contact has been made

So, I thought i would have health insurance by now… it turns out that I have to turn in some form after 60 days. Did I know about this? No. I may or may not have filled it out already.

However, my current prescription runs out in T-minus one day and counting. So… do I try to stretch out the prescription in hopes that I’ll get insurance speedily and deal with some withdrawal and shit until next week? Or do I break down and cough up another $249 for another month’s worth of drugs?

I’ll probably just cough up the kizzash; fuck my vacation account again. It will take me so long to save up the last $249 I took out for drugs that it’s hardly even worth it to have anything at this point. Knowing my life, the insurance won’t happen for another 800 years, based on the number of bureaucratic complications everything on earth manages to throw in my way when it comes to health care and reality.

On the plus side of being abandoned– Saki said I could have free reign of his CDs since he has them all burned onto his iPod and doesn’t want to store them all! I scored a ton of awesome shit!!! I now have a ton of CDs that I used to play all the time at work when I worked at the record store because we had promos, but never bothered to buy: Blackalicious. Dan the Automator, Gnarls Barkley, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and… THE POWERSTATION, bitchez!!! Hellz yeah I’m not sweating when the heat is on! I have this on vinyl, but there’s something to be said for having it on CD so you can blast it in the car at any time.

Also: Bell Biv Devoe, Digital Underground, Gorillaz, and the only Beck CD I don’t own (The Information) are now in my collection. I haven’t even finished going through his collection (he has zillions)– that was just the cursory glance!

Well, I’m not approved for the state-funded emergency health insurance. I’m older than 19, and I’m not pregnant nor do I have breast cancer. They’re allowing me to appeal the decision, but I can only check one of the 5 boxes that list the exceptions and changing jobs and not qualifying for health insurance for 60 days isn’t one of them. I’ll bet you anything that come tax time, I’ll have to pay the tax penalty for not having insurance for these two months. Just wait! I totally will have to fork over like $200 or whatever to Uncle Sam, because the way to get poor people to not clog up the city’s emergency rooms is to fine the semi-poor for not having insurance! That makes sense, right? Well, I’m happy that I can ensure that some giant multi-national insurance conglomerate stays on top. The CEO really needs that golf vacation!

Let’s see… the last time I went to the emergency room years ago, the fee ended up being like $600 (but insurance paid for all but $35 of it). That was about 5 years ago, so I’m sure the ER rates have gone up since then. Plus, I had to have a real doctor plus one normal nurse and a super high-ranking nurse all there to pull shit out of my ears, so that will probably cost a whole lot more.

Hmm, stressing out about money? Moi?

Now that my hearing is back, my conjunctivitis is getting worse. Luckily it’s only in one eye, but I can’t really see out of it at all. I should get an eye patch, because it’s annoying to have to see everything with one normal eye and one completely blurred eye. AHRRR, MATEYS!

Shit. I KNEW I should never have gone to the hospital. I’m a wimp. I didn’t think I could wait the 3 weeks until the insurance kicked in. Next time, i’ll know better. Where’s my time machine? Can I go back and undo my hospital visit? Even if it means that I could only hear 25% of Jamie Lidell last week?

Let’s see. I need something to not whine about…
I like the new Ladytron CD a whole lot. It’s really good! I’d go see them in concert in a couple of weeks (with Datarock opening), but I’ll probably officially owe several unborn children to the Cambridge Hospital by then.

Wait, I said I wasn’t going to whine.

I will think up 10 awesome things in my life right now. This means awesome things that ARE, not things that are awesome because of their absence (i.e., it’s awesome that my arms aren’t amputated).

Here goes:

