Dead Blog?
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Forty six & 2
Is this blog dead?

Raise
Mood:  happy
I got a 50 cent raise today. Yay!

Haven't Written in a While...
Mood:  not sure

I haven't written in quite a while because I was very busy with school. I am now done with the semester and still have a summer class and clients, but it should be a lot less stressful.

 The only big news that I have is that I am getting top surgery on August 7th. I will post all the details about this soon.

Worn out
Mood:  rushed

I have felt very stressed the past few weeks, and bitter about always having to do things. Yesterday my afternoon class was canceled and I just did not know what to do with this extra three hours. I think all of my cohort was a little lost. I went home and cleaned my apartment. Then I went to sleep at 7pm until 9am. It was glorious. But, I am still very tired. Perhaps I slept too much or maybe no amount of sleeping will take away the exhaustion.

 

 

Restless
Mood:  loud
I feel like exploring, but it is too cold outside. I like to explore the drainage pipes around the city. I went in the one by NDSU last summer and it was really exciting.

Pissed at my cat
Mood:  irritated
So, I get home tonight and my cat has chewed through not only my brand new headphones (he also did this a few weeks ago with another set of headphones), but also my ipod charger cord, so now I can't charge my ipod. I am really pissed because these are things that were new and now they are destroyed and I have to spend money again.

Pupaphobia
Mood:  hug me

So, tomorrow in play therapy I fear that puppets will be present again. I know they will be present! I have been afraid of puppets since I was a child. I found this article that sums up my feelings about puppets and why I am afraid of them:

Why Puppets Are So Creepy
By SARAH BOXER

Everyone knows about claustrophobia (the fear of confined places), agoraphobia (the fear of public places) and xenophobia (the fear of strangers). But what about pupaphobia, the fear of puppets? Puppets are creepy. Whether they are jerking around on strings or bowing on the tips of fingers, they seem to make people nervous.

So, at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in December, Roman Paska, a master puppeteer, and Eric Neutzel, a psychoanalyst in St. Louis, got together to discuss the fear of puppetry and what can be done about it.

People apparently do not understand their own horror of puppets. According to Paska and Neutzel, the fear of puppetry has less to do with the specter of manipulation than people think. For centuries, Westerners have wrongly cast the puppet as "a symbol of man manipulated by higher forces or beings," Paska wrote in an essay titled "The Inanimate Incarnate."

Heinrich von Kleist's seminal 1810 essay "On the Marionette Theater" treated puppets as surrogate human beings too. But apparently the human aspect of puppets is not what makes them scary.
"It's the absence of the human that is frightening," the fact that the puppet appears both dead and alive, Paska said. "The puppet is a dead thing and it's up there moving. If it provokes deep anxieties, that's why." The closest human analogies to puppets are not powerless citizens under dictators but mummies and corpses made to dance.

In fact, puppets were once explicitly used to represent the dead, Paska said. Pulchinella, the puppet that came before Punch and Judy, spoke with a swazzle, a reedy piece in the mouth, which is still used by Rajastani puppeteers and is called the voice of the dead.

Puppets show us that "our own existence is not so different from a table," Paska said. In the blink of an eye, the inanimate can become animate, and the animate can become inanimate again.
In other words, the puppet is part of what Freud called the uncanny: "that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar," to a time before we were alive.

It is worth noting that "puppet" comes from the Latin "pupa," which is not only the root for the French word for doll, poupee (Freud's example of an uncanny object), and the English word puppy, but also the name for a creature enclosed in a cocoon, not quite alive and not quite dead.
African and Asian cultures have always been more mindful of the puppet's awful "otherness" and its strange power, Paska noted. For example, in Indonesia, puppeteers have the status of priests and are thought to spiritually possess their puppets during the performance. Indeed, it is considered dangerous for puppeteers not to finish a show, Paska said, and when a puppeteer dies, his puppets are buried with him.
Puppetry is a kind of necromancy. "A puppet doesn't exist alone," Neutzel said. By itself, "the puppet is just a dead thing." If the audience fails to imbue it with life, there is no show.

