Mama's Boy

I had to have Fuzz put to sleep on June 6th.  He'd been sick for the previous six weeks with several problems that in the end left no other options.  He had inflammatory bowel, which is analagous to Irritable Bowel for humans, plus hyperthyroidism.  The vet also suspected he might have had cancer or lymphoma in his intestines, which didn't show up on the x-ray they did.  The result was that he couldn't eat and was starving to death.  The vet also said that he didn't seem to be absorbing the protein from what little he did eat properly, which led her to suspect cancer.

He kept getting weaker and thinner -- when he died he weighed only 6 pounds, which is frightening for a cat that used to weigh a hefty 15.  The hyperthyroidism could be treated with any of 3 options:  a special formulation diet, daily pills, or a radioactive iodine treatment.  I did try the food, as it was the easiest all around.  But he wouldn't eat it.  At first I thought this was just him being picky and tried to mix it with regular canned food and then even tried mixing it with double cream, but he wouldn't eat any of it.  He would nibble sometimes on a bite or two of the dry kibble version of the hyperthyroid food, but not enough to gain any weight.  I tried to give him also some gastrointestinal formulation food that would have helped with the inflammatory bowel, but he wouldn't touch that either.  A couple weeks ago I decided to do the radioactive iodine treatment -- something had to give, and that was the quickest and surest way of dealing with the hyperthyroid.  But he needed to be stronger to go through that, and he just wouldn't eat.  The vet also mentioned that we could have a biopsy done to see if he had cancer, but that would also require him to be stronger to get through the anesthesia.  It all depended on getting him stabilized and fattened up, and he simply wouldn't do it.

He was himself up to the moment he died -- walking around, bonking his head on things, sitting on my lap wanting to be petted.  The vet said it would take less than a minute for him to go when she gave him the shot.  He was gone before the vet nurse laid him down, before the vet even got the needle out of his leg.  It was like flipping a switch.  He was just... gone.

I still feel like a murderer.  This was my child.  And I was the one who sat there and allowed someone to kill him.  I know that's not how I should see it, and that I did all I could.  I know that he would have died weak and probably in pain if I had allowed him to die naturally.  But I still feel like a murderer.

No more pets.  Not for a long time.  I can't take this kind of thing anymore.

I love you, Mama's Boy.  I'm not going to get over you for a long, long time.

Going to end the psychologist visits today. She's not helping me and I need that nearly $300 a month elsewhere. Am I resentful? Yes I'm resentful. Because I'm paying $70 / wk for answers and all she's doing is nodding like a bobblehead. So enough of that. I need that money for real solutions.

The postal service will be laying off between 120k and 200k people soon. We'll be insolvent by October. Due to not having any seniority, I'll probably be laid off soon. So yeah, looking at having to make a decision re the magazine project sometime soon. Do I go ahead with it, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead? Or do I scuttle it again in favor of survival? I'm sure my mother will go for option #2. And would find Kickstarter the devil incarnate.

Could use some people in my corner since I seem to have the backbone of a single-celled organism when it comes to standing up to my mother. Oh well.

Huntsville made the Top 5 list of Geekiest Cities. Maybe I could move there?

I have ConStellation coming up in September, less than a month away. Feel like Wile E. Coyote feebly waving a flag as he's falling off the cliff again.

I have to learn that my first reaction to fear should not be to pull away even further into my shell, but to keep trying to connect. Even if doing so ends up exactly as I fear it will. Correlation does not equal causation.

Have changed name on the project. Magazine will be called "JumpGate" and the whole shebang will be JumpGate Press.

At the moment, I am in the process of trying to save up $6k as start-up money. Also investigating various aspects such as how to do the conversions from RTF format to Kindle and EPub formats, how to get them sold on Amazon, etc. Have bought the domain names. Need to do some biz cards and letterhead, I suppose. Also signed up as a monetary contributor to Duotrope, which has probably the best publisher info database for authors looking for where to submit stuff.

I try to do one thing per day, however small, toward the project. Under the concept that every line is really a series of points.

So as a result of the recent therapy (on the fence about whether it's helping or not), I decided that I need to do SOMETHING even if it appears to have little chance of making a living. If I just sit here, nothing's going to happen anyway. If I go on the criteria that whatever I do must result in making a full living, I'll never get anywhere because I have no viable options.

BUT if I remove that from the table, then I have more options available. I arrive at a place where I can do something that I want to do with the criteria that it could possibly EVENTUALLY make a living, but it's not mandatory. If the criteria is, "what can I do that I could spend 40 hrs a week doing and feel as if it meant something to me", then the answer was immediately clear.