1. the new Ladytron CD is awesome (of course I probably shouldn’t have bought it because now after I pay rent I’ll have exactly $1.33 in the bank) WAIT! THAT WAS WHINING!!! Now I’m going to have to think up 11 things…
2. I have an ancestor named Patience Bacon. I just think that’s a cool name.
3. my wrist feels slightly better
4. uh… Netflix should be sending me disc 3 of MI-5 on Friday, and though I don’t like Adam as much as Tom, he’s growing on me.
5. I just made $46 in freelance jobs in the past week, and one of them was totally a breeze.
6. Tomorrow’s high temperature is predicted to be a balmy 26 degrees [79 Fahrenheit]! Where are my mittens?
7. Since the BPM of most house music falls nicely into the range of bagpipe marches, I have an idea for how to combine the two and maybe have it not suck. Snap your fingers: around the world, around the wor-rld. around the world, around the wor-rld… keep snapping. Now hum “Scotland the Brave.” See? Same tempo! Really! Now, to find a decent hack so my software doesn’t keep expiring… ARHH MATEY! I be a software pirate!
8. I managed to resurrect a large number of dying pothos at one account at work, as well as kill most of the bugs at another one.
9. the withdrawal symptoms from going off the one drug are getting less and less, so I don’t feel like punching things as much.
10. I watched 28 Days Later yesterday and I had forgotten how awesome it was.
    ‘Man walks into a bar with a giraffe. They both get pissed, the giraffe falls over. The man goes to leave and the barman says ‘Oi, you can’t just leave that lyin’ there.’ Man says, ‘Naw it’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe.’

11. After nearly 7 years of searching, I finally found a 9/11 joke!

    Q: What did the hotdog vendor outside the two towers say when the planes hit?

    A: Hey, who ordered the two jumbos?

    (I know it doesn’t have the wit of the Space Shuttle jokes nor the sophistication of Ethiopian jokes, but at least one exists!)

12. uh… uh… I can’t go to bed until I think of one more awesome thing in my life… and it can’t be something abstract like the Stills are coming out with a new CD someday and possibly Daft Punk might tour again and make it with 500 miles of Boston… OK. Something good. OK GOT IT: Lard Ass has managed to keep his bodily fluids contained to his stomach and the litter box. I.e., he hasn’t barfed or peed on anything in a while. That’s a good thing.

    SWEET. I can go to sleep now.

I forked over the $248.99 for 1 month of drugs… it hit me as I was standing in line… do you realize how many illegal drugs I could buy with that kizzash? I could keep myself tripping for the entire 3 weeks it takes for my insurance to kick in, and probably have enough cash left over for a hit of Ketamine or two. It’s a sad world we live in when prescription drugs are way more expensive than the ones you get on the street. My vacation this year is to the land of Correct Brain Chemistry, I guess.

My latest obsession: making a family tree. Why? I don’t know. I mean, I’m not even genetically related to any of these people. It’s still kind of fun hunting through records and stuff, though. It’s kind of like a scavenger hunt, or collecting baseball cards. Let’s see if we can find the illusive record that shows where Jacob Schoenwald’s mother was born! (haven’t found it) I did find his draft card for WWI though. He and Grandfather, Aunt Julia, and Grandfather’s mom (her name was apparently Mrs. Jacob Schoenwald) all lived at 222 W 15th St. in Manhattan in 1915. Hunting up Moth’s people isn’t too difficult– there aren’t too many Sidney Schoenwalds in the world. However, on Pad’s side of the family it’s another story. Come on, ancestors, did you really have to recycle names left and right? Besides, HOW MANY Daniel McSweeneys were there in county Cork in the 1870s? A little originality, please?

This is taking over my former mini-obsession with Lee Harvey Oswald. I don’t know why I find LHO so fascinating, I just do. Dude had a totally messed up childhood, decided he was a Communist, moved to the Soviet Union and tried to kill himself there when he was denied Soviet Citizenship, married a Russian woman and had two small daughters when he shot JFK… or DID HE? (shoot JFK that is, we know he had 2 daughters). Was he framed? Was he coerced/brainwashed/blackmailed? The whole Jack Ruby thing was a little too convenient, too…

The new Futureheads CD is out, and I really want to hear it, but thanks to my new vacation I won’t be able to buy so much as a carton of milk until June 18. At least I won’t cry about it!

The most fun thing about not being on the correct dosage of drugs isn’t that I end up bursting into tears at stupid inopportune moments for random dumb little reasons. No, the most fun thing is that I get hideously frustrated at the slightest little thing and feel compelled to throw it across the room. Today I came very close to kicking a very large plant over at work, because whoever had installed it had done a shit-ass job of securing it into the (too-large) planter and I was trying to work with the too few pieces of foam in order to better anchor it.

Basically, everything is pissing me off. The sound the Wales-flag shaped metal thing on my keychain makes when it smacks against the keys whenever I pick them up made me almost throw them across the yard. The movement of the pouch attached to my tool belt hitting my leg as I walk made me almost kick something. My nose has been alternately tickling/itching all day, which has caused me to almost rip my nose off my face.

