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Archive for the ‘attention deficit disorder’ Category

Just in case you didn’t believe that my weight gain is a real thing with an impact on my health, here’s a photo of my face last month telling the tale:

I do not even look like myself in that picture. I actually think I look cute in it, but like someone else. Oh yeah, I *recognize* that it *is* me, but she’s like an alter ego of some sort, like I was transformed overnight (which of course is ridiculous since it’s taken me awhile to get there) or am experiencing a Freaky Friday scenario where I’m magically switching places with my chubby twin sister.

That is the biggest and SOFTEST I’ve been in my entire life and the second time I’ve weighed that much (around 130, 132 pounds). I am back to 125 and those five pounds make an enormous difference in the number of chins I have (and if I lost only ten pounds now I’d be at a very good place). At the time of that photo my period was severely overdue, not because of pregnancy but because I didn’t ovulate which I’m certain is because of how overweight I was. I know 130 pounds doesn’t sound enormous considering how much fatter people are capable of getting, but for my frame that is just really WAY too much. With my hormones totally out of wack and the stress and pressure of our plans to get pregnant being delayed and feeling out of control, all I wanted to do was eat. Carbs. Lots of them. It’s a vicious circle.

Once my period finally started last month I stopped having my usual two teaspoons of sugar in my morning tea, stopped eating candy (except some dark chocolate here and there), and have been exercising more. I feel better, but still have a major energy dive in the afternoon/early evening and have been napping almost every day; it’s only 30-60 minutes, but I feel enormously guilty about it for some reason. I don’t know if I’m just stressed out, tired from exercising, fat and lazy, or have some internal voice ordering me to focus on a very few things. It is (and has been for the past nine months or so) very difficult for me to focus on anything besides our conception attempts. It sounds stupid, since if I were really focusing I should have been exercising more and eating better, but my main priority has been to try not to stress out my mind or body. All I have wanted to do was try to be patient, calm, and relaxed and honestly? Accomplishing that takes all of my energy, I think. And lots of food and lazing around.

It should come as no surprise that I have not felt great about shooting photos and videos of myself. Part of it is self-consciousness about my weight, but another part might also be me feeling a need to keep some of me to myself. Trying and failing to get pregnant over and over makes me feel like there’s a demand being placed on my body that I keep failing to meet in spite of the many different adjustments and approaches and changes we make to get it done. I already feel like I’m asking enough of my body, forcing it to get fucked on a schedule, to tell me what it’s thinking, to subject it to tests, to tell it to work harder and be “healthy”. Other than that, I really just want to put it in a cocoon of blankets and comfortable clothes and to try to let my mind escape. I want to protect myself, my mind AND body, from more opportunities for failure.

There are a few other factors contributing to my state of mind, including missing my girly birth control hormones, my ADD and hypersensitivity to stimuli (I am fucking exhausted from processing so much information and trying to tune things out; I have not been able to concentrate at all on blogging or anything), stress/guilt over an argument I had with my mom in March, MISSING my nephew and longing to live closer to my family, and the way all these things work together to make me feel, I suppose, a little depressed. I’m not particularly worried about it in the short term, but if I allow myself to fret about how long this trying-to-conceive business could go on I do get anxious and concerned about, ummm, my mental and emotional health.

I guess my main priorities right now are making my body healthier and focusing on transcending daily worries to get to a place where it’s all good, whether it’s in a nap, brushing the dog, dancing, reading a book, writing for myself, daydreaming about things that make me happy, visualizing the positive possibilities, drowning myself in mindless entertainment, researching stuff I want to know for future and current projects, listening to cheesy new age music, smelling good things and enjoying sensual (but nonsexual) pleasures like massage, or processing these thoughts and reflecting on my needs the way I am right now by writing this. I feel better having done it.

But I still don’t feel like shooting porn. Not today, anyway. And of course this makes me feel slack and guilty which only deepens my mini-depression. I would like to be more productive and intellectually have a hard time allowing myself a break; part of me says if I were a better person I would just WORK HARDER. Still, I know that once we do get pregnant, if we do, there will be a whole new set of demands on my body so maybe it’s okay for me to just SURVIVE right now.

NOTE TO MEMBERS: I’m not saying that I’m ceasing shooting, just that updates are coming a little slower than I’d like and don’t have as much tastiness as usual. I’m sure we will shoot soon, especially since I’m no longer quite as pudgy as in the above photo. Oh, and another uninspiring factor in all of this is that we really need a better camera; I bought this one in 2002 and it’s really not up to par anymore and has some problems. Not so fun to shoot with and the results are less than stellar.

