After a week of eating in the 1700 to 1800 calories per day range I’m feeling better.  Not good mind you but better.  I’m totally dragging my ass at work but at least I’ve been able to drag said ass to work which is an improvement over last weekend, physically at least.  Despite eating more or maybe because of it I’ve been very sad for the past few days and I feel revoltingly, hideously ugly.

 

I met with my new therapist for the first time on Thursday.  It wasn’t too bad, it may actually prove helpful but I’m finding it really exhausting to present myself again and again to all these different people- the intake worker, the psychiatrist, and now the therapist.  The whole experience of going to a community mental health clinic is really making me aware of my middle-class prejudices. 

 

I don’t like the fact that they have a “cash only” policy.  It seems like such an insult, like I can’t be trusted to write a good check or pay with a valid credit card.  It just seems icky to me that there’s a selection of condoms available in the ladies room.  When my therapist suggested that since I’m not happy with my job that when my depression is under control she could refer me to their “ready to work” program all I could think of was myself in a room of semi-illiterate people who have been on disability their entire lives being told things like “Don’t use excessive profanity during a job interview.” 

 

I hate myself for being sure a snob.  I know part of it is that I equate low-rent, half-assed recovery with my ex-boyfriend and his whole marginal lifestyle.  He didn’t have a bank account and he had to take jobs that paid in cash because he had all these creditors who would have garnished his wages if he’d gotten a check.  Most of our dates seemed to involve AA meetings and most of his friends were on welfare and/or disability.  I think I was finally convinced to leave the relationships when he started talking about how someday we would have a place together and when his friend June’s boyfriend got out of jail we could have them over for dinner. 

 

Basically when I go to a place like the mental health clinic I feel like I’m stepping back into a kind of life I’ve made every effort to distance myself from. 

I’ve developed something of a passion for the manga of Ai Yazawa, mostly Nana (I’ve devoured the first eight volumes) and also Paradise Kiss (which I’ve read the first volume of). 

 

Her series Nana was recommended to me based on a bit of Princess Tutu yuri I’d written and right before I lost my second job at Biff’s office I decided to take a chance and secured copies of the first eight volumes of the series from e-bay.  A rather significant risk, I might have hated the series, but as luck would have it Nana turns out to be one of the better manga series I’ve ever read. 

 

Basically it’s about two very different 20-year-old women, both named Nana who come to Tokyo, meet and whose lives become increasingly intertwined.   No science-fiction or supernatural elements, just a pair of girls trying to build their lives and become themselves. 

 

Nana Komatsu is an exuberant but essentially aimless young woman.  Good hearted but clueless she allows herself to drift through life in the wake of whoever she happens to be in love with.  When her friends, including her boyfriend, move to Tokyo to attend art school, she follows them.  On the train to the city she meets the other Nana, Nana Osaki.

 

Nana Osaki is a punk rock singer with very definite goals.  Her previous band, Blast, was a local success in the small city she is from but that ended when their bassist Ren left to join the major label band Trapnest.  Ren was also Nana’s lover and he asked her to come with him but she declined as it would have meant being relegated to “rock star’s girlfriend.”  Their affair was put on hold and in Tokyo, Nana O is determined to become a success at least equal to Ren, with her new band.    

 

Nano O is guarded as Nana K is open, sharing little about her painful childhood or her personal life.  Yet her music has the ability to move people deeply.  Through her music, she seems to speak for them. 

 

While there’s some cutesy stuff, overall Nana is much more adult- as in grown-up, than most manga I’ve read.  Also it’s more novelistic, things seem to develop, grow and deepen with each installment. 

 

Also it has a sensibility I love. 

 

While so much manga seems to focus on students in school uniforms who aspire to the student council, Yazawa’s characters are hip bohemians, artist and musicians in Nana, an enclave of edgy fashion designers in Paradise Kiss.   They shop at thrift stores and vintage shops and garner inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Velvet Goldmine- definitely my kind of scene.  In a way Nana reminds me somewhat painfully of my college years, especially Nana K’s desire to be included in Nana O’s circle of punk musicians.  

 

Though I’m quite late to the party, I’ve started watching the BBC series Torchwood.  I polished off the first season on DVD and am two episodes into season 2 via downloads.  Overall I like it quite a bit.  Season One was fairly uneven.  There were some good episodes but some truly baffling suspensions of logic were required (I’m sorry, but any solution that involves reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson aloud is not acceptable).   Still, it’s amazing what you can forgive of a show that makes just about everybody in its entire cast more or less bisexual.    

