Crappy Coincidences, or Bad Omens?: or, how to tell you're going to have a bad day.

When I woke up today, I absolutely could not convince myself to get out of bed. It was warm in the bed and cold in the room, it had snowed all night and looked soft and quiet outside, and I knew that today would be a very long day of sitting in a chair in various places if I did get up. It didn't look promising. But I told myself I'd been so productive the past few days and had so many things to accomplish that getting up would be worth it. So I did.
And then the shit started happening. Small at first, but escalating slowly. I had slept in too late to yoga, which I've been trying (somewhat successfully) to do every morning to help keep my energy up. Instead I got in the shower to soften up my skin so I could give myself my two weekly injections of anti-joint-hurty medicine, but then remembered that I'd left the refill of Enbrel at work because they have to be kept refrigerated and I hadn't gone straight home after they were delivered yesterday. So I gave myself the other shot when I got out of the shower. When I was done with that, I set about making eggs to go with the Korean-style kimchi-fried-rice bowls we had half-prepared the night before, but all the frying pans were dirty. So I had to wash one, and of course I chose the one that had the most stubborn grossness in it, which took me a good ten minutes to clean out of the pan, only to get it dirty again, which seemed wrong and made me angry. As I set about cooking the eggs, the ferret came up and started giving me the most mournful, "I-know-you're-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-here-all-day" looks and pawing at my leg, which made me feel really shitty. And then, for no reason at all as far as I could tell, both the eggs I broke into the pan had broken yolks.
I had no time to eat breakfast after this, and left my house later than expected. On the way to the subway, I got dripped on three times, all over my face, the makeup I had just put on, and the hair I had just blown dry. I told Connor I was sure this was going to be a bad day, and he told me these weren't omens. I disagreed.
Once at work, I realized how little money I have when I glanced at my banking account. Then it turned out that my coworker had called out sick, which will make it much more difficult for me to leave here in time to get to my first night class of the semester. Showing up a half hour late for the first class would be embarrassing and unpleasant.
Just now, I decided that I'd give myself my second shot in the bathroom on my lunch break. Giving oneself an injection in the work bathroom is not fun. Not only because this particular injection hurts like a motherfucker and then stings for hours afterward, but also because the bathroom here is like a middle school bathroom. A row of four stalls and four sinks and no way to lock the door to keep out the constant stream of other women who need to use the loo. So there I was, with my shirt rolled up and my pants pulled down so I could see my stomach, where I was preparing to inject my Enbrel subcutaneously. I'd brought a cotton swab and alcohol in a plastic bag, and as the woman in the other stall made the usual preparing-to-pee noises, I was standing creepily in the other stall and crinkling a plastic bag a whole lot. I'd already gone to the bathroom a half hour or so before so I couldn't even fake like I wasn't doing something shady by popping a squat. As she left the stall to wash her hands, I actually injected myself and bit my lip--hard enough to really hurt--to keep myself from sucking in a breath at the stinging pain of the medicine going into my body. I think it might be one of those things where the molecules in the medicine are too big to fit in with the molecules in the blood stream or something, but I'm really bad at remembering science-y facts so maybe I made that up. Whatever the case, injecting this shit hurts really bad and I had to try really hard not to make some noise that would fit the context, but to someone else in the bathroom minding her own business, would sound really, really creepy. It hurts so much that no matter how much I try to inject the very small amount of liquid into my fatty tissue, I just cannot push the plunger down very quickly. At home, when I'm being more of a baby about it, it can take me up to a minute to get it all in. This time it took me maybe half that long.
Finally the other woman left the bathroom, I finished injecting, and I put the used syringe on the makeshift 'shelf' I'd fashioned out of the toilet paper holders. I got all my clothes back to where they were supposed to be, and as I reached up to put my instruments of torture back in the plastic bag, I accidentally knocked the syringe into the toilet.
GOD DAMN IT.
There was nothing else in the toilet, and our toilets get cleaned every day by the building cleaning guy, and I've heard a billion times that the water that comes into the toilet is just as clean as the water from the tap, but... There are like 20 women at the gallery who use this bathroom every day. I did NOT want to stick my hand in there.
Luckily--I thought--the air in the syringe and the plastic of the stopper and hand-grippy-thing at the end were keeping the syringe floating, needle-down, in the potty. If I could reach in and just grab the very end of it, I might be able to avoid getting wet.
I grabbed a paper towel/napkin I'd been using to set things on and folded it up so it was long and thin, then bent over the toilet. I balked the first time, and rearranged the way I was holding the paper towel, then reached for the floating end of the syringe. As soon as my hand brushed against it, the entire thing stopped floating and landed with a soft 'chink' at the very bottom of the toilet bowl.
No words for my frustration. The skin on my stomach burned and itched where I'd injected it (this happens every time... actually, it still does...), but it was really annoying right now. "Fuck it," I muttered, plunged my entire hand into the toilet bowl, brought out the dripping syringe, stuffed it in the bag, and stormed out of the stall.
Thank god nobody saw me come out, all wet, and stuff a plastic bag into the garbage, muttering obscenities to myself. I washed my hand for a LONG time and went back to the desk, where I'm writing this now. If you don't hear from me for a few days, rest assured it's because something even STUPIDER happened to me, and I am hiding out in my bed until the bad days pass.

