Hubris.co.nz

So I know that I have yet to write about my Big Day Out weekend, but I’m hoping I will do that tomorrow because quite frankly, I am too damn tired to do it right now, because it will be a lot of effort, and will require flickr links, and pillaging Lisa’s photos and all that sort of complicated stuff which I don’t have the brain capacity to do right now, but suffice to say that a good time was had by me.

Monday was of course Anniversary Day, and I’d realised the night before when I was starving that Anji still had my car, so I got her to come over and pick me up and we went to Elements for brunch. After dropping her off in Newtown and grocery shopping, I spent too much time fucking around at home reading the paper so that by the time I got my ass out to the south coast the sun was hiding and the wind had come up something fierce. Nevertheless, I plunged into the ocean and spent 15 minutes or so kicking and flailing frantically to keep my legs and hands from going numb while floating up and down on some pretty fiercesome waves. It was fucking fun, but ohmygod so fucking cold.

I can’t remember the rest of the day, which suggests that it wasn’t all that. I do know that there was spinach & cashew pesto involved somehow, and perhaps a steak, although perhaps that was the next day. And celery! I’ve never prepared celery before (because wow, it’s so hard topping and tailing it and vaguely stick-ifying it!) but I felt like a salty treat and thanks to Jane‘s article about better foods to crave during a hangover or PMS (that is the awesome thing about Jane – it’s not all “boiled egg, wholemeal toast, steamed lettuce” diet, it acknowledges that you’re a human being and will drink until you puke – and then gives tips for how to feel better in the morning) I knew that celery was salty.

The next day, I was supposed to go to work again, but after sitting on the edge of my bed for half an hour being unable to reach out and grab the clothes that were an arm’s length away because I just couldn’t, I had to give in and text my manager and tell her I needed a mental health day. In fact I ended up feeling really fucking nauseous anyway. I did have a counselling session at 1.30pm, so I kept that, and holy fuck, that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I found that I was talking without cohesion, and that really annoyed the narrator in me, because while I was throwing out a series of ideas about things that may have been linked, I didn’t feel like I was making the links clear, but I think she knew what I meant. We discussed the semantics of things again, with me not knowing the word that I thought I should use, and she declared it without a second of hesitation, and I was like aaaargh, and then I laughed at my body language, the tension in me, and we were laughing at the end at something completely inappropriate, but fuuuuuuck, it was a hard time. And part of me doesn’t even want to write about it here, even this obliquely, but i want to keep it as a record. And why do anything in private? If only I hadn’t left that mp3 player on the plane, I could podcast my counselling sessions. Heh. Wow, that’d be comfortable for all parties involved. And yeah, you’d get to hear me cry some more.

I was worried after my manager’s text about needing to talk the next day, but of course I shouldn’t have been, because when I told her what was going on, she was lovely (as of course a sane person would have realised anyway), and I said that I expected to be straighted out and normalised by the end of the week, but what I needed most was more work to do. As it happens, I seem to have actually achieved a lot this week, making many changes to the website, and taking on new projects, and also making my cow-orkers laugh quite a few times. Today I helped three people set bookmarks in their browser, which made me go “Really?” but I suppose not everyone has a tertiary qualifcation in Multimedia.

When I got home on Wednesday Smoo had cleaned the house and I nearly cried at that, but instead I decided to tackle the huge pile of dishes, and then scrub the bathroom. Briar helped me by drying, and it’s nice that she’s moving out so amicably to go and flat with her brother, and that while she’s taking her bookshelf which fits my books perfectly, she is leaving me her blender because she has another brand new one, and she knows how often i use it, so hurrah for that!

Yesterday I went for dinner with Karen and Anji at Siem Reap and we plotted Mum’s birthday present. We were going to send them to Martinborough for her birthday weekend, but we might send them up to the Wairarapa Food & Wine Festival instead on the 17th of March, except that it sounds like so much fun we’re looking at booking a house that can sleep five and tagging along on their romantic weekend. Heh.

