The Cracked Blade

well i have come to a decision regarding the blog, something that i didn’t want to do. Starting tonight, i have blocked part of my blog off to the public. Starting with a great suggestion that i can relax and get my feelings and thoughts out, to being informed by my medical provider that this would be an excellent release of pent up stress so i don’t have a heart-attack, this blog has gone through many changes. but apparently my frustrations make several people highly uncomfortable, so in retrospect, i have choosen to password protect my 1st admendment right to free speech. life goes on, those i have made angry are angry, so on and so forth. for those who want the password and that i can trust, you know how to get ahold of me. it really galls me that in a society of free speech, i cannot express my anger and frustration in a personal forum which takes effort to actively seek out and read. well i’m off back to my homework, my medically prescribed break/dinner is over and i’m back to finishing up a book for next week over globalization.

When you can’t walk, you crawl. When you can’t crawl, you ask someone to carry you. —Firefly

Thanks to who reminded me of this quote.

ugh, mornings suck, as all can tell from the first post of the day. my diet is going so badly, it isn’t even funny. i’m supposed to relax for 30 min a day, and then work out 30 minutes a day…you know, all of this to stave off having an early heart attack at the young age of 26. after being able to handle half of that last week, this week has torn the crap out of me and i feel like crap. hell, i haven’t even had 15 minutes since monday morning to sit back and breath and relax, maybe do some yoga to loosen up your body. the degree of detoxing your body with all these healthy fruits and veggies is insane…they just don’t taste good anymore. my oatmeal and i have become mortal enemies. as i sit here, eating my breakfast, staring at mein kampf which i read alot of the night before, sometimes you have to wonder if this american obsession with immortality is really worth it (and yes, i can say american, i have been to other countries where i have been questioned on why we have such an obsession among other things.) food, which once i enjoyed, is now a chore, a survival technique just so i won’t die during the day, the bland, tasteless gruel infront of me reminds me of that. it could be that i just didn’t sleep well last night (if you could imagine the nightmares i have sometimes, you would want me commited…yet they are nothing compaired to what i’ve really done in the past.) i’ve been told that alot of people with my background suffer a strange sort of “survivor’s guilt,” that it is natural to have these feelings. on grey days like this, it is hard not to remember as you sometimes recognize similarities between a madman that your reading and yourself. Well my gruel is done, and I should get to the shower. time for another wonderful day of getting the shit kicked out of me when i’m feeling frustrated at life and my diet. (hopefully mom won’t call and nag me on my diet and the pills that i’ve been prescribed…just not one of those mornings.)

OK…so I visited the dietician on Tuesday, and let’s just say, I am on this side of being a vegetarian. I have nothing against the new diet; it is just frustrating with the list of foods I’m not supposed to be eating. It has taken the fun out of eating. I don’t look it, but apparently I need to lose some 57 pounds to get back to a low level moderate rate. As far as eating veggies go, I don’t mind it so much beyond the fact I have to hit the store every few days to get more veggies because of the shear amount that I have to eat. Eleven servings a day of veggies…that is an insane amount for anyone, and even now I don’t eat that much every day, and even before this new diet I wasn’t eating badly…I was eating like a grad student working his arse off just trying to survive the first semester of graduate school. Yeah, I know that I’ve been eating out more in the last few months, but when you live on campus for ten plus hours you have very few choices. I did eat fairly healthy, but I do have to cut back a lot of things, including the good things in life…pop, sausage, bacon, potatoes (which hurts the most, is taking potatoes away from an Irish-boy has to be some sort of cardinal sin), processed bleached flours, 1/3 of the whole chicken breast I eat every day. Yes, it hurts a lot…and screws up most of my enjoyable foods. Go figure. In other news, I am starting to feel a lot better from my various infections that I had…so that should help a lot in how I feel. Soon I’ll be able to get back to your normal work out schedule, which will be great. Anyways, I need to get back to reading for tomorrow, huzzah! Hopefully I will get my new class added soon so I can get my student loan in…paying off some bills and maybe buying silly things like my textbooks would be good.

