Continuing my Just a Minute… series.

Reading… Honestly, not a lot! With how much coding I’m doing, it’s been hard to settle into anything relaxing. Also, considering I’m working on a rec site for fanworks, reading fanfiction (my go-to) has lost it’s shine thus far.

Listening… I have been obsessed with rock music, lately. Probably about 293 entries ago, I mentioned my parents could tip me into sleep with only Rock music (now considered Classic Rock). Still true to do this day, if some of my naps are any indication.

Watching… My sister showed me Letterkenny years ago, but only this year have we really sat down and watched it from the beginning. Recommend it highly if you’re a fan of comedy, and even if you’re not, just watch it.

Relieved by… Medication. The hardest part of being so sick all the time is the medication. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about what does and doesn’t work, and what should and shouldn’t be taken. I just want to focus on being relieved, even if the pain doesn’t go away. Other than medication, I abuse the shit out of my heating pad, and a couple of lotions that help with aches and pain.

Taking a photo of… My new cat, Louise! I got her around April 1st, so she’s been with me nearly two months, and I’m so in love with her.

Writing… If coding was writing… three novels? I have been writing to-do lists a lot, as well as blog posts corresponding to my edits to my sites. Really, this blog post is my most recent “writing”.

I love my mother.

I love my mother’s flaws, I love my mother’s quirks, I love my mother.

I love my mother, but sometimes I wonder if I got my sadness and loneliness from her. I’ve seen her draw attention and befriend anyone in a way that’ll always be foreign for me. My mother probably thinks, “why can’t she just try?”, but you see, that’s not a quirk of my mother’s, not noticing how unalike we are, but a flaw: she’ll never accept the differences. I love my mother, and I love her quirks and her flaws.

I love my mother, but I wonder if my mother gave me my anxiety. If stress and anxiety can be hereditary, there’s a good chance she had a part in those particular genetics. I love my mother’s nitpicking, because she’s unaware of the feelings she hurts, and I love that my mother doesn’t change her behaivour based on age: we’re always her children. I love my mother’s overspending, because it’s hard to say no in the face of happiness, when you see her experience it so little.

I love my mother, but I do wonder if the unconditional love I give is given in return. I know my mother loves me, but does my mother love my quirks and flaws? Does she love that I’m so fucking picky about everything I eat, touch, feel, and look at? Does she love that I went from cleaning a whole house to barely being able to do my laundry? Does she love that I’ll never accomplish anything she thought I could?

I love my mother’s quirks, I love my mother’s flaws, I love my mother.

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I haven’t regularly blogged in eight years, and while I’ve talked about a lot of the things listed below, you’d have to browse my Tumblr, Twitter, and probably my e-mails with Chris to piece all of these together. AGGRESSIVE DRUM-ROLL: a FBF! I decided to stick to seven things, because I’m long-winded as is, and literally nobody needs to read eight things about me; I’m not that fucking interesting.

SMALL NOTE: I always double check my Spanish, and was writing “siete”, and couldn’t fucking figure out why my dictionary was translating that as “seven” instead of “eight”. Always check your grammar, and always check for reciting numbers in your head in the wrong order.

1.) My Dad died
I’ve blogged about this occurrence several times, but one of the reasons I stopped blogging was my Dad’s cancer treatment. While I was coding the Listing Admin 2.2 script, I found out my Dad has cancer. While I was coding it’s follow-up (2.3), I found out his chemotherapy wasn’t working. We moved down south to Gainesville (in Florida), which was literally THE MOST BORING CITY ON THE PLANET, where he died of complications due to a bone-marrow transplant.

I will probably never go back to Gainesville. Not because it’s where my Dad died — I find that part hilarious, because one of the things he told my Mom before we moved there was, “don’t let me die in fucking Gainesville” — but because I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it was boring. Like claws your eyes out boring; there is no water except in hotel pools, and there’s no curricular activity that doesn’t include basketball or football.

2.) Health problems
I almost listed all of my health problems up there to be dick, but I’m trying to keep this organised. My OCD won out over a being a shithead, you’re welcome.

I was 21 when my Dad was undergoing chemo in 2010, and during that year, I suffered from what I would later found out to be “attacks”. In 2012, I was diagnosed with two stomach disorders (neither of which are related to each other) and a spine disorder/injury. I’ve struggled with mental health my entire life (PTSD, social anxiety disorder, major depressive order, probably other shit) and I thought I was okay with it. Most days I am, actually. But when you add in chronic pain, you begin to question whether you can handle anything at all.

For the most part I’m functional — I work full time, and I’m fairly active — but most people don’t live with me/have to deal with me when I’m in pain or anxious, or both.

3.) I have a niece!
That title is about 90% more excited than I am right now, but I prefer babies over kids any day. My closest sibling, Hannah, had her in 2013, and while I would have preferred she waited, I’m glad she didn’t for this damn little girl. Here’s a picture of her when she was 2, and not prone to talking to herself in my vanity mirror, or telling me about a day I care nothing about.

