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Archive for the ‘anxiety’ Category

Nico is getting senile. We think her vision and hearing have both become impaired. The good part is she seems in good spirits most of the time. I guess it’s both fortunate and unfortunate that she wants to go in and out of the house about fifty times a day and has taken to WHINING and barking madly if we don’t comply with these requests. You think fifty is an exaggeration? Okay, at least twenty-five times a day. AT LEAST. It’s insane.

Sometimes I do lose my patience with her and feel so frustrated not knowing if it’s our fault for giving in to her or if she has genuine need (or perceived need) to go outside so often. This morning after she woke Delia up WAY too early to let her out and back in she then ate and pooped on the floor. She never does that (poops inside). I think she’s just totally confused and can’t get comfortable so she paces around. Then when she goes outside her rope gets hung up on rocks or stiff tufts of grass and for some reason she can’t pull free of those tiny hangups anymore and just starts going apeshit for  us to come out and rescue her.

Lately she can’t find the doors she wants and we’ll see her in the bedroom waiting at the closet door or the bathroom door (this makes no sense). Last night she was stumbling around in the dark doing god only knows what. This makes me wonder if it’s not really a vision problem, but something else; if it were her vision, wouldn’t she still have the layout of the house memorized?

So I asked Delia, “do dogs get Alzheimer’s?”

Delia’s response: “no, but they do get Barkinson’s.”

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In other mundane, un-sexy news of real life, we had to take one of our beater cars to the shop today. It is going to cost over $900 to fix it. We can’t afford it, but the main reason I felt compelled to go ahead with the repairs is that we’ve been really lucky with our vehicles for the past couple of years (aside from getting pulled over for having a stolen car, but that’s a totally different story) so I felt like it was time to pay tribute to the gods of car or whatever. We got this car for free and it should continue running reliably after this so . . . yeah. Goodbye, thousand dollars. Or rather, “hello, maxed out credit card that I was trying to clear room on to pay taxes”.

I also found out my mom went to the hospital last night. She’s (relatively) fine — it was an anxiety attack. One of those things we know is a serious problem for her but that she is in denial about. The only treatment she’s ever had for it was years ago when her way of describing the problem was that she had trouble sleeping. So our pill-happy family doc/gp prescribed her Xanax. Which she became addicted to.

Fortunately she kicked that addiction all on her own. Unfortunately, she has never talked much about that and never did anything else that I know of to deal with her problems that she doesn’t really acknowledge. It’s not that my mom is reluctant to talk, or to talk about problems, but getting to the root of matters and deciding to make really important changes that start with herself? Not so much. Instead she’ll be like, “if I could just catch my breath for a couple of days and get that goddamned garage cleaned out it would help so much!”

How do you get a woman to realize that her problems go ever so much deeper than A FUCKING GARAGE? You can try, but it’s extremely ineffective.

So last night at the hospital she was prescribed Ativan. An anti-anxiety med that’s even MORE addictive than Xanax! And the doctor flat-out lied to her about what it was. He said it was a muscle relaxer she should take when she’s feeling dizzy.

Someone tell me again why pot and prostitution are illegal. I think someone misfiled RATIONAL THOUGHT in this country.

Anyway, I have a billion related and unrelated thoughts on this stuff and life in general and my direction in life and wants and desires and loves and blessings, small and large, and ways I’ve been ministered to online and off in beautiful ways and inspirations and insecurities and religion and porn and coming out and staying in and spycam projects and activism and writing and music and dancing BUT there are so many awesome books and six feet of girlfriend to go to bed with that I’ll leave it at that.

Normally I love fall, but it took so long for winter to go away this year that I’ve actually been apprehensive about letting go of the summer. Fortunately, we’ve had an extended Indian summer. Last week I *thought* it was over one night when I found myself craving heat, but this week it’s back. Sunny yesterday, sunny today . . . and clear for viewing the full moon last night and crone moon tonight.

It’s also been spider season with one lady in residence in our line of vision from bed in the corner of our sliding glass door:

Spider Lady & Half Moon

She’s been there every day and I know we should get rid of her big egg sac or we’ll have shitloads of spiders in our bedroom, but I haven’t been able to do that to her. I love seeing her there at least once a day and/or night. It doesn’t seem like the best place to have a web with us sliding the door open and closed and some of her anchors being attached to it. But I guess there’s no spot to weave a web that is completely invulnerable.

