There Will Be Blood

It’s one of those seasons where there is so much to do and little to write.  My business is going well, so well that my husband had a little chat with me re: the amount of time I am putting in to it.  I can understand that, some what, but I don’t feel guilty.  If he wants to play with me then he can’t watch Ice Station Zebra and Dangerous Catch all evening long. 

I am having trouble with my etsy purchase, mostly because the guy running it takes 3-4 days to return emails, or he doesn’t return them at all.  Oh, and when my logo/return address label/web address stamps came (it took a month to get here) one of them was for Karibou Kindness, an etsy store – not the stamp we ordered at all.  (As if you didn’t figure that one out yourself).  I had to go mail some cards anyway, so I mailed the rubber stamp to the folks in Provo.  The vendor had the nerve to send me a letter along with the stamp saying if we had any opinion, different than a five star rating, to be in touch and they will fix it.  This is what I want to do:

Tell them I require the www.ccc-cards.com stamp as proofed before

In addition I want a stamp with my name, Molly Malakoa, and phone number so I can stamp it on cards and give it to people instead of scribbling out my phone number on a small lined piece of paper.

come to think of that, maybe it’s not necessary.  I can probably make the business cards with the stamps due me.  One with the web address, one with the address and a hand written phone number.  I can even    wait until we’re about to leave and then write my phone number on the card to make them feel special.  I can write the website as well, which I think is a safer way to be in business.  I don’t know why I am being so careful about that.  I’ve had panic attacks lately – I nip them at the bud with my Ativan, but the fear remains.  

I thought I was going to die if I didn’t buy a muti-box of glitter.  It was large and beautiful.  I left the store but I had to come back.  It’s safely in my drawer right now.  Don’t try to take it, and you can’t borrow any.  Go ahead and try.  There will be blood.

 

You don’t have to say you love me

I am so crazy tired I can hardly believe it.

Lovin’ the Life

I am almost legally a small business owner.  I just need to finish up the expensive notices and fees and all sorts of b.s. that I didn’t realize  I had to do.  I see why people say you should have X amount of money saved before you dive into it.  Well, I didn’t.  I’m in the middle of this.

Another expense will be clothes.  I do have clothes, praise be to the Lord, that because I’ve lost 30+ pounds.  I had to wear a dress to drop off cards and am wearing slacks with a chartreuse shirt because I have to deal with some government officials today.  I haven’t had to dress up for work since the 20th century.  Most of the time I hang in lounge pants, though.  Who wants to get glitter on your best rags?

Pay Pal surprised me, too.  I have to pay $.30 a transaction plus 3%.  It takes four days for money to transfer from that account to my business account.  Because of this waiting period, I have to make two trips down-town because I won’t have access to that cash until next week.  I’m already eleven days over due when it comes to the fictitious name filing.

I can be a jump in with both feet kind of person.  I also can be studious and measured.  In this endeavor I am more the first rather than the last.

I’ll keep you up to date.

 

The Overweight Housewife

9 days…. after setting a goal of writing every day.

I went to the grocery store today. I’m usually friendly, let the person with less groceries in his cart go ahead. The grocery store line is not so interesting. I haven’t felt good – my insides are turning themselves inside out and I ate about 1/2 of a bag of Cheetos so that grease was lubricating a pipe where my whole grains, strawberries and freshly pressed pineapple juice could block up and pass through. Disgusting, so what?

Anyway there is a point to this post. Waiting in line I decided to stand behind the groceries. The man behind me, dressed in a burgundy pressed dress shirt and shiny black shoes, was getting off work and getting something for his dinner. I thought to myself, He thinks he’s getting extra points in good citizenship land if he gives the overweight housewife instructions on how to check out in a grocery store she has been in a thousand times.

I felt pretty bad about myself. Then I remembered -

I’m not overweight anymore. So what if I was? I’d still deserve some help – even if I looked Valliumed-out. And what if I was “just” a housewife. It’s something an innumerably number of families work thier bottoms off to have – it’s called a “full-time mom” these days anyway. And I’m not “just” a housewife. I’m an artist who regularly sells her work and I’m a writer.

But if I were just a “full-time mom” that would be okay, too. I respect and love many “full-time moms”. I don’t know why I think it’s beneath me.

