just an ordinary goddess…

Once upon a time I used to be a klutz. I would run into walls and trip down stairs and slide on non-slippery surfaces with such regularity that, upon falling down four steps in my drama class in high school in front of everyone, a fellow classmate reassured the substitute teacher that I was fine by saying, “Oh, she’s okay. That’s just Carol.” That classmate was right. I was okay. Because I was young and flexible and used to falling (due to not really paying attention to my surroundings or comprehending spatial distances), I rarely got hurt.

Over the years I became more graceful. I noticed my surroundings. My depth perception got better. As a result I now trip and fall far less often. However, when I do exhibit the klutziness of my past, my advanced age and decreased flexibility ensures that I usually manage to hurt myself.

(We shall not speak of the time that my worst sprained ankle was a result of dancing alone in my living room in tennis shoes and landing on the side of my foot. No. I mean it. It is not to be discussed.)

So it is not entirely surprising that when I did battle with a treadmill this morning in JPL’s gym (which is in the basement of the building in which I work), I survived but did not come away unscathed.

It’s my fault. I can’t blame anyone else (except, perhaps, John Scalzi) for me getting so into the beat of “Thunder on the Mountain” by Bob Dylan that my eyes were closed while I was not holding onto the hand grips. Since I wasn’t (say it with me, class) paying attention to my surroundings, my left foot took a misstep and I slid off the treadmill (which has never happened in my 20+ years of using treadmills), scraping up my left knee, landing on my bad right wrist and twisting the right side of my back (the side injured in a car accident three years ago) unnaturally in the process. I didn’t really feel it at first, aside from the scraped knee, so I just jumped right back on and continued with the treadmill until my time was up because, hey! It’s just a flesh wound! As long as I grab the hand grips this time I’ll be fine!

Now that I’ve been sitting at my desk for awhile, the aches have set in, especially in my wrist and arm. I’ve taken Motrin IB to head off most of of the pain, but I think that tonight I’ll be staying in and eating the pain medication that I was prescribed for my back last year after thinking I was fit enough to play tug of war with my sister’s big dog and lift and toss my eight year old niece around like she was a small toddler. Also, I think there’s a big old bruise on my right hip.

And yes, I have witnesses for today’s bit of clumsiness.

Update: please see the comments for a few excellent points by my friend Eric, a damned good lawyer who does credit to his profession. I may not agree with him on all points, but I respect his point of view. There’s a reason why he’s the subject of mucho internet lust by the UCF Trollops.

So, this morning I’m checking my referral logs and I find a referral that gets my blood boiling.

The referral is from Google. The search term: “how can a drunk driver get off on a technicality.” The searcher was directed to my “white-hot hate” category, wherein my post about P*r*s H*lt*n’s sentence for drunk driving is located. So he or she no doubt read – or at least saw – that entry.

I’m including the actual search term used because I am hoping that Mr./Ms. Cox Communications in Newport Beach, California finds this specific entry and sees him/herself referenced.

Mr./Ms. Cox Communications in Newport Beach, California? You are an asshole.

You dare to drive drunk, endangering others (you’re obviously so stupid I don’t care if you endanger yourself – the gene pool would be well-rid of you) and you have the temerity to try to get off on a technicality? Fuck you, asshole. Not only do I hope you not “get off on a technicality,” I hope your sorry drunk ass is thrown in jail.

I’ve had a sister killed by a drunk driver. I know how it can tear a family apart. And I have no sympathy for anyone who has been drinking enough to set off a breathalyzer and then is stupid and uncaring enough to get behind the wheel and drive. You’re fucking lucky I don’t try to hunt you down and shame the fuck out of you to all of your neighbors, find some way to make sure you land in jail. There are ways. I know people.

But I won’t do that. Because it is illegal. Because I don’t believe in breaking the law. Unlike you, you waste of skin. And, unlike you, my fantasy of breaking the law wouldn’t endanger anyone.

So if you do come across this entry and see yourself in it – be a man. Be a woman. Be an adult. Be a fucking human being, for G-d’s sake, and turn yourself in. Get help. You obviously need it.

