STILL SEEING RED, AND NOT SEEING RED
I've been bleeding for a week. We'll see if this turns out to be another marathon.

It's been over a week since Red & I got together for a...mini-date? I don't know what you'd call it. He mentioned a venue that's sort of near where I live but completely inaccessible to me and my mass-transit limitations. I looked up the venue, and there are a number of acts I'd be willing to see, but all of them are on inconvenient dates. I sent him a list of "recommendations" & he thanked me. That was last week, no communication since.

Then...it occurred to me that one of the acts is performing this upcoming Saturday in the city, and it's a free show. So I shot him an email telling him this & suggested he check out the free show as a preview. No response.

And if this gives you any clue as to how good of a cyberstalker I am...during our "date" we talked about the Artist at whose show we first met, and I mentioned some little factoid about him. He asked me how I knew it, and I said he'd put out a Facebook update. He said that he had "liked" the Artist on FB but had never gotten any updates.

Now...I've looked for Red on FB but never found him. But now I had confirmation from him that he was in fact there. So I did a search--not on him, but on the Artist. Y'know how for every famous person on FB there's usually one "official" page and a handful of unofficial pages that are started by fans? Well, turns out Red "liked" the wrong page. I picked one of the unofficial pages that have only a few hundred members (the "official" page has more than 4,000 members) & clicked on "Members" to see who was there. And that's where I found him.

It's definitely him, because he put his picture there. And he has his profile set up so that if you're not his "friend" you can't send him a msg (otherwise I would have). But here's the cool thing: He listed his alma mater. Turns out it's a college not far from the one I attended. Similar in academic caliber, and we kick their asses in football every year, which means if I ever see him again I'll have something to bust his chops about.

Now that I know where he went to college, I did some more net-sleuthing. Turns out he's older than I am. Like, if we'd gone to the same college we wouldn't have known each other because he graduated before I started. THAT much older.

This is why I'm such a failure with men. I just know that if/when I see him again I'm going to blurt this out somehow and freak the hell out of him.

In other news, my checkbook is balanced. For the year 2009. That's right, I'm THAT far behind in balancing my checkbook. My tax appointment is next week & I decided to try & get some of my shit together today. Fortunately my credit card company created a year-end summary that lists all my categories of expenses, so I only have to look at that to know how much I spent at the conference I went to a year ago and how much I spent last year for this year's conference. Then add the medical receipts I have, and I'm good to go.

Not much here in the way of anxiety/depression, but I wanted to give an update. There's really not anyone in my life I can talk to about Red, so I blab about him here.
- posted by Pat @ 10:07 PM | 0 comments

 
SEEING RED (PART 2)
Last time I used this title, it had a double meaning. It still does.

First of all, my uterus continues to hijack my body & hold it hostage. There is no longer any discernible pattern to when I bleed, nor for how long or how profusely.

Now to the other Red. On Thursday I won tickets to a Friday concert. So I sent out a mass email to my local friends (including Red) asking if anyone wanted to go with me. My loyal concert friend was the first to respond, as she usually is. So we agreed to go to the show together.

About an hour later I get an email from Red telling me that he's going to be in the city that day and he would love to go with me. I shot him an email back that sorry, I'd already promised someone else the ticket. But I had a couple of hours in between work and concert to kill, and if he was going to be in the city I'd meet with him then.

I went home that night & began a mad rush, during which I dyed my hair and fished one of my nicest tops out of the laundry and hand-washed it. On the way into work the next morning I did my nails on the bus. Toward the end of the work day I scrubbed my face clean in the ladies' room and completely did my makeup. I even spritzed on a little perfume.

We met in an area not far from the venue & went to a tiny restaurant. He was wearing jeans & dirty sneakers. It didn't appear as though he was dressing for a special occasion. Since I was planning to eat at the concert venue, I just had a small soft drink while he noshed on an appetizer.