 

And when I say everyone I mean everyone.  The leader of Torchwood (an alien hunting organization that’s sort of the UK equivalent to Men In Black) Captain Jack Harkness  openly admits to lovers of both sexes, is sexually involved with a member of his team but still manages to have a kind of “unresolved sexual tension” thing going with Gwen.  In addition to holding up her part of the UST with Jack, Gwen has a boyfriend and has an affair with the team’s medic Owen.  This doesn’t stop her from kissing a woman processed by an alien in the second episode of the show.  Computer expert Toshiko, who seems to have a crush on Owen has an affair with an alien who is female in human form.    An episode is devoted to another team member, Ianto’s efforts to resurrect his girlfriend but it’s gradually revealed in future episodes that he’s become involved with Jack.  Even Owen, a compulsive womanizer and seemingly the straightest member of Torchwood makes out with a guy in the series premiere and during an apocalyptic moment suggests that both Ianto and Toshiko have end of the world sex with him. 

 

I sort of love this kind of stuff. 

 

Season One had a lot of promise which I hope Season Two will deliver on.  It definitely seemed to be off to a good start in the first episode (appropriately titled “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” when Spike (yes, that Spike—Buffy Spike) shows up looking for Jack to be his Drusilla.  Okay, it’s not Spike.  His name is Captain John Hart.  He’s brunette and American.  And he’s not a vampire, he’s some sort of time agent thing that I’d know about if I’d actually watched Dr. Who before watching the spin-off but basically it’s Spike engaging in violent making out with a really cute (if full of himself) guy and in my book, that is pretty stunning. 

 

On the literary front I just finished reading Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith.  It’s the third novel I’ve read by Waters (I admit it, I have a thing for Victorian lesbians).  The others were Tipping the Velvet (my favorite) and Affinity.   

 

I’d seen a BBC adaptation of Fingersmith a couple of years ago so I knew the basic outlines of the plot, which is probably a good thing.  I’m less concerned with being surprised than I am with knowing what’s going on and Fingersmith is full of the sort of twists and turns and reversals that often times confuse the hell out of me.  Knowing where the story was going freed me up to focus on the characters, the wonderful period dialogue and the rich atmosphere that Water’s evokes.  This atmosphere is by turns sensual and sickening.  Water has a way of making you smell the 19^th century and what with chamberpots and close rooms on rainy nights reeking of dog and unwashed bodies it doesn’t always smell good. 

 

In Fingersmith, Waters seems to deliberately set out to write a sort of post-modern  Dickensonian novel brimming over with melodramatic contrivances such as switched babies, ghastly uncles, and dastardly plots as well as expanding Dickens social themes to include issues of gender and sexuality as well as wealth and class. 

 

Another bit of post-modern pseudo-Victoriana I’ve indulged in lately is Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, about a pair of rival illusionists.  This was my second viewing of The Prestige.  I have to admit my first left me rather baffled.  As I said, I’m not so good a following plots and The Prestige is extremely complicated, a puzzle of a movie in much the same way Nolan’s Memento was.

 

The film’s complexity is encapsulated by its framing device—much of the movie concerns a man reading another man’s diary about reading his own diary.  Follow?  Of course both diaries were intended to be read and are full of deliberate misinformation.  Appropriate for a film that’s central themes are doubles, the creation of illusion and how things are not what they seem to be.  I definitely got much more out of the Prestige by seeing it a second time and I’d like to watch it again just to clear up some details I didn’t really follow.  Also having watched it, I’d rather like to see Nolan’s contribution to the Batman mythology.  I’ve been intensely interested in Batman as a sort of masculine   archetype since I was a teenager but somehow I never got around to seeing Batman Begins. 

I’ve managed to make myself ill, again.  This time it’s a combination of  things- an increase in my  new medication from 20 to 60 mg per day, having my period (which always makes me feel really tired) and a month of fairly rigorous dieting finally catching up with me.  

 

I haven’t mentioned the dieting because I knew it wasn’t something I should be doing, but I decided I really wanted to get back down to 140 pounds so I’d cut back from 1900 to 2000 calories a day to 1400 to 1500. 

 

Trying to lose weight always makes me feel good at first.  I’m a sneak.  I’ve always liked getting away with things and it feels like that’s what I’m doing, getting away with something by taking in less food than my body needs.  Unfortunately if I get away with 1450 calories in a day that becomes my new standard, the new norm and it becomes something I aspire to do everyday. 

 

And in all honesty, it really hasn’t been worth it.  I’ve been feeling progressively more run down over the past few weeks.  Yesterday I had a pounding headache and was so exhausted I ended up lying on my bed for most of the afternoon even though there was construction being done in my apartment and there were workers coming and going, sawing, arguing with their girlfriends on their cell phones, and making rude remarks about my kitty’s girth. 

 

Right now, I’m only dealing with the fact that I feel lousy.  On payday I will have to deal with the fact that I missed two and a half days of work and have absolutely no sick time incurred.  I can cover it with some of the money I got from my tax return but I’d much rather leave that in savings. 

