Note to self:
Deciding that since you're awake at 1 am anyway, you might as well be doing further research into the link between environmental pollution and chronic autoimmune illness, is an extraordinarily bad idea.

My memory is getting worse as I get older - this is true for most people, but I'm still only 27 (28 in about 2 weeks). I find that I can't remember 90% of what I studied even in college courses I took a couple years ago. When I was in elementary school, I tested as having a genius-level IQ, but now I doubt I'm even above average at all. I wonder: is this lack of retention because I spent too many of my teenage years and early 20s partying? Is it because I attended schools where I was never taught how to study correctly? Or is it the cumulative effect of years and years of dioxin exposure at levels hundreds of times above the US average? What is all this dioxin exposure doing to me anyway, besides obviously affecting my fertility? What happens to Adam as he's getting a steady transfer of my lifetime's worth of dioxin exposure through my milk? I should've never had those toxicology reports done, they confirmed everything I already suspected about what happened as a result of growing up so near to Dow. My blood contains more than 300 times the safe amount of dioxin. What is this going to do to me? I'm offloading a lot of it onto my baby while nursing, so that decreases my cancer risk somewhat, but it's no wonder I've been so fucking sick this past year, what with all those stored chemicals being released into my body as I breastfeed. In my town of 30,000 people, I personally knew 8 kids who had leukemia as I was growing up, including the little girl I babysat for - this is so far above the normal rate of leukemia and I just wonder if my kids are going to end up one of them. I haven't called Lisa in almost 2 years now because I don't want to hear that her daughter died of leukemia, I don't think I can handle it and I hate myself for wanting to spare myself bad news more than I want to offer support to someone I used to be close to. By the time Adam was 6 months old, he had already been exposed to the lifetime so-called "safe" limit of dioxin through my milk (this is true for any breastfeeding mother, so it was probably more so for me since I was exposed to so much more growing up and therefore have so much more stored in my body). What effects is this going to have? I feel like I am a walking time bomb, I don't know what's going to happen. In the past 6 years I've just gotten sicker and sicker and illnesses caused by chemical exposure don't usually get better. Whether you get cancer is the luck of the draw. Will I be around to see my kids grow up and maybe bless me with grandchildren of my own? Will I live a normal life span and just feel like shit? I finally realized a year or two ago that I am never going to feel better - the constant feeling like I'm shaky won't ever stop, the headaches won't stop, the chronic nausea won't stop, my cycles will never become normal, I'll probably never be able to regulate my moods, the pain in my extremities won't go away. This is who I am and what I have to live with and it's fucking depressing. Will my kids feel like this someday, since they grew inside my body and drank my milk? Did I just pass a lifetime of illness on to them? Will I ever be able to change the world and convince people to stop demanding products made with these chemicals, will I ever be able to scream and stomp my feet and yell loud enough to make chemical companies like Dow (though they're far from the only one) realize that if they kill off all of the human race, there would be nobody left to buy their fucking products anyway? Not that it would matter to them of course. I think about the fact that the world is so polluted, our bodies and food and water supply tainted beyond repair, and don't see much hope. The earth will someday recover, I think - it has from other great catastrophes, though it must be noted that the others were natural disasters rather than man-made. But future generations, should there be any, will look back on us and our fall the way we look back on the fall of the Roman empire. Modern Western civilization just wants money, no matter who is destroyed in the process. I guess the leaders of government and big business figure that the earth will still be inhabitable for them for at least the remainder of their own lifetimes, so it's more important to make as much money as they can and forget about the fact that they are slowly poisoning the entire human race. The air is poison, the animals are poisoned, our food is poison, our water is poison, our body has these poisons absorbed systemically throughout. The quest for money destroyed the human race and I really can't even get into the mindset of the people who felt this was ethical or justifiable. I hope I never do understand.

This is just fucked beyond belief. How cheery, huh? Now it's 1:45 and I *still* can't sleep.

 
Mega fluff:
My sister and I both have minor obsessive-compulsive (OCD) tendencies, and it drives our mom crazy if we mention this. Actually, Joseph Campbell says that most people in industrialized Western societies have OCD tendencies, because it's an unconscious attempt to compensate for the lack of rituals in modern life. But anyway, today I sunk to a new low of all obsessive-compulsive actions: I scraped soap scum off the shower caddy. Oh yes, I really did. This was no brief swipe over it with a sponge either, it was detailed freaking scraping. I have sunk to a new low. Does it make it better that we're having some realtors preview the house tomorrow morning and that's part of why I did it?

My mom called today and just said she hadn't returned my call or email in so long because she had to work (she never works longer than a 5 hour shift) and keep up with her regular housework and go to doctor's appointments. So she isn't even mad - as far as I know, at least - and I worried for nothing. Instead she is exhausted by her really busy schedule. She's not even 50 yet, but having a dentist appointment is apparently so exhausting to her that she can't do anything else the rest of the day. I hope and pray that I have way more energy than that when I am 47.

Nice resolution department: I had one loser buyer at half.com leave negative feedback for me because the post office damaged their package during shipment, and rather than contacting me to get a refund, the buyer decided to ruin my previously perfect seller rating by saying I did a shitty job on the packaging. I'm very happy to say that a few people have ordered things from me since and they all left positive feedback, one of whom even commented that it was packaged well. Heh heh. So now my seller rating is back up to where it used to be. Selling some of my books on half.com has been a really good way for me to get extra cash these past few months. I don't think I would've been able to buy Christmas presents for people without it, and it paid for my ticket to the Live concert in November. Yay!