Lamp-lit spider on web.

Our dog’s much better after her trip to the vet’s. The x-rays didn’t show any arthritis but part of her spine had some degeneration, probably from aging in an area of past trauma which Delia thinks must have been from a time when she was a young dog and made a quick break out of the door of their house straight into the side of a moving car on a busy road, bounced off said car, then ran back inside never appearing any worse for the wear.

There have been times in the past nine months where Nico has seemed so old and uncomfortable and tired — and she IS old. Fourteen, I think. Everyone thinks she’s a puppy because she’s a runt of a husky and looks so young, up until recently when you see her walk, especially watching her from behind and her whole hind end just takes so much awkward effort to move. SOMETIMES. But if she’s excited? She’ll still bound and bounce and run around the house like crazy, even though, to me, her yips of excitement sound tinged with pain. I don’t think anything but the most debilitating pain can stop a husky from doing her husky things, so when we started noticing her having real problems has been at night when she can barely lie down and whimpers/cries like a squeaky wheel, circling around and around before painfully lowering herself down.

Anyway, the vet put her on prednisone, a steroid, which seems to be helping quite a bit. We took her on walks in the woods the past couple of days, which she loved even if she’s slowed down a lot since I met her and Delia seven years ago. Now her pace is really pleasant and companionable. She still runs ahead a little bit, but there are times when she actually walks right beside us, or takes breaks so she’s always close by.

Watching her yesterday on the trail looking so much better than she has in a couple of months I thought about how long it took for my dad to die and how unprepared I was for that. How there were so many times where I was impatient for it to happen already, for all of us to be put out of our misery of waiting, and then having days where he was present and I was so happy he was still around and it didn’t seem possible he was anywhere NEAR ready. At least, not nearly as ready as I recently had been. I feel that way a lot with Nico where I can’t help contemplating the convenience of her death one day when she seems uncomfortable, lethargic, and droopy-faced, then feeling overjoyed the next with how well she’s doing — how alert and happy she is, how it’s so not time yet — how YOUNG (for her age) she looks.

My ninth grade (and seventh grade) English teacher did something pretty fucking progressive and unheard-of for kids as young as we were in a public school: she taught us a section on Death and Dying. Practical planning stuff about funerals and wills, the Kubler Ross stages of grief, and of course literature like some story about a brave young man  with a brain tumor (title escapes me, but not the memory of how much I disliked that book) and one I’m forever grateful for being exposed to and having TAUGHT to me (not just read on my own), The Plague.

I remember all of us talking about what we wanted to happen to our bodies after we died and everyone laughing when I said I wanted to be dressed up like the Chiquita Banana Lady and thrown into the woods to rot and be scavenged by animals. Since then I’ve changed my mind, partly because I loved my dad’s funeral including seeing him all dressed up in his coffin that we picked out with special things tucked in to go with him, including stuffed animals that were ours, but that he kept after we outgrew them. I was shocked by how much I did not want his eyes to be plucked out for harvesting; I’d assumed he was ineligible for donating because of his glaucoma (which he was, but they weren’t aware of it so the question was posed to me anyway) and I was just totally unprepared by the topic even coming up even though of course we are all listed as organ donors, but MORE unprepared by how viscerally opposed I was to having his body — especially his eyes — taken out of him when I’d been looking into them MINUTES before that.

So. Aside from it being illegal to throw costumed dead women into the woods, I realize people have emotional, albeit irrational, attachments to the bodies of loved ones and I’ve even become attached the IDEA of my own dead body and perhaps want a more traditional type of ritual to accompany me to my final resting spot. Plus I’m extremely fond of coffins.

I asked Delia if she knows if people can come to our house to put Nico to sleep when the time comes so she can be at home and we can bury her. Delia said she’d prefer to take her to the vet’s. When I heard that I experienced another one of those irrational, emotional reactions (especially since Nico is really DELIA’S dog, not mine) of not being able to bear the thought of taking her to a place she’s afraid of and have to die there. I know it’s over fast, but having done that (thankfully only once and with a kitten we’d hardly had for any time at all) the drive there is just too fucking sad and crying your heart out in a clinic standing around in that sterile setting is just not the ideal to me. I am so glad my dad died in hospice where we got to hang out with his dead body for a few hours afterward (I probably wouldn’t have understood it before, but that is incredibly comforting and helpful, not to have to be seperated physically from each other right away), but obviously a seventy year old parent is pretty different from a fourteen year old pet.

