Hello ladies and gents...

Forgive me indulging in something of a long shot! I'm from Manchester, England, and I'm coming to Chicago as part of my vacation. I'll be in town from Tuesday through to Saturday.

I was due to travel with a friend and as such I bought two tickets to the Blackhawks-Maple Leafs game on Friday night. As it is, for long and complicated reasons, I'll be travelling on my own. I've only ever seen one NHL game previous to this trip and I'll still be going even if it's just me and I sit next to an empty seat. However, that seems a bit of a waste.

So my question is, is there a local fan who'd like to take my spare ticket and come along too? I'd appreciate the extra experience of watching the game with a local who can probably teach me a few things, and er...well, you get to have me buy you a beer between periods. And you get to laugh at my stunning ineptitude when it comes to the game of ice hockey.

All I ask is face value ($95) for the ticket, which is in block 208 of United Center.

Leave comments or you can email me: ben dot rushworth at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

Saw the nutritionist yesterday. I don't think she normally works with eating disorders, because as I was talking about trauma and how I coped (and how Sis coped in the completely opposite way) and she seemed totally weirded out. I'm going to be asking her if there's a nutritionist in the Harris County system who DOES do work with ED patients. I'm thinking that this woman mainly works with the poor parents in the area to educate them how to feed their kids well and other stuff like that. I'm seeing a nutritionist in the first place because my triglycerides are in the 400s. That's SERIOUSLY bad. A product of an empty carbs/fast food/crap food diet that's been going on for YEARS. She asked me why I hadn't tried to fix my eating habits earlier. She didn't seem to understand what I was saying... I explained that my focus for the last 10 years has been just staying alive, so doing something beneficial was a low priority. I was in so much emotional pain, and eating made me feel better. I completely didn't care about calories or fat content, because I just cared about stopping the hurt. I also didn't care because the dark, damaged part of me rather wanted me to have a stroke or heart attack so I wouldn't have to do anything more drastic to die. Now that I'm a little more balanced emotionally, and no longer suicidal on a regular basis, I can focus on things to keep me alive, like exercising and eating better. However, she threw so much at me, I have overloaded. She wanted me to reduce both portion size and what I'm eating. Even though I explained that we needed to take this rather slowly or else I would just give up on it entirely. And that's already the case... yesterday, I got nothing but tea and a salad. I ate veggies as snacks. Today? Thus far I've had a double cheeseburger and a large regular coke. I have asked Mom to go to the store with me later so I can get some more healthy things so I have food in the house and not have to feel like I need to go out for fast food. Because having nothing in the house is always my downfall. My other downfall is not having any alternatives to my normal craving foods available. Mom bought sour cream and onion ruffles the other day. I have said on many occasions that a bag of potato chips in the house will ALWAYS disappear, because it's one of my biggest binge foods. And, if Mom wants to have chips, she needs to either buy the snack-size bags (which force me to only eat a small amount instead of the whole back in a sitting), and/or buy me some alternative. Like, she could have bought some baked lays or baked cheetos for me and I would have eaten those instead. Last night, she literally said, "So, I can NEVER have potato chips in the house again?" I really felt like saying, "YES DAMMIT. Not having chips in the house ISN'T THAT MUCH TO ASK." But, instead of getting mad, I calmly explained again about alternatives and snack sizes. Her response was that the snack-size ones are too expensive because you are just paying for packaging. I told her that it was critical for a while until I get to a point where I can be better about portion size. I mean, WTF. She KNOWS this is a problem and needs to listen to me as to how to help me get better. I get really frustrated and hurt when she gets all "you're messing with what I can eat" on me. She made the changes as Sis was recovering from the anorexia/bulemia. Why can't she do the same for me? Once again, it's the problem with being a compulsive overeater/binge eater. You just look fat and lazy, not actually sick, so it's a lot harder to get people to support you in recovery.

Thank GOD I had some therapy. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy has saved my life. Literally. It's a particular therapy approach that focuses on being aware of your feelings and learning how to have a feeling without letting it take over your life. Anyone who suffers from depression and/or anxiety really needs to check this out. Where I used to get so completely pissed at Mom about something, I am now able to stay calm. When she starts to ramp up and freak out, I don't ramp up and freak out with her. We haven't had a real screaming fight since I got about two weeks into the IOP prep group. It's so fabulous.

In other news, Texas is finally actually PLAYING football. The first quarter of this game against Central Florida was so horrid. But things are getting better now. Whew.

Sis moved back upstairs last night after having spent 6 weeks recovering from her first bunion surgery by living in Mom's room. This meant Mom slept on the couch again. She was getting crankier and crankier as time went on. Thank God I didn't engage her in the cranky. Now she has her own room back for a few weeks until Sis has surgery on her other foot. Maybe I can convince Mom to do convert the dining room into a makeshift bedroom for her next time. Just push all of the furniture against the walls, put up an air mattress, and hang some curtains to seal it off. It might help her sleep some. Since Mom is no longer out in the living room all of the time, Max has decided that he needs to climb the stairs to cuddle with me all the time. He used to sleep in my room during the winter when I was a teenager. Max's presence in my room is seriously annoying Fluffy, because she wants to be my cuddle kitty. But she has Sis now, and I think Max has told her so. It's just too funny.

