castledoom.com

[Morticcia]

You are The Empress
Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.

The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents, beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.

The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love.

Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.


Hmm, very odd. Oh way back when in my youth I used to be a tarot reader. I still have my deck in the same place it's always been. Neatly wrapped in a cotton swath. This card always came up often. I can't believe the answers I gave generated this card, though.

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Well, I've been hiding under the metaphorical desk for some time. My psychiatrist wants me to get back on antidepressents because I'm miserable. Yet, my heart tells me I need to face the things that make me miserable. The problem is I have been facing them and they are no less oppressive. Yet I know in my heart that antidepressents are not the right way to go this time. They were in the past, but not now. This time I need something else.

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I'll be Forty this year. I don't mind aging. I only mind the wrinkles a little. I mind the fear of the loss of body strength much more so. And enough to get this hermit butt into one of those women's gyms. The second most important thing I mind losing is my fertility. That has been a scathing loss.

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I'm back at castledoom because this online world represents a place of pain for me. Not here necessarily but the place where many of the founders came from is a source of hurt for me that I can't get over. I don't know why I can't get over it but I can't. This pain coupled with four years of ineffectual, physically and mentally damaging fertilty treatments, have left me raw.

Raw when you're 20 is a lot different than raw when your 40. I've accummulated so many petty disturbances I'm buckling from the weight. I have no natural sloughing defense. I'm a sponge. How do you change this? I don't know but I'm not giving up. I'm hoping that if I return to the source of some pain it may diminish. Maybe by walking away from certain people and places I have allowed a small problem to grow large with generalized fear. I don't know but I'll try anything once.

M

[Morticcia]

The human body is so amazing. It's capacity for denial often amazes me.

Our youngest cat, Grissom, didn't come back in Sunday night. That's unusual but not necessarily unexpected. Since we've moved out to the real burbs last fall we're surrounded by a lot of conservation land. Conservation land = mucho macho prey! Grissom is a natural born killer and prefers the feral countryside to the slouchy couch.

We've also come to believe he's setting up second, third, or even more surrogate homes in the neighborhood. Grissom is a charmer when he puts some muscle into it.

And I am not as fearful as I used to get when were locked in the grid of metropolitan suburbia. We've had one scare resulting in 3K spent on a bionic leg for Hunter, courtesy of crazy local drivers. Now that we have 25 near neighbors where we once had at least 3000, I have made peace with the fact we may lose our felines to natural predators like coyotes and maybe even the mythical fisher cat. I could never find peace with the fear of death by car or by worse, crazy local kids who think torturing animals is fun. Paranoia has always been a keen bedfellow.

So Monday comes and goes and still no Grissom. I have no feelings about it. I put it right out of my head. Yes, I go to the back door and call his name over and over, every half an hour, but no, I am not worried. I go to bed and sleep well.

Not a thought of Grissom enters my mind all of Tuesday day. Yet late afternoon, I pull into the drive and POOF! it finally comes over me, my Grissom is gone (again! but that is another story) and an ache of grief contracts within my chest. I almost start to cry as I get out of the car but my attention is quickly diverted - I hear a meow so small, so quick and bright, I think my mind is playing tricks on me. But then out of the rhododendrom comes my favorite little monster, my Grissom, as if he's just coming home after an hours hunting.

The joy was not expansive - I had yet to fully alight from the wave of grief when it hit. My body's nervous system was confounded for some time.

Here is a picture of him lying on me, which he never ever does. This is the night he came home after being missing nine days back in November, just two weeks before we moved to the new house. That was really hell.

[Morticcia]

Hey Melly Mel. How are U doing? Is this just a flyby? :D

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My favorite blogger, Crazy Aunt Purl, is a bit of a social phobic, like me. She made a great point the other day on her blog about being social with the neighbors. It hit home something fierce. She spoke of something that I already knew and understood, but she did something more important and that is allowed me to see it in context. That is one of my weaknesses. I know what my problems are I just have no aptitude for seeing them in context.

Ms Purl went and talked to some neighbors for the first time and she noted a milestone in this interaction. Now Ms Purl has problems, like me, with her social filter. So it was a major accomplishment to first, get out of her trauma shell and be social, and second, get out of her shell and NOT burst into tears and inform them of her 'recent' trauma. You see Ms Purl’s husband up and left her one day saying he needed space for his art, when all the while he really needed space to shack up with someone new.

