LaughAtlantis

Five days from now I will be flying to Seattle and boarding the lovely Norwegian Sky for a seven-day cruise to Alaska. I am giddy with anticipation about this.

People keep asking me why I wanted to take a cruise to Alaska. The idea had never really occurred to me before a year and a half ago, when my friend Shawn was searching for random vacation deals. He asked me if I had any interest in Alaska and I must have looked at him as though he had two heads because he never mentioned it again. But the idea stayed in my head and so when I got a bonus at work last year, I started investigating cruise lines. Now my cruise is less than a week away and I'm so excited that I can't sit still!

Sigh... sadly, I have to focus this energy on work.

FIVE MORE DAYS!!

So, I'm packing for my trip to Alaska (twodaystwodaystwodays) and I'm noticing something about my suitcase. It looks big from the outside. But I swear, it's an optical illusion. I put three pairs of pants and a jacket in there and it's half full! I have no idea how I am going to fit shirts and skirts and everything else I need in there... sheesh. Who knew vacationing would be so complicated?

Actually, the ice woman wenteth and hath cometh home. Lots of details about my trip are forthcoming. Stay tuned...

Joy

I want to apologize.

I have been notably bad about keeping up with my blogging. Vacation was... well, it was a vaction from everything, including blogging. But since I have been back I have told my Alaska stories a gazillion times and I am like to tell them a bazillion more. Literally.

So what have I been doing with my time since I got back from vacation? I shall show you.

First, there are my recent game obsessions - Candy Train, Mini Putt, and Copter Crash. They pass the time when I should be busy doing work or something.

I've also been reading a lot of magazines. Don't know why really, but I just finished a series of several really good books and I guess I don't want to ruin the streak. This month is the 15th anniversary of Premiere magazine. Good issue. Right now their message board is discussing the top teen movies ever. Go vote for The Breakfast Club.

Gosh, what else have I been doing? Sleeping. Eating. Breathing.

Oh, and shopping for mutual funds. I want to open up a Roth IRA so I need to figure out what the heck I want to invest in. Through some miracle of God, I have actual managed to invest my 401(k) money in funds that have not completely tanked, so I am attempting to choose some other winners. Cross your fingers for me.

Yes, I know that last link had nothing to do with crossing one's fingers and everything to do with counting on them. So sue me.

Okay, I need to go work on.. um... work. And I need to take a nap. Got a show tonight!

Okay, it's taken a while, but I am finally getting around to chronicling my trip to Alaska. It will likely come in dribs and drabs, but here's a start.

We were scheduled to leave from Boston at 6:20 in the morning. This meant a couple of things had to happen. First, we had to leave from Rod's house at 4:30 in the morning. And before that, Rod had to pack. He opted to do this at around one in the morning. Men are so practical. While he packed, I took a brief nap, then got up at 3 to shower and then we headed off to Logan. At 5:15am, Logan Airport is a barren wasteland. It's like the airport in The Langoliers - there's just nobody there at all.

So we wandered in, bleary-eyed, and sat at the gate for an hour. Upon getting on the plane, we both were asleep withing minutes. I have no recollection of the plane ride whatsoever except waking up about four minutes before we landed in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is a fun airport. There are lots and lots of shops there - it's like a mall in the middle of the airport. Rod was still exhausted and sat with our bags at the gate while I wandered, mumbling, "Get me a present," before I walked away. With that as my mission, I meandered through the airport and ultimately wound up at Godiva. The girl at the Godiva counter was extraordinarily giving. SHe offered to let me try the three new truffle flavors for fall. I didn't want to disappoint her by saying no. I bought some chocolates and she forgot to ring two of them up but gave them to me anyway. Then I went to the Discovery Store and got Rod his present - a crocodile keychain that lit up when you opened the mouth. Quirky without quite attaining the label of lame.

I returned to the gate, we hopped on board, and Rod was asleep before the plane even took off. He woke up about ten minutes later and was notably confused to see that there were clouds out the window. This puzzled him so much he decided to just go back to sleep.

The little pocket thingy on the seat in fron tof me was all broken and there was this hard wire that stuck into my knees for the whole five hour flight. Yippee. Some previous passenger had attempted to stick it up with bubble gum. Very attractive. Needless to say, this did not make for a comfy flight experience. Rod finally woke up about 3 hours into the flight and got to listen me gripe about it... no wonder he sleeps so much with me bitching non-stop.

