The original vagabond

I heard this the other day, and it made me think of you :)


Long ago and oh so far away
I fell in love with you before the second show
Your guitar it sounds so sweet and clear
But you're not really here it's just the radio

Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you'd be coming back this way again baby
Baby baby baby baby oh baby
I love you I really do

Loneliness is such a sad affair
And I can hardly wait to be with you again
What to say to make you come again
Come back to me again and play your sad guitar

I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you'd be coming back this way again baby
Baby baby baby baby oh baby
I love you I really do

Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you'd be coming back this way again baby
Baby baby baby baby oh baby
I love you I really do

Thank you

So I found this buried in the depths of my facebook, and I felt like sharing it for some reason.  I don't really know why, but I felt like sharing it, and probably also having a record for the next time facebook inevitably changes its message storage and display interface.  It's pretty damned obvious what its about.  Consider it egotistical or narcissistic, but reading what I wrote makes me want to cry.  In a really good and happy way.


Thank you.
So much
For the whole of the past two weeks.

Thank you for putting me up for 2 weeks. Thank you for letting me share your bed. Thank you for cooking for me every night. Thank you for paying so much. Thank you for taking me to shitty movies that you'd already seen. Thank you for showing me Boston. Thank you for driving me, and others, all over the place without complaint, or asking for gas money, even at 3am in the morning. I'm sorry my head got fucked up yesterday. And I'm sorry I'm running 4000 miles back away from you as a result. Thank you for dealing with it. Thank you for holding me, and telling me you loved me, and how much you'd miss me. Thank you for curling yourself around me in bed and making me feel special. Thank you for the shirt you gave me. I'm gonna be holding it all the way back to the UK. I cried the whole train journey up to Boston, and even now, if I stop, and think for a few seconds, tears start welling up in me. I don't do tears. You probably noticed last night, I can cry, I can shake, I can give myself sore eyes and short breaths and all the other symptoms, but I don't produce tears easily. Thank you for understanding exactly why I hate you, why I hate being in love with you, why I hate being with you and why I hate being apart from you. Thank you for understanding why I love all those things too. And thank you for feeling the same way back.

And in a way, thank you for being restrained. I get that it was better for the both of us. But as you've noticed, where things like this are concerned, I have no strength or resolve. I gave it up the moment you told me you loved me. And I know that as much as I love you, and as open as you are with me, I don't know so many things about you, and the part of me that wants to bee with you all the time is silly and childish. But I don't really care. If you asked, I wouldn't care for practicalities, or consequences, or reason. If you asked me to slaughter the entire world to get to you I'd do it. And you know that, and that's why you're the sensible one, and you don't ask anything of me, because you feel you don't have the right, and that makes it worse that I'd still do whatever you wanted of me. As I say, I'd rather go through a week of hell and know I'd lived for a brief moment, than have a dull ache all my life about all the things that passed me by. My heart constantly wants to break through my chest again today, but where yesterday it was in pain, today its a happy hurt. Thank you. Please keep being you, and making me hate you. I'm sorry I won't be around for another 3 weeks; I'm sorry you won't be able to surprise me by turning up at Patricks or whatever; I don't expect that of people, no-one else would do it for me, where I would do it for others, so I've grown not to think of it as a possibility, and one day, I'll learn to forget that around you, just as I had to learn that Joel is the only person I've ever met that is just as faultingly loyal to his friends as I am.

I know I'm rambling, but I don't really know what else to do. I don't want to be here, and I don't want to leave you. Once again, I find myself wishing I could press pause on the entire world for a few weeks, and just exist with you and me, and nothing else, except maybe some extra boys to play with...

Please come visit soon; I don't know when I'll next be able to come over - September isn't a confirmed thing, and depending on where Chris and I end up, I might not be able to come to the US for 2 years, and I don't want to wait that long for you.


I love you.
x.

I made my bed, now I must lie in it. Alone.

One of the boys I will love till the day I die is currently trying to sleep downstairs on the sofa.  And all I want to do, is curl up in the same bed, our bodies wrapped around each other, and have him tell me everything will be all right.  That my faith in people isn't misplaced.  That I am a good person.  That one day I will wake up and feel happy.  That in spite of myself, he loves me.

But I can't, because I made my decision, and I have to live with it.  I don't doubt it was the right one, I look at him, and I love him, and I get hard over him, but I don't want to be with him any more, so I know it was the right decision, but that choice can still hurt, and I can still want him to be the one who makes me the centre of his world when I'm feeling bad, and I can curl up in my bed alone and wish that I could go downstairs and hold him, and pretend that doesn't make things harder for the both of us, even if it's just for one night.


-- Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight till it be 'morrow.

Unpretty

Never insecure until I met you
Now I'm bein' stupid
I used to be so cute to me
Just a little bit skinny
Why do I look to all these things 
To keep you happy
Maybe get rid of you 
And then I'll get back to me...

Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach; I feel it in the air - the summer’s out of reach

I keep finding myself in a really meh kinda mood.  And then I keep thinking about lots of things I should know better than to think about.  And I'm not sure if the meh mood is because I'm thinking about them, or I'm thinking about them because I'm in a meh mood.

I went to the doctors again today.  Hayfever this time.  It hasn't started yet; it tends to kick in end April/mid May through to mid/end August.  But I was low on anti-histamines from last year so it was time to stock up in advance anyway, besides which last years, like pretty much every years previous, didn't really work.  I was on the strongest dosage of the drug and it was barely lasting me 1/4 of a day.  So another year, another drug...  Apparently I've exhausted most of the BNF's list of drugs; there are 3 left.  That's a lie, there's plenty more, but they all have arrhythmia risks and such, and doctors don't like prescribing those, especially given I have relatively severe asthma.  I actually have one of the most stable and regular heart rhythms going (asthma aside); my other medical fails have put me on various drugs with high heart problem risks in the past (again, because those were the only options left), and so I've always had to go through stupid amounts of ECGs and other such tests as well as regular monitoring to make sure I was okay and you can literally trace one heart pattern over another from 6 weeks ago.  But equally if the doctors prescribe it in the full knowledge it can cause problems they don't have a leg to stand on if it all goes horribly wrong, so they tend to avoid those ones.  So I got given one of the 3 remaining options - Levocetirizine.  Given I was previously on 180mg of fexofenadine, and the new one is 5mg max dosage, that makes it at least 36x stronger in theory, but that remains to be seen.  They also still refuse to give me immunotherapy for no obvious reason.

One of the reasons I go abroad each summer, beyond wanting to get out of the country, wanting to visit other friends, my love of America, etc etc... is that I don't get hayfever abroad.  The grass pollens in Europe, Malaysia, Singapore, and both East and West Coast USA don't affect me.  I have no idea about the rest of the world yet but I'm going to assume I'm probably safe.  I get hayfever REALLY bad in the UK.  My eyes get so bad I can't physically see.  This means I can't get to work, or I can, but driving in rush hour traffic, on 2 hours really bad sleep, with your eyes shut, is NOT something I recommend.  Hell I can barely see to cook, or shower, or anything.  I have to lock myself in an overheated house where I can't open the windows, and every time someone opens the front door my symptoms flare up for a good half hour.  On top of this there's the getting through an entire box of kleenex every day, not being able to sleep even more than normal, and generally feeling like I have the worst flu possible for 6 weeks each year, and bad flu for another month or two either side of that.  Needless to say this puts a big downer on my summer, so I try and get away each summer, because its good to get away, it calms me down, it recharges my batteries, etc... and it means I ACTUALLY get to HAVE a summer.

This year, I can't afford that.  I could maybe *just* scrape together a plane ticket for myself, but a) I'd screw myself over for deposits/rent/job when I came back and b) I should really go on holiday with the boyfriend this year as it was about 5 years ago since we last went anywhere together.  So I have a summer in the UK to look forward to.  Aside from knowing that this means months of feeling like utter hell, I'm actually really really worried about this prospect.  Every summer I've stayed in the UK, I've lost my job due to hayfever.  Because when you can't turn up for work for 3 weeks straight, it becomes a serious issue.  Even if I do get into work I pretty much always get sent home within an hour of turning up.  So I'm pretty fucking scared that I'm going to lose my job from illness this summer.  Yes its a job that pays shit, and that pisses me off a lot, but its a job, it's income, it's straight forward and easy to do, and I need money.  From August onwards I have a £200pcm loan to repay for the next 5 years.  So I can't afford to be without a job.  And I definitely can't afford to be trying to look for a new one and attend interviews when I can't see to put one foot in front of the other.


In fact, I may just bitch about money again, 'cause that's always fun.

I asked for a raise the other week.  Because I now have to work 6 days a week.  The boss pointed out although the actors earn more, they have to pay their own tax\NI as self employed staff.  I countered they earn considerably more (200pcm) more than me, so I'd be better off getting what they do and paying my own tax/NI, on top of which I do considerably more work than them.  So the other day my boss conceded to give me a pay rise.  To the same level as the actors.  I took it, because at the end of the day more pay is better than no rise at all, but this means I am now being paid £55 more per week gross, in order to work an extra day.  So really, I've received bugger all pay rise in real terms.  I'm not happy with it, but I'll take it for now.

We also have 4 bank holidays coming up.  Good Friday, Easter Monday, the extra Royal Wedding Friday, and May Early Bank Holiday.  Of these I benefit of a grand total of one; work have graciously given us the Royal Wedding day off,, Good Friday I have to work (as well as Easter Weekend), and the two Mondays are my one day off a week now anyway.  And I don't get paid any extra for working bank holidays either.  In fact, because I have Mondays off as a matter of course, I benefit from hardly any bank holidays throughout the year.  FML.

