Evagation

Where I've been.

2007-06-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

Tired. Achy. Busy.

(I also have so many draft entries that I think I've officially created more drafts than actual published entries. Perhaps today I'll finally go back and start, you know, posting some of those. Because they're almost done, and most just need some sort of conclusion. Since I talk about some of my favorite things in the world, they do go on for some time. I talk about The Plague and how it won't kill us if we just respond correctly, and quickly. By the way--that guy with the XDR-TB is a jerk. Not because of his XDR-TB but because he openly disregarded instructions from the CDC. If the CDC tells you to stay put until they know more about your XDR-TB, then you freakin' stay put until you hear differently! Dude knew he was doing something he shouldn't be doing when he flew to Canada because he suspected that he was on the US No Fly list. As far as I'm concerned, I think he should be happy that he didn't get put into jail for what did, like that poor Russian guy in Arizona a few months ago, who also has XDR-TB and was JAILED for going out in public without his face mask on. The fact that more tests showed that Speaker's strain of XDR-TB is not highly contagious doesn't excuse what he did AT ALL. Had he just listened to the CDC and waited for those test results to come in, then the whole mess could probably have been avoided. But Speaker's an annoying fat-head who thought he knew more about TB than the CDC. Also: The CDC is not perfect and the only person we have to blame for that is Bush, who consistently cuts funding to everything important to us because of his goddamned war.)

I need to work on writing shorter parentheticals.

Devin and I both finished the six Harry Potter books in eight days (so that was a while ago, and I wrote a draft entry about it). Since Devin asks me every other day when the new book comes out, I made a sign, and posted it in our kitchen, that says, "The next Harry Potter book is STILL coming out on July 21st." I smacked him when he started complaining about having to wait that long because I've been waiting two years for this book (eight if you consider how long I've been reading the entire series).

He also made me promise to get him his OWN COPY. Which I think is a spectacular waste of money but he's adamant that he will NOT wait for me to finish my copy (even though I'll read it in one day, as I've done with all of the other HP books, but that's not good enough for Devin).

After finishing up Harry, I watched Season 3 of "Battlestar Galactica." I highly recommend watching this show if you're not watching it already. You need to start at the beginning, though. (Seasons 1 and 2 are available to rent, like most TV shows are nowadays, which is a wonderful use of DVD technology. Season 3 comes out sometime in August.)

The final season doesn't start until February of next year, so I let Devin complain about the long wait because it wouldn't exactly be fair for me to start griping when I'm smacking him around for complaining about having to wait for the last HP book. Although eleven months between seasons really is an insanely long amount of time to wait for a show. They're showing a two-hour episode in November but it's a prequel to stuff that was already dealt with during Season 2 (if I say any more, I would veer into spoiler territory).

We celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary earlier this week (the 11th) by going out to dinner and then seeing "Ocean's 13." Which we both liked it, but not enough to see it again on the big screen. And as much as I love Ellen Barkin, there needed to be more women in the movie. Maybe just ONE more woman. But it was funny, and fluffy and certainly not a waste of money.

My arthritis was kicking my ass for the past few weeks. The weather's been going a bit crazy and all of that change made my knees swell on a daily basis. Although now that the weather has finally settled on hot, my joints are no longer achy balls of pain. I've been able to go back to doing Yoga and Pilates (even though I hate Pilates because it is brutal). And Devin is thrilled because I'm no longer lying around the house with my knees propped up and ice-packs strapped to them.

Otherwise it's been a lot of summer TV. I'm addicted to "Hell's Kitchen" and "Top Chef," even though I hate cooking and eat very bland foods when I'm sick, so I also have an aversion to anything spicy. But "Hell's Kitchen" cracks me up and "Top Chef" teaches me all sorts of things about cooking. (Even though I never put any of that knowledge to good use.) I also love seeing the "Top Chef" people go absolutely nuts during their Quick Fire challenges.

And, of course, I watch "So You Think You Can Dance?" because DAMN, the top twenty dancers this year are phenomenal. This week was the first night of competition for the top twenty and it was spectacular. Usually the first week isn't particularly good because you have dancers who are dancing in styles that they have never danced before, and many of them have never done any partner work, either (for those unfamiliar with the show, the top twenty are partnered off into ten couples and they continue to dance as couples for many weeks).

The few dancers who struggled with new dance styles, and were put into the bottom three couples by popular vote, managed to save themselves (except for two contemporary dancers) based on their solo routine. Which sucked for the two contemporary dancers who went home because their solo routines weren't even as good as their auditions, so they were sent home by the judges. (Again, if you are unfamiliar with the show, America votes for their favorite couples, the bottom three couples then have to perform solo routines for the judges, and the judges send one boy, and one girl home. This goes on for a few weeks until most of the dancers have been sent home.)

Although I'm getting tired of the judge's fascination with break-dancing. They kept one guy who pulled out the same damn break-dancing tricks that he's been doing since the first round of auditions and the judges are still heaping praise on him. They must not realize that there are a whole lot of guys in this country who can spin around on their freakin' heads. (I remember guys break-dancing during breaks between classes while I was in junior high. They'd bring out pallets of cardboard--old refrigerator boxes and the like, and would practice spinning around on their heads, and a bunch of other common break-dancing tricks.)

And I'm not saying that break-dancing well is easy. It's hard as hell but if this particular break-dancer (there are a few of them in the top twenty) ends up having to perform a solo routine again, he'd better do more than freakin' spinning around on his head. Even the other break-dancers in the competition realize that there has to be substance to their routines to balance out the tricks.

My bizarro week.

2007-05-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was lamenting the end of Gilmore and my lost Harry Potter paperback books.

Well, of course Gilmore is still gone, but at least I found the books. Last Thursday, I started reading Sorcerer's Stone and, since I was pretty sick, I stayed home on Friday and had myself a nice four-day weekend.

I was planning to take my time reading the six HP books. I have until July 21st, so I wasn't at all worried. In-between reading, I was planning on finishing the second season of Battlestar Galactica (they did Season 2 in two parts--part 2.0 and part 2.5, which is weird).

Since Devin has a disc-golf tournament every Friday (and one every Tuesday, and a monthly one on Saturday mornings), I figured that I should spend my Devin-free time reading HP because he would probably want to watch Battlestar with me (when I went ahead and watched episodes while he was in bed, he was a bit peeved that he missed the chance to re-watch them).

Which is when things started to get odd.

Devin got home from the tournament, and I was already half-way through Chamber of Secrets (I've read Sorcerer's so many times that I have the damn thing memorized). We talk about how the tournament went, and I'm telling him that I'm ready to stop reading for a while and watch some Battlestar.

And Devin picks up Sorcerer's Stone. I have been trying to get Devin to read the Harry Potter books since the moment I met him. Which is no surprise because I think every literate person in the world should read Harry Potter, and have told that to anybody who will listen to me.

Devin has never showed any interest in Harry Potter. Even the movies bored him silly (well, except for Prisoner and Goblet but that makes sense because those two were far better than the first two, which were directed by Christopher Columbus, who freakin' cut out some of my favorite "RENT" songs from the damn movie to get a PG-13 rating, the rat bastard). I had given up on trying to interest Devin in Harry Potter a long time ago. He goes with me to the movies and tries not to look too embarrassed because I'm wearing my "Quidditch" shirt and am squealing over the movie like a teenage girl.

I love my husband but he is just not a reader. Since graduating from high school, he's read more books in the five years that he's been with me, than he ever did during school (not including assigned reading, of course, since he always read the books he was assigned to read but never read for fun, and would, in fact, argue that there isn't any "fun" reading).

When we moved in together, he had less than ten books, almost all of which were assigned books from high school and junior college, and (of course) The Book of Mormon. After we moved into our second apartment, which was twice the size of the little cottage that we were living in before (referred to as "The Stoops," since we all spent most of our time sitting on our stoops, talking with our friends, who also happened to be our neighbors, the cottages were built after the first World War for war widows and their children), I was able to move in a whole lot of my books.

It took Devin a while to notice that his meager book collection wasn't visible in any of the bookcases. They were hidden behind my Nora Roberts books (which is truly bizarre because most women hide their romance novels). He tried to argue that, since he only had a few books, I shouldn't be hiding them behind my books, and especially not behind a bunch of romance novels.

He said something about how he didn't even remember what books he owned, so I pulled out all of my Nora Roberts just so he could see his books.

"When was the last time you read one of those books?" I asked him.

"Ummm... I read Choke by the Fight Club guy (Chuck Palahniuk) after you gave it to me."

"That was almost two years ago, Devin. And I just finished reading a Nora Roberts trilogy, so that trumps your book collection."

We eventually decided that if Devin started to read for fun--even if it was only one book a year--then his collection would not be kept hidden behind my romance novels. Since he liked the first "Bourne" movie, and a close friend of ours kept telling him that he should read the books, Devin started reading Robert Ludlum.

Which was actually rather funny because he became completely obsessed with Robert Ludlum's books and was excited to hear that a "new" book of his was coming out. And I got to explain to him that Ludlum was dead and that his "new" books were being written by ghost writers (using Ludlum's rough drafts, outlines, and anything else that he left behind).

After plowing through most of Ludlum's books, Devin read The DaVinci Code (since all literate Westerners feel obliged to read that book at some point--and it's actually pretty good).

Last Friday, while Devin was looking at Sorcerer's Stone, I told him that I was ready for a break from Harry Potter and why don't we watch some Battlestar together?

"Nah. Since you did something for me--started watching Battlestar--I'll do something that you like."

"Are you actually going to read Harry Potter?" Over two years ago, I had shoved the dark blue, mass-market version of Sorcerer's at Devin and he didn't even finish the first chapter.

"Yup." And then he took the book to his game room and, sure enough, started reading it.

I decide to watch an episode of Battlestar and, when it's over, I go in to check on Devin.

"This is great. Are you almost done with the second one?"