 

I don’t know why it’s so difficult for me to take care of myself.  I did mention this to my psychiatrist on Thursday and she says it’s because I have disordered thinking patterns around food and I need to 1.) Recognize them and 2.) Resist them.  As with most things I’m a lot better at dealing with extreme cases than day to day stuff.  For instance the case of the Master Cleanser Fast. 

 

This is that cleansing fast where you live on a drink made of distilled water and organic lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper.  One of my co-workers at the market was doing this and I got really interested.  I was asking questions, looking information up on the web, earnestly absorbing testimony on how horrible it is that people are so addicted to eating (breathing too) and of course thinking of trying it myself.  In this situation, I was able to see that while cleansing fasts probably do have their benefits for most people it would be a dangerous thing for someone with my history of eating disorders to get into and dropped the idea of trying it.  However when faced with a less extreme situation, attempting to lose five pounds, I can justify it to myself as normal or even desirable behavior and give in to the compulsion. 

 

Someday I’m going to work this all out. 

 

Several years ago when it first came out, I bought a copy of the Tori Amos album The Beekeeper but never really connected with it.  Recently however I’ve been listening to it quite a bit.  The song “Parasol” sort of reminds me of where I am with this, where I’ve been for a very long time…

 

“When I come to terms with this when I come to terms with this when I come to terms with this my world will change for me.”. 

Nonnie, my maternal grandmother, called me yesterday morning before work and we had a good conversation.  She’s always been really easy to talk to and even though it’s been months since we’ve spoken and almost a year since I’ve seen her it still feels very comfortable.  She turned 90 a couple of months ago but you’d never know it, she’s still completely lucid, very sharp, and aware of everything around her.  She had some trouble with her eyes over the winter and she’s suffered from severe arthritis for years but she seemed to be in excellent spirits when I spoke to her which is good.  Sometimes she gets very frustrated and sick of it all and says things like “I wish I could just die,” and “I’ve lived too long”.  When this happens I really don’t know what to say.  I hate to hear it but I can understand.  Living with chronic pain is a terrible thing and I know she’s lost many people who were important to her, especially my grandfather who died almost 10 years ago. 

 

I really do miss her.  Since I’ve come to Chicago I’ve really tended to focus on the negative aspects of my life in Upstate New York but Nonnie and I had a pretty good relationship.  I actually lived with her for a couple months when she had knee replacement surgery and we got along very well which is quite an accomplishment considering both of us are fairly independent and happiest living by ourselves so we can do things our way (she’s still living on her own, my parents, who live across the street, keep a close eye on her to make sure she’s okay but she doesn’t want to actually live with them because they bicker all the time and their house is too cluttered for her taste.)

 

Speaking of my parents bickering, that’s one thing I don’t miss at all.    The other day at work there was a couple arguing in another line, the wife yelling at her husband, and it really upset me because it reminded me so much of the way my parents interact with each other—constant antagonism and hostility.  I always saw it as my obligation to try and keep some kind of peace between them and I devoted nearly a decade, from 23 to 32, to trying to mediate their marriage.  I made no impact on them but they’ve certainly made an impact on me.  I think it’s what inspires me to live alone, not date and limit my love life to crushes on people who are unavailable (straight women, gay men, people of both sexes in established relationships).

A couple interesting things from the past few days.

 

I apparently have an admirer.  A few days ago when I was in the nearby park a gentleman I recognized from the low-income housing residence on my block came up, introduced himself and told me I was “cute as hell.”  Then he asked me if I had a boyfriend to which I promptly answered yes.  Now I feel a little bit paranoid every time I go out.  I guess I do have deep seated issues with men, especially men who have those little teardrop tattoos that I think I once read somewhere tend to indicate involvement in a gang or a history of incarceration.

 

Work on Friday was harsh.  I had not one but two customers ANGRY with me.  Well, they weren’t really angry at me personally but I got to be on the receiving end of their generalized frustrations with Whole Foods and the public aid respectively.  First a woman came through my line and started yelling at me because the store didn’t carry plastic bags anymore and saying that Whole Foods was arrogant and that they were disrespecting her.  There are channels to deal with customer complaints and I am not one of them.  I suggested she speak to Customer Service, fill out a customer complaint form, e-mail Corporate Headquarters, etc. etc. She refused to do any of these unless Whole Foods was willing to pay her to be a consultant and continued on her tirade.  At which point the other customers in line started yelling at her to shut up and stop holding them up. 