So, today was not the day to attempt to break in my newish sewing machine. The stupid motherfucker won’t sew. It won’t go, as in the wheel won’t turn more than 1/2 turn so I can’t even see if it sews or not. Thus I punched it, knocking it over without injury, but messing up my right wrist once again. My stupid wrist will never heal. Not EVER. Whenever it stops hurting for a little bit, I always manage to fuck it up again somehow.

It will be nice when I can be properly medicated again. However, who the hell knows when that will be… my current supply of way-too-little-a-dose runs out in 3.5 days. I have a nice prescription waiting for me at the pharmacy, but it will cost $244 in order to pick it up thanks to my lack of insurance (it will take 2-4 weeks to see if I’m accepted into the Poor Person Program and by then my real insurance will have kicked in). So, do I further deplete my Vacation Fund to give myself some chemical peace of mind? Probably, since going cold turkey off the one remaining drug will probably screw me up more than ever (if that’s even possible). I’ve been having withdrawal side-effects from the other drug I had to go off of which are not pleasant for a couple of weeks now–I can’t even begin to describe the weird noises I hear and the way everything will shift to the left for a fraction of a second and it feels like my head is about to explode ( and those are just the most tangible differences)– and don’t really want to repeat the show. I get these mad, crazy feelings of insane frustration, and the only thing that will make it go away is to break something, throw stuff across the room, or bang my head really hard on something solid. Even then it only goes away for about 5 minutes or so. Of course then I just get frustrated again because my head hurts. I’m trapped in this state of ultimate frustration that I can’t escape from; and everything I do only makes it worse.

Who am I kidding? I’ll never go on vacation again. I’ve had this stupid fucking vacation fund for EIGHT YEARS and have I gone anywhere? No, the account is basically a safety net when I run out of cash and need to pay rent or something. yeah. In eight years I’ve managed to save up about $700. That’s so pathetic. I could maybe hitchhike to Hoboken on that.

I don’t even know how I feel about anything anymore. I have an overall layer of apathy towards everything, covered with an all-beef patty of despondence, iced with a nice layer of frustration. Everything is the same– I feel like sobbing uncontrollably for 3 minutes and then after that I just feel a big, fat :WHATEVER:. Getting dumped? Being broke? All the same, which is also exactly how I feel about missing the Simpsons last night as well as my opinion on the movie Charlotte Grey which I got from Netflix.

I was really disappointed that, even though Cate Blanchett is one of my very favorite actresses, I could probably fake a Scottish accent better than she can (or at least did in this movie)– it was weird, she sounded American. In fact, this movie should have been called People Badly Faking Accents– I don’t even know what Billy Crudup was supposed to sound like… French? Retarded? The whole language thing in this movie was confusing. It was about Charlotte Gray, this Scottish chick who gets picked to go do secret agent-y type stuff in France during WWII because she’s fluent in French. She’s supposed to pass herself off as a French person, but report back to the British spies or something. However, the entire movie was conducted in English (except for the token Nazis saying a few choice German phrases). Or, occasionally Franglish, as sometimes people would say, “Bonjour Madame” or something, and then start speaking English.

OK, I get that you can do movies about stuff taking place in one country in another language. That happens all the time. However, since language seemed to be important in this movie, couldn’t they have done something about it? I mean, like hold up a sign that said, “OK THEY’RE SPEAKING FRENCH NOW!” or had it in black & white like The Wizard of Oz? It got really confusing to figure out who was working for who, because everyone spoke English, so… were her contacts in France British spies, or were they French people who were collaborating with the British? It sounds like kind of a nit-picky squabble, but it really did make things confusing, especially since everyone’s fake accents sucked balls.

Anyway… what was I bitching about? Oh yeah, the state of my brain chemistry. It sucks. I need money.

At the end of the day, that’s pretty much what every entry on this stupid blog is about anyway (unless I’m busy outing myself as a terrorist, obviously). I should just get a template, or just write

YEAH MORE OF THE SAME.

I’m having a bad week. I’m in a cranky mood. Allow me to indulge in some more whining…

1. I worked 10 hours straight today with no breaks or food. The plants on my accounts are suddenly all getting bugs of various sorts. Plus, all the lawyers at the law firms I had to service were mean today and didn’t want me touching their plants because they were busy. The lawyers that is, the plants weren’t busy. Plus, I cut myself 3 different times today on various plants and bled all over my clipboard.

