Crisis mode- Hooray!! (not sarcasm)

ok, so i'm feeling slightly less dramatic. if i look too closely at my life, it still seems pretty depressing, yeah... endlessly so- BUT i'm trying not to think about it. also, i caved and had lots of milk, and then spent the last week trying to kick it again. so my crazed junkie withdrawal symptoms probably haven't been too helpful. plus i'm off the melatonin.... hmmm. gotta remember to take that tonight.

so, ironically, i have been wishing for a crisis.

seriously.

(now, one might think i am IN a crisis mode, what with all my whining and black depression. not so. this is just the tedium of everyday.)

a nice little earthquake or something. someone should die, start gushing blood, lose a limb or two. that would be awesome... why? because!!! i totally rock in an actual crisis.

here's my theory- so, pretty much all the time, my body FEELS like there is a crisis. fight or flight, that kind of thing. my sensory crap is constantly freaking out. i'm tense, poised to spring, ready to kill the bad guy... except of course, there never is a bad guy. i'm always "overreacting." the noise that just made me jump was NOT a gunshot or even anything remotely threatening... but my heart is pounding, i am SURE there is DANGERDANGERDANGER!!!

are you imagining this?

so, your body is telling you DANGERDANGER!!! but since you are unfortunately not a complete idiot-- your more logical brain can see there is nothing wrong. it tries to assure you that you are freaking out over nothing, just the phone ringing, the cat shifting it's weight. the UPS man has left several packages without mishap- it is very unlikely he will suddenly decide to break in the house and stab you, so it seems a little silly to hide under the bed when he knocks on the door...

but you do. you hide. and you coil your fists.

and the anger is just so huge after awhile, all that coiled adrenaline... wanting something to hit, to fight. but there is only you. stupid, stupid you, freaking out over nothing.

so most of the time, you are the object of all that anger, because it has to go somewhere. and your body's stupidity in creating it in the first place makes it easy to hate yourself for being such a pointless, illogical creature. you and whoever is unlucky or crazy enough to stay in your path.

but here is the wonderful thing about crises... there is something to DO.

instead of a spinning, helpless, pointless-- DANGERDANGER!!! with no one to kill, attack, fight to the death, spinning, spinning, no where to go, turning back in on myself, self-destruction, circling, circling.... there is a beautiful clarity. there is PLAN, KNOW, DIRECTION, GO GO GO

green means go.

i love green.

garret woke me up out of a dead sleep a few weeks ago, and said, "i need you to drive me to the hospital." it was terrific. i usually throw a fit if someone tries to wake me up, takes me a long time, i get tangled in dreams, sure that waking up means death to me. i also have never driven the huge van he has because it is big and scary and i hadn't driven at all in about a year, and of course i hate people and doctors, so there were several "small" things i would have been angry and stressed about under other circumstances. but he looked really bad and i didn't know what was wrong, so i blissfully thought there was a chance he was going to die, and i was able to function perfectly. (btw, he's fine now. had surgery that day and was home later.)

i remember zac as a baby in his car seat, laughing and laughing over a shel silverstein poem i had just told him--

when the light is green you go, when the light is red you stop, but what do you do when the light turns blue, with orange and lavender spots?

he kept doing a big exaggerated shrug as he asked orange and lavender spots??? and then bursting into laughter.

what do i do?

shrug. i dream of hurricanes. i dream of florida. i dream of green lights.

green means GO!

A picture of a picture...

Today is pictures.

Ick sent me a picture of a pacing tiger in a cage... and I thought-- wow. that is a great picture of him.

Which got me thinking about photos and images. Because Ick is a person who has to live in a house, not a corporeal tiger.

And i thought about photos of me. i have noticed that most people don't like photos of themselves. i don't either. But i don't like certain photos, because, i am not IN them.

Photos in which i look nice/presentable/have makeup on-- these are "good" pictures according to my family/friends. However, i best like ones that i feel capture me or a mood- which are usually the pictures that they label odd, depressing, goofy, or strange.







For example, this is not a "good" picture of me. No makeup or smile, you can't even see my face, just my poor taste in pajama bottoms...

but my brain yells, "THERE'S AMANDA!" to me when i look at this one-- evokes more recognition than a "good" picture.


i am in the left ankle, in the angry-fisting-toes...

when i am "hiding" is when you can see me best.

