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Home.

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So I got home safe and sound and boy was I wrong to be worried! Everything is just so great, now that I’m back where I belong, in my normal surroundings and free to do what I please, when I please. Katsumi decorated the apartment with rose petals for my return, and even Jake seemed happy to have me back! It’s great, awesome, fantastic.

Just kidding.

My first night back, Tuesday, we got takeout and then I sat on the couch and cried for 20 minutes. I couldn’t decide what to do, or when to do what, and even though Katsu had cleaned the apartment and done most of the laundry (!!!) I was still overwhelmed by all the things that had to be completed, tasks I’d started that were only halfway to finished. After a bit, I calmed down and we did some exercises from my DBT workbook, which made me feel better.

Wednesday night was OK, we went to Michaels and spent the night painting (me) and working on a model pirate ship (Katsu). At some point we decided it was a great time for me to finally take charge of all the household finances.

So yesterday I spent 45 solid minutes wrestling with Quicken during my morning sessions at the outpatient facility (there’s a “nuts and bolts” group where we can work on whatever we please), drove home in traffic from HELL, and stopped at the new Market Basket to get supplies for dinner. Dinner was to be pork chops and applesauce, a dinner that I hate and one that required three hours of prep time.

When I start spending a lot of time cooking things I hate from scratch, you know i’m going down a bad path.

Sure enough, katsu and I wound up having a rip-roaring fight about credit cards and debt consolidation, I refused to make the pork chops (peeling 2 pounds of apples had been all that I could take), and I took my sleep meds at 6:30pm. I did manage to pull myself together and finish making dinner, but I was passed out by 8 sharp.

So yeah. Home is kind of a mixed bag. And Jake couldn’t care less that I’m here.

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Posted by erinire

Leaving

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So tonight is my last night inpatient. I’ve been living at this hospital since June 6, and I didn’t realize how long that was until I just now typed that date.

I’m so scared I’m numb.

When you’re inpatient (as I was until June 12), or resident (as I will be until tomorrow), there’s a sense of control. There are rules, regulations, structured activities, and bedtimes. There are counselors you can talk to when and if you need it, and near-daily meetings with therapists of all make and model. I find it comforting. Here, I am safe.

When I go home, all that’s out the window. It’ll be just me, Katsumi, and Jake… and my newly acquired cache of psychomeds. No counselors, no hand-holding. No rules.

I know I’ll be OK. I know I can do it. But still.

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Posted by erinire

It really is a MENTAL hospital, I guess.

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Not to gross everyone out, but I’ve had this nasty thing happening with my feet for over a year. Itchy, scaly, dry skin on both soles. The internet diagnosed me with the strain of athlete’s foot known as “moccasin infection”, and, since I’m at the hospital anyway, I decided to have it checked out.

Now, for the past year I’ve tried everything to get rid of this shit. I’ve tried powders, creams, Eucerin and every OTC fungal cream at the drug store. Last month, I even resorted to soaking my feet in a mixture of vinegar and water, a remedy I found on Wikipedia with the note “needs verification”. Nothing worked. So I was really hoping for some results here.

The doctor walked in, took one look, and was like, “Vaseline.”

“Vaseline?”

“Vaseline. It’s not athlete’s foot. It’s eczema.”

“Yeah, I know, but like, I’ve tried all that stuff. Like, Eucerin? I used that every night for a month and no dice. I really think it’s athlete’s foot.”

“Nope. Eczema. You need Vaseline.”

Vaseline. Right.

Trying to make the most of the situation, I told him that I hadn’t had a physical in like, five years. He sighed, resignedly took some breath sounds, and made a halfhearted attempt at a blood pressure read. “You’re fine,” he said, grimacing.

“OK, well, I’m kind of concerned that I’ve lost some weight while I’ve been here,” I continued, doggedly groping for any reason whatsoever to have walked all the way up to the med clinic. “Can you weigh me?” Truly, I WAS concerned, and not in an eating disordered, ‘too thin isn’t thin enough’ sort of way. Since starting on Celexa, it’s been just really hard for me to eat stuff. Any stuff. Not much appeals to me, and whatever I do manage to choke down just tastes… WRONG somehow. I’ve been living on Ensure meal replacements, bananas, and lowfat yogurt.

Can I tell you that asshat doctor didn’t even so much as BALANCE THE SCALE??? He just slid the weights to 102 and was like, yup, ok, you weigh the same.

The in-house eating disorder counselor, however, was much more helpful. not only did she accurately weigh me (she didn’t actually let me see the numbers, of course), but also ordered blood tests and suggested I try and eat granola with the yogurt. At least SOME people around here are doing their fucking jobs.