Like Ms Purl I too have been afraid of what I may say when confronted with a simple salutation like ‘Hello!’ To insulate myself I have slowly but surely put distance between myself and everyone else in the world. People with no social filter, when asked the seemingly benign question of ‘how are you,’ will invariably give you a true and honest answer. We feel we must recount the emotions we are feeling now, right now. But in the life I’ve had for the past five years, even I realize that anecdotes of failed surgeries, steely speculums, and multiple needles that leave bruises the size of small island nations, aren’t really sparkling topics, conversationally.

So when all I want to scream is “LOOK at all these HARD, FATTY deposits on my butt from injecting 2cc’s of progesterone in OLIVE OIL into it every night!” all that is socially acceptable to say is “great and how are you?” The only recourse I have being what I am is to stop putting myself in a position where people talk to me. So I’ve closed myself off from my family, my coworkers, and from the one or two people who could be considered friends.

In this way I’ve reduced the instances where I would have been considered a nuisance, monomaniacally absorbed in my very own pathetically mundane drama. But in fortifying this behavioral pattern, this empty façade for the world, I’ve been suffocating. I wasn’t wired to live like this, I was wired to tell all and tell it all again.

And I’m scared poopless for the future. Soon, very soon, when the rain clears, and the days get warmer, my new neighbors, a gaggle of suburban nosy nellies, previously held back by the icy curtain of winter, will billow out into the streets. (We moved in too late last year for a fall inspection.) And I will be on their radar. I can only hope that I am as successful as Ms Purl when it comes time to don a facile smile for my close-up.

[Morticcia]

[Morticcia]

NibbyC are you really thinking of giving that guy your address? I don't know you well enough to give you advice, but I can't but help give you my opinion.

I'm far more distrustful than anyone I know, so forgive me my hyper paranoia. My first (albeit uninformed) thought was that his continued non-compliance may be based on a plan to to break you down to get that info and put you into an unsafe position.

Furthermore, do you really want to be with someone who either a) lies like a rug, b) seems doomed by a far larger amount of mischance than the average human being, or c) both?

[Morticcia]

I hate people with infertility blogs that fill their blogs with the self-satisfied blatherings of motherhood once they overcome their infertility. There is nothing more rage inducing to those of us who will never overcome our infertility.

This isn't about free speech, it's about sensitivity. If you're not infertile you have no clue the frightening intensity of being infertile. It takes over your whole life. The self-absorption doesn't end when the high doses of hormones wear off. It exudes from your pores as if you eat it breakfast lunch and dinner. You are no longer a woman, you are "INFERTILE WOMAN."

All I ask is that these women START a new friggin' blog. That's all. Start a "LOOK the "F" at me, I'M More Special THAN most because I HAD a BABY! Woot!" Blog. That way if I encounter your esctasy I'm prepared. Infertile women should know better.

There's nothing like an unwanted dose of sour grapes to spoil a bright spring day. :oops: :sick:

[Morticcia]

Good luck with finals Crispy. :)

I am on vacation. A. Real. Life. Vacation. Well, not really. I didn't go anywhere! :eyebrow: Although inherently selfish, I still find it near impossible to do ANYTHING solely for myself. That is what this vacation is. Stay at home, recharge, maybe get some projects done for ME.

Was so afraid I'd fall prey to inertia but I've been so downright productive, I have had to stope and think who stole my soul and made me normal?

Yesterday I FINALLY birdwatched with my grandmother's (circa 1970) bird book. You see where I really grew up our only wildlife were roaches and seagulls. It was a man made island. With binocular's I had borrowed earlier from my sister-in-law, I sat sat out in the sun. Me. IN the SUn. OMG! I didn't melt!

I saw one cardinal, who I named Mr. Hardy. Numerous red breasted robins, but they're easy fixin's since they spend half their day walking across the lawn. Then I saw two blue jays. Well the painted pictures in the book due no justice to their myriad colors of their bottom tails. GORGEOUS! But beauty is not what beauty does. These guys have such an ugly call.