2. I went to the Cambridge Hospital to see about my ear on the suggestion from someone at the Somerville Referral Line. Unfortunately, the free care clinic is only open from 8:30 to 4:00, and I have to work usually from 8:00 - 4:00. Maybe I can try to work something out tomorrow.

3. My shrink is on vacation for another week, so even if I could find some way to pay for drugs without insurance, he isn’t around to prescribe them. So, I have a splitting headache and am prone to bursting into tears at inopportune times. Oh yeah, the constipation isn’t terribly fun either.

4. Lard Ass peed on my brown pants, but I didn’t realize it until I got to work and smelled myself. I smelled lovely today.

ON THE OTHER HAND…

-Lard Ass hasn’t been peeing on forbidden things since I set up another cat box. Now he has one all to himself.

-I’m even more addicted to MI-5 and I discovered that season 2 is also available for “instant watching” on Netflix.

-It’s the perfect temperature for hot cocoa, and I actually have some.

-All Lard Ass and Jarvis do is sleep together and fight. They’ll fight, and then the next moment they will be curled up together snoring. They’re kind of like most of the couples I know!

-The new Indiana Jones movie comes out this week.

-I have a ticket to see Jamie Lidell next month

- Athena and I went for ice cream sundaes yesterday and mine was exceptionally tasty. Ice cream (at least temporarily) solves all my problems!

- I bought a new battery for my camera so now it works again.

- I just watched the movie Gone Baby Gone and it was actually pretty good.

-My bike will be fixed by tomorrow! I got new purple handlebar streamers just for the occasion!

I confess… I’ve told a lot of Helen Keller jokes in my lifetime. I can’t help it– they are funny! I mean, how can you not laugh at

Q: Why does Helen Keller need two hands to masturbate?
A: She needs one hand to do it, and the other one to moan

?!?! Or

Q: How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her?
A: they put her in a round room and told her to sit int he corner.

So now I’m being punished– my left ear is now 1/2 way blocked up. Before it was just my right ear, and I was getting kind of used to it. Deafness, schmeffness– I could go a month until I got health insurance with only 50% hearing. No problem. However, now that I’m down to only 25% hearing, it’s getting irritating. I mean, today I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at Saki’s house, and I thought I didn’t need hearing because I already have had the film completely memorized since I was about 12. However, I couldn’t really hear the music, and that’s in integral part to the movie.

I feel like an old fart now, having to turn the volume way up on the TV and yelling “WHAT’D HE SAY?!?” every other sentence.

Thus I am going to attempt to navigate the complex system that is the Massachusetts health care customer service phone line tomorrow and try to see a real doctor. I called the info line today, and after picking about 35 menus, they gave me another phone number to call… which was the same number I had initially called! By some bit of divine intervention I managed to get another number to call, but of course there are never customer service representatives around on Sundays. Thus I will take an unpaid day off tomorrow to see what I can do. Hopefully I’ll be able to re-fill my prescription for happy pills too, because I’m almost out.

I can’t hear out of my right ear. On the one hand, it’s kind of irritating. On the other hand, I got the movie Juno on Netflix, and at least the lack of stereo hearing made the annoyingly painful soundtrack more tolerable since I couldn’t hear it so well.

I’m not sure what’s up with my ear– when I sleep on my right side, I often wake up with my ear feeling like it’s full of water or something. It usually clears up after a little bit, though. Today, however, it’s not. There’s probably a gigantic glob of earwax or something stuck in there. The last time I went to the doctor, when I had that sore throat, he looked into my ears, but couldn’t see anything in my right ear because it was too blocked with wax. This was a couple of months ago, so the wax build-up is probably larger now…

I think I should see a doctor if I don’t get my hearing back by Monday, because along with not being able to hear, there’s this faint ringing sound happening that’s really getting on my nerves. However, since I quit my last job, I no longer have insurance from there. My health insurance doesn’t kick in at the new job for 60 days. With the new MA health care reform law, people are required to be covered by insurance. If this means I am obligated to go on COBRA, I will be pissed! COBRA means you can continue your health care once you leave a job, but it will no longer be subsidized by the company, so you have to pay the full price. The last time I was offered COBRA, it was going to be something like $350 a month, and there’s NO FREAKING WAY I can afford that. Of course, it’s highly doubtful that I’ll qualify for one of the poor people programs, since the poverty line is defined as a single handicapped mom with 12 asthmatic children working part time at McDonald’s.