FAST FOOD PORN NATION
Why I haven’t finished reading the book, my childhood experiences with fast food and eating out, and my current fast food addiction:

I didn’t grow up eating fast food. For one thing, it didn’t exist in our town; neither did stoplights. On very special occasions we might stop at a McDonalds out of town, but between Dairy Queen, Burger King and McDonalds, I probably ate fast food less than twenty times before the age of twenty. Oh wait, we did go to Skippers and Kentucky Fried Chicken more often (my grandpa even brought home KFC a couple of times) so I could probably add another twenty or more onto that number. I think we ate at Skippers quite a bit; my mom loves fish & chips. Skippers now seems to be the grossest, dirtiest fast food restaurant around — a shame. We also did eat burgers out, but generally at actual non-formula drive-ins that did old fashioned grilling or were local destinations with a sense of regional history, like Dick’s. Also, my mom hated soft-serve ice cream and didn’t want to spend money on milkshakes or cones unless they were made with hard ice cream.

When our family would really “go out” to eat, my stepdad would take us to obnoxious pizza places. Shakeys in Redmond was one, and Showbiz Pizza was another. My stepdad LOVED the animatronic band way more than we kids could possibly relate to. Showbiz was always pathetically underpopulated, so I picture my stepdad’s chortling head hovering in an empty room, the garish red stage lights reflecting off his glasses while he stared, mesmerized by the inhuman display and echoing music.

We did go out to eat a lot with my dad when he had visitation on the weekends, but he took us to diners and family restaurants. In the seventies and early eighties, Guadalajara #3 in Crossroads (Bellevue/Redmond area) was an early favorite; my dad would always order a side of corn tortillas which they presented hot wrapped in a royal blue cloth napkin. He would butter them for us. I always got a cheese enchilada. Eventually that restaurant closed and I moved on to ordering chicken enchiladas instead.

We also ate at VIPs in Issaquah where my sister enjoyed coloring their wacky bunny heads and I learned to copy my dad by ordering my eggs sunny side up. After VIPS died, we went to Shari’s where my dad usually ordered steak and eggs. To this day, that’s still one of my favorite breakfast meals.

Our dad was also partial to Chinese food so we went to Andy’s in Issaquah a lot. We were such regulars that once my sister and I even went to Andy’s house and on an outing with his daughter and some other kids to Chinatown where we went to Oujimaya (why can’t I fucking find anything in google for oujimaya to find out if I’m spelling it right?) and ate out. He scolded us for using too much soy sauce on our noodles. Last thing I heard he was embroiled in an immigration scandal where he was accused of bringing a bunch of illegals over and had them working in near-slavery and living in inhumane conditions.

As we got older, we wound up eating at Red Robin a lot with our dad. I also remember a restaurant called Casa Lupita. I can’t remember many of the other places, but they were your regular suburban dining spots. He never took us to Denny’s, but we did go to The International House of Pancakes where he would order the Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruitie. Lately I have been wondering a lot about my dad’s real gender identity and sexual preference.

I was not an IHOP fan, probably because they didn’t have good booths at the locations we went to; there was something disturbing to me about sitting in the IHOP with those high ceilings and the fish bowl plethora of windows with no good partitions inside so every single person in the joint was highly visible. I think good puffy booths with high backs and a table layout that affords some privacy are appealing to children for their fort-like atmosphere and sense of glamour. I haven’t outgrown my love of booths and I hope I never do; I’m guessing that our early exposure to restaurants, as modest as they might have been, instilled a preference for being waited on over grabbing fast food. I also suspect that my dad’s (undiagnosed except by me) ADD made him fear ordering fast food; I understand this fear — the menus are overwhelming, everyone’s clamoring for their turn, the rules and rituals seem so regimented and difficult to decode. Everyone around you seems to know exactly what they want while you stand there alone adrift in a sea of confusion, beeping machines, and teenagers incoherently mumbling their customer service lines. It’s much less stressful to have time alone with a menu at your own table with your own waitress who will answer questions or just go away if you need more time.

