A Heart's a Heavy Burden

It's happening again. I thought I was doing super well (and I was!!) because I didn't get my usual October Depression, but apparently it was just waiting around for me to get overwhelmed and busy, because it appears to be creeping up hardcore, just waiting for a catalyst. It became apparent when I realized on Saturday that I had missed a discussion for class (the first one I ever missed!) because I was so thrown off from working Black Friday (11:30pm Thursday-8am Friday) after Thanksgiving at my Mom's and also working Saturday. I realized something was amiss upon reflection because I absolutely had a tantrum about it when I realized the day/time and that I'd missed the discussion, as if that would have changed anything. It set in motion a spiral of mope that has culminated in me not yet turning in anything due for class today (due at 11:59pm) or the discussion due Saturday and instead wallowing in self-pity and apathy.

I appear to have forgotten that a schedule that is too full causes an opposite reaction from me, and even while I KNOW my super busy schedule won't last forever and there are a hundred atypical situations occurring right now, I just want to quit everything and hide under the blankets with all the lights off and maybe a candle going. Like, I see my calendar looking like this:

( Here )
And I just want to cry. Remember that I also work every weekday on top of any appointments.

And yet, if you look at it, there are THREE trainings that I have/had this month which will not need to be repeated for a whole year, my tattoo appointments are FUN even if they're time-consuming (and I switched my next appointment from the 21st to December 6 so I wouldn't be upset about the time), and I won't need be going to the urologist again until February. And yet. I'm suffocating. I just need to get through this week and then my next month is blissfully empty right now. I will continue going to the chiropractor once a week and I will be working on my sleeve, and I have my two Face-to-Faces for class, but I can do it. I just need to remember that I can.

I asked Steve to cuddle me while I mope and it eventually turned into me holding up his upper half by the shoulders and he dead-weighted and then I said he looked like he was flying nonchalantly like Superman and then he slowly started to sway back and forth with a smug look on his face, which dissolved us into giggles for a solid couple of minutes. <3

And now, cram work time because I have less than two hours to do this assignment. Let's see if I can build the motivation.

Holy moley I'm tired today! Traffic was very bad this morning due to a fatal car accident - I saw the SUV involved, and the person was probably crushed. During this time there were several minutes of dead-stoppage. The highway is already down to one lane beginning in that area because of construction, and morning traffic is always bad around that time. When we were stopped I made a tweet, and my great aunt deigned to remind me that texting and driving is illegal. It drives me insane when people take every opportunity to remind you when you're doing wrong, as if it will change the behavior. I'm here to tell you, it will not. End of story.

 

Anyway. I started my second grad school class, and we met yesterday. During this meeting I came to the should-have-been obvious realization regarding why I do what I do. I want to work with EBD and Autism, and thrive in chaotic environments... I process information very quickly and become bored almost too easily, it's like I *need* the environment to be unpredictable from day to day and even up to minute to minute to keep my brain excited and stimulated. Coming to this realization was really amusing, but also freeing. I love developing new awareness and understanding of myself.

 

This LJ app sucks, by the way. Not capitalizing the beginning of sentences, really??

 

I'm seeing a chiropractor twice a week for 6 weeks for adjustments, acupuncture and some muscle therapy. It's mostly for my bladder issues but I have longstanding back pain from having lordosis (swayback) and horrid neck pain. Since insurance will pay, I'm treating the whole package. :)

 

A nap is most definitely in order today after work. I'm so so tired!

 

Steve and I went to a local farm with an apple orchard and picked delicious apples and bought homemade pancake/waffle/muffin mix with pumpkin flavoring. It smells so good! Faith and I made the muffins and they were amazing.

I almost decided to lead a double life for a moment. Quite surreal, and insane how easily it could happen. In another life, I think. But not now. I'm glad I peeked through the window, though. I needed to.

I've been able to talk to Bre relatively frequently lately, and I like that. She and Lamin even visited the townhouse for a bit on their way to a rodeo in Wisconsin. I love her inability to have a filter, and her brutal honesty, but above all, her genuineness. There is no way for that girl to be disingenuous and it's that quality that keeps her so near and dear to my heart.

When writing on my phone I must hit the letter k instead of m about 90% of the time and the text predictor always changes 'my' to 'Kyoto'. Lol.