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Posted by erinire

A Short List of Things that Mental Health Professionals Seem to Not Get

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- the occasional swapping of benzos between friends
- the occasional swapping of pain meds between friends
- the time-honored ritual of wine while cooking
- diagnosis-related jokes (ie: “it’s not like I think my toaster is talking to me or anything like that”)
- the time honored ritual of the White Russian nightcap
- Unisom all night every night
- the sinking feeling that despite all this DBT training and positive talk, we’ll never, ever, get better.

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Posted by erinire

KHW #10: Hotels are stupid

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Why. Why would they put the coffeemaker on top of the big-ass super-tall cabinet. Why.

And also,

it seems that there’s never a need to microwave anything other than liquid or starch. No wonder we’re all fat.

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Posted by erinire

It’s kind of a miracle that I even have a pot to piss in.

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I truly do love ING. I’ve had an account with them since like, 2003, and they’ve never charged me a dime, even during the dark years when my balance hovered somewhere around $25.02. I mean, twenty bucks just sitting there in the ether of internet banking, earning about a penny a month – it’s ridiculous. I finally remembered that I had a savings account right about the time I started getting paid regularly, and I’m happy to say that, thanks to automatic transfers, I now have enough socked away for a pretty decent spree on Bluefly. Which is why it struck me as amusing, this morning, to see this ING ad plastered all over the side of a bus:

“There’s no such thing as Saver’s Remorse”

Um, yes there is. It’s called WANTING SHIT.

Leave a Comment » | money, progress? | Permalink
Posted by erinire

Someday, there will be advertising in the sky, and that’s when I’ll officially move to the jungle.

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Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy billboards as a means of advertisement. They’re ugly, ostentatious, unavoidable, and visually assaulting. You’re stuck in traffic, sucking fumes, people are laying on their horns as though it makes a difference and there’s nothing to look at but these fucking billboards, and it sucks. I thought it couldn’t get worse than the recent Pepsi array, what with the migraine-inducing color combos, lame co-opting of election fever, and wholesale use of nonsense-speak, but now, I have to say, I would take a thousand Pepsi boards over the Snickers campaign.

There’s one planted en route to my apartment that reads “GET SOME BLING WITH MASTER P-NUT”, and every time I pass it I honestly cringe. Like, I guess P-Nut is a real dude or whatever, but the image I get in my head is a bizarre cross-breeding of a grossly overweight 90s-style rapper and a testicle. Like, maybe instead of a gold chain, he’s got one huge, diamond-studded ballsack hanging around his neck, or maybe instead of grillz he’s got some glittery man-parts or something, I don’t know, but I don’t like to mix metaphors that way. Seriously.

At least, though, I generally witness that particular nugget of advertising perfection on my way HOME. The billboard that REALLY gets under my skin is on the pike westbound, near Fenway Park. I pass it every morning on my way to work, which, these days, is at or before dawn. Mornings aren’t my best, and so perhaps I’m unduly offput, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCK IS A NOUGAPLEX AND WHY DO I WANT TO PUT MY HUNGER IN ONE??? Is Nougaplex a secret government prison made of sugar and fat? Or is it some kind of amazing handbag, with sharp edges and lasers? Maybe it’s a mental state similar to disaffectation, or maybe it’s kind of like a headlock. However I try to spin it, the whole notion just BOTHERS me because THE WORD SOUNDS DUMB and it’s MORNING.

I have to admit, I probably haven’t eaten a whole candy bar since the tender days of 1993 (post-braces, pre-eating disorder), and even then I was more of a Milky Way girl. So clearly, I’m not the target audience here. But after months spent staring at these shit-brown stories-high pieces of corporate trash cluttering up my city, I would literally have to be starving to death before I’d even consider letting a Snickers bar pass my lips. And even then I might choose death, as a matter of principle.

Anyway. That’s that.

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Posted by erinire

KHW #8: There’s no thermostat in Hell.

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I don’t really know what time it is right now, but I’m pretty sure I should be asleep. I also know that the past several hours, which I would rather have spent in blissful slumber, have slipped by in a haze of goosebumps and sweat – a losing battle with the heater in room 122.

This heater has two knobs: one, ostensibly, to control the “temperature” (red for warm / blue for cold) and one to control the flow of air into the room (‘low heat’, ‘high heat’, ‘low cool’, ‘high cool’, ‘fan’ and ‘off’). My 1994 Hyundai Excel had a remarkably similar onboard system.

