Little Fattie Gangsta Penguin

So we went to see the purge yesterday with Ethan and a friend. I was pretty excited about the whole thing because I love interactive storytelling and if there is one thing that they take seriously in LA, it's halloween. The whole experience should've been awesome...essentially we were part of a group of 1%ers who were, for whatever reason, taking a great amount of entertainment in the annual "purge", which is a 12 hour period where all crime is legal, presumably as a form of population control. we then get taken hostage and get dragged through an entire 6 story building completing tasks, being threatened by revolutionaries, and working to complete tasks to try to get the revolutionaries to not execute us. The whole experience should've been awesome as the actors were great, obviously a ton of time and effort had been put into decorating both the inside and outside of the building, so many of the pieces were there for it to be pretty incredible, or at the very least, more engaging than Universal where they scare you more through shocking you vs telling any sort of story. However, sadly, our experience was pretty much trainwrecked by a drunk chick who would not fucking shut up throughout the entire goddamn experience. She was CLEARLY annoying everyone in our group, to the point toward the end, we were told that we have to sacrifice one of our own and the whole group instantly turned her over to be killed. I've never seen a group of strangers come to a unanimous decision that quickly in my life ever.


I'm just going to copy my yelp review here because it's easier...it sucks because most of the time I have little to no patience for people who let one element of a situation (or life) ruin their outlook on things. life is too short to spend an inordinate amount of time pissed off about shit that you can't change, which is something i've really focused on this year...which has been great in a lot of ways. but for whatever reason this whole experience just drove me completely bonkers.


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Honestly I'd want to give this 3.5 stars because this night was a bizarre combination of awesome and complete suck which I'll elaborate on in a second... I'm also going to try to be really vague since i don't want to give away any spoilers for people who haven't gone.

The location is great and the performance starts off REALLY REALLY REALLY strongly. They do a great job of decorating the interior and exterior of the building, the actors are all fantastic, the experience starts off super frenetic and amazingly intense, but halfway through it gets a little muddled and repetitive. It's pretty interactive (moreso than sleep no more or delusion), the characters talk to you and actually seem to sort of acknowledge you as individuals vs "nameless, irrelevant customers", you have to perform tasks, it's quite immersive overall. They do a GREAT job of timing the groups that go into the experience, we never heard the people who went in before us, for all intents and purposes our group was in there alone... I probably would have enjoyed this experience immensely but we had one glaring problem which set the tone and COMPLETELY ruined the night

You go through the experience in smallish groups and are forced to work together and perform certain tasks with each other. You're acutely aware of the people you are experiencing this with, and ostensibly it's supposed to build some camaraderie since it's you vs. the purge. However we had an INCREDIBLY drunk person in our group. Like, practically falling down, slurring her speech, constantly heckling the actors, just being completely obnoxious. To be quite frank, she fucking ruined the experience for me and my friends because she was the epitome of a stupid, trashy bitch. I was praying that somehow she'd get separated from us so I could stop listening to her wailing about how she had to pee, how she was annoyed the actors weren't paying enough attention to her, just a constant insipid barrage of drunken foolery. I wanted to tell her off _so_ badly. However being as I, unlike her, have some fucking manners, I kept it to myself as I didn't think getting into a fight would've really enhanced the situation for anyone.

She should NOT have been allowed in the show as she was pretty clearly intoxicated even when we were in line. Apparently the producers noticed her and figured she might be a problem and sent some sort of defacto chaperone in with our group to keep tabs on her...which is cool and all of them to do, but said chaperone should've removed her about 5 minutes into the experience as once the play/frights started, she did not fucking let up for a second. I was astounded at the wealth of useless, self serving, loud, nonsense this woman was coming out with. It's perplexing when people talk constantly and say so little in the process

I live in Hollywood, I'm used to seeing intoxicated people making fools of themselves, but when you're in a supposedly intense situation in close quarters and you're paying to have an immersive situation and some asshole is CONSTANTLY trying to make the focus of the event be on them, it's not fun. I didn't pay to see "drunk bitch make a fool of herself" i paid to see "the purge" and sadly I saw a lot more of the former vs the latter.

I wish I could find this fool and get her to reimburse the entire group since she essentially wasted our time and money by constantly trying to make the experience about her. I also think that the producers of the show need to be more proactive about making sure that attendees are at least relatively sober, or if not sober at least not exceedingly distracting and disruptive.

