiting constantly for several months on end. Eventually the whole not-keeping-food-down for a month left Cousin C in desperate need of medical attention. Cousin C is Anorexic Auntie's daughter. She's 18, has Downs Syndrome, and was not very healthy to begin with because she flat out refuses to eat anything other than this one particular kind of sausage and one specific brand of yogurt.

As if the poor kid's life isn't hard enough, last week she just kept getting sicker and sicker, and ended up in the hospital's ICU, where they proceeded to diagnose her with something different every few hours. On Friday, they came to the conclusion that she must have some kind of infection that they just can't find, so now they're bombarding her with antibiotics hoping they fix it. And the rest of us just get to wait and see if she gets better.

Also on Friday, my Cousin N was rushed to the emergency room. She's been staying out in L.A. and ended up going to hospital a week or so ago for abdominal pain. They told her 'twas just a cyst, nothing to worry about, gave her some pills, and sent her home. A few days later the pain had intensified, so she went back and they did a scan. Lo and behold, there was a fetus attempting to gestate in her ovary.

Now I'm no doctor, but to me that seems like the sort of thing that requires emergency surgery. The docs out in L.A., however, felt it could be handled just fine with medicine similar to Plan B. According to Cousin N, the docs seemed a bit less than fond of her foreign insurance (N hails from England, not the US, and so does her health insurance). They hadn't even wanted to do the scan that ended up confirming the ectopic pregnancy.

When the pills they gave her didn't work (ummm, DUH?), Cousin N collapsed in her apartment on Thursday whilst on the phone with her mother (Loud Auntie), who couldn't do very much about the fact that her sick daughter just stopped talking because Loud Auntie lives in London. Loud Auntie called Mum, Mum alternately called Cousin N and the hospital, and Loud Auntie hopped on the next non-stop flight to LAX to meet Cousin N in the hospital, where the staff were refusing to do the surgery that Cousin N desperately needed because it had not been cleared with Cousin N's health insurance.

I was unaware that we did away with the Hippocratic Oath. 'Tis something you may want to consider when you've got, say, a knife in your chest and a health insurance* plan that your local hospital doesn't like.

Or an ectopic pregnancy that has just resulted in the sepsis of your entire body.

I'm not kidding. Cousin N's ectopic pregnancy had become a massive infection, her system was going septic, and the doctors ACTUALLY REFUSED to do the surgery she needed. Like seriously, Loud Auntie had reached the hospital by then (after an 11+ hour flight) and they were still refusing, but then I doubt any of those doctors have ever encountered anything like one of the Henry Women when they're pissed off and one of their kids is in mortal danger.

 They eventually did the surgery at around 3.00 in the morning on Saturday. Then they kicked Cousin N out of the hospital at 4.30 AM. Apparently even if your lack of good health insurance somehow gets you the treatment you need, that doesn't mean you get a bed. Even after major surgery.

Cousin N's not doing too hot. Loud Auntie is still with her out in L.A., and last I heard, Cousin N can't stand up for more than 30 seconds at a time, and is having trouble remaining conscious for longer than an hour. Cousin C, last we heard is stable, but we're not sure if she's out of the woods yet. 

If you've stuck with this post until now, I would hug you for listening if I was the sort of person who hugged. Instead, I'll give you a virtual pat on the back. 

...when it rains, it pours fire and brimstone.

*If you have no insurance at all, you may as well just yank that hypothetical knife out yourself and use it to dig your own grave.

I see you've chosen to lose your way.

Thank you all for your kind comments on that last post. I had a rough week, but things are looking better now. My new bow and arrows help. :D

I was going to do a post like that one Amber did ages ago, basically complaining about all my various pet peeves. But most of the ones I came up with are things that piss everybody off (tailgaters, children without manners, racists, animal abusers, etc.), so I thought making a post about it might be redundant in the grand scheme of things.

So instead--aided and inspired by Lil' Sis--I have compiled a list of weird things that piss me off and/or freak me out, and--according to Lil' Sis--are contributing factors to what makes me certifiable. 

8. Human Hair.

As I child, I was apparently so disturbed by and terrified of hair (especially other people's), I would freak the eff out if, for example, I had a stray hair on my sleeve, and would run screaming to the nearest adult, so that said hair could be removed.

It's not so much of an issue anymore, except when it comes to Little Sis. For some unfathomable reason, she is incapable of removing her hair from the drain after taking a shower. This causes intense arguments in my house at least twice a week.