 

Somehow this got resolved… I don’t even remember how.  I think she finally just got sick of me and went to yell at Customer Service.  About 20 minutes later a gentleman came through the line with a bottle of soda.  Seemed like a nice safe transaction but it ended up being a complicated mess because he was paying with a Link card (Electronic Food Stamps) and apparently the soda couldn’t be purchased this way.  Which seemed very weird because I’d always thought any food item except alcohol was okay but apparently the state had recently updated their list of what can be bought with Food Stamps but in the meantime there was much tension.  I was accused of doing something weird on my end to prevent the transaction from going through and the poor unfortunate co-worker I called over to help me figure out what was wrong was accused of playing games.  Finally he too went off to the Customer Service Desk.  No matter how difficult my job gets I am infinitely thankful that I am not a supervisor and therefore unqualified to work at the Customer Service Desk. 

 

Interestingly, despite all the ill-will and hostility aimed in my direction I didn’t get really upset or start crying or anything.  Maybe my new medication is starting to kick in.

I started on the new medication two days ago—no change yet, these things always take a couple weeks, but I’m hoping for the best It seems incomprehensible to me that it’s already May, I feel like I’ve been dealing with the same issues (not liking my job, depression) since January or even December. I guess I’ve made some progress but it really feels like I haven’t moved at all, haven’t accomplished any of the things I wanted to. I haven’t even finished the painting I was supposed to give my sister for Christmas yet.

I have been thinking about what kind of job I would like, which is a step in the right direction. Last week when my brother was visiting I was over at my sisters and I was coloring with my three year old niece who said I was very good at coloring and I said that I wished I could color for a living.

Which got me thinking, there actually are people who color professionally-- comic books have colorists and that’s a job I’d love all to pieces. I looked on-line to find what skills are needed. I could do a bang-up job working as a hand-colorist but except for really fancy painted graphic novels most comics are digitally colored so it’s recommended that you learn Photoshop.

So I’ve spent the past couple of days learning Adobe Photoshop 7. I got a book out from the library and there are also some tutorials on-line though of course just messing around with the program is the best teacher. I have a lot of scanlated manga to files which gives me lots of black and white images to practice on.

This is one of my first attempts. It’s just a simple image from Setiba Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (the black and white orignal is on the right). I’m working on a full page, backgrounds are more difficult to do than images of characters and some of the effects are a little tricky but I think I’m doing pretty considering I just started.

 

( completed page under the cut )

 

I had my psychiatric evaluation on Thursday.  I’m pretty familiar with the structure of this sort of evaluation because I worked at a Chemical Dependencies Clinic in Upstate New York for five years and part of my job was transcribing our in house doctor’s notes.  Basically they have a checklist of questions to go through to determine if you’re oriented x3 (person, place and situation), whether or not you’re having visual or auditory hallucinations, whether or not you’re a danger to yourself or others. 

 

I know this but I still feel a little insulted when asked if I hear voices.  I’m depressed, not Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Of course I suppose in all fairness they have no way of knowing that without asking (well, maybe reading the notes from the hour and a half evaluation I went through on my last visit). 

 

Anyways the psychiatrist thought that I should either bump my intake of Effexor XR from 275 to 350 mg per day or try adding a small dose of Cymbalta, an anti-depressant I’ve never heard of. 

 

I don’t want to take a higher dose of Effexor because I already feel foggy sometimes at the dose I’m on.  I looked up Cymbalta on-line and it doesn’t seem too much different than any of the other anti-depressants so far as side effects are concerned so I’m going to give it a try.  To be perfectly honest I was hoping for Wellbutrin but it turns out Wellbutrin is not recommended for people with a history of eating disorders which is probably smart as I only wanted it because I’ve heard most people lose weight on it. 

 

I haven’t started taking Cymbalta yet; my brother-in-law is rounding up some samples for me, that way I won’t have to spend a lot of money on something that might not work. 

 

I have a tendency to peep at doctors notes when I can.  I noticed that I was given a 40 under Axis V, which rates level of functioning.  I looked it up and according to psyweb.com a rating of 31-40 means—

 

Some impairment in reality testing or communication ( e.g., speech is at times illogical, obscure, or irrelevant ) OR major impairment in several areas, such as work or school, family relations, judgment, thinking, or mood ( e.g., depressed man avoids friends, neglects family, and is unable to work; child frequently beats up younger children, is defiant at home, and is failing at school ).

 

I think (I hope) I fall under the impairment in several areas rather than the impairment in reality.  Impaired reality seems much more serious. 

I saw my brother and his wife on Wednesday- our sister had everyone over for dinner at her place.  It was really good to see them again.  They’re fun to be around; unlike me (and my sister to a lesser degree) they don’t seem to devote most of their time to being REALLY ANXIOUS.  My brother is so easy going and self-assured sometimes it seems impossible to believe we come from the same household. 

 

I think part of it might be that he figured out early what he wanted to do with his life (be a lawyer and make a shitload of money) and worked towards it with a single-minded focus from a fairly early age.  I on the other hand have always know I wanted to be an artist and writer but have gone about it in a completely half-assed way never feeling that it was a legitimate career to pursue and that to make a living I’d have to do something else.  Ironically I am barely making a living whereas if I’d gone after I interests with more conviction I might be doing something I enjoy much more than working as a supermarket casher and making more money. 