So it's hard for me to review The Purge truthfully since my experience was more "learning how to put up with an insanely drunk, trashy, crude, idiot who was easily my mom's age" vs "learning how to survive the purge"

So yeah, producers, security, whoever, please do the rest of us who want to experience your night a favor and bounce people who are obviously walking disasters. If it was Universal it wouldn't matter since those mazes are solely about shock tactics. But when you're trying to tell a story and you've got people who are practically screaming, "PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" at every possible opportunity, it kind of detracts from all the hard work your actors and set designers have put into the production.

It sucks because I'm generally easy to please, but when it comes to horror, the overall tone is REALLY important...it's why we watch horror movies or tell spooky stories in the dark. we WANT to be scared, we want to be on the edge of our seats practically drowning in the experience...and it's just really really not possible when you're trying to actively ignore an incredibly loud heckler. It completely destroys the illusion

so i had surgery on my foot Tues morning.

this has been going on forever, pretty much since January when I hurt my foot while hiking a lava field. At the time I went to a podiatrist who decided it was fractured and put me in a boot for a month or so. Then when it still hurt and was visibly swollen, no one knew what to do with me until I found some eccentric rock star surgeon at Cedars. He felt confident it was a ganglion cyst, though the pain it was causing was atypical. While I found him to be smart, I didn't like him and didn't feel comfortable with him operating me as a masto patient since he seemed to show a lot of hubris when it came to the disease and his knowledge didn't match his arrogance.

FINALLY I found another ortho surgeon (another rockstar who works on ballerinas and athletes and whatnot) and he seemed to be a lot more down to earth and human about the whole thing. he hooked me up with the head of ortho anesthesia (as we all know at this point anesthesia is the hardest part of surgery for me) and we went from there.

so far so good. my left leg is still mostly numb as they applied a nerve block which meant less general anesthesia but more numbing to the affected area. as it turns out, while the surgery wasn't super complicated, the cyst was strangling the nerve it was wrapped around, which explains why it was exponentially more painful than it should've been. so now i'm off my feet and just kinda hanging out.

which brings me to the second point in life, we're moving. in like, 2 weeks. If i can ever share any piece of advice with you, it is DO NOT PLAN MOVING AND SURGERY IN THE SAME MONTH. It is the worst idea ever. between trying to pack, sell stuff on ebay, all while not being able to walk, it's less than ideal.

i am psyched about our new place though. it's an apartment in Hollywood, right near Runyon Canyon, so it should be a good mix of nature and urban. I will no doubt miss the canals and the ocean something fierce, and I imagine we'll end up on the westside again, but there's something to be said about being less isolated too.

3rd point, e got a pretty cool job offer from beats by dre. i was hoping it would be signed by either Jimmy Iovine or Dr Dre, but alas that was not in the cards. Still though I think he'll be pretty psyched.

that's about it. things are good save for the surgery. we're going to see the Breaking Bad finale at Hollywood Forever, I have _no_ idea how I managed to score the mystical karma for that event since it sold out in 30 seconds (!!!) but I'm way happy.

Also vaguely related, Fever Ray is a goddamn fantastic band. I am ashamed to be so late to their game.

Otherwise I'm pretty horrified at the state of the world, but at times like this I can understand why myopia is sort of comforting. i'd rather talk about the triviality in my life vs try to articulate how messed up things beyond my control are. i sort of feel like it's necessary. i've gotten so riled up about giant things where i have _0_ agency (apparently this is not uncommon for people with chronic illnesses) that instead I'm now just trying to focus on things within my control. which is not to say i'm playing some game of willful ignorance, it's just at this point i am unclear where to channel those energies and throwing tantrums on FB seems pretty futile.

For christmas last year, my brother in law got me a fitbit. i don't use it to track sleep or calories, but i do use it to track my steps each day. it's been a great motivator since it holds me accountable for my movement. there are some frustrating things like the fact it doesn't know when i'm standing vs sitting or when i'm using my arms (90 minutes of poi mean nothing to fitbit!) but i love it. it's also good because it keeps me accountable for making sure that Bones gets enough exercise too. He loves to walk, though as it's been warmer out we've been taking longer walks in the evening with a few shorter walks during the day. french bulldogs are notoriously bad at regulating their body temperature due to the shape of their heads so taking him for long walks midday is just out. but making sure he gets exercise is important since if he gets too fat, getting him back to a healthy weight would be difficult (again due to the breed's tendency to overheat). So during the day we have a couple short walks and at night we either walk him on the canals or on the boardwalk. he's a total rockstar on the boardwalk with people taking his picture, playing with him, you'd really think he was part of the unofficial show that is Ocean Front Walk. I always love those walks the best, it's a dramatic contrast to the multi million dollar serenity of the canals, but he always seems -so- happy after hitting the boardwalk, there's always just this adorable bounce in his step after getting lavished with love from strangers and he'll look up at me or ethan with this doggie grin that almost says, "i wish we could do this every day!"