Been playing a lot of Persona 3 Portable on the PSP and watching a lot of Breaking Bad with Steve and Pat. I'll be finished with my first grad school class this weekend and immediately start class number two! Otherwise there's not too much else going on, just seeing family here and there. Steve did the Mud Factor 5k obstacle course with me and will do the Warrior Dash next summer with me. Warrior dash was way more fun anyway even if the mud smelled and felt like actual shit. Mud Factor has amazing soft sandy mud that did not stink.

Oops! Break is over!

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

So, I had a looooong day at work and just needed some couple time. I feel like I've been taking Steve's love as a given and therefore a bit for granted. That's not cool. So we went shopping at our favorite B-ville mall, got cutie dinner, horribly messed up Caribou coffees - I ordered a small Northern Lite Vanilla Latte hot, he ordered a medium espresso cooler. I got the espresso hot latte and he got a vanilla cooler. BLEHHHH. But I choked it down among teases from Steve. ("So uh, how's that coffee taste?" "It... has flavor." "Oh, so you like it?" "I ordered a coffee drink, and it has coffee... And flavor." XD). Got a few cute new items and bleach + blue hair dye.

Then we went to our favorite GameStop and I found one of the few PS2 games we don't own - Tales of Legendia. Even if it's considered one of the worst Tales games, it was pristine, $20, and OMGPS2!!!!

Get home, start bleaching my hair, and stumble upon a STATUS ON FACEBOOK my mom posted about my sister having a seizure in downtown Minneapolis while driving and crashed into a parked car. While it turns out she's okay at this point and wasn't seriously injured, and a nearby police officer witnessed it and sprang into action, when I read the status and thought about if my sister had been on the highway or otherwise in serious danger... I sort of awkwardly burst into tears. It was Leah-bursting, which is more like a slow build-up and very full eyes but lots of wiping of the face, but shit! Here I was all having an amazing day, and my only sister could be fucking DYING in a CAR ACCIDENT. Jesus. The fear of what would happen if I lost her went almost out of control. She may be at rock bottom, but I love that girl.

After I spoke with Mom on the phone (and sufficiently made her feel bad because I got so upset), I finished dying my hair. See here! I loooove it. I wish I had done more blue and maybe not attacked my bangs so hard with the scissors, but I get so frustrated at how quickly they grow! I JUST got my hair cut. Ugh.

This weekend Steve and I, awkwardly accompanied by my old friend Isaiah (mentioned several times in 2008, and definitely mentioned in my high school years as well... the ones that made it into LJ, anyway [fuckin' GJ]) and his date, drove 4 hours down to Iowa and back for our good friend Tessie's wedding. This was the second wedding in which I saved Isaiah's ass and brought him, btw.

During the time in Iowa and on the way back, Steve and I spent the vast majority of the time discussing things we like and don't like, and what we'd want at our wedding (as we have done at all four of the weddings we've been to together and will likely do at the 5th, at the end of the month) - Like: songs like "Wonderwall" by Oasis, "Hallelujah", and "Soul Meets Body" by Death Cab for Cutie composed orchestrally. Dislike: Hay bales as seats. We consistently discuss the merits of dancing, as people these days do not seem to want to dance at weddings. We discussed our wedding party, and have this amazing plan for it. We know what song we're likely to dance to as our "first dance" and have a choreography plan as we will not be awkwardly slow-dancing, looking meaningfully into each other's eyes.

We ended the night listening to the mix Steve made me two months into our relationship and decided we could easily play it at our wedding. It's really, really good.

Then tonight, after over 3 years of dating, I finally went with Steve on one of his nighttime bike routes. There's this one area, a stretch behind a field that he calls "the heart of his bike ride", where it's dark and quiet, with fireflies everywhere and that earthy smell of a marsh nearby. It was incredibly romantic, and he said it reminds him of the scene in FFX with Yuna and Tidus in the water - beautiful, breathtaking, and it's only you there (of course we all know they totally did it). My heart swelled with love and we spent the rest of the ride making lovey-dovey eyes at each other and talking about how amazing our life is.

Whenever I think of him at night, alone, it reminds of this time he texted me while at this park we passed on our ride, like a month into dating, something like, "You make me want to CRY. in joy. And DIE. from cute." Of course in trying to find the exact quote in my text dump entries I read about a million heart-melty things he has said to me and I died over and over again.

He's just... the best. I love him so hard I could squeeze him to death and then be like an excited kid crushing their taco. Or something. I completely stole that idea from the Office. Only it wasn't a kid. Anyway, point being, Steve is for me, no doubt about it.

