| 29 mar 2002 here's the first part of an article on a uconn women's basketball player i found on espn: "Diana Taurasi has astounding hands. Her palms are wide and thick and calloused. Her long, swollen fingers hang like screwdriver handles on a carpenter's wall. Taurasi, age 19, got those monstrous hands from her father..." dude... how UNFLATTERING. the article goes on to say that in seventh grade, she could already palm a men's basketball. wow. kind of a freak-girl, if you ask me. i think the author should have thought about what he wrote before laid the words out. it reminds me of that sally fields tv movie _sybil_, where in her mind one of her multiple personalities is this little girl playing the piano with these huge bear paws. i've been sort of distressed at my memory these days. i can't seem to remember a lot of things. my brain seems to be rotting. i mean, last night, while i was watching tv, at 10:10pm i asked myself what i watched from 9:30 to 10:00. and i couldn't remember... shit... that was only 10 minutes ago! stuff like that really scares me. of course, i think part of it may be because i find myself asking more questions lately... and it's inevitable that i'll eventually ask a question whose answer i've forgotten. but still, i'm not used to being at a loss for an answer, so it's kind of unnerving. these past two nights, i've done a little experiment. after i turn off the lights to go to bed, i stare at a poster on the near well, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. at first, i can't see anything, and soon after, i start seeing dark hazy shapes. it's kind of an interesting conflict, between what my eyes can't physically see and my memory of what i know is there. as my pupils slowly dilate, i start making out the large letters "MONEY," yet, once i try to focus on them, everything starts to fade away and pulsate, until my eyes get so dry from not blinking. once i do finally blink, the shapes become slightly brighter, only to start fading again. interesting. in the past four days, jay's gotten two nights of sleep. he pulled back to back on-call sessions at the hospital. i have no clue how a person does that and still stays functional and sane. after he came home last night, he didn't say anything at all... he just seemed to stalk around and soon he disappeared into his bedroom, most likely to get some badly needed sleep. i am constantly in awe of what medical residents go through. so apparently mcdonald's has discontinued its chicken breast parmesan sandwich. and i'm very bummed. i drove to the one near my place last night, and i knew something was wrong when the big banner next to the drive thru was down. alas. i grew quite attached to that sandwich... and that is a clear sign that i've been eating way too much mcd's these past few weeks. i had a pretty neat dream this morning. basically, osama bin laden had put a $100K price tag on my head, and all these bounty hunters were chasing me. one in particular was hiding at the bottom of a swimming pool, and he was ready to get out and kill me, when john cusack (acting as his hitman character from _grosse point blank_) came out of nowhere and launched a bullet-torpedo into the pool and killed him. and then, i said, "hey! you couldn't have possibly killed him! with the refraction of the water, you have no way of telling exactly where he is!" and then i ran away. i am getting increasingly frustrated with myself and this depression. like my tourette's, i'm blaming all of my problems and shortcoming on my medical condition. everything from my lack of exercise to my inability to focus to my general disinterest in life... and i know that my mentality is that i'm just going to depend on my medication to miraculously kick in, and then life will just instantaneously get better. fat fucking chance. i think this weekend i'm going to address one big issue: getting up earlier. i think i've figured out a plan that will force me to get up earlier, so we'll see how it goes. sunday night, as i was starting to feel sick, something weird happened. i was doing my regular naked sunday night _time_ magazine reading, and it took me an hour and a half to read 15 pages. yup. that's like 6 minutes a page. i noticed that i would read a sentence and not comprehend it at all, and i'd have to go back two or three times to achieve a semblance of understanding. it got to the point where i was actually whispering the sentences out loud to myself. seems like my brain was starting to fail me. i guess i should have known that something was going wrong with my body right then and there. on wednesday (i think), i said that i couldn't decide whether mental or physical illness was worse. i think i realize now that mental illness is definitely worse. because the mind can get so messed up that it starts believing that there is no way out. and because the methods for treating mental illness are much less developed and dependable. i think that the brain is still a great big mystery as to how to fix its malfunctions. god damn, that was the ugliest sentence ever. writing has been really hard lately. sometimes in between these paragraphs, i sit for like ten minutes thinking of what i want to say. i think the main reason why i keep going is because i want to remember how i pass the days. for example, these past few weeks, there have been holes in my journal, and i simply can't remember what i did those days any more. it really bugs me to have an empty spot in my memory. i am anxious to get this week over with. because next week will be a new month, and hopefully, a new beginning. of course, designating monthly boundaries as opportunities for change is completely stupid and arbitrary, but still it makes me feel like i have a symbolic point into to springboard off of. march has been horrible for me. really. if you don't have your health, and you don't have anything. |