a year or two ago the city of Venice put all these new ordinances into play to clean up the boardwalk, probably in an effort to make it more appealing to all the silicon beach people moving in along with the Google offices. They cut down on performance artists, what people could and couldn't sell on the boardwalk, and they banned dogs on the weekends from 11am to 8pm, which is kind of a bummer, but it has made for some awesome sunset walks along the beach.

last night we were sitting in our tv room when we heard a cacophony of sirens and helicopters. there are usually sirens and helicopters in venice, especially in the summer on the weekends, but this was -intense-, like nothing i had ever heard before. i checked on twitter and saw that there had been an accident on Ocean Front Walk, which in and of itself was horrific. So many people, so many street vendors, it must have been total chaos. At first I thought, like most people did, that it was an accident, that someone was high or drunk and did something stupid, however as more details came to light it sounded scarier and scarier. The driver actually drove half a mile on the boardwalk mowing down 12 people in the process. Security footage showed that he was actively swerving to the left and right, seemingly trying to hit people. It also showed that he stopped his car to get debris off it before continuing on his rampage. I guess an hour or so later he showed up at the Santa Monica police house asking cavalierly "So, here I am, how many people did I kill?"

He killed one woman who was visiting, on her honeymoon, from Italy. One person is in critical condition, and he -just- missed murdering a friend of mine who sells hoops.

I'm just sort of surprised how much this has left me shaken.

Growing up my family always had wolfhounds. They are these huge, majestic dogs with a long and storied past starting off as war and sheep dogs and eventually being revitalized as pets. my father always refused to teach them tricks outside of sitting, staying, and house training, as he felt like it was demeaning to make them behave like circus clowns. I'd always be slightly jealous when I'd see dogs that could do all sorts of ridiculous behaviors, but I was also sort of proud of the fact that our dogs retained the bulk of their individuality. this is something i've carried over into how i've raised my own dog. he's well behaved but he's not trained to perform. He's my companion, he's not around for me to get youtube hits or facebook likes.

When I was 7 Ringling Brothers Circus announced that they would be showing a live unicorn. I was a 7 year old girl so obviously i was all about the horses and the unicorns, and as such i was ridiculously excited. Then my parents explained to me that the unicorn was actually a goat who, somehow, had had its horns surgically manipulated so that they would grow into one horn in the middle of its forehead. I was -horrified-. Even at 7, this seemed far worse than any of the medical oddities I'd seen at various state fairs ("come see the two headed goat, the 5 legged calf") since it was an aberration that was man made solely for the sake of entertainment vs flaws in nature which were not intentional. I never went to see an animal based circus again.

Even though we owned aquariums and I loved marine biology, we never went to Sea World. We went to tons of zoos and aquariums that were accredited but my parents felt like there was no educational purpose behind Sea World and therefore it would be a waste of money and time. I wasn't particularly drawn to going since it looked large and mawkish, though I would've loved to have seen an Orca up close. I'd seen all sorts of sharks and even beluga whales, so the idea of seeing an Orca was super appealing.

Yesterday I went to see Blackfish (http://www.magpictures.com/blackfish/) and in hindsight I am SO happy that my parents opted out of taking me to Sea World as it essentially goes against every single thing I was ever taught in terms of respecting animals. Those animals are treated with less dignity than bettas, and at a great cost, both to them and to their trainers. Sea World is -awful-. I had no idea it included people standing on whales or riding them or making them enact all sorts of completely ridiculous behaviors that they would never come close to engaging in the wild.

Obviously the film has a heavy bias against the corporation but you can't deny the fact that the bulk of the "trainers" have no backgrounds in marine biology and are hired on their looks and swimming ability (something that was attested to by a bunch of former trainers) and all they do is parrot pre determined commands to the whales using operant conditioning. This is clearly not safe for either the whales (who live in tiny pools) or the trainers (who, when the whales do react negatively are essentially on their own since, you know, whales.) Their lack of understanding of the animals coupled with poor living conditions has resulted in numerous trainer deaths or severe injuries.