We’re all smart enough to know that television and movies are inaccurate and unrealistic, but I personally never realized how much until my dad took years to die, and then again especially during the days and hours surrounding his actual death. I felt and still feel very unprepared for the process of death by aging and protracted illness. My mind is still boggled by the concept that all of us, if we are lucky, have to watch our parents die. I don’t feel like I was taught to expect that or how to process that even though I’ve probably been given more tools and experiences to deal with that than most post-baby-boom American kids have. I’d had friends who lost parents way too young and I knew it was devastating to them and in some cases they even talked about it a little, but not nearly enough to ever intimate exactly how huge that loss was. I and my dad were not too young, it wasn’t a tragedy, and it’s still hard and has taken SO LONG. I mean, it’s still not over for me. I’m still shocked by the revelation that death is never over or never not coming and that it’s VISIBLE and active for So. Many. Years. I’m trying to accept that with Nico . . . even to use her as practice and I am flummoxed at how ill-prepared I still am . . . how disbelieving, impatient, sad, and scared I am in spite of feeling that’s not really in my nature. I feel like I’m the kind of person who should be able to embrace aging-towards-death gracefully, with serenity instead of blubbering.

I don’t even know how my mom has handled the past thirteen years, seeing her own dad’s decline and death, living with and taking care of my dad/her ex-husband (they continued to have a fond and extremely helpful dysfunctional relationship even after his death), packing up the house she grew up in and moving her mom out of it and into first one home, then another, and now a third offering an even higher level of care. I really do not fucking know. I don’t think she really knows either, but I know it’s a lot harder for her than she’s gotten help for, and my distance from her doesn’t help. What I still idiotically fail to GRASP is how this is THIS LARGE a part of life. Because tv never taught me that and even though my family has always talked openly about these things and plans for when we die, I still can’t remember exactly what I’m supposed to do with my mom’s ashes and I still can’t believe that IF I AM *LUCKY*, I will live through many more loved ones’ deaths. I read so many young adult books about death — GOOD books about a girl whose dad was shot about a kid with Lou Gehrig’s disease about drug addicted kids . . . about pretty much every kind of unanticipated death you or someone you know could have but not so much about the deaths we all aspire to without any proper planning.

What is the life span of a spider? I have no clue. I am still trying to brace myself for the day this season when I look out the window and in the cracks around the sides and she’s not there and doesn’t come back.

The good news: yesterday we got out into the woods to shoot a set of pictures (eventually I took this dress off):

Today I have a set of pictures to post for members of me wearing cowboy boots, which I’m looking forward to sharing.

We also have webcam shows scheduled tonight and tomorrow, as well as a members-only chat.

Now for some of the annoying news:

*One of the webcam networks disconnected our access, but don’t worry, you can still get in a couple of different ways to see Delia’s show tonight. I will alter the page to tell members how. There are, however, a number of good reasons why my approach to dealing with that problem further are complicated. Not for you to worry about, even though blogging about it would make an interesting read — I’ll have to continue to bite my tongue for a few months or years longer.

*Ever since Twitter got attacked early yesterday, I haven’t been able to tweet as TastyTrixie or SpyOnUs. Not via text/my phone, not on our main cable connection, and not on our DSL connection. For some reason, Delia’s twitter account is working just fine, though. I *am* able to post tweets through blip.fm, though. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but it’s driving me insane. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve to try to get it working, but honestly – there’s a limit to how much time I can spend dealing with one fucking tribulation at a time.

*When I added more spycams, it broke some of them. The microphone on the NightVision cam (formerly known as “ballroom”) is no longer reliably working, and my alternate method of connection to that cam using a different microphone also mysteriously died even after I tried reinstalling the software and other things. I guess the only solution at this point is to buy another microphone. In the meantime, you can still hear bedroom audio (though probably not as well) on the “MoreBed” and “BedroomDesk” cam. When they’re not crapped out. Which they tend to be at inopportune times.

