January 2009
Web MD is pretty much Satan.
I woke up this morning at around 4:30 after having a series of really freaky awake-dreams. You know the kind of dreams where you’re not actually asleep but still drowsy enough to sort of hallucinate that things are happening to you? No? Well, anyway…. I woke up and decided to go upstairs to try to get back to sleep. When I got up and started walking, I felt an immediate rush of intense dizziness and I could hardly stand let alone walk. In my stupor, I decided that perhaps it had something to do with low blood sugar or something like that, so I went into the kitchen and ate a banana before heading back to bed.
In the morning, I woke up to find that the dizziness had not subsided. Being the insane hypochondriac that I am, I immediately went on Web MD and concluded that it must either be Type 2 Diabetes or carbon monoxide poisoning. The second option seemed more probable and, with the potential swift and silent death, somewhat more exciting. Pretty certain that I would die if I stayed inside of my house, I called my father to ask for advice.
“Do we have a carbon monoxide detector?? I think I’m dying.”
My father suggested that I get dressed and walk over to his apartment. My body felt way too tired to put any effort into putting on clothes and walking outside, but I felt like it might be the carbon monoxide talking. Instead, I went up to my mother’s room (which is far away from what I deemed to be the carbon monoxide’s source) and sat in her bed with my head out of an open window.
Eventually, my mother came home and I decided that it might be a good idea to take a shower and get dressed while she was home, just in case I passed out or became asphyxiated while in the bathroom. Because I only have two days left before I head back to Brooklyn, my mother wanted to take me to her classes before she and I went back-to-school/apartment shopping. Right now, I’m sitting in the library at UB while my mother is busy becoming Dr. Mom a few buildings over. The dizziness is still here and I’m a little bit freaked out by that. I probably just have a cold or something (after all, carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms are pretty much the same as cold/flu symptoms). But, still. I would probably feel much better if we had a carbon monoxide detector at home. Or even a smoke detector that had batteries in it.
Resolutions 2009!
1. Stop freaking out about everything. Seriously. I need to take a chill pill. I don’t even remember how many times over the past year that I’ve had a panic attack about something. I need to just breathe and take everything one step at a time.
2. Remove the stick from my ass. Unwind a little bit. I really need to stop being so uptight about everything. This kind of goes along with the first resolution. Maybe I should take a meditation class or something like that. Or yoga.
3. Quit being all ADD. I took like five online personality tests to determine whether or not I actually have ADD and pretty much every single one was like, “You are psycho, go get help immediately.” Anybody who knows me really well can attest to the fact that I can hardly pay attention to anything. I forget people’s names that I should definitely remember, I awake from a daydream only to find that somebody has been having a conversation with me for the past ten minutes, I can’t finish books EVER, and I find it almost physically painful to sit down and study. My attention deficit problems weren’t really that bad in art school (in fact, they may have been a good thing in that setting), but because I’ve made the decision to transfer once and for all (hopefully) to real school, I think it would be wise to finally nail this ADD thing.
4. Do things. ANYTHING. For the past semester, more often than not, I was holed up in my apartment twiddling my thumbs or sleeping. This is probably due to the fact that my school schedule was absolutely retarded and by the time I had time to do anything, I was just too tired. Also, having zero money doesn’t help, either. Whenever my friends were going out to dinner, I’d have to be like, “uh…. I have some leftovers at home that are just screaming my name. But you guys go ahead.” It’s gross. So, I guess this brings me to resolution five….
Checklist 2008!
Here is the checklist from my 2008 resolutions.
1. Explore New York City more. Not really. But I did get to know certain parts of New York better than I did before. I spent a lot of the summer walking around my neighborhood and parts of Manhattan for work, so I guess that’s something.
2. Get a job. Yes and no. I had two jobs this past year (working as a personal assistant and then as a sales associate at a soap store), but I have been unemployed since August. So I only fulfilled my resolution by half, kind of. I need a job again. Badly.
3. Do more fun stuff! NO. 2008 was kind of the anti-fun year. Not only did it suck hard core in terms of school, but I think I became a total lame-ass because of the gigantic rut I seem to have been stuck in. For much of the year, I’ve been a total homebody and haven’t really been up to all that much. This needs to change.
4. Cook/bake more interesting things. Not at all. I’m still making peanut butter sandwiches and pasta pretty much all the time. It’s not like I didn’t try, though. I bought like three cookbooks and subscribed to Martha Stewart’s food magazine. Still, I haven’t really had the time or money to really get down to culinary business. This also needs to change. I can start by finally calling the super when I get back to New York and getting the oven fixed.
5. Network with people! NO! Part of being a lame-ass is not socializing enough so it kind of goes without saying that my plan to network was a failure.
6. Throw parties! YES! It took me a while to finally start throwing parties in my apartment, but I finally did over the summer. I also had a pretty cute Halloween party and I threw a cool New Year’s party the other day, too.
7. Take more pictures of random stuff and bring my camera everywhere. Yes, kind of. I did this like once. I probably would have done this more, though, had I not broken my mini point-and-shoot camera earlier in the year. It’s a huge hassle to carry around a digital SLR everywhere I go. This is probably why I haven’t taken that many pictures in general this year.
8. Take interesting classes! YES! I took four very interesting classes at Brooklyn College for my Spring semester: History of Modern Art, Psychology, Anthropology, and French. Then I went to FIT and kind of killed that whole thing. Now that I’m transferring back to Brooklyn College, I hope to start doing that again.
9. Experiment more with photography and photographic gadgets. No, but I don’t really care that much about this one.
10. Do more things that are free. YES! I went to the library a few times. And I went to free museums and saw movies for free at MoMA with my student ID!
11. Have an awesome year! HA. Not really. But I guess it could have been way worse. Here’s to making 2009 way better than 2008!
