make healthy beautiful wish!

I've been shopping at Vietanamese grocery stores since I was 20, but somehow never discovered the instant cereal drink section. a girl from my Eastern Nutrition class is always eating some kind of oatmeal type packet with seaweed in it, so when I went to pick up some kuding cha for my air conditioning induced sore throat, I made sure to scour the aisle for some kind of breakfast gruel. While most of them had wheat flakes, I was able to find this lovely blend which is relatively gluten-free, if you eat oats. It contains oats, Job's tears, green mung bean, lotus seed, and oligofructose.

It's lightly sweet, bland, a little nutty. the consistency is fairly gluey with a few flakes or lumps. I made a double serving and added water to the texture of pudding, but it's probably intended to be served more as a beverage.

Coix seeds, mung beans, and lotus seeds are all used to strengthen the digestive tract as well as clear internal dampness and heat. Internal dampness and heat are a sort of mystical-sounding Chinese Medicine concept that basically breaks down to "metabolic friction." They can manifest as skin problems, muscle and joint pain, bloating, edema, urogenital dysfunction, digestive pain, diarrhea, insomnia, anxiety, even bleeding. They can be caused by stress, improper diet, lingering pathogens, weather, or congenital predisposition.

I assumed oligofructose was the same as regular fructose, i.e. fruit sugar, but it's actually a type of fiber that is about half as sweet as regular sugar. it's called a prebiotic because it is digested by intestinal bacteria. it helps with calcium absorption and may help prevent yeast overgrowth.

one packet breaks down to 143 calories, 29.6 g carbs, 6.6 g fiber, and 4.6 g protein. it also has relatively high iron, B vitamin, and calcium content for an unfortified cereal.

and finally, the package has a lovely Engrish description on the back:

Oat and Job's tear are both annual plants. Job's tear is especially renowned for it's high nutritive value as "The kind of grass family." Oat has been proven to be good for healthy by many agricultural experts and scholars in Europe and America in their researches. The combination of Oat and Job's tear is able to compliment each other and provide excellent nutrition to keep healthy."

In summary: this shit tastes good. it'll make you gorgeous, sexy, and give you superpowers. Total win.

happy fibromyalgia awareness day

somedays it's hard to carry an invisible boulder.

in the days we sweat it out on the streets

my body is a temple.
my body is a cage.

hope is the thing with feathers.

I can feel them inside my lungs when I'm running along the lake path. I can't take a deep breath.

I can run twice as far as I could ten years ago. I guess I got more chasing me.

I count to five. over and over. there's little room for thinking when you're choking on a broken heart and metaphysical wings.

I will be the fittest person with fibromyalgia on the planet. you will never, ever think to look at me that I have an untreatable nervous system disorder that makes me feel like someone's been borrowing my body at night to play rugby in.

at least this way I own the pain.

for the fucking win.

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

I'm starting to feel distant again

this

or this.

I'm just so fucking depressed
I just can't seem to get to get out this slump
if I could just get over this hump
but I need something to pull me out this dump

I took my bruises, took my lumps
fell down and I got right back up
but I need something to get me psyched back up...

and it never really began, but in my heart it was so real...

it just kind of hit me. it's really over. there was never much there in the first place, just a lot of misplaced hope, a lot of trying real hard to cram a square peg into a round hole.

I wanted so much and I tried to make myself believe that too little was enough. but it just wasn't. my heart's been broken for a long-ass time and it's just now catching up to me.

I have spent almost every waking moment of the past 18 years longing for someone to take me out of myself. to give me someone to be. to make me belong. to make it stop hurting. maybe it's because I was raised on that "god-shaped hole" nonsense. maybe it's because my mom made me get on my knees as a little bitty girl and pray to Jesus for a husband.

I don't know how to be ok alone, despite the fact that I spent almost all my time alone. it's like, if I have someone specific to obsess about, then I won't feel so empty. If I can name and qualify this hurt it will somehow be lessened.

I have endless time. and endless pain. and nobody but me.

steel guitar makes it real

The flag is gone from the roof of the Edgewater Beach Hotel.
how will I know which way the wind is blowing.

he says I love you just not how you want me to.
how the fuck am I supposed to process that.
what the fuck is that supposed to mean.

needs and wants and hurts

naked and bloody and veiny and shaking
alone and broken and unwanted in the dark.



it all boils down to this:

I wanted you
and you were a stone.




"and if it could start being alive you'd stop being alone."

everything falls apart

here's the thing. every time I try to have a relationship, it's never just me and him. it's always me, him, and pain. and if he's got his own pain to deal with, well, the bed just gets too small for all four of us.

maybe one day I'll be able to see the difference between me and pain. I'll quit thinking that my brokenness makes me inferior. I'll quit making excuses for the way I am when I am ravaged by pain.