We arrived in Seattle and headed for the pier. There was ahuge line of people waiting to check in at the boat but a woman was standing in front asking if we were US citizens or not. Rod isn't, I am. There were about two people in the non-US line, and about two hundred in the US line. Thankfully, they let me go with Rod and thus allowed us some time to explore Seattle before we had to get on the boat.

We went to this kitschy marketplace where there were bakeries and eateries and fish stores and a magic shop and all manner of things... it was a bit on the touristy side and we didn't stay all that long. We did buy a couple of HUGE cookies - a molasses and a snickerdoodle that were to last us two days - literally. We headed back to the pier and stopped at a little place along the water to have fish and chips. Instead of your average cod, we had salmon. So good!

When we had checked in at the boat, we were given a boarding group number. That number was 13, and they were calling goup four. I think there were about a hundred people in each boarding group - that's just a guess, mind you - but when we returned to the pier two and a half hours after leaving it, they were just calling number 14. So we sneaked in front of those folks and climbed aboard.

About two weeks before the cruise, I had booked our shore excursions online but I had never received confirmation for them. So the first thing we did when we got on board was go check in at the shore excursion desk. I was fairly pissed to find that only one of the two shore excursions that I wanted had been booked, and the other one was sold out. We put ourselves on a waiting list, but I fumed about that for a bit. Luckily Rod did not sleep through the fuming, but instead vented along with me. We dumped our stuff off in our stateroom - our wee tiny stateroom - and headed out to explore the ship. We hit the top decks first, where they attempted to give us cocktails that, as it turns out, were six bucks a piece. No thank you. We had somebody take our picture on the top deck with the space needle in the background. (I will put some links to our pictures in as soon as I'm able to figure out that whole puttin'-pictures-online business.) We were up on deck checking things out shortly after the boat took off - you couldn't even tell when it started moving! We spent a little more time wandering the boat and finally just got really tired. It had been a long day already, so we went back to the stateroom and took a nap which stretched into just sleeping till te morning.

And that was day one.

(I know, this is slow going. I'm sorry. I'm a very bad person.)

Okay, so day two of my marvelous cruise dawned and we got up late and headed for the breakfast buffet. Rod decided he was going to race me up the two flights - don't ask me why, he was beign goofy - and so I was harassing him about the fact that it takes a lot to beat an asthmatic girl with only one lung. We were joking around, getting in the buffet line, and began chatting with a couple in front of us. Their names were Larry and Mary - never did get their last names - but since seats were somewhat at a premium, they invited us to share a table with them. They were just the nicest people - lived just outside Seattle and were taking the cruise to celebrate their 25th anniversary. We sat and chatted with them for probably 45 minutes - nice, nice people - and then there was an announcement that they were going to have Bingo in the Stardust Lounge - yes, they have a Stardust Lounge - so we headed for bingo madness.

Bingo madness, as it turns out, was really freakin' expensive, so we departed just about as quickly as we came. It was something like forty dollars for six bingo cards or some such thing - and we just weren't that invested in Bingo. We decided to head back to the room to pick up a card game, then we were going to go out on deck and play while we watched the ocean go by. On the way there, we passed through the Checkers Cabaret (aren't names for shipboard rooms amusing?) and they were setting up paintings for an art auction that would be happening that afternoon.

It was sorta funny... every day they leave a little newsletter-y thing for each stateroom - the Freestyle Daily - which highlights the fun activities of the day. We had seen the art auction when we looked through it and had sort of made fun of it; after all, who buys art onboard ships? But when we walked through, Rod's eyes lit up upon seeing a print called 'Where's Bart?' It was a limited series lithograph of about (I'm guesing here) 300 different Simpsons characters, many of which were obscure and had appeared in perhaps one episode. You could practically see Rod begin to salivate. We made plans to come back at two for the auction.

Sometime later, we found ourselves playing Phase Ten in the Sports Bar. They had a buffet set-up of nachos, salsa, and guacamole. It was sooo good. The salsa and guac were made fresh and were just, wow, so tasty. Hit the spot. Rather than have lunch, we had those as a snack and then headed off to the auction.

Auctions are interesting. We got a number and we sat and waited for our lots to come up. There were two animation cels that Rod was interested in (in addition to the Simpsons lithograph) and a Romanian lithograph that I really liked. As our lots came up we got to wave our number, and as stupid as it sounds, it was exciting. Nobody bid against us for anything except the Simpsons print, but we still got it. Yay!