"Ummm... no. I'm about half-way done."

"Well, you'd better hurry up and finish it because I'm already half-way through this one."

"What about Battlestar? Are you going to watch any of it with me?"

"No. I'm going to read Harry Potter."

And so he did. He was also very serious about me finishing Chamber before he finished Sorcerer's.

And that was how our holiday weekend went. I plowed through Chamber less than an hour before Devin finished Sorcerer's. I plowed through Prisoner of Azkaban while Devin read Chamber of Secrets.

I damn near didn't finish Prisoner before Devin finished Chamber. That was definitely a close one.

Then I threw a bit of a hissy fit. Goblet of Fire is easily my favorite Harry Potter book. I told Devin that this madness of me plowing through the books just so he could read them after me had to stop. I refused to plow through Goblet. I've read the first three so many times that reading them again was pretty much unnecessary, I read them because I love them, not because I had forgotten anything that had happened in them (even the small, minute details).

But I flat-out refused to do that with Goblet, and Devin was not pleased with that decision. It was Monday morning, and he'd stayed up until the very wee hours of the morning to finish Prisoner and was ready to read Goblet. I was about half-way through it, so Devin decided to go play some disc golf with some friends and instructed me to finish the book while he was gone.

Which is when we started fighting. Over Harry Potter. It was WEIRD. Once again, I told him that I love Goblet and was not going to rush through it. Fine, he said, then I'll just read your hardcover copy.

"NO YOU WON'T. Do not even THINK of touching that book."

"Have you gone insane? What the hell is your problem?"

"No one touches my hardcover Harry Potter books. Especially Goblet of Fire. I've read that book so many times that the spine has completely separated, right at the part where Harry gets the golden egg. It will fall completely apart if you try to read it. Leave. It. Alone."

"You broke your favorite Harry Potter book?"

"I didn't BREAK IT. I just loved it too much."

"Fine. Whatever. I'm going to go play disc golf with Mike."

"You do that. Have fun."

So, Devin stormed off and I re-immersed myself into Goblet, filled with happiness because I didn't have to rush through it just so Devin could start reading it.

When Devin came home a few hours later, he was carrying a Target bag.

"You didn't..."

Before I can finish the sentence, Devin interrupts me, "Yup. Bought my own copy. Now we can both read it."

"Devin! We now own three copies of Goblet of Fire! That's crazy."

"No. YOU are crazy. But don't worry, Mike told me that I can borrow his copies of Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince. Even though he thinks you're crazy as well."

"What about watching Battlestar together?" I didn't bother fighting over my alleged lack of sanity because... they were both a bit right. 99.9% of the time, I am thrilled to lend a book from my library to a friend, since I firmly believe that books should be shared.

Except for a few very special books. All of my beloved autographed-by-the-author books, my antique books and, of course, my HP hardcovers.

"You can watch Battlestar if you want but I'm going to read Goblet of Fire."

Devin is now half-way through Order of the Phoenix and he cannot stop talking about all of the stuff that was left out of the "Harry Potter" movies. Which means that he never listened to any of my lectures on that very subject but that's okay. At least now he understands.

His goal is to finish Order of the Phoenix today (I'm not sure why, other than the fact that he is now addicted to the series and is obsessed with finding out what happens next). He wants to read Half-Blood Prince over the weekend, and has already told me that we should put a second Deathly Hallows on order for him.

Never in a million years did I expect Devin to plow through five Harry Potter books in less than a week. But I am THRILLED. When he's not reading, he's asking me questions about the books and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Out of touch with time.

2007-05-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

And probably reality.

This year is going by at an insane rate. I can't believe that my two-year wedding anniversary is less than a month away and Devin and I have no idea what we are going to do about it.

Although it will probably not involve spending much money, unless our parents gift us with a gift certificate to a nice restaurant. We're lucky to be able to funnel money into our savings account after paying our bills and mortgage.

Last week, Devin had the brainstorm that I needed to replace Gilmore Girls with another show. Which was really just his three-thousandth attempt to get me to watch Battlestar Galactica.

Entertainment Weekly is obsessed with this show. Since I read every issue cover-to-cover, I had been telling Devin about it because it sounded like something he would like. Which turned out to be a gross understatement: He loved it. And maybe I made fun of him for loving what is basically a science-fiction soap opera.

Before Gilmore went off the air, Devin would complain about how yeah, it sucks when the shows that I like go on hiatus, but they come back on in a few months, and his precious show isn't even returning from hiatus until 2008. Once I learned Gilmore was ending for good, I turned the tables on him and said hell, at least your show is coming back.

Yes. Sometimes we act like children.

Since watching my shows last week ran the gamut from being highly emotional to just sucking monkey butt, I was pretty cranky over the weekend. Obviously, Gilmore made me crazy. Then Jaslene won America's Next Top Model and it was making me think that Tyra is either on medication, or needs to be on medication because that was a seriously fucked-up decision. (I could actually give a reasonably well-argued rant for why Jaslene was the stupidest choice possible for winner but I shouldn't waste my time because obviously the judges don't give a rat's arse about who is actually the best freakin' model. Stupid show.)

Then CSI got way creepy. Which is saying a lot because CSI is certainly not a warm-and-fuzzy type of show. Although their Miniature Killer storyline was fabulous, and it left us with a great cliff-hanger. But it also gave us the creepy puppet man who turned his dead five year-old daughter into a puppet for his stage show and kept having her sing about how she had a "pain in her sawdust."

Try getting THAT out of your mind.

On the work front, I actually had the mother of a former pool client calling me a couple of times Friday afternoon because his son told her to call.

The son is in his forties. I've dealt with some crazy callers at this job but I had never had a forty-something year-old man have his mother call me because he felt that we were not returning his calls in a prompt manner. (Which was completely untrue--we returned his call every day that week, he simply didn't happen to be home for the calls and refused to give us his cell number.)

(Although it was a bit funny when Devin was trying to figure out the work number that he gave us. Apparently, he gave us a work number that is actually an emergency hotline for freeze disaster relief. Which was pretty much useless because it was an answering machine.)

That pretty much unhinged me. I've gotten yelled at, cursed out, and hung-up on by former customers but I'd never been scolded by their mothers. I feel very sorry for that man's wife.

So, it was in this weakened state that Devin convinced me to watch some Battlestar Galactica with him over the weekend. We watched the three-hour-plus miniseries that served as one huge pilot for the show.

Now I'm hooked. You have no idea. It is the soapiest, campiest show that I have ever seen and I'm in love with it. In two days, I managed to bust through the entire first season.

Of course, Devin is thrilled that we actually have a shared interest in a TV show that isn't The Simpsons. I still can't really believe it. I have been mocking Devin for loving this show for almost a year.

He also might be gloating a bit about how his devious plan worked so well. Although he was a bit peeved with me because I was laughing at things that he felt were NOT funny. Except I always do that. Gilmore didn't bring out that side of me because the writing for it was superb, right up to the end.

I love dialogue. As a kid, I actually wrote far more plays than I did short stories. In class, whenever we were given a creative writing assignment, mine were always heavy on the dialogue. In fact, up until high school, they were pretty much ALL dialogue.

Oh yeah. That's also why I'm writing a one-act play for Script Frenzy. It's the June version of Nanowrimo for dramatists. Luckily the deadline is only 20,000 words, so I actually have a chance in hell of making the deadline. (Even though re-reading the entire Harry Potter series and watching two more seasons of Battlestar might make writing a one-act play a bit impossible.)

Although, honestly, I'm not that worried. Most of my Nano novel was dialogue because I am one of those people who enjoys dreaming up characters and then putting them in a room together to see how they interact.

Plus, if it's any good, I can submit it to the local community college for their theater department to use when they perform their one-act plays at the end of the year (obviously, I would have to wait until next year). I did this with a one-act that I wrote in high school but they didn't go for it because the main character spent the entire play in a hospital bed. Although this was before W;t won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

(I wonder what the hell happened to that one-act of mine, now that I think about it.)

So, you may now start betting on which thing I will not follow through with:

Reading the entire Harry Potter series by July 21st.

Writing a 20,000 word one-act play during the month of June.

Watching two seasons of Battlestar Galactica.

Watching any of the first two movies in a trilogy, of which the third installment is coming out this summer (Pirates, Bourne, Ocean's).

Or all of the above.

Acting like a baby.

2007-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Tonight is the last episode of Gilmore Girls EVER.

Devin's being incredibly sweet about it, especially yesterday, when he came home and I was crying.

Yup. Crying. Like a baby. Devin just wrapped me up in a big hug and said, very softly, "This is about Gilmore Girls, isn't it?" But he was being very nice.

"Yes." Sob. "I'm an idiot." Sob. "But I just started thinking about Tuesday nights and how I always watch House after Gilmore because Gilmore is so much fun, and House is so insane. How will I be able to watch House without Gilmore Girls?"

Which is when Devin realized that I had truly gone completely insane. He was especially pleased when I started sobbing about how Gilmore had taken the Buffy slot when Joss moved Buffy to UPN and that I've been watching a show on The WB/CW on Tuesday nights, at 8:00pm since 1997.

THEN I started sobbing about how I still have no clue where my paperback Harry Potter books are, and that I need to be reading Sorcerer's Stone soon if I'm going to be able to read all six books before the final one comes out in July.

Which, of course, turned into me sobbing about the end of Harry Potter and how the hell was I going to survive THAT? Because there will be some serious melting down over here if JK Rowling kills any of the Weasleys. Except for Percy. She can totally kill Percy Weasley but absolutely no other Weasley.

At this point, Devin was just trying to get me to stop crying. Since it had perhaps gotten a bit out of control. (Although I still think that it was totally understandable why I was crying because this is turning into the worst summer EVER.)

