contact has been made

For some random reason I found myself reading all the entries in this blog from January 2004. I had fun back then! My band had gigs, I hung out with friends and DID STUFF. What happened? Where did all those friends go? God, I have no idea– Muffy is… no clue; Shanikqua & Fuggy moved to California; I haven’t talked to Assmunchkin, Hillary, or Dana in forever; Lil’ Bitch is up in Lowell…

I have no idea about the rest. All I know is that I don’t get out of the house a fraction of what I used to. I went to multiple parties in a single night on more than one occasion during that one-month period. When’s the last time I went to ANY party whatsoever? When’s the last time I went out dancing? Oh yeah, I think that was March. Before that? Sometime in November.

Life is passing me by and all I’m doing is lazing around in poverty and nerding out by immersing myself in all my stupid projects. I’ll have time for them when I’m old(er) and (more) decrepit. I need to make an effort to have more fun. Or something.

The problem is: no money. I can’t even ride my bike that much because of my stupid wrist. Will somebody please fix my stupid wrist so I can at least have some bicycle-related fun? Sunday was gorgeous, but I stayed in and cleaned the house because what else am I going to do? Gas is too expensive to even drive my little fuel-efficient car anyplace, I can’t bike much (though I did ride to Newbury St. on Saturday and around Central Square and of course my wrist is killing me now), and I ride public transportation multiple times a day and am sick of it. Besides, if I wanted to take a long walk close to nature, the T isn’t really going to help me out getting there. FIX MY WRIST, HANDS OF FATE!

God dammit! When do I finally qualify for that stupid health insurance? Haven’t I learned my lesson? Yes, I GET IT. DON’T EVER CHANGE JOBS. DON’T GET FIRED FOR BEING A TERRORIST. ok, got it. just hook me up with the Blue Cross and I’ll shut up!

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.

Now that it’s been a couple weeks that I’ve had 100% of my hearing back, it’s time for something new: I’m getting conjunctivitis! It never fails; I always get it when it’s the hottest, or when I’m on vacation. I always get it when I go to Ireland; there’s something about that country that just inspires bacteria and/or viruses to attack my eyeballs (or rather, the tissue covering them). I got it in the middle of the desert in Kenya, and at an Irish music festival in D.C. (see? The Ireland thing again). Now, since the heat index is well above 38 (see me gettin’ funky with the centigrade? That’s 100 to you philistines!) my eyes are at it again. Oh well. Binocular vision is for pussies anyway.

My car wouldn’t start the other day, but I knew it would. Do you know how you just know things sometimes? I was in the parking lot of Market Basket and I turned the key and… the battery went on, but the ignition did nothing. BUT, I knew it would start for the following reasons:

1. It wasn’t snowing
2. There wasn’t anyone with me that I didn’t know very well
3. I wasn’t wearing a dress
4. There were no live animals or perishable goods in the car
5. I wasn’t late for anything
6. I had my cell phone with me

And lo and behold, my car started!

I should have my own psycho psychic hotline!

The heat is also amusing because it causes my cats, who normally sleep curled into tight little balls like armadillos, to sleep all stretched out on their backs with their legs up in the air.

Or they just drape themselves over things:

STOP THE PRESS!!
I just found someone in my Family tree who was FRENCH!!! HOLY CRAP! I’m being sarcastic here, because it seems that everyone on my dad’s dad’s side of the family as well as my mom’s mom were all of Scottish or English descent (nobody really bothered to keep track of the tree on Grandfather’s or Nana’s branches–the Hungarian and Irish ones). Nobody mixed it up with any other race like EVER except for this one French dude. Whoa, you go people in the 1600s–you go with that funky multi-culturalism! Yeah, being Jewish or Irish wouldn’t get you into the D.A.R., I guess so who really cares, right?

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.

So I’ve called like every health referral line in the state. They are always very helpful– their job is to refer people. Unfortunately, the people they refer me to are impatient, underpaid people who either are annoyed at the chutzpah of someone not 15-year-old mother of 10 homeless amputee on the brink of death requesting health care from a free clinic that is totally booked up anyway, or they aren’t actually a free clinic and can’t help me if I don’t have insurance. Most often, though, they transfer me to some random line (seriously, I’ve been transferred to everything from the neonatal care unit to scheduling heart surgery). The people I get connected to seem to realize that the operators connect people to random numbers and it doesn’t surprise them. However, they never know the real numbers of the people I need to talk to.

Now I’m getting the snowball affect. I’m running low on anti-depressants which means I’m getting seriously constipated, which means I’m getting a splitting headache. So, I’m depressed, headachy and irregular in addition to not being able to hear anything. Yay! It’s just going to get worse in the next 4 weeks! Maybe someone will be able to fix something if I come in with a noose around my neck snorting Metamucil and yelling “Speak up, sonny! I can’t hear ya! Yer talkin in ma bad ears!”

