Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

Thanks for all your kind words on the last post. Cousin C seems to be doing better now with the antibiotics, and Cousin N seems to be back to her usual whining-spoiled-brat self, which leads us to believe that she is feeling better. I am also feeling a bit better. ...or at least, slightly less like a psychopath.

MOVING ON

Because I love Kazehana dearly (OMG 17 DAYS :O), I am now going to continue that post I did about my weird pet peeves. This one particular phobia of mine needs a post all of its own for me to properly explain it.

I like to think of myself as a pretty fearless person, in general. Not much scares me. Few things even make me nervous. And the things that do make me a bit nervous, I still try my darndest to master the fear and deal with it. (Like in the case of airplanes.) Spiders, snakes, head-on collisions, illness, bill collectors, burglars, mountain lions--these things don't really scare me.

But one thing does really scare me.

A lot.

Like really, it leaves me so terrified that I can be reduced to a shaking, incoherent wreck.

TERRIFIED.

I don't even like talking about it. Or thinking about it.

Just doing this post required a hefty dose of alprazolam.

The thing what scares me most...

.........

.....

...is Kevin Bacon.

You don't even want to know how much xanax I needed for that google image search.

But it is through Kevin Bacon, and my fear of him, that I came to believe that God actually exists. Because God knows I'm afraid of K.B., and God really REALLY likes to f*ck with me.

It started small. As much as he freaks me out, I must admit that Kevin Bacon is in a lot of really good movies. Like The River Wild (which made me develop a fear of white water rafting because Kevin Bacon might leap into your raft and take you hostage), Tremors (which for a good two months made me afraid of going outside, in general), A Few Good Men, Murder in the First (that's the one responsible for the Fear getting really bad, but I'll get to that...), Sleepers, Trapped (DEAR GOD NIGHTMARES FOR WEEKS), Stir of Echoes, The Mystic River, and

Wild Things. Particularly, the end of Wild Things.

Scarred for life.

So when I was like twelve or thirteen and the Fear wasn't quite a phobia yet, my Cousin F went through a Christian Slater phase.

(Yeah I'm not sure either.)

That summer she came out to stay with us for a couple weeks in June before I went back to Ireland with her until September, and pretty much every day we walked to the Super Video Store so she could rent another Christian Slater movie.

Heathers is still one of my fav movies. But after that, I was forced to sit through Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (which at least had Michael Wincott, so wasn't too bad), Pump up the Volume, Broken Arrow, Bed of Roses (omg RUBBISH), and Murder in the First.

And then for some reason, Cousin F decided she wanted to switch to watching nothing but Kevin Bacon movies.

This carried over into our return to Ireland, where--praise be to God--the local video rental shop only ever had like 10 movies in stock, so the K.B. watching was limited after that first hellish week. But I still had to sit through Apollo 13.

My other big phobia is space. Like it's almost at the same level as my Fear of Kevin Bacon.

Kazehana made me this nice picture when she found out both of those fears:

The next ten years of my life saw Kevin Bacon popping up during my day to day activities ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Like almost every time I turned on the telly: Kevin Bacon movie. There was even this one time I was sleeping at a friend's house after a night of heavy drinking--I woke up around 3.30 AM (which should not have happened after the amount of alcohol I consumed; normally I would have slept soundly for at least 8 hours) and I glanced at the TV, which we had forgotten to turn off, and

there was mothereffing Kevin Bacon. On the screen. With the giant horrifyingly empty void of space in the window behind him.

A couple years ago, Cousin F came out for a couple weeks in the autumn. She wanted to go into New York City (she always does, to my utter confusion) and see some touristy things. In particular she wanted to see the Empire State Building, but neither of us are really that into heights, so she said why don't we do the virtual helicopter ride instead, as that's on the 2nd floor of the Empire State Building. And I was like that's cool.

So we went, and go into one of those theaters with the weird seating and the domed walls and ceiling like they have at the IMAX, only this was like 1/1000th the size of an IMAX theater and extremely cramped. It turned out it was so small and cramped because the seats moved to make it feel like you're actually in the helicopter. We sat, were forced to strap ourselves in, and then the little virtual-helicopter-ride-movie started.

Guess who narrated it.

Omg... Seriously you guys.... I think I almost wet myself.

Cousin F almost wet herself as well, because she was laughing uncontrollably through most of the film and I'm pretty sure by the end of it, everyone else in that theater must have thought we were lunatics. I have never exited a building so fast in my life.

But that doesn't even compare to the time about two years later, when I was working in the city. I was on my way into work one morning, walking from the path station to the office on 5th Avenue

and I sh*t you not

Kevin Bacon walked down the street.

So, naturally,

 I spent the next twenty minutes believing that all of my worst nightmares of Kevin Bacon hiding under my bed were about to come true.

And then I had to explain to Supreme Evil Bossette why I was half an hour late to work.

There are countless more incidents like this (though none actually as horrific as seeing the real K.B. walk down the street). Take Mum, for example--her favourite actress is Kyra Sedgwick.

Guess who Kyra's married to.

She's married to Kevin Bacon.

I'm getting a headache, so I'm going to have to stop now. If I get bombarded with Kevin Bacon spam by any of you, YOU WILL PAY.

♥

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.