 

I know I shouldn’t compare myself to my siblings but its difficult not to.  I do feel like I’ve accomplished so little compared to both my brother and sister who are in stable relationships, financially well off and reasonably happy.  Whereas I seem to have such a hard time with basic stuff.  A very good illustration of this was the dinner itself.  They were both comfortable enough with themselves that they could eat Indian food and drink wine whereas I did neither.  I ate before I came so I could control my calorie intake and drinking is not an option for me because once I start I can’t really stop.

 

Not that the evening was unpleasant in anyway.  A great deal of interesting stuff talked about. 

 

My sister-in-law is working on a master’s thesis in interior design on vintage art-deco hotels in Miami, Florida which sounds absolutely fascinating.  I’d love to see some of the places she was talking about.  She says that the furnishings weren’t always as far out as the architecture however and sometimes would be down right Victorian as if to reassure the people who stayed there that it wasn’t such a far out establishment. 

 

She and my brother also go to Disney World at least once a year as do my sister and her family so they talked about it quite a bit.  I’ve never been and would probably hate it if I did go (being 0% fun) but in theory all sounds very exotic to me, all the internationally themed restaurants and crazy pirate and Haunted Mansion stuff. 

 

Politics of course came up as they’re bound to.  My brother and sister-in-law live in Washington DC and they were at National Park when George W. Bush threw out the first pitch and was booed by the crowd.  They’d seen him throw out the first pitch of the season a couple years ago (2005 I believe).  My sister-in-law had stood up and turned her back on him and she said she got quite a bit of flack from it from people in the crowd but that when she did it this time nobody said a word.  “Even guys who look like me we booing him,” my brother (who is very corporate/conservative looking) said.  So apparently there’s not a lot of love for President Bush anywhere these days. 

 

My sister had heard about the incident and actually had a discussion about it with one of the other mothers at my nephew’s school.  The other mother said it was wrong to boo the president and that people needed to show respect for the office even if they didn’t like the person in it.  My sister disagreed with this as there have been countless examples of people in positions of authority- Hitler being the example she gave- who have done horrible things and should not have been respected simply because they had a title or occupied a high position. 

 

This sort of reminded me of one of the many themes in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, which I was reading at the time.  The idea that Billy is essentially innocent but has to be punished by death because that is the law and the law is the decree of the King (Billy Budd is set in the British navy) and therefore must be observed to the letter.  This is the argument put out by Captain Vere.  Melville portrays Vere sympathetically but I don’t think he intended it to be lost on the reader that the same King who’s decree Vere is set on upholding is the same King that his countrymen revolted against in the American Revolution and that Billy Budd is ultimately a tragedy because law wins out over morality.

Good news and bad news.

My little brother Jackson and his wife are in Chicago. While Jackson has had to do lawyer things for most of his stay here he has tomorrow evening free and I was able to change shifts so I could have it off so I’ll be able to see them. We’re probably going to be meeting at my sister’s. I haven’t see Jackson and his wife since August and I don’t think my sister, brother and I have been together for a couple of years so I’m really looking forward to it.

The bad news is that I got an e-mail from Biff yesterday and his Uncle, who owns the business Biff runs, has finally given him go-ahead to hire a full time assistant. This is good for him because since he manages over 200 properties he really needs someone to help him. However it is bad for me because it means he won’t need me to come in once a week and pay bills anymore which means I won’t be getting that extra $80 a week I’ve been making.

I’m pretty sure I can mange without it but it means no extras—no impulse buying of manga or DVD and I’ll have to be more careful about buying groceries, no splurging on exotic and overpriced things I see at the market that look ever so interesting.

And I have non-financial reasons for wishing I could have kept the job. I had really been excited about being around when Biff and his partner’s baby came in June. I’m sure I’ll see the baby and everything but it’s not the same as being around for hours a day. Of course it’s not as if the baby would be down in the office all the time…

Maybe this will help nudge me towards finding a job that pays enough that I don’t have to work 6 days a week to support myself and buy the occasional used DVD from ebay. I am finally feeling better after my very difficult winter though I don’t know if I’m quite at the point where I can imagine anyone hiring me. Also I feel like I need to take a serious look at what I want to do. My career strategy in the past has always been to take whatever job will have me but the other day I was reading one of those stupid articles on yahoo or MSN called “Tips to Find Your Dream Job” or something and the first tip was “Define your dream job”. I’ve never really looked at it from the angle of “what do I want to do every day?” (or maybe in my case “What would I be less miserable doing every day?”).