I’m getting increasingly irritated and the ringing in my ears isn’t helping. I can feel myself losing it mentally, too, thanks to the sudden reduced dose of happy pills. Arrgh. I wish I could just sleep for the next 4 weeks.

Here’s some happy shit. Maybe that will negate my crappy state of mind:

Kittens!

Unicorns!

Rainbows!

Puppies!

ice cream!

Abdul the baby wombat!

uh… a taco cat!

Baby dressed like a squid!

Baby for dinner!

Pug Vader!

A scarf that looks like bacon!

Argh. I’ve been trying to make an appointment with someone, anyone, to get my ears checked out today. There are all sorts of programs for pregnant chicks, people with STDs, refugees and homeless people, kids with weird diseases and the like, but there are very few resources for regular people with jobs who are going deaf.

I called the Mass Care health people; it’s a state program to provide insurance to low-income people (I actually qualify, even though I make 250% of the National Poverty Level!), but it would probably take several weeks to get my application and stuff straightened out and by then I’d probably have insurance from my job.

The MassCare people referred me to the Health Safety Net, which sounded awesome– it is a place that provides insurance for up to 3 months; exactly what I was looking for. I called them up and their answer was, “you aren’t even in our system.” So I asked them how I could get in the system, and they said “you’re not in our system.” That was helpful.

So I called the Joseph Smith Community Health Clinic in Allston, and they’re not taking any new patients unless it’s a serious emergency or I’m pregnant.

There’s another clinic in Southie, but since they don’t take charity cases, I’ll have to pay the full price, which I totally can’t afford.

Basically, I’ve been on hold, listening to staticky classical piano music all morning with various places, having a pleasantly calm recorded voice informing me that “your call is important to us” only to talk to a bored operator who tells me there’s nothing I can do.

I guess I’ll have to get used to deafness, which is holding steady at about 75% today.

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’m not seeing Cut Copy and the Mobius Band right now because I figured it would just be frustrating with hearing in only one ear. Out of desperation, I tried all the methods of removal everyone has suggested (warm olive oil, warm water, hydrogen peroxide) to no avail.

You see… the wax has built up in my middle ear, which is blocked by the eardrum:

So, anything I put in my ear doesn’t actually get to the wax, it just gets my ear canal nice and clean. I think I must have the cleanest right ear canal of anyone on the planet right now– go ahead, check it out! I bet it’s so shiny you can see yourself in the reflection!

Now that I’ve gotten all the whining out of the way, I can go onto other topics, such as how I am currently addicted to the show MI-5. I don’t even know if it’s still on. Apparently in the UK it’s called Spooks, but they can’t call it that here because that’s apparently a racial slur. Spook? Maybe I’m just ign’ant of racism, but I have never heard that one before. Anyway, this show is pretty rad! Just what I need, right? Another TV show on a channel I don’t have to be addicted to!

Athena called me up yesterday just as I woke up to inform me that Freezepop was playing a free show on the Common in slightly less than 2 hours. We managed to mobilize in record time and get to the event, which was a gay youth pride rally, with 10 minutes to spare.

Oy, kids these days! Gay kids these days, especially! I’ve had many moments where I just don’t understand the youth of America, and this drove that home. First of all, let’s discuss fashion. Now I’m the last person on earth who should be called a fashion expert, but what’s with the 90s revival thing? All the kids were wearing a strange melange of 90s grunge, current hip hop fashion, all topped with brightly colored geometrically-patterned 80s wear.

Most of them had various pointy piercings sticking out of their cheeks and chins, and a good 1/4 were carrying around homemade signs advertising “free hugs” or “free kisses.” It’s not just about gay kids; it’s kids in general. Teenagers like this used to always come into the store–it’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever been in a crowd of this many so recently. Kids These Days seem to be begging to be noticed. I got those challenging stares that teenagers are so good at giving from everyone–the ones that say “go ahead, I DARE you to make fun of my weird appearance!” The problem was, everyone kind of looked the same. The only weird-looking kids were the ones without any piercings and with normal-colored hair!

Oy, back in my day… uh… yeah. Something.

On another note, I still can’t hear out of my right ear. People have been giving me advice of what substance to pour into my ear to melt the wax and get my hearing back (thanks, guys!). However, the problem is that the wax is stuck behind my eardrum. i remember having this problem with water years ago. The doctor said that because of my allergies the sinuses do something or other so that water and wax get trapped behind my eardrum, and there’s nothing I can really do about it without messing up my eardrum. So, I don’t want to pour anything into my ear, because it will probably just get stuck behind my eardrum with the rest of the stuff (I took a shower this morning and now have water rattling around in there as well). Argh.