What really killed me was learning how many of their animals are still wild caught. As someone who was an avid aquarist for years, who still owns lizards, one of my main personal rules was that none of my pets could be wild caught, they all had to be captive bred. Most recently during my horribly failed jellyfish tank experiment, I found out that one of the suppliers for jellies was using wild caught animals and i was enraged. And we're talking about -jellyfish- which are not known for either their intelligence or their pod behavior. But whales and dolphins are...and to realize that these parks are separating families solely for the purpose of entertainment is gut wrenching, especially since orcas travel in pods their entire lives...even whales born in captivity are taken from their mothers in instances where either the babies or the mothers end up not performing up to par as a result of the distraction of the whole mother/child bond. But even just watching/reading how many of these animals live seriously shortened lifespans in captivity made me sick...because again as someone who has owned animals as a hobby, I quickly have come to realize there are some animals I could not care for properly (either do to the environment or something as embarrassing as user error) and in those instances I STOPPED TRYING. Because when you're constantly killing animals that you don't know how to adequately care for, you need to be responsible and stop.

Anyway, Blackfish is an astounding movie. There are absolutely times where the filmmaker's bias bothered me slightly, though realistically they are trying to pack in decades of a story into a shortish documentary. The film easily could have been another hour and I wouldn't have even minded. It's a really great and simple examination into why sea mammals should not be used for entertainment purposes and how companies like Sea World are not being held accountable both for endangering whales and humans. I also can't remember the last time a movie made me cry like that, I think it must've been Requiem for a Dream.

When I was younger, Tom Petty played something like 20 nights at the Fillmore and I remember being devastated that I couldn't go. I forget when this was, but money was an issue and at that point the idea of traveling across the country to see a band, even THE band, seemed unrealistic.

This month the Heartbreakers did a week long residency at the Beacon Theater in NY and are following it up with a week long residency at the Fonda Theater. The Fonda is small, it maybe holds 1500 people and it's general admission. Suffice it to say I was psyched when we were able to score a pair of tickets for one of the shows (being last night). The goal of the shows was to NOT play their greatest hits (yay!)

monday night
On Monday, I checked twitter, something I do maybe once or twice a month at most. Generally I only check twitter if there's some huge news or if I'm bored at the doctor's office...but for some reason on Monday I decided to see what going on and RIGHT when I checked it, the official Tom Petty account announced there was going to be a trivial contest on their website for tickets for that night's show. I logged on assuming I'd probably missed the contest, but instead was there right for the beginning and because an inordinate amount of my brain is reserved either for Tom Petty trivia or Tom Petty lyrics, I ended up winning the second question and getting a pair of tickets for the opening night. I was beyond psyched.

So we got to the Fonda and waited in line for 2 hours on Hollywood Blvd which in and of itself is awesome people watching. Then we got inside and had to stand around for 2 more hours until the show started. More great people watching but something was off...primarily that the audience, opposed to the arena shows which seem to be mostly hippies or fratboys, was mostly much older than me and where I got free tickets, they'd spent hundreds of not thousands of dollars for their tickets. In addition, no matter how much people had spent on their tickets, everyone had had to wait outside in the sun for hours before getting into the venue so I think a lot of people were dehydrated and were also not used to GA shows...so between the amount of money people spent, being worn out, overheated, and out of their element, once booze got thrown in things turned kind of nasty kind of quickly. I assume people who bought scalped tickets had an unrealistic sense of entitlement and felt it wasn't fair that they weren't in the front row (ethan and I were 6 people back from the stage) and suddenly I was witnessing people my mom's age attacking each other. It got so bad that I tried to break it up (as this was happening right next to me) and then suddenly someone my mom's age was screaming at me to fuck off while simultaneously punching anyone who tried to walk closer than her to the stage. It was kind of tense and unpleasant.

