Lachrymosity

I cry when I'm angry.

This means I cry when my ex is being a douche; when my mother presses my buttons (and she does it better than anyone I know); when the Twin does something selfish when I know he's better than that; when I talk about the first Passover; when someone accuses me of doing something that they should know I wouldn't do if they knew anything at all about my character; when one of the kids at work does drugs or gets someone pregnant again (or gets pregnant again); when one of the kids gets arrested deservedly; when one of the kids gets arrested undeservedly; when my brother says something stupid and thoughtless about my weight or eating habits; when people ask me why I don't go on holiday / throw big parties / learn to drive and I have to tell them AGAIN that I don't have any money and then fend off mystified stares; when people constantly question my intelligence; when I find celery in a soup or other food that didn't say celery on the label; when someone borrows my clothes and smokes in them when I've asked them not to; when I try to cook something that I used to cook well and it goes completely wrong; when I see Juliet; when my clothes don't fit; when mom damages the spine of yet another book of mine; when I read political news articles; when I look at YouTube comments; and sometimes when the alarm goes off in the mornings.

I cry when I'm sad.

This means I cry when I talk to dead people; when I have nightmares; when my ex is being a douche; when I think of much of my childhood; when my mom is sad; when I watch the ending of Terminator 2; when I read Caroline B. Cooney's The Stranger; when I think of my parents dying; when I think about my BFF's marriage; when I think about Julian; when I watch Carousel or South Pacific; when I hear the words Agent Orange; when I watch a movie with Heath Ledger or Brad Renfro; when I read L.J. Smith's Forbidden Game trilogy; when I look at nine words someone sent me once; when I read old conversations between me and K; when I run into K; when I remember how my Dad's voice used to sound when he called me darling; when I give away or throw away books or clothes; when I remember that I won't ever be a surgeon or a photographer or a jewellery-maker ever (or ever again, for those last two); when a limited-edition food or make-up that I really like stops being sold; and when characters die in my favourite TV programs.

I cry when I'm afraid.

This means I cry when I think I'm going to throw up; when someone near me throws up; when I think about parasites invading my body; when I have to clear up maggots; when I dream about snakes (curiously, when I'm awake snakes don't bother me); when I'm swimming and I see a jellyfish; when I have the dead-baby dream; when I see black-and-white checkerboard tiles; when I see dark purple petunias; when I see Greek columns that aren't supporting anything; when I see Zeppelin airships; when I think of Pripyat; when I see barbed-wire fences with metal towers in the background; when I find myself thinking of Kenji's stories about the Ainu; when I find a toddler alone in a supermarket and don't know what the fuck to do with it (look around for a parent? Stand there keeping an eye on it and hope a parent comes soon, maybe getting mistaken for a child molestor? Go find security and leave the kid? Take the kid to security and chance the parent coming back and finding it missing? I am not a child-oriented person, unfortunately children do not seem to realise this); when I see pictures of New Zealand; when I see Miyazaki's On Your Mark video; when one of my friends talks - seriously or hyperbolically - about suicide; and when I can't figure out how to pay all the bills.

I cry when I'm overwhelmed.

This means I cry when I read Dean Koontz books; when I read Christopher Pike books; when God talks to me; when the moon looks red; when I have any of the spaceship dreams; when I hear (or sing) Carly Simon's Let the River Run; when I see the tree in the golden field at the end of Knowing; when I read about ancient civilisations; when I read the Chronicles of Narnia; when I read or see Lord of the Rings (they play all three of the main movies at Christmas - it's a very wet time in this house); when I hear Regina Spektor's The Call; when I think about time travel; when I look at nebulae; when I hear any of Clubroot's music; when I get to the mythical sections of any Pokémon game; when I hear the words "Tetragrammaton" or "New Jerusalem"; when I'm at the Teide National Park in Tenerife; when I remember past lives; when I see possible future ones; when I have really really great sex; when I think about living in Japan; when I get a compliment from someone I really admire; when I have dreams about when the continents were different; when Kenji tells me about the Ainu (yes, again); when the sheer weight of time presses on me; when I am just on the verge of remembering everything I've forgotten; and when I have a crush.

Occasionally I cry when I'm happy.