The only fast food our dad ever took us to was Wendy’s; he loved their chili. Wendy’s never did it for me, and fast food in general didn’t do it for my dad. He seemed to be opposed to it. I learned to be a responsible and proud tipper from my dad and I think my sister and I are healthier people today because our weekday family was too poor to go out to eat much but did have STANDARDS when it came to burgers, burger joints and ice cream, and because Daddy took us to actual restaurants instead of grabbing us happy meals.

*****

I started reading Fast Food Nation, but it was so good I couldn’t get past the preface; my head got busy making parallels to porn. How most porn is made and presented like fast food. How people would never say that all food is intrinsically bad because FAST food is bad, but they will irrationally say all pornography is bad because some sucks ass, or has a few ass-suckingly unhealthy characteristics. Not that all forms of ass-sucking are bad or unhealthy . . . it’s just a figure of speech. How people feed their children extremely unhealthy, addictive, and eventually life-threatening fast food and call it good without a moment of critical thought going into the decision, but think that PORN is somehow a gigantically dangerous threat to their children’s lives.

That’s why I don’t read nonfiction as much as I’d like to. MY HEAD STARTS SPINNING AND I CAN’T KEEP READING FOR THINKING TOO MUCH.

*****

At twenty years old I finally moved to a place with fast food restaurants ALMOST within walking distance. I became addicted to Taco Bell, and it was good. I ate a great many chicken soft tacos without ever feeling too badly about it.

Lately I’ve become addicted to McDonald’s, though. Our town has restrictions on formula stores, so McDonald’s and Subway are the only fast food places that are grandfathered in. McD’s is the only place I can go late at night to get a hot and tasty treat; once I started taking advantage of this I started doing it more and more. It’s only become a frequent (once or twice a week) thing in the past four or five months.

Just the other day I got suckered into playing their little Monopoly advertising game and went TWICE IN ONE DAY. We strategically planned our menu choices to get the most “game stamps”. I am even online right now entering codes from my game stamps on their site. On top of that, I’m considering doing research online to find out which stamps are the hardest to get, and starting new “collector” boards to fully maximize our chances of winning a big prize; I mean, I wouldn’t want to throw away a large-prize-winning property to turn in a board for a $50 prize!

I feel like a sucker.

I wish we had a Taco Bell in town — if we did, none of this would ever have happened.

FIRST DAY IN A JU MONTH, 2007

My sister and almost-one-year-old nephew are here visiting, which is splendid in many ways. For one thing, it gets me out of my routine and out of my head, spending more time outside with people I love and (on a more trivial level) using muscles for good purpose (ex. pushing the baby in his stroller up a steep hill and on the beach; it’s difficult to push a stroller through sand, fyi). Part of me feels calmer when they’re here, and another part of me is sort of stressed out and nervous just from having people around with different agendas and noises and expectations; I feel tired and can’t concentrate enough to do really basic things or remember why I decided to walk from one room into another.

Delia is about to grill some salmon and portobello mushrooms for our dinner and then my mom is going to come out, partly to babysit so we “kids” can go out and be rowdy, but I actually feel exhausted right now (as I often do after socializing) like I’d rather spend the night quietly in bed.

It’s windy here, but blue-skied. Lying on a blanket on the beach was great this afternoon, but got a little too blustery to stick around more than an hour.

HEAD CLEANER

After waiting half an hour yesterday for our internet connection to return in time for our shows, it was time to shit or get off the pot; we decided to cancel and put our time to better use than repeatedly dialing the cable company.

We left our downed-connection at home and drove over forty miles (over 80 round) to the nearest Best Buy so we could get a MiniDV camcorder head cleaner; our videos have been coming out with some bizarre chirps and bleeps and wacky messy visual disturbances and it took me a few months to realize it’s probably because the heads are dirty. I’m not so smart about those things. Too bad I just spent hours downloading six videos the other day and will have to redo at least some of them to reap the benefits of the newly cleaned heads.

Anyway, I hope the cleaned-up video for members will make up a bit for the lost show. I also scheduled a make-up show for Friday evening.

Speaking of head cleaner, my return to Ritalin has been treating me well. I do feel like I need to post a status report for voyeurs so they’ll know when I’m medicated and when I’m not (because my behavior IS noticeably different) since I don’t have enough of a stash right now to take it consistently and have no idea when I’ll get an appointment with a doctor (I left a voicemail with my psychiatrist yesterday but then I pushed the wrong button and have no idea if I actually saved/sent the message) PLUS I have no intention of taking all three doses every single day. For one thing, a girl has got to eat; most of the time food is not very appealing when you’re on stimulants. Just as an example, since yesterday was a special day (May Day, five year anniversary of my site, etc.) I wanted to fully enjoy good food and not have any of my natural tendencies repressed or subdued so I didn’t take any pills.