I get that when you sit outside for hours you want to be close to the stage. but I also believe that over the course of a 2 hour show it's totally reasonable to switch places with people and let them have a better vantage point, especially for such a rare occasion. I say this as a HUGE Petty fan, but to me, I didn't need 2 hours of being 20ft away from the dude, and was more than okay to see two happy dancing people get a little closer to the stage. But sadly most people were insanely territorial of their real estate on the floor and you could just feel the hate radiating from them whenever someone got up closer...which was really pathetic when you think about it, as it's a rock show, people are going to dance and get shuffled around and it's supposed to be FUN, but you could just see these little clusters of people who were infuriated by the fact they weren't in the front, by the fact someone in front of them let a stranger pass them by...it was just really disheartening in a way. But the band sounded great and the song selection was awesome.

thursday night
we tried to sell our tickets (at face value) for thursday's show because we felt like we'd been very lucky to go to the opening night and wanted to share our good fortune with others. however, it was reallllllly a pain in the ass to transfer tickets, so in the end we sold Ethan's ticket to a hardcore fan and I went by myself. It only seemed right because Ethan doesn't really even like Tom Petty and the woman we sold the ticket to had driven down from SF for business and decided to try to get a ticket for the show last minute. So I went into the venue with her and she pulled me up to the first row (!!!!) where some friends she had made on line were hanging out. Somehow I lost her in the crowd (i was still in the first row) and suddenly I was getting SCREAMED at by another posse of women my mom's age who were threatening me for being in the front row. To be incredibly clear I did not push in front of these women as I was about 10 feet to their right, I did not push in front of any of their friends, and the guys behind me had absolutely no problem with my being there as they were quite tall and I wasn't blocking their view. I told them that I'd head toward the back after the first song, that I just wanted to see Petty up close for the beginning and then I'd go find somewhere else to stand...the conversation between me and the raging women essentially went like this:

them: we waited out here all day to get in, you don't deserve to be here

me: i was outside all afternoon too, but I didn't have VIP tickets (which cost $300 a piece) so I was at the head of the other line...I'm going to leave right after the first song, I promise

them well maybe if you got a fucking job you'd be able to afford expensive tickets. YOU DO NOT DESERVE THIS

then they started screaming that they were going to call security but the guys behind me essentially told them to shut up. it was very exciting! then a fight broke out about 3 people behind me because some one else felt that their territory had been encroached upon by some guy (and said guy was super petite, easily shorter than me). This was essentially the vibe throughout the whole venue.

So Tom Petty came out and I was like 6ft away from him and I swear I was just heartbroken. He was wearing so much makeup and looked -so- old and tired. His hands were shaking as if he had some sort of tremor to the point where I have a hard time believing his guitar was really even plugged in because it would've sounded awful. It wasn't some stylistic choice, he just seemed like he couldn't hold the strings down without shaking....I don't know if it was nerves or health or what....but after nearly 30 years of fandom and wanting to be close to the stage, there i was and it was AWFUL. Seeing him so old and frail made -me- feel old and frail (standing for like 6 hours didn't help) and after the first song, true to my word, I escaped the front row and went up to the roof where the music from the mixing board was being piped. It sounded better than being in the venue since you could actually hear the band instead of hearing drunken screaming women.

On the roof I ended up talking to a bartender and security and they essentially said that these were some of the worst audiences the theater has seen in a while. They felt that the audience was one that wasn't really handling the whole standing in the sun all day and then standing on the floor + drinking thing very well and that EVERY night so far had had a lot of people getting into fights or passing out....but that the difference between this happening at a punk show vs a Tom Petty show was about a 40 year age difference and that was actually making things worse.

I eventually went downstairs again and ended up hanging out with some guy who was friends with the band and he was going to give me his afterparty pass because he didn't want to attend, but I demurred since Ethan was not with me and all I wanted to do was go home. Even the guy who was friends with the band thought that the crowd was nasty and kind of out of control and was counting the minutes for the show to be over so he could go back to the hotel suite and get his stuff and drive back to San Diego. This night the band sounded good (not as good at monday) and played more covers.

So all in all it was a weird scene. I feel incredibly lucky to have won tickets, to have gotten my brief moment in the front row, to have made another hardcore fan seriously happy, but I was also just disheartened by the whole VIP ticket thing. It is, in my mind, stupid to have VIP tickets for a GA show since there's no way to enforce one's VIP-ness and because of that, it results in a lot of tension...which is a shame to have all these undercurrents of hostility happening in what should be a really special event. Don't get me wrong, it was still awesome and I'm thrilled to have gone twice, but it was memorable in all the wrong ways.

it's been a fucking week.
i was going to write some stupid fucking post about it, but there's no point as people lived it and people far more eloquent than i have have already summarized it and will continue to do so.

