Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Bringing The “Yee Haw” Since 1972

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This past weekend my husband and I went up to North Carolina to visit my family, and in order to do so we had to drive through South Carolina. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever personally driven along I-85 as it passes through the state of “smiling faces, beautiful places”, but if you ever do I think you will agree with me that the one thing this state apparently wants all of its visitors to know is that, by god, YOU WILL NOT LACK FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO SEE HALF-NAKED WOMEN!

There is one particular billboard that advertises a place called “Cafe Risque” which, as far as we can tell from the ad, is a combination truck stop and adult entertainment club, and which makes sure to emphasize, in bold capital letters, “Couples Welcome.” As we passed by this weekend my husband said, “You know, I wonder if this sign is so far away [from the “cafe”] because that’s how long it takes men to convince their girlfriends or wives to actually stop there.”

“That’s a good question,” I replied. “I wonder if they did some kind of market research.”

“Yeah, like they kept moving it back and moving it back because guys were saying things like, ‘Oh man, I just needed those 5 extra miles and then I would’ve had her!’ ”

So that helped the miles pass just a bit more quickly, and I entertained myself for the rest of the trip by thinking of ways that I could work it into a story that I could tell here.

By the time we’d eaten dinner I was so proud of myself, because I’d even thought of a new slogan for the SC tourist bureau’s ad campaigns: “South Carolina: Keeping you here until you’ve had at least a mildly pornographic sexual experience.” I had proudly announced this to my husband, and was eagerly awaiting his accolades on my brilliance and wit when he said, “Um, I’ve got some bad news for you: that “cafe” is actually here in Georgia.”

So yeah, apparently that’s what I get for making inaccurate, sweeping generalizations about a fellow state-sorry, South Carolina. Please feel free to add your own opinions of Georgia here in the comments. I’d stick around to help, but I’ve gotta go and run the General Lee down to Cooter’s garage, then see if Uncle Jesse can hem up my new pair of overalls before the pig pickin’ tonight, and then make sure we’ve all got enough chew to last us through Junior’s bail hearing.

And while we’re on the subject, I really need to tell you about one of the roommates my husband had during graduate school. (I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention the school here by name, so I’ll just tell you that it rhymes with “Schmorgia Schmech,” and its school song features the stunningly crafted line, “I’m a helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, helluvan engineer.”)

Anyway, this guy had come here to Georgia from California to get a master’s degree in traffic flow and management. Which was fine, except for one small thing: He came here completely convinced that Georgia was EXACTLY AS PORTRAYED IN “THE DUKES OF HAZZARD.”

Which meant that he had come to do graduate work

a) in a state which, based on my recollection of the series, featured not one single institution of any education, much less higher education, and

b) in a state whose traffic flow patterns were based on there apparently being only two roads (a low road for the completely incompetent, “Roscoe P. Coltrane”, and a higher road which allowed Bo and Luke Duke to escape said sherrif by taking advantage of Georgia’s canyon-sized potholes and vaulting their way to safety) and three cars: the General Lee, Roscoe’s police cruiser, and the car driven by the menacing, mirrored-sunglasses wearing sherrif of neighboring Chickasaw county.

Which means that, as far as I can tell, the only traffic management strategies anyone need learn are as follows:

a) raze all hilly areas to the ground, making sure the entire state is completely flat and level, therby ensuring that the good old boys literally can no longer “take the high road”, and,

b) ensure that every state has their own “Uncle Jesse”, who will feed you some fine Southern cuisine, and then speak sternly to you about your errors in judgment and how you can correct them

In which case, due to my religious TV viewing habits of the 1970s and 80s, and the fact that I own the copy of Scholastic’s now-defunct kids magazine, “Hot Dog!”, featuring a cover story which details just exactly how the General Lee was able to fly through the air, as far as I can tell I am actually Dr. Jenny Ryan, Ph.D. in Traffic and Engineering .

YEE HAW, Y’ALL!

Wherein I Must Once Again Unfortunately Revisit The Subject Of People And Their Dumbassery

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Although first I would like to say thank you to anyone who has continued to visit me here, despite the fact that I haven’t posted anything for a week and a half.

The good news is that the blog is FINALLY UPDATED! And it is so pretty! And clean! And did I mention the prettiness?