Today after work, much to my disgust I went to the Loaded Hog to meet up with D&D, because Dave’s cow-orker was having goodbye drinks there or something. There was no sun so it was cold outside on the balconey, but coronas were two for $7.50, and when I only ordered two and was polite the bartender said that he loved me and that I was his favourite as it was crowded with stupid rude demanding people. Then when we went to Boulot Gabe welcomed us with happy new years and cheek kisses, and addressed me as “Pretty”. Awww. Bart and Blair joined us for a bit, and pizza was eaten and shit was talked. You know, the usual kind of Friday stuff. When I left I got a taxi with a green sign, and made sure that I repeated the name of the company – Amalgamated – to myself several times. I didn’t talk to the driver either, even though that felt somewhat unnatural, but it made me really fucking angry last week when I was telling my friend about how a taxi driver had groped my leg as I was paying right before Xmas, and the friend was like “were you flirting with him?” and I was like “NO!” but the point was that even if I had been, which I wasn’t, he still had absolutely no right to do that, and I wasn’t to know that I was putting myself in a bad situation when I thought I was taking the safe option home. My counsellor agreed with me that it’s okay if I decide to only use Combined from now on and call one if there’s not one on the rank, and I decided that as long as I try to make sure I don’t discriminate in other areas, the number of bad experiences that I have had with a particular kind of taxi driver means that am I well justified in trying to avoid them. That said, my cab tonight was only $8.70 when it’s usually like $13. Go Amalgamated! And if I remember to call them on 3888 4000, then I can call and complain should I need to as well. I know I am ranting, so I will return to my 90210 dvds now. But I will say that tonight I am in love with Cold War Kids’ “Hang me out to dry”, and if you have perhaps been living in a basement worried abotu an atomic bomb for the past 35 years, look up “dick in a box” on Youtube. That is, of course, mostly a suggestion for D&D who apparently actually read my journal and I never knew until tonight. Party.

xojo

For my homework last week I had to think about my emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual needs, and while I only wrote it on paper today, I did have a good think about it. As a non religious person, I decided that my spiritual need would have to be something that makes me feel calm and at peace, so I decided that I needed to see the sea every day. After my counselling session today I went and sat in Frank Kitts park for ten minutes to soak in the tranquility of the green sea and wished that I too was jumping off Taranaki Wharf, and so after work because it was still hot and sunny I rushed home and rushed to my swimming spot where the water was gorgeously clear and the warmest it’s been yet, and I just felt so fucking good. I came home and showered and tried on my new dress, which looks much better with a proper bra then when I tried it on at the shop today, and it was only $35, and it’s two sizes smaller than what I’d normally go for, and it’s long enough to wear without pants which is extraordinary, although I might have to *shock horror* shave above my knees.

So that’s spiritual, and I suppose to some degree today’s swim aided my physical needs. Intellectual is obvious – I need constant stimulation. It’s taken me a while longer to figure out my emotional needs, and I think it’s tied to the stuff that I’ve been going through lately. I need to be around people that I am comfortable with. Who am I comfortable with? Am I comfortable with you? Here’s a simple test: have you ever hung out with me for a long period of time in which I was sober? If the answer is yes, then I am probably comfortable with you. If I get rapidly drunk, then – and this should have been obvious to me a long time ago – I am uneasy, probably with my own standing in relation to you. Good times.