…often cause me to think like this:

see more dog and puppy pictures

From I Has A Hot Dog, a daily online stop of mine.

see more dog and puppy pictures

That it has been…

I find myself with a dilemma.  I’m actually in the mood to update this here blog, but am utterly without an idea about which to write.  And I’m not in a meme kind of mood – something creative is what is yanking at my writing chain, but it runs away and hides in a fog covered ditch before I can wring out anything worthwhile.  (Or anything at all. Also, I’m feeling a little lazy.)

And so I turn to you, my wonderful readers.  Is there anything you’d like to see on these humble pages?  Submit your ideas (safe for work only, please, as I’m writing this while at work) and by 5pm PST I will write about the idea that tickles my fancy the most.  Or I may incorporate several ideas in one scary, scary entry.  Or I may be inspired by something mentioned, but take it off on some Fellini-esque tangent.  No one really knows!

Sometimes I am not the brightest bulb on the tree.

Wordpress has a new update that I was considering installing. Before I did so, I backed up the entries on my blog. Cause I’m smart like that.

(Sometimes.)

I thought it would also be a good idea to back up the database for the blog as well. Unfortunately, I selected something I shouldn’t have selected, clicked on whatever it was that would have made the back up happen and…

I wiped out my database.

Crap.

Luckily it didn’t take much to reinstall Wordpress 2.6 and import my previous blog entries. I may have fallen from the Stupid Tree, but I was close enough to the ground that I didn’t hit too many branches on the way down.

Now the only thing I really have to do rebuild my sidebars, which is a pain in the ass, but not as much of one as losing all the entries I’ve written since I started the new URL would have been. A plus? I get my categories back after an ill-fated attempt to do something fancy a few months back, which turned them all into tags, which I found I liked a lot less than the categories.

I guess I’m not the dimmest bulb on the tree either. *phew*

However, the people mentioned in this YouTube video just might be:

I hate the celebrity society in which we live. Hate how the deaths in Iraq and Darfur and Afghanistan are less important than the Alec Baldwin tape. I despise it with a white-hot passion.

But I feel I have to respond to this whol P*r*s H*lt*n crap happening. I feel I have to respond to her cries of, “I feel that I was treated unfairly and that the sentence is both cruel and unwarranted. I don’t deserve this.”

Fuck you, cunt.

Forty-five days is not cruel. It is certainly not unwarranted. If you were anyone else, you would have been in jail for at least a year, and deservedly so.

You drove drunk. You could have killed yourself. You could have killed another human being. Then you were stupid enough to drive on a suspended license. Consider yourself lucky that no one died and that I wasn’t your judge, because you can bet you’d get the maximum amount of jail time available.

I hope that, while in jail (and you had damned well better go to jail and not get off on a technicality), you are forced to talk to people who have lost loved ones to drunk drivers. I’ll gladly step up to the plate for that one. I’ll watch you squirm as I tell you about how, thirty-four years ago last week, my brother watched my sister get hit by a drunk driver as she crossed a street. How he saw her dragged under the car wheels for several yards. How my mother, when she had to identify her oldest child’s body, wasn’t allowed to hug her one last time because, as the police told her later, her daughter’s scalp had been torn off and was only sitting on the top of her skull. How the driver got off with a slap on the hand when she should have been locked up for man-slaughter for killing a ten year old girl and shattering a family whose members still have scars from that day and always will.

On Saturday I told some friends, when the subject of drinking and driving came up, that I am a stone cold bitch when it comes to this subject. I will always be a stone cold bitch in regards to drinking and driving. I make no apologies for that, nor will I ever.

Suck it up, P*r*s. Do the time. Be human. For once.

Or at least I bear a strong resemblance to one (or several):

How weird is it that my first match (at 78%) is a guy? I just don’t know what to make of it.

They must, for what else would they turn up at my poor nickel?

Backing up: the candy vending machine in my building seems to only like the brand new coins. You know, the fancy ones with all the changes that make the older coins look like the poor cousin with the Salvation Army clothes. I mean, my 1986 nickel is a good nickel. It’s worth as much as those flashy nickels with their offset Jeffersons and history lesson backs. But at the apparently ancient age of 21 (hey, it’s old enough to go to drink!), it’s just not hip enough to get an almond Snickers. I put that stalwart five cent piece in three times. The damned machine spit it back out at me three times. Put in a nickel less than a two years old? Gobbled it right up.