*****

Anyway, little problems like that drive me batshit. I hate to admit how easily frustrated I get with those little unanticipated pinches of obstacality(?), but I do, especially when I’m in the middle of feeling bogged down and incompetent with larger projects (namely redesigning, like, all of our sites and most importantly helping get DeliaTS.com off the ground; I feel like it should be easy but all these design projects are just sucking out my life force). But of course as soon as I get through them, maybe we’ll be a few steps closer to being able to HIRE people to do the parts of design we can’t/don’t want to do. At least, I pray to motherfucking god that will be the case.

I plan on enjoying a lovely and orgasmic show tonight, though, and I hope to make a new sexy show music mix to inspire me. See you there?

Yesterday we did a bunch of housecleaning with special attention on two of our most important rooms: our bedroom and the parlor where we do all of our indoor-exercising and sun-catching. After a week of smelling not-so-fresh places (the thrift stores, our van, the smokey-smelling motel room with the “no smoking” sign) it feels so good to be able to walk through our house and have it smell like lavender and other fresh things.

All I want to do is walk around in our house, picking stuff up, folding laundry, stretching, lighting candles, and daydreaming. That’s not all I *have* done, but that’s how I feel. Like right now I want to take a small container of polished rocks into bed and just pass them back and forth with Delia, inspecting their colors and feeling their contours, holding them up to lamplight, listening to dorky new age music.

I feel great. Maybe it’s the four anti-inflammatories I took for my period cramps today. I don’t know. But it’s pretty fucking rad. Maybe it was the sunshine we had the past couple of days and the exercise we got with it shining on us. Maybe it was being able to get work done even while I had to spend time on hold with the phone company. Maybe it’s all of the clarifying and focusing I’ve been doing lately.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think maybe I’d been hitting one of these sweet pussy pipes too hard. Or not. Since 40% of the few times I’ve smoked it’s given me major anxiety attacks. Yes, few enough that I could count each of them and calculate the percentage. And right now I feel nothing but peace.

From our motel room:

You always hope for good weather when you’re shooting outside. Actually, you basically COUNT on having PERFECT weather. “Good” weather doesn’t always cut it. Like today, when I wanted it to be gloomy, but not actually rain or snow. Instead it’s sunny. Bright blue. Too loud.

Delia’s getting ready for me to shoot her but the light is just not right at all.

I could have a spycam on me right now in our motel room while I blog this but I don’t want to.

*****

Sometimes it makes me nervous when I communicate shoot ideas/plans to people because I’m afraid they’ll get their hopes up for something really creative and amazing based on how much work and planning we seem to be putting in it. And of course it never winds up being THAT great / is still pretty generic. At best everything is still sort of a rough draft of a good idea. Shows potential. Meets or exceeds a sort of bland standard of certain amateur porn things. We’d have to shoot a lot less to do a lot better or have a lot more resources and people working for us or stay up all day and night. People sweetly encourage me, “just shoot less! Shoot what *you* want!” but I don’t think you can make money that way. The better and higher quality your work is, the less there is of it and the easier it is for people to “steal” and pass around. Have you noticed that on the internet? The more beautiful something is, the more people feel they have a collective right to enjoy it for free and share it with each other. This is great! Everyone should know about it! It’s an extremely flattering compliment that can wind up starving you to death.

I could pull out a lot of things we do and present them in a different way to make them seem better than they are, but I can’t seem to find time for that. And again, I’m still proud of mediocrity and just having potential. It’s a very good thing to make pictures that make people happy every week, are genuine, straightforward, show promise, suggest a certain mood. I think I’m good at that: being suggestive.

*****

I have a hard time accepting compliments that make our work seem better than it is. I also can’t help feeling defensive towards people who think what we do is easy or that they have solutions to challenges I complain about, solutions they are sure would work and certain have never crossed my mind or been attempted or dismissed because they wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons.

I remember standing outside our local movie theater listening to some blow-hards talking about what THEY would do if THEY owned the local theaters. Why don’t they do X and Y? It would be simple . . . if I owned it, X would be the first thing I’d do. I hate those people even though I do exactly the same thing. Maybe that’s why I hate those people; because I can’t resist being a stupid know-it-all either, even when I know I don’t. It’s people’s way of being part of the conversation when they really are in no position to comment at all. I just really hate being the subject of other people’s imaginary business-plan hobby-thoughts myself, but I guess I encourage it to a certain extent. Love it up to a certain point. I want people to think of the growth of our business as a serial novel, something they want to keep reading about and hope will end well and spawn many sequels. I just don’t want them to tell me how to write it. But with some people you can’t have one without the other. I don’t blame them since I can’t resist doing the same thing sometimes. And some of them really mean well. They really do.