The bad news is that after 6 days of editing 550 posts, and then presenting my husband with a list of “back end” tasks which ended up taking him 7 hours last Sunday, neither he nor I could even think about my blog without wanting to punch something.

But happily that time has passed, and I am now able to continue my discussion of People Who Have Obviously Never Experienced Pain So Debilitating That They Have Actively Wished For Death, And Who Therefore Act Like A Dumb Ass Around Those Of Us Who Have.

So last week I was listening to a radio show on the internet where the hosts were discussing strategies we could use to help us follow through on the work of our dreams, once we had figured out what our dreams actually were.

A man called in to the show to discuss how he had successfully written and self-published a book. He said he set a deadline for when he wanted the book to be available for purchase, and then he just worked backward from that point, planning out and then completing each task until the entire thing was finished.

He didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before, but what irritated me was the tone in which he said it, which was somewhere along the lines of, “Uh, DUH! How can you NOT know this?!”

You know the kind of person I’m talking about.

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Week In Review

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Sunday

If I ever need to get a clog out of my computer, this will be why.

Tuesday

What is it about barfing that then makes my cats want nothing but to physically express their love for me directly on my face?

Wednesday

I just put out a burning ember with my finger. How did I think that would not end badly for me?

Dear predictive typing: why on earth would I be trying to say “Holy shut”?

Me: Is it fixable? My husband: Probably not. Me: (crushed). My husband: But that doesn’t mean there’s not a workaround. ENGINEERS ROCK!

Thursday

Someone at a NY TGI Friday’s found a SEVERED SNAKE HEAD in their dinner, and now I can never go out to eat again FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

Husband’s arrival just interrupted strange cats having sex in our garage. Was unaware that I was running a feline brothel. Honest.

Sunday

I’m very sad to report that magical thinking does NOT work, and that I STILL have fibromyalgia. F@#$.

Life

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Having fibromyalgia, which needs to be treated with Lyrica, which drastically reduces your pain (AWESOME!), but which also causes quite a bit of swelling (LESS AWESOME), which causes quite a bit of pain (NOT AT ALL AWESOME), which necessitates fucking with tweaking the Lyrica, which could take you all the way back to square one, which truly makes you question the idea that there is any kind of benevolent force in charge of the universe AT ALL.

There seriously needs to be some kind of Universe Official whose nuts you can punch on days like these.

A Review: Havi Brooks And The Procrastination Dissolve-O-Matic

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I have giant Internet crush on the very cool Havi Brooks.

She is an expert in patterns and habits, specifically;

-how to gently and compassionately notice the patterns that are keeping you stuck

-how NOT to beat yourself up over the fact that you have patterns that keep you “stuckified”

-how to gather important information from these stuckified places

-and how to use that information to gently and easily create new patterns to get you where you actually want to be.

Havi has created a lot of great products to help us with our own, personal destuckification, such as her “Emergency Calming Techniques which I reviewed in an earlier post.

My other favorite product, which I almost bought just for the name alone, is her “Magical Procrastination-Dissolving Fairy Wonder Dust.”

Most of the other things I’ve tried in order to help me get past my procrastination start with the assumption that, because I am experiencing some temporary procrastination, I am “bad”. Quite often I have already made this assumption about myself, so the new person or technique begins this process by joining with me in agreeing that I am somehow wrong, and basically just giving me some more ways that my Inner Slave Driver can use to beat me up some more.

But not Havi. She starts out by telling me that I’m okay. Yes, I am temporarily experiencing some “stuckness”, but that’s okay. That’s just life, and my “stuckness” does not mean anything who I fundamentally am.

She helps me meet myself exactly where I am with kindness and compassion, which in and of itself goes a long way toward dissolving the resistance I’m feeling to doing the things I want-or need-to do.

Then, when I’m in this gentler place, she gives me a simple-and slightly wacky-technique I can use to help soften the rest of my resistance.

