Tiredness, the weightloss thing, and big triggery stuff @ the end.

One wonderful thing for you:

My Egyptian friend told me that his uncle in Cairo got a call from Tunisia yesterday.

The Tunisian congratulated my friend's uncle on Mubarak's departure.

My friend's uncle said something like, "Um, why, thank you, but I don't know you."

The Tunisian replied "Oh, no, I just wanted to congratulate an Egyptian, so I called a number randomly and got you."

(GO EGYPT! ) (RA! RA! RA! ;) )
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The rest of the post isn't fun or funny-in fact it's a very solemn one...keep checking back for the more upbeat ones... I imagine they will come along presently.


This tiredness worries me...Does it mean the sinus infection's returning? or just the result of a typical sleep-deprived week?

 I'm getting a bit more green stuff out.  And saving it in a jar for the county ENT doctors who think I'm making shit up.
I find this ridiculous, demeaning, makes me feel less valuable as a human being and it screws with my sense of reality.
My palate is itching...but of course they won't believe me when I tell them that.

Since they have two hospitals, both with ENT departments, I'm going to call on Monday and see what I have to do to get into the other ENT department.  Maybe the other ENT's will actually believe me when I report symptoms.
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Over the week I managed to snag four-count'em, four good pallets.   Four pallets equals two planting beds.  What I'm doing is cut a little bit out of the center of the pallets, then pick which one has the more busted up or rotted bottom, and remove those boards.  After that, I nail them together at the top corners-it's a pretty straightforward procedure when you take the back off..  Then they get lined, first with cardboard, then with mulch. The cardboard will not only help retain moisture around the sides, I think...it's definitely going to kill the grass.

I'm too tired to do this today...I really am.  Tonight's a down night also.

Oh...I should explain my wacky ways of eating, and how that came about:

You see, I am now weighing about 152-157 at 5'9".

About a year and a half ago I weighed 275.

Before that I'd eaten my way up to 320 in high school...managed to diet down to 270...got stuck there until I went "pretty-much" vegan, dropped to 190 mainly through exercise, but a little through diet, shacked up with the wife, let myself go, back to 220, then got sick and ballooned due to stress and repeat courses of prednisone.

When I hit 275, my allergist(then about as frustrated as I was at my case) asked if I would consider stomach stapling. Said it would dramatically improve my condition.

I want my life back.  Badly.  So began a year-and a half diet-a-thon.

Well...when I got to 220, I got stuck.  I was eating 1200 calories a day, was ravenous, and stuck hard.

Enter the Johnson Up Day Down Day Diet.

I started doing it.  Actually, being the perfectionist I am, I started doing an even tighter restriction than called for, but pretty much the Johnson diet.

The weight melted off me so fast that my coworkers expressed concern.
This was full of unfun...when I first started down days going up stairs made me dizzy.  Working out made my heart pound.

Now I don't seem to really even get that hungry on down days.

BUT
I want to weigh 140.
Why?
155 is too close to 164-the threshold for me being overweight.  Having yoyoed all over the place, my body can store it like nobody's business. 155 is close enough that one good case of the fuckits can propel me into the overweight range.

That's not cool.   I want to be firmly of normal weight, because I want to guarantee I will never be obese again.

Half of the reason I wanted to kill myself in high school was my binge eating disorder...
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And that brings me to the last thing:

It occurred to me last night that the entirety of my adult life...I never anticipated happening.  Which hasn't helped matters as far as doing things in a planned, coherent fashion.


(BTW...You want to click away now if you're easily upset or triggered...Don't blame me if you flip out, you've been warned.)







By ninth grade I hated myself for failure to kill myself. I didn't work in high school or take college prep classes-because I was just doing things to make the parents not yell at me and-or hit me until I worked up the nerve to kill myself.  I self-denigrated every day in an active attempt to make myself do it, convince myself to slice my wrists open.
I so wanted to die that I regularly called myself a coward and beat myself up for failure to have the courage to wipe the stain that was me from the earth.

This was all before I decanted my sexual abuse memories.   This is where the shame and the self-loathing came from...but I didn't know that then.

Some of the sexual abuse was forced on me-the oral rape at four by the neighbor and the vaginal rape by my uncle when I was six.

My Dad, though, I don't believe he had to force me, or keep doing so...because being alone with my nightmares-the terror-was worse than the physical pain of his adult penis in me combined with the comfort of being touched, of not being alone, abandoned.

And there was arousal as well. Not that I wanted that arousal, was ready for it, knew what it was.
I think I may have thought I was dying, because I always thought my father could kill me-that's what I thought when he hit me.
His physical abuse was never extreme-certainly never bad enough to leave a mark.
I'd categorize his physical abusiveness as usually mild occasionally escalating to moderate...but I was afraid he'd kill me nonetheless when he went off.
His verbal abusiveness actually probably did me as much damage-perfectionism is a 50-pound millstone around my neck, and it comes from both parents.
Anyway...
I needed something from him...well, he decided he needed something from me in return. So I paid that price at age six, seven and eight.  The memories are still very blurry, but I think several times a week he chose to have sex with me.  I remember waking up in my parents' bedroom and having no idea how I got in there the night before repeatedly, so I was dissociating a lot.
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Nowadays, we've come to an understanding.  He doesn't get around me, I don't try to kill him.

Because if I see him, a cloud of red, red rage just descends over my eyes.  I cannot see straight.  I cannot think straight.  All I see is someone who took advantage of my desperation, who was entrusted with my care, and who damaged me for life because he felt like it.

There is no one else in this world I can say I truly hate with the profound depth that I hate this man who is half my genetic makeup.

Yes, he was raped as a child.  I don't care. He's still responsible for his actions.

Yet at the same time part of me wishes...that he'd try to make amends for what he did.   There's a part of me that aches for a real father.

But he's not a real father, he's a 60-something adolescent who can't apologize for the damage he's done to everyone in his life-and I think I'm the prizewinner of that contest.
I couldn't  have a decent relationship with him even if I could get past my own fury.

I don't know how I'm going to feel when he dies. Probably both sad and relieved.