For Jenelle

Prepare to go on a trip, whether you've eaten drugs or not!

Good Things Should Never End.

Kicking ass and taking fewer pills...

This is not a blog post in the truest sense of the word, in that it will be of no interest to anyone who doesn't already follow the blog or know me (and that is the vast majority of the human population). But, oh well, screw you guys!

I went to the rheumatologist today and he said that my new medicine appears to be doing me a world of good. ALL the inflammation in my joints is gone, I have more energy, and I am generally doing really well on it. He took some blood and said if all the tests come back looking good I can start cutting back on my other medicine, too, which is a godsend. I've been taking one of these anti-inflammatory pills once a day since I was like... I don't know, maybe ten years old. And they make me sleepy and they hurt my stomach and I think they're maybe giving me a stomach ulcer. And now I get to stop taking them, fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc etc etc.

Today rocks. And so do I, because I'm like UBER healthy. I feel like the dude pictured above.

Running on fumes...

Not a lot to report on here at Chez Lynsey. I haven't found any media stories that are a) funny and quirky and interesting, or b) not way too complicated to talk about. I'd love to go into this whole CIA-has-been-lying-what-a-big-f-ing-surprise-that-is thing, but it's just so convoluted and ridiculous, and frankly, my brain has been trying to take the day off ever since I woke up, so I think I'll at least let it idle, if not turn itself off completely.

I wanted to write about this story about a Brooklyn daycare that turned out to be a front for a giant drug dealing operation (by giant I mean ten POUNDS of marijuana and around $100K in cash in the basement) but most of my talking points kept getting shut down by my brain as I thought more about it. Like, at first I was incensed by people's admonitions that having all those drugs around kids was despicable, because, I mean, c'mon it's WEED. Like, I guess I could see there being a problem if the people in charge of the kids got too excited about the book they were reading, "Mr. Bigglseworth Bakes a Pie," and then went to heat up a pre-made pie in the oven and, being high, obviously, left it in too long and caught the place on fire, but really it's pretty harmless with children.
But then I realized that the reason the operation got busted in the first place was because a gunfight had broken out there a day before, when some robbers went in to try to get the cash. So, yeah, having drugs = having cash = having people trying to rob you = having guns around kids. So, not so great. Not much of a soapbox to stand on there, Lyns.

Ummm, so there's that.

Wow, what a blog fail. Oh well.

But I DID see a guy on the subway yesterday who had his cheekbone pierced. Or something. It was wild. He had a metal stud in his cheek, right over his cheekbone. I don't know if it was like pierced into the bone, or just through the skin, or what, but it was crazy.

Oh and also, I discovered an interesting tidbit of information you might enjoy: George Clooney used to have a 300 lb pot bellied pig named Max (I've seen those giant Vietnamese pigs before - they're the ugliest sons of bitches on the planet) that shared his bed with him in the early nineties after his breakup with Kelly Preston. Turns out, Max, like other, more agile animals, could feel earthquakes coming, and woke George up early one morning in a frenzy, getting him to leave the house before an earthquake hit and ostensibly saving his life. Pretty cool, huh?

Another animal ethics dilemma, and mercury poisoning...

1) I just read this article about skinny-pigs, a genetically mutated strain of Guinea pigs originally developed by dermatological testing labs in the 70's, but which were subsequently turned over the pet market, re-bred with normal Guinea pigs (which, by the way, are not from Guinea) to improve their overall health, and are now becoming new "designer" pets.

I'm torn here, because I really hate it when human beings fuck with nature for entirely selfish reasons. I think it really overstates the importance of our species (although I suppose every OTHER species overstates its own importance as much as possible - it's just that we have the brain power and emotional understanding to NOT do so because it's so stunningly arrogant, I find that irresponsible and short-sighted; but I digress...) and highlights the imaginary rights we have invented for ourselves as humans. Poor Guinea pigs are just going along their merry, squeaky way, nibbling on things, and then in comes a giant rubber-glove clad hand, scooping them up and doing weird experiments and forcing them to breed with genetically inferior pigs until they turn into hairless, unhealthy freaks that nobody wants. It's kind of sick and utterly self-serving and just plain mean.

