In which she unveils her tarot cards and learns of the presence of Arabic-speaking bears.

Tags

albuquerque, arabic, art therapy, bears, chronic fatigue, New Mexico, too much sun

The semester is nearly at an end, and I have been waiting to post until now. It feels like a sweet little treat – as does anything that is not paper-writing. I have started cleaning my house on a regular basis. This is bizarre and unheard of activity.

I am also getting tremendously excited about my trip back home that starts just after my last final is turned in. I have a hundred things to do and people to see and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And I’m not going to lie, there is a part of me that gets very (very) excited about packing. It is like a fun little puzzle that later, I get to wear. Awesome.

77 Hand Drawn Tarot Cards

This is not exactly from this week, but I didn’t want to post it until now. These lovely tarot cards were created for my brother’s birthday earlier this month. They took me only about three months altogether, and that includes drawing drafts of each one. I took a lot of care on some of them to make them really representative of the symbols, etc… for tarot. Others I just wanted to draw things. I’ll be honest – I stole a number of ideas from people. But that’s okay, because I’m not planning on selling them or making them any more public than this. The ones that I am most proud of, and that are clear favorites are of my own making (See: Sulu as Queen of Swords). There are many, many terribly geeky references among them. 

I made them by cutting out pieces of paper to the size that I deemed appropriate (which for some stupid, awful, Piscean reason was not an even measurement either in centimeters or inches…so they were something stupid like 2 1/6 inches by 4 1/100 inches). Then I draw on these papers the silly things that I wished to draw, in a 3H pencil. I went over everything in a fancy black pen (Like everything I do, I do not know the appropriate technical terms. You should be super impressed by the 3H mention), and then colored them in with various colored pencils or pens. I cut out some cardstock to 3×5 and used spray adhesive to fix the drawings to the backs. It was a lot of fun. And as usual, way more work than it probably should have been. But that’s the way I roll.

Who isn't, really?

I was tutoring a student on Tuesday and upon entering the room, found this written in Arabic. It means I am a bear (f). Considering how few bears I have seen on campus, this intrigued me muchly. 

 

Art Journal Prompt: Look outside and let the weather and surroundings influence your page.

This second prompt annoyed me. I did not want to look outside and I did not want to let the weather influence my art. I don’t know why I was so hostile to this prompt, other than the fact that I have been relatively unhappy in Albuquerque – particularly with the weather. When someone says 300+ days of sun, I imagine being able to go outside and frolic. I feel like I am stuck inside more here than in the PNW – the rain just gets you wet. The sun at this altitude literally kills you. I have a wrought iron fence right outside the apartment, so, well, honestly this is not such an abstract drawing as it might seem. Sometimes this is all I can see.

 

 

I am holding on, I swear.

Tags

art journal, art therapy, sewing, teapot

In light of the fact that I discovered that I have one week less left in my semester than previously thought, these past few days have been…difficult. Sometimes, when things (particularly scholarly things) get difficult, I tend to burrow myself in other things, like Facebook or blogs. This time around, I’ve isolated myself a bit and spent my precious energy cleaning and, please bear with me, actually tackling my assignments. My goal is to have my massive (20 page minimum) final paper done a week before it’s due, and this seemed like a really good plan when I thought I had an extra week. Less so now.

Since I don’t have much energy, time or thought matter, I thought I’d keep it kind of brief in a word-sense (see? do you see why I shouldn’t be writing?), so…here. I’ll stop creating new phenomenon for linguists to study:

 

 

Upon complaining to my brother that I was without a teapot and that it was difficult to find one, he disappeared briefly from gchat…and then reappeared to inform me that he had purchased me a teapot on Amazon, and that I would be receiving it shortly. And so I did. He has never seen my precious kitty-cat mug that it matches perfectly. It also, oddly enough, perfectly matches the Tulsi Raspberry Peach tea that I have been drinking like a maniac. I also received a lecture on why every household needs a teapot. What a lovely big brother. I can say that because he doesn’t know about my blog – he would have a fit about the slight astrological lean. Frickin’ Aries. 