Just for fun I decided to track this process for a bit, and these are a few of the tasks on which I used my magical fairy dust over the past week:

-cleaning the cat box
-taking out the trash
-calling the phone company to report a problem with our phone line
-making a vet appointment for one of the cats
-making a phone call I’d been dreading for a week
-writing a new blog post and announcing it on Twitter
-answering 2 emails which I’d been avoiding
-emailing a friend to ask for some help with a project I’m working on

My application of this technique also had an unexpected benefit. As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, a few months ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalagia, and I’m having to re-learn how to be me, in my life, with this new health situation. It involves a lot of trial, and error, and bashing around on this occasionally steep new learning curve.

So one day last week I had a list of things I thought I should be able to accomplish, but I was feeling very reluctant to actually work on any of them. So I applied a liberal dose of my fairy wonder dust, and was able to get through maybe a third of my list. However, when I got to that point and actually stopped for a moment I realized that I was in a fair amount of pain, and instead of working anymore I needed to take some medicine and go rest.

So instead of just encouraging me to push my way through the pain so I could complete my list, the Dissolve-O-Matic helped me see that my procrastination was actually there for a very specific reason; to help me stop working and deal with my pain so that I could feel better.

Here, in Havi’s own words, is what’s included in this seriously, you-need-to-have-this kit:

1. “MAGICAL PROCRASTINATION-DISSOLVING FAIRY WONDER DUST (the instant-help-right-now guide)”

2. “THE E-BOOK: DISSOLVE PROCRASTINATION (108 pages of pure unadulterated problem-solving)”

3. “Bonus mp3 recordings of me (Havi) doing the emergency genius technique with real, live people who are in the throes of stuckness. This is a great way to experience how it’s done in a powerful, visceral, body-memory kind of way so you can get even better at doing it on your own.

So if any of this feels like something that could help you get through your stuck spots a little bit more easily and gently, just click on the graphic at the top of this post, or you can click here.

And here’s to all of us learning how to be just a little bit kinder and gentler with ourselves.

Week In Review A La Twitter

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Sunday

The zipper refuses to stay up on my new shorts. Nothing like finding out you’ve just bought yourself a new pair of slutty pants.

Monday

My Relentless Emails Of Terror have triumphed victorious!, and husband’s business trip to Mexico has been canceled.

Feline pill pockets are my boyfriend.

Tuesday

Dear Future Me: Days with fibro pain are NOT the optimal times for “growing your business”.

Wednesday

Hey Lizard! I’m trying to help you live, but you’ve gotta meet me halfway here, and stop running TOWARDS my cat. That won’t end well for you

I just explained the concept of object pronouns IN Spanish AS the fibro meds kicked in AND made sense. I am a rock star .

Thursday

To my slutty pair of shorts: It’s just me and the cats here so it’s really not gonna do you any good to continue randomly unzipping yourself

Friday

As the school year draws to a close I must now take up the mantle of my summer job: Person Who Protects Porch Lizards From My Cat, Tigger.

Saturday

Just heard that next door neighbor’s BDay party includes a “reptile wrangler.” Because apparently, they hate me.

It Must Be Love

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So I went to get another foot detox this morning, and since my husband was just coming out of a massage as my appointment started, he decided to stick around and see for himself all the weird goo that comes out of my feet. (I don’t know why. I mean, I adore my husband, but no way would I stick around to see disgusting crap come out of his feet. Blech!)

It took a while to get the whole process going, but soon the ick was flowing freely, and my husband and the therapist were fascinated.

“Ooh, look,” he said, about 20 minutes into the process, “you’ve got all these really gross rings around your feet. Cool.”

“Oh yeah,” I replied. “I’m like my own, disgusting planet.”

“Exactly!” he agreed.

“Well it’s nice to know that, even after all these years, I’ve still got some mystery left,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “Who knew that you were filled with so much YUCK?!”

Top Three Reasons Why It’s Really Really Good That My Husband Gets Home From His Week-Long Business Trip Today

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#3-I received approximately 79,000 phone calls from what appeared to be 3 individual charities, and instead of just ignoring them, I developed a new hobby whereby I picked up the calls, hoping for a person on the other end so that I could yell at them to STOP F’ING CALLING ME ALREADY!!!!

#2-Total food consumed during his 5-day absence:

3 bananas
4 yogurt cups
1 12-pack of Coke
1 box chocolate Graham Crackers

#1-My biggest goal for the week: To learn how to manipulate 2 separate kitty “fishing pole” toys, in separate hands, at the same time