It's frightening how calmly she can talk about these things...

I got home from work today to find Candy taking a nap. I can't remember how the typical "how was your day?" conversation went into a discussion about our relationship, but it was kinda overdue.

I expressed with her what has been bugging me about the diagnosis and what's been bumming me out over the past few days. She said that inevitably that me wanting kids would become an issue one day, and that she would then tell me to go find someone else. Long story short, I got offered a get-out-of-jail-free card. I told her flat out that I love her and I'm not gonna let this be a catalyst for a break-up.

As much as I hated to talk about a hypothetical break-up scenerio, she assured me that if it were to happen that we would be friends. I've heard this before, most often by women that would rather set themselves on fire than ever speak to me again. However, if this were to happen between Candy and I, smart money's on this prediction coming true. We came together as two whole people, we love each other dearly, and any kind of split wouldn't be any big catastrophe. We would survive. That doesn't change the fact that I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN.

There are a lot of thing I want in life, but that doesn't mean I can ever have them. At this point in my life, having kids is equal to owning a Tuscan villa. The chances are remote, and it may happen one day, but I'm not gonna be ready anytime soon.

While we were laying all the cards out on the table, I went ahead and confessed that I've been smoking again. She wasn't too shocked by this. Besides, with what I've been putting myself through, as unneccesary as it may have been, it's a wonder I haven't started mainlining heroin directly into my eyeball.

Fortunately, tonight is my night at Arnie's, and that means enough mind-numbing alcohol I can take, just to sober up and head home.

No pic tonight, but I will have more soon.

losing suction

Just wondering, why did this guy Dyson make it his life's calling to build a better vacuum? Just how thick was this guy's carpet that he had such a problem with losing suction? Makes you wonder about his home life, don't it? "I want more suction, damn it!"

and the real bitch of it is, he's laughing all the way to the bank, and probably getting all the suction he can take. Hey, if murderers can have groupies, why not a vacuum cleaner magnate?

Terror alert level lowered

Today was much better in most areas, but a bit worse in others. My mood is better, but my energy was much lower. I've been sleeping, if you can call it that, in the guest room since friday. Not because there's anything wrong between Candy and I, I just want her to be comfortable as she sleeps and not have to deal with me tossing and turning like I normally do. However, she's kinda getting used to it, and I'm a bit paranoid that it may downgrade me to roommate status. I need to have a talk with her, but with two jobs, classes and taking on stage managing duties for a play, she's got a lot on her plate.

I'm dealing with my depression a lot better now, because I've had the chance to talk to a lot of people about it, and it seems that I've been doing more than my fair share of the worrying for both Candy and myself. She's getting back to her old self, cheerfully sarcastic and busy as hell.

Right now, I'm watching Lost, and the only thing more confusing to me now are the Target ads, the one with the dog that I'm surprised hasn't been in my nightmares yet. I guess that's one of the rules of advertising. Rule #1: If there's one thing that sells the company better than good advertising, it's bad advertising, because people will remember a sucky ad. Rule #2: if you can't hook them on a bad idea, confuse the hell out of them so they'll think it's avant garde.

Geez, never before has a show's title been so appropriate. I am so lost.

No pic today, too distracted.

ugh.

Another night of intermittant sleep. It wasn't nightmares this time, but a sense of dread about having nightmares. Is it possible that my sub-conscience has lapped itself?

I woke up feeling like shit, and it continued for most of the day. I really didn't want to deal with anybody today, but I cleverly disguised my contempt as sly sarcasm. Rather than give into the temptation to tell everyone to fuck off, I just let the zingers fly. Fortunately, they all laughed instead of taking swings at me.

Deep down, I wanted to pick a fight with the biggest, baddest biker I could find, I wanted to drink until I collapsed, I wanted to smoke and entire carton of cigarettes and clean out the buffet at Cici's then spend an hour on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I wanted to do anything I could to have a physical reason for feeling so shitty.

When this kind of malaise hits me, I naturally want to figure out why I felt like this. Most of it stems from the Candy situation, while some of it was sleep deprivation. The rest is just my clinical depression, what I call my I'm-only-happy-when-it-rains factor.

To me, living with depression is like living in a trailer. If you live there, it's pretty much all you have. So, when a tornado comes along, your choices are limited:

1.) You can go the medication route, which is like having a stranger tow the trailer to another state and not tell you where it's going. You don't know how you're gonna react, you just hope you can adapt to the new environment.

2.) You can ride out the storm, huddled in the dark closet the whole time.

