…and it is whatever rock like substance has taken up residence in my shoulders and neck in place of my muscles.

Okay, so this isn’t quite the kind of stress they we’re talking about, but…

(yes. I just made an engineering pun. You knew I was a geek when you decided to read this. Fortunately for you, I’ve already forgotten the part where I make some psuedo-witty comment about how muscles are made of carbon, and the unmatched tensile strength of carbon nanotubes.)

But all this is neither here nor there… It’s a way of avoiding talking about what’s wrong and a way of avoiding dealing with things I can’t control. We’ve already established the control freak thing, right?

Anyway, my being stressed seems to have a new and interesting side effect… When I get stressed, my cell phone quits functioning properly. To some of you, this should come as no surprise. I’m one of those people that have that effect on electronics. It’s gotten a lot better over the years, sleeping with the alarm clock on the other side of the room keeps it from dying, the case I have put my palm in seems to help, occasional reformatting of the drives and clean OS installations seem to make the computers get by. But I have no idea what to do for my cell phone. Not that the thing hasn’t been somewhat dodgy from the get go… Once in a great while it can’t recognize my headset (for months at a shot), then one day it knows what it is again.

The breaking point for the phone seemed to be when I found out my truck had been broken into. The phone said it was dialing a 1, but the voicemail program on the other side couldn’t recognize it no matter what, nor could I dial a number with a 1 in it. After about 20 minutes, when I finally calmed down some, it worked fine again.

This morning I woke up good and stressed. Today I should find out about the job one way or the other, I should find out if Monacita got her insurance so she can have the ultrasound the doctor recommended (so it’s not a pre-existing condition), and I still need to find someone to fix the damn truck window because it started sprinkling yesterday, and it’s supposed to really rain today.

And my phone has now decided that one of the numbers doesn’t work again. I don’t know which one, but I know that 1,2 and 5 work, so it is apparently a new one. And it now randomly drops the call I’m on into hold, and then won’t retrieve it.

It’s kind of funny in an “unnecessary-extra-stress” kind of way…

On the plus side, Monacita said that if she got approved for her insurance, I can start making pregnancy jokes. Her doctor said she looks like she’s about 5 months pregnant.

I’m stressed. I’m also exhausted, but that’s neither here nor there.

I can’t even quite explain why I’m stressed… Part of it is the fact that Monacita is finally going to have the mystery lump checked. This fact has gotten to both of us over the last couple days, but we both seem to be handling it a bit better now… One of us far more gracefully than the other. (And those of you acquainted with us have no doubts about the fact that it’s not me, correct?)

It could also be the fact that I feel like my life is on hold until I hear back about this job. There are only two candidates, so I have at least a 50% chance of getting it… And I think the interview even went well. I would like the job. Everyone was really nice, and the commute isn’t bad at all for working in SF. But at this point I would just be grateful to know either way. I’m trying to take this one day at a time. But ever since they asked the question “Would you be willing to put in a couple years at only 15-20 hours a week?” I can’t seem to get out of Future Planning mode. This is an unusual one for me since I usually have no mental image of where I will be in 1 year, let alone 2 or more.

Partially, it’s simply my nature… I like possibilities. Closing out all possibilities but one (even if I know there is only one that I would feasibly choose) causes me something akin to physical pain. That’s simply who I am. (For those of you into the Meyers-Briggs typing, I’m an ENFP. It explains a lot.)

But there’s another aspect of both of these events that has barely functional… I feel out of control. It’s the same thing that has gotten to Monacita. We’re both control freaks in our own ways, though her ways are a bit more obvious than mine. In her case, there is a lack of control over what is going to happen to her. Sure, it’s going to be fine, intellectually, I know that, but emotionally, I look at what happened with my father, and have kittens. It’s made me look at a lot of things in our relationship, and how things have changed, and how much she means to me. It’s made me realize how much it would rip my heart out if something happened to her.

But then again I already knew that. I’ve mentally prepared for that possibility in terms of every person who affects my life in any major way since my father died. I do it about once a year. Is that sick? Does that make me distance myself from those I love and care about? I don’t know. I don’t do it on purpose…

I suspect it comes back to the same damn thing again…. Control.