Ok, so no mono. So I have disproved the theory that I was making out with some random woman in my sleep. Darn…;-) But there is a problem with my blood test, one of the chemicals that is linked to my liver is well past the maximum range of 200. It is at 578. More than two and a half freakin times more than what it should be. This is a little disheartening to hear, but I’m going in tomorrow to get more blood tests done. What is annoying is that i’m not allowed to eat anything for 14 hours before the test, and not allowed to drink anything but water before the test. That is alright though, I don’t have much of an appitite with one of the meds I’m taking, nausia is the main side effect for it. What compounds the fun is my other pill I have to take, which causes insomnia. So together it makes a perfect combo for long nights without much to do (well it is the first week, but honestly, I know what I study is boring, I love it, but at some point in the night I just want to fall asleep reading it. Sleep, I tried taking a nap when I got home today and had dinner, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. I like sleep, it is my friend, and in a few weeks she will go away again until the end of the semester. I haven’t told my parents what’s going on yet, they are worried enough about my youngest brother being a butthead and making choices which revolve around trying to one up me, but what can I say. Tomorrow morning I will give blood, although I’ve warned them that I will be a monster with my blood sugar so low in the morning…but it is their funeral. Hopefully I will hear back on friday and have a meeting with the doctor in charge of me right now, yeah…i can’t remember his name, it started with a Z i think:) Till then I get to smile as some of my good friends joke about dividing my stuff among them, but I have the final laugh! I intend to go out like a viking, on a burning ship, surrounded by all of my worldly possessions (which mostly are books that burn really well), with my friends tossed onto the burning ship for good form. Show them to be a smart arse to me, I can still dish it back;-)

In other news, I was really excited when I had a good friend from the past post to the blog, it brought a huge smile to my face. I sent her and her hubby an email on how i’ve been doing, but with how tired I am, I wonder how coherent it really was. I’m also glad that another of my friends left me a comment, and I really appreciate what she was wanting to do for me:) This afternoon on The Cracked Blade brought a huge smile to my face, and with the concern that my profs and Stina are showing me, it feels good to know people care.

Well I’m going to attempt to vegitate for the night, read some pages for class, and then try (and plead with the chemicals in my body) to let me sleep. I wish everyone a wonderful night, and hear from you all later.

Well my break was insane…if we can call it a break. The doc ended up sick, so i spent some fun time finishing all the grading. For 160+ students. With a really crappy grad list from a fellow TA. With a really strict timeline to get this all done. It just took me a bit of time to get it done, but I completed it sans my health. The funny thing about hospitals is that when you go into one to visit, you often come out of them sicker than you went in. Well i spent the middle of my break getting over a cold/flu that I didn’t want to give anyone until Christmas time rolled up on me. The trip home was interesting, not too stressful in the over all scheme. I did come out of it with a huge stack of DVDs, I made off like a bandit, which was great. Christmas eve was a little depressing, I have to admit, but concerning that it has only been now 3 years since I had my heart ripped out by the ex-fiancee, that is understandable. I was moody, and I know that I shouldn’t have been alone, but I did it anyways and played many hours of video game carnage. Yeah, not healthy, but I did it anyways.

New Years was fun, I played games with my friends for hours on end. I even came close to winning the game early on, but then i got ganged up on, but it was a really really good game. I had a blast. I had a glass of bubbly at midnight, watched all the couples be mushy, and then headed home an hour after midnight cause I was tired. The next day I had my traditional serving of cabbage (those with alot of irish traditions in their family will understand why) and had a good day of lounging around and doing artsy stuff.