Once I calmed down, we treated ourselves to a nice dinner in one of our favorite restaurants (we're trying to save money but we both decided that getting me out of the house last night, so I wouldn't start watching my saved episodes of what is now the final season of Gilmore Girls and start crying about it all over again was worth spending a bit of money).

Then we went and saw "Spiderman 3" for the second time. (Yes. Second time.) We saw it opening weekend, early Saturday morning, so the theater wasn't packed but there were still way too many little kids there for us to really enjoy it. They got bored long before Eddie Brock became Venom.

(The next morning. Can't remember why I stopped writing the entry. Probably because all things Gilmore makes me want to cry. Or actually does make me cry. And I'm not even PMS'ing or pregnant, so I can't blame it on hormones. Even though I'm female, so I could still blame it on hormones if I wanted to because sometimes females don't make no sense.)

So. "Spiderman 3" was actually more enjoyable the first time. Simply for the obvious reason that it was brand-new and we didn't know what was going to happen next. The first two movies were still good after multiple viewings but this one rather sucked a bit the second time around (for me, Devin thinks it was just fine). Because Mary Jane Watson is a freakin' bitch. I tried to tell Devin how bitchy she was after we saw it the first time but he didn't believe me. So, the second time around, I kindly pointed out to him every time she did something bitchy by saying "Bitch!"

I'm nothing if not helpful. My favorite part of the movie the second time around was one of the ads that they ran before the previews. It was from the Tulare County Department Of Health urging all young people to get tested for HIV because many people who have the virus don't know that they have it.

Finally. It's only been 26 years since the first recorded case of GRID (gay-related immune deficiency, which is what they called AIDS until 1982) but finally our county is urging people to get tested for HIV. I seriously applauded the screen and yelled, "YES!" when that ad came on. Since at least they're finally getting their act together about it (yes, they are a few decades late but since I thought this was never going to happen, I'm feeling pleasantly surprised... now I want to see some stats about how HIV is affecting Tulare County but that will probably take a few more years).

And to abruptly change subjects: Gilmore Girls last night totally made me cry. A lot. It was rather pathetic. I seriously started bawling when they ran the theme song because they aren't going to be with me anymore when I need them, so Carole King and her daughter Louise Goffin were totally lying to me.

So, I think crying because I felt that "Where You Lead I Will Follow" was lying to me probably means that I have lost my mind. When Devin heard the music signaling the end of the show (and series, SNIFF) he came out and very sweetly asked me how I was doing.

"I'm crying. It was just so... PERFECT. Well, almost perfect. There was no Sebastian Bach, which makes me a bit mad."

"Because you wanted Sebastian Bach to sing?" Which made me laugh.

"No! Because he's a member of Lane's band Hep Alien! I just wanted him there. But they got almost everyone else so it's okay."

It really was a fantastic series finale. From the beginning, it was very clear why they chose this as the end of the series. Rory had graduated from Yale and was leaving on her first big job (as a reporter with the Barack Obama campaign, of all things) and the damn episode was called "Bon Voyage" for goodness sakes. So the entire cast getting together to say goodbye to Rory was obviously a huge metaphor for saying goodbye to this wonderful show. It was a very heavy-handed metaphor but I rather liked that because heavy-handed meant that this was really the end. If they hadn't given me a hugely emotional episode, with a lot of tearful goodbyes, then I would have been freaking' pissed. Because ending something like Gilmore Girls is different than ending Seinfeld. Gilmore fans expect to be bashed over the head by obvious metaphors because that's part of the show.

And I'm seriously going to miss Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann. I have loved them both for far longer than I've been watching Gilmore Girls and I was so pleased to see them on this show. ("Dirty Dancing" and "Overboard" were two of my favorite movies growing up. Although apparently the entire world hates "Overboard," I thought it was absolutely hilarious when I was eight years old.)

So. After over a decade of watching a show on The WB/CW on Tuesday nights at 8:00 pm, I now have nothing to watch. It's probably the heavy-handed Gilmore metaphors talking but this honestly feels like the end of a very long era of my life.

Which probably means that I need to grow up. Except. I rather like knowing that I can still become emotionally invested in a fictional story. I've never been ashamed of crying at the end of a movie, even if I was the only person in the theater sobbing. Or of giving a movie a standing ovation, even though it's a movie theater, and not an actual theatre. The first time I stood and clapped for a movie was when I saw "Apollo 13," the last time I stood and clapped for a movie was two weeks ago, when I saw "Dirty Dancing" on the big screen (I wasn't kidding when I said that I love that movie).

The last time I cried at the end of a movie was when I saw "Stranger Than Fiction." I sobbed my way through that ending because it was beautiful and good lord, do I love that movie.

Every time I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I cry over Cedric's death. Which actually makes it difficult when I see the Harry Potter movies because I already know who is going to die (Goblet kicked off the dying motif in the series), so I actually cry when that person simply appears for the first time in the movie because I know what's going to happen to them.

The Order of the Phoenix movie is going to be very emotional for me. JK Rowling is an incredible writer because she doesn't give the fans what we want--a nice, happy story about a bunch of wizards (reminiscent of the first book in the series) and instead gives us heart-breaking tales of death and redemption. Devin can attest to the fact that I went absolutely bonkers when I finished reading The Half-Blood Prince. I was crying so much that I couldn't even get enough breath to tell Devin WHY I was crying. I'm still hoping that the character she killed at the end of Half-Blood Prince isn't really dead because if he is really dead, then JK Rowling was serious when she said that all bets are off, and that many characters could die in the last book. Including Harry.

Just thinking about that is making me sad. So, I suppose I'm glad that I am able to feel so much for people that aren't even real. Even if it means making a damn fool out of myself when a favorite show of mine goes off the air.

Confession.