That evening we went to dinner in one of the main dining rooms. The way things work on Norwegian Cruise Lines is this: you can eat whenever you want with whomever you want. I guess a lot of cruises make you sit with the same people at the same table and eat at the same time - sorta like prison, but with shore excursions. NCL allows for a lot more flexibility. So on Monday night we offered to share a table and wound up sitting with a couple of retirees from South Carolina, Mack and Becky. They were very... Southern. Nough said.

After a fabulous dinner we had baked Alaska for dessert and headed for the ship's casino. We had determined that we were going to spend $40, that's it. So we each got two rolls of quarters and scoped out the slot machines. We took about ten minutes to decide which ones had a good vibe and where we wanted to sit and this, that, and the other. Ultimately, we sat down, I put ONE quarter in a slot machine and won $45. First coin. Needless to say, we were hooked. We walked out that night with more than four times what we brought in there in the first place. Yeehaw!

To celebrate, we headed up to the Observation Lounge for a drink and to play Scrabble. We had established, before the trip, that I am a far better Scrabble player than Rod. He beats me at Phase Ten nearly every time, but I kick his ass at Scrabble. Well, we got up to the lounge and started to play. About halfway through the game, I started to feel awful. The ship was tossing back and forth quite a bit and my stomach was roiling. Churning, even. To make things worse, I started to lose at Scrabble. Clearly I was distracted. The motion was really getting to me and so we headed back to the room... and I JUST made it before, well, losing my dinner. Blech.

Thus I ended day two, with nothing in my stomach and just a dream of Juneau for the next day...

Day Three dawned and we headed up to the breakfast buffet - I was already getting spoiled by the sheer volume not to mention variety of food available. We had a lazy morning in preparation for a busy afternoon. We had gotten word the night before that we were going to be able to go on the shore excursion we wanted - a flightseeing tour over four glaciers that landed at a wilderness lodge to have a big old salmon bake. Sounds good, huh?

Well, we didn't get to go.

Despite the fact that the tickets say "All shore excursions operate rain or shine," they canceled this one - and did not inform those people who were on the excursion that it was going to be canceled until you arrived at the meeting palce to leave. By that point, most of the other shore excursions had left and so we decided, what the hell, let's just wander around Juneau.

Well, we shopped a bit along the main drag, and just a little ways away from the dock was the Mount Roberts Tramway. We decided to take the tram up Mt. Gastineau and then we hiked for about three miles. Despite the fact that it was overcast, the views were spectacular. We saw a porcupine and some grouse (grouses? grice?). After coming back from our hike, we followed some of the walking tour of Juneau in this great book to find a statue of a nun feeding chickens. The statue was very modern, not what I expected at all, and we took many pictures with it... in fact, in Juneau we started a rather silly tradition regarding pictures.

A lot of stores in Alaska have huge stuffed animals outside - bears and eagles and timber wolves and whatever... and we took our pictures with pretty much every single one. We're goofy like that.

The ship was docked in Juneau for eight hours and we spent the great majority of that time in the city. On the way back to the boat we stopped at the Alaskan Fudge Company and got the best fudge I have ever had in my life. If you are wondering what to get me for Christmas or my birthday or just because you love me, click on that there link and order me up some Alaskan Chewy. Soooo goooood.

Back on the ship that night we headed to the casino again. It's addictive. We took the original $40 that we had taken in the night before and we played all those quarters. We were left with about $15 in winnings, I think... that is, we wer $25 down from when we walked in. Oh well. Still up overall, right?

We capped off the night by heading to the Observation Lounge (our favorite spot on the ship) to play cards and listen to the Glenn Miller tribute band. I believe that it was that night when we discovered the wonder of the banana smoothie. In the Lounge the bartender would make us these luscious banana smoothies where you couldn't even taste the alcohol. Again, sooo gooooood. We were to arrive in Skagway the following morning, so we went to bed *relatively* early, knowing that we could come back for banana smoothies at any time... and boy, we would abuse that privilege in the days to come.

Thus endeth Day Three.

So this morning I was on my way to work and realized that I didn't have any reading material on me at all - a necessity for the commute - and so I stole a magazine from my boyfriend. When we were in Alaska, he was reading this magazine/journal thang and it looked really intriguing, and it was just lying on the floor of his living room, so I really don't think he'll miss it. Anyway, it's this British journal called The Idler and it's brilliant. It's sort of like Granta, but less hoity-toity and with a smattering of pop culture and a sense of humor - and it celebrates being lazy and hating your hometown! I like!