Conversely, "any object to which people attribute life and energy" can be a puppet, Paska explained. He recalled a performance enacted by a coffee bean and a match, a love story. During the show the two objects acquired character traits. When the coffee bean was lost in a pile of other coffee beans and the match made an attempt to find the bean, "the audience knew one was special," said Paska. "And when the bean was ground up, it was heart-wrenching," he said. "The audience was almost in tears."
That is how a ritual object is born, Paska said. "The audience is complicit." And, he points out, that is not a controlling impulse, a wish to manipulate, but a creative impulse, a way to multiply the self.

Or a way to work out inner conflicts: since puppets are not really alive, people relate to them more freely. "Puppets can express the audience's forbidden impulses better than theater," said Neutzel. If Punch throws a baby out the window and almost kills Judy, no one is the worse for it. It works the other way, too. In "The Great Gabbo" (a movie that has occasionally been spoofed on The Simpsons) the dummy, Otto, expresses all of the cruel puppeteer's soft emotions.

"Puppets are ideal objects for working out human problems at a distance," Neutzel said. That is why puppetry is lot closer to Antonin Artaud's idea of the theater, catharsis, than to Bertolt Brecht's idea, instruction.
"The audience projects something onto the object," Neutzel said. The puppet can become what psychoanalysts call a transitional object, like a blanket, which can make a child feel the presence of something that is not really there. It is a connection between himself and something he left behind (his home, his mother). With the use of this object he can, in a sense, bring the dead alive.

Still, with all the fears there are in the world, why would a psychoanalyst deal with the fear of puppets? Maybe it has something to do with the charge of manipulation. Manipulation, Paska noted, is a problem word not only for puppeteers but for psychoanalysts too.
In other words, just as puppeteers do not like to think of themselves as masters pulling strings, so psychoanalysts do not like the suggestion that they are practicing mental manipulation, trying to get their patients to say and do what they command.
Psychoanalysts, like puppeteers, would prefer to think of themselves as liberators who can wake up the living dead. Well, let the show begin.

 

2nd day in my one day at a time
Mood:  a-ok

So, I made it through my 1st day of therapy on my own! Two out of the four clients I had scheduled canceled, but that is normal. Out of the 10 or so scheduled for everyone yesterday, 2 showed up (my two). Today I was supposed to have two more, but one already canceled. Oh well...

 In other news (DRUM ROLL)....I PAID OFF MY CREDIT CARD TODAY! Yes, my credit card, that just a few years ago was up to $8,000. Today, there is none! Booyah 24.9% APR! You aren't getting anymore interest out of me!

One Down, Two to Go
Mood:  on fire

So, I just had my first solo therapy session and it went super I think. I have two more today, so we will see how that goes! I took some clonopin yesterday for a test run and it made me loopy, so I have to go through today without any of that, so it is scarier. :S

So far, so good!

 

Stationary!
Mood:  happy
I just bought a gazillion dollars worth of the most amazing stationary! I'm really excited to write letters to people now!

Klonopin
Mood:  irritated

So, it is once again the wee hours of the morning and I am awake and consumed with anxiety. While I was cleaning my closet last week I found a random tablet of Klonopin. I don't know where it came from, but it was like Jesus himself placed it there.

Klonopin is medication used for panic attacks. I was saving it for the first day that I have to do therapy by myself, but then thought that I shouldn't wait until then because I'm not sure what it will do to me. I've had people tell me that it makes them feel drunk, instead of less anxious, so I decided that the next time I have a panic attack at night I would take it.

I had been having the panic attack for about 45 minutes before I decided that it was time to take it. It has been about 15 minutes so far and I seem a little calmer, but I don't know if it's actually the medication doing that. It was an orally disintigrating tablet, so I'm sure it works pretty fast.

I'm thinking about going to the student health center and getting some, if it's not too expensive because I'm really poor and can't afford silly things like health care....

 

Lately,,,
Mood:  blue
Lately a lot of things have been making me sad. I cry about all of it a lot.

Later in the day
Mood:  chillin'

It is later in the day now and I feel sick. I get so worked up and stressed out about things that I make myself sick.

Today I lead session. My co-therapist, Monica, talked probably three times and I did all of the rest! It was amazing and terrifying. I kept trying to think ahead of things to say, but then I wasn't paying attention to what was going on so I said, Ok, pay attention to what is happening in the moment and I did and it went a lot better after that. This is the second time that I've lead the entire session.

