I'm sitting in the grocery store watching people walk by and listening to snippets of conversations. It's interesting what you'l see and hear when you just stop and sit for a while.

GAAHH!!!

so i've been going around and around with the VA today about my gi bill weirdness.

after attempting to call and actually make it through the busy signal for several hours, i finally managed to get through. the very nice lady that i talked to told me that i needed to expedite my claim and she transferred me to a totally different branch. the lady that i talked to there was also nice but had no idea how to help me so she transferred me to a rather abrupt gentleman in another department who gave me absolutely nothing other than another phone number to call.

so....i managed to get through (after some interesting hold music) to another very nice lady who basically said that she couldn't help me at all and that i needed to A) get with my school rep who was supposed to call them back anyway (according to their notes) and B) call the financial department (which was where i started todays journey).

so i chose option A and called our very awesome school rep and she said (sounding a little exasperated) that she had talked to them yesterday and that she now had no idea what was going on so she was going to call them back and try to get it figured out.

so, as it stands now, i'm not getting paid for this month. which means serious trouble.
very. serious. trouble.

so on top of the left over headache from yesterday, i have now compounded that with a stress headache and an "i really should have eaten 2 hours ago" headache.

on the upside, i started another blog (http://fthrgasp.wordpress.com/) where i'm planning on doing a little more "formal" writing. i'm going to do a  "thing a week" type deal where i'm going to try to think of something interesting, do some research on it and then write it up. hopefully it'll both interesting to read and write. i'll even capitalize letters. i promise. i told a friend that yesterday. he put it on his calendar.

wordpress is a whole different world. the dashboard where you configure/control everything is ... different. it's going to take some getting used to. lots of control though. maybe a bit too much control.

anyway....back to busy signals. joy.

This is just a test to see if this is working of if I screwed it up somehow.


( ps, the above was posted from my phone while i was trying to see if it worked or not.

it did. )

busts...and the tales thereof.

ok so, so far today at least hasn't been a total bust.
i've attempted to get several things done today and have been at least partially successful with some of them.

i managed to get the majority of the dishes out of the sink. this may not sound like much, but we haven't been home much to actually clean the house lately. so...it's a bit more challenging than the usual sink full of dishes.

i got quite a bit done on my ssi stuff. i just need to actually get ahold of doctors who can get me my records so i can provide them to the appropriate people.
i managed to find out some more about the debacle that is the current state of my GI Bill. right now it's not as bad as it first seemed. hopefully things will look even brighter on the subject by the time it gets straightened out.

i've done some more looking into doing the freelance writing gig. i think that if i can train myself to start using capitalized letters again then it should go ok. i just have to find the right sort of things.
i'll also have to learn how to bid on things and blah blah blah.....it'll be fun. i'm sure of it. luckily a friend (thanks brent!) sent me a shit ton of stuff to read up on about the whole process of getting started, so that should help some.

i have an amazingly bad headache. even by my chronic headache standards, this one sucks. badly. my teeth even hurt.
the additional downside of this is that i
a) have 2 classes tonight (one of them i can probably zone out most of it, but the 2nd one i'lll have to pay attention to people giving their speeches)
and b) we have tech rehearsal tonight so i'm going to have to pay attention because lisa and i are running spots and this is a really spot heavy show.

at least on this show i don't have to run my ass off every 5 minutes to chase people down to tell them what time it is.
that makes me happy.

did i mention the headache?

ok, i'm going to go back to being productive now.
or at least attempting to be.

wheeeeee

ok so....i've decided that i'm going to try to start doing at least a post a day. or every couple of days. as opposed to my current record of every 3 or 4 years.

anyway...

so here's the latest.

i've quit smoking. to some people this has come as a huge monumental shock (hell, to me it's a huge monumental shock), but i wouldn't have been able to do it with out the help of something called an e-cigarette.

it's such a wonderful thing. basically it has a battery, an atomizer for the liquid and nicotine juice that gets atomized and inhaled. there's also various ingredients in the nic juice that produce vapor when you exhale, but all in all, it's a helluva lot healthier for you than cigarettes are with their 4000 or so chemicals (not to mention the tar and ash etc...) that you inhale.

so to test the theory that i've quit smoking, a couple of weeks ago i tried to take a drag off a friends cigarette.

i nearly coughed my left nut up. had tears streaming down my face. it was worse than when i originally started smoking i think.

it led me to wonder how in the FUCK i'd managed to do that to myself multiple times a day for the past 20+ years.

i still haven't come up with a good answer for that.

anyway. i can't recommend this strongly enough to my friends who smoke. www.puresmoker.com was where i got mine from. (not a paid ad. just a company with awesome customer service and good products). i got the pure smoker ace kit and a couple of boxes of cartomizers (which they call atomz) and all in all it was about $60.