Well the last week of my break I began to get tired, which I just thought that i needed to catch up on some sleep from everything that I’ve done the last few months without a real break. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, and i started to feel fairly icky at the end of this last weekend. Icky bad, but I thought survivable. Well I went to the student health center today and got the look of “your still standing?” which kinda fits in with my stubborness. The diagnosed me with a nice sinus infection, stomach flu, a very mild case of brochitis, and a wonderful blood test because I was showing possible signs of having mono. As the prof said tonight on the phone, “so who have you been kissing…” and I want to know too;-) But as Peppy le Pu would say…”le sigh,” so I don’t worry too much about it. Everyone keeps telling me that I will find the right woman eventually, it isn’t like I’m too hard to miss:) But back to my possible mono…it could be several other things, including nothing, my liver with an infection, or my gall bladder finally needing to come out (family history). So 2 of my 4 possible prognosi that I have involve me getting cut open. Oh fun…last thing I need is a new scar;-) But anyways, the semester is going fine so far, my classes seem alot better than last semster. I just need to get one more class added to my schedule and I’m good to go. I have a global history course that is going to be challenging, but alot of fun, I’m expecting to learn alot about how to teach a course of that sort of material. I’m also taking a class on WWII and Hitler, examining germany in the 20th century with one of the best Profs in the department. Minus one class, I’m also TAing for the doc again in Ancient History, hoozah!! It is a packed house, but out of the 220 in the class, I expect 50 will drop when they realize that we’re not lying about this class teaching you alot. Anyways, with my plague going on, I’m getting tired so I’m going to head to bed. Sleep well all and say healthy.

I appologize from the begining for the distasteful reference to the wizard of oz, it is one of the creaper book series that i ever read as a kid (and the second movie is still among those movies that i hate to watch…too similar to nightmares that i have) anyways, after a week long escape from reality, aka writing papers and generally working my ass off, i am oming upon this wonderful holiday season where we celebrate the conquering of this nation, Thanksgiving (ps…for those out there who hate the truth of the matter, sorry but i’m not responsible for the truth, i just prefer it over lies). Anyways, i do love thanksgiving, it is one of my favorite holidays, where else do you get to sit down with your family and consume a large ammount of food prior to stealing all the desserts from the adult table and sit at the kids table hording it (ok, yes i still sit at the kids table, but so do most of my cousins who are older than me and have kids themselves…and the youngest who sits at the kids table is my baby brother, who is 23)(my cousin’s kids get sucked up into sitting with at the adult table, even if they don’t want too…my aunts and uncles are trying to resist me and my cousins corrupting their grandkids (my second cousins)). Tis the season where the fine art of stealing desserts from the table to sneak back to kids table has become more of an art than decorating grandmaws christmas tree after the meal (which is a sad little tree now, which disappointed all of us last year…so grandmaw got a bigger one this year) the sad part about the dessert stealing is that we don’t even have to be sneaky anylonger, all we have to really do is send in a distraction (ie…me ussually), and then one of my brothers and one of my cousins walked in and takes two desserts each…amd every time we get yelled at but don’t care;-) Looking forward to good times coming up this week, relaxing and goofing off between working on huge projects.

back to life, at least for a little bit, this last week kicked my ass up and down the block, i was not a happy camper when finished, and i have a few more projects to work on. The biggest and most pressing is a paper which i am writing over infanticide in edinburgh from 1713-1721…if there has ever been a reason to understand why a woman should have the right to choose how to control their body, this would be the example. I won’t go into the debate over abortion rights, but seeing how these women were treated by men because they had no choices (or men controled the choices of women’s bodies) within society to go to is down right frightening; no one can tell me that it won’t happen again because of modern laws and religious beliefs beacuse of moral standards because edinburgh supposively had them also and i have at least half a dozen broadsides on the execution of these women because of this religious and lawful center of civilization. If i get enough support, i might publish the paper to the blog when i am finished unless i am able to get it published into a journal somewhere, where i would be sure to leave a link to the journal so others can find it. As a man, i have no right to decide a woman’s right to her body, and no matter what my beliefs might be about what she does, it is still her body to make decisions about…which is why i believe a woman should have a right to choose. please don’t use this blog as an angry forum to bash me because of what i believe is a choice, if something came up regarding my own gender’s reproductive rights or something to do to our bodies which some might think immoral, then i will fight for myself and my choices, but on the same note i fall into the beleif that woman can make the same decisions regarding their own bodies and that i cannot choose for them, only give them a choice. and no, i don’t think i am wishy-washy on the topic as some of my hardline friends are, i just have no right to tell others what to do. Willing to give advice, yes, tell someone what to do, not anymore.

well i better pretend that i am doing something productive today, back to grading again, but hopefully i can write again today when i get home or to post a few things that i have written in the past.