2007-04-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

My entries here have been depressing, and long, lately. I am simply try to meander away from obsessing about quitting opioids, or mentioning the health scare that my Dad has been dealing with (since that would be really depressing) by confessing to all of the things I do/have done/watch/read that are maybe a bit embarrassing. Feel free to laugh at me all you want, that's why I'm doing this. 1) I obsessively watch Gilmore Girls and refer to it as "GiGi." I think giving it a pet-name is what really sent me over the edge into crazy fangirl status. Except I am NOT writing fanfic about any of it, which is a good thing. Since I've only ever written dirty, X-rated fanfic (we'll get to that later) and I really can't think of a great "GiGi" hook-up that would make for great, porny fanfic. Unless I did some cross-over stuff with some of the Buffy characters. I've also kept track of all of the books Rory has read on the series and I own most of them. Which must mean that I'm as bookish as a fictional bookish girl. 2) Yes, I have written porny Buffy fanfic. I love that show (there's no past-tense on that because I will never stop loving Buffy even though it all went to shit when Joss left to do Angel and, without Joss Whedon, the show was just crap). I was in love with Spike. In fact, I went to a few James Marsters (actor who played Spike) signings/appearances and the dude felt me up! Happiest day in my teenage life. I asked him to take a picture with me, then asked for the vampire-bite on the neck pose, and, as he was snuggling me closer to him for the pose to work right (I'm taller than James Marsters) he brushed his hand right across my boobs. My friend took the picture and James said something like, well, how about one more just in case? I damn near died because James Marsters didn't want to let me go! And then he felt me up again! Again. Happiest day of my teenage life. Afterwards, I asked my picture-taking friend if Spike had just felt me up and she looked at me like I was a moron, "Yes, Katie, Spike totally felt you up. Twice." I think my friend was a bit disgusted by it but I obviously didn't care about that, at all. I was thrilled. 3) In high school, I created, and ran, the pre-eminent Neil Patrick Harris website. Yes, that would be the Doogie Howser, M.D. guy. In high school, I used the internet to make fan sites. I had a few going but the Neil one was the biggest, and was definitely the best one around. All of the other piddly Neil fansites kept trying to steal my stuff and there was actually a bit of a war because I had a bunch of exclusive photos, since I started the site after I saw him in "RENT," at the Ahmanson in L.A. All of my RENThead friends would give me their Neil photos to put on the site. Seriously. The thing was huge. I had met him once after I saw "RENT" the first time, but every time I tried to catch him at the stage door after another "RENT" show, he would never show up. He had gotten tired of all of the RENTheads camping out at the stage door just to get autographs, and pictures, so he would have security open up some random exit door for him, just so he didn't have to deal with the fans. When I finally DID meet him again, after the site had gotten enormous, and I was THE Neil Patrick Harris Website Girl, he acted like a complete asshole. It was another stage-door thing (but for a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, and yes, he wasn't very good as Romeo). Someone had already told him that I was going to be there that night (being a theater kid in L.A. means running in a VERY small circle, since it's not really known for it's theater), and he had better come out and meet me after all of the goodwill I had created on the internet for him. So, he did shake my hand, and sign the playbill, and let me take one picture. Then made some really snide remarks about how the site was great but that I must have a really boring life and he'd only been to the site a few times but wasn't really impressed. Less than a week after that meeting, I had the site completely torn down. I let another girl use most of the stuff from my site for hers, and her thank you to me for it, is still there (that was back when I still owned the chuckie.org domain, which was bought by a "Rugrats" guy). You've got to scroll down but it's there--and I must not have let her have my picture of me posing with Neil, since it's not there. I didn't know, at the time, that a friend was talking with Neil's management and they ended up approaching me about making the site an Official Neil site, except it was gone by then, and I had no desire to bring it back to life. Have to say that I'm a little glad that Neil is such a jerk. Had he not been a jerk, I would have been known as The Girl Who Runs the Official Neil Patrick Harris Website and that would have been BAD. 4) I sucked my thumb until I was nine years old. This is random but hey, it's still embarrassing. My parents tried everything to get me to stop. They started with coating my thumb with something that promised to make the thumb taste so bad that no thumb-sucker would stand for it. All that did was make me really, really sick in the morning, since I had still sucked my thumb during most of the night. Then they covered it with that stuff that will turn your thumb, and mouth, bright red if you suck it during the night. Which simply led to me freaking my teachers out and having them send me home because they thought I had some strange, contagious pathogen that had turned my tongue, teeth, and lips bright red. After that, I started going to bed with really thick mittens on, and since I couldn't fit my thumb in my mouth because the mitten was so big, I eventually stopped sucking my thumb. Even though I would still turn to the comfort of thumb-sucking while I was in the hospital, although that eventually stopped, as well. As you have probably already guessed, sucking my thumb for all of those years completely messed with my teeth. One tooth in particular had gotten seriously fucked up. It was one of the two biggest front teeth, on top, and my thumb had made it grow in completely horizontal. After a few years dealing with braces, my orthodontist admitted defeat when it came to that tooth, since the braces hadn't really moved it at ALL. I had gotten used to smiling with my mouth closed, since kids always made fun of the freakish tooth. So, the dentist did a root canal on it, and then began extracting it from my mouth. It was HUGE. The dentist called everyone into the room just to show them how ginormous the root on the tooth was--I still have it in a keepsake box, somewhere. After the extraction, I got a fake tooth, and spent the next few months running my tongue over my newly flat, front teeth. It felt so weird. 5) I am addicted to bad reality shows. Which is what happens when a generation has been raised on MTV's "Real World." Even though nothing will ever top Puck, and that guy from the London "Real World" who got the tip of his tongue bitten off by a fan, and this was around the time his girlfriend sent him a dead animal's heart in a box (it had to have been a heart-shaped box). And what about that crazy Lyme Disease girl in Seattle? Good times. So, now I watch things like "America's Next Top Model," even though I promised myself I would stop a few cycles ago when the title went to that awful Naima over Kahlen. Now I don't care who the hell wins, since the judging is completely arbitrary, anyway. (Last cycle being a good example of this--bitchy Melrose was actually the better model, she took great pictures, she handled fashions shows like a pro and not like an insane monkey but, alas, the title went to the insane, but cute, monkey.) And, honestly, if you are not watching the show this cycle then you need to get your ass over to TWoP and read the re-caps. They are glorious. Between the mail-order Russian bride, and Wholahay, the show is campy, comedic gold. I'm also obsessed with "The Girls Next Door" on E! It's a bit odd, in the sense that it's Hef's mansion, and these are his girls, but poor old Hugh just wanders around like the geriatric he is while his girls talk about how much they love him. Although those aren't the funny parts. The funny parts happen in-between the talking about Hef. I really love those girls. Even Kendra, who is undoubtedly the stupidest one in the bunch (Holly has more brains that I used to give her credit for, and Bridget is actually quite intelligent, it's simply hard for a grown woman who loves pink and takes dogs on romantic, Valentine's Day strolls to be perceived as being pretty damn smart). Kendra is great because she does wonderful things like sitting in Holly's birthday cake. She also invites her family (they live in California, so it's easy for them to visit--the other girl's families rarely show up) to every major Mansion function, and then proceeds to try and find Playboy girls for her newly-18 year old brother (he needs to get laid, according to Kendra). Once she's done with the brother, she moves on to try and find a man for her Mom (who also needs to get laid). She's also the "sporty" one (I can't help but think of a group of girls in old Spice Girl terminology), except when she went snowboarding in Vail, CO with Shawn White, she crashed into him and sent him flying, and rolling down the mountain. Way to go, Sporty Girl. The Vail trip was great for another reason--elk meat. Apparently, Holly (that's the main Girl) was raised in Alaska. When Kendra starting talking smack about how gross elk meat must be, Holly quietly said that it's pretty good but she's been eating it her whole life. Then she said something about how they used to have to hunt and kill their own elks for food in Alaska, and Kendra looked like she was going to puke on the dinner table. Then the elk was served! Holly daintily dug into it and began contentedly chewing away, while Bridget shaved off a tiny sliver of elk meat, ate it, made a face and said it wasn't THAT bad. And Holly was still working away at her own elk meat, loving all of the fond memories if brought back to her of her childhood in Alaska. And any episode that ends with a Playboy girl, and the main girlfriend of Hugh Hefner arriving back at the mansion, telling the mansion chefs that she now has a major craving for elk is FABULOUS. Even some of the best comedy writers in the world wouldn't have been able to come up with that little gem. (Holly had another stellar line in the newest episode, which ended with a big Mansion Mardi Gras party. For Mardi Gras, Hef has a bunch of naked Playboy girls painted as if they have skimpy clothes on, and Holly designed a few new painted "outfits" and Hef actually chose one. The peacock-painted girl was a huge hit and Hef told Holly that she should sign her creation. So, Holly confessionalizes to the camera that she signed her name right on the girl's ass, and followed that up with a glorious, "Classy." You all should really be watching this show.) I've also watched the horrible "Search for the Next Pussycat Doll" thing. It's not even funny-bad (well, not anymore, it used to be hilariously bad, now it's just bad). The whole thing makes no sense to me. The only girls left are these midget teenagers, none of whom would fit in with the real Pussycat Dolls because most of them are fairly tall and OLD. At least, old when compared to teenagers. The show is crap and Robin Antin gives me the creeps. But I'll probably watch the re-run of it tomorrow just to see which midget teenager won. I hope it's the one who can't dance because that would be great. Since the opening credits include Robin screeching that "If you don't dance like this, then you're outta here!" Which is why I want the baby doll who can't dance to win because then there will be no question that Robin Antin is insane.

At least she's finally getting some sleep.

2007-04-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

(This entry ended up being written over the course of the past three days. So, besides being insanely long, it also has three distinct parts. Sorry about the long-arse entry but I really didn't want to mess around with cutting it up and turning it into three separate entries.)

Monday, April 9th

Devin and I were supposed to head down south again this weekend to celebrate Easter.

Except I finally managed to sleep for longer than four hours at a time. I crashed out Friday evening, fairly early. Devin attempted to wake me up Saturday morning to at least TALK about whether we were heading down south, or not, except I wasn't communicating. I remember him coming in much later (or, at least, it felt much later to my sleep addled senses), kissing me on the forehead, telling me that he's going to let me sleep some more because goddess knows, I must be TIRED, and that he was going to play disc golf.

I slept until the afternoon. Then crashed back into another deadening sleep right after dinner.

Managed to get up and go out to breakfast with my Aunt T. and my Dad yesterday morning. Dad celebrated his 65th birthday last week (or, maybe on Saturday, I'm absolutely horrible with birthdays) and, at breakfast, we all talked about going out to dinner.

Guess who slept through dinner? When I crawled back into bed at two o'clock in the afternoon yesterday, I knew something was going on because I was passing up the "America's Next Top Model" marathon on MTV, which is sad but I would happily watch it all weekend, to sleep.

Devin tried to wake me up at some point but I'm fairly certain that I hit him. Or, at least, attempted to hit him. He let me sleep some more, after that. At some point, he brought the phone into the room and said something along the lines of, "Your family is wondering what the hell is going on."

At least, I think that's how I ended up with the phone in the bed. It woke me up at around ten o'clock last night, and it was my Mom telling me that I'd hurt my Dad's feelings by missing dinner. Which I did feel fairly guilty about, except my little brother hadn't even bothered to see Dad over the weekend, or talk to him, at all (we're no longer religious enough for his new life as a Baptist, which is fine except I don't understand how our desire to not celebrate what is, essentially, a pagan holiday that was adapted into Christianity has anything to do with whether he acknowledges his father's 65th birthday, or not).

Although I got Mom feeling sorry for me when I reminded her that I'm going off the opiates and, until the weekend, hadn't managed to sleep for more than three or four hours at a time, so my body definitely needed some rest.

Then we talked about Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and how I'd finally found a few meetings in our town that aren't associated with a church, and she asked me if one of them was in the multipurpose building of our town's hospital, and I said yeah, there was, and how the hell did YOU know that, Mom?

I'd forgotten that Mom and Dad went to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings when I was a kid (even though Dad wasn't an Adult Child on a Alcoholic, and was there supporting Mom, who most definitely was an Adult Child of two Alcoholics--even though, oddly enough, my maternal grandfather died of COLON CANCER, not liver disease, even though his liver was definitely killing him, he just happened to get colon cancer before it finished him off--and boy, having such a close relative of mine die of colon cancer has always sent my doctors into a tizzy). She explained that, while she's definitely proud of the fact that I'm kicking opiates, that maybe Narcotics Anonymous isn't going to help me out, very much.

"It's full of weirdos, Katie."

"Well... yeah, Mom. Drug addicts usually aren't the most normal of people."

"I know that! I mean weird even for drug addicts! There was even this group that obviously was addict to Anonymous meetings, and the guys kept asking me out, and the girls kept asking your father out. I'm just saying... it might not be the best place for you."

"That was twenty years ago, Mom. Maybe it's different now."

Except I didn't really believe that because there isn't much evolving when it comes to drug addicts. In the sense that the addicts themselves haven't really changed at all over the years (especially running with the theory that once a drug addict, always a drug addict), it's only the treatments that have changed. I don't know about any of you, but I miss the time when those of us opiate addicts could get drinking passes, or whatever the hell they called them in the eighties, because being a drug addict in the eighties meant that you could still drink alcohol on occasion. Although I always wondered if that meant that the alcoholics could just try a little coke every once in a while.

"Besides, Narcotics Anonymous is for the, you know, REAL drug addicts, Katie. Not girls like you."

Erm... what? "Mom. Even just earlier this year, I would follow two Vicodins with two Percocets, and then when those wore off, bump it up to three Vicodins, and two more Percocets. I think that's called a drug addiction, Mom."

"Well, of course, but it's not like you were shooting up heroin."

"Only because I didn't NEED to shoot up heroin. I had a doctor who was writing me prescriptions for unlimited amounts of Vicodin and Percocet! Although I would never, ever, shoot up heroin."