it was an insane week, i imagine made more insane by not being there, as counter intuitive as that sounds. i miss my friends, i miss my family, i am eternally grateful for social media, amanda palmer is a terrible poet, bobby makes awesome t-shirts, my kidney no longer has a catheter in it (thank god), i taught a bunch of wonderful stoned ladies how to hoop this past saturday, i watched the news and talked about it with friends online, i learned more fire fan stuff.....it's just been a fucking week, something i don't think anyone can dispute.

last week when i was getting prepped for my surgery, my anesthesiologist was telling me how he'd previously worked with one of my surgeons from MGH. even though i was at one of the best hospitals in the world, being seen by doctors at the top of their field, that nod toward boston made me feel safer. it was a notion that i wrapped myself in as i felt the propophol crawl up my arm. (i think i might've tried to high five my doctor too)

i was raised on Long Island, New York was always "the city". When it came time to choose where to go to college I decided I wanted to move to Boston. I didn't want to commute to school (i lived about 45 minutes outside "the city") but I knew I wanted to be in a city. I'd heard about Emerson, went to visit, and fell in love. I remember the first time I visited, in Feb of 96, it was freezing out, there was ice everywhere and i felt sort of numb. My grandmother had just passed away, it was me, my dad, and two friends who were interviewing at Harvard and Wellesley respectively. We got to our hotel (a howard johnson's that sort of bordered the now defunct combat zone) and just wandered around and i felt like it was the start of something.

a few months later, i was walking down boylston street with my newly minted classmate/boyfriend. he was from rural maine, the type of rural where his graduating class was 19 people from probably 19 different towns, whereas I had graduated with 500 people from one town. we were exploring, figuring out where T stops were, where the best video rental places were in respect to our dorm. I remember hitting Copley and both of us just stopped to take it in. Almost simultaneously he said "it's so big" while I said "it's so tiny". we laughed at the differences in our experiences and expectations.

while I was raised on Long Island, I grew up in Boston (i am still growing). In no order, I made friends based on common interests vs physical proximity. i joined a bunch of mailing lists, i started going to clubs with regularity, eventually had the honor of djing at said clubs, i put holes and ink in my skin as a way to further claim it, make it my own. i did dumb things, i did smart things, i primarily met brilliant people. i did more dumb things. i trainwrecked my life and then dug myself out from the resultant ditch. i got a cat, it ran away. eventually i got another cat. we had a lot of parties. i met a boy. honestly i met a decent amount of boys. i fell in love. i got my heart broken. i worked in a record store and ended up on the local news after a radio dj freaked out about a tasteless statue of elvis. i got to see the fountain in copley full of bubbles. i walked around with 2 of my dearest friends singing tori amos and the cure at 4am, a feeble attempt to stay warm. i went to baseball games. i went to deli haus, a lot. i worked at urban outfitters and hated my job but loved riding my bike passed the neco wafer plant at night; the air thick with the smell of sugar. i went to a lot of coffee houses. i moved to england. i moved back. i missed england. i got a job, got married, got sick, got diagnosed, got treatment, i kept going. i discovered a whole host of things from flow arts, Anonymous, making jewelry, rising fish, geckos, frogs...i felt utterly alone, i felt completely loved. i fell out of love with the city. it felt small, i felt suffocated. i moved to los angeles. i love the energy of los angeles but i missed the people from boston something terrible, even people i hadn't spoken to in years, even people who don't like me. the amount of love i feel for the residents of boston, the people whose lives touched mine, has never wavered, regardless of my feelings of the city.

watching the news over the past 24 hours, i find comfort seeing shots of the streets that are not blood soaked, of hearing bahston accents, i got teary eyed when the yankees played sweet caroline, i got teary when i saw copley, and i was just overwhelmed by how defensive i felt for -my- city and by how much love i felt. i've cried. a lot.