7. Having my blood pressure checked.

I would rather have ten shots, or even twenty, than have that thing wrapped around my arm. I don't know what it is, but even the thought of it makes me go all shivery and heebie-jeebie, so I'm going to have to move on because I donwannatalkaboutit.

6. People who are really into politics.

This is probably a common pet peeve, but I'm going to complain about it anyway. You know the kind of person I mean--they could be extreme right-wing New-World-Order-Conspiracy-Theorists, environmental terrorist sympathizers, republicans, democrats, hippies, Cthulhu worshipers, whatever--they all drive me nuts because for some reason they MUST get IN YOUR FACE about what they think and why, and they'll argue with you until you're laying on the floor sobbing and begging for death. I know people get intense like this about lots of things other than politics, but it's the political ones that tend to piss me off simply because they JUST . WON'T . STOP.

Like at Easter dinner, when Stepmom decided to start telling me why I should must do it or die and vote republican this year because Obama is ruining America and blah blah blah. And despite the fact that I did not argue, that I did not really comment, and all I did was to say that I really have no interest in politics and couldn't tell you one candidate from the other, she K E P T  G O I N G. The woman who is about as close to the stereotypical Susie-Homemaker happy sunshine and smiles mother housewife got in my face and raised her voice at me because I did not leap up and proudly declare my agreement with her political opinions.

And for the first time in my 27 years, I took a stern tone with my stepmother and told her that I really didn't appreciate her behavior. She apologized to me before I left to go home, so we're good....

....anyway, moving on....

5. Lilies.

As in the flower. I hate the way they look. I REALLY REALLY HATE the way they smell. I know lots of people find it to be a pleasant flowery sort of scent, but when I smell lilies I immediately think of dead people. Specifically, dead relatives who should not have died at age 19. Sure there are a few other flowers I don't really like that much--irises, impatiens, tulips--but if someone happened to bring me a bouquet of those I would politely accept it and put the flowers in a vase in the kitchen.

But bring me lilies and those disgusting things are going straight out on the compost heap.

4. These people:

A good book is a good book, asshole. Regardless of the size and ages of its fanbase, or the number of Hollywood deals it has generated. Just because you might not like doesn't mean it's a bad book, or that the author of that book didn't work intensely hard to write it. 

3. Even worse are these people:

I get this a lot, because apparently my neutral facial expression is one of intense anger. Perhaps it's a hint of what lurks just under the surface, because every time some random stranger (and 99% of the time it's a man) tells me to smile, I want to punch them in the face. And not because they're inconveniencing me personally in any way, but because if they're the sort of person who feels the need to tell random unhappy-looking strangers to smile and be happy, eventually they're going to say it to someone who has a very legitimate reason NOT to smile.

2. Cheese.

I know I've mentioned it before, but I seem to have to explain this to lots of people very often because FOR SOME BLOODY REASON there's cheese in almost every fricking thing ever when you go out to eat; or go to eat at a friend's house; or the worst ever: when you've been on an airplane for nearly 8 hours and the only options are a sandwich with chicken and cheese, or a sandwich with just cheese.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE.

You're eating smelly sh*t that's made with the combined forces of slaughtered baby cows' stomachs and milk that's so sour it's actually solid. I just don't get it. Even the mere sight of cheese makes me gag uncontrollably, and I can no longer be in a room if there is strong-smelling cheese, or cooking cheese. I actually had to the flee the restaurant where Lil' Sis wanted to have her 8th grade graduation dinner because the odor of cheese was so bad I almost vomited all over the hostess.

1. Markers.

You could shred a chalkboard with your nails in front of me. You could scrape your knife and fork on your plate until you're blue in the face. I don't mind.

But dear god PLEASE don't

press that marker to the paper

so forcefully that it makes

that AWFUL

squeak.

There is no faster or more effective way to get Mich to leave a room.

Like for real, that noise can bring me to the point of a seizure.

I had many a run in with teachers over this issue when I was younger. I'm not sure when my hatred of that accursed noise reached its peak, but it came to the point in high school that I would walk out of a classroom if someone was using a marker and pressing it too hard. During my nannying years, all children under my care were strictly banned from colouring with markers. No exceptions. At work (and in all previous office jobs I've ever had), I have removed all markers and felt tip pens and hidden them where Boss can't find them.

...

......One thing is for certain--I am probably going to have very interesting children...

I have discovered a new band, and I'm in love.