Pain In The Neck. Seriously.

I have this weird pain in my neck. It might actually count as two pains. I can't turn my head to the right (pain #1) or to the left (pain #2). I think I injured myself while sleeping two nights ago. Sleeping. It's getting worse. Last night, every time I tried to turn, I woke up in pain.

I've had two Strode neck massages today and still the pain. Hm. You'd think it would take some extraordinary talent to injure your neck while sleeping. Perhaps this is one of my superpowers.

Now I'm thinking, "this sounds familiar. Isn't this some kind of symptom for some incurable disease." How badly would that suck. Now I'm thinking "way to jinx yourself."

Now it hurts when I swallow. I hope you're happy, T$. I was looking for something to write about. Maybe I was looking too hard.

Trials and Tribulations of Luna the Kitty

We are still cat sitting. Their mom and dad come home today. So two days ago (evidently they didn't think turning the big plant into a litter box, peeing all over the bathroom rugs, or uprooting my oldest house plant were adequate mementos of their stay) the fuzzy one stabbed our kitty, Luna, in the eye with a claw and punctured the full thickness of her cornea. (Those are the doctor's words. I would have been alarmed simply if he'd said "punctured her cornea" but I guess he didn't want to take any chances that I might react in a reasonable fashion so it was "full thickness of her cornea"). Our regular vet took one look at her spectacularly gory eyeball and sent us across town immediately to the cat hospital to see a kitty ophthalmologist.

Luna kind of hates the car with a fiery passion. When she is feeling good, she will start crying from the moment the engine turns over until we shut it off. But - even though we were stuck in stop and go traffic on the 405 for almost an hour - she was mostly silent in her misery. She was also foaming at the mouth. We had her in her travel case because we didn't want to risk her freaking out and doing more damage to herself. I had an arm inside there to sooth her but I couldn't see her. Then I noticed my arm was wet, looked inside, and saw the foam coming out of her mouth. For one surreal moment I had this thought that she'd contracted rabies from the visitors, but that's just insane. Turns out the anesthetic they'd dropped into her eyes at the vet tastes like coconut. Cats hate the taste of coconut. She was foaming at the mouth in an effort to flush the coconut taste out. Because she wasn't in enough misery. Oh, and somewhere during that drive Luna peed all over her towel.

So after 50 minutes we arrive at the animal hospital. Bravo for people coming up with this idea. It's exactly a hospital, with wards and wings and specialists and crash carts, but for animals. I guess I never really sat down and though about kitty ophthalmologists before. Ours was really sweet. You might get a different version from Luna, but until she learns English you'll just have to trust me. He had more anesthetic eye drops for her, and then he used a massive cue tip to rotate her eye around and see if any "eye juice" (I can't remember the technical term, I know it has something to do with "fiber") was coming out of the wound. Good news: it doesn't look like she needs surgery. The whatever-you-call-inner-eye-juice-fiber-stuff plugged up the hole. The thing we've got to worry about is if there is infection / bacteria down deep in the scratch. So the ophthalmologist (I just like saying our cat has an ophthalmologist) sent us home with four prescriptions that need to be administered 6 times a day, including two antibiotics, a steroid, and a local anesthetic kind of ointment-dealy-bob. And a lampshade.

For anyone who's ever had to put a lampshade on their animal - I mean, I love my kitty, and I feel so bad for her, and we're going to do everything we can to help her get better, but I laughed when I saw her wearing it. I'm a bad person.

Right now Luna just lays in a corner. The lampshade makes it hard for her to walk because when she doesn't feel good she kind of slinks along with her head really low to the ground. She'll take a step and the lampshade catches on the carpet and jerks her head and she stops. Then she heaves the lampshade up, takes a step, lampshade gets caught on the carpet, she stops and heaves... It's really very sad. You want to try to anticipate where she wants to go so you can pick her up and just end the misery that is her journey to get there.

All this being said, I don't blame the visitors. They're just cats. Cats are basically Id running around unrestrained. That's what I love about cats. If we'd known this was going to happen we would have segregated them right off the bat, but they seemed to be getting along. So to OF-Q and IF-Q, sorry about solitary confinement these last few days. Mommy and Daddy will take you home in about 4 hours.

Coffeeland

I have to say, I love coffee. I especially love it if it's the first thing I consume over the course of the day, and that love is most intense anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or so after drinking it. I love fresh, uber-dense coffee (with cream if I can get it!) in the mornings when I need to face my desk-in-the-corner-of-a-dark-office job. I love caramel machiattos in the evenings, when I need an after-work-before-losing-consciousness-writing boost. I love espressos in the afternoons. Who needs a reason for those?!

I don't think our coffee machine is going to make the transition over to Evil Corporation.

Did I mention that I hate Evil Corporation? This is a Wolfram and Hart kind of Corporation. Squash the (as my grandpa would say) "little guy" to make a buck, it's fine by E.C. The "little guy" a member of the staff? Even better!

I'm going to get a coffee.

Is there such a thing as too much coffee? Only time will tell. Oh, and my Acid Reflux. It's pretty vocal about too much coffee.

Steering My Own Ship Of The Damned

So I think about money pretty much all the time. Root of all evil and what not. I got up with every intention of writing this morning and instead sat at my computer and tried to calculate how we're going to make it with my pay cut AND still try to save some money to eventually buy a place. I'm sure we'll have more stories about this in the near future (not the BUYING, but the WISHING we could buy).

This is the rub: with my previous salary I was able to save aside some money from each paycheck towards a "House Savings Account" which made me feel that - despite the fact that this job is a shit job, in no way part of the "industry" I claim to want to belong to, and will lead no where and no step closer to getting into the "industry" - I felt like I was making progress on some front (specifically, the "get a house" front).