Also today I had to pay rent, BUT I forgot that my check book is in my car which Joie has in Mandan. So, I had to go to the bank and get a cashier's check, which I wasn't happy about because my landlord usually keeps the check for a week before cashing it and by then I'm usually close to getting paid again. But, with the cashier's check the money is taken out right away. The good thing was that I didn't have to pay for the check. I don't know what is going on at my bank because I used to not have a checking account so whenever I needed a check written I would get a cashier's check for free. But then they started charging a ridiculous fee...like $4...for a check. I guess they have now gone back to free cashier's checks. People were probably complaining.

I also found out today that I am getting kicked out of my office at the graduate center and being moved to a new office. My classmate Courtney was also in the same room as me, so we went over there to get our stuff out (I had to get a space heater, she had to get a lamp and antibacterial wipes). So, we get there and they are kicking us all out of the room because they guy we share the room with is a complete hog and took over the room anyway. I guess he whined or something, so now he has HIS OWN OFFICE! There was a couch in there and everything, while the rest of us are being shoved in some other room with even more people. What, is he going to turn that into an apartment or something? He is there ALL THE TIME, so I wouldn't put this past him. I don't think that is fair at all, but I'm not complaining because I didn't want to share a room with him anyway because he completely took over the room and left all his crap everywhere all the time and hogged all of the expensive computer programs (which were only loaded on his computer because when the IT people went there to install stuff on the computer he was the only one there and said, "Oh, put it on my computer" and no one else dares use his computer because all of his personal stuff is all over it). So, I never went there because I didn't want to deal with him. Maybe I will go there more now that I don't have to worry about him.

Ahhhhh!!!!!!!
Mood:  hug me

Dear Internet Blog,

So, here I am once again at 3:30 in the morning having a panic attack. I can only imagine that they are going to get worse and worse as Jan. 14 th (and beyond) approaches. I have not started crying, throwing up, or having nose bleeds yet, so I guess I shouldn't be complaining.

I am so scared about doing this and I think about dropping out everyday so I don't have to do it. I imagine myself just sitting there and staring at people and hearing the clock ticking. I imagine that they will know I have no idea what I am doing and they will call me out on it. I imagine that I will forget to do something, paperwork or phonecalls or something. I am starting to shut down as it gets closer and closer, dreading sessions I have with my co-therapist because it reminds me of how I won't have her in a few weeks.

I try to tell myself that it will be ok and remember all of the people that are confident that I can do it, but it is very hard because I really don't believe that I can do it. No amount of other people believing in me is going to make me believe in me. I think I am at a real risk in the next coming weeks of dropping out because that is what I do when I am scared about things and not confident.

What's worse is that I feel like I don't have anyone I can talk to. I don't want to burden friends and I know they have a lot of stressful things going on in their own lives.

 

No School
Mood:  blue

So, I don't know what is wrong with me. When there is too much to do I wish I had nothing to do, but when there is nothing to do I get depressed and don't know what to do with myself. That is kind of how I am feeling today.

I have also watched all of the Harry Potter movies now. I am mad that they don't include nearly as much as the book and don't follow the book at times. For example, where were the house elves in the movies? Why didn't they just make the movie 3 1/2 hours long like they do for other movies based on a series of books, like the Lord of the Rings? It's not like they aren't making enough money off of it. I would also like to see more of Snape, since he is a key character, but his story is not being developed I don't think. Also, with the Order of the Phoenix movie, I would have liked to see Harry realize things about his father, like he did in the book. All in all, I prefer the books to the movies so far I think. If I hadn't read the books and just watched the movies, I probably would have no idea what was going on, especially in the Order of the Phoenix since that is one of the most complicated books I think. Joie hasn't read any of the books yet, but she watched the movies and I had to explain a lot of things to her because they left out so much of the back story and the context. And that is the end of my critique of the Harry Potter movies.

Warm drinks and cool scars
Mood:  a-ok

I have gotten a variety of hot cocoa and I have decided to be adventurous and try them out. I usually like to stick to classic hot cocoa, although I really, really like dark chocolate hot cocoa. Today I tried caramel and that wasn't so great. I also have mint, french vanilla, and....butterscotch. I don't know if I am able to try new things and enjoy it....I mostly feel apprehensive about the cocoa tasting.

