thankful.

I am thankful for the following (in no particular order):
-my husband.
-the fact that my sister is moving to new york this weekend.
-my friends.
-having a job (albeit a temp one) that requires the skills that i specialize in, not just my ability to alphabetize and type.
-the band.
-the time i spent in england this summer.
-rumpole of the bailey
-my health, strange and fragile though it be.
-bourbon.
-sushi.
-boots.
-dual citizenship.
-my family.

basically, i am thankful to be healthy, and loved, and loving, and happy (despite my lapses into the blues). and also to have a kick-ass band.

sickened.

i am not notorious for being sick. while i will occasionally succumb to a sore throat or a sniffly nose, or even the occasional tummy bug, it's rare that i am SICK. this is why this week has, for lack of a better term, sucked the bag.

that's right i've been Sick-with-a-capital-S. feverish, stuffed up, sore throated, not sleeping nights sick. which, i will admit, has made the week interesting. i've had to contend with a job interview and a rehearsal in this state of demi-delirium, and i'd be hard pressed to tell you which was more fun, but one thing is sure: this week has been an adventure on wheels.

the last time i was this sick was february 2004, when dom and i made our pilgimage to new orleans; that time, i was so sick i really thought that being on an airplane was actually going to kill me (or at the very least cause some intenst structural damage), so intense was the pressure in my head. plus, nothing says romance quite like dripping snot all over your loved one. it was fun, and exciting, and more than eighteen months ago.

i am not of a sickly constitution; i have difficulty coping with being unwell. it is no small secret that i take after my mother on that count. she of the nonexistent stoicism.

however.

i suppose the point of this is that i wonder if i'm sick in that other way because i'm utterly fascinated by the swollen state of my lymph nodes, by the way that i can measure my return to health on an hourly basis, by the way that the body can respond to infection with a resounding bitch slap. it may not be cool, but i think the human body is pretty neat.

also, nyquil. i find nyquil pretty neat, too. because i like sleeping, and i suspect i wouldn't have gotten nearly this sick if i had been sleeping better of late. but that's an entirely different story.

what am i, fifteen?

i am twenty five years old and i still get test anxiety (not to be confused with text anxiety, which is what i just typed there three times). i would have thought that i would have outgrown it by now, particularly when being examined on something i am fairly certain of my abilities in, like photoshop. which i've been using fairly steadily for, oh, the last EIGHT YEARS. but no. the anxiety, she leaps in, jamming my brain into neutral and making the simplest tasks feel impossible.

the real kicker is that i know i am absolutely capable of forcing a sense of calm upon myself; i mean, i had to have gotten through the SATs somehow. it's just that doing so does have its downside, usually manifested by such strong feelings of calmness that i work in slow motion; good when i'm checking figures, not so good when i'm trying to perfect within one hour 300 square inches of layout in a program i don't yet know in my sleep, as i discovered during the first test.

my foray into self-calming meant that i managed to get through the test without twitching myself into oblivion; it also meant that i completed just over half of the test in my prescribed hour.

i don't think i've ever turned in anything half-finished in my life.

i was utterly mortified until the receptionist, taking pity on me, confided that everyone at the office knows bloody well that the document we're supposed to make during the test takes at least two and a half hours to complete, so it's an extremely small percentage that actually finish. despite the reassurance, my failure to complete the first test blew my last shreds of reserve out the window, and so by the time i sat down for the second test i was a wreck.

"you want me to what? and the where? and what's with the layer mask? and why is that red? and you want me to save HOW often? and...wait a minute."

i was cautioned by the instructions to save early, save often, which i attempted to comply with at every turn; ctrl-s became a kind of talisman, a calming influence, a good luck charm....the harbinger of the news that the computer i was using was utterly fucked and could i come back next week to finish up?

awwww, yeah.

that's right. i was given a reprieve to grab a smoke and go lurk sullenly behind the music building instead of taking that stupid exam go get my head back together, erase the specter of test one and come back fresh to kick ass and take names.

*ahem*

testing, testing.

have you ever done something of questionable sense and/or intelligence? like volunteer to take a test on a program you've never used before? that you don't own a copy of? on a mac, when you typically use a PC? when a job potentially hangs in the balance?

no, me either. um. no. never.

ahem.

guess it's back to using mallets, then.

Posted by shivery at 03:20 PM | Comments (1)

i turned up the radio, i can't hear it.

every now and again, i get despondent over my inability to craft the perfect pop song, my recent inability to write meaningful lyrics or anything AT ALL, and i feel bad about my capacity for music.

and then i listen to the radio.

and i feel infinitely better.

give the girl a hand. or two.

so, it was a common halloween saying in my household (and the simpsons', apparently) that if you ate too much candy before going to bed, you'd be plagued with nightmares. i, being of robust constitution and dogged sweet tooth, never suffered particularly from that. halloween pleurisy, yes. halloween nightmares, no.

until this year, which seems like an unforgiveable irony, because on halloween eve i'd imbibed no sweet treats aside from a cocktail with dinner. and still i dreamt badly.

typically, my bad dreams fall into one of two categories: planes falling out of the sky and having my teeth fall out. i'm not sure why, but these are my recurring dreams. i have them so often that i don't even class them as nightmares anymore. beyond them, my dreams are rarely noteworthy. monday night, however, involved a bryce dallas howard lookalike offering me her dismembered hands if i would promise to wear them at my cuffs in addition to my own. which, for unknown reasons i did, only to be horrified when I tried to wash them and they began to disintegrate. how would i return them now?!

i think if i were to analyze the dream, it would have something to do with difficulty accepting help from others, or perhaps feeling inadequate to some task. i'm not sure. if i had a therapist, i suppose it would be a question for them. analysis? never really my strong suit. this is why i want to make pretty noises and pretty pictures for a living.

but i digress.

i know that reading about other people's dreams is typically a red flag signaling 'DANGER! BOREDOM AND NAVEL GAZING AHEAD', but i figure that dreaming about dessicated hands is just too gross not to share. and sharing, after all, is caring.