This means I cry when I watch the dancing / bedroom scene between Sarah and Karl in Love, Actually; when I look at real estate in Tokyo or Kyoto; when I see Example's eyes in the Kickstarts music video; when I read any of L.J. Smith's books other than Forbidden Game; when it's Halloween or I think about Halloween; when I see the leaves turn colour; when I'm at the beach or swimming in the ocean; when I think about going to watch live sports; when I read sappy Rebecca Winters books; when I see cherry blossom; when a new Pokémon game comes out; when I think of marrying the Love of my Life; when I talk to Anna; when I read Mary Francis Shura's Summer Dreams, Winter Love; when I read Christopher Pike's Final Friends trilogy or the beginning of Scavenger Hunt or Gimme a Kiss; when I think about attending high school in the USA; when I see Homecoming Queen sceptres; when I go shopping and everything looks good; when I get a dress-shopping scene in a book I love; when I date a man who's big enough and strong enough to pick me up and / or sit me on his lap; when it's time to get my autumn clothes out; when school starts again; when I meet a guy I'm really attracted to and then find out he speaks Japanese; when I write a piece of writing that's well-received; when Morgan says something totally gloriously romantic to Garcia on Criminal Minds; when I dream about skiing or ice skating; when I watch Chage & Aska on MTV Unplugged; when I see Prof Brian Cox smile; and when I do something well that I thought I couldn't do.


Perhaps this is why I'm single.

Do Inzombiacs Eat Brains? Because I Prefer Pizza...

I told myself a week or two ago that if I couldn't sleep, I wasn't allowed to spend any more nights reading and playing video games. There's too much stuff that needs to be done. If I can't sleep, I work.

I've managed a lot of cataloging, and quite a lot of paperwork. No writing, since I don't have the energy or the mental awareness. I've managed very little sleep, dammit.

I don't know if it's something to do with the weather, or what. Usually at this time of year, things are getting warmer, but here in Alby it's freezing (literally) and periodically snowing, even though it's nearly April and most recent years we've had bikini weather by April 1st. I'm in that generally unsettled frame of mind and body, where I'm not quite sick but not quite right either. I do keep getting stupid health problems, things that come right out of left field - since I got back from Somerset three weeks ago I've had four ear infections (yeah, I get a lot of ear infections, but four in three weeks is pushing it even for me) and a urinary tract infection and then today I broke a rib, stupidly. I don't even know how I did it - I was rushing to get in and out of the bath, and then get dressed and dry my hair, but there wasn't a particular moment when I suddenly felt the pain. No cracking sound or sensation, or sudden sharp pain. It just came on over a period of about ten minutes - a twinge at first, then a pain that I thought was a pulled muscle that I could walk off, and then half an hour later I couldn't move at all. I'm guessing it's a rib, anyway, unless I actually tore a muscle. I've had strains and sprains and pulled muscles before, and they don't hit me anywhere near as badly as this. That said, I've also had broken ribs, and they haven't been this bad, although the one that I broke in a car accident five or six years ago still gives me trouble if I sleep on it wrong. Ribs are funny like that.

So I'm stuck in bed. I literally cannot move most of the time, although I'm managing to make it to the bathroom and back every so often (although it takes about ten minutes to sit up and walk down the stairs, so I have to schedule bathroom breaks). I can't sit in a chair. I find it hard to stand. I find it uncomfortable to lie on my back. Lying on my stomach is the only position that's even vaguely comfortable (the injury is in my back) - everything else sends my entire left side trapezius and latissimus dorsi into spasms. I'm surprised at how much the darn thing hurts - I've had back injuries before, but never any that made it impossible to actually MOVE. There is, of course, the possibility that I'm just being a huge pussy, but you'd think that as used to pain as I am, I'd be able to cope with this better.

I'm generally irritable right now, because of the pain, and the tiredness that I've been feeling since Christmas - well, okay, since the strep in Oct 2011 really - and the extra weight I'm still lugging around on my body (with all the health problems I've had over the last year, I haven't managed to stick to an exercise regime for more than a couple weeks) and the constant, gnawing hunger that never quite goes away, even though I feel like I never stop eating. (In reality I'm probably not eating that much. I can't afford to eat more, though. Money is really tight, but that's for another blog post.)

I'm also irritable because I have so much freaking stuff that needs to be done, and I can't afford to be bedbound. I've been decorating - my walls are now entirely pink - and I've been painting the shelves and brackets white, since I can't afford to buy bookcases. Unfortunately, this is a VERY long process. Each shelf needs two coats of primer and at least two coats of paint (they're going from a very dark colour to white) and this results in me having to run to Wilko to buy more paint on a regular basis. I should really just buy several cans and be done with it. I can only paint one side at a time, unless I want to end up with paint smears everywhere. And I have to do the work outside because of the fumes - and it's been pissing it down with rain most of the time. I can't work in the rain. Or the snow.

