RE: AK

@LBT, they lowered your disability benefits *because* you’re homeless? I shouldn’t really be surprised but please tell me I misunderstood.

Nope. I mean, I told them I was homeless, that’s the only change in my housing situation I’ve reported. So unless a hamster attacked the records room or whatever, that’s it.

Also, it’s weird, I’d never heard of the ablation thing till you mentioned it, but now one of my friends is getting it done! Small world.

RE: Argenti

Would “at least you got yours” be rude?

Yes. By all means, ask for support, your situation sucks but I am really, REALLY not in the mood to be told to count my blessings when I’m back in the closet again.

Oh, also, in pleasant news: today is the last day to prompt for Spookathon! Come make me write you things!

I’m more a lurker than part of the community . . . but, well, whatever. Girlfriend’s going to prison, I need a second job, and I no longer have health insurance. Woohoo. I’m just coming here to anonymously vent.

This place is good, though. I’ve learned a lot about How Not To Be An Asshole, and I look up to you guys.

RE: Kittehs

Woo! Thanks muchly!

RE: cloudiah

Sorry about the nightmares; they suck ASS. Hope you sleep better soon.

Okay, Kittehs! Ooh, this’ll be some fun prompts, especially since Argenti asked for more Tree-That-Wasn’t too, so I plan to have a lot of fun with those prompts.

I’m really glad this writeathon is going at a more leisurely pace, since my brain has been a bit of a screamy brain this go and so I haven’t had my usual explosive energy. I pretty much have received the perfect number of prompts, so I feel pretty good. Thanks, everybody!

My boyfriend would rather drink than hang out with me. I’m a “recovering alcoholic/drug addict” who hasn’t used anything for years, and it is difficult for me to be intimate with someone who is drinking (while they are drinking). Because my boyfriend drinks, I ask that he doesn’t drink around me, though I’ve never expected him to quit. On Halloween, we had been planning for weeks to hang out, and it was a question between us of whether to go out or to watch a scary movie. I suggested both, I could spend the night! But he had been planning to go drink with friends after I left, so he didn’t want me to stay over. I must have looked disappointed because he said “you know, I would only ever choose hanging out with you over hanging out with friends. However, when it comes to choosing between having a glass of wine or hanging out with you, it is a difficult decision.” He chose his wine, and I went home early.

@ Amy – wow, that sucks. What a jerk.

To new and future United States disability receivers. You may not know that when you get disability, you may be able to get your student loans forgiven under a medical exemption type thing (you can even get this before disability goes through). But you will be 1099ed eventually, paying taxes on the amount as if it were income. Mine was relatively small amount (unfinished community college), so I do not know if the I.R.S. would do a flexible payment plan or whatever.

I was entirely surprised by it, and wanted to make sure others were not.

Also, when I was trying to get the student loan forgiveness document for my doctors, I had to call to get them to send out the forms because they stopped making them available on the website.

Super long comment ahead:

Yesterday I went on a hike with my older brother, a cousin of mine, and a friend. We went to this large state park close to Morgan Hill, CA. It was the scariest and most difficult hike of our lives.

It started out pretty nicely – the weather was just right, the sky was clear, and the fall colors were beautiful. Eventually, we reached a point where a large, dried-up creek intersected through the trail we were on. We decided to hike down the entire creek because it was dry and because we thought it would be a much shorter trip than taking the trail all the way to the top of a large hill.

The creek, as we expected, was very rocky and treacherous. But we thought we were going to reach a junction halfway through that would help us get back to the starting point much faster, so we kept hiking. Things got a bit scarier once we saw two deer carcasses – one that was very old and dried up and another one that was just recently disemboweled by a cougar. So basically we were at a high risk of being attacked by cougars in that creek area.

Once we had reached the junction, we found it to be an extremely steep dried-up trench going all the way up the side of the hill. Not only was it too dangerous for us to take as a shortcut, but it seemed like it would take longer than expected and my friend sprained his ankle again earlier. I insisted that we keep going down the creek since it was the only route we knew would take us to the place we needed to go. Eventually we all decided to keep going down the creek.

At this point, it was about 6:00 PM – the sky was getting very dark, and my vision got way worse. All of us were experiencing severe fatigue and anxiety. The path ahead of us was starting to get pitch black and nearly impossible to safely navigate. And then we reached a point where we could climb up a large hill next to the creek – we climbed it because we thought it would help us figure out where we were.

By the time we had gone up halfway up the hill, it was 7:30 PM – the sky was completely dark. We had lost hope in getting through the creek because it was so dark and dangerous, so we decided to camp on the hill until the early morning and then continue our hike. We had no cell phone signal at all, but then I managed to get signal for ~5 minutes and called the visitor’s center of the park – I only had time to briefly tell him about the creek we were going on and the train that intersected with the creek.