That movie was amazing. Very, very funny. The "cheap" scares all got me - the ones that make you jump. For some reason the scariest part for me was when they were all celebrating and Dana was getting beat up by the zombie in the background D: I felt so bad for her! Under the cut I have listed the best quotes and one-liners. SO. GOOD.
( FAVORITE QUOTES OMG )


EDIT
Mordecai is TOTALLY this guy from South Park:

"Do you SEE! TELL ME, do you see?"

Which I guess makes me love him more/find him funnier. "Would you like to see my... cotton panties?"

Sooo, I'm reading this book based on the incredibly terrifying and gruesome Hi-Fi Murders. Steve says I'm morbid. I know I am. When I was in 11th grade and had to find a skeleton picture as the cover of my Shakespeare reviews or whatever, I spent hours discovering gory death pictures after that was the majority of search results. I haunted my dreams with awful ways people look after being murdered or committing suicide. The Hi-Fi murders are particularly horrible because they were planned deaths of random people. That is, the primary killer decided that he would horrifically murder anyone present during the robbery of an electronics store. The book is non-fiction, weaved together from interviews with the survivor and anyone involved (including the murderer) as well as testimony from the trials. The book is highly detailed to the level I desire, which only intensifies the effect. I've spent two lunch breaks with teary eyes wallowing in the despair the family experienced and is poignantly captured. I was talking to Steve about how amazing it is and at one point he burst out laughing because I "Leah'd" - a term with many definitions but is frequently referenced when I tell unnecessary details because *I* would want them (the example in question was where I was talking about an investigator and felt the need to explain that he was actually sort of retired and not the *main* investigator but it's still cool that the murderer in this case is also the murderer in the ONLY unsolved homicide he had). I was most moved by a man whose wife and 16-year-old son were both involved in the murders. He describes how it felt to face his dead wife in all her ruined glory and having to come to terms with the fact that the woman he was with for 36 years and was his "partner for life" was gone. Yep. Just gone. No more. The end. Never coming back. Over. And how he had to be strong while each of his other family members mourned after they arrived at the hospital and that he had to close off his heart to the fact that his life partner, who he was JUST talking to before she left to find their son (AND she was frantic with worry at the son not returning home yet and he told her she was overreacting. Think about THAT guilt), was dead forever. I explained to Steve that for me it would be a CONSTANT immediate back-and-forth where I would tell myself that information and then swiftly reject it with an "IMPOSSIBLE NO IT'S NOT TRUE IT'S NOT I CAN'T ACCEPT THAT FUCK YOU IT JUST SIMPLY IS NOT POSSIBLE I CAN'T DEAL WITH THIS AND NO TAKE IT BACK." Rinse and repeat.

As a result, I should not have been surprised to have a similar heart-wrenching dream in which I left a church and drove by many crazed velociraptors (naturally) and when I arrived at his office building I KNEW that Steve had been attacked by raptors and I was frantically trying to find out where he was and I went to the hospital to find him and I was screaming for him and I knew he was dead but I couldn't accept it and I knew I would try to take it back when I found his mangled body and I kept willing him to be alive and not hurt. I woke up with my "trying to cry" face on, breathing all heavy and terrified. I immediately rolled over to Steve and cuddled him super hard and could not let go of him for several hours. And of course when I tried to fall back asleep I had to try to force the remnants of the dream away so I could stop trying to manipulate it and fail. My dreams like that go in endless circles as my brain refuses to allow a proper ending. But seriously, when I imagine that he could just *poof* and be gone just like that from my life, I feel exceptionally suffocatey and hyperventilatey and will it never to come to pass (which Steve also includes in my morbid thinking category). He is just the most important person in my life. If I think about it hard enough I want to keep him locked up at home so nothing bad could ever happen to him. Thank god I don't want kids because I'd freak every time they left the driveway. This exact thing is why I HATED the movie Practical Magic - the moment when Sandra Bullock thinks that she and her husband's love will overcome the curse but then there's that stupid cricket or whatever and she tries frantically to catch it but can't and her stupid husband dies anyway. NO. NO.

In other news, I officially applied to grad school for an ABS license, which will be a broad licensure allowing me to teach levels 1 and 2 of EBD, LD, and Autism and I can go back again to get licensed for 3 and 4. I went to the informational meeting and everyone there (prospective students as well as faculty) agreed that the type of license is a great investment and there's been a growing need for me-types.