Today was Earth Day, the deadline for all Whole Foods Markets to eliminate plastic bags. The store where I work actually finished up our stock of plastic and has been all paper for about a week. It hasn’t been the easiest transition. Not all customers are happy about the change and I don’t think there’s anyone on the front end who wouldn’t happily bitch slap the next person to ask “What will I use to clean up after my dog?” Stuff like that is expected and pretty minor. The major problem came when we didn’t have enough full sized paper bags—I guess the order had been made when we still had plastic. For most of yesterday we had to bag all orders in little paper bags. This of course required twice as many bags per order as it would have with the bigger bags which probably ruled out any environmental good done by not using plastic. Chaos.

My own personal observance of Earth Day I decided to focus on one wasteful habit of mine, bringing my lunch to work each day in a plastic bag I throw away and using plastic forks and spoons from the deli to eat it with. Starting today I used one of my older recycled plastic totes and brought silverware from home. Also I’m going to try to ride my bike for shorter trips instead of driving. I don’t know if I’m going to ride to work like I did sometimes last year. I really feel nervous about some of the intersections on the way (most of all the Damon/ Diversey/ Clybourn intersection where I had my accident last year but also the place where Logan Blvd. crosses Elston—a couple of new businesses have gone up at the corner in addition to a very busy Target and I really don’t want to ride through it). Final thing I want to do for Earth Day is find out once and for all what is up with recycling (or lack thereof) in my neighborhood. The City of Chicago blue bins aren’t here yet and you can’t get blue recycling bags from the old program in stores any more. I don’t even know if the city is still taking blue bags to be recycled anymore or if they’re just treating them as trash. I haven’t recycled in a couple months but I just haven’t been focused enough to sort things out.

Yesterday I broke out my bike and went riding for the first time since November.  I went over to my sister’s place in Ukrainian Village and though I took mainly side streets I did a little riding on busier roads and it’s going to take me a while to get used to traffic.  It gets sort of daunting when you’ve got parked cars on one side and cars and trucks zooming by on the other.  I do wish my bike had narrower handlebars.  When my bike was in the shop after my accident last summer (for those of you who missed it: Deathly Hallows release + 3 way intersection + city bus + turn of questionable legality + me= smashed bike and spectacular bruising) but they still seem too wide.

 

After numerous false starts it seems like spring is finally here.  Several successive days of fine weather have done wonders for my mindset.  I feel like I’ve finally pulled out of the period of low mood I’ve been in since the end of March.  Yesterday when I was at my sisters I felt pretty content and enjoyed myself whereas a week or two ago I felt quite bad about how we were relating and everything.  I think when I get in these moods everything is off. 

 

Because I’m feeling so much better I’m almost tempted to cancel my psychiatrist appointment next week because frankly the clinic in Pilsen is seedy and depressing and I’d really rather not go there.  Unfortunately it’s what I can afford and I have to make myself follow through on the appointment.  I’m all right at the moment but if I don’t address the problems with my medication the sort of depression I’ve had to go through this winter is going to continue to be a problem. 

On Tuesday I went to see the movie Stop-Loss, a drama about Iraq war vets who return home believing their service has ended only to learn that under the militaries stop-loss policy they’re going to be sent back.  Stop-Loss is the first film that openly lesbian director Kimberly Peirce has made since Boys Don’t Cry back in 1999.  One of the reasons I really wanted to see this movie is because a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to see Peirce speak (she has Chicago roots, she’s a University of Chicago alumni) and she was talking about the struggle she was in with the studios to make the film she wanted—a movie about war and returning veterans drawing from her younger brothers experiences in Iraq and 70’s films on similar themes like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. 

 

I’m glad she was finally able to make her movie and I think Kimberly Peirce is the ideal choice to make a movie of this kind, maybe because she isn’t a Hollywood insider.   She has a lot of respect for her soldier characters; she doesn’t denigrate them for their lack of education and their very traditional aspirations and that makes their love of their Texas home town seem real even to someone like me who’s very alienated from small town values.  Peirce doesn’t glamorize or sentimentalize this world, she just let’s us see it through her characters eyes. 

 

She did this very effectively in Boys Don’t Cry as well.  When I first read about the life and death of female to male trans-person Brandon Teena in the Village Voice I remember thinking “He should have gotten the fuck out of Nebraska, gone to San Fran or NYC.”  Watching Boys Don’t Cry, this didn’t really seem like an option.  Brandon didn’t want to escape Nebraska, he wanted to belong there.  It was sometimes exciting, sometimes beautiful, it was home.  It was where he died but it was also where he found a girl who accepted him and loved him.  Peirce never vilified Brandon’s world, didn’t turn it into a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vision of homophobic hell.  There were good people in it and bad.  

