And now you can get credit when Hec's inevitable fruit audit comes up! So you're already ahead!

I'm glad you spoke up, Erin.

Erin! Good to see your pixels, sorry about the black dog. He'll behave better if you pay him some attention, probably. Texted you, btw.

Erin, I'm so glad you spoke up. We've got your back.

msbelle, you're the best.

I'm glad you're here, Erin. Very much what they said, up there.

Happy almost-vacation to msbelle and meara!

Erin, good luck in dealing with the Black Dog.

And do keep taking the meds. I can usually miss one day, but I really feel it if I miss two days in a row.

I am glad I did, too.

Ugh, it's been so long since I had a bad bout. And I haven't had one since I've been living with D -- not a long, scary one like this one. It's got to be so freaky looking at it from the outside looking in.

Last night he was like "I'm worried. You're wearing a sheet."

Me: "It's a flowered sheet?"

I disconnect so much when I do this. Forgive me if I post a bunch of stupid crap today, but I have to plug in somewhat.

I have to be grateful for Maria...but I also have to be grateful for a hairball. I sat down bare-assed on a wet, cold hairball on my pleather computer chair this morning, before I'd had a chance to sip at coffee, and I think the fact that I was able to be so wholeheartedly grossed out, despite my disgusting state of hygiene was the shock my system needed.

Combine with reading all the other stuff, I guess I was like "If you're not too far gone to be utterly oblivious to the sensation of cold hairball on ass, I guess you can grab yourself by the lady-cojones and do something about it."

I feel like shit, though, despite the shower, banana and coffee. My whole body aches, and my head hurts. At least I'm aware enough to know my body feels like shit? And I'm trying to do something about it? That's something.

This time last year I had just lost a job I loved and started a job I would very quickly come to hate. And my cat ran away. I was a ball of anxiety, I burst into tears at the slightest provocation, I was totally miserable. It sucked.

Right now I have two jobs I like and am making plans to start a small business that I'm pretty sure I'm going to love. I still miss my cat, but I can think of her without waterworks, because I am appropriately medicated and the therapy took. I'm writing on a regular basis. I socialize without anyone having to drag me bodily out of the house. I'm thinking about dating again.

It's pretty awesome how stuff can turn around.

Stuff can turn around, but you have to turn it around.

I hate depression. It's so...depressing. And it never goes away! No matter how hard you work at it, if you slip, it's right there (bad black dog) to bite you on the ass and drag you down again.

OK, I'm going to watch Once More With Feeling right now.

It's my obligatory "start digging self out of the grave" watch. I don't know why it works, but it does. Once I can get it on the player, it's like a kick-start.

One of the (many) problems with depression is that it keeps me from doing the things I need to do, which makes my life that much more of a mess, which makes me more depressed, which....

Wow. I've barely done a lick of work today; reading this thread was much better. Now I have a gigantic rambly meara-type post (although meara herself is tiny); please bear with me. (It is a panda bear, FYI.)

I fully support both Allyson's love of the Camaro and the FPC.

I wonder if tied shoelaces will go the way of vinyl records, and soon young folks won't even know what a shoelace is. Or an aglet. Personally, I hate using Velcro to fasten shoes or clothing, because it invariably starts to turn up at the free edge and it looks stupid and catches on everything.

Which is not to say that you should feel one way or the other about it, it's a very personal decision, but there's some useless anecdata for you.

I know a woman who's given birth to two very healthy babies both after she was 50. Older women have healthy babies all the time.

I'm 48, and I still don't have a plan or goals for the rest of my life. I wanted to own my own home (done!), find a good boyfriend, and finish writing a novel. I don't even care if it never gets published, I'd just like to finish one of them. I wrote out sort of a bucket list while I was in the hospital after the PE, but it was all stuff like "wear red more often". I remember thinking, I don't need to do anything special; I don't have grand ambitions. Even if I spend the rest of my life sitting on the couch watching Buffy reruns, I want every moment of it I can get.

Why? Relationships are pretty much all compromise. (Not necessarily of principle, but...)

Can't speak for bonny, but personally, my relationships of "compromise" with men always seem to turn into "give him what he wants so he'll stop angsting; I don't need anything much". Sure, the problem is probably me and the men I've chosen (and one woman, let's not forget the beautiful blue-eyed buxom blonde crazy-ass control freak), but still. It leaves me rather unwilling to make any more "compromises". I've got a good life right now. It's hard to imagine fitting a man into it without losing something I don't want to give up.

Of course, I should probably leave the house more often and meet people.

That would have to be part of any plan to find a good boyfriend, right? Damn. Why can't they just have a delivery service?

I love going to Idaho because in Idaho Falls, I'm comparatively healthy and attractive, but also comparatively thin.

Heh. I've said it before, I'm a lot prettier in Virginia than I am in New Jersey/NYC.

I feel like there's something DEEPLY, severely wrong with me that I don't want kids. I really want to WANT them; I feel like I should be wanting them so I have the large brood to gather around my deathbed, etc., etc., but -- I have zero urge to have a kid. None. It makes me feel like a failure as a woman and a human.

Aw, Steph, I want to throw my arms around you and give you a supportive hug, but you don't like that, so I offer this instead: Fuck that. You are not a failure in any sense, as anything. I look at it like this: having sex is a normal human thing for a human to want to do, right? Don't many humans who find they DON'T want to have sex often think there's something deeply severely wrong with them? (Or is that just me?) What would you say to them? Maybe "be yourself, there's nothing wrong with you"? Not wanting kids is the same sort of thing. You don't have to do it, and you don't have to want to do it. (Besides, having kids is no guarantee that there'll be someone taking care of you when you're old and gathered around your deathbed to mourn -- just ask my sister's former MiL, whose four children have basically abandoned her because she's too much trouble, being all old and infirm and such.)

Me, I knew (not decided, knew) when I was 14 that I would never marry and never have kids. It wasn't *me* to do so. I had no regrets, and I still feel the same way. (Well, I might marry, now, having escaped the Church and realized that marriage does not necessarily equal slavery for a woman, which is what I felt it essentially was. But still, for me to ever marry would be a big (continued...)