The ability to take medication vacations is one of the things that I like about stimulants; they don’t stay in your system very long (four hours for what I take), they don’t take weeks or months to start working, you can take them as needed or not, and you’re not going to have a total meltdown if you decide to go without them (though of course you will have all your ADD or ADHD symptoms come back, sometimes rebounding in an exaggerated way like a kid with a mild case of Tourettes who has managed to control most of her tics all day at school and then comes home and unloads a volley of pent-up energy; it’s not the same thing, but is the only thing I can imagine that might feel similar except without the holding-it-in part since the meds take care of that without any conscious, painful effort).

My apologies to those of you making it through this entire entry but aren’t really interested in this stuff. I would try to keep some of this to myself but it seems like there’s a significant number of readers and members who find ADD and stimulant talk useful/interesting, and it definitely helps me to blog about it.

Bubblegum lovers: since dry mouth is a side effect of stimulant use I am counteracting that by chewing and blowing more than normal on my spycams.

AN UNUSUAL SILENCE

If you’ve been watching my spycams the past couple of days and noticed an unusual silence, it’s because I decided to try Ritalin again. No loud, angry outbursts of swearing! Isn’t that refreshing?

I’m still noisy in the fart arena, though. Yesterday I sat down at my desk and ripped the craziest-sounding fart with a squeaker on the end; I burst out laughing, it was so cute. THAT IS WHY WE HAVE AUDIO ON OUR SPYCAMS! Also, last night I posted a short fart video in the behind-the-scenes section of SpyOnUs. Here’s a picture of me farting from my favorite gallery we shot last week:

Full Gallery coming soon in my Members-Only area.
Join TastyTrixie.com or SpyOnUs.com for ALL of my long sock photos!

Anyway, I hope you don’t miss seeing me ripping out my hair and hearing me throw conniption fits over stupid little things because while I’m dosed on speed I generally don’t freak out like that.

DRUGS: Part I

The topic of drugs came up while I was talking to Ron and my wanker the other night. It was one of the main reasons I muted the spycam audio; I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about me and drugs, so I don’t want them to hear me speaking about them in a casual way.

While I’m all for decriminalization of some drugs and drug activities, and all for legalizing marijuana, I’m pretty straight myself and relatively inexperienced with most mind-altering substances. I also tend to be fairly judgemental (compared to other liberal folks) of other people’s drug use (including caffeine and alcohol) so I worry that other similarly judgemental people will get a bad impression of me if I openly discuss my RARE drug use or dreamily describe my drugs of choice. I would just hate for that to be a surfer’s or member’s first impression of me.

How nervous am I about coming across as a drug-addled loser? Nervous enough that when I take totally innocent pills on cam I’m paranoid our voyeurs imagine I’m using schedule I drugs for fun. Nervous enough that when I brainstormed a list of labels/categories for this blog I hesitated to make a “drug” label. Nervous enough that I wanted to make this entry, sort of the definitive “Trixie on Drugs: it’s not what you think!” post. So here you go:

PILLS I TAKE ON A REGULAR BASIS:

Vitamin B Complex
I usually take this in the morning with my tea and it is a LIFESAVER for my brain, my chapped lips, and who knows what else.

Birth Control
I usually take this at night. It’s so I don’t get pregnant AND to regulate my hormones so I don’t alternate between wanting to kill other people and wanting to kill myself.

Naproxen Sodium
If I have any aches or pains, this anti-inflammatory is what I take. It’s my preferred over-the-counter fixit pill (I’m not a tylenol or ibuprofen gal). My loyalty to this particular med started when I was in junior high and I could only get it as Anaprox with a prescription. I took the double-strength variety. Once when I was eighteen or nineteen and suffering from terrible cramps I actually had to go to the doctor during a bad bout with them and I got scolded for admitting to taking more than the recommended dosage. Then he prescribed some other painkiller to me. Thanks, GP! Anyway, the OTC stuff seems to be enough for me these days.