3.) Or you can run, and deal with the aftermath when you come back.

Number two is the one I'm most comfortable with, if you can call it that. I know the clouds will clear away eventually, and I consider myself fortunate that I have plaenty of friends who'll let me drone on and on about the weather and not judge me for it.

The pic says it all

Dog days

I truly hate myself sometimes. I know this makes me sound like a whiny-ass little bitch, but it's true. Whenever a stressful situation rears its ugly head, one that I know will bring with it a great change in my life...one that I have little or no control over...my mind kicks into overdrive. Thoughts build up and repeat themselves until it's like having about a thousand dogs barking in my head. And it you know anything about dogs, it's the meanest and nastiest ones that bark the loudest.

What I hate about this are the bad thoughts, the selfish thoughts, the completely unreasonable ones. Thankfully, I never think of hurting myself or others. The duality of this is that I just wanna beat the crap out of myself for these things ever entering my head.

Since Candy got diagnosed on Friday with Endometriosis, the dogs have been barking. Strangely, she is the third girlfriend I have had with this affliction, so the diagnosis I was prepared for. It's the severity that threw me for a loop. There are options, but none of them are a choice I could make, not that I'm in a position to make the call.

One option would allow Candy to be able to have a child. However, the chances of natural conception are slim (slightly greater with in vitro fertilization), the medication needed to treat the Endometriosis can lead to birth defects, and there's a limited window of opportunity for conception before, inevitably, leading to option #2: Hysterectomy.

The biggest trouble I have, of course, is that this woman I love has to go through this, and the only thing I can do for her is stand by her side holding her hand. I cannot do anything to ease her pain, all I can do is make sure she's as comfortable as possible.

Running a close second is the fact that I cannot impose my will on the outcome. I've always wanted to have kids. Candy has been saying that she never wants to have children. I've been willing to accept that because I love her dearly and respect her decision. However, there's always been this hope in me that one day she'd change her mind. Now, that remote chance is gone. Poof! Now, I have to accept that. Unfortunately, this is the loudest barking dog in the pack.

Sounds selfish as hell, don't it? Doesn't it make you wanna beat the crap out of me for thinking like that? Me too.

I don't wanna be like that. I don't want this to be this way. I don't want Candy to have to go though this. I want to help her through this. I need to be stronger than this, and all I want to is break down. I need to break down, just to get it out of the way. The real bitch about that is it's like trying to force a sneeze. It has to happen on its own accord. In the meantime, I may have another night of nightmares.

Last night and the night before, I've had nightmares where I'm walking around my normal day-to day life, only to enter a room or round a corner and find someone I care about laying dead in a pool of blood. And I vapor-lock. I freeze up and just stand there, afraid to do anything. Five times on Saturday night and three times on Sunday. Now, this could mean that all of my anxiety over Candy's condition is really screwing with my head, combined with watching waaaay too much CSI.

Maybe a warm glass of milk and about three or four sleeping pills will silence the dogs for the night. Otherwise, expect the posts to get a bit darker in coming days.

No pic today. Hey, YOU try to find a picture that goes along with this little rant!

Quit screwing with me, brain, or I'll stab you with a q-tip

My friend Sterling once told me that I wear my heart on my sleeve because I want people to understand where I'm coming from. When he told me this, it became the single strongest realization of my life. This is why I cannot give a simple one word answer to a question. I have to explain everything, in great detail, to the point that everyone is just staring at me wondering if my train of thought has a caboose.

Another side to this is that those close to me can tell if something's wrong every time. I have the wolrd's worst poker face. I went to Arnie's last night, and the first question everyone asked me is "What's wrong?" Again, I couldn't give a simple answer.

I ended up spending a lot of time alone, not wanting to speak to anyone. At one point, my friend Kelly came up to me. She was quite tipsy and she wanted to know what's wrong. I was kinda tightlipped with her last week about what was bothering me at the time, and she suspected that there were problems between Candy and I. I had to tell her that there weren't problems like what she was thinking, but things were gonna change dramatically. See what I mean, horrible poker face. Whenever I beat around the bush, I sound like a fortune cookie.

I got home around midnight and fell right asleep. I woke up five times due to nightmares. I rarely have dreams, or at least any that I can remember, and the ones I do have/remember are ones that indicate high anxiety. I know why I had those dreams last night.

The only way I know how to handle personal stress is to have a breakdown as soon as possible. After a little panic attack, I can regroup and focus on what needs to be done. I haven't had that luxury this time around. I haven't had a chance to talk to Candy about everything, because of any number of reasons. I'm currently waiting for her to get done with her homework so I can talk to her.