But, I have to admit, I'm happy that the unfortunate offspring of the more-unfortunate lab pigs are being given a chance at happiness. I'm just worried about the implications of an entirely new genetically modified species entering into the world - it just seems so patently unwise. Who knows what could happen? Chaos theory and a very basic working knowledge of biology says: Nobody has any idea what could go on when an entirely new and non-evolutionarily developed species enters into the game. Could be earth-shatteringly terrible.

So I'm kind of against the idea of these pigs continuing as a species, given they're mostly the product of our crazed imaginations.

But. Look at this!

I think I NEED one. How incredibly and mind-bogglingly CUTE! I could hold one and pet it and squeeze it and love it!

...but. Maybe that's part of the plan of the egotistical, selfishly over-important mindset of the dermatologically tested skinny-pig brain. Maybe they WANT us to find them too cute to resist, so they can enter our homes, then infiltrate our hearts and souls until one day we wake up to find that each one, upon contact with water, has asexually reproduced to form 5,000 MORE skinny-pigs and we'll all be doomed to a life of running on oversized hampster wheels while our captors squeak at us from outside the bars of our huge cages, cedar chips strewn on our floors, gigantic and unspeakably difficult to operate water dispensers hanging in the corner... Oh man.

2) Anyway, on the other hand, here's something a little more blatantly terrifying and yet, so beautifully and wonderfully right:


Oh, Johnny... I love it when you look at me like you've gotten mercury poisoning from putting the shine on too many hats over the course of a long and twisted career of luring hapless head models into your hat shop over the meat pie shop and then stuffing mercury down their throats while you lovingly stroke your top hats with the precious silver liquid and croon songs about the world deserving to die...

Cop out

I am way too sick and full of mildly psychotropic medicines that are supposedly combatting my illness to write a blog that comes close to making sense today. And, given that last time I tried to make sense I ended up talking about Bowie Child vs. Robots in the future, I thought making an attempt in my current state would be a mistake. Perhaps hilarious, but it would get nobody anywhere in the long run.

So instead, I'm taking the opportunity that having my sinuses feel as if they're going to pop my eyeballs out of my head and my lungs hurt with each breath I draw to do what some of my favorite other bloggers do, and guide anyone who reads this to some other interesting websites. I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from some of these, so I thought maybe others would, too.

1) Firstly, on a somber note. If you like seafood, which I know most of you do, or sushi, or anything from the ocean, you should be aware that most of our fish stocks worldwide are being overfished and fish in really destructive manners. I just watched a British documentary last night called "Deep Trouble" about how badly depleted our once-thriving ocean is becoming, and how it's our responsibility as consumers to find out how the fish we eat was caught and where it comes from. But it's hard to make responsible decisions about what we purchase without first knowing what's ok and what's not. So,here is a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Guide . The people here keep a close watch on fish stocks in the wild and on fishing practices world-wide, and keep their site up to date on what types of fish are ok to eat and which are not in the area where you live. I'm sure their info isn't 100% accurate, because depending on where you're buying, you could be getting fish from any number of fisheries and markets and so on, but it's a good start. You can even order a wallet-sized card with a guide appropriate to you region on it, so you can keep a list of what's ok and what's not with you at all times, making spur-of-the-moment sushi forays less morally confusing!.

2) On a more entertaining note, NPH hosted SNL on Saturday! Hooray for initials, and the for the internet making it completely ok for me to use them and expect people to understand what I'm saying! I was really considering getting up at 4:00 am to wait in line for ticktes, but I got drunk instead and ended up sick from a cold too, AND Had to be at work at 10:00 am, so I didn't make it. But go to Hulu for some good clips.

3) Any of you who are responsible YouTube watchers or internet trollers have no doubt already seen Drunk History , but if you haven't yet, go check it out. It's entertaining and yet slightly disgusting in a perfect balance. There are a lot of homehade ripoffs out there, though, that ARE gross, so try to be prudent with your link-clicking.

4) Of course, if we're going to venture into YouTube territory, there has to be an obligatory Cute Animal installment. I used to be quite against the Cut Animals on the Internets phenomenon, but as the days here at the gallery have dragged ever onward and I have gotten more and more bored, I've become ok with. Animals are funny. Especially the ninja cat .

5) And, to make your day a little brighter, there's scientific proof (or at least a study showing that perhaps it's true) that fat butts are an indication of good health! True story!