Today my boss is out, and I am in charge. As they say, while the cat's away, the mice will play. But the thing is, he put me in charge, so I have to at least pretend to be relatively productive and official and stuff.
Yeah, whatever.

Apparently reckless driving is an affront to God.

The new Lemony Snicket book comes out today. I am actually giddy with anticipation.

My latest fun obsessions? Online Clue, Battleship, and Monopoly at games.com. Like I said, while the cat's away, the mice will play.

My brother just got online - as in, he is completely and utterly computer illiterate and is just joining the web world. I share this with you because I love to have stuff to rag on my brother about - and because if he can find his way back to my website, he might eventually read it, and then he will attempt to tease me. However, he will not be able to figure out how to enter a comment and will be forced to call me to abuse me about it. Or IM me. He has figured that out, at least.
I jest, but I love him.

It's 2:52 a.m. and for the past three hours I have been playing online Monopoly. I am not going to get up tomorrow until like 2. Gaw, I am a dork.

Every so often, I dive into writing. I have started three different novels, only to put them aside when I got bored or busy or just tired of it. Well, this month is National Novel Writing Month, and there's this challenge going on urging folks to try to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.

I know what you're thinking. "That's CRAZY, Joy, that just can't be done." You know what? You're probably right. If I start today, I need to write 1923 words a day in order to have 50,000 words by November 30. It sound impossible. I don't have that kind of time, do I?

Do me a favor. Scroll down to my entries from November 3 and see how much time I spent playing online Monopoly and Clue on that day. Anyone remember my Crazy Train obsession? It's insane how much time I spend doing *nothing* online. So instead, why not write? Can't hurt, can it? Maybe come December I will have 10,000 words of utter crap, but you know what? It's more than I have now, right? And maybe I will be able to work the kinks out of some of the crap I've written in the past. Never can tell.

Okay, I need to end this post, because I have a novel to write.

I'm now 3137 words into the novel. I would've written more by now but I'm a lazy whore. But what this means is that in the 23 days remaining, I have 46863 words to write, which works out to roughly 2037 and a half words a day.

Sure, I'm gonna finish it.

Riiiiiiiiight.

Hell, now I've just wasted 74 perfectly good words on this entry. I wonder if I could fit them in somewhere?

So I was thinking about this novel-writing thing today.

The challenge was supposed to start on November 1, but I didn't hear about it until the fifth, so I was already behind. I've only been averaging a thousand words a day, so I'm even further behind if I really want to get to 50,000 words by November 30.

But, that being said, I've written 5,311 words. If I keep going at this rate, I will have 25,000 words by the end of the month. I won't have the completed novel, but 25,000 words is FANTASTIC! I mean, that's 25,000 words that weren't there before, and that goes a long way toward getting this story told.

So instead of lamenting the fact that I am so far behind, I hereby am allowing myself to say, YAY ME!

So, have you ever gotten food at the salad bar, and something from a nearby container has fallen into the container of whatever you're getting and you don't notice until you're eating it... only to find out that it's really GOOD?

That's fairly specific, I know. But a couple weeks back I was getting tuna salad from the salad bar so I could make myself a sandwich. (If you get the tuna and the pita at the salad bar, it tends to cost about $3.00. If you buy a tuna sandwich, it costs $4.25. Further proof that I'm a cheap bastard.) Anyway, the tuna is next to the chow mein noodles and I wound up having a sandwich that had a few crunchies in it.

Today I went to the salad bar, couldn't decide what I wanted, and finally wound up dumping chow mein noodles and tuna salad together in a pita for a crunchy tuna effect. SO GOOD. And yet, I somehow feel as if I actually ate this concoction in front of people I would be berated and scorned.... or at least stared at like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club when she puts popcorn and pixie sticks on her sandwich.

But I'm telling you, TRY IT.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I've realized something. I have weird favorite holidays.

I love Thanksgiving. There's no gift-giving pressure and there's pie. You have a nice meal and then you just sit. You might even nap. You get to see your family and then you're actually allowed to watch football and ignore them, go to sleep and ignore them, or unbutton your belt, read the paper, and ignore them.