Steve and I are also doing what we're calling "ghetto week" and seeing who can make the best of of $20 from Friday to Friday. This of course does not really include not spending anything, because it kind of ruins the fun. So we each got a $20 bill to spend on whatever we like for the week and we aren't allowed to spend anything more (excludes gas). It's easily doable, but we're so frivolous with the money we don't put in savings that it's a cute game for us to be frugal. Yes, we admit we are privileged, even with me working a crappy-paying job.

My weekend was kind of a blur, mostly because I was deathly ill on Saturday.

Friday I was NOT IN THE MOOD for anything work because I was achey and my throat hurt. It was awesome then that only one of the four babies was present in the latter half of the day. But in the first half I had to continue working with the preschoolers on a dance myself and another teacher are preparing for the Spring Program, which entailed a lot of dancing and movement and was simply not cool. One of the parents of a baby let slip that one of the toddlers had bronchitis over the previous weekend (and said child had been coughing into my face all week), and I didn't know bronchitis was contagious. Now, I'm probably being a baby and don't have bronchitis since I have not been incubating a cold for a week or more or anything, but I've had a stuffy head, been feverish, severely aching and experiencing deep painful coughs that have contributed to a very unhappy throat. I've basically been overloading with DayQuil, Mucinex, Naproxen, and Emergen-C in an effort to rid myself of this BS as I am a giant crybaby when I'm sick and I hate going to work when sick. It seems to be relatively paying off, as my aches (the WORST for me, completely put me out of commission whenever I get them) have mostly subsided. The rest is manageable and I also bought cough drops, woo! But as a result, I lost the vast majority of my weekend to sleep/rolling around the bed/hobbling to various house locations pitifully, which was very disappointing as the weather was nice this weekend (in the 60's, where it's been in the 40's for the past week and will resume said crap this week). I was really motivated to get out and go running too!

I finished a Kindle book I recently purchased - 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. I purchased it when reading through a blog in which the woman was going through a job slump and she happened to mention keeping track of her time and trying to figure out how to make more time for herself in order to work on her core competencies and feel good about what she does. The book is pretty interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. I really liked how she continuously reiterated the need to hone your skills and focus on what you're good at. A large part references families, but it's easy to apply to my own life as well. It's made me very excited to attend the informational meeting about graduate programs tomorrow. I also watched a documentary on the failing public school system on Netflix (Waiting for Superman, if you're interested), a really interesting documentary on being open-minded and taking a severely autistic (though high-functioning) boy to shamans to see if there's any way to help him (The Horse Boy), one on the Scrabble tournament in 2004, and a really cheesy one about quantum physics that actually presented some unique information that has made me want to project a more positive outlook on myself. Yeah, so I guess I knocked off a bunch of Netflix queue stuff, but didn't do anything I really wanted to.

Oh, I DID knit a quick scarf with some lovely new yarn
( as seen here: )

( Oh, and as long as I'm adding pics... )

Jenny, the woman who started dying my bangs, did awesome at letting the black mix with the pink and since I've stopped going to her (the drive is just so damn FAR), I've tried my damnedest to keep the look going. I think I do a pretty good job, and is very cheap - I paid $14 for the "demi-permanent" pink dye, and am getting many uses out of it. Versus $20-$40 a pop when going to Jenny, plus tip and gas both ways.

On Friday Steve and I spent the afternoon texting in Haiku. It was awesome and adorable and omg I love our relationship.

Pat broke up with Faith on Friday AT OUR HOUSE OVER THE PHONE and got back together with her today, which everyone in the friends group disagrees with and he will be receiving very deep glares from me over the next week.

I spend a lot of time on the internet reading blogs about how to be a better person. Or being on school websites on how to be a more "educated" person. Or on tumblr about how to be a funnier person. But mostly I read about other people's lives and compare them to my own and try to figure out what I can learn about myself in order to be a happier, more fulfilled person.

Because to be quite honest, I experience anhedonia more than I think I should. I haven't yet figured out if it's just my brain being bored/not stimulated enough, or if it's because I haven't found what makes me *truly* happy.

I often find myself discussing with people who revere the things I've done in my life (things like becoming a CNA and taking care of old people, working with children with autism, working in group homes, working with the mentally ill on a deep level) and feeling silly. Silly because they think I am a "special kind of person" and all the amazing differences I have made in people's lives. When I left MHR, I struggled with massive guilt because I had clients frantically calling me to make sure they got to tell me how much they enjoyed having me as a case manager and what I meant to them.