Throughout the morning I kept catching sight of what I thought was a woodpecker but in the afternoon he came back and sat on a branch long enough for me to discern all the details I needed to mark him: a yellow shafter flicker. (Had to go get the book for that one.) According to the web, he is known as a Common Flicker. He has the most amazing yellow under his wings that for the unitiated creates a WOW sensation when this mostly dull brown and spoted bird soars and all you see is the distinctive yellow. Crazy.

Other locals that seem in abundance are black capped chickadees and house sparrows.

Viva la vacacione!

:cheesy:

[Morticcia]

I have some good news. I've been searching petfinder.com since the beginning of the year for a chihuahua to adopt and I finally found one! His name is Topper D. We had a home visit from the rescue group on Monday and all went well. I haven't heard anything definite but I don't see any impediment at the moment.

If our application is accepted we should be able to adopt him in a week and a half. That is when he gets to New England from the midwest. They do weekly transports, but not on holiday weeks. I am so excited! :D :D

Though some eating problems are starting to resurface, I've had almost 2 good months. Mostly good. I'm glad I didn't go on the antidepressents. Poor shrinky may feel a little disabused, but c'est la vie.

I read an article a week or so ago in Salon. The writer, a Minnesota woman, has an autistic son. She had written a lifestyle piece about him two years earlier that I really enjoyed. The current article was about her run in with the mental health establishment. Her son experienced a catatonia and the consultants she met with put him on a new breed of antipsychotics called atypical antipsychotics. They diagnosed him as being schizophrenic and confidently informed her that the autism diagnosis was in error.

Shortly after starting the drug tx the boy deteriorated so badly they thought they had lost him forever. Like their predecessors, stelazine and thorazine, these drugs can and will do permanent damage. Well once again the internet came to the rescue. A parents' research saved a child. She learned the root cause of his catatonia, got him off the drugs and finds that he has not been irrevocably harmed. Lucky her.

The importance of the story to me is the history of doctors prescribing these atypical antipsychotics because they receive kickbacks from the drug companies. During her son's recovery there was a front page article in the New York Times about Minnesotan doctors and drug kickbacks:

"In Minnesota, psychiatrists collected more money from drug makers from 2000 to 2005 than doctors in any other specialty," the Times reported. "Total payments to individual psychiatrists ranged from $51 to more than $689,000, with a median of $1,750. Since the records are incomplete, these figures probably underestimate doctors' actual incomes."

Three years ago I was in a meltdown from the fertility tx. My anxiety was at an all time high. The therapist I was seeing referred me to a couple of psychiatrists for a medication review.

One of the doctors he sent me to had a box of Zyprexa on his desk. Zyprexa is one of these new atypical antipsychotics made by Eli Lilly and reported on by the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/business/17drug.html?ex=1180065600&en=b176de3001aec8ab&ei=5070

And almost offhandedly, after barely spending five minutes talking to me, he gave me the sample told me to take it and check in in a month to let him know how I was doing. I took the box, went home and promptly did an internet search. I was floored by what I saw. This man prescribed me an antipsychotic. ME. ANTIPSYCHOTIC?!? And an antipsychotic that causes diabetes because it raises the body's blood sugar, as well as well-docmented permanent neurological damage known as tardive dyskinesia,.

I promptly fired off a letter to my therapist and never went back to him. If I had been in better shape I would have filed a medical complaint. Laissez faire capitalism at it's finest. :nono: :nono: :nono: It so pisses me off that doctors would do this to patients. And never will I trust a one again!

[Morticcia]

June is a great month. I'm so busy at work! Being in state government and finance, all my year's work depends on my end of fiscal year numbers so I am in my element now.

Yet while I'm running a macro, I thought I'd post some pics of our new addition, Ripley, so named because his overbite is so pronounced he looks like the inner jaw thingy of the alien from Alien(s).

It's tough being a dog at Chez Morticcia!

[Morticcia]

A few weeks ago I started reading knitting blogs and now all I do is read them instead of reading up on news of the world. The world is too depressing, this administration too friggin' surreal. (One day soon Cheney's gonna announce he's emperor of Fredonia. I'm just sayin' is all!) Knitting blogs, much nicer.

Writing here has renewed my interest in blogging. I'm not ready to present my world views, even in with my webdenity "morticcia," in a real online diary. All I have to journal is a repository of rage, I think. Even I wouldn't want to read that and it's my pathetic life. However. But. I did catch the knitting blog bug and set up shop at http://twoknitsofivory.blogspot.com/.