I've been working on the damn shelves for at least a week now, and I'm not quite finished. I thought it would take me a couple days. But then I thought there'd be sunshine and warmer weather.

The walls are looking pretty good. They could have done with another coat of paint, but I ran out, and I certainly wasn't going to go out and spend twenty quid on another can. I can't believe how expensive paint has gotten.

The frill you see isn't part of the paint, it's just the shadow of the lampshade. I should have taken photos in daylight, but we aren't GETTING any real daylight right now. Shelves will go in this alcove - I actually put the brackets up yesterday, before I did the ribs.

You can see that the window surrounding needs another coat or two of paint, so I bought some tester pots just to do that...and then found out that you're not supposed to paint with them, because they don't give a decent finish. Fuck.

My bed is about the only pretty thing in the room right now, aside from the walls. Oh, and my bedside table. If I had the money, I'd dump all the furniture - I've had it since I was eight. But I don't have the money to replace everything. Nor will it paint (it's cheap MDF, and I've tried, to no avail). So I'm stuck until I can at least buy a dressing table.

The thing that really drives me batty is that there is so much STUFF everywhere. Stuff that doesn't have a home. There's like, NO storage space in this house. This suits mom well, because she likes open-plan thing - shelves made out of planks of wood and brackets; everything sitting out on display. I hate open-plan. Unless you have a weekly housekeeper, it's horribly impractical. Everything gets dusty and grimy and you can't ever get it properly clean. I like cupboards and wardrobes and closets and everything stored neatly in its place except when you're actually using it.

The room looked so nice when I had just finished painting, and there was nothing in it. I seriously wanted to throw out everything I owned and have a room that was empty except for my bed. I like starkness. It makes me feel clean. Or at least less dirty.

I wanted to put coving up, and to smooth the horrible textured ceiling out, but I'm not sure that I'm going to have the time. Mom's talking about putting the house on the market in May. (Bad timing for me to paint, but I've been putting it off for four years because Mom keeps saying we're moving. You can't put off life indefinitely.)

For so long I've had this idea in my head of what I wanted my room to look like, and now that I finally have the walls painted, I can no longer see the plans. I'm just so tired, and the amount of work that needs to be done in this house before we can sell it is weighing heavily on me. There are 200-odd boxes from the attic to sort through. I have to go through the emotional battle of trying to separate mom from her hoards, and the emotional battle of getting rid of some of my own books and clothes. I am not at my mom's stage of hoarding, where I keep things like dried-up tubs of paint and boxes of bricks, but I do find it hard to get rid of clothing and books. Stuffed animals, too, although those are in bags in Ryan's wardrobe right now, and have been for several years (my cardiologist told me I had to put them away until my allergies improved).

I guess the long and short of it is that I'm not feeling good, and I suppose I'm kind of depressed. Not suicidally depressed or anything; not focused on the futility of life, but exhausted mentally and physically. I can't see a way forward right now, except to keep plodding on. My health seems to get a bit worse each season, no matter what I try to do to keep things working. I don't sleep anywhere near enough, and for a couple months I've been waking up every morning in truckloads of pain in my back and neck. I thought it was my sleeping position, and have been working to change it, but so far it doesn't seem to matter what position I sleep in, I still have the pain in the mornings. I'm constantly shattered, constantly starving, and can't seem to lose any weight, even when I don't allow myself to overeat. If there had been any men in my life, I would wonder if I were pregnant, but barring alien abduction, that's not a possibility. Nothing I do seems to matter at the moment. Nothing touches the work that's piled up. No amount of money I bring home in my paycheck makes any difference to mom's debts at the bank and with the Visa. No amount of housework makes the house any cleaner or tidier. No amount of organising or throwing stuff away seems to make a dent in the shit that came out of the attic. I was looking into the possibility of hiring a storage locker to hold some of the stuff I had for my home when I have one - mostly stuff I bought when I was planning on moving in with C - but in this town, the cheapest storage unit I can get is £30 a week. A WEEK. I'd been expecting it to be about that a month.

Damn, this note is depressing. I'm just so tired. I seem to have a lot of blog posts over the years that say this. The fibromyalgia is kicking my butt, to be honest, no matter how good a fight I put up. I just wish I had someone who could and would help me out sometimes.