"Exactly. Because you are so scared of needles." This is true. Did I tell you all that my doctor had to physically hold me down at my last colonoscopy because the anesthesiologist didn't get the needle in on the first try? In fact, she finally had to switch arms because she just couldn't get the vein in my left arm, and all I remember is sobbing like a baby, while Dr. Dhillon held me down and said, in his darkly accented voice, to not move my arms. Which is when the anesthesiologist piped up and said, "Oh, she's being VERY STILL." Which is also true. Even when I'm crying over the stupid needle, my arms are stiff as boards because I know what happens if I flinch, and it means more poking at me with a needle. At least this time around they didn't call me a baby and tell me to act my age. After I complained to the American Medical Association about their rudeness, and wrote them a letter telling them that I don't care if I'm screaming the roof down with my fear, you do not call your patients names, they finally learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

"Mom. Just because I never shot up heroin doesn't mean that I'm not an opiate addict."

"Well, I KNOW THAT, sweetie. Remember your Aunt Lucy? I know about drug addicts. It's just that I don't see how you'll get any help by being surrounded by people who probably DID shoot up heroin. You're just a pill popper. Those people are probably going to be a lot sicker than you are, Katie."

"Um. Isn't the point of Narcotics Anonymous the fact that you can't judge your addiction against anyone else's?"

"I know, I know. I'm just trying to warn you about the sort of people you might run into at the meetings."

Entry is now interrupted because I had actual work to do, so I drafted it away and never got back to working on it. Until today--Tuesday, April 10th

As much fun as dialogue between me and my Mom is, I'm killing that particular conversation. It never got more interesting, anyway, and it mostly illustrates that I am no longer hiding away my drug addiction.

Since I am now addicted to "Oprah" (something I will mention in an upcoming entry about shows I watch, books I read, and anything else that should cause me to be ashamed of my desire for bad pop culture), I got home last night and started watching the new episode.

"ADDICTION" blazes across the screen, helpfully pointing out to us viewers what the topic for the show is today. Oprah starts talking about these five people on her stage, and how they consented to have their lives filmed for a documentary about addiction. At this point, I'm expecting a reference to "Intervention" on A&E because that is one hell of a disturbing show, even though it is brilliant in the sense that it helps families pay for lengthy rehab treatment for their loved ones (the ones who actually 1) make it to rehab, and then 2) actually make it THROUGH rehab, which is not something most of the addicts featured on "Intervention" are capable of doing).

But no reference to "Intervention" is coming up, Oprah is referring to an HBO documentary film entitled "ADDICTION." (Upon hearing this, I immediately paused Oprah and started checking HBO for show times of this documentary, and it recorded at around 7:00 this morning, which I guess is a good time for cokeheads and tweakers because they never sleep.) Out of the thirty addicts featured in the documentary, she has chosen five to appear on her show.

The first guy, Rick, was a television reporter for "Inside Edition" during most of the nineties (and, I think, late eighties) but what nobody knew was that he was a crack/cocaine addict. Oprah explains that we're now going to watch pieces of Rick's story as recorded by "Addiction." Oprah warns us about graphic drug use. Which doesn't bother me, all that much, because Rick liked to smoke and snort his drugs, not shoot them up.

Lots of Rick smoking the crack. Then it cuts us back to the show, and Oprah prompts Rick into explaining about that one time he interviewed the FIRST President Bush (I seriously hate it when people refer to him as the "FIRST President Bush"), at a charity event to help people say no to drugs, except poor Rick had just smoked a ton of crack about an hour before the interview.

Obviously, now that Oprah has gotten him to admit to something that is horrendously humiliating, she moves on to the next addict. Crystal who is... yup, addicted to crystal. She and Oprah talk a bit about her addiction, how she first tried meth when she was 20, and promised herself that she would never do it again. Which gives Oprah the chance to interject that Crystal was lying to herself about crystal, so let's see some of her scenes from "Addiction." Again, we are warned that they contain graphic drug use.

Crystal suddenly appears on the big, Oprah show monitor-thing that looks bigger than a movie screen, and she's shooting up meth into her jugular vein.

Which damn near gave me a heart attack. I do not handle watching people shoot up very well, it makes me feel nauseated and dizzy. Especially people shooting drugs into their neck, which I didn't even know drug addicts were doing nowadays, and I've seen a lot of "Intervention" on A&E.

So, someone needs to explain to Oprah that there is a vast difference between the graphic drug use of a guy who smokes crack, and the graphic drug use of a girl who shoots up meth in her neck.

After lots of wonderful scenes full of the girl shooting meth into her neck (which must be far more disturbing to Oprah's audience since Crystal's neck on that giant screen would be about four feet long), Oprah asks her why the hell she was shooting up in her neck, and that Oprah has never even HEARD about junkies doing that, and that she's done a whole lot of junkie shows.

Crystal explains that, well, she started off with smoking it. Then that high wasn't good enough, so she went to snorting it, which wasn't much better than smoking it, so she started mainlining it into her arms. Which she loved because we all know that drugs are gorgeous things when done intravenously (except I let anesthesiologists do this for me) except then she blew out all of the major veins in her arm. Which is when she came up with the jugular vein idea because that was the next biggest vein in her body that she could think of (which, I guess, gets her some drug addict points for originality, even though any heroin junkie could have given her a huge list of veins to try before stabbing herself in the neck) and boy, was that one hell of a great high.

Crystal is wanting to talk about her recovery from meth but Oprah is still stuck on the neck thing. She explains to Crystal that she's heard mainlining any drug gives a really fast high, so what was Crystal's high like when she shot up in her neck? Even though Crystal pretty much already answered that question, and is obviously trying to hold herself together through all of this questioning, so major points to her for that, Crystal explains that shooting up in the arm is nice, and all, but it doesn't result in an instantaneous high, just a quick high. But shooting up in the jugular? She was high before she even took the needle out of her neck.

(Which makes me hope that no heroin junkies caught this particular Oprah show because they might start thinking that shooting up in their jugular vein is a fabulous idea, and why the hell hadn't they thought of that before?)

Since Oprah got all of her ghoulish questions answered, she moved on to the next addict. And I will stop giving you all a complete re-cap of the show because I really just wanted to talk about the girl who shot up meth in her neck. The other three addicts are: William, a crack/cocaine addict; Tom, an alcoholic for fifty years; and Cheryl, a cocaine addict.

Cheryl was definitely the most eloquent of all of the addicts, who basically summed up what every addict needs: Instead of asking us why we can't stop using drugs, ask us what you (our friends and family) can do to HELP US stop using drugs. That's a great lesson for anybody who has a friend, or family member, that is a drug addict.

The show also taught us that there are a lot of studies being done on the brain of an addict. Dr. Anna Rose Childress explains that they are now taking pictures of addict's brains as they play cues/triggers on a continuous loop for the addict's viewing pleasure. At first, I thought that these cues would just be a bunch of images of people doing drugs, of the drugs themselves, etc.

Since Oprah is also not getting the cues thing, she asks her production people to cue (ha!) up Dr. Childress' example of what they would play for a cocaine addict.

Turns out that the pictures of drugs, and drug use, last a total of 33 milliseconds (seriously) and they are interspersed between long periods of blackness. So, for us, it went something like: black screen, flash of coke vial, black screen, flash of bubbling spoon. Dr. Childress would play this cue reel for the addict (although the cue reel would be specific to that addict's drug of choice, since the aforementioned crackhead, William, participated in this study, Dr. Childress used his cue reel, and then showed us pictures of his brain).

That's when it got interesting. When William was shown pictures of things like cats, windows, and other random, normal things, his brain was not doing a whole lot. But when William watched the cue reel, even those 33 milliseconds of drug stuff got his brain completely fired up. Tons of bright redness in William's brain, which most of us know means that his brain was working over-time.

Which is how doctors are now learning that it's more than just environmental triggers that drive an addict deeper into their addiction, it's also their brain telling them that this drug is the most important thing in their life right now, and that they must get the drug. The brain studies also showed that, while one part of the brain is going crazy, sub-consciously telling the addict to go get more drugs, another part of the brain is not doing much of anything at all. Dr. Childress called this the "brakes" of the brain, and that the brakes in an addict's brain aren't working properly at all. These "brakes" are what give us the ability to use reason and logic in our everyday lives. That's why when you ask an addict why they can't just, you know, STOP TAKING THE DAMN DRUGS. The addict can now fire back and say, well, it's a brain thing. My brain isn't letting me take my foot off the accelerator (the part of the brain that fires up when an addict just thinks about getting high), and my brakes are completely gone.

So, now they're developing neurological meds to help addicts deal with their addiction. Although I was pleased when Dr. Childress made the point that this isn't a cure, just another form of treatment, and that addicts should, in no way, think that this gets them out of going to rehab, or Anonymous meetings. That every addict should use ALL of the tools available to them to help them deal with their addiction, and not just one or two of them.

See? The Oprah show can actually be completely interesting sometimes.

After watching Oprah, I saw that there was a "House" re-run on Fox. Woo! I love me some "House."

And it's the episode where Cuddy dares House that he can't go a week without Vicodin because, apparently, the world is conspiring to keep me thinking about my addiction every hour of every day.

Although only a few things from the "House" episode got me thinking about Vicodin. (Besides the fact that every time House fists another few pills of Vicodin, I instinctively reach for my Vicodin because House was my unwitting drug buddy. I'm so glad I had Oprah to tell me that this was one of my triggers because, you know, I might not have realized that since we drug addicts are considered to be morons.)

The thing is... House's Vicodin use is completely wonky. And I know from whence I speak. When Cuddy is chewing him out for how much Vicodin he takes, she says something along the lines of, "Did you just take more Vicodin? You're already taking 80 mg. a day!"

Just in case you all aren't Vicodin addicts like me, and have no idea what 80 mg. a day means: 80 mg's of Vicodin means 16 500's a day. Vicodin comes in two dosages--the 500 mg. pills, which is the most popular form of Vicodin because it is far easier to get than the other dose, which is 750 mg.