 I have really been thinking lately about scarification. I can't find anywhere in Fargo or Minneapolis where someone does this. I think it would be really cool and I would get it on my legs, since I don't like leg tattoos, but I would like to decorate my legs in some way. It seems very painful, but I like the "earning it" aspect of body art, so I think I would be ok with the pain. I imagine it is a lot more painful than a tattoo, since they not only cut the skin with a scapel, but then peel off the skin so you get a larger scar. I think I would get something pretty. I like the flowery scars that are shown, such as this:

http://www.scarabbodyarts.com/scarification/

 http://modblog.bmezine.com/2006/03/23/best-scarification-bodysuit-in-the-world/

http://modblog.bmezine.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/pheonixxx2-copy.jpg

Wednesday
Mood:  cool

Today I hung out with Lea and that was fun and I felt happy. We played Wii for a long time, sports, some scary bunny one, and TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for those of you not born in the 80s). Then we went to the transgender holiday party. There was spinach dip, cheeseball, and cake. We played Mousetrap and Upwords. It was fun, but it was mostly just my friends I invited along and I felt bad for possibly excluding others.

Earlier today I went to my work's holiday party. That was ok I guess. I'm not big into socializing with my co-workers, but I knew there would be free food and gifts, plus I had to pick up my check anyway. They had a variety of hot cocoa gift bags and a tin of shortbread cookies that Joie seemed to enjoy. I was really excited about the hot cocoa since that is my favorite hot drink.

Yesterday I watched Deep Blue. It is from the makers of March of the Penguins and it was amazing and sad at times because I don't like when things die. Especially baby whales. It was a very pretty movie, and I may even say visually stunning if I felt fancy, and I was mesmerized and I'm pretty sure I just kept saying, "Wow! Wow!" and various other exclamations. 

For some reason I can't get the trailor to be embedded on here, so follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n_2A0kW1Uw

Bella
Mood:  irritated

So, this post is a week overdue, but I wanted to still write about it. Last week I went to see the movie Bella. I thought the movie was going ok, until I started to realize that it was a pro-life movie! I started to get this idea when the woman in the movie had this fantasy (I'm not sure this is the right word, who fantasizes about this?) about going to a get an abortion and at first I thought they were in a bus station, but then I realized that it was meant to be a women's clinic. Why? I thought to myself, would they portray a women's clinic this way? Also, the man went with her to get her fake-fantasy abortion and while it was happening the man was praying with the rosary beads.

Then, throughout the movie the guy kept saying that she should think about adoption versus abortion and that this had something to do with his brother being adopted and him hitting a kid with his car somehow. Then, it turns out that he adopted the woman's kid while she went off and lived her life. That's all fine and great, but how many men would actually do something like this? In the words of my friend Lea,  "If every girl who had an unwanted pregnacy could find a guy that looked like jesus to take care of her baby for a few years, that would be one thing...." and my friend Dena, "people like that guy don't exist. People don't just adopt children and be cool like that and still respect the mother and AHHAHAAH." Which pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole thing.

I did feel guilty though because I thought the main guy in the movie (with the beard) was really hot and I couldn't get over it the whole time. After I got home and looked up the movie on the internet and confirmed that it was a pro-life movie I had mixed feeling about thinking the guy was hot. But, then I just told myself that a lot of people that I think are attractive are probably asses in real life, so it's ok. That's how I justified it to myself.
 

 

 

Depressed
Mood:  blue
I have been depressed for the past few days. Partly, I think it is due to anxiety which leads to depression in me. Partly, it is because I want to hang out with people more, but I just sit around at home by myself instead.

Sparkles
Mood:  a-ok

Today, a few things happened that made me feel happy/funny. The first was at the post office I saw this old white man wearing a Tupac coat...with Tupac's picture on it. The second was when I was at the store, the guys checking out in front of me bought $176 worth of Banquet tv dinners and potpies. It was ridiculous. Another thing that happened, not today, but this weekend was there was a group of 12 year old boys walking around the hotel and one of them dropped a rainbow penis lollypop. They all just stood there as I walked by it and pretended that I didn't just see this group of pre-teens with a gay penis pop.

 In other news, I have a concern. Ok, so I got this credit card, but I didn't activate it. Do I have to call them and close the account or is it not even open since I didn't activate the card?

I have also enabled comments, in case anyone wants to comment on my blog.