4.) I was a nanny for a two years; now I’m not
From 2013 to 2015, I was a nanny to a beautiful little girl. I really loved being a nanny, and the free time it afforded me was pretty priceless. It also paid terrible, and towards the end, I was really unhappy. I’m kind of still unhappy — is anyone who works at a restaurant truly happy? — but I make more money, filing taxes isn’t as hard, and I have health insurance. Do I want to learn different cuisines, like I outlined in my In Ten Years post? No the fuck I don’t, but at least I learned that I don’t.

5.) I came out (twice)
I actually came out to my Mom when I was 19, but her and I had this unspoken oath to never really talk about it, because I was also crying in the middle of the kitchen at the time. I simply asked her (while crying) if she was okay with it, and she said, “yes” and “please stop crying” and “is that what this is about”. I never really thought too hard about the gender of any partner, but when you don’t have any desire to have one, you kind of forget to think about what kind of partner would interest you.

I don’t want to be the asshole who ignores how hard it is for other people, or how much people struggle with that part of themselves — it hasn’t exactly been easy for me — but I also don’t talk about whole parts of my life. Being bisexual is just a thing I am, not my entire personality.

6.) I lost my Dad’s cat and my best friend in a 4 month period
I’ve blogged about losing my friend but I also lost an animal in November 2017. My house is full of them, it’s hard to keep up with them. I’m close to all of them, because animals get me in a way humans don’t; all I want is to be left alone unless I’m crying, and my animals get that. Tanque was my Dad’s cat, and losing him hurt so much, because for my family, it felt like losing another piece of my Dad.

7.) “Who am I?”
…was not actually a question I asked myself, but the overall feeling was something I had a hard time dealing with. For so many years, I’ve known myself as Tess. Tess likes a lot of things — I’ve been told too many things — and Tess doesn’t struggle in quite the same way. I spent so long locked up in my own head, that as cliche was this is definitely going to sound, I didn’t know who Austin was.

Turns out Austin is kind of a dick, but when you deal with people on a regular basis, you kind of have to be. I’ve also had my ass handed to me so many times, and I needed that. I needed to know what I can and can’t deal with, what my limits are. I have also learned: how many times you can irritate a co-worker (depends on the co-worker, but usually about a solid hour before a meltdown), how to handle confrontations when you’re unable to walk away, when it’s appropriate to cry in a walk-in (before opening hours), and how many lost hours of sleep you can work efficiently on (4 a night for a week).

I felt like using that title because it’s actually a song by The Blood Brothers », and you know me¹, if there’s a reference to be made, it will be had.

But I’m not here to talk about The Blood Brothers, or how awesome they are, or how I cried at the news of their break-up, but in relation to this entry » by Rachel » about a doctor who played around with his bushy eyebrows, and repeated the process a million, billion times.

So, I didn’t feel sorry for her like the commenters clearly did, and I just LOL’d SO HARD I almost had a cramp in my side. Which, if I were the superstitious type, I’d think that today’s events were Karma LOL’ing at me and biting me in the ass, as the saying goes. So along with the Dad and the sister, I had an eye doctor’s appointment this morning, and I was the last to go. I go through the whole shebang with the Halle Berry-esque nurse, and the Doctor comes into my room first. From there, the nurse decided she would have this conversation rather loudly in the hallway outside my room:

Nurse: She’s just been dilated, you don’t need to see her first.
Doctor: Oh, she is? So, the other two are dilated.
Nurse: Yes, both of them are fully dilated, I just dilated her. You need to see them.
Doctor: OK, I’ll go see them since they’re both fully dilated.

So, after feeling like a fat pregnant lady — and feeling like the Dad and sister were pregnant as well, as they were talking about them — I was then told to wait “just a moment”, a moment that I am convinced turned into an hour. During that hour, I stared down a headpiece I swear came from The Silence of the Lambs², and chastised my nurse internally at leaving a unlocked computer in the hands of hacker in the guise of a developer — but that’s neither here nor there, and for a different entry entirely.

I eventually did see my eye Doctor, where I would have convinced myself he was gay by his elegant and wide hand gestures and the way he consistently crossed his legs — except, well, my late Uncle had ravishing hand motions while being utterly³ straight and he did happen to be wearing a wedding ring. Of course, this in no way means I think my Doctor can’t be gay because he wears a wedding ring, or that I wrongly accuse others of being gay to myself — I’m just suggesting, in the future, that perhaps doctors should think about using terms such as “dilated” and the situations that surround them, as the sister and Dad got a kick out of hearing that they were pregnant, too.

(For the less than sarcastic variety, yes, they heard it from their rooms, too – and yes, we did laugh hysterically in the car on the way back.)

1. « And if you don’t, you certainly should.
2. « A headpiece he actually ended up wearing! Cue in the frantic heartbeat of trying to stuff down my laughter.
3. « I use “utterly” because most of us still think he was in the closet.