I love the Fourth of July. When I was a kid our family would always go to my great-grandfather's house on Boot Pond in Plymouth and swim and have a big cookout. My brother and I would walk down the beach at South Pond and collect tiny little toads - hoppy-toads, we called them - and set them free at the end of the day. There was a dock at our section of the beach that you could jump off of, and you could see guppies and other fish in the water. Those days defined the fourth of July for me, and even though we don't do anything like that anymore, I guess the memories bring out the best in the holiday for me.

Lastly, I love Christmas Eve. For the past several years, I have gone to my friend Jen's for Christmas Eve to celebrate with her Italian family. They do the full traditional dinner, which amounts to about a billion courses of fish. Jen's family members always remember things about me that shock me somewhat - they always bring up some tidbit of my life from the previous year that I have completely forgotten. Every year her grandmother asks me if I'm coming over on Christmas too, and I never have yet, but she always seems convinced that I've been there in previous years. Jen's cousin James is certifiable and her sister is... indefinable... and her dad looks like a mobster and her whole family is just lovely. It's just homey.

I don't know, I suppose the thing that ties all thes things together is that they are really family holidays - odd in that there is something of a disconnect within my family. My parents have been divorced for 13 years but we still all spend holidays togather, which has always seemed terribly odd and somewhat false to me. I guess all of these things have the air of togetherness and family - well, outside of Thanksgiving. And that has pie.

I have a deep-seeded fear that my mother will somehow remember what the name of my website is, and so I don't feel entirely comfortable with spilling my guts about my holiday. Let me just say that my brother cooked an amazing feast, it was wonderful to see my grandmother, and my niece and nephew are absolutely a joy to behold - especially when my niece is projectile vomiting on my mother.

And Mom, I mean that in the nicest possible way.

This Sunday I will turn 30. That's right, thirty years old. And I suppose that should intimidate me in some respects - after all, I'm 30, I'm not married, I don't own a house or a car, I don't have kids - what the hell have I been doing with my life???

But I don't know. It's just not bothering me. Right now I'm happier than I've been in... well, pretty much ever. My job is going well (despite the fact that my boss is somewhat clueless, he does trecognize that I'm good at what I do), I've got an outlet for my creativity in the form of my improv, I live an hour away from my family - just close enough to go home on a regular basis but not so close that my mom can just "stop by," and I'm blissfully in love. So thirty doesn't phase me.

Last year, I had a party that I billed as my First Annual 29th Birthday Party. It was tongue-in-cheek. Now that I'm faced with my second annual, hell, it's just easier to embrace the idea that I've had three decades of fun and excitement. Yeehaw!

Don't expect me to feel this way when I turn forty, though.

So, I am doing this internet Secret Santa thing and I got my secret Santa assignment today. The person, who shall remain nameless, had nearly eighty things on her wishlist! It was nice - lots to choose from - and makes me feel like maybe I ought to put more stuff on mine. Wishlists are great... last year I just made up a wishlist at Target for my mom to buy stuff and another one at Amazon to give my friends ideas. It seemed to work. I wish more of my friends kept up their Amazon lists... might give me a remote clue as to what to buy for them. Sigh.

A while back I joined a web ring promoting Random Acts of Journaling. It provides its members with monthly prompts as ideas to spark journal entries. Here's one of this month's that made me think.

The meaning of life is too big a question for me to answer, but I'll break it down to a question I can answer: What is the meaning of my life? I will tell you: When I fall into a warm bed after a day's hard work, when my belly is filled with the good food Hjordis made for me, when I've done something nice for someone else and heard a good story that's made me laugh—well, that's a good day, a day that's had meaning.
Welcome to the Great Mysterious, Lorna Landvik (p. 116)

I love this.

I'm not a philosopher. I'm not going to go down in history as one of the great thinkers of my time. I don't spend time pondering the great un-ponderables. What's the point? Life's mysteries are mysteries for a reason, right?

But my life. That's something different.

Back in high school, we were all encouraged - nay, forced - to take part in various charities and philanthropies. The theory was that it made you a better person and could give your life meaning. I think philanthropy is very important, don't get me wrong, but life has meaning whether you're feeding starving children in Rwanda or waiting tables at Denny's.

Did Ebenezer Scrooge become a better person simply because he became a philanthropist? NO! He became a better person because he found meaning. He figured out that the way he'd been living had kept him miserable for his entire life. He hadn't really been living, just sort of existing in a meaningless way because he didn't see the value in his own life or in the world.