My counsellor has decided to try and figure out at what point I started to fake having confidence and to trace it back and find out why I stopped having confidence in the first place. That’s the stage in our session when I found my chest tightening and my hands curling up and smushing at each other. It’s a funny thing to be aware of your body language but not being able to change it. It also seemed like I was arguing with her about being bullied – she was saying that it seemed like it was an issue that was continuing to have an impact on my life and was therefore important, and I was saying “yeah but how is that productive, to accept that it’s okay to be upset and hurt and shaken by those events? How does that make me stop having depression? HOW IS IT PRODUCTIVE?” I know she was right, but I couldn’t say what I should have said. And I’m not explaining myself properly here, because I don’t want to talk about it again, because I tensed up and wanted to puke tonight but settled for crying instead when I was watching “Smells like the 90′s [sic]” and the video for ‘Jeremy’ came on and I felt like it was 1992 all over again and that fucking hurt and oh, it was just somewhat difficult. The reason I’m relating it here, apart from my own records, of course, is because I’m getting to a semantics thing. I was all “I’m not happy with myself if I dwell on things that are long gone, because I should be smarter than that”, and she was like “what if instead of dwelling you’re processing?” and I said “I like that you can change the entire concept of soemthing and all its conotations just by changing one word” and she was like “well, you like words!” and I laughed, because anyone who has my business card knows that I like words – I really like words.

That was a lame story. My homework is to write her a timeline of events in my life that I think have shaped me. When she said a timeline I thought she meant for the future and I panicked, because what, have goals and aspirations? Ha! But no. And this freaks me out a little, because I know that there are things that I haven’t talked about since Kalpana and I know that my rage at taxi drivers has roots there, but holy fuck, man, it’s just eeeeeeeeeeeegggggggggggh. Yeah.

But you know, things go on. I got my camera back and discovered I had taken two photos on New Year’s Eve. One I knew about, because it was of a crate of beer in the bath and one of the bottles had a different cap, and for some reason that was just enthralling. The other suggests that I sat at the dining room table for a while at the party, and that the house has far too many pepper grinders. I got approval at work for the start of an FAQ I’m writing for our website – or rather, I’m writing the questions but don’t want to have to come up with the answers. One of the questions features Bono. Another talks about religious agendas. Yes, this is government work. I drank a beer tonight. Two in fact. Smoo’s building a model car. My arm is sore. The bath needs cleaning. The people in City Life reruns are still wearing too much lipstick,and I wish I had some purple lipgloss. I lost the lid to my coconut Lancome Juicy Tube on New Year’s. Of course. I’m planning outfits for Auckland. Blah blah. Yeah I’m okay. I should probably just go to bed, although I have once again run out of books. Maybe I’ll read The Game again and neg all the boys. In fact, that sounds like a good idea. Brad’s coming to Auckland with Lisa and I. Roadtrip!

The awesome side of having depression is that when you start to get better, it’s like, so fucking awesome. Yes, this is pretty obvious, but when things have been bad, and you take steps to make them better, and all of a sudden you feel good, you can feel this amazing sense of inner peace and feel like you’re glowing, and everything, just everything is fine, and it’s so fucking good. I’ve had this recently while watching the sun set at Lyall Bay, and when I had Lisa and Brad and Bart around the table for the flat dinenr roast on Tuesday night and my face was starting to ache from smiling, and today while floating in the ocean tryng to pretend that my toes weren’t going numb from the cold. And I know it won’t always be like this, that there are going to be more ups and downs all the time, but you know, let me have my moment in the sun. I deserve it.

And yes, there have of course been ups and downs. I had two days off work last week because I was dizzy and nauseous or just wanted to hide under the covers all day, but the good news is that my blood tests came back clean and when I went to the doctor’s to get a half-hour long blood pressure test, it turned out that I’m down to 118/74, so they didn’t even bother doing the whole half hour thing. Wahoo! I saw my counsellor for the first time on Thursday, and she’s going to make me an appointment with their career counsellor as well as she was quick to discover that I get depressed when I’m bored. She ventured a theory that I rely too much on other people to validate me, and I was like “well, since you said it, it must be true”. Heh. And then I cried when she asked me what I was good at, and what the ideal me would be like. One thing that I’m not good at is talking about what I’m good at without tagging on caveats to everything I say, like “I’m good at writing – but I don’t do it often enough”, “I have a tremendous capacity to love and be compassionate but there are many people that I think I have let down”. I like big buts and I cannot lie. And I talked a lot about feeling like I was 12 years old again and she implied that I was hanging out with a bad crowd and I laughed. The one way that I thought she wasn’t as good as Kalpana who I used to see in 2002/03 was that it was obvious she was looking at her watch all the time, wheras Kalpana had this tremendous ability to guide conversations perfectly in the available time without feeling like anything was rushed, and finding perfect ending places. But that’s okay, I’m sure it’s something I’ll get used to.