(though i have to admit it's fucking alien to see people wearing winter coats)

first off, i'm selling some awesome and useful things: http://www.ebay.com/sch/bridgetvoid/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p3686

in other news, still recovering from surgery. it's a blast. i don't know how i did this, and the specifics are unimportant, but i totally wrecked my neck/shoulder in my sleep and now i feel like i'm half paralyzed. really it's just a muscle strain, but it's bad enough my kidney and bladder are going into spasms constantly, i don't need this on top of it. it's frustrating because the kidney/bladder pain shoots all the way down my leg into my foot, which is gross, and the beck pain shoots all the way down my right side into my hand. while i appreciate this unintentional attempt at shitty pain symmetry, i'm over it. of course all this could easily be remedied with medication i cannot take. though i -did- fill a prescription for some sort of pseudo narcotic painkiller ( can't recall the name) that is only somewhat risky, but so far i've been trying to just stay ahead of the pain with tylenol. i think tweaking my neck out has just exacerbated stuff since it feels damn near impossible to do anything without using your neck. at least with the kidney stuff, if i stay really really really still, it backs down enough to be background noise.

Biobitching
i'm achievement whoring through bioshock infinite now, since i feel like ass and repetitive simple stuff is comforting. the more i play the game the more i like it, but i also see more and more inherent flaws. ethan was telling me that some reviewers had sort of gone back and said "yeah maybe we were too enthusiastic about it" though i haven't confirmed that fact for myself... sort of hope that is the case though, because while this is a great game, it's not gaming's Kane moment. If we have to be all redundant and throw titles around to somehow prove the worth of things, that should still go to the first Bioshock. That game had way more depth, the audio diaries were amazing, the few characters you ran into were captivating. One thing I realize playing BSI through more is that it's very much like going through a really elaborate Disney vacation or something. There's all this opulent looking stuff around me that is nearly impossible to interact with and completely unreal. instead of feeling immersive it just gets old after a while.

it's frustrating because the game is really quite good, which i guess makes the shortcomings more jarring because they seem like sloppy oversights on some level.

Dead Space 3
so spriggan and i were thwarted earlier in the weekend when it came to co-oping this as XBL was down. i can't remember the last time i scheduled playing a game with a friend and i really can't remember the last time xbl went down. good timing. but this game man. i don't know. it's pretty and i have no idea what is going on and i can't tell if it's because the game is hard, obtuse, or because i just feel really out of it due to a messed up sleep schedule and intermittent kidney spasms. it is awesome to play a game with a friend online so i can't complain too much, but this game just seems SO much different from the first Dead Space and also about 100x harder

so i -could- have had surgery on my kidney this past thursday (wheee!) but there was nowhere near enough time to do all the pre op testing, schedule my anesthesia guy or train his replacement (he was on vacation last week), get my cardiac guy on call, get my oncologist prepared, start pre meds, and know that everything would be safe. one thing that is suuuuper annoying thanks to masto is that surgery under general anesthesia is more risky than for the general population due to reactions to all sorts of drugs. sadly this kidney thing is more complicated than the last time, so i can't get ESWL done, it needs to be laproscopic and apparently this is just complicated enough that doing it under twilight isn't possible. i guess this kidney stone is HUGE and will require lasers and stuff.

so this week i go in to get my kidney taken care of and hopefully that will be that. this surgery is more invasive than the ESWL but it's also got a better turn around healing wise. though in the same vein, last time i had ESWL my father in law had a massive heart attack the next day which required a quadruple bipass, so no matter what healing this time around is going to be more comfortable.

this has sucked so much though. again the no pain meds thing is fantastic to deal with, but i'm also astounded at how utterly exhausted i have become over the past week. my temporary totem animal is the sloth and it sucks. it sucks because i feel a hundred years older than i actually am. on the other hand, if i were to be spending more time awake, i'd be considering laying down on my bass amp and making a ton of noise to see if that got me anywhere stone wise. so i guess sleeping a lot right now is probably for the better.

one thing i have noticed is that getting sick has seriously amped up some weird longing for boston that i didn't even know was there. while i fully admit that moving to LA hasn't been as successful or exciting as i'd hoped it would be, i am not quite willing to throw in the towel just yet. but when i get sick i have this automatic desire to go home to a tiny city where things aren't on average 45 minutes away from each other and where scheduling surgery is infinitely easier because i was only dealing with one hospital, not one large hospital with two locations (ucla) and a secondary hospital for my oncology needs and getting records transferred seems tantamount to, i don't know, something big and dramatic. though people posting about the fact it's still snow and cold sort of tamps down that longing for the most part. but it is frustrating, this whole move, this whole getting sick thing. i know none of these things are permanent and they all have workarounds but bleargh.

in the meantime i've been playing a lot of bioshock infinite and it seems to have been infiltrating my dreams. so i'm glad i'm not playing TWD anymore because i don't think i'd be too psyched about zombie dreams.