As always, I'd like to go away in the summer.  I would maybe manage it if I was on my own, but probably because I'm only willing to fuck my life over in the future for the sake of short term relief.  But as it is, there is no way in hell I can pay for a holiday for 2.  Someone suggested I perhaps don't go the the US; I countered anywhere else I'd have to pay hotel and food costs, US I can get accommodation and half my food costs paid for me.  And a week or two of hotels and food for 2 in Europe would easily eat up the cost of a second US plane ticket.  So that's a non starter.

It's just been announced that the New York Rangers are coming to Europe to play the 2011-12 NHL Season Première games in October.  To Stockholm, but to Europe.  That's likely to be my only chance to ever see the Rangers play, and almost certainly my last ever chance to see Chris Drury play as he's getting on a bit, in hockey terms at least.  Tickets are £70 each, there are 2 games.  If I go for one game, it's £200 odd, for both games it's £250.  And that's not including taking Chris, as again, I should do, which then means another set of tickets, flights, hostel beds, food etc.  So that makes it £500.  Even at the £200 I can't really do it.  So now, one of my best ever chances to see my hockey team play, I won't get.  Which sucks.

In fact I technically have no surplus, as on top of the £200 outgoing from August onwards, at some point this summer, I will have to move.  Which means I need to save a 6 week deposit, and a month's London rent.  Which is a total of about £1000 - £1500 I need to magically save at some point, which to be honest, just isn't going to happen So no trip abroad, alone or with Chris, no rangers tickets, no xbox, no shiney new pc parts, no new tv, no portal 2, or dragon age 3, or swtor or any of that.

And you know what that all makes me want to do... spend money.  Spend money on comfort buying something to make me feel better, which I know just guarantees that I'll be really fucked when it comes to moving next time, let alone any of the other stuff I'd like to do, and frankly, I don't consider a summer holiday and a weekend break to see a team I've followed since I was 12 for the first time ever that unreasonable as luxuries go.

I'm 24, and I'm fucking sick of struggling so much just to keep going.
...and Sarah McLachlan's 'Full Of Grace' just came on.  Fuck you SpotifyESP

Diagnosis

So I never updated you all on what happened with my psychoticness.

Eventually, I got a new appointment with the psych doctor through, and spent a stupid amount of time talking to her (whilst my leg was frantically jerking around erratically as it tends to when i'm suppressing panic attacks).  Anyway, long story short she reckons I have Cyclothymia.  Most people tend to characterize this as the milder version of Bipolar II.  Which is somewhat accurate, though I kinda resent that as much as I imagine people with Bipolar II resent the impression that they have the milder version of Bipolar I.

For those not well versed in the DSM, the differences are as follows.  BP I requires you to have had a fully manic episode, complete with psychosis, hallucinations, the works.  BP II you've gone pretty manic, but not actually broken down into psychosis, so this tends to be what most bipolar people are.  Cyclothymia, again, only  hypomania, not full psychosis, and also only mild depression rather than a fully depressive episode.  Of course, these are clinical distinctions, try telling someone with these they're not quite in enough emotional turmoil and pain even though they can't physically control themselves and you'll find the physical lack of control will be oddly controlled enough to concentrate on your face.  But the Cyclothymia does seem to make sense for me.  I switch between the genuine extremes a lot less than a BP II person; I rather tend to switch up and down between what I guess you could call severe depression and mania, rather than crippling depression and mania :P  And I do it a lot, very frequently in fact, and cyclothymia effectively accounts for the rapid cycling qualifier of a bipolar diagnosis too, so it explains why my mood shifts so dramatically within the space of a week or even a day.

I'm supposed to be deciding what kind of therapy I want to go for.  Drugs are a bad choice for me.  I likely wont take them; I've never known them to be a viable long term answer for anyone, and as much as I hate the mood swings, I hate feeling 'middley' even more so, paradoxically, I cope a lot better with depression or mania than i do with just feeling okay.  And as the drugs are designed to narrow your emotional range and suppress the extremes, that's clearly not going to end well in my case.  So I have either the Freudian lying on a couch option whilst talking about my daddy issues, or cognitive behavioural therapy where I get to make mood diaries and other such annoying shit.  Obviously I not going to react well to either option, so its a case between the lesser of two evils at this point, though they were supposed to send me information on this about a month ago and they still haven't, so I guess I should ring them and chase this up, especially as there's a 3 month waiting list for a therapist.

By the end of the year, I might finally be seeing someone who can help for the suicidal feelings I was having back in December. -.-  God bless the NHS*



*I mock and deride the NHS and medical professionals constantly, and that's because, by and large, it's shit, and unbelievably broken, but in fairness, I am immensely grateful for its existence.  If I was born in a country without free social health care, I would have died many times over before I was even 1 year old.  I was never supposed to survive by natural selection.  And it's only by modern medical treatment I have stayed in the world so long, on so many counts.  If I lived somewhere where I had to pay medical bills, I just couldn't do it.  I would have died, or bankrupted my parents, and then died another 5 times anyway.  So the NHS for all its shitness, for all my frustrations at medical staff, and my hatred of them, is genuinely the only reason I am alive, and in spite of whatever suicidal thoughts I may go through, I will always be grateful for it's existence in British Society.

No Key

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