Since it’s Fargo, and since it’s cold, I turned knob #1 into the red, set knob #2 to ‘low heat’ (‘high’ produces something akin to the Santa Ana winds – you could blow-dry your hair in 5 minutes flat), and tucked into bed. I tossed, I turned, and soon realized I was covered in sweat. So I dialed knob #1 down a bit. Still sweating, and also parched. The air this heater kicks out is like, scientifically designed to rob your body of all moisture. Knob #1 goes down a little bit more, and suddenly I’ve got full-on air conditioning, goosebumps, and probably pneumonia, so we notch it up a tad back towards the red, chugging tap water to ward off the eventual drought. This little waltz has been continuing now for well over three hours, during which, like a hypothermia victim in his last moments before the blackness, I have peeled off several layers of sleepwear.

These sheets are like sandpaper, mind you. And I think I’m allergic to their detergent.

Frustrated and exhausted, I’ve just now turned the heater OFF. It’s nine degrees or something outside, so there’s a pretty good chance that some hapless member of the crew will knock on my door in a couple hours, eager to get started on our Starbucks run, and find me naked, frozen, and curled up under the television. (Terminal burrowing. Google it.)

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edit:

OH HEY WOW AWESOME! When the heater is “OFF”, it will still rouse itself for brief (but loud!) periods to spew COLD AIR across the bed! Life couldn’t get any better. I think I’ll just wander out into the street and die now, jesus christ.

Leave a Comment » | i hate technology, insomnia, north dakota, personal hell, progress? | Permalink
Posted by erinire

Think of it as a PSA.

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I’ve been to some filthy bathrooms in my life. Dirty hippie port-a-potties at IT were a new low, back in 2003, matched only by the putrid stink wafting from the woods behind our tent. The truck stop at Costa Rica warrants mention, as does the single rest area on North Dakota route 2. And who could really talk about nasty bathrooms without mentioning the 2-inch deep sewage swamp at Gathering of the Vibes, where the ratio of people to toilets was approximately 300:1?

Given all this, it never fails to amaze me that the bathrooms at the Kendall Square Cinema are such a constant source of horror. Like, you go to a 3-day music festival, and you KNOW that things will get nasty. You stop at a gas station in a foreign country, and you PREPARE for the worst. You don’t adjourn to the ladies’ room at a quasi-art house movie theater in the heart of Cambridge’s tech district and EXPECT to see a huge log of shit just lying on the floor, three inches from the bowl.

And this is not a one-off scenario.

I’ve been to Kendall Sq. probably hundreds of times over the years and never – not ONCE – has it not been horrible in some way. Half of the toilets don’t work, there’s rarely soap in the dispensers, and actually finding a stall with TP is like a miracle dream, (unless one counts the TP that permanently lines the floor and walls). Un-flushed tampons, half-flushed poop … I once visited the restroom mid-film and was treated to an upchuck cacophony, and as I was rinsing my hands a middle-aged woman emerged from the stall with a wink and a smile.

I mean, I’ve seen a lot of great movies there, and I don’t want to trash the place total-sum. But like, wow, we were there tonight to see Slumdog Millionaire and it just struck me how incredibly, reliably, improbably disgusting their bathrooms always are. And I was like, why have i not written about this before?

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Posted by erinire

KHW #7: Hubris or Sloth?

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Laundry is the most thankless of chores, I think, and hotel laundry is even worse. You have to beg the front desk for quarters, find your detergent and dryer sheets (or grovel for more change, so you can buy some from the ridiculously overpriced dispensers), get the key to the secret room, and take the elevator to the third floor, where the laundry machines are invariably in some state of meta-use by a staff member or fellow guest. The washer never rinses out all the soap and the dryer never dries all your clothes in one cycle, so you wind up making seventeen trips to and from the third floor, which is great for calorie burning and shit but is also a total waste of time. I flew out to ND pretty much determined not to engage in such nonsense.

I got the big win on this, our seventh shoot. It was our longest trip yet by two days, in the winter to boot, and I managed to squeak through the entire thing without having to fuck around doing laundry or having re-wear socks and undies.

So like, it’s no mystery, right, that my great coup was made possible by the close proximity of our local Target, and the kind help of reserve credit on my Bank of America account.

The laws of physics state that when you fly to Fargo with a bag that is already overweight, then spend a bunch of money on new underwear at Target, and, in the process, pick up more cute things like tank tops and sweaterdresses and leggings on clearance, your return luggage will be even MORE overweight and, in fact, may not even zipper shut properly. And so, you will have to mail your dirty clothes back to yourself, at a personal cost of $28.00.

My quest totaled charges in excess of $200.00 (including overweight baggage fees at NWA), and the dirty laundry arrived just today via USPS… with a giant hole in the side of the box and a pair of black XS boyshorts hanging therefrom. There’s gotta be a better way.

Leave a Comment » | confession, I enjoy being a girl, north dakota, progress?, work | Permalink
Posted by erinire

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