Moving On

I’m in the middle of card making, but need a little break and have been telling myself I would blog every day, so here I am.

I am really hungry. When I get that way, I eat chocolate for lunch. I don’t take the time to really prepare a meal; it never occurs to me. My husband often leaves out leftovers for me, or in today’s version a can of tomatoes and a bag of whole wheat penne pasta. I’m not in that mode right now. Hopefully I will kick my butt enough to throw some tuna together. I may not.

I thought if we moved somewhere, bought a house and stayed there that friendships would be easier. So far, not so. I have many devoted and even some super devoted friends here. Problem is that they don’t stay put the way I assumed everyone but me stayed put. Small had a great friend in pre-school and she moved an hour + away. She had a little crush on a boy that moved away, and her classmate that lives across the street (the smartest girl in the class I’m told) may be moving this summer. My favorite of her friends is moving to Texas. This will not do, but it does. People come and go.

Our next door neighbor has a huge, wonderful family and a son the same age as my daughter. Her high school aged son is lovestruck and is longing to marry his girlfriend, Her husband is big like a panda bear. They are from Central America and can speak English but most often speak Spanglish. (Strangely enough the Spanglish and the Spanish are equally as difficult). I love going over there and we’re welcome anytime. We will also be welcome in Texas six weeks from now, because that is where they are moving.

I will probably cry and give her lots of kisses and hugs when she leaves. She is so smart and so generous and laughs at my stories. (See, her generosity shines when she laughs at my stories). I have decided that I do not want them to forget about us, so we’re going to leave them with birthday cards for a year for all of them. I’m tossing in a wedding card, too, just to twist her tail.

If we had to move it would be to a smaller house and I’m pretty sure it would be somewhere here. I don’t regret our choice. I love the Bay Area and miss it very much sometimes, but I feel like I’m better suited here. My parents live in Fresno and were so disappointed that we didn’t move there, but I just couldn’t do it. I don’t mind the heat – it’s that I can’t relax there. I feel like I’m on edge, waiting for the world to blow up. I fear I’ll run in to an old flame or friend – I’m afraid of my mom’s sister and don’t know quite how to relate to my cousins, who are much younger than me. There are some people I’d love to see again, but there are more that I don’t want to see. When I was fat, I didn’t want people to see me that way. (Ridiculous, but the only place I felt huge and floppy that was in Fresno, or at one of my husband’s workout soirees.) There is too much Malakoa history and I can only take it in small doses. Of course, my daughter will have a ton of history here, but I think she will have to be aware that she needs to care better for people, to set stronger boundaries and I think she is better at living and resting that I was at her age.

I found the solution

It’s April. I started dieting December of 2010. I have lost about 33 pounds. If I lose four more I will qualify for Lifetime Membership, which means I met a goal weight and don’t have to pay $40 a month anymore. I’ve talked about this before, but I have quite a new new readers, so I’ll tell it again.

At 207 pounds I thought I was probably about fifteen/twenty pounds over weight. I took funny pictures of myself looking sad eyed at the camera. I was pretty fat, but not all that fat, I thought.

I lost fifteen pounds and I was excited! That calls for New Pictures! Imagine, to my astonishment, I was not only still fat, I was still very fat. The weight began to creep off and I did (most) everything right. I tracked my meals on eTools program, exercised some, and showed up to meetings. (As of press I have missed two meetings in almost 2 1/2 years.) I got down to 173. And it stayed there. Every week I was either up a pound, stayed the same, or down .2. This has gone on for months now and I’m tired of it. I know how I lose weight: Follow the Weight Watcher’s Program. I will do that, guzzle water, counting points of everything I eat and exercise.

But wait, there is more. It’s warm out and I really wanted a cold drink, like a freddo from Pete’s. I decided to save a dollar and go to McDonalds. Shamrock Shakes are here for just a little while, and I have good memories of a friend who has fallen by the wayside, and Shamrock Shakes. While I was there, I’d get a “Mini Meal” A hamburger, french friends and Diet Coke. (For the record, Diet Coke and mood disorders usually don’t mix. I popped an Ativan just to get through it.) They did not have Shamrock Shakes.

Bait your breath no longer: I managed to find another milk shake. It was good – I sucked it down. It had 2/3 of my Weight Watcher Points Plus for that day and I am pretty sure the hamburger and french fries knocked the rest of them out of the park.