Harris County's pharmacy is pissing me off AGAIN. But what's new, right? So, after trying every SSRI under the SUN to find one that didn't make me crazier, Lexapro was it, and I've proven that when I'm off of it for only 2 days,  I turn into CRAZY!Em. Naturally, this wonder drug is expensive, and Harris County has decided that it won't pay the extra money for it. This forces Mom to now shell out $130/month to keep me sane. Yay. The woman who does all the paperwork for this stuff hasn't gotten back to me about whether or not my doctor can appeal the committee's decision to not get me my drugs, or what the fuck happened to the prescription assistance paperwork I did for Lexapro's manufacturer. Because it'd be a hell of a lot better to get the meds for free/almost free.

I'm also probably going to drop out of the IOP. I had a breakdown on Monday (precipitated by the lack of  Lexapro, but it had been building for a while anyway), and realized that all I was really getting out of IOP was tired. I get up at 5:30 to commute an hour (in good traffic) to sit and listen to other people's problems for four hours, then sit in more traffic for 45 minutes to get home. I find that I'm good at providing feedback to others, but everyone else is so self-absorbed that they are unable to help me out much. So I'm putting in way more that I am getting out at this point. There is one woman who has no self esteem whatsoever and is perfectionistic, yet refuses to do stuff like comb her hair. She's otherwise functional, just batty. And has the most annoying mannerisms EVER. I think what's annoying is that she reminds me of me at about age 12, where all of my self-esteem was externalized, and I was trying to be perfect so people would like me. It took another 15 years, but I finally figured out that perfection was unattainable, and what bitchy Casey said didn't really mean that I sucked as a person. So I tend to want to constantly yell at this woman "YOU"RE 54!! GROW UP ALREADY!!" I spent last Wednesday getting lectured to for an hour by a dietetic student who actually had a full-on Valley Girl accent. I shit you not. She sounded EXACTLY like the girl who does the "Oh My God Becky" dialogue at the beginning of "Baby Got Back." This student was so stupid I would have mocked her, but she was already using the accent I would have used to mock her. There was nowhere else to go with the impression, and that actually frustrated me. She was even smacking her g um. You know, I was so stuck on the living caricature in front of me that I only just stopped to realize something: Do Valley girls even sound that way anymore? And, if so, what was she doing in Texas? She was too young to have grown up during the original Valley Accent Wildfire that spread across America and still has me saying "like" and "dude."

I emailed Dr. Shah (my kick-ass psychiatrist who is still the only person who I think really cares and is doing the job because he wants to, not because he's forced to), and let him know about my missing Lexapro and my feelings about IOP (since he's the medical director for it and was the one who referred me there). I want to know what he thinks before doing anything else.

I'm so headachy due to allergies. Yay!

Okay. Now for something happy/funny to balance all the woe:


What makes this one for me is the "WTF are you doing?" look on the background cat's face.

I smile big in photos. Closed-mouth smiles, half there, look silly on me. My eyes are big, and they get bigger, somehow, when I smile. I look like a goof when I try to smile with my lips together.

He smiles small. His favorite pictures of himself have his mouth closed, and he looks like he's got a secret that he's not telling the camera. He doesn't like photos where he smiles with his teeth showing.

When we smile--and I mean really, genuinely, deep-down smile--I sparkle; he glows.

I'm still waiting for a transcendently beautiful picture of the two of us laughing together, but whenever someone takes one, one or the other of us has our eyes squinched up funny, or a huge double chin.

At first glance, this is the best description of the two of us. I'm more outgoing, more verbose, more likely to be the one heard across the room. He's less likely to talk for the sake of making noise, more likely to think before he speaks, less brash, more likely to back up what I'm saying and distill my ramblings.

And maybe the fact that those first impressions are as one-dimensional as a photographed smile is why we complement each other so well. It's a clear, accurate picture, but it's far from being the full spectrum of smiles that either of us has.

Maybe the squinchy-eyed, double-chinned, weird-angled laughing photo is transcendently beautiful after all.



For the visually impaired: There is a photo of Colin and I standing in front of a Christmas tree. We're both looking straight at the camera. I'm smiling a wide, full smile. He's smiling more gently, with his lips together. It's one of our favorite photos of the two of us together.

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This has been an entry for therealljidol. Other entries for this topic can be found here.

NaNoWriMo is going well so far. It helps that I have a story to tell in which just rushing through I'm sure will be more than 50,000 words. I confess, I didn't write Sunday or Monday, but I didn't let getting off on the wrong foot stop me. That's something I'm continually getting better at over the years, not letting procrastination and embarrassment win. Most of the time anyway. There's still a few things that I need to work on.