So where did I get the idea that House is taking at LEAST 16 of the 500 mg pills per day? Well, the 500's have 5 mg's of actual hydrocodone, which is the lovely opioid that makes Vicodin fun, and 500 mg's of acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol. That's what gives it the 5 mg/500 mg split on the prescription bottle. The 750 mg dosage of Vicodin works in the same way--it has 7.5 mg's of actual hydrocodone, and 750 mg's of acetaminophen (making it 7.5 mg/750 mg).

This is where I start to get a little angry at the way Fox portrays House's Vicodin addiction. Obviously, in order for House to be getting the 80 mg's of hydrocodone that Cuddy is insisting he takes on a daily basis, then he would need a hell of a bigger pill bottle than the little dinky one he is always using. Even if he only got a week's supply at a time, that's still 112 pills, and those things are BIG. For some perspective: I was allotted 3 of the 500 mg's of Vicodin on a daily basis, so I got 90 for the whole month, and those 90 pills filled up a very big pill bottle.

In all honesty, there is no way House could even fit his daily dosage of Vicodin into those tiny pill bottles. There's just no way. The little bottle would maybe (MAYBE) fit half of his daily dosage.

There are also a lot of stupid doctors where House works. When I started taking double my daily dose of Vicodin because my tolerance got so high that I had to double the dose just to get a meager high. I was switched onto Percocet (I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was twelve, just in case there is someone reading this who is wondering how the hell this girl got herself so many painkillers, and my knees hurt on a daily basis, and swell into agonizing balls of pain a couple of times a week). Percocet has oxycodone, instead of hydrocodone (don't ask me why one is more effective than the other, that's something for a chemist to explain), and is also cut with acetaminophen.

Which is why someone should have switched out House's 16 Vicodin-per-day habit into, maybe, an eight Percocet-per-day habit. Someone should also talk to him about adding tons of fiber to his diet, otherwise he will never poo again in his entire life because 16 Vicodins a day means no movement of the bowels. Although his freakishly gaunt appearance makes a bit of sense, now, because he probably loves Vicodin far more than he loves food, so he probably gave up on food a while ago.

(Which does make perfect junkie sense. When I was taking both the Vicodin and the Percocet on a daily basis, I really didn't care about food. At all. All I cared about was taking more pills, which hit you a lot faster if you take them on an empty stomach. Although that tends to make a person, even me and I'm really good with my opioids, a bit nauseated.)

Once again, coming back to this entry the next day--the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

I have got to stop writing these things while I'm at work.

Just finished watching the HBO Documentary "ADDICTION," and I am both frightened, and energized, about everything I learned. It's not like A&E's "Intervention" series at all. Instead of focusing on drug addicts hitting their "rock bottom" and following it up with an intervention, the small films that made up the "Addiction" documentary discuss what happens AFTER the intervention. Now that we've got the addict to admit that they have a problem, how do we go about treating addiction as a chronic, but manageable, disease?

While I'm glad that the medical community is finally learning enough about our brains on drugs that they are discovering ground-breaking new therapies, and educating the public about addiction as a chronic disease, I'm also very, very angry with myself. On top of everything else, I had to go and willingly give myself a NEW chronic disease.

Although I'm trying to get past that because... well, at least now I'm willing to admit that my opioid use was becoming a huge problem, and that I needed to stop using them. I actually wrote a letter to ALL of my doctors, explaining that I had realized that I have an addiction to opioids, and to NOT prescribe them to me no matter how much I beg, and cry about the pain. I did that over a month ago. Because eighteen years of dealing with a chronic disease has taught me how to manipulate doctors into giving me whatever the hell I want. Until the opioid addiction, being able to get what I needed from my doctors was simply a matter of me explaining to them what was going on with my body (whatever symptoms I was suffering from at the time) and the course of treatment that I thought would be the best way to go.

Which is probably why they also gave me the pain killers. They trusted me enough to let me run with my own treatment options and, thankfully, they still trust me when it comes to my Crohn's. Just not when it comes to pain, and my cons for using that pain to just get more drugs. I think the fact that I fessed up to the addiction is what kept my doctors on my side. If I had continued to con them for the drugs, and lie about how deeply I had sunk into them, I don't think any of my docs would ever have fully forgiven me for deceiving them, and abusing their trust.

It also sucked to learn that opiate addicts are the addicts with highest relapse rate because our withdrawal symptoms could go on for weeks, or months, or even years, the doctors in the film explained. It all comes back to our brains, and how we (opiate addicts, and not, necessarily, all addicts) have those opioid receptors in our brain and when we start taking a lot of external opioid drugs, we completely fuck up the natural opioid receptors in our brain. We basically flood our brains with far more opioids than it could ever produce naturally, and it we continue to do that over a period of time, we're basically re-wiring those receptors to get them accustomed to the onslaught of drugs. We actually trick our own brain into thinking that it needs all of those extra opioids to survive, which has a lot to do with why the withdrawals are so incredibly intense.

The good news was learning that the brain has an incredible capacity for healing itself, and that it is possible to completely reverse the damage done to it by drugs by simply remaining sober.

At least the withdrawal symptoms are lessening on a weekly basis. Even though it is still kicking my ass on some days. Or, rather, on all days, it's just no longer a 24-hour per day problem, and more a 10-hour per day problem. After spending the weekend mostly in bed, finally crashing out from the crushing insomnia that plagued me during the first week of sobriety, I'm back to not being able to get to sleep until the wee hours of the morning.

It's a bit crazy because I've slept through my alarm both yesterday, and today, so I was an hour late to work on both days, and I stumbled in like I had a nasty hangover. In fact, it FELT like I had a nasty hangover. My head ached, I couldn't form a coherent thought, and I was yawning like I hadn't gotten any sleep at all. I could tell that my father-in-law thought I was either hungover from drinking too much the night before (definitely not the case, since I haven't had a drink since last Thursday), or was heavily abusing drugs.

I don't particularly feel the need to explain to my in-laws that I'm actually trying to STOP abusing drugs, and that the opiate withdrawal looks a whole lot like someone who is actively abusing drugs. Since that would necessitate me having to tell them how many drugs I was taking, and they consider addiction to be a choice a person makes (and my mother-in-law is extremely judgmental about drug addiction, and pretty much puts it in the same category as homosexuality, and she firmly believes that these are bad choices made by bad people).

So, unless they ask me point-blank if I'm abusing drugs, I'll probably just continue letting them believe whatever they want to believe. At least for now. Right now I'm more concerned with actually getting through this addiction, and the withdrawals, because I don't really care what people think of me. I'll probably start caring at some point in the future but right now, it's the very last thing on my mind.

Because. Withdrawals. Are. Evil. I completely understand why opiate addicts have such a high relapse rate. We'll pretty much do anything, even if it means making another pact with the devil for more pills, just to make the withdrawals stop. And I know about methadone, and Revia, and the other pharmaceutical treatments for opiate withdrawals but I'm tired of taking more drugs to deal with the symptoms that arise from having taken other drugs. It's a cruel, vicious cycle that never ends.

It's like when my Crohn's flares up and I have to go back on oral steroids. I don't just take the Prednisone, I have to also take calcium supplements so that it won't completely gnaw away my bones, and a mood stabilizer (usually Elavil) because Predisone will make anyone crazy, and a whole lot of other drugs, depending on how much Prednisone I am prescribed. I can easily double my daily intake of pills when I'm on Prednisone because the side-effects are inconceivably intense.

Because once you get on that merry-go-round, it's damn near impossible to get off. Since none of us enjoy being in pain, or simply feeling uncomfortable in our own bodies, there is this crazy desire to just throw as many medications into our system as we possibly can to help us mask the pain, and discomfort. Which is how we trick ourselves into thinking that we're not drug abusers, we're drug USERS, and that drugs help us live better lives.

Of course, this is often true of chronic diseases/conditions (or infections, or cancer, and you get the idea) because, without my 6-MP (6-Mercaptopurine, also known as Purinethol, a drug used primarily to treat acute lymphatic leukemia), I would definitely not be in remission today.

But I'm actually using that drug to treat my disease. To keep me healthy. Whereas I was definitely abusing pain killers, even though I was legitimately in pain, because I had completely lost the ability to determine the intensity of the pain. I was treating a minor headache with the same amount of drugs that I used to treat my incredibly swollen, and bruised knees.

And then I started using the opiates just to keep me from going into withdrawals. I believe this is referred to as maintaining the addiction solely for the sake of the addiction. Which is when you know that things are really bad. When I started taking Vicodin first thing in the morning (or Percocet, if I felt that it was a particularly ugly morning), even before I had breakfast, I knew that I had crossed that invisible line between use, and abuse.

Even though it took me months before I actually confronted the problem, and started dealing with it. After my brief bout of sobriety last year, and then getting yelled at by my Internal Medicine doc because I could have freakin' killed myself from detoxing at home, and not in a hospital, we tried the taper-down method of getting me off the opiates. (Similar to using methadone for getting opiate addicts out of the clutches of the drug, except my doc and I figured that we should try having me take progressively smaller doses of Vicodin until I could safely stop using it altogether and not have my doc freak out over the possibility of me going into cardiac arrest from trying to get clean.)

Maybe it would have worked if I was doing addiction counseling on a weekly basis but the only thing tapering down did for me was extend my drug abuse. Doc and I started on this taper-down method MONTHS ago, and I quickly became content with the idea that hey, it was okay that I was still taking some opioids because I was just easing myself away from the addiction.