Just like I’ve got used to not drinking. Two weeks sober now! Who knew that was possible? Sure, dinner with my family on Friday night was a bit weird, but I’m going to blame that on the disappointly tiny portion of food that the vegetarian dish at the Manhattan Lounge was, and the fact that Horrible Gay Jonny was working behind the bar there, and that made my skin crawl so much that I got my parents to pay for my meal so that I wouldn’t have to talk to him. Brad brought over bubbly on Tuesday to celebrate him landing his first commercial, so I thought I’d have a half a glass to celebrate with him, but after a couple of sips Sebastian knocked my glass over, and so I figured that was a sign. And I tried to have a half glass of red wine tonight with my cumin gouda, but it just didn’t feel right. Of course, it might be that the wine’s oxidised or whatever it is that happens to wine that’s bad since I opened the bottle two weeks ago. I’m planning on drinking again when I get to Auckland, but until then, it’s a no. Did I mention that my doctor warned me to be careful if I do drink on the citalapram “because it lowers your inhibitions quicker, and then come the calls to your ex boyfriends” and I laughed and laughed and laughed. I’m now up to 3/4 pill a day, or I suppose 15mg. I was expecting to go from a half to a whole after a week but I think because I’ve been so nauseous she thought it would be better to take it slower with easing me on it.

I’ve been scatty and spaced out at work, but tonight I finished a thingie that I’ve been trying to work on, so I feel good about that. I also sanded down the other little bookshelf and spraypainted it gold. I bought magazine holders the other day, and sorted out my magazines today. My car is working again although I suspect a new alternator will be on the cards when I get my warrant in February. I found a new flatmate yesterday who I have a really really good vibe about – she works for the same ministry as me, loves Sebastian, wants a home not a house, said she was addicted to Buffy and smiled at my STD paintings. Now I’ve hung them, although they’re not straight. I feel like I’ve been achieving things, and that is good, even if it’s just doing the dishes, doing laundry, going swimming in the ocean. I found a headscarf to wear to the Big Day Out and I’m looking forward to coming in my pants at Dimmer the night before, and then again when Muse play, as long as they play ‘Hysteria’ which once featured in a dream of mine where I was making a porn movie with a guy who looked like Jesus, and we were timing our anal sex so that we’d both come right when this particularly impressive bit of guitar comes in in the song. And also I’m annoyed that I wrote two ‘in in’ together like that, because that’s so Danielle Steele with her bad writing skills being all about the “had had” and I fucking hate that. I also hate that I read two Danielle Steele books in a row, but I’m blaming that on the scattiness and blaaaaaaah of adjusting to my pills, like the proliferation of teen movies I’ve been watching. Much better are Jasper Fforde’s books about the Nursery Crime Division – The Big Over-Easy has Jack Spratt solving the case of who murdered Humpty Dumpty and the sequel The Fourth Bear speaks for itself. Sooo good. And full of word jokes which make me hot.

And that was far too long a paragraph, wasn’t it? Now all I have to do is tax returns for 2005 and 2006 because apparently they owe me money from 2001 (which is odd since Nicky did my tax returns for 2002 and 2003 and they said nothing then), set up a term deposit account and get my stuff back from everyone who has it (my camera is at the Aro house – I’m hoping I can sweet-talk Lisa into retrieving it for me) and reply to people’s emails and I’ll be like, totally on top of my life. For now. And that’s nice.