I’ll also take some Aleve sometimes if I’ve gotten some exercise and feel sore. My sister tells me I’m ruining the whole muscle-building effects of exercise by doing that, but I honestly don’t care. Feeling pain ruins the positive effects of exercise for me, so there. I do avoid going hog wild with Naproxen Sodium because it’s hard on your stomach. I don’t worry too much about the other side effects (increased blood pressure) since I have really low bp.

PILLS I USED TO TAKE ON A REGULAR BASIS:

Ritalin
I am SO GLAD I tried it! I’ll try not to make this a big entry on Attention Deficit Disorder, but just say that while therapy and my eventual ADD diagnosis in my mid-twenties gave me a whole new (and mostly-positive) perspective on myself, trying Ritalin taught me what being normal could feel like. I took my first dose under super-controlled circumstances (at home alone with no distractions, on vacation) so I could observe myself and my reactions, and when the speed kicked in my first overwhelming observation was that THE FLOOR STOPPED MOVING. The jangled blur of chaos I was used to was stilled.

It was an almost-perfect duplication of the time someone at my data-entry job pressed some mini-thins on me when I was sleepy (back when mini-thins were just pure ephedrine) and I was elated to discover that I could alternate my gaze from the monitor to the data on my copy-stand WITHOUT SEEING ANYTHING BUT THOSE TWO AREAS OF FOCUS. I could look back and forth without anything else distracting me! Miraculous!

On Ritalin I could play piano and actually HEAR myself for WHOLE ENTIRE SONGS rather than plunking along and, three measures into a piece, be immersed in daydreams and consuming trains of thought that blocked out concentration and made practice completely futile except as something to do with my hands while, you know, daydreaming. On Ritalin I actually got BETTER as I practiced instead of getting worse.

On Ritalin when someone was talking to me, I actually heard them for the whole conversation. Someone could even tap me or start talking behind me and I would barely even register the feeling or sound; I remained totally focused on the primary conversation and I DIDN’T EVEN *WANT* TO INTERRUPT THEM.

On Ritalin, if I was trying to find something (my keys in my full backpack, for example) I would FIND them straight away instead of forgetting what I was doing and finally pulling out some random object hoping it would jog my memory or just so people near me wouldn’t think I was batty, rummaging aimlessly in my backpack for ten minutes. On Ritalin, when I walked into another room to get something I wouldn’t find myself in that room (or some other room) wondering what in the fuck I was doing there a mere 15 seconds after I began my task.

On Ritalin, I experienced blissful sleep. I’d set my alarm for an hour before I wanted to wake up, take my first pill of the day, and fall back into the most amazingly restful sleep EVER. It didn’t last long (25-45 minutes), but it was fucking fantastic and made getting up pleasurable instead of a cranky nightmare. I would also dose myself before I’d get a massage and those massages were the most blissed-out, relaxing, meditative, beautiful things EVER. Sometimes I fell asleep. It was these experiences of relaxation that convinced me that ADD and speed’s paradoxical effects on people with ADD/ADHD were real. Or at least real enough to be of significant use to me.

On the flip side of all of the positive effects (too many to list here), I did experience pretty bad rebound at the end of the evening when my last dose wore off. I would start freaking out, getting really explosively hair-rippingly angry, sensitive and frustrated, without realizing what was going on until my husband would look at me and tell me to go to bed, that my pill wore off.

At work I also got negative feedback from friends who said I was acting like a zombie, I was boring, etc. I also developed a really bizarre compulsion to whisper instead of speaking normally (I think that was the only side effect or symptom I described to my psychiatrist that he’d never heard of in connection with stimulant use — in fact, he didn’t seem to have ever heard of that compulsion at all).

I’d also lost quite a few pounds during therapy (before I was prescribed Ritalin) simply because I felt happier, so when I started taking the Ritalin I wound up losing more on top of that (no way around its appetite-suppressing effect). I don’t know how much I weighed then — maybe 103 (a good healthy weight for me in spite of it sounding underweight because of those retarded BMI charts). Then my dad got really sick and almost died a few months later.

While he was hospitalized and then transitioning to possibly dying at home, I eventually realized I had to stop taking the Ritalin since the combination of it and major stress (and not having TIME to eat much) pretty much destroyed my appetite and I sunk down to around 93 pounds, if I remember correctly. At the end of my first full day back at work I couldn’t figure out why my ass hurt until I realized it was because I HAD NO FAT LEFT ON IT.

That was the end of my love affair with Ritalin.

This is getting way too long so I’ll post Drugs: Part II later.