Now that ship has been blasted out of the water by a torpedo entitled "(SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS) Corporate Policy."

So here's my new strategy: get the f**! (hi, mom, hi, dad) out of this job and take an entry level job IN THE INDUSTRY. If I'm not going to be able to achieve ANY of my goals here, why not take another crap-pay job that might actually (wait for it... wait for it) LEAD SOMEWHERE?! I will be the captain of my own destiny!

Basically: I AM LOOKING FOR WRITERS' ASSISTANT WORK. Anyone know of any people I can talk to / any advice to offer about looking for a job? I will make you some cookies. (These are seriously good cookies).

I'll try to think of something else to write about later on today.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Because I mostly blog when something is irritating me (with the exception of my beautiful sister's beautiful wedding!) I just wanted to write and say - I am happy! Need to document this moment. I haven't even had coffee this morning.

And this is despite the fact that JB is in night shifts now (sniff) so he came home this morning about 2 hours before I woke up and I left while he was in REM sleep (so I figured - not the time to wake him up) and he'll be gone before I get home from work and I believe this lasts for 2 weeks.

I did finish a writing project last night. That is probably the core of this happy feeling. Hm. Why is it that my moods are SO DICTATED by the writing successes and failures? If I don't write for several days I turn into a depression-laden bleak monster of a person. When I manage to write consistently I still feel this urgency, driving towards the finish line. So really it's only the day of and maybe the day after I finish some stage of writing that I feel totally content and happy (assuming that nothing is wrong in my "life" life).

So I wish for happiness to all and success with your own writing projects!

Anatomy Of The Bustle

You know how they take pictures at weddings of the Bride getting dressed? Have you ever seen pictures of the Bustle getting done up after the wedding? (For men: "bustle" is the term for when you take all that material that drags on the ground behind the bride during the wedding ceremony and cleverly attach it to the dress so it doesn't drag anymore.) Yeah, well I don't think I have, and I'm pretty sure why: doing up the bustle is like planning a small military action. Let's take my sister's wedding dress as one small example. There was one button, one loop, six hooks, six eyes, and two snaps. Now, sure. Doing up one button, six hooks, and two snaps is a piece of cake*. But when they are cleverly hid over twelve yards of beaded and gemmed white shimmery material - with no diagram as to WHICH of the six hooks goes into WHICH of the six eyes - it becomes something of a Mensa puzzle.

Let me just add that the direction: "it's supposed to lay flat" when applied to a voluminous and complexly folded skirt doesn't really help and will, even if you're on the right track, cause you to unbutton, unhook, and unsnap several times to try other combinations of buttoning, hooking, and snapping to attain theoretical "flatness" which is both physically impossible and fundamentally unnecessary, as the folds looked damn fine.

* I forgot to tell you about the cake - it was done up in broken slabs of various shades of blue chocolate so the whole thing looked like it was covered with beautiful tile mosaic - SO AMAZING. Two different flavors, one was a strawberry shortcake kind of thing (there's a much cooler French word for it) and the other was chocolate layered cake... yum.

My Sister's Beautiful Wedding

She looked like a princess with a tiara and everything. So beautiful. I think everyone had a great time. Sunset over the ocean... it was really lovely. SF (new husband) was very dashing as well! This guy looks like a GQ model normally, and when you put him in a tux - wow! Very good looking couple. There were many tears, but (and I am happy to report) I only cried while speaking once. I gave a reading at the wedding, which came right after their vows, and after watching SF's face as he said "I take you as my wife" and then gave this little overwhelmed gasp/smile/joyful sigh (I've never heard a sound quite like it) I didn't know if I'd be able to say ANYTHING without waterworks, but I pulled it together. My step dad (CS) was the preacher who married them and he even got a little teary - it was a beautiful service. My teary moment came at the reception - during my toast. I made it most of the way through without crying, then lost it right at the very end. Then we partied!

JB was there with video camera in hand (when I didn't pull him onto the dance floor). We tried to get him to break dance, but alas, there was no tequila to be found. I can't think of the event that wouldn't benefit from JB doing the worm. He tried to teach me "popping" but I haven’t got the inherent talents that he's got. Doesn't mean I can't strive for perfection, right?

All Of A Sudden I'm An Entrepreneur

You know how Blogger puts those adds at the top of the pages that are technically supposed to reference the content of the page? All of a sudden mine are talking about government grants for small business loans and business plan software. Is this a sign? On the one hand, maybe it's telling me I'm too good to be a cog in an industrial machine, I should strike out on my own, tame new business frontiers, be my own woman. On the other hand, it could be telling me to get the hell out of this industry and start up a little convenience store somewhere. Hm.

Post Post Grad School Blues

I don't think I can attribute this bout of depression to having recently graduated from film school, as "recently" doesn't exactly apply to me anymore. I love school because the goals are clearly defined and (relatively) easy to attain - if only because you KNOW it is possible. If I study, I'll pass this class. If I pass enough classes, I'll graduate. Ect.

"Out here" things are far less clear.

So I spend my days working at a day job that is effectively contributing nothing to society whatsoever, but is conveniently eating up all the time I could spend writing. What happens if I want to make a feature film? I don't even know where to start. Do I hook up with a producer (how do you do this?) who likes my writing and is willing to risk letting me direct as a first-time-feature-film-director? Do I try to be my own producer and raise money (how do you do this?!).

I'm thinking more than anything, these blues come from lack of A Plan. If I knew what steps I'd have to take to accomplish one of my goals, I'd have something to work towards. No matter how hard it was, I could think "okay, I just have to do this, and then I will be one step closer to my goal." As it is, I have no idea what steps to take. Hm.