 

I learned to sew when I was really young – I even had my own little tiny sewing machine, until I stitched my finger through the nail. Even then, Mom had no qualms about me sewing, but I did. For quite some time. I think I started sewing again when I was nine, when I wanted to make a quilt for my American Girl Pen Pal in New York. I’ve never really had a grasp on appropriate gifts. My sewing has continued to be oddly erratic – I decide to make someone a quilt (and then usually never see them again…is this similar to the Sweater Curse of Knitting?), and struggle with it because I’ve decided to do something complex and I haven’t used the sewing machine in years. Then I stop until the next time a fit of quilt-making or clothing reconstruction comes over me. I thought it would be nice to actually learn to sew, from the beginning. I’ve never learned to follow a pattern. Even when I would ask my mom to help me follow a pattern, she is so experienced that she disregards half of the instructions to do it “her way”. This is all well and good, but I think I’d like to learn to walk before I learn to run. So I purchased a Sew Simple dress pattern a few weeks back, and waited until there was a 50% off sale at Jo-Ann Fabrics, and acquired just the loveliest chiffony fabric and all necessary items. I won’t be able to start on such a project for awhile, but it’s nice knowing that they’re all there, waiting for me. 

 

Art Journal Prompt #1: Close your eyes, visualize your emotions, then draw them.

 

I recently began a therapeutic art journal, complete with a list of prompts. I’d love to link the prompts, but I printed them off over a year ago (and am just now getting around to using them). I still don’t see art as therapy – it does not help me feel a release from the pain and the strong emotions. But it does fascinate me. I used to draw a lot in high school, but gave it up when my ex-husband would push me to “make something of it”. That took all the fun out of it, and I decided that I simply wasn’t any good. Before his comments, it never occurred to me to wonder if my art was any good or not. It was just a thing that I did. I have tried for some time to reclaim the fun of drawing, painting and pastels, but it has been a rocky road. I still find myself judging and criticizing. These prompts have helped considerably to get me out of that rut. There is something about sitting down, grumbling about the stupidity of the prompt and overcoming that to actually create something, whether it is good or bad. 

 

So there you go.

* a focus and a start

Reblogged from The Friday Influence:

(winter morning by the Sandia Mountains)

in the distance

the peaks

speak

                          (J)

*****

The phrase sensitivity to language that I have used in previous posts stems from an interview with Charles Simic in which, discussing the practice of writing everyday, he notes that by doing so one maintains “a certain sensitivity to language.”

Reading these words was a paradigm-shifting moment. 

Read more… 355 more words

It's National Poetry Month! Let's love poetry!

It’s not getting any easier…

It has been almost a week since I decided to drop my MA program, and I am not feeling much better. I had sort of hoped for a lightening of the spirit, a happy-go-lucky freedom of the soul, etc… But I feel pretty much the same. 

I dread the fact that I have four 10-paged papers and two 20-paged papers due in…five weeks. I had hoped that with the pressure off, they wouldn’t feel so bad. But if they felt pointless and frustrating when the classes were important, they feel even more so now. I have thought about simply dropping out and not attending until the end of the semester, but it’s too late to strike them from my transcript, and should I be applying to other programs, I’d really like to have grades on the transcripts, rather than ‘drops’. The kicker is that I don’t know if it makes a difference. 

Now I have the pressure still to finish all of these papers (two of which I am scheduled to be working on right now. Whoops), as well as the nagging feeling of having not decided my career and future yet. I am, perhaps logically, aware of the fact that even if I choose something now it may not be what I do in ten years. But that does not seem to help emotionally.

My career choices are currently a very mixed bag (a la Pisces):

1. Go for a postbac in  design – this would entail staying in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Pluses for this include not having to re-register my car which was a massive, stupid operation, as well as not feeling like a lame chicken for moving back to Oregon after only a year. I am interested in graphic design, fashion design, and interior design. I would also get to be creative – I miss being the artsy kid. Minuses include not knowing anything about the practicality of these jobs and what one actually does on a daily basis.

