shoesonwrong

Five

Surprise! We survived five years of marriage without appearing on any major news outlets for domestic homicide!

Actually, last Friday was our anniversary, but I thought that delaying a post about it would build suspense. And also: I was really lazy. 

More people called to wish us happy anniversary than called to wish me happy birthday, but whatever. I'm not bitter. I'm not that bitter. For our anniversary present, we got books. Not, like, books for each other, we just went out to a bookshop together and bought books. Call me unromantic and selfish, but I really prefer shopping for myself rather than other people -- so much more gratifying, you know? YOU GET TO KEEP THE STUFF.

Then we had a fancy but homemade dinner and watched movies all night. Our anniversary coincided with game seven of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and downtown was too packed to move. Plus, had the Red Wings won (they did not), downtown would have erupted into total chaos. So we decided to just stay in.

Five years of marriage has taught me so much. Things like someone has to clean the toilet and it's probably going to be me, if you wait long enough the other person will run out of underwear first and have to the laundry, and don't go to bed angry because you'll just wake up even more angry due to a lack of sleep.

Happy five years, Ryan. Love you.

Please Let Me Know If I Am Allowed To Sue For Backwages

My parents, who have expressed love for neither heat nor humidity, bought a summer home in North Carolina. A summer home. As in, a house to go to in the summer in the South. I love my parents, but they're like confused birds -- don't old people usually fly south in the winter? I actually looked up the proper Latin phrase just for this post, and I believe it translates to, "You're going to boil alive, and I get all your stuff. Well, as long as you don't read this blog post first, and write me out of the will completely for suggesting you're old people, leaving all your stuff to Ryan. I knew you liked him better than me."

So, saying they bought a summer home is a bit of a stretch. They bought some land that they intend to go to in the summer, and it has a home on it at the present.

When I say "home" I of course mean "deathtrap that has to be torn down." Apparently the land was a really good idea, though, and it is in a pretty location. Still, their vacation home isn't really a home and isn't really a vacation yet, since they have to tear it down. My mother, who has been working on it for three weeks now, said to me, "I'd ask you to come help, but I know you're having all those mental health issues and stuff, so you can't come right now." For the first time since my personal struggle with mental health has began I though, "Oh thank God I'm crazy because I don't want to do more manual labor."

I'm not entirely sure why they would want me to help, since my track record with these projects has usually involved a lot of whining and pretending to go to the bathroom while really just sitting on the john and reading to avoid work. I guess over the years, though, I've picked up some skills. Before I moved out of home, I helped re-shingle two roofs, install a metal roof, install a drain field (where the sewage goes!), refinish hardwood floors, plane and sand endless pieces of board that was used as baseboards, and paint my own bedroom. (I specify MY bedroom because my mother wouldn't let me near the primer or paint for other rooms of the house, believing that I was going to do it wrong and leave drips or weird brushstrokes -- both of which she is famous for herself.) And all those are just home projects. My parents also heat their home with a wood burning boiler, so every year we had to haul firewood. When we were done hauling firewood, we hauled more firewood, took a break, and then hauled even more. We hauled so much firewood that we used a skid steer loader to do some of it, which I learned to drive. My parents laughingly recall how I, in a fit of rage that I wasn't being allowed to sit indoors with a book where it was clean and not outside, screamed at them that I was a CHILD and shouldn't know how to drive a skid steer loader and it was CHILD ABUSE or at least  CHILD LABOR and why can't I just go inside now? They actually have lots of stories that involve me screaming outrageous things in a fit of rage. Ask them about it sometime.

Sure, I've aged some and matured a very little bit, but my commitment to not getting dirt on me and whining when I do get dirt on me has not lessened. Now, my mom calls me regularly to check up on me (remember, I'm crazy) and tells me how it's going. She's the picture of cheerful optimism. It makes me kind of ill. She's all, "The house is coming along great and we just love it down here!" No matter how much I try to point out that she is getting actual dirt on her -- dirt that makes her hands feel chalky and gets under her fingernails and makes her feel a little anxious (that last part might be me) -- she cheerfully continues to recount stories of the house and hiking (outdoors!) and the cute things Cassie is doing. 

I think I'm adopted. I also think I hope that they build a really cool house there and I can visit it.

As if the bum ovaries weren't enough, now I've got these stone-throwing kidneys

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, two-thirty to be precise, I got up to pee because I drink a lot of water and have a bladder the size of an acorn. At two-fifty-seven, I had a sensation that I can only describe as an explosive and searing pain that felt like someone had planted a tiny bomb directly in my left kidney. I was a bit confused because I didn't see any bleeding or shrapnel, but I was a little too busy screaming in pain to ponder it further.

By three-thirty, Ryan had decided that he'd had enough of my wailing and I was going to the hospital, like it or not, so he went to go get our car. The battery was, of course, dead. We arrived at the hospital at four in the morning, after a car ride where Ryan hit all three million potholes in Detroit and I threw up into not one but TWO old fast food bags in our backseat.

In triage at the hospital, the nurse kept asking me to sit still instead of pacing or pedaling my legs so that she could get better measurements. I kept asking her if she wanted to vomit on her like I did a little bit on Ryan's leg in the car. She said no, and so I kept pacing to help reduce the pain a bit. Then she snidely said that if I have a kidney stone, I'm getting a taste of what it'll be like to have a baby. I roared back that I was never going to have a baby, then, and if I got pregnant I would HOLD IT IN. This entire process took six hours, according to me, or twenty minutes, according to Ryan.