Why would I do such a thing? I am so close to my goal and, when I am asked if I’d like fries with that, my answer is, low and breathy, “yes, oh yes.”

Here some of the reasons I might do such a thing:

I prefer being fat – As T so elegantly put it I want to hide under a huge mound of fat.

I don’t want to reach my goal. I’d rather have the life of gobbling whatever it is that I want, anywhere or time than I want than that of health and wellness.

I hate myself and am going to let my body know it through a steady diet of junk.

I’m afraid of being thin or attractive.

I don’t want to succeed at this or anything else. Keep me plain, chubby, unaccomplished. It’s easier this way. Except for it’s not easier. I could have popped in to Trader Joe’s and got any of their deli lunches. It would have taken about the same time as it did for me to go through two drive-thru menus. Being destructive is a chore with physics on its side. Being constructive needs creativity and planning. I am creative. Sometimes it is difficult to put this creativity in motion. It’s like words that catch my ear and sound beautiful. It’s like a just right jar of red paint – on clearance. Maybe if I saw my body as an act of art I would take better care of it.

I want a tattoo that says, “TOSKA” except for in Cyrillic. I won’t get one. He says they are too expensive and that it would be even more expensive when I decided I didn’t want it anymore. He won’t get one either.

“Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

Prescription pain killers

If I were trying to be cool, I would wake up every day the same way I woke up today: in a cold sweat. I thought it was Thursday. I leapt up and ran down stairs looking for a calendar to confirm the disaster. Not only was I unprepared for the rest of the week, but I had missed marriage counseling. I mean, we missed marriage counseling. I hate missing things. I hate forgetting things. I have been doing better, but I still forget about appointments, assignments.

It is Sunday, 5:15 am, and I’ve been up an hour.

The last important thing I forgot was Small’s family tree assignment. We threw it together last minute, and it was beautiful, but it didn’t have a lot of the things it should have had, and would have if I looked at the assignment sheet. I didn’t and I still feel terrible.

But back to me. Two nights in a row I took Xanax to sleep. Last night I lay awake for an hour. I am not familiar with insomnia so it was frustrating and strange. I finally got up and took a Flexerill. It took about a half hour to put myself down.

Tomorrow I will not take anything to sleep. (Who died of an over-dose, or misuse of prescription medication in the last couple of years?) “…commonly abused prescription drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax, Soma and the newly popular Fentanyl, which has 100 times the pain killing abilities of morphine, cause more deaths than cocaine and heroin combined.” (Emphasis mine) http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/18/surge-in-prescription-drug-overdoses-causes-drug-induced-deaths-to-top-motor-vehicle-fatalities/) Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Brittnay Murphy, all had high levels of legal, prescription drugs in their systems when they died.

I didn’t know Sara Teasdale died by suicide. Have been convicted I want to do more for the cause – considering the Out of the Darkness Overnight. More about that here http://theovernight.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donordrive.eventDetails&eventID=501

No more for now. Don’t want to think about it.

Living your life as art today

Movies and New Generation dolls are Small’s choice of self-expression. She makes movies with her pink Hello Kitty camera and I post them on youtube. Today, in humble observance of Marcel Nunis’ Live your life as Art Day, we went to the park and recorded some takes. There were two little boys there, discussing whether or not their guardians could speak English. The mother of one could. The grandfather could not.

We decided we were done filming for the day and Small, now seven, walked up the steps to go down the slide. One of the little boys asked her in all seriousness, “Will you marry me?”

Tell him no, I whispered to my daughter. “No.” She said.

Then he had a few questions and words of advice. “Is that a doll or is that a baby?” “She should be wearing shoes. It is cold out here.”

“I will put them on her when I find them,” she replied.

After a while I told her it was time to go. She headed back and the little boy ran up to me and asked, “Can I have a date with her?”

I said no, she was too young for that. To tell you the truth, though, I disagree that she is too young. Being twenty-five or forty-five does not make you a more reliable or truer lover than a seven year old. Maybe we will see that little boy again soon. Maybe it will be at the altar while she walks down the aisle. Grandpa may speak perfect English by that time. I have no way of knowing what will happen to him. There are men who ask every woman they date to marry them. Maybe he will become one of those guys. Or maybe my daughter really is special in his heart and he will never forget her.