Speaking of buying used stuff online, I won another Strawberry Shortcake rag doll on ebay today. I am trying to slowly collect them and only do it when I have enough money in my Paypal account (and don't need the Paypal cash for groceries), but I have a price limit I absolutely won't go over. This one (Apricot) makes my third rag doll; I already have Raspberry Tart and Apple Dumpling. If I got insane with the Strawberry Shortcake collection like some people do, I would spend thousands of dollars and have too much junk cluttering up my house, so I'm limiting myself to just the rag dolls and the original vinyl dolls. I still cannot believe my mom threw away all my Strawberry Shortcake stuff when she moved out of the old house - though I suppose it was really my fault for not taking it with me when I got married. If I still had my collection, it would be worth a fortune. Of course I never had Plum Pudding when I was a kid and I have now decided that she's my mascot because she's the geek girl, but I absolutely cannot afford one on ebay as I have never seen one go for less than $75 and I just ain't spending that on a stupid doll. I don't know why I had to choose such a dorky yet expensive thing to collect.

 
Update on Logan and the quest to attend school:
He has decided that he no longer wants to attend school, after all. I think the real shift came when I told him that once we're in Michigan, we will know people there and he will have kids he can play with. I told him that Jill will be there and he can play with her daughter Jordan, and Adam can play with her daughter Emily, and he was so excited. He asked me for a backpack to sweeten the deal and I agreed, and I think that was all he wanted. I know that someday the desire to go to school is going to crop up again, but at least now I have a little practice dealing with it. I don't really know what I'll do if the day comes when he really does want to go to school, period. I believe in following my kids' cues and I don't know if I'd want to hold him back from exploring it, but I really don't think I'd feel comfortable sending him to school before he was at least 10. Everything I've heard, especially with regard to boys, is that the ages between 5-8 are the most vulnerable for children's personality development and I really don't want my kids to be in an institutionalized school environment during that period. Right now Logan is really confident and sensitive and I really love who he is, and I'm so afraid of exposing him to a "Lord of the Flies" environment with other kids and having that change his personality. So for now, the school thing is resolved. And I'm glad, because Dirtwitch's comments about the Waldorf school definitely made me think twice. The ideal school may be non-existent for us, at least in any of the areas we ever plan to live.

We watched the movie Office Space yesterday - it's a couple years old, but it was one of the funniest damn movies I have ever seen. If you've ever worked in an office, so much of it rings true. There's an absolutely hilarious scene where they take one of the frequently malfunctioning printers into a field and smash it to bits, and do so to a soundtrack of gangsta rap - oh my God, I was dying. What a fun movie.

 
Snarky comment of the day, from something observed in the grocery store: there is a new brand of disposable diapers that are red, white & blue called "Little Patriots". There is SO much wrong with this concept that I'm not even sure where to begin. First of all, it does seem oddly fitting that a way of showing patriotism would be buying disposable products - what better tribute to the American way, right? Furthermore, are people really so stupid that they will fall for this marketing gimmick? Wait, I know the answer to that, and it lies in my archives: the same people buying the patriotic diapers are those who have 7 flags on their car. But most of all, I cannot stop laughing about the concept that these patriotic diapers are going to be pooped in. Let's teach our babies to show respect for the flag by pooping in something decorated like the flag - what a great idea!

Adam's favorite things in the world (alas, patriotic diapers are not on the list because he wears cloth):
*pulling up on the stove and turning the oven light on and off repeatedly
*grabbing raw potatoes from the pantry and taking a bite out of them before anyone notices, then putting them back
*chewing on socks
*unrestricted penis grabbing
*throwing food overboard from his high chair tray to signal the end of mealtime
*"dancing", which consists of wiggling his butt if he's standing or kicking his feet rhythmically if he's lying down
*turning the TV on and off repeatedly, especially if people respond by getting up and turning it back off when he turns it on
*pulling all the books off the bookshelf then mixing them around until all the book jackets fall off and get crumpled
It is amazing how many of his favorite games were Logan's favorite games at the same age, too.

Logan's favorite book is Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type and he is attempting to learn to read it himself, which is very exciting. More troubling is that he likes us to act out the book, which means invariably that he gets to be Farmer Brown, and J, Adam and I are cow, chicken and duck respectively. When we're playing the game, he asks me a question but if I answer him, he reminds me that ducks do not talk and I should be quacking instead. *sigh*

I have decided that when we go to Ann Arbor, I'm going to try to get a part-time job writing a column for one of the alternative weekly newspapers in the Ann Arbor or Detroit area. Alternative weeklies don't usually require a degree to work for them, and I really think I can do this! By now I'm getting enough publishing credits that I can just take in some of my clips to show them and let my work stand on its' own. I feel very confident about my ability to do this, but in the meantime, I'm going to try to get more publications so my clip file is bigger.

I talked a lot to J today about what to do regarding the situation with my mom, and I have decided that I simply have to stop expecting that I'll ever be able to make my parents happy. I am going to start challenging the things they say that I don't agree with, and I'm going to stop living my life in fear of their disapproval. I think this is going to be a long, gradual process, but it's long overdue. My sister has never hid much about her life from my parents, nor tried to make decisions based on their approval, and she certainly hasn't been shy about telling them what she really thinks. And for a while, my mom was really unhappy with her, but she got over it. I think I can do the same, though it will probably come as a shock to both my parents and me since I've been so docile for almost 28 years. I'm going to be polite while I'm staying in their house, but after that I'm going to start speaking up for myself. They can't hurt me anymore unless I let them, right? My childhood is over, I have absolute freedom over my own life. We'll see what happens once I actually put this into practice. I hope things will be better, but I have no guarantees. But facing their disapproval head-on and allowing conflicts to happen instead of desperately trying to avoid them will mean that I will face my fear, and one way or another I'll be free.