Yesterday was pretty much the first summer day that I’ve had all summer holidays, and so of course it was also the day that felt like I didn’t need to go back on pills. Nevertheless I took my half, as I’m easing onto them for the first week and headed off to Newtown for blood tests, and was somewhat surprised that the woman in the clinic didn’t wear gloves while she was doing it. Granted, it does seem all very clean and stuff, and maybe she didn’t want to disturb her manicure, and she’d obviously done it before because I hardly felt the needle go in at all, but still, shouldn’t she have worn gloves? Anyone?

Afterwards I came back home and sanded down one of my small bookshelves and spray painted it golden. Then I went to the beach! Yes, that’s how hot it was. I had my first swim of the summer – if you don’t count the night that I finished up at CWA – and I realised as I was in the cold water at my special secret cove (okay, so there is a concreted path and a handrail down to it, so it’s not actually that secret, but it is the perfect place to swim and yet is often populated only by two other people) that it was a really good way to describe the physical manifestation of the anxiety I’ve been feeling – like you know how when you get in really really cold water your breathing becomes really shallow and your heart rate speeds up? It’s like being like that all the time.Other things going through my head nonstop is the line from The Killers’ newish album which I have been listening to despite my total hatred of Brandon Flowers, and I am much enamoured of ‘When you were young’, so I’m all about the “you sit alone in your heartache / waiting for some beautiful boy to save you”, because I am still 14 and still thinking that Nuno should have been there and busted in and saved me and consequently I will always be expecting someone to save me from myself. And I’ve been so with the trying to figure out exactly where everything went wrong with my life that on New Year’s Eve if I’d had her number I probably would have called up my form one teacher, Ms. Petz, and asked her why she didn’t like me. Because I am teh crazy after all, and all of this stuff keeps me up at night and can’t turn off in my head. Except not so much yesterday, because as I said the sun was shining and that meant that I actually got things done. I did two loads of washing, hung them on the line to dry and actually folded them and put them away afterwards. I changed my sheets. I sanded down a bookshelf and spraypainted it gold, and then put coats of spray-on varnish on it. I installed new shelves in the kitchen. It was fucking amazing how much of a positive effect the sun had.

Today of course, the sun wasn’t out and so I stayed in bed for a couple of hours reading Danielle Steele before I managed to get my shit together to go to the warehouse to buy frames for my art – via the Maranui Surf Cafe, of course. And then I realised that I shouldn’t have taken my half pill on an empty stomach because I got spacey and nauseous, and I spent what felt like hours in the Warehouse, eyes glazed over in the DVD section, fighting impulse buy urges – I want to watch Deadwood but they only had the second series, I probably wouldn’t be that in to 21 Jump Street now that I’m actually old enough to stay up past 8pm and would therefore be able to watch it if it was on TV now, and then I decided that I didn’t need to spend $85 on Beverly Hills 90210 (and got it for $25 US from Amazon instead, natch). I did, however, come across The Breakfast Club by itself for $14, but decided to get the triptich with Weird Science and Sixteen Candles instead. The eighties’ movie fest continues. I felt sick for a couple of hours and weak and kitten-like, so I’ve been hiding under my duvet on the couch since I got home, you know, just for a change. Lisa came over and we watched The Breakfast Club together and made really smutty dirty jokes about the movie and also about a choice selection of NZ musicians. You know, just for a change as well.

I’m starting to feel a bit like Osama Bin Laden here. I mean, apart from the bit where he fancies Whitney Houston and plots to kill people, of course. Just that me sitting here, sending journal entries out into the ether as proof of my continued existence instead of actually talking to people. I am still ducking the phone, and I have emails from some nice people I should reply to, but oh man, that just seems like so much effort. I should talk to people and find out about what’s going on in their lives instead of just thinking about mine. And I will. Soon. It’s going to be sunny tomorrow, right?

So today I had my doctor’s appointment and I thought it might be weird to have to tell someone new about my mental history, but as it turns out she’d googled me and had the citalapram waiting on her desk when I walked in.