That was obviously a completely moronic method of treating opiate addiction, especially since I wasn't participating in any other addiction therapies--I wasn't in counseling, I wasn't going to meetings, I wasn't doing anything except taking a little less Vicodin than I was before. Although, according to the HBO "Addiction" site (which is highly informative and quite extensive), the taper-down method is a known method of treatment for opiate addicts, but I still think that it's useless without the addict going to counseling, and meetings, as they are tapering down off the drugs. Because, otherwise, you end up with someone like me who gets her last bottle of Vicodin on 3/5/2007, with it's 90 pills because one of the assistants in the doctor's office faxed the refill request to the pharmacy, not realizing that we were still on this taper-down method, so I should only have gotten 30 pills.

And since I'm a drug addict, it took me less than two weeks to polish off that bottle of Vicodin. Yes. I'm being completely honest. It took me about twelve days to go through 90 500mg Vicodin pills. Which was more than double my daily dose. I knew that it was going to be my last bottle, so I did what any addict would do, and just threw myself into taking them all day, every day, until they were gone.

Which was when my doc gave me a few day's worth of Tylenol-3 (that's the one with codeine) because I had, once again, done a stupid thing and was endangering my own recovery. The Tylenol-3 was certainly not strong enough to get me anywhere close to being high (only six Vicodins a day could manage that frightening feat) but it did help wean me off the opioids.

So, now I'm back to just getting through another day without taking any more opioids. (The "Addiction" documentary taught me that opiate is a term used to describe the drugs that are derived directly from opium plant--heroin, opium, and morphine--and that opioid is used to describe drugs that are synthetic--Vicodin, Percocet, Dilaudid, and others.) Which has been made even more difficult by the strange, central California weather that has been going on lately. Today it's cold, cloudy and generally gloomy. Under normal circumstances, these are my favorite days of the year because I don't really like the sun. On cloudy days, I happily open all of the blinds, curl up with a book in my comfy office chair, make myself some hot tea, and generally enjoy the hell out of the gloom.

Except my arthritis absolutely hates gloomy days. I walked one of the disc golf courses with Devin yesterday (I don't play it because I do not enjoy throwing discs, running off to retrieve a disc, and then starting again with the whole throwing thing) and I could not stop complaining about my damn knees. It was such a lovely evening, not too much sun and a really nice breeze, so I had no idea why my knees were acting like I was in the arctic, trying to climb an ice mountain.

Once I finally hobbled home (I left Devin at the course because I just couldn't walk anymore without collapsing into a whining ball of pain, so a friend drove him home) and took a look at my knees I was pretty distressed. The damn things were completely swollen, so I had to elevate them, ice them down, then do some simple stretching, and yet more elevating, even more icing them down, and then I wrapped a heating pad around them.

When I woke up this morning and saw the cloudy gloominess, it all made perfect sense. The change in atmospheric pressure had wrapped itself like a vice around my knees (and, to a lesser extent, the other major joints in my body).

Except today there is no Vicodin, or Percocet, to help me cope with the pain. Which is why I need to get myself to a damn Narcotics Anonymous meeting because a few more days of this crazy pain will probably crush my will, and desire, to stay away from the opioids. The most important thing that I have learned from "Intervention," and "Addiction," is that no drug addict can do this on their own. Because there will always be cloudy, gloomy days that wrap themselves around my body so tightly that all I can think about is getting some drugs, any drugs, just to make it all go away.

Being kicked by the addiction.

2007-04-04T23:19:00.000-07:00

It's been two weeks. I know that I'm going to make a horrible day counter because numbers jumble around in my mind.

I cannot understand why people talk about kicking their addictions. I'm not kicking anything right now. I'm getting kicked, repeatedly, in the head. At least, that's the one part of my body that has been in the most persistent, constant pain since I stopped taking opiates.

Never mind the fact that I haven't gotten a decent night's sleep since I stopped the Vicodin and Percocet. I can manage without sleep. I was an opener at Starbucks, for goddess' sake, for nearly three years. My work days began at 3:45 in the morning. Thursday nights were always the worst. I adore CSI (to the point where I am always considering, just in the back of my mind, that maybe it would be fun to take some criminology classes), and would stay up until ten watching it, even though my shift began at four am on Friday.

So, not sleeping because I'm no longer pounding my body with drugs doesn't particularly bother me. I have my computer, and wireless internet access. I have a wonderful library full of books about all sorts of things. Keeping myself occupied until I pass out in the wee hours of the morning isn't difficult.

It's the headache. Especially behind my left eye. The one that they took out of my skull and clamped a buckle around. That eye. It is throbbing, right now. Pulsating and grinding with pain that I haven't felt since I was recovering from eye surgery last year.

Although the strangest thing about kicking the opiate addiction is how tight, and itchy my skin feels. If you've ever taken opiates for any length of time, you know that, after a while (or after a particularly strong dose), your body begins to itch. When I was popping both the Vicodin and the Percocet on a daily basis, I was constantly having to monitor my nervous scratching. Otherwise I would scratch these huge red welts on my arms. I'd almost smash my nose in with my fist because it itched so damn much.

I honestly thought that all of the itching would just go away after I stopped taking the opiates. No one told me that it would only get WORSE. Which is especially harrowing because I still catch myself doing the junkie knock to my nose, as if hitting it really hard will make it stop itching, and without the opiates, doing that really, really hurts. I didn't even realize how much of a natural reflex it had become until I was about a week into this foray away from opiates, and could not understand why the hell my NOSE was hurting so much. I don't normally have sinus problems, and I've never done any drug that required passage through the nasal cavities.

Then I realized that I was still banging on my nose, even though I was off the drugs. In fact, since beginning this entry, I've already whacked my nose at least three times. Granted, the withdrawal seems more intense at night but still... that's a lot of nose whacking. No wonder my damn head hurts.

What the hell kind of weird junkie withdrawal is THAT? Banging your nose with your fist? For some reason, I can accept the fact that I would often cover my body in red welts from all of the scratching but admitting that I am punching my own face? That just seems sad.

And of course I am jittery as all hell. Yesterday Devin made some reference to my "foul temper" (which is certainly a fair statement, considering my Irish ancestry and my flaming red hair) and I went ballistic. Of course my temper is foul. I am a drug addict without her drugs.

The man is a saint for putting up with me. At least I've gotten to that comfort level with him, where I know that no matter how awful I am (whether it's my disease putting us through hell, or simply my crazy-ass temper raining down all over him), that he will never leave me.

That doesn't excuse my bad mood, though. I usually try to pull myself together and go back and apologize for screaming at him for no reason at all. Except for the conference over the weekend, we're spending most of our time sequestered in our rooms (which makes it sound like we both grounded each other, or something equally inane) because I am in no shape to be around people. Even dealing with the conference was a huge trial because people wanted to talk with me, get my story, hear about my journey with Crohn's Disease, and the part of me that is being consumed by the opiate withdrawal didn't want to talk to any of those people AT ALL. It took every ounce of will-power I have to not run from all of those chattering people and retreat back into the safety of the truck. I spent most of the conference with my head in my notebook, taking copious notes through-out the entire process because the paper didn't want do make small talk with me.

Have I mentioned the freakish withdrawal symptom that is leaving me freezing cold, with goosebumps covering my entire body, even on the nice, 80 degree days? I'll be sitting at my desk in the office, bundled up in a huge sweater, wearing my heavy corduroy pants, even thought the atomic clock telling me that it's currently 82 degrees inside the office.

And I know that it has to be due to the intense withdrawal. Because even the heavy sweater doesn't keep me warm. I'll just sit there shivering, running my hands up and down my arms, trying to push the goosebumps back down into my skin. My father-in-law mentioned something one day last week about how weird it was that I was bundled up in a perfectly warm room, and I certainly didn't have a good excuse to give him for it. Since I would rather not announce to my Mormon in-laws that I'm in the middle of getting my ass kicked by opiate withdrawals.

I probably told him something about how I seem to be losing quite a bit of weight, and maybe that's what is making me feel so cold. And that's actually a somewhat true statement. I have lost a surprising amount of weight over the last two weeks.

(Although I really shouldn't be surprised. Since I've also stopped smoking pot, even though my docs had finally gotten me a prescription for it, because I learned at the conference that even though some docs DO recommend pot for IBD patients because it gives us the munchies and gets us eating, they're beginning to learn that it's a treatment that works best on IBD people who have Ulcerative Colitis, not Crohn's Disease. It turns out that smoking anything is just a really, really bad idea for people with Crohn's. This information is so new that none of the docs at the conference could explain WHY smoking doesn't affect U.C. patients nearly as much as it does the Crohn's patients, they simply know that Crohn's patients who smoke tend to have shorter periods of remission, and get extremely intense flare-ups from it.)

So, goodbye maryjane. And hello loss of appetite. At least there are no withdrawal symptoms when it comes to pot. Unless you count the aforementioned loss of appetite.

Normally I wouldn't really care all that much about fluctuations with my weight. Having IBD for eighteen years has taught me complete detachment when it comes to how much I weigh. Since my weight is almost always dictated by my illness, and the only time I really cared about my weight was when I had to fit into that insanely small wedding dress.

Except now I'm just annoyed by it. My clothes have gone back to being too big for my bony frame, and the thought of going clothes shopping in the state I'm in seems a bit like getting bumped from purgatory and into hell.

Although those 34-DDD bras that I bought a few months ago are ALSO too big for me. I'm thinking that's my consolation prize for trying to deal with my addiction. Even though my eyeballs hurt, and I'm punching myself in the nose, and wandering around in sweaters on perfectly warm days, and not sleeping for more than five hours at a time, well, at least my boobs have gotten smaller.

Not to mention the fact that my liver is probably ecstatic because I'm no longer making it filter massive quantities of opiates on a daily basis.

And the whole getting clean, and healthy part. That's definitely a good reason for putting myself through all of this, especially without the luxury of rehab. (Is it wrong that rehab sounds a bit appealing to me? I'm a bit drawn to the idea of being in a place where my only job is to focus on making myself better. Especially if they let you take an entire suitcase full of books to rehab.)