I am a control freak.

It’s why I eat. It’s why I shop. It’s what immobilizes me.

And I’m feeling awfully out of control right now.

On the plus side, immobilization by lack-of-control-induced-panic is not nearly as dire as it used to be. I still made it to two swim classes, and made it into a pottery class. I managed to (with one exception) confine my binge eating to foods that were gluten and dairy free. I figured out how to get health insurance for Monacita that will retro-actively go into effect BEFORE her doctor’s appt on Tuesday. Thus, no matter what, it won’t be a pre-existing condition. I even managed to do a load of laundry, so I’m not out of clean underwear. As breakdowns go, this is a huge improvement. And I AM looking forward to getting good and messy on Monday. They’re starting us out on the wheel. Eep!!

Today was my phone interview with Greatschools.net. I had managed to stress myself into a nice little froth by this afternoon… Even knowing that I knew the people calling me didn’t help much.

Of course, this was a total over reaction… There was one person on the line, and the conversation basically consisted of two questions, and took all of five minutes. It really helps if you’ve known the person interviewing you for the last ten years or so.

Anyway, once it was over, I was feeling pretty proud of myself and wanted some celebratory sugar. I searched mom’s pantry, and found a canister of Ovaltine (Just add milk!) and a box of almond milk. Bingo! When I was a kid I hated hot chocolate and such that you had to add to milk cause I hated having to warm milk up. It just seemed weird. You couldn’t just put it in the kettle and wait til it started whistling. Plus it had milk in it, which I kind of knew I wasn’t supposed to drink anyway.

Of course, now I know that they just added powdered milk to the ones that need water. So now I like the ones that you add to milk because you can make them with soy milk, or some other dairy free substitute. So when I saw that Ovaltine required milk, I didn’t think twice, I grabbed the nut milk, the canister of Ovaltine, and made myself a nice, large glass of dairy-free, sugar-laiden goodness.

Of course, within about 10 minutes, I began to feel tired, and distinctly unwell. Within 30 minutes I began to feel extremely sick to my stomach. I spent the next three hours or so alternating between running for the bathroom, and passed out in bed. In between one of those phases I made it to the kitchen long enough to look at the canister:

Sugar, Chocolate, Malt, Whey Powder…

*sigh*

I should really know better than to not read labels. Stupid, stupid me.

I know that it’s in New Orleans, and I don’t even know anyone there, and it’d be stupid to make everyone go halfway across the country, and it’s not like I’m bloody likely to get married any time soon (damn legal details), but….

Oh my god, talk about the bio-geek venue of choice!!!

Rent Me!

Check out the giftshop page… I totally want an “I’m a sucker for leeches” shirt!

It truly is.

And now that I’ve got some, I need to run, or I’ll be late to taxidermy.

hehehehehehehehehhe

(I re read much of my blog while working on the design, and noticed that I’m notorious for never getting back to things I mention. So I am making an effort, at least for today, to try and follow up on such things. Regular posting. It’s a concept anyway…)

Sleepless nights can be amazingly productive. In my case they appear to be the perfect time for a bit of web design. I finally managed to figure out how to successfully add the comments option to my blog without having to adopt one of their god awful color schemes. And I managed to restore my yellow page. I’d forgotten how much I liked this color scheme. I even tweaked it a little, but I doubt it shows much. Most of the changes were to the underlying html. It’s still pretty messy, and a lot of things are left undefined, but it works, and that’s as much as I ask of a project I do in my spare time.

As for why I had a sleepless night… I almost can’t remember, and that’s the whole goal of staying up til 5 AM tweaking the blog and posting. So rather than drag the issues up via a trip to Weaselville, I think I’ll indulge in exhaustion-induced amnesia, and go to bed. There will be plenty of time to stress tomorrow.

I need to learn a new way to deal with stress. When I stress I don’t sleep. It’s not a good thing.

Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

I added the ability to post comments, but I had to revert to one of their templates to figure out where all the code goes, and I’m just too damn tired to figure it out right now…

It’s hideous looking, but it’s better than no blog I guess…