I just don't know how to do that now. days like this when I just feel flayed, when my heart and lungs are raw with grief, I don't know how to separate who I am from this rotting flesh.

When I was small a teacher gave me a collection of fairy tales. I identify very strongly with the story of Catherine and her Fate. Except no fairy godmother ever came to me and asked me to decide between happiness in my youth or happiness in old age. and I have no guarantee that the Universe will ever cease to ask so much of me.

Cascando

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you




(S. Beckett, 1936)

definitely a madman with a box

new season. new Doctor.

newly restored faith in things getting better.

but I'd trade the rest of my days for you tonight

first sunburn of the year, slow to develop, just a little glow on my forearms and face. riding bikes by the lake with my lost friend's little sister and talking about loss and love and hurt and growing up.

my heart aches. there's so many holes punched in it that I imagine it like lace, gushing and leaking inside my chest. maybe that's why it's beating so fast. 85 bpm, unrelenting, like new love, like stage fright, like being chased down a darkened hallway in the night by the wolf from under the bed.

where is my brave face. where is the script for me to follow. what is love. can I love without trusting, or is that just addiction to oxytocin and dopamine and a very specific bioelectric field.

when I was little my mom used to make me pray for a husband. now I can't imagine anything other than living and dying alone. even when I'm with someone. when nobody's going anywhere. when they're right where I need them. I'm still alone, because there's no hope of anything other than loss and loneliness and broken shattered pieces of my lacy hole-filled heart. when did I lose faith.

who broke my heart first. my dad. jesus. the world. I remember being 13 and telling myself that there was no such thing as love. losing my virginity in a tent in the woods to a stranger, before ever even having a first kiss. because nothing is special. nothing is pure. nothing will last.

tomorrow I give in to the dark side. I lose the mission. I cease to keep the faith. I go to a psychiatrist and I get pills to quiet my heart. to put me to sleep. to make being unwanted hurt less. to keep my brave face on. to live through this.

everything sticks in my throat. pills. raisins. toast. resentment. fear. maybe I'm choking on love, on insecurity. on being unable to let go and trust. to surrender control.

I first heard this song the summer of 2003. the first time I lived alone. me and the cats and a sixpack of high life writing in livejournal, bike rides to the food coop, to decleyre, to the felix house. honeysuckle and porch swings and blue shadows on the street. sitting alone in the dark listening to lucero, loneliness like a knife embedded in my chest. surrounded by love but unable to open my arms and take it. like tantalus in hades. pushing the rock of my own stubborn lack of faith and hope and trust endlessly up this hill.

so I'll swallow my pills until summer, until the earth tilts, until things make more sense. until they are better.

but it won't be tonight.

I really wish I could go back on meds, that they'd work. that the side effects wouldn't be just as miserable as my baseline state is.

weeks of unending dopesickness has left me sure that my neurochemistry is irrevocably fucked.

I've read that crippling depression and anxiety are part of "secondary withdrawals," that it's going to be another month before I feel anywhere close to normal, which is way too close to rock bottom for me anyway.

I'm losing friends because all I do is whinge. I can't stand myself either. I can't stand feeling like this and all I can do is stick needles in myself and take handfuls of valerian root and drink lemon balm tea and wait for my heart to stop pounding.

I'm at wit's end. I've been having a panic attack, unable to stop crying for 3 days straight.

strong at the broken places

after two weeks off Vicodin I was stupid. I took a few pills when I had cramps too bad to walk, thinking surely it wouldn't be too bad.

instead I triggered another set of withdrawals all over again. fish-flopping limbs. racing heart. searing pain, like sunburn under my skin and on top of my muscle layer. hallucinations. nausea so deep it felt like dying. icy sweat.


I've been pushed to the very deepest darkest places this past month. I've been in more pain than I ever thought I'd be able to bear. I had to relive the whole Second Chance experience over again, being locked up and in pain and being treated like a liar. being forced to kiss ass and make nice to get out and get back to my life when inside I was seething with rage because no-one would help me.

and yet I go on. like a good little Newtonian. at some point these experiences will have their equal and opposite reaction. I will learn whatever it is I was supposed to learn from this and I will make myself its master.

and eventually this world will get tired of breaking me, and it will kill me in the end. even then they will gather after over the pieces of me that are left and say, she was so strong.