2. Go for the professional MSc in Computational Linguistics – pluses include getting to live anywhere I wanted because University of Washington offers an online-only course that costs the same as the in-house courses. Or I could move to Seattle. Pluses also include an average annual salary of about three times what I’ve made since I was 18. Minuses include knowing nothing about computers other than they have my facebooks and my e-mails (Okay. Is a lie. I know quite a bit, and I am a competent html/CSS programmer, I just..don’t bother apparently for this blog, but I feel like I don’t know anything about the stuff I’m supposed to know about).

3. Apply at the CIA/FBI for translating work. Same salary benefits as above. Would use my linguistical skills, but not the ones I got my degree in (Excuse me, Mr. President, but I don’t like using the word “subject”. I will refer to it from now on as a “Subject-like-thing-that-may-or-may-not-be-a-subject-at-any-given-time” or a SLT. Okay? Okay). I’d also have to live in D.C. Ew.

4. Teach for America or teach ESL – Eh. Teaching skillz would be great to acquire, but…eh. It always seems like it’s a lot more work than it’s worth. I tend not to like the kinds of college students who ABSOLUTELY LOVED it.

5. Apply for a MA in Special Education or Alternative Education – this would be cool. My grandma did it. And she’s cool. But, as a general rule, I hate it when kids come within 3 feet of me, so that’s an obstacle. But I would love to teach TAG or Autistic kids who need different methods for understanding. I was one of those kids – imagine my surprise at learning that I’m good at math after 12 years of being told I wasn’t. I just wasn’t taught in the right way for me. Also, despite taking a hundred thousand language courses, I never learned a thing from them. They were just a forum for me to teach myself. So that’s cool. But if you get a license in K-8 teaching you need to do it in the state you want to live in. I do not really like the pressure of deciding where I want to force Jose and I spend the next five or so years. 

Those are my preliminary ideas. As I do more research, I think I’m going to do some individual posts for each idea. It’ll help me out, maybe. 

 

In the meantime, I really need to finish a paper on the linguistic diversity apparent in the Pacific Northwest. My claim is that the tribes settled down in a nice PNW July 6000 years ago (Okay, so I haven’t read up yet on when they populated the PNW. Get over it), and then the rains set in. And then never left their longhouses to speak to each other again. Too many trees in the way, and too little Vitamin D to go a ‘visiting. My best friend used to live a 45 minute drive away from me in the PNW and we still only saw each other once a year. It’s just too much of a bitch – especially for those early hominids, y’know? 

 

Not exactly social weather.

What’s a little sad, is that I’m really annoyed that it’s so sunny here in NM right now. It is disconcerting to be so sad and frustrated without the rain. The sun is mocking me. And dehydrating me. Ugh.

 

Sadness, tiredness and crankiness …oh my!

Tags

CFS, chronic illness, tacos, wheat-free

I want to post a post. But I also want to crawl into bed and sleep for ten days straight. But I also want to move a lot because I am tired of being tired. But I also am just plain sad and don’t have the energy to write about all the little things that make for the sad. This equals crankers.

Wheat-free is going well. I accidentally ate wheat on the third day, but I was really distraught and confused and knew not what I did. I forgive myself. I don’t know that it’s making a difference. If anything I feel more tired than I have been feeling recently. I’ve heard that the initial removal of wheat can create a brief spike in symptoms, so maybe that’s what’s going on? I do not know.

I also recently decided that I would be dropping my MA program. I’m not doing it because of my illness, although I think I might have my illness to thank. If I wasn’t so tired, if it wasn’t so detrimental to my health to keep pushing through things, I might have just continued to force my way through a program to a career that I won’t like. Burnout would occur later if not now. So now I face a year or so of recovery time while I regroup and pick my career. The only worrisome part is not exactly knowing where I’ll be living for the whole year – we may stay in NM or we may not. That would help to have a little stability in terms of putting down roots in support groups, doctors, etc…

Finally, I joined a support group on Meetup that seems to be active in the city on a monthly basis. I look forward to trying that out.

And I’ve worn myself out. Tacos wait. 