So, Ebenezer met his three ghosts and found out what he'd been missing. He was able to see how much nicer his life would have been if he'd been something more than a cold hard shell. Go back to my original example - you're feeding starving children in Rwanda. If every day you just blankly hand out bowls of rice to children, they are going to appreciate the food. That's a given. But do they appreciate YOU? Not necessarily. You have to find the meaning in what you do in order for others to do so. That waitress at Denny's might make every one of her customers smile. She might love her job and her existence, and the relief worker might be a miserable SOB with an attitude problem. It's finding the moments in life that have beauty, recognizing their meaning and acknowledging it that gives a whole life meaning.

When the space shuttle Challenger blew up, I was in eighth grade. I remember it distinctly - every day we had five 50 minute classes and one class that was two hours long. The long class was the lunch period - you had a half hour of that time scheduled for lunch, and which half hour it was depended on what grade you were in. Eighth graders had second lunch - which was a half hour of class, then off to lunch, then an hour of class after lunch. On the day of the Challenger disaster, we had our half-hour of class, went to lunch, and when we came back there was a TV in the front of the classroom. My teacher, Mrs. Langlois, was a woman who wore makeup along the lines of Tammy Faye Bakker, and I can still see her crying - the makeup melting on her face.

At our school, things were heightened a bit because our science teacher had been part of the applicant pool for the NASA Teacher in Space program. She'd met Christa McAuliffe during the application process and we were all very attuned to the shuttle launch - I think most schools at the time were, because it was such an unusual thing. But that moment will live with me forever.

It's funny what you do and don't remember. I don't remember where I was when Reagan was shot or when I heard about Columbine - and those are big deals for a lot of people. I remember the OJ verdict - I was in a car riding to work as they were reading the verdict out and it was taking forever. The guy who drove me to work stayed in the car for twenty minutes waiting for the final answer and I just went inside. I had no patience to wait for something like that. I remember where I was when the David Koresh ranch burned in Waco. I was in college and I had no classes that afternoon. I was in my dorm watching the soap opera Another World when they interrupted to show footage of the place burning down. It was over so incredibly quickly - I think they even went back to the soap opera when it was done.

And now, there's this weekend. I got up up Saturday morning and was messing around on the computer - playing Clue at games.com - and I decided to switch over and play Mille Bornes. When I got into the game room, nobody was even playing; there were just a bunch of people loitering in the lobby, and one of them wrote 'debris on the ground in Nacogdoches Texas.' I thought the worst - that there had been a terrorist attack of some sort (after all, a regular airplane crash wasn't likely to attract that much attention) and so on some level I was relieved to find out that it was "just" a space shuttle explosion. That sounds so incredibly awful but in today's sociopolitical climate, it's not altogether surprising.

When the World Trade Center collapsed, I was at work. I work at the Federal Building in downtown Boston. My cube with a view overlooks Boston Harbor, and in my direct line of sight out the window is Logan Airport. My mom called me at work and told me to go home... and at about that time, our company decided that people could go home if they felt unsafe. I didn't feel unsafe - I just didn't know how to feel. So I didn't go home. I went to Barnes & Noble. I didn't figure that the bookstore was going to be a target any more than my house would be, and I just didn't want to leave the busy-ness of people and downtown and the city yet to venture out to the suburbs. There's a strange sense of community that descends upon you in disaster - but somehow of late there has been so much tension and foreboding in the world that this most recent addition - the space shuttle disaster - pales. And on a lot of levels, that's sad.

I know where I was when I heard about the Oklahoma City bombing. I know who was with me when I heard that Princess Diana had died. I remember the Exxon Valdez disaster. And it's important, on some level within me, that I remember this too - in its own context, outside the world touched by al-Qaeda and Saddam and random threats from wherever. It's important.

I'm kinda bummed about Mr. Rogers dying. This morning when I changed out of my sneakers at work, I took a little moment of silence.

So, I haven't talked at all in my blog about being an epileptic.

I'm an epileptic.

This has not, historically, been much of an issue for me. I can go for months, sometimes years at a time without having any problems. Up until last March, I hadn't had a seizure in three years. But in February 2002 I started to change my medication. I was having trouble with the long term side effects of the stuff I was on and it just seemed like a good idea to transfer me to something else before things got really bad. The process of changing medications was slow and difficult. I was so overdrugged at some points that I couldn't even hold my head up. I remember one point where I was watching a movie on the VCR and I couldn't get up to switch the tape, so I just pressed rewind and watched the same damn movie three times. I was a mess.