Have you ever thought about X? I would totally read that! I’m sure it would make you rich! You know, I saw you on cam for ten minutes last week and I really think what your problem is . . . Hey, I’ll bet if you did more of Z a lot more people would jack off to you! Z is totally where it’s at.

*****

Every time we go away from home to shoot I go through a little process. First I’m anxious that we’ll forget to pack something, that things won’t go as planned, that we won’t get enough work done. Then I realize everything is going to be fine, and if it isn’t, I might as well enjoy the time away as time off, well-deserved. Then I get a fresh perspective since I’m away from home/work and a million distractions and have a little flexibility to think clearly. About what I want. About what I REALLY WANT TO DO. If I could only do one thing.

I’m at the point where I know what that one thing is, even when I’m at home and not away. But I’m not at the point of wanting or being able to give all my other work up in favor of that one thing and don’t know if I ever will be. I still cling to the notion that it might be possible to do it all. Or that I should do other things first in order to make doing the one thing easier, foremost and full-time, without having to give a fuck what anybody else thinks of it.

If I could be good at any one thing — if I were to invest 10,000 hours of practice in attempting to master it — I know exactly what the one thing would be. I used to think forty-five would be too old to start being good at something, but now I think it would be perfect. Even fifty would be fine. Which means I don’t really need to start practicing right now to be completely satisfied with myself in fifteen years. I’m comforted by this thought.

After having family stay with us for a few days, I usually feel like I need a day off to myself to recover from the energy kicked up from so many people around me. During this visit, however, I kept retreating to WebWhore Headquarters (that’s what I call my home office) for a couple hours here and there, allowing myself to WORK to relax.

Instead of picking work that I really *need* to do that’s high priority for making money, I allowed myself to work on low-priority stuff that’s fun and not complex or stressful (except for feeling guilty for not doing more important things) and requires no interaction with other people. Stuff that’s compact, like blogging and posting one-pagers on domains I’ve had for a long time that have been sitting, completely BLANK. My thought is that anything I accomplish is a bonus since I should be taking time off from work while family is here for our late-Thanksgiving so I should do something totally relaxing instead of tangling with bigger projects.

Here are some of the one-pagers I’ve made over the past week or two:

Worse Than Porn
TrixieDoll
Borg Porn
DeliaTS
Give Me Sugar

It’s soothing to play with fonts and colors and inspiring to remind myself of concepts and ideas that interest me. Only a couple of those were frivolous, actually, with no immediate application, but I still feel conflicted all the time and defensive about the choices I make with my time. Like if I enjoy it and other people might not understand where it fits in the puzzle, then I should feel badly about it. There are a lot of things I’m choosing to NOT do, and I constantly imagine a crowd of people criticizing my choices, saying “what, she’s not doing X so she can do Y and Z?? THAT is stupid! She hasn’t earned the right to waste time doing that — I want X! I want X! Y and Z are useless! She would be so much better off doing X; a bigger commitment to doing X would solve all of her problems, can’t she see that?”

One of my goals is to stop worrying so much about the critics, both external critics and my own internal asshole voices who can ALWAYS find some way to make me feel like I’m not doing good enough. I need to focus on what I’m doing right (and right NOW), not what I’m doing wrong (or not doing at the moment). Unfortunately I’m often painfully aware that every choice I make to do one thing means not doing ten billion others. It’s depressing and I have to knock that shit off. Being on Ritalin does help a lot because I can sit down and focus on something without intrusive thoughts and ideas continually popping into my head of all the other things I can/should be doing which then make me totally anxious, overwhelmed, afraid to proceed with the task at hand, and hopeless because of my limitations and lack of giant progress.

I know a lot of people struggle with similar feelings, so I share this for a couple reasons: because I know other people can relate and it always feels good to know you’re not the only one with these kinds of challenges, and because it helps ME to type out my fears and remind myself I don’t want to carry them around. I want to be happy with what I *can* do and what I *want* to do right now at this moment. I want to look at what I’ve done and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride, not guilt and maudlin hyper-criticism.

*****

Anyway, the family is gone now, our spycams are back up, and Delia’s warming up some of her delicious turkey & stuffing leftovers. Life is good.