granted, this was a bit of a pricey start up cost for me given our usual money situation, but in the end it's been worth it.

anothing (er....wtf happened there? i'm just gonna leave that one for posterity)

take 2 aaaaand action!

another thing i've learned about recently is drug augmentation. i learned this the hard way.

i'm bi-polar. there i said it and everyone knows now. wheeeee. good times(tm).

so i'm on a whole shit ton of drugs to combat this situation and to keep me fairly level and low key. there's also drugs for some other options that i've added on to the mix (it's kinda like buying a car?) but they didn't seem to figure into this as much.

so the 3 drugs that are in question here are risperidone, lamictal and divalproex sodium.

what i didn't know about these 3 drugs was the way they interacted with each other.

the lamictal seems to be at the top of the food chain, with the divalproex being second and the resperidone coming in a close 3rd.

we lowered the dosage of the risperidone to about half of what i had been taking. about a week or so went by and everything was all sunshine and roses (ok, not really but hey...) and then, suddenly out of the blue (or at least it was to me) everything went wonky. wonky is a technical term which, roughly translated means "oh fuck...here we go."

so.....basically, when you lower the dosage of the risperidone, it in turn (basically) lowers the dosage of the divalproex and the lamictal.

ok, that's a little broad, but you get the picture.

so....this resulted in an extra trip to my psychiatrist to get my doses adjusted...again.

to top that off, i ran out of the divalproex and missed a dose. usually when i miss a dose of one of them, it takes me a couple of days to get right again. so i'm feeling a little funky today. doesn't help that it's raining and i literally could NOT get my eyes open this morning.

so to add to all of this, my GI Bill stuff has gone completely wonky (see, it's a technical term that's good for all sorts of things) and i don't actually know if i'm going to get paid for the next month or 2. if i don't, then we're pretty much financially fuckered.

things have been submitted to try to get it straightened out, but i'm not sure that it got done in time, so we'll have to see.

the shitty thing is, this is for last semester, so it makes it a bit more difficult to go and talk to teachers about it since they typically don't have said records that are needed right there on hand.

and i always feel guilty about making them dig this shit up. it's not like they don't have enough else to do.

anyway. sorry about the wall of text. i started writing and got carried away. maybe if i write more often i won't get so carried away.

or maybe it'll happen more.

i guess we'll just have to wait and see.

ok, this one is just bizarre and i didn't really want to write it, but it kept bugging me so much to get out that i had to.

i suppose anyone that's written anything will understand that concept.

anyway...here.

i('m) w{ait}a[lready]nt to d(ead)ie

(th[e)(ver)] p(resent)romise of(uck) t{(y)o(u)}morrow

l(iar)ies b(astard)l{e(vry)}edi(o)n(e)[g(one)]

in(ow) i(m)t's be(afrai)d

the snowflake falls

whirling and twirling

blinded by the wind

into the fire.

!alive:

the crushing sadness

takes it's toll

the mind

you see before you

is gone

a shadow of fear

reality...pain

...formality

the shadow inside me

goes on

i saw everything in a night.

i heard, felt,

touched, tasted

...inside the dream i lived.

then no more.

a little less perfect

a little more real

skeletons in a closet

used souls for a steal

words and pictures...

and a whole lot more

for the first 7 souls

through the opening door.

all are welcome

at the 5 and Damned store

with visions of sugar plums,

dancing like whores

broke mem'ries in a room

like toys long forgotten

a lifetime of sin

only buys you a coffin

the whorls of fates threads

cut short, the wrong end

perfect melodies harmonize

with lies of truth in your head

that shit that you asked for,

and sadly received

a mosaic of hunger,

petulance and greed

happily presented

with a smile and a bow

unwarily shoved

in young faces aglow.

ok, since it's been soooooo fucking long since i posted, i thought i'd post some stuff that i've written over the last couple of years before i started taking all the drugs to squelch the bi-polar issues that made me loose all my creativity.

ok, they probably didn't make me loose the creativity, but they sure as hell made it more difficult to find seeing as how i haven't written anything in at least a year and a half.

hell, i'd even forgotten that i had a blog till about 2 weeks ago. and i'm not sure why i remembered it then. there's really no telling.

on a totally unrelated note, i've stopped smoking. i haven't had a cigarette in 9 weeks and 2 days (not that i'm counting). i got an e-cigarette and after i finally decided to stop smoking i pretty much haven't looked back.

i isay pretty much because i did take a drag off a friends cigarette a couple of weeks ago. it fuckin near killed me. i almost coughed up my left nut. my mouth tasted horrible and i thought to myself "self, how the FUCK did you do this to your self repeatedly every day for 20+ years?"

i still haven't found the answer to that.

anyway.....poetry posts to follow. we'll see what happens.