Treatment Plans

Tags

chronic fatigue treatment, cookies, gluten-free, physical therapy, wheat intolerance, wheat-free

My next two steps in treatment are going to be:

1) Ditching wheat – I’ve been reading up a lot on wheat intolerance and a lot of my symptoms seem to overlap with those. My darling mancreature and I will be going on a wheat-free diet for the length of April. If nothing else, I expect that doing so will help us branch out. We’ve been about 75% wheat free in preparation for the last half of March, and we’ve already tried more new things in our diets than we have in the entire two years we’ve been together. So that’s cool.

2) Physical therapy – I’ve mentioned the ITB syndrome and the bursitis and the sciatica, etc… I keep trying PT and getting really close and then moving to a different state/country or running out of money. So money shouldn’t be an issue, and I’m in ABQ for a good 2-3 years while I finish my master’s. The only thing that stands in the way is, once again, getting a referral. I went to the Student Health Center at UNM, but they are only allowed to refer out to certain clinics, and I don’t get a choice in location or anything. I’m very picky about my physical therapists (stay tuned for How a Physical Therapist Ruined Me), so I may have to force my way into a doctor’s office. I plan on trying to find one that’s not from New Mexico and try to bribe them with good coffee*. Anyway… the idea is that my CFS symptoms might be more manageable if I can lessen the constant pain that pervades 50% of my body.

 

I have a hundred thousand other things that I want to try. Pisces does not like to do the logical thing that is try a couple of things at a time to see what works. Pisces would really, really prefer to do everything at once even though she knows that she won’t be able to keep up with it all and it will all consequently fail and she will feel miserable.

 

I certainly hope those are gluten-free.

 

 

*I also want to post on how godawful and impossibly bad the coffee is in Albuquerque. But I think that’s still too sore of a subject. I am currently drinking what was supposed to be a plain latte. I can’t even talk about what it actually is. It’s too difficult.

It takes a village…

Tags

albuquerque, albuquerque health care, chronic fatigue syndrome, fish oil, kombucha, treatment for chronic fatigue

Oops. I meant to write a while ago. Perhaps blogging while not actually having the internet at home is not a great plan. We’ll see.

Trying to find care for Chronic Fatigue is been almost as exhausting as the syndrome itself. I understand that if I lived in a select number of towns in Colorado and Texas I’d be golden. But I don’t live there – I left Oregon where I might have had a decent chance at help for Albuquerque. I’ve heard from other transplants that finding medical care in ABQ is a nightmare – much less trying to find the all-encompassing care that I am looking for. The major medical groups won’t schedule me – no matter how many times I call, or if a doctor herself has told me that she has openings, I am told curtly that no one is taking new patients and then hung up on. According to my forum of Albuquerque knitters on Ravelry, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Since it is New Mexico, there is a large number of holistic and naturopathic practitioners (although mainly in Santa Fe). I am really more interested in an integrative approach – preferably someone who is capable in both Western medicine as well as other approaches, but I would also be happy with a practitioner who had no qualms about sending me to a naturopath or an acupuncturist for certain treatments.

So far, I have found one practitioner, and I am not happy. My insurance is accepted, but s/he is an independent clinician who does their own billing and, well, despite the number of extremely unexpected EOBs from my insurance, no actual bill. I have trouble making appointments, etc… I’ve started again on the long, painstaking attempt at finding practitioners, and came across the UNM Center for Life.  This center looks absolutely fantastic – the only hitch is that it requires a referral. Which means I have to get an actual appointment with an actual doctor. I expect to be admitted to the Center for Life in about two years’ time, just as I’m about to leave the state.

Spectacular mountains. Terrible health care.

Despite all this, I have been doing relatively well. I began seeing my flaky practitioner (I am also trying to set a record on how many times I can mis-type ‘practitioner’ in one day, apparently) at the end of December, and was prescribed Zithromax for my mycoplasmic friends, and Valtrex for my persistent Epstein-Barr. I felt considerably worse for the three months that I was on the medication, but having finished the doses, I am starting to feel much better. Am I feeling better than before I took the medication? Unfortunately, I don’t know. I am supposed to see my practitioner to check the blood,etc… but s/he’s not taking phone calls.