 

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit about the cultural divide in America lately because of all the controversy surrounding the statement Barack Obama made regarding Pennsylvania primary voters about bitter people clinging to God and guns.  I have to admit when I heard it I didn’t think it was at all offensive or questionable, I thought it was true.  Yet watching Stop-Loss I was able to suspend judgment, to watch and feel for characters that don’t see the war in Iraq the way I do, who believe in Tody Keith songs and guns and the military.  I think this is quite an accomplishment on Kimberly Peirce’s part that she can make someone with a lousy elitist attitude like mine inhabit the world of these characters.  In times like these its’ critically important to have artists who can serve as a bridge between liberal and conservative, red and blue, urban and suburban (does rural America even exist any more?  I think of the area around my hometown, how acres and acres of farmland turned to acres and acres of used car lots, gas stations and fast food restaurants as I grew up).   

 

Though its characters honestly believe in “killing terrorists over there so we don’t have to kill them here” Stop-Loss is very much an anti-war film and it pulls no punches in showing the damage war does to the men who fight it and the ways in which the very people who support the action in Iraq are being screwed over by it.  The scenes of fighting set in Iraq are pretty harrowing and really give a sense of just what urban guerilla warfare involves—it involves driving (and sometimes shooting) on city streets with pedestrians, bicyclists and local traffic as well as people on sidewalks.  It involves combatants running into civilian apartment building.  It’s not just a matter of taking out the enemy but of trying not to take out the neighborhood and of course not to get killed in the process.  Both the psychological and physical toll the war takes on soldiers is also unflinchingly portrayed.  We see a solider named Rodriguez wounded early on and references are made to him thought out the film but it’s very shocking when we finally see him, blinded, scarred by shrapnel, minus an arm and a leg, during a sequence set at a VA hospital.   On the emotional side, both of the films main characters, Brandon (Ryan Philleppe) and Steve (Channing Tatum) as well as their friend Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have been seriously impacted by their experiences in Iraq.  All of them display volatile behavior and abuse, both Brandon and Steve have flashbacks to combat, and neither Steve nor Tommy can sustain a relationship with their partners.    It’s no wonder that the stop-loss policy, which threatens to send Brandon back after everything he’s been through, seems so consummately unfair. 

 

Unfortunately, while Stop-Loss has moments that are powerful and thought provoking overall it just didn’t seem to come together for me.  It sort of meandered towards the middle and I really felt there was something missing in the character trajectory of Tommy.  He really felt more like a plot contrivance than an organic part of the story.  Still, I’m glad Peirce was finally able to make the film though I can’t help wondering if innovative directors would fare better outside the studio system entirely.  I guess it’s the cultural question all over again.  Because Stop-Loss was made through a studio it has wider distribution, it’ll show at multiplexes instead of art house theaters.  It might actually show outside of major cities.  Whether or not anyone in these markets will opt to see an anti-war film directed by a gay woman is up for grabs but it’s good that they’re given the option.  Given the amount of time I spent in living in rural upstate New York I can appreciate that Peirce wants to reach beyond what would be considered the target audience of educated, urban liberals and actually have this picture seen by the people it’s most relevant to.

The weather here in Chicago has been bouncing back and forth between wintry and spring like over the past couple of weeks with each new front being ushered in by heavy winds.  I think I must be affected by barometric pressure because I’ve been very lethargic recently, taking naps during the day and not doing much beyond dragging myself to work and watching a whole lot of DVDs.  

 

Maybe in an attempt to remedy this I’ve made a couple health related decisions recently.  First I’ve gone off the pill.  I initially went on it in January in hopes that it might lessen my pre-menstrual depression however something is amiss and during the three months I’ve been taking it I’ve had my period five times.  So I’m still having the pre-menstrual depression, just every two weeks instead of every six. 

 

Also I’ve stopped drinking diet soda.  Again.  I got hooked on diet soda circa 1994 and have alternated between periods of abstinence (several of which were a year or more in length) and periods of massive consumption (three to four 20 ounce bottles a day, a liter over the course of an evening).  When I started working at whole foods back in September of 2006 their “no artificial sweeteners” policy inspired me to cut out diet pop and I managed to avoid it completely until December of 2007 when I started up again at my usual excessive levels which was a big mistake. 

 

Drinking diet soda not only makes me feel like I’m freezing cold from the inside out it increases my appetite, which is already pretty substantial to begin with.   Even though I’m at a normal weight and I’ve been eating nearly 2000 calories a day I still feel really hungry sometimes and I expect that has to do with drinking diet soda.  I really think the taste of sugar that isn’t really there makes your body want calories.  In addition to the screwed-up physical things it does when I drink diet soda I tend to go into a weird obsessive compulsive mode and treat it in the same way an alcoholic might treat liquor—that is to say I spend an inordinate amount of time planning and working out things so that I will have access to diet soda at all times (caffeinated for during the day, non-caffeinated for evenings), stocking up for the next day, and going out of my way to get certain flavors I’m fixated on (Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper is to me the holy grail of diet pop.  The only place I’ve ever seen it in 20 ounce bottles is at CVS at Chicago and Western).  It’s actually quite a load off my mind not to have to be doing all this extra worrying and plotting. 