The next, nicer nurse got my IV in on the first try, but in her haste to try to pump anti-nausea and pain relieving medicine into me, she pumped the anti-nausea stuff in too fast and blew out a vein in my hand. The anti-nausea medication made me throw up, which I proceeded to do for the next five minutes while she put the IV into the underside of my wrist and FINALLY administered some pain medication.

The pain medication didn't work.

Well, that's not entirely true. It turned my head into a balloon and made it float away. I began to fall asleep while screaming in agony -- one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Then I had to wait another fifteen minutes while they ran some blood work to make sure I wasn't pregnant before they pumped me full of something delightful that took away all my pain and got me high as a kite.

On the wheelchair ride down to get a CT, I kept trying to wave my lead-filled arms while shriek-slurring, "I'm flying, Jack!" Then I waved at everyone like I was in a parade and fell asleep in the CT machine.

Later in the morning, I had apparently passed the stone and gotten a diagnosis of a kidney stone, severe urinary tract infection, and a yeast infection. I am positive I only went in with the kidney stone and that they planted the other things on my person in order to charge me more.

P.S. Did you know my real name is Andrea? I'm not entirely sure I did until I was four years old because everyone called me Annie as a baby and have ever since.

And Of Course Ryan Slept Through It

I've had this bear, Snuggles, since I was just shy of three years old.

It's that bear from the Snuggles fabric softener, and the only reason my mother got it for me for Christmas was to win an ongoing argument we had as to whether or not Snuggles really had the ability to walk, talk, and fall gently into a pile of laundry while giggling. That my mother had to shell out twenty bucks to win an argument with a two year old is neither here nor there, really. The point of this story is I still have Snuggles and he is still basically intact. The stuffing is a little less stuffy and his eyes and nose are all scratched up from when I would chew on them at night to fall asleep. I also scratched out his tongue because I found the bright pink to be garish. Okay, so aside from some toddler Guantanamo treatment, Snuggles is totally fine.

When we were at my parent's house this past weekend, I found Snuggles and thought, Hey, I should bring him back with me. He can sit on the bed. It will be cute. I did not think, My cats are completely insane, view this stuffed bear as a threat to national security, and treat it as such. It's becoming increasingly clear I still have no idea what I'm doing with two cats and someone should have made me pass some basic psychological competency test before letting me out the door of the animal shelter with a kitten.

Snuggles got wedged up between two pillows on our bed while we slept. Our bed is huge and I don't think either one of us really remembered Snuggles was still up there. At least I know that I didn't until it was three in the morning and I had a sixteen pound marmalade tabby cat on my stomach and an eight pound grey tabby sitting on my forehead, working in tandem to investigate, abduct, and probably destroy the innocent childhood relic. I'm not someone who wakes up in any sane manner. Sometimes there's tears or screaming. There's always a wide-eyed terror-filled look of confusion. Waking up wearing almost twenty-five pounds of cat was... well, I'll be honest: it wasn't one of my proudest moments, considering I punched the big cat in the face. Once the first punch was thrown, the little cat clung to Snuggles. I think he knew I wouldn't hurt the bear. I pryed his grubby paws off the bear, rolled out of bed, stumbled into the closet door, opened the closet door, and then put the bear on the highest shelf.

The next morning, I woke up and rolled over to find two cats sitting on the nightstand, both looking at me with malice in their hearts.

Mental Illness and Baby Pictures: A Match Made In Heaven

I haven't logged into Typepad in so long that it had forgotten me and required me to reenter my information. Wow, I am THE BEST BLOGGER EVER.

Over the past few weeks, I have been having some mental health issues. Okay, that's not true. Over the past few years I've been having mental health issues. FINE, it's been nearing in on a decade -- must you badger me, internet?! In late February of this year, I went onto a new antidepressant, Effexor, and also took a complete leave of my mind. It got lost somewhere in the couch cushions, I think. My anxiety levels shot off the charts, I slept twelve hours a day and still felt tired, then at night I sprang to life and paced frantically around the apartment with my mind racing. I was homebound as well, because, let's face it the outdoors is a terrifying place filled with sidewalks and pigeons and squirrels.

It turns out that I was having a mixed episode. A mixed episode is something that happens if you're bipolar, which apparently I am. Not depressed, as I've been told by several doctors, a couple therapists, and at least one or two strangers from the internet. I've been repeatedly prescribed antidepressants, which would pull me out of my bipolar depression and slingshot me into hypomania, at which point I was so busy doing things like getting honors in graduate classes as an undergrad while carrying a full class load, not sleeping very much, and admiring the beautiful beautifulness that is life I would take myself off the antidepressant. Who needs mental health medication when LIFE IS SO SUDDENLY AND INEXPLICABLY GRAND WHEN JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME AND SUCKED?

I went on Effexor in February because I'd been sliding into another bipolar depression. Effexor didn't just slingshot me out of it, it catapulted me out of depression, past hypomania, over a flat out bipolar mania, and landed me in a crappy mixed state. After nearly two months of living with a weird, unwashed, anxious specter, Ryan dragged me to a psychiatrist, where I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder currently exhibiting as bipolar I disorder (the more horrendous of the two) because of the Effexor. I've changed medications and things seem to be looking up. I went outside and ran errands the other day, and I didn't even end up huddle in a public restroom, texting Ryan to COME HELP ME COME HELP ME NOW.

This has been a really trying experience, and blogging has temporarily fallen off my list of priorities. But, hopefully, my meds are starting to help and I am back, baby.

Speaking of babies, I have been scanning my old baby pictures and uploading them to flickr. Most of them are set to private (I actually DO have some boundaries, believe it or not), but I have changed the permissions on some pictures so you can bask in my baby cuteness.