But so yeah, its at over eight thousand words right now, this revision might be the hardest to imagine when the time comes, because ofhow many places I'm doing "telling". I suppose that's my personal gimmick. There are a lot of tips out there on how to pummel through and get a first draft written and I think mine is, "don't worry if you're telling."  Sometimes when I notice it I think I should make a note of it so I know to go back and fix it later, but when I start getting into the analysis that begins to paralyze the writing.

Meanwhile my hunter is desperately trying to find herself an Onyxia 25 group, I believe I've become unhealthfully obsessed in this regard, except that it doesn't require a lot of conscious effort on my part, mostly I'm just keeping an eye out and hoping magic happens.

Packing for a month long trip in a foreign country is a bit intimidating, it turns out. Better to be like girljim, who was packed on Wednesday.

I had a little fender-bender in the car leaving a bon voyage dinner last night, which put a slight pall over what should have been a celebratory evening. My mother in law said she would take care of fixing the car while we are away. :)

Off soon! I have to change the OGM on my cell phone--"Out of the country for a month. Try e-mailing me."

You don't realize how many secrets you have until you start reading the Postsecret archives.
Then you worry about what is wrong in your head.

My secret is, I'm full of secrets and am afraid to tell anyone any of them.

Yes, I'm moving again. A year has come and gone, and apparently it's time for me to move again. It's not like I had lease or that I had to move, but apparently I've developed this restless bug that forces me to move once a year. I hate boxing up my stuff and hiking it from place to place. I hate unpacking and discovering that things got broken or somehow lost along the way. In short, I hate moving, but I'm doing it again anyway. This will be at least my sixth move in four years.

The movers arrive today to get the furniture and I should be able to finish up the small things this weekend, if not today. I'm remaining in the Cincinnati area so I can be close to my family and friends, and I'm hoping to stay in this place for at least two years to give myself a proper moving break.

In the meantime, I've got the copyedits for Pray for Dawn sitting on my partially dismantled desk and my editor is threatening to send me the edit letter for Wait for Dusk any day now. Oh, I did you know that I'm also writing in NaNoWriMo, working on Book 6. Take a wild guess at how that's going. Ugh. If I just get through this weekend, my life will be back to normal.

In other, less whiny news, I completed a guest blog at Silk and Shadows yesterday. Take a peek at it and enter to win a copy of all my books, including the anthology!

Also, don't forget to enter to win a signed copy of Jeri Smith-Ready's Bad to the Bone! The contest ends on Saturday.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
-J.B. Priestly

I saw something Sunday that made me wish I had my camera. I actually did have my camera, it was just in my purse which was in my duffle bag in the back seat, and I was the one driving so it seemed inconvenient to try and dig it out, even though the car wasn't moving at the time.

A pink dump truck.

We'd been forced off the interstate, apparently all lanes were closed and we were traveling up route 1, stopped at a light and there it was off tot eh right, a totally pink dump truck.

Its things like that for which you're supposed to carry your camera around. Stuff like that I want to capture and remember. I'll have to be satisfied with my words I suppose.

It was hard for me in the last post to write just a few lines about THE RETURN OF THE KING, so I could get to the point and write about our trip! I woke up with my brain full of three more things toto say. The primary reason I haven't reviewed the trilogy on this blog before is that it would go on for pages. I do have a few tidbits in the archives somewhere from before this blog started.

One who knows that girljim and I met in Northwesternesse, a Lord of the Rings fanclub, might fairly ask, is this trip just about going to look at LOTR movie locations? No, this trip is only ~20% about going to look at LOTR movie locations.

Suffice it to say, the only thing REALLY going right is my desire to be closer to Mr. Houston. Things are getting done, but not fast enough, I have no help, and I'm about to cry tears of mental exhaustion. I'm not so physically tired as I am mentally. I've been trying not to admit this for days.

Then today I ran across this article: ( Read more... )

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.
-Thomas Paine

Just finished watching part two of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003) (extended edition, naturally). The first disc can be a little slow, but boy is there a lot packed into the last two hours. The tunnels, Shelob, the Tower of Cirith Ungol--and most of all the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, that huge endless battle outside Minas Tirith which you know cannot, positively cannot, work on screen. No way--unless perhaps you're Akira Kurosawa, or Peter Jackson. I watch the Mûmakil, and the Nazgûl riding on Fell Beasts, and remember that when this film was released, nobody had seen anything remotely like that before. It still looks fantastic.

We have watched all three LORD OF THE RINGS films in the last two weeks. Why? Because we're leaving for New Zealand on Friday. One whole month down under. Among other things, we'll get to see "Hobbiton"--the Alexander Farm on Matamata--all replanted and starting to be dressed for the shooting of THE HOBBIT. Guillermo Del Toro says:

We will officially be doing a lot of prep on ‘The Hobbit’ this summer, there is so much to do, its amazing. Just the reforestation of The Shire, re planting all those trees and plants will take months, and we’re going to be as exact as possible.”

We'll be there in a week.

We'll have one computer along, which girljim and I will be sharing--hopefully there will be many blog posts (and pictures!) to share. I hope you'll read along, and keep in touch!

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
-Oscar Wilde

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.
-Harrison Ford