Because I wasn’t able to say much on the phone, we lost hope in getting help from a park ranger. I started having panic attacks and crying my eyes out because I was afraid of cougars finding us and making our families worried and upset, wondering where we were. I was also feeling horrible because I had lost the park map, which wasn’t very useful for anyone TBH but I still felt like everything was my fault. Everyone else managed to help me calm down eventually, but I was still terrified. Even my friend, who has a tendency to distance himself from others, consoled me and patted my back – that helped me the most for some reason. Later on, we all huddled together next to a tree since it was starting to get chilly.

And then my brother heard a car driving in the distance. He got up immediately and started screaming at the top of his lungs to get the driver’s attention. I got up too and started waving my cell phone light and screaming “HELP! WE’RE ON THE OTHER SIDE!” A light came from the car (probably from a flashlight) and then after more yelling from all of us, we heard a voice coming from that side, telling us to keep going down the creek and to meet him somewhere along the path. We were suddenly filled with adrenaline and rushed down the hill, which was very dangerous to navigate at night – one wrong move and one of us would have been tumbling down the hill towards a creek bed full of sharp rocks and boulders. We were starting to lose hope again until we FINALLY saw a flashlight in the distance and the man approaching.

He helped us get out of the creek every step of the way. And he said that he received a call from the visitor’s office about someone calling about being stuck in a certain creek intersecting with a trail. In other words, someone at the visitor’s center actually told the ranger about my call. We were so fucking grateful that the call actually helped. Not only did we need the ranger to help us find our way out and drive us to the place we parked at, but we also needed his help in crossing the most dangerous part of the creek: a sharp drop into a shallow pool of water with rocks at the bottom. Without his help, we would have probably died trying to cross that part since the rocks were very slippery and wet. Somewhere along the way my brother pulled his calf muscle and we had to wait for him to recover for about 5 minutes. The sky was beautiful – it’s rare to see so many stars in the sky. We were even able to see the Milky Way galaxy.

Around 10:00 PM we finally got to the ranger’s SUV, and he drove us up to the parking spot we were at. And then we thanked him profusely and left the park. Since we were exhausted and we couldn’t go into a sit-down restaurant because my brother’s shorts were ripped open from behind (we had to do a lot of sliding), we decided to go through a Taco Bell drive-thru and get copious amounts of junk food. And then my brother and I dropped off my cousin and my friend and we went straight to bed.

I’m so grateful all of us survived. This hike has been a life-changing experience. We stuck together and managed to stay safe even though we were all completely unprepared. We are never going to hike down a creek again, but I think the experience was valuable in many ways. I feel so grateful that there are still people out there who are willing to lend a much-needed helping hand – the ranger told us that, even if he didn’t receive the call, he would be up all night trying to look for us.

@Ally, that sounds like a terrifying experience! I’m glad you got out ok, and that you were able to find something important in it.

So, this is really petty compared to everything everyone else is dealing with right now, but I’m doing NaNoWriMo and am kinda regretting it. The whole miserable lack of self-confidence I get when I try to focus on my writing is coming through full-force. I still think I can pull through, but I think this is gonna be a tough month…

Commiserations, condolences, virtual puppy-hugs for those who need them (and virtual beatdowns for evildoers)!

I’ve been lurking sporadically because I’m currently rest-home shopping, for my not-so-old but sadly recently brain-damaged mother. It’s… um, interesting. And exhausting. Comparing the shiny brochures with the Ministry of Health audits is headache-inducing. There’s also the guilt. So far, the whole family/friends network has been supportive, but then there are the times when I’m visiting Mum in hospital and she’s in a terrible mood and she’s begging me to take her home and there’s just no way.

Plus there’s the whole cultural idea of a rest home being where you dump your elderly relatives when you get tired of them (thank you so much, Simpsons!) My grandmother spent years railing against the very notion of going to a rest home, even when she could barely move due to two types of arthritis and she would fall over and be stuck for hours at a time. Didn’t help that the first rest home she ended up in was so crap that she broke her hip there (with no trace of osteoporosis either so it was an almighty tumble she took, with someone supposedly helping her!)

Gah, all the stress-induced headaches (tension AND migraine, yay!) at the moment make me think I’m headed for a brain haemorrhage myself. Hey, there’s family history of it on all sides, but my GP doesn’t think I need a scan or anything. Maybe she thinks with any luck a painkiller overdose will get me first. Or I’ll wander out in traffic because I can’t see straight.

You guys can have all the booze from my self-pity party because I’m trying to avoid the hangover!

Yeah, does that banana bread travel well via email? ;)

I signed up for NaNo but haven’t started it yet. I love the idea of my book floating around in my head, and I know it will turn to crap as soon as I try to write it down.

I haven’t started mine either, but tomorrow is my official start (I’m doing Candy Haven’s FastDraft at the same time, and it goes way faster. You write 20 pages per day).

Last year was the first time (after about 5 attempts) that I actually won NaNo. The most amazing thing I learned was that stuff that I think is shit while I’m writing it is actually pretty good when I go back and read it later (and I’ve forgotten how much more beautiful it was in my head).

Also, Forward Momentum! Even if it’s shit, write it down. If you end up with pages of “This is my next sentence. What do I write now? Why did I even start this stupid thing?”, all those words count toward your daily goal, and you can ditch them in your editing phase, AFTER November.