Gluten. and Milk-Poetry

I do not fully understand the whole gluten/autism thing. They guess that in some people, gluten makes opioid peptides, and this is the Wiki explanation for opioid peptides:

Opioid Peptides are short sequences of amino acids which mimic the effect of opiates in the brain. Opioid peptides may be produced by the body itself, for example endorphins, or be absorbed from partially digested food (casomorphins, exorphins and rubiscolins). The effect of these peptides vary, but they all resemble opiates. The opioid food peptides have lengths of typically 4-8 amino acids. The body's own opioids are generally much longer.
Brain opioid peptide systems are known to play an important role in motivation, emotion, attachment behaviour, the response to stress and pain, and the control of food intake.

My motivation, emotion, and stress/pain response is wacky. My sleep patterns are screwy too, and i read this other blog where the girl said her sleep was also all tied into her gluten thing.

bread is nice, but it's just food-- i don't feel particularly attached to it. MILK, however, is a very different thing. i need milk. i love milk. when i am mad, i want milk to drink to calm down and i hum when i drink it. if there is no milk at 3am, this is an emergency-- it is not a problem that can wait until morning-- i need to be taken to the store at 3am.

i had a awful period of a few months where milk tasted sour to me. this was very bad, as i still CRAVED it, but then i'd drink it and it just didn't taste right, so i would just think about it all the time and be depressed about it. (i was taking medication at the time, which may or may not have been the reason for the milk tasting bad. haven't taken any kind of medication besides aspirin/Tylenol for a few years now.)

it occurred to me that perhaps this it a rather dramatic way to feel about milk... and that most people are not inclined to dedicate sonnets to it, or think about it quite so much...

i have eaten low-carb for periods of time in the past, but i just can't seem to do without milk. if i have one little taste, i need MORE, so it's an all or nothing kind of thing. i have not had any milk today... so this is day one of going cold-turkey. i'm trying to write this down for the record...

i wonder if this means i am more susceptible to opiate addiction? maybe some morphine could get me off the milk ;p

Sage F ight Club Escape Artist

in the two places at once. tyler isn't here. tyler went away. tyler's gone. but in disassociated-manda-land, ALL the magic is in the breakdown, baby.

not a genius, just a genie-- poof i'm gone.

Sage Francis. A healthy distrust of sea lions...

i don't have a very large music repertoire. when i like something, i listen to it for months sometimes... so the same few songs can keep me interested for years.

today is sage francis on repeat.

mental-music-video, over and over... that haunting melody of sea-lion, that so captures that trudging numbness i hear all the time, the what? huh? why-should-singer-care part that i just want to lie down and drown in, that takes so much effort to pull away from.

building the same sand-castle over and over. watching it melt into the sea over and over. firing into the sand, nothing tangible to shoot down...

so many times i have heard it... and the girl's voice at the beginning still startles me sometimes, it sounds to me so like my own, i'm always disconcerted. how did i get into the song? wait. where am i? who is where and which is real...

my wooden arms are too tired to pull off the armor. too tired to remember why i should care. but Being only among songs is not where i want to BE, only where i am.

Another shower

Maybe the emotion is leaking from my head and affecting the physical world. I was just in the shower, thinking, and the shower-head kind of exploded and gushed sideways and loud. The startle of it almost made me cry. But I didn't. But almost. And then when i picked up the shampoo, tried to pour it into my hand, i almost missed because my hand was shaking so. But i didn't miss. But almost. Sometimes i think i am all calmed down, and then i will notice how i can barely hold a towel, how i don't feel the weak and shaky until i see the towel shake.

i am racing and racing, my thoughts are pacing. i am egg. i am fragile. i am so full of thoughts and talking. Poor little caged thoughts.

i spoke to someone yesterday. they said-- i am a quiet person.
and i said-- why?

because i really wanted to know. because i wanted there to be a REASON.
but all they said back was-- because i just am.

which was not a very exciting or dramatic response. and i tried to pretend a bit, that there might be more to it, because of course, if you are quiet, and then you give a long-winded explanation as to why that is so, well, that is not very quiet. but i do not think they said "because i just am" to be ironic or funny, i think that was just the end of the story. which was disappointing.

all the real-life people i know are still imaginary in every other sense.

who are you?