This does not help my guilt because when I am working with people, I genuinely feel that while I am *good* at it, I am pretty much phoning it in. Maybe I AM a special kind of person. The horrible kind where you look like you genuinely care, and do in fact on a deep level, but because of the stress and constant letdowns you force yourself to close off these feelings for further examination and experience at a different time when it is not immediately affecting you. The kind of person who actually feels impatient after working with a certain type of people for awhile because you already have been through this a thousand times. And yet somehow my indifference goes unnoticed and apparently is received as heartfelt concern.

Ugh, I'm being hard on myself. But that's really how I feel like I get. I get to a point where I start convincing myself that I don't care and everything about the people I work with annoys the shit out of me.

Relevant because I've been seriously looking into Special Ed. licensure programs (I need to amend to state that I can't actually get a Master's in anything Teaching without a license, and if I get a Special Ed license it will, in effect, make me eligible for any future teaching degrees and legally able to teach in the U.S.) and even completed a FAFSA. I think if I choose this program I will go to Bethel as it seems to fit these needs the best.

But.

I am deeply unsure if I should have a career working with people because it's what I'm good at vs something that I don't get burned out on after 6 months. I am very concerned and stressed about this issue. Why must everything burn me out? Is it something I'M doing, or the work, or what? Hau~   -_-

I am definitely discussing this on the walk tonight with Steve.

---------

(  In other news, Steve and I have created some goals )

I accepted a position working as an Assistant Teacher at a Montessori school in the same city that Steve works in. If he can coax his boss into letting him have the later shift (9-5:30 vs 8-4:30), we will be able to carpool. I'm fairly certain my hours will be 9-6 because they specifically said they wanted someone who could close, and thank god for that because the school opens at 6:30am DDDD: I am so ridiculously not a morning person that I don't even think I could manage that. Anyway, the position is full time and Montessori schools have programming year-round (so no worrying about having to find a summer job!). I have the option of advancement to be a teacher if I take their training courses in the future, and I definitely want to switch rooms in the future. They just opened up a young infant program and so that's where I'll be starting. Babies aren't my cup of tea but they're not overly stressful, and hey, maybe working in that room will make me like them more? When I told Faith she about pooped herself in jealousy. She's got mad baby fever.

As for my current job, I've pretty much checked out. Supposedly I'll find out who everyone on my caseload is going to by noon today... a whole two days before I'm leaving. Way to leave time to prepare and talk to the receiving case managers, guys. Woo. So I've mostly been sitting around doing nothing, or updating client profiles and such. I just want to be done - I'm so over it!

Friday I'm getting my IUD checked bright and early at 7:15am, and then I'm going to go fill out paperwork and do some training at 9:15 at the school ^_^ Steve and I have BOTH tried to find my IUD strings as told, and failed... I'm just hoping that they've just so successfully contoured to my body that they're hard to reach, and not that anything's gone wrong. I get afraid of that every so often because once in awhile I'll get a severe pang of cramps, though very briefly. Just freaks me out thinking I got an infection or the IUD shifted or something. I keep looking at the bill - $1500 - and thinking that everything better be okay because that shit was expensive! I wouldn't even go in for this check-up if I wasn't worried I could like, die of some infection if it went wrong. I hate check-ups - they're a waste of money. And I'm about to lose insurance for 2 months so this better be the only thing! Anyway, I have almost enough in my health savings account to pay for it - I'll only need about $100 out of pocket by the time I do pay it. But I'll be paying for the entire doctor's visit this time without my HSA. Thank god Steve and I have been saving like crazy. We'll have well over $5,000 in savings by the time I get my last check from MHR at the end of the month. And then moving in with his family until June or whatever will also be super great.

We watched Louis C.K.'s "Hilarious" the other night on Netflix and both almost died from laughter. Steve doesn't even laugh very often, let alone HARD, but we were both heaps of uncontrollable, gut-wrenching, teary-eyed, can't-breathe, laughing doofs. I would be Louis' friend in a heartbeat. I love Louis C.K. Especially when he talks about parenting, and technology.

So I have all of next week as a vacation week, with Steve having taken Monday and Tuesday off for Valentine's day. Not that we're a mushy couple, just that it's an excuse to spend time together around a holiday XD We don't even know if we're doing anything yet, and we don't plan on getting each other gifts (in keeping with our new ghetto-ish style of living in order to save more). Just extra cutie time together :)