At least it gets a little easier every day. Which is a horrible cliche but, like most cliches, it has elements of truth in it. Even though the headache, and the other aches and pains, don't noticeably improve on a day-to-day basis, that's not such a horrible thing because I'm changing on a day-to-day basis. I no longer wake up and obsess about the fact that I really, really want some Vicodin but dammit, I can't have any Vicodin, so I'm just going to stew about it all day and spew crankiness on anyone who comes too close to me.

Now I wake up resigned to the fact that I can never have any more opiates, and that I just need to get on with my life. I suppose that doesn't sound very inspiring but I'm trying to cut myself some slack on this because what really matters is not relapsing and begging my doctors for more opiates.

And hopefully I'll wake up some morning in the (hopefully near) future and won't even think about opiates at all.

Those crazy kids and their widgets.

2007-04-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

If you have noticed that completely static main page for my domain, you'll realize that it's been promising a new site since... oh... about five years ago. Now. I'm not going to get into WHY the new site never surfaced (the strange thing is that I really had almost finished it, and then my computer crashed and I lost a bunch of my work, and once I met my husband, I began to not care as much about sitting up in my room all day, and night, coding a website) because I would just be lying to you all, and I'm trying to stop being such a nasty liar. Except five years ago, when I was coding that site, Cascading StyleSheets were the newest and coolest thing around (they still are the coolest thing around, in case you didn't know) and I was able to code html in my sleep. (I realized the other day that my parents have been completely wrong about me. They always talk about how I took three years of French classes but never became close to fluent, and therefor I do not know any language other than English. NOT TRUE. I am fluent in Hyper Text Mark-up Language. SO THERE, MOM AND DAD.) Back then, blogs were called online journals, and most everyone who had one needed to know at least a moderate amount of html. I swear to you all on every book that I own, that I never thought I would be 26 years old, and complaining in my online journal about those damn crazy kids. Except there are some damn crazy kids running around the internet nowadays. And they want WIDGETS for everything. When I got back into journalling, I kept seeing that word all over the place, especially at Blogger. In fact, Blogger urged me to change from it's classic templates to it's new, improved widget layout. I had to look up "widget" in wikipedia to see what they hell they meant. OH. A widget is just a bit of code to put into your website pages. Now that I knew what Blogger was trying to push onto me, I decided what the hell, maybe these widget things will make my life easier and I won't have to do so much tedious coding. I switched over my blog into their new widget-based layout. In the past few years, I have only been gloriously, spectacularly wrong about a few things (letting my mother-in-law run my wedding day is pretty much the most major mistake I've made in recent history) and, boy, was I REALLY wrong about this new widget stuff. You see. I thought it would make my life easier. That I would be able to say, oh, well, I want a two column layout but within those two columns, I want some nice CSS boxes and I want to be able to easily manipulate all of the major elements in my page from one stylesheet. So, I started messing around with those wacky widgets. Blogger promised me that the only designing I had to do was to select some of these widgets and Blogger would do all of the work for me! I started randomly selecting widgets to go into my blog, just to see how easy it was going to make my life. Then I got really confused. If I pressed the "Image" widget, all Blogger did was give me some image code that I knew in my sleep (you know, like: [img src=url], except without the brackets, obviously). I couldn't believe that this was all the new, purportedly wonderful Blogger was going to do to make my life easier. So, I tried a few more widgets. Same thing. If I clicked "Make a link" (or something similar), it would just write a href= code for me, which is probably the one bit of html that I have never, ever forgotten because I code all of my links by hand using a href= This was the great new Blogger layout?! These WIDGETS? Blogger was turning into freakin' myspace. They weren't out to make my life easier at all, they were actually catering to the teenagers who don't want to learn any html but still have a website (or blog, whathaveyou). Because, seriously, have any of you spent any amount of time on myspace? It's a horrible, horrible place. Full of awful pages with embedded midi (except do people even USE midi, anymore? am I, once again, dating myself with an old skool web term?) files and those wretched backgrounds that render all of the text on the page completely unreadable. Not that I want to read what those teenagers are writing, anyway, but STILL. It's an affront to anyone who appreciates good, clean webdesigns. And now Blogger is in on the game. Except their widgets don't seem to be helping those crazy kids much because they keep flooding the Google/Blogger Discussion Forum (which is here, if you ever want to read the incoherent ramblings of people who don't know what they hell they are doing... well, to be fair, except for the 1% of us who actually post intelligent questions) with their inane complaints. For example. When re-designing this blog, I wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple. I had already gotten the posted comments to embed into each entry (that was the easy part--the hard part was formatting the comments so that they looked like they belonged on the page, and not like I just decided to tack them onto the end of an entry just for the hell of it), I had even figured out how to load the Blogger userpics for people who post in the journal through their Blogger account (even though, as of this very moment, the only Blogger user with a pic who posts a comment here is John Q. Casual, Hi John!). After embedding the comments, I wanted to somehow get that annoying "Post A Comment" pop-up to NOT force people to read the exact same comments all over again just to get to the comment form. I posted a question in the Google/Blogger Discussion Forum, asking if anyone knew how this could be done. Vin, of Beta Blogger For Dummies responded that there was no way to manipulate the comment form, and that many have tried before me and failed, so I should really just give up. Of course I didn't give up. I had to show all of those guys that it COULD be done. In fact, it was pretty easy to do, even though I couldn't have done it without the Web Developer add-on for Firefox (an add-on that I completely recommend to anyone who is coding by hand). Which is how I learned that the Google/Blogger forums are not meant for people like me. They are meant for the people who post things like, "Blogger took away my comment link! What happened to my comment link?!" (That was an actual post, in case you think I'm just making all of this up as I go along.) Since I had learned my lesson from posting my own question and not getting a single useful response, I began to take pity on these poor souls, and tried to help them out. Like the girl who claimed that Blogger just took away her "Post A Comment" link. Of course Blogger didn't "take away" anything from her blog. Blogger can't even DO that because, in order for them to be able to do that, they would have to log into your Blogger account, go to your blog template (or "layout," if you're a widgeter) and physically remove the commenting code from your template. Which, OF COURSE, is not something Blogger can actually do. The most they can do is disable your blog for breaking the Blogger TOS. So, in the interest of helping someone else because I was still smarting from being told that mine was a useless question, I checked out the source of that girl's blog. Just to see what was going on. And oh, dear lord. If you ever want to make yourself crazy, spend a few hours in that help forum and check out the source code for some of the blogs. Because the source code will make no sense. After realizing that the missing-comments girl had obviously done something wacky with her template because she had a span class (from her stylesheet, in case you all are not fluent in CSS) for her comments but no Blogger code for posting comments. None. And there is quite a bit of Blogger-specific code (called "tags" in classic Blogger and, obviously, "widgets" in the new Blogger) that you must include in your template if you want to enable commenting in your blog. The other hilarious (to me) thing was that she had also, very obviously, messed her stylesheet up because the span class that she was using for formatting her comments didn't even exist in her stylesheet. This is what happens when people use pre-made Blogger templates and try to mess around with them, except they don't know what the hell they are doing, so they end up doing something like removing the Blogger "Create a Comment" tags without even realizing it. And then, when I tried to explain to the girl that you have to put the Blogger comment tags INTO YOUR TEMPLATE in order to enable commenting, she responded that I didn't know what I was talking about, and that Blogger had stolen her comment link and, not to worry, she had already written to them about it and she was sure they would be restoring her link very soon. See, Blogger? This is what your crazy widgets hath wrought. People who don't even know when they make a mistake, and then blame YOU, Blogger, for their mistake. At least I blame you for things that you are actually guilty of (like that annoying "Post a Comment" pop-up, and using the meta tags to embed your OWN stylesheets into every single Blogger blog, which over-ride my remote-hosted stylesheet, forcing me to write my own meta tags even though I don't understand why you would do that to me, Blogger, why would you use meta tags for your own, nefarious purposes?). I promise that the seemingly never-ending entry will actually end. At some point. Hopefully soon. Since Devin and I were stuck together in a car for a good seven hours this weekend, I relayed to him all of my Blogger woes. Complaining about how difficult Blogger makes life for those of us who just want to write our own code, and use our own stylesheets. Then I bragged a little bit about being the only person who has figured out how to manipulate the "Post A Comment" link to jump straight to the comment form, effectively by-passing all of the posted comments. And I might have done a bit of complaining about that Beta Blogger For Dummies site because, while it might have some useful information on it, the design is so wacky that trying to find an answer for whatever question you may have is pretty darn difficult. (I also might have editorialized a bit about how ugly I think the site is, and that a help site should be beautiful, and simple, otherwise some people might not take the advice held within very seriously because the site is so poorly designed.) Which is when Devin told me that he was sick of hearing about Blogger, and that maybe I should just make a section in my blog for Blogger griping, and use that section to educate people about how to properly manipulate your template, and stylesheet, and that you CAN make your blog look pretty, and simple, and have it do everything you want it to do (well, ALMOST everything, since there is really no way to get around the Blogger post-a-comment form--you cannot embed it into your blogs like the blogs on Wordpress, or Typepad). Except, sadly, my foray into the Google/Blogger forums has taught me that people really don't want to LEARN how to do all of this great, and nifty-keeno html and CSS stuff, they just want a bunch of widgets to do it all for them. And thus ends my rant about those crazy kids and their widgets. (P.S. After digging around the Google/Blogger Forums all morning, I have realized that about one third of the questions that get posted there are actually intelligent, genuine pleas for help. Which is why I'm so happy that I'm able to start helping some of these people. It feels good to actually use all of my html, CSS, and Blogger knowledge for something more than just making myself a bunch of pretty blogs. Although I'm steering clear of those damn crazy kids, mainly because I don't know how to help them with their widget questions, anyway, since I'm not using the Widget Blogger. What's even more fun is that I'm actually finding new blogs that are well-written, and interesting, so I should probably cut the Google/Blogger Forums a bit more slack. They are definitely not all bad.)