Okay, so that’s not strictly true (or even vaguely true at all), but she did give me a prescription without me having to cry (much), and I get a subsidised script for citalapram because I told her I can’t take fluoxetine. Well, technically I could but the bourbon necessary to deal with that would probably not fit in too well with my plan to not drink for a while. She took my blood pressure and it turns out that it’s now 140/100 – remember how it was 131/99 last time and THAT was high? Yeah. So tomorrow I’m going for fasting blood tests and pee tests and all sorts of fun things like that in case my kidneys are packing up instead of it just being stressed. Apparently there’s also something that can send stress into your body if it’s fucked up, so that could be interesting to find out if maybe it’s my physical health that’s fucked instead of my mental health. While going over my depression history before I filled in the depression survey and discovered I was circling the 3s on almost every list, I told her that I wasn’t in as bad a condition as I have been the past when I’ve signed up for the crazy pills, and she was like “you don’t have to justify yourself to me”. Well, she didn’t say that, but then we talked about early intervention and blah blah, and she also warned me of the likelihood of increased anxiety in the early stages (wahoo!) and said that I needed to be on the lookout for suicidal feelings. This is why the modern world is so fucked – in order to avoid getting to the stage where I feel like I might want to harm myself I need to take a drug that comes with the risk of increasing the wanting-to-harm-myself impulses. But hey, I dealt with that okay when it happened in March 2003, and I’m sure I can do it again with Tom on speed dial and KateH just five minutes drive away. Oh no wait…

Ha, sorry, I suppose this sort of thing is inappropriate for me to be making jokes about, but come on, it’s me – when have I ever been appropriate? I have all the shiny knowledge, pamphlets, plans to call the work-provided counsellor on Monday and most importantly the motivation to not be like this anymore that I need to defend myself, which makes me practically Harry Potter. And also some Danielle Steele books and movies of the ’80s teen genre to fill in the time until I feel okay again. Plus, thanks to Lisa, I have new craft projects to fill my time. I’m not huge with the wanting to talk to people right now, because it makes my chest hurt thinking about it, so I’ve decided she doesn’t qualify as a person. Instead, she’s an Awesomeness. Last night she brought over milk and cookies and paint, and we made art inspired by magazines. Her piece, which has been called Oh Penelope is fucking awesome. My art talent? Not so much so hot. So instead I created a quadtich which is a celebration of celibacy.

HPV

Chlamydia

Gonorrhea

Genital Herpes

That’s so Jane. Heh. And if I hadn’t used up all our gig of bandwidth this month watching Dick in a box over and over again, I could download the photos that Lisa kindly took for me of my art, since of course I’m still cameraless and have yet to suggest to Brad that he hire a panda costume to go over to Aro and get it for me. If it’s even there and not in the taxi. If I did leave it in the taxi, it’s probably fair payment for me yelling at the driver after Chrisana got out about how the taxi driver two nights before had fucking groped me. And about how fucking angry that made me. New year’s resolution: only take blue taxis from now on.

Today Lisa and I went to op shops in Newtown to find frames and then tried to eat at the Medditereaneaneanean Warehouse, but the bastard was still shut, so we settled for Hell at her house, and I made myself feel better about my own life by watching House of Carters in absolute shock and disgust and confusion about why the fuck they could possibly ever want to put their lives on TV. Their father is so clearly a child molestererer. And yes, I laughed my ass off at one of the daughter’s stories about how her mother told her she was goign to horse-riding camp but then had her kidnapped and sent to Fat Camp because she couldn’t make any money for the family as a fat kid. Oh yes, Karma and I still need to have a cuddle and make up at some stage. Then we watched more bad TV, and came here to watch Say Anything, because really, who doesn’t want John Cusack standing under their window with a ghetto blaster? Exactly!

Now at some stage I might try to go to sleep, but to be honest, I’m waiting for City Life, because haha! And besides, everyone needs a late night TV addiction while they’re waiting for the drugs to start working. I had 90210 in 2001 (not to mention September 11 coverage), and then Buffy in 2002. At least I’m keeping it home-styles now. But tomorrow I will endevour to get up before noon, so I can get these blood tests out of the way. Wahoo, needles!