I have decided that I don't care what course of action that's needed to be taken. All I want is for Candy to be healthy and happy and with me for as long as humanly possible. I love her and I really can't bear the thought of losing her.

I got blisters on my fingers

Candy's feeling a lot better today. After a night of her not being able to keep down saltines and ginger ale, maybe serving her breakfast burritos this morning and cajun chicken with crawfish stuffing wasn't such a great idea. Time will tell, though.

I now know how her mom handles stressful situations...she cleans. My job this morning, mow the back yard(s). The house next door is still unoccupied, and the previous tenant didn't mow the back yard for a month and a half before he moved away. I let it go until it was about waist-high before I cut it. This meant, I had to go over it three times with the mower, each time at less of an upward angle.

This posed more problems later on, because I couldn't mow it again until I raked up the clippings from last time. That is what I did today, and sweat out half my body weight and turned my hands into two large blisters in the process.

In order to salvage my day off, I opted to stay home while Candy and her mom went to the mall, as well as now, when they went down to Fringe, formerly known as String (thanks to some knitting store snobs in New York and their lawyers).

So now, I'm watching the Discovery Channel, watching these guys tear out walls in an office building. Boy, that looks like a good way to work out aggression. They just took a sledgehammer to a glass brick wall, a sight that would make my mom faint. She's always wanted a bunch of those grass bricks, and here they are just being destroyed. A shame, really.

Tonight, take care of Candy until she turns in early for the night, then I may head downtown to see Larkin at Arnies, or McNellies, I'm not sure which.

Here's another pic of Candy and I.

I love this woman

I spent my morning in a waiting room. Candy was in the other room having a camera inserted into her to take a look at her girly parts from an agle no one has ever seen before. I won't get into the whole diagnosis, suffice to say that I was (and still am to some extent) a nervous wreck about the whole thing.

The short of it is, Candy is home and quite high on painkillers. Her mom is here and we're taking turns tending to Candy's needs. I'm just trying to be the good boyfriend, letting her know that I love her and I'd do anything for her, and I've got receipts from three different trips to the grocery store to prove it.

I went into the office for a couple hours, but I had to leave because I was so distracted with thoughts of Candy that it was hard to focus. The strange thing is, I went to the office because I was worried about what I was missing at work. Catch-22, I guess.

Here's a pic of Candy and I, taken about a year ago at Oktoberfest.

My ego, now with free checking!

Today was another mile-a-minute day. Print this, proof this, deliver this. It was a pretty good day, all in all.

I've felt something on this job that I've rarely felt in a job: an occasional feeling that I'm depended on. It's never expressed out loud, and not ever very clearly, but it does happen. That feeling that if I'm not there, that, if it were to get done at all, it wouldn't get done nearly as fast or as well. Geez, the way I just worded it didn't make it sound special at all. I'd edit it, but it's actually demonstrating how my self-doubt keeps my ego in check.

Wanna know what builds me up? Looking no further than my own TV, at all the no-talent halfwits holding onto that last shred of fame. Those guys standing at the end of the offramp asking for money and noticing that their shoes are newer than mine. At least I've got my dignity. My meager paycheck every week may not be much, but at least it's honest.

Here's a pic of me riding a hog. Wanna know what else keeps me going? BAD PUNS!

The Lappy is dead...Long live Lappy II!

The laptop, or Lappy, as I call it, died yesterday. Actually, the monitor died, which left the lower portion in a persistant vegetative state. The most logical and cheapest solution at this juncture was to buy another laptop just like it and transfer the contents over to it. Unfortunately, half the work we had in the art department was either on the Lappy, or could only be done on the Lappy.

That was just item one on our glitch list. Our plate/film processor had a motor blown on it. We were able to run some more plates and film on it while the part was being shipped in...until the film jammed...big time...like, at a 45 degree angle...in the middle of a hot job...

That, and the copier crapped out on Monday. The leading theory is that these pieces of equipment belonged to the same union. If one was going down, they all were going on strike.

So now, I got the Lappy II, the processor is fixed, and we have a new copier. All things considered, my boss coughed up over two grand, and was not happy. The good news is, I completed all of the logjammed work in about two hours once everything is fixed.

The only thing left to do is convincing my other boss, who's on vacation this week, that everything would've gone to shit regardless of him being there.

Anyway, I've got chores to do, and I don't have a pic for the day.