Thursday, October 31, 2013

Changing my life: TMD is ruining my life.

I have TMD. Here's a link to an article about it. Basically, it's the worst pain I have ever been in, and your face says Fuck You, I'm going to be unbearably painful and keep you up at all hours of the night no matter how much ibuprofen you take (for the record, I'm averaging between 2000 and 4000 mg a day. At some point, I'm sure my kidneys and liver are going to reject all of this and my stomach is going to start bleeding, but on the upside, maybe it'll lead to death and then I won't be in this kind of pain anymore. Yes, it really is that bad).

As I was telling my husband this morning, it's the kind of pain that makes you think really crazy things, like if someone took a hammer to my jaw and broke it and we wired it shut and just started over, maybe that would be better (and hey, as an added benefit, I'd have to be on a liquid diet, so I'm sure I'd be skinny).

And since it's Halloween today, maybe I can find a zombie to just bite off that part of my face. The downside is, then, wouldn't I be infected with a zombie virus and I'd be inclined to prefer brains over, say donuts?

And unrelated to all of my problems, because I have an awesome boss, and I work at a company where you can, in fact, go to the cafeteria and get not only a costume, but also face paint, my boss went there to get zombie face paint (maybe to help me with my TMD problems, despite the fact that he's dressed up like a pumpkin), and came back with a wizard hat for me. Which is sort of funny because this morning I took a shower. (Go with me on this.) I normally shower on days I work out, which is really fine, because I exercise almost every day. But yesterday and today I didn't make it to the gym because I was up half the night in pain. So I totally wasted time showering today, because everyone knows Merlin never took a shower.

So, what I have found works best for managing the pain for TMD is two Vicodin and a shot of tequila. Which is the way all healthy, well-adjusted adults deal with their problems, right? Because it causes the pain to go away COMPLETELY, and I sleep through the night, unlike the rest of the time when I wake up between 1 am and 3 am praying that my face explodes and ends the misery. And I know I sound like I'm being dramatic, but I'm really not.

And for extra fun, another coworker got me a Captain American face mask. So now I'm wearing both a Merlin hat and a Captain America mask.


Captain America mask

Merlin hat

Captain America mask with Merlin hat

My "magicy" face to go with my Merlin hat
Um, yeah. There's really no reasonable way to end this post. 





Tuesday, October 29, 2013

I'm going to change my life

On my drive home from work today, I decided I needed to change my life. I'm really bored. Like back-in-high-school bored. And so I fill up my time with a lot of things, like going to the gym (which is actually good, because it's healthy and because it exhausts me so that I don't remember that I'm so bored). And then I started thinking about how much fun I had last year with NaNoWriMo, and how much I'm looking forward to it this year, too. And I thought, maybe if I spent more time writing, I'd be less bored. Which got me thinking that I need to change my life.

As maybe weird (or maybe not) as this sounds, I think the first place to start is with my diet. I love to exercise, but I wouldn't have to do quite so much of it if I ate just a little better. Which, of course, to me, means I should first focus on eating up all of the stuff I shouldn't be eating that's sitting around the house. Or I should just be eating up all of the random stuff in general so that I can start this program with a clean slate. Which is how I ended up eating mystery soup for dinner.

A few months ago, when I was feeling totally overwhelmed by the amount of random food being provided by my CSA, I chopped it up, mixed it with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs, and roasted it. Then I froze it, figuring at some point in the future I'd want soup (by my calculation vegetables in liquid equals soup). I did date the bag (from May). So tonight, I dumped that bag of roasted veggies into a pot with some frozen broth (I'm not sure you can freeze broth, but I did, and we'll see if I'm still alive tomorrow), tracked down my immersion blender, blended the shit out of it, and called it dinner. (This sort of activity might be why my husband hesitates to leave me home by myself).

So then, here are some other random things going on. So my company is giving away a free super bowl commercial, and all the employees get to vote on the top 20 finalists. I realize I just did a very bad job of describing the contest, but whatever, you'll have to deal. The point is, I'm super excited about the finalist I voted for, Goldie Blox, because they make engineering toys for girls, and I really think I should have been an engineer if anybody had ever told me that there was some other math-based career path than teaching. But I'm old, and I have two non-math related degrees, and a bunch of student loans, and going back to school sounds like the worst thing possible to me right now, so I'm just going to bitch about missing out in some other alternative universe future. But I don't want that to happen to your girls so check this out. (By "this" I mean the link I posted above.)

So then, my coworker shared with me this thing she bought to sit on that makes her chair so much more comfortable, so I have to have one. And while I was Amazoning (yes, that's a verb), I figured I should do some white elephant shopping. Last year I totally scored big time and received a Black Santa Pornament. It is awesome. So I thought I'd regift it and get him a girl. You know, so he wouldn't be lonely. But the only one I could find on Amazon looked like this, and I didn't want to spend $20 on her. Because I have standards, people. So then I did some more internet searching and discovered that there's an insane amount of this sort of stuff that you can't order directly from the manufacturer. Instead, like the perv I've apparently become, I have to go to some other third party to buy my girly pornament.

So then I thought, what else would make an awesome white elephant gift? Tactical Bacon, that's what! But I didn't want to spend more than $20 on that, so I started looking at some cheaper options. And I found Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit in a Sardine Can, Canned Unicorn Meat (that you apparently can't actually eat, although based on the Harry Potter premise that unicorns are more or less sacred, you probably shouldn't even think of owning their meat), and Zombie Jerky, that you can apparently eat, but maybe wouldn't want to.

So now I have too many white elephant options. And I haven't technically been invited to a white elephant party. Oh boy. This might be why I need to change my life.