This also sucks because I’m running out of happy pills and I don’t want to have to go off anti-depressants cold turkey again because the last time it sucked major donkey balls what with being dizzy and nauseated all the time and barfing up every food item up that came within 20 feet of me for a week.

Maybe I should talk to the people at the ghetto clinic where I’ve been going– they’re used to poor, uninsured people. Of course, they only speak Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean (if you request it in advance) there, so I may have to take a crash-course in one of the above languages in order to have any questions answered. Of course the ghetto clinic is just for loonies, so they won’t help much with my hearing.

At least it’s warmer now… I can’t describe why this is so depressing, but every time I see the shrink, I have to walk past a gang of smokers huddling together for warmth on the corner across from the clinic. There’s some kind of law that says you can’t smoke within like 500 feet or something of a hospital door, so the staff and patients have found a corner exactly 500 feet away to sully their lungs in the freezing cold all the while complaining bitterly in various languages. I don’t know exactly why, but I find it really a major downer to see the Future Emphysema Patients of America all huddled together like that. It should be uplifting to see such camaraderie and teamwork as they share cigarettes and lighters with each other, but it’s just… not. Anyway with the warmer weather, maybe they won’t look so miserable (because you know that all people exist just for my aesthetic pleasure).

This sore throat and goopy eye thing is really cramping my style. I’ve had it for over a week now, and it doesn’t feel any better. I even went to the doctor on Tuesday. Did you hear that? I actually FOUND A DOCTOR and made an appointment. His name is, uh, Dr. Williams I think? Something bland like that. For some reason, I always like the moment when you have a new doctor and it walks in and you don’t know if it’s going to be a guy or a girl. There should be more gender-neutral whatever-those-are-called. Titles? I’m drawing a blank. It’s probably totally obvious. You know, like Mr., Mrs., Captain, Master, etc.

Anyway, I went to the doctor and he said I had a virus (my strep throat test came out negative) that was causing all of my woes at once. Since it’s a virus, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, of course. I just have to sit around with my throat feeling like I just gargled with steel wool until my white blood cells decide to stop being little pussies and kick some viral ass.

Maybe I’ll try the Charm of Making…

anaal nathraakh, urth vas bethud, dokhjel djenve

Yes, i just watched Excalibur for like the 900th time. Damn I love that movie! According to IMDB, that Anaaaal Naathrakh.. phrase was actually an attempt to pronounce the Old Irish phrase they list as:

Anáil nathrach, ortha bháis bheatha, do thuar dhéanamh.

But, since I’m a giant geek, I have to point out that the above phrase is in modern Irish, and in modern Irish would be pronounced something like “AH naw’eel NAH hrakh UR-ha VAW’EESH VEH ha do HOO-ur YAY’uh nav.”

In Old Irish it would be more like..

OK, I’m not going to get into it because I’m actually boring myself to tears as well.

Here, check out this echidna instead:

I know I’ve had issues with student loans for probalby decades now, but the sallie Mae website has done it again! They’ve added this new really annoying feature– you can’t log into your account if it is past due. This is really stupid, because the only way I ever pay them is through the website. If I pay by check, something always happens to it so it gets delivered late so I have to pay a late fee. Don’t even try to blame it on the mail system– even if I send it 3 weeks early, it will invariably get there late, and going through customer service representatives is so convoluted and frustrating that I might as well just forget about it. If I pay by phone, they charge you an extra $10 just because they can. SO, the only reasonable way to pay is through the website. Alas, they’ve managed to make that extra annoying too! Now I can’t even see how much I owe them. I’m going to have to call them, stay on hold for like 45 minutes until I get some pissy, bored woman named Lurleen who has a cigarette-scarred Arkansas accent so thick I can’t understand her, and most likely be put on hold by her at least 5 times until someone can tell me exactly how much I owe. Ah, I love life.

As if it isn’t bad enough that I’m going to be in debt until I’m 59 for college degrees that are as useful as an Ethiopian Salad Shooter, now they’re making it as difficult as possible to actually pay them when I have the money. That’s the American Way, I guess.