Pa-daddy was in town from Thursday until Monday night. I had to work most of the time but I did have Saturday off and was able to attend my nephew Minya’s 6th Birthday party. It was quite an event. They rented out the Portage Theater, a big old-fashioned movie theater on Milwaukee Avenue, and were showing cartoons on the big screen. In the lobby (which was about as big as the average multiplex theater) there was cake and a table with toys and one that had stuff to color with. There were a ton of kids, they invited Minya’s entire kindergarten class plus some kids they know from outside of the class and friends of my three year old niece Kitten.

It was all pretty neat though I find it hard to get my head around the fact that Minya is already a six year old. I can still remember in vivid detail when I came out to visit the week before he was born, what the weather was like (sunny and cold then gray, drizzling and cold), the movies I watched (all horror movies—Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, The Witch’s Mirror, Daughters of the Darkness), I even remember going to the Whole Foods where I work now for groceries. It doesn’t seem possible that it was six whole years ago.

I had been hoping to go out to dinner with Pa while he was visiting but in the end I just couldn’t. I feel really bad about my body and my weight right now, almost to the point of hallucination—when I look at my body I see the shape of a Hottentot Venus, huge distended stomach and jutting buttocks. I feel like I let my father down but I honestly don’t want to go out in public these days much less eat in public. The thought of going to a restaurant where I wouldn’t have any idea how many calories I was eating freaked me the hell out. We did take a couple of walks together which was nice. He seems to be fairly happy. He’s preaching again at a small church and very involved with the parishioners. He also has his business buying, selling and refinishing antiques and does a lot for my grandmother.

It was good to see him yet part of me feels dissatisfied. It just seems like no one in my family—not just my father but also my sister and her husband-- seems particularly concerned about me. I’ve been having a really hard time lately. I’ve had serious depression that I nearly had to the emergency room over. I’ve had incidents of cutting, they’ve had to give me a medical leave of absence at work, and most of the time I can hardly stand myself. I feel like I’m a complete mess and that no one even notices or if they do notice they’re used to it. Maybe I’ve been crazy so long my latest crisis hardly makes a blip on the radar.

I know this is passive aggressive but I kept saying stuff about how I felt like I was over weight and how uncomfortable I was with my weight and how I felt like I needed to lose weight and eat less. No one told me I looked fine or that I was okay where I was which was sort of what I wanted. Maybe I’m asking too much. I know I shouldn’t try to manipulate people into giving me validation and I’m sure it makes them uncomfortable when I start harping on how much I weigh or how unhappy I’ve been. 

I have a lot of stuff that I need to update about.

Last Friday I had my mental health evaluation at the clinic in Pilsen. They gave me a referral to a psychiatrist but that appointment isn’t until 04/24/08. The same day I had the evaluation I completely crashed out. I missed work (thankfully it’s covered under a medical leave of absence so I won’t incur any points) and was practically catatonic for the rest of the day. For the next couple day I was well enough to go to work but like a zombie barely functioning.

I don’t know what it way-- I tend to have a lot of problems of this kind in the spring when the weather goes back and forth or it might have been stress from everything that’s been going on at work lately plus the evaluation—but it really wasn’t a very convenient time for a crack-up given that the employee forum was scheduled for Tuesday morning and was set to arrive for a visit on Thursday.

Thankfully after a generally horrible weekend by Monday I felt semi-human again and I was able to participate in the forum on Tuesday morning which I think went well. It sounds like there are going to be some positive changes and that Store Leadership will be more involved with the Front End. Also team member input is going to be taken into account when the new Front End Team Leader is hired which is very important.

Overall I feel pretty positive about the forum. There was a good turn-out even though it was at 6:00 a.m. in the morning which tells Store Leadership that people are concerned and that they want change.

I have to say, my personality quirks were on full display at this meeting.

I have a very extravagant streak and I’ve always loved throwing parties and playing hostress so I ended up bringing breakfast—Dunkin Donuts coffee, munchkins, organic half and half and soy creamer, fruit, scones, and mini muffins for 40 people. A bit over the top and a bit over my budget. Luckily one of the Store Leaders offered to reimburse me for part of it.

My other bit of weirdness was that I felt the need to call on my full power for the meeting, so despite getting up at 4:30 a.m. I managed to deck myself out in full make-up and fishnet stocking (because the legs are an often untapped source of power). It’s funny, I guess I see my sexuality not as something that’s really a part of my daily life but as something I evoke at those times when I need to call in the heavy artillery (“So you wanna have some fun? Well break out the big guns” as the L7 song goes)..

This is an automatically generated collage of the things listed in my user profile. I thought it was rather nifty.


( My Interests Collage! )