I’ve also been taking an adrenal support and massive amounts of fish oil. I know that I feel a difference in my mood and functionality if I miss any of the fish oil. The fish oil is something that I haven’t really read about in any information on CFS, nor was it prescribed to me. My grandmother told me to take it (read: she sent me the biggest bottle of it I have ever seen). Also instrumental in my daily life has been the addition of occasional kombucha drinks. They really help improve my mood, digestion (which has been destroyed from disordered eating and massive doses of antibiotics both for sinus treatment and CFS treatment), and are rather delicious. I started drinking it when none of the probiotics suggested to me seemed to make a difference, and I read the label of a bottle of Synergy Kombucha that said it had a lot of probiotics.

So far, practitioner: 0, grandmother: 1, Synergy’s Ad Department: 1

Related articles

• How To Choose A Naturopathic Doctor. (alternativendhealth.wordpress.com)

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – More than just being tired

Tags

Adrenal gland, Cake, CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, Conditions and Diseases, Disease, Epstein Barr Virus, Fatigue (medical), Health, recovery, Rihanna

I’ll be honest, I don’t share much. So I don’t tell many people that I have CFS, but when I do I often get the response of “Oh, I’m always tired too…” plus a sharing of a story or difficulty with exhaustion. While this is sweet, and usually done in a bonding and friendly way, it is primarily the reason I don’t share much.

Some people are fighting to get a different name for CFS for the same reason – we’re tired (har har) of being misunderstood. From the mouths of the Center for Disease Control:

Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, is a debilitating and complex disorder characterized by profound fatigue that is not improved by bed rest and that may be worsened by physical or mental activity. Symptoms affect several body systems and may include weakness, muscle pain, impaired memory and/or mental concentration, and insomnia, which can result in reduced participation in daily activities.

It’s a gradient syndrome. I am a lucky one. I am still capable (if only just barely) of keeping up with my MA program. I had to quit my part-time retail job, and in reality, would have had to quit it eventually even if I hadn’t started back up at school. It is never, ever a matter of “pushing through”. I’ve “pushed through” the past five years, and I’ve hit a wall. I would never have believed that there was something that you couldn’t just get through if you set your mind to it! Five years ago, honestly, I would have thought that someone saying they had CFS was just kind of lazy. I assure you that I am not lazy – I do love leisure, to be sure, but I also love being occupied. I am frequently angry because I can do nothing. Sometimes I can’t even read a book or watch a TV show. I’ll take a day to take care of myself but not even be able to carry out tasks that are supposed to be relaxing. It’s frustrating, to say the least, but things could be so much worse. It’s possible that they will be if I don’t watch myself.

CFS is a complex disorder, meaning that its causes and hence its cures are relatively unknown. Often, those who suffer from CFS also suffer from an autoimmune disease. Again, I am lucky to be free of this aspect of CFS. I do, however, have Epstein Barr Virus which is still active (not just the passive marker that it should be) in my bloodstream after nearly six years. I am on a strong anti-viral drug which makes me, surprise, more tired, to try to supress the virus so I can heal it.

My body is also home to not-so-friendly little creatures called mycoplasmas. These little guys are bacteria that don’t have appropriate cell walls and are rather difficult to find – they create a number of different diseases and symptoms. As of yet, we haven’t really been able to isolate which of my symptoms come from the mycoplasmic fiends. I have been on a strong antibiotic (they are resistant to a good many antibiotics, god bless them) to try to kill them off. I finished my three months, but my nurse practitioner appears to have disappeared for some time, so I don’t know if we’ve done any damage yet.

My thyroid, iron count, b-12 and testosterone are all low – those are easy enough symptoms to pick off one by one with supplements. We’ve only tried to supplement the iron and the b-12 at first.

My adrenal glands are also completely shot – the aforementioned years of pushing myself should have been easy enough to recover from in a normal, healthy 24 year old. However, during those five years I was struggling with severely disordered eating  and an abusive relationship. Combine those things (and add in the Epstein Barr and the Mycoplasmic friends) and you get a body that is simply not resilient. So I have odd bursts of energy when the adrenal glands do get to recover and then immediately use up all of the adrenaline because that’s what they’re used to doing. I’ll spend my day utterly and completely exhausted and then want to go for a run at 2am.