Once I got acclimated to my new medication, however, things began to look up. I'd had two seizures in the process of switching meds, which, all things considered, isn't bad at all. And things went along just fine until January 2003.

On January 6, I had to give a major presentation to a large group of people where I work. It was to be an all-day meeting, and I was (and am) the person who has the most familiarity with the stuff we were presenting. I could tell from the minute I got up that morning that I was not doing too well. I was spacey and out of it and I really shouldn't have gone to work but I let my pride get the best of me. So off I went. And less than an hour into the meeting, I had a seizure. Apparently I had just described sincere customer service and helpful customer service, and was about to give an example of the difference between the two. I basically said, "For example..." and then fell on the floor. I suppose that if the team is confused, I should blame myself. After all, not a particularly good example, you know?

A lot of the people in that room didn't know that I was an epileptic. Obviously, they know now.

On Wednesday, I had another seizure. I was in my cube, eating lunch, and this one just came out of nowhere - no warning, nothing. Apparently I really did a job on myself. I managed to bang my forehead on the desk and twist my shoulder around and bang that on the back of my cubicle. Some people in my office watched over me, called a cab, and sent me home, where I slept for the remainder of the afternoon. Now that I'm back at work, I see that I apparently ripped about six post-it notes off my desk and crumbled them all up - not on purpose, mind you, just as a side effect. I just destroyed this place.

The weirdest part of my whole seizure experience this week was that this morning, a guy on the T had a seizure while sitting directly opposite me. He fell and started making chewing motions with his mouth. For the most part, people didn't panic, but somebody did attempt to stick something in his mouth as a means of stopping him from swallowing his tongue. I stopped them from doing that. The whole tongue-swallowing business is a myth and you're likely to get bitten - the jaw clenches when a seizure happens and can thus result in you getting your fingers broken if you try to stick them in someone's mouth.

Anyway, this guy popped back up and said he was sorry, that he'd been feeling faint and wanted to get off the T and get some fresh air. He got off at the next stop and somebody followed him in order to make sure he wasn't alone. Thank goodness they did, because he seized again the minute he got off the train. It was weird though, this guy really seemed like he didn't know that he'd had a seizure - or he didn't want other people to know that he'd had one.

With me, you can tell. I'm out of it for a long while afterwards. But I don't mind talking about it. Ask away - ask whatever questions you've got. I can't tell you the world about epilepsy, but I'm happy to share what it's like for me. If I didn't, well, I guess I wouldn't be writing this, huh?

I hope I don't have a lot of seizures coming. Seizures sorta suck. And while that statement doesn't tell you the world about epilepsy, it's a fairly good encapsulation.

Another AlphaBytes entry... with my thoughts on bravado...

I started thinking about my entry from a couple days back about my epilepsy and I realized that I didn't really give remotely the full story. It's all well and good to put a brave face on, cheerio, pip-pip, I had a seizure, and I have a sense of humor, ha ha ha... but that doesn't show you what happens, not really.

This is what happens. This is what my last seizure was really like:

So, yesterday I did my C AlphaBytes entry and basically went off on my fiance's roommate. There was reason behind it - he had a blog entry about us, I was hurt, I decided to hurl a whole bunch of vitriolic sentiments his way. It was very junior high. And it was just supposed to be an entry about clutter.

In any case, there have been apologies and there will be talking further, no doubt, and now I have to redo my C entry, because I thought it only fair to take the initial entry down. But that entry took a lot out of me, from a purging the poison in me standpoint, and now I am just going to leave one C word as my hope for the end to this saga.

Catharsis.

Cross your fingers.

As you may well guess, deranged is not actually one of the AlphaByte list words, but I'm using it because of something that happened yesterday on the T.

So, I was running late yesterday, trying to get to North Station via the green line. So (to explain logistics) I had to take the red line to Park Street and switch to a Lechmere-bound train, which I needed to take four stops. There were a lot of people getting on the train at Park Street and it was pretty much packed. But at the next stop, a few more people managed to squeak their way on. The doors started to close and I thought we were about to leave the station when I heard a voice say, "This train is not moving! I have my foot in the door and I will not take it out until you make room for me!!!"

What the hell is that about????

He railed on and on about how he could see a space and we would have to move in because he had waited for four trains and it was his turn, dammit, his turn, and we couldn't stop him from getting on the train because we had no T authority, we hadn't been to T school, and he saw the space, HE SAW THE SPACE.

At that point, T cops came and dragged him away.

Ah, life in Boston. Gotta love it.