Since I have a tendency to monopolize conversations, and since he tends to respond to emails in monosyllables, I kept quiet and let him do most of the talking. I liked some of the things he had to say, but not all of them. He told me that when we had originally met, his job was sucking him dry & he just wasn't in a place to take on more in his life. But now that he's lost his job (which he now believes was the wrong job for him), he very much wants to have more culture in his life. And he wants me to be his concierge (his word, not mine). He also mentioned at other points during the conversation that he'd taken acting classes at some point, and that he's currently singing in a choir. These things are all pluses as far as I'm concerned. Live music is so much a part of my identity that any man with whom I enter into a relationship needs to understand and support that. He also said that his godson lives sorta kinda near where I live, and that there's a music venue near there. He told me that if there was anything playing there that I would recommend, he'd be happy to pick me up & take me there. So he obviously DOES want to see me again.

He also told me a story about going to see an artist who's very much a social activist, and how he didn't like sitting in the audience being surrounded by "hippie liberals". Bad move. You don't speak disparagingly about hippie liberals in NYC, not without looking over your shoulder first. That's like going south of the Manson-Nixon line & cracking wise about Bible-thumpers.

Then when it came time to leave he goes to pay with a card, despite signs all over the place that say "Cash Only". He had NO cash on him, so I had to pay the bill. In his defense, we did walk to an ATM & he immediately paid me back.

It's just as well that he didn't go with me to the show. The show sucked, & by the end of the night I was exhausted & cranky.

So...we managed to spend an hour together without any major disasters. He does apparently want to see me again, although it's unclear at this point what his motivation is for wanting that. If we do end up spending a significant amount of time together we're obviously going to have some major political disagreements. And the pay fiasco was not cool, although he made up for it.

So he's not perfect. No one is. And I have no right to expect perfection when I'm not capable of offering it in return. What I have to figure out now is where his imperfections lie and whether I can live with those imperfections. He in turn has to do the same with me.
- posted by Pat @ 4:10 PM | 0 comments

 
LET'S TRY THIS AGAIN
As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, here's what happened at my last pdoc appointment.

Recall that at my last visit in December, I was depressed as fuck. As a result, my pdoc upped my doxepin from 75 mgs to 100 mgs. I'm obviously feeling better now and I told her so.

Then she whips out a lovely letter from the cardiologist clowns. They apparently sent her a snitch report. My pdoc asked me about what happened. I responded that experiences like the ones I'd had at that office are the reason why I hate doctors. I told her how both of them wanted me to undergo a procedure that would require me to lie naked on a table while they shove needles up my crotch & fry off a part of my heart--without anesthesia. I told her that there was no conclusive proof that I'd ever experienced any symptoms because of my condition (it's POSSIBLE, but it's not CERTAIN), and in light of that, I didn't think an invasive heart procedure was worth the risk. My pdoc agreed and left it at that. However, she said that at the end of this month I should drop my doxepin back down to 75 mgs because one of the possible side effects is heart arrhythmia. I said that this was fine.

So after I got home I did a little research on doxepin. (You'd think I would have done this when I first started the drug in 2006.) Turns out arrhythmia is a potential side effect for ALL tricyclic antidepressants. Uh-oh. I'm not going to stop taking doxepin, but at my next appointment I want to discuss possible alternatives in case I ever HAVE to stop taking doxepin.

One more side note about Healthcentral--it's bad enough when people on the street mistake me for being male. I suppose I should expect it from people who've never met me face-to-face.

I thought for sure we'd get a snow day today because of the treacherous conditions. But we didn't. So I took a day off today and did absolutely nothing. Then we closed early. So I guess I took half a day. I'll be surprised if we don't get tomorrow off. It's supposed to be even uglier.

Didja hear about that boy in Philadelphia who was attacked by his classmates? 6 people beat him up, a 7th person filmed it, it happened in broad daylight near an apartment complex, and NO ONE CALLED 911 FOR HELP. You can even see people walking past in the video.

Why is it considered socially acceptable for students to beat each other up? Why is it "just a part of growing up"? Why do we "just have to learn to deal with it"?

You've probably heard about Katie, the little girl in Chicago who got picked on by her male classmates for bringing a Star Wars bottle to school. Well, someone at Epbot.com picked up on the story, and from there it spread like wildfire. Then the Epbot people decided to put all the supportive comments together in a book & sell it. You can buy it at Lulu. I did. It's nearly 600 pages long, and the print isn't terribly large. Every few nights I read a few pages of it. It makes me feel better when bad stuff is happening to kids at school.
- posted by Pat @ 7:33 PM | 0 comments