So I'm resurrecting the sci-fi novella magazine project that I was going to do just before we were told the REC was closing. It's not going to be "The Terran Conspiracy", but it will be the same project under a different title. Since I actually did file LLC paperwork and had to scuttle it, I think I should change the names so as to avoid confusion. Instead, I'm planning to call it "The Sidereal Times."

This time, I'm actually going to try to do a business plan. And I've ordered new desktop publishing, website making and photo editing programs that look to be somewhat more capable than MS Publisher. I've bought a new computer.

I've been here more than a year now in Jonesboro. I'm honestly tired of not being able to plan for the future, and I just said the hell with it. I'm tired of my life being on hold, so I'm going to assume that I'm going to be here a while and get on with my life. If I'm not, if I get excessed next week or a month from now or whatever, oh well, change all the addresses and carry on. This superstitious thing that the minute I put down roots they'll be ripped out has to stop.

In light of that, I've also put in for a week off in September. I'm going to ConStellation. I'm done with fafiating. I'm going back to fandom, and I'm going to find new friends.

So yet again my guildmaster didn't stay gone, he came back, only days after I quit the guild. 3 of my 4 toons are now back in. And he made Ancasta a Co-guildmaster.

*sigh*

Ancasta is now 80th level.

Skyamaalu, my lowest-level toon, is now 41st.


It's Memorial Day. I went out and got a hamburger, stocked up on Diet Coke. Back to work tomorrow, after 2 days off.


Latest wild-hair wish: To get a piece of land somewhere, build a yurt, put in a few solar panels, dig a well and a septic tank, and live off what I can make making soap, growing herbs, and building junkbots out of old tape players.

Because I'm really, really coming to hate being around people. And I'm really, really coming to hate living by everyone else's rules and schedules, in a nature-less environment, at a job that I hate.

See www.coloradoyurt.com for details.

Never volunteer. Never take over because no one else has. Someone will crucify you for it. Every fragging time.

I quit the guild again. And this time, I'm about 1 centimeter away from deleting all my toons and quiting WoW altogether.


This is why I'm in therapy.

So I've been thinking lately about what things or conditions truly help me, calm me down, give me space to breathe, etc. What subjects feed my soul, what do I truly love that makes me feel like there's some reason to go on, what makes me forget the usual mantras. This line of thought started during the ice storm, when I ran out of Diet Coke and started drinking so much tea. The tea literally puts me in a meditative state -- provided I drink it mindfully. Or maybe that's the thing. I dunno. I just know when I take the time to make the tea properly, sit down in a quiet room or with some soothing non-frantic music playing, I feel better. At peace.

Maybe I'm getting old, I dunno. But I have to start digging myself out of this hole I'm in and not just mentally race around the same old crazy.

This kind of path can lead you to some uncomfortable truths. For one, Warcraft is a net negative effect. It's a stressor. It makes you forget, sure -- the same way TV does. It's not constructive, though when I started playing it was. For all that I'm an officer in one of the largest guilds on our server, I have a grand total of 2 people I talk with semi-regularly -- Kill and another Gnome mage named Morgianna (another older lady like myself, we have much the same experiences in WoW so we commiserate a lot). Otherwise, there are names I know because they are often troublemakers. But they're not friends. Also the frustrations of just playing the game get to me a lot, which just adds to it all. Zoning out on farming motes in Nagrand is not a healthy kind of forgetting. It's the kind that leads to "what the hell, it's 11 PM already, where did the time go?" and waking up the next morning feeling like the previous night wasn't restful at all.

Problem there is, I love Warcraft. But it ain't healthy for me.

Further along that line, the realization that spending every night and most of my days off in front of the computer is only exacerbating things. It's alienated me from a lot of things that used to be of interest to me, such as my mythology studies, my writing, my crystal collection, the podcasts I used to get into, the ambient music I used to get into. My hippy side. The psychospiritual side of me.

Playing Warcraft, mindlessly checking Fark or my RSS feeds and the fanfic sites, it's just escapism. It's not dealing with myself. It's worsening all my problems, not helping me to heal. It's not letting me think beyond a narrow set of parameters. It's not just Warcraft that's the drug, it's the whole shebang. Everything I do in my life.

As I said, uncomfortable truths.

But the tech is inescapable. It's woven into my life. The tech itself isn't bad. It's what I'm choosing to do with it that's screwed. And it's not going to be solved in a day. No more than heroin addiction is.


And aside from pulling myself out of this, there's the larger issue of my job and my life circumstances in general.

But we will see.