I also get a heartburn that is in no way associated with food. It appears when I am at my most exhausted, and often I think of it as a guardian friend that lets me know that I have reached a critical point and need to stop before my body shuts down on its own.  No one seems to know what this is or why it shows up. So, cool, I guess.

Is this just a post of whining? Maybe so. Maybe so. But I like to think of it as a basic overview of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and how it manifests itself in me.  I generally only see posts about CFS that refer to it in the past. Understandably that is because it takes too much precious energy to post. So maybe I’ll fall out, maybe I won’t.

 

And to end with a Pisces quote of the day:

“He want that cake, cake, Cake, cake, cake, cake, cake Cake, cake, cake, cake, cake Cake, cake, cake.“

We all do, Rihanna. We all do.

 

 

For the next post: How to find help for CFS… (and can you find me better help?)

 

 

Related articles

• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and Biopsychosocial Intervention Strategies (eitheory.com)
• Online Therapy Proves Highly Effective in Treating Teen Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (inquisitr.com)
• Study Linking Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Virus Now Retracted (livescience.com)

In Which She Awkwardly Introduces Her Blog and Can’t Decide to Talk About it in the Present or the Awkward Future/Conditional

Tags

chronic fatigue syndrome, disordered eating, domestic violence, lamb, new blogger, New Mexico, pisces

What precisely do I mean by living with pisces? I suppose a joy of being Pisces would be the lack of necessity of precision in an answer. But I’ll do my best, and probably flop around a lot and maybe sort of answer your question (which, it might be noted, you did not actually ask) and maybe not.

Firstly, this isn’t an astrological blog. It’s also not a particularly latinate-fish-related blog either. It’s just a thing, so don’t get your fussy ‘astrology is a pile of poo’ knickers in a bunch. I do rather enjoy astrology and will likely blog about it from time to time, but you’ll be warned and you can go study algorithms to balance out my ignorance.

You know those helpful, friendly blogs like “Living with Celiac Disease”? Well, this isn’t like that either. But we’re getting closer. 

Astrologically speaking, Pisces are known for having unfortunate health problems (Hello Steve Jobs and Jean Harlow!). I am one of those! Other Pisces are known for dealing with more difficult psychiatric/traumatic things (Karen Carpenter! Drew Barrymore!). Ooh! Ooh! Me too! So, wanting things to turn out a little better for me than, say, Kurt Cobain, I’m trying to face my problems with the ever-therapeutic blogosphere. And without Courtney Love, thank you very much.*

So look forward to explanatory posts on such things as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Iliotibial Band Syndrome, disordered eating, domestic violence,as well as cookies, linguistic tidbits, my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with New Mexico, and my newfound love of cooking lamb. 

 

 

*Don’t you dare try to convince me that other signs of the zodiac have “problems”. Pssh. **

**This is considered a “joke”. See? Oh, the fun times we shall have.

The Pisces

Pis·ces

/ˈpaɪsiz, ˈpɪsiz/  [pahy-seez, pis-eez]

noun, genitive Pis·ci·um
/ˈpɪʃiəm/ pish-ee-uhm]

1. Astronomy . the Fishes, a zodiacal constellation between Aries and Aquarius.

2. Astrology . a. the twelfth sign of the zodiac: the mutable water sign.

                        b. a person born under this sign, usually between February 19th and March 20th. An adamant fan of cookies.

3. the class of vertebrates comprising the fish and sometimes including, in certain classifications, the cyclostomes.

Let us, preferably, stick with the 2nd definition. Despite what you may have heard, I am in no classification a cyclostome. And I now sincerely wish that I had never looked up what cyclostomes are. I used to be afraid of jets in hot tubs and pools because I thought a lamprey would come out of them. What am I saying, ‘used to’?

 

My favorite Pisces: Me, clearly, my gramma, Rihanna, Ke$ha, Albert Einstein, Don Gabriel Garcia Marquez (galletas de almendras y muerte?  que si!), Adam Levine, WH Auden, Alan Rickman, and of course, the Cookie Monster.