My hobby

I knew a woman who had TMJ, severe back pain and fibromyalgia. She also suffered from secondary infertility. I felt pity on her. She asked me once to accompany her on an appointment at University of San Francisco. It was about a thirty minute drive, a toll bridge and parking is a huge mess, but we went and waited. When we finally saw the doctor, she took off her shoes and pulled off her socks. She showed the doctor her ankles. One was slightly more swollen than the other. She was in no pain, not even that nameless feeling you get when things just aren’t right. Nothing.

The podiatrist did notice that she had a corn and that she had the choice of whether she wanted to remove it or to hang tight. Of course she signed up for the surgery – her hand almost quivering with excitement. She thought her intuition and God drew her to that place and that it was just wonderful that she had her convictions verified.

I could not believe she went to that effort to fix something that wasn’t broken. The amount of time and money we spent to get there was astounding.

Her hobby was going to the doctor.

I am afraid I have become like her.

Today is Friday. I started the day at the physical therapist, where Megan, Ph.D and I worked on my knee. The knee bothers me more than hurts me. There are a few other things she is working on – including my balance caused by those tumors in my foot and strength in the hips. Thank you, Dr. Megan.

Monday is the day I see my psychiatrist. She adjusts my psychiatric medication and helps with my regime – she loves yoga and likes meditation. If you have religious objections to them that you would like to see addressed, please comment and I can tell you why I think that is cool for me, or any other Christian, to practice them.

Tuesday is Weight Watchers. No doctors there. But I quit eating milk and my face has cleared up. Wonder if all along a milk allergy caused the mess that was my skin. I saw a dermatologist and he gave me two tubes of goo for my face.

Wednesday we visited the marriage counselor, LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) with a Ph.D in Psychology. She is very small and I recognized her because her office is in the same building as my beloved Dr. G (He moved to San Diego.)

Thursday I went to my talk-therapy therapist. The psychologist is arrestingly smart. She earned her Ph.D from University of North Dakota. I talked about my foot problems and how the doctor (A podiatry degree is separate from a MD – but still a doctor.) told me there was nothing he could do. I reluctantly agreed to get a second opinion. But are there enough days in a week to accommodate another doctor?

It’s not a hobby. It’s just what my life is right now, I keep telling myself. It’s not forever, but maybe it’s not. When I was young the family doctor didn’t know my brother had a sister. He managed to get every single childhood illness that is not vaccinated against and some that were. I didn’t. I never broke a bone or needed anti-biotics. Now, I am quite sure he hasn’t been to the doctor for years, while I haven’t been to the doctor in hours. It’s not a contest and being free of bodily disease is not a moral issue. I do my best not to be sick: I wash my hands and brush my teeth and try not to be overweight. Even if I do those things I will always be sick – I will always a close, personal relationship with my pharmacist and the pharmacist techs. (Ah! The pharmacist is a doctor, too!)

Edited to add: I didn’t mention the teeth doctors: Dentist, endodontist and orthodontist.

I’ve Got a Rock

I’ve got a rock in my belly in the form of a Devil’s Food Glazed Doughnut. Why did I do it? I do not know. But it’s too late to undo.

I spent the morning with Dr. RH, PhD. We discussed important things and not so much important things. First of all, she wanted to know about Marriage Counseling by Dr. PP, PhD. I told her it felt productive. I asked some questions about the way the brain is made, and did she think it was possible bipolar was caused by brain damage found in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. She said probably not and that we will never know. If there is a problem with the brain, it is probably caused my the neuro-transmitters faulty firing.

She asked about my goals in our one-on-one therapy and she gave me a Career Assessment Inventory. I’m going to bring it back and she’ll send it to the company so they can process it. I’m also to organize my business paperwork and bring it so she can see it.

Personal goals in therapy and relationships and life:
Think before I speak and speak kindly
Take care of my body with exercise, yoga and thoughtful eating
Support and love and care for my family – help them work towards making all their dreams come true.
Find meaningful, productive work and do it diligently- consider whether the book will qualify and if so, when?
Be able to follow Jesus by following principles he put in to place.
Organize tangible things in such a way I can find them and use them later.
Make beautiful things that people are happy to see.

More later.