see you at the crossroads

It's gonna be awhile before I can write about the past couple weeks in any sort of depth. bad reaction to Yasmin had me feeling like I'd been set on fire, my MDs decided it was narcotic withdrawal despite the fact that I was taking 60 mg a day of hydrocodone, I went to the ER, got sent to the state mental hospital, went 8 days without seeing the sky or riding my bike, got out, had Howard Brown fire me as a patient because my health problems are beyond their scope of practice, one of the nurse practitioners there somehow gave my therapist the idea that I was a narcotic addict so now she's refusing to treat me, Howard Brown refused to refill my pain meds because I won;t have a laparascopy done so now I am detoxing, I had to drop two classes, I'm weeks behind in the 3 I kept, I lost 5 pounds cos the fucking state hospital's idea of gluten-free meals are a scoop of government peanut butter and three cups of canned fruit cocktail...

hospitals trigger my ptsd like fucking hell and if it weren't for all the meds I"m on right now I think I'd be fucked out of my mind.

right now the only thing that is helping is eating bacon cherry chocolate chip pancakes 4 meals in a row.

and this beautiful amazing inspiring song, which I've got on repeat.

avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?

I've been buying herbs from a Chinese pharmacy in Little Saigon for a couple months now. the owner is a diminutive woman who appears to be fluent in several languages. she stocks all the major medicinals for decoctions as well as the most commonly used pills and teas and creams and liniments. We've gotten to be on a first-name basis and I've joked about getting her to sell me her shop when she wants to retire.

I've been in there about 5 times in the past week; I've been having horrible hot flashes that make me feel like my bones are boiling, sending a very uncomfortable fizzing sensation through my muscles. I get so hot that I get goosebumps, despite having no measurable fever. I'm frantic with worry and sadness, not sleeping well, nauseated, downcast, miserable. I've spent about 80 bucks in the past week on medication and herbs trying to get my body back to its normal miserable state. seriously, I can deal with just fibro, but this endometriosis and pseudo-menopausal crap are grinding me down.

Lin, the owner of the herb shop, was asking me about my health. she knows what she's selling, so she can tell from my purchases that I'm not the average 30 year old. I was trying to give her the short rundown and somehow ended up giving her the whole life story.

I don't give myself enough credit. I really don't. between the culture shock of the South's suburbs and my brother's attempts to molest me and then getting sent off to a brainwashing lockup and force-fed lithium for years, I went through more hell in my early teens than most people do in their whole life. and shit didn't even stop then. my life has been an avalanche of poor health and poor decisions made from an inability to plan for the future for most of my adult years too.

I've had a hard time being around people lately. I'm ashamed of my inability to keep my composure. I am constantly afraid that the few friends I have will turn their back on me, that they will be sickened by my neediness if I ask them to keep me company when I am sad or scared or feeling self-destructive. I have been hiding in my apartment for weeks, watching hours of downloaded tv, sticking needles in my feet and hands to keep from cutting myself. I schedule one or two social events a week and try my hardest to put on a brave face.


I am fragile. I am crumbling. but I have to believe that I am not broken past all hope of mending. as much as I want all this pain and fear and anxiety and sadness to be over, I'm not done living yet.

I just have to hang on a little while longer. and then a little more after that.

I'm too unforgiving towards myself. I let my physical fragility cause emotional fragility and then get angry at myself when my circuits overload and I lose control of how I feel. I need to learn to step back.

these past few weeks, I've felt like I'm running on a giant hamster wheel, constantly tripping and falling down and skinning my knees and palms, busting my lip. I feel like a giant bruise emotionally.

I should have broken down and called my shrink. she was out of town and I didn't want to bother her, but she told me to call if if I wasn't doing well, and fuck. this past week has been one of the worst I can remember.

hindsight is 20/20, right.

cheer up, honey (I hope you can)

today seemed slightly better, as if I've rounded some sort of bend, as if the light at the end of the tunnel has come microscopically closer. there was an earthquake this morning and a foot of snow on the ground. soon it will be March.

I don't think I have ever missed anyone this intensely. not and still believed that they were coming back.

please come back.

fail

I gave herbs and acupuncture a year to try to fix all my mysterious lady problems; today, after having to combine vicoprofen and tylenol 3 just to get out of bed, I broke down and called my doctor for a birth control script.

I'm so hormonally overloaded it can't possibly make it worse, right?

I'm ok with my boobs growing, but I can't afford new britches, so let's hope my ass stays the same size...

consolation prize

I keep telling myself, "At least you still look good," but honestly, it's not really helping. I'd rather be ugly than hurt this much.

I am constantly overcome with envy.
I feel so left out.

I miss having a life.
I miss working.
I miss being busy.