I think I figured it out. The vending machine is a pedophile.

That’s just wrong.

…my heart, I mean.

Yesterday I went and had myself an echocardiogram. Not because anything new had developed, but just as a “Gotta Make Sure” measure. It lasted about half an hour and was pretty easy on my end, since all I had to do was lie on my left side, try not to shiver as the doctor smeared cold clear gel around my left breast and try to relax while the doctor kept pushing the echo transducer into my chest, following the trail of the now-skin-temperature gel. A few times it seemed she pushed the transducer so hard that I’d have bruising, but so far no bruising has developed.

It was actually pretty cool, trying to watch my heart beat on the monitor, seeing my valves open and close regularly and the blood rushing through. I’ve always been fascinated with what doctors and dentists do to my own body. When at the dentist, I like to keep my glasses on, if possible, and watch the action in the metal center of the light, which turns into a mirror if the light is reflected just right (which it usually is). Chances are if I ever had a triple bypass, I’d try to find a way to watch that. This despite the fact that I can be very squeamish and can’t watch anything graphic in movies or documentaries. I could never watch medical documentaries or even the graphic scenes on Nip/Tuck. Hell, I still haven’t seen the steak crawling scene from Poltergeist, even though I’ve seen that movie more times than I can count.

Anywho, good news: she said that everything looked okay to her, but it would be a couple of weeks before the full results would be known. Unless, of course, they saw something immediately that was concerning, in which case I’d get a call from my doctor. But I’m betting that nothing unusual will be found. Which is good, because it’s obvious that having a heart problem would really suck. But there is still a part of me that thinks, “Aha! If they find something physically wrong, then I’ll be vindicated.”

Yeah, I know.

However, it looks increasingly as if the diagnosis is a newly sprouted anxiety disorder. Whee! I’ve been coming to this conclusion as well, especially considering that recently I have felt anxious in situations that have not phased me in the past. Driving, for instance.

Since I don’t have a car, I don’t drive often. I have, however, rented cars in the past when needed and had no problems. Aside from the usual, “All drivers that aren’t me are idiots,” sort of frustration that pretty much every driver in L.A. feels, that is. But on the weekends of 1/13 and 1/20, when I’ve rented cars because I’ve been exceptionally busy, at least a few times while driving I felt some of the symptoms from November and December come back. Nothing bad, and not enough to distract me from my driving (though they did make the drives interminably long), but they were there nonetheless. And this time I really did feel as if it were anxiety that made an appearance, instead of my heart and head deciding to conspire against me.

So guess what I’ll be picking up tonight? Ativan. Oh fucking whee.

I don’t like pills. I take ibuprofen when needed, which is more than I’d like due to my bad neck, but I take the smallest dose I can get away with. I take vitamins when I remember to do so. But that part of me that thinks I should be able to “power through” my anxiety is highly annoyed that I have to resort to taking medication for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a number of friends who are taking or have taken medication for anxiety or panic disorders. I fully understand why they’re on such medication and am happy that it helps them out. I’ve seen great improvements in the quality of their lives.

But I still have remnants from my past that tell me I’m the strong one, I can take it, I don’t have to resort to chemical assistance to make my life better. It’s unreasonable, I know that. But there it is.

However, if this medication is going to help me, is going to keep me from experiencing such overwhelming anxiety that I swear I’m having a heart attack or that I’m going to faint while sitting at my desk at work, well, then I’ll take it according to the doctor’s orders, but make sure that I don’t become addicted to it. It’s going to be the lowest dose available, so I think I should be okay on that front.

Hey guys, I’m joining the Benzos club. G-d, I hope there’s no initiation…

…there really is a National Step In A Puddle and Splash Your Friend Day! And it’s today!

Here you thought that there was no day on the calendar that would allow you turn your dearest friends into sopping wet messes, thereby ensuring you a lifetime (or at least a week) of well-deserved purple nurples.

(muttering Holy freaking A…)