neon anima

i came down with some other chest infection or cold a few weeks, maybe a month, after recovering from the last one. it felt very similar, but much less severe. the fever and body aches were fleeting this time. the worst symptom was the sore throat that took so much gargled saltwater to conquer. i replaced the air filter but margot suggested that i might have mold due to all the water damage. i called a mold inspection company. $450 for one air sample. fuck it. if the company i work for doesn't implode before july, i'll have enough money for all the reasonable, basic environmental health precautions i need.

i'm sure all the stress and anxiety at work isn't helping. i realized my last 3-4 sessions with my therapist were all about my CMO. these weekly four-hour meetings with her are killing me. it's a new direction, a new market, a new audience, some drastic new pivot every week. they can't even settle on what we're actually selling. i can't imagine it's much better anywhere else right now. a.i. has everyone acting like they're robot experts and they can't wait to lay off half their workforce. i desperately never want to work for a tech/software company again.

tues i finally went to the ent like i've been meaning to for a year or so. an audiologist conducted a hearing test because of the ringing in my ears i've been complaining about since i had covid in '20 or '21. i have no hearing loss and he said it didn't seem like i had any blockage behind my eardrums, but i still wish someone could tell me why water never seems to find its way out of my ears anymore or why they randomly hurt or feel clogged. re: the ringing, he told me that i might have first heard it during covid inflammation and, since noticing it, i always hear it now. i just have a new definition of what silence sounds like.

the ent doctor said everything looked fine, as well. she doesn't think it's sinus infections i've been experiencing. she snaked a tube with a camera on the end up my nostrils, which was a trial even with the lydacaine she spritzed, but not as horrible as i thought it'd be. i'm going back for an allergy test in may. after all the things i was told i was allergic to as a kid that have proven to be non-issues, it will be interesting to see what actually does set my allergies off.


the perfume hyperfixation is over. couldn't care less now. i moved on to vampires again, for a bit. finished memnoch the devil, which sees anne rice taking her vampire chronicles into much less vampiric territory. in it, lestat is essentially just a virgil-esque observer of her rewrite of the god/devil conflict. after learning that rice lost her six-year-old daughter to leukemia, i have a much deeper appreciation of her obsession with life, death, and god.

i'm still in a phase where i'm ravenous for anything that shamelessly injects spirituality into its plot. finally watched end of evangelion with margot, snek, and baron. it was playing at a local theater. absolutely sublime, cosmic occult divinity. i told margot there is something so special about eva. something that speaks deeply to my motherlessness, loneliness, and fear of others. to my desire for some cataclysmic, shattering and freeing restart of humanity. i think anno managed to put a piece of his soul into it.

i'm trying to finally get through the second season of twin peaks so i can watch fire walk with me and the return. there is a stretch of truly rancid episodes. worse than i remember. last time, i gave up when josie was turned into a drawer knob. i've struggled past that and ben horne's civil war delusion, literally skipped every scene with james/evelyn. so wild to see the cut to the theme music and waterfall after something as stupid as ben marching his little confederate figurines. then i guess someone in the writers' room said, "hey, did you guys notice there are many beautiful actresses on this show? what about a beauty pageant subplot?"

there is so much more of this sitcommy crap (some of it pretty fun—i actually like nadine's superpowered schoolgirl subplot) than the glorious enigma of laura palmer, it's hard to imagine what s3 will be like or how the characters will suddenly care about her again after having already put it all so far behind them in these episodes.


i started taking 5mg of lexapro on the hypothesis that cutting it out had made me irritable and removed that glass floor stopping my mood from seeing how deep and dark it can drop. i noticed a pretty immediate difference, particularly in how upset i am about work. i think i'll want to write again soon.

my leep was on friday. i keep wanting to say "leep procedure" but the p stands for procedure. n and husbands let me stay at their house in the big bedroom with the door shut, because i wasn't allowed to sleep with a cat in the bed and if i tried to sleep at home with my cats locked out of my bedroom, they would be stressed and bang on the door all night.

i was scared, mostly of the anesthesia. it seems execessive that they needed to put me all the way under when they weren't even cutting me open. anesthesia is so strange. i laid there, prepped and cleaned, lightened a bit by what one of the anesthesiologists called "'happy to be here' meds." they told me they were going to take me to the operating room; i closed my eyes, opened them, then there was a man standing next to me who told me "you're all done." i really wanted to talk to him about how dumbo was the best and most underrated disney movie, about how they intentionally or unintentionally snuck a racism allegory into it; about how i read on the internet years ago that african elephants have bigger ears than indian elephants so the whole thing was that he was an african elephant.

they brought n back. she had a banana and an energy drink for me. swallowing was a gritty ordeal. my mouth was really dry and raw, i guess from having the tube down my throat. i had a huge pad and they gave me some gauzy panties to hold it in place, but nothing much escaped.

my gyno mentioned that she tries to be more gentle on the cervix with patients who plan to be pregnant someday, but i said "no, tear it up." after, she told n she was confident that she got all the abnormal tissue. it was 2-3ish when they finished. i slept till 7 when we got back to n's and woke up feeling fine. they have these patches now they put on your neck to mitigate the effects of anesthesia. when i had my wisdom teeth out 10+ years ago, i was loopy for the rest of the day, drifitng in and out of sleep and remembering over and over that i was already done with surgery.

the next day we went to a cat adoption event because s is ready for a new baby after the recent passing of his two darlings.

i laugh to myself whenever i think about the fact that i haven't heard from chris during any of this. i don't think we've spoken at all since the succession finale. it still astonishes me how someone can be so uninterested in someone they claim to want to date. my therapist said i should have a conversation with him about the whole speaking-over-and-ignoring-me thing, but i can't bring myself to do it. i'm willing to communicate my needs, i'm not willing to repeatedly tell someone "i need you to seem even vaguely interested in what i have to say even in a crowd of people." the most insecure part of me tells me he was just hoping to get closer to n. and i know the most insecure part of me isn't the part i should listen to, but it feels safer to me to just let this fizzle out. i never would have thought i'd end up feeling this way again when he was the one who pursued me.

my pupils were dilated and different sizes on saturday night. i've been a bit concerned about that. there is shockingly little information—whether it was given to me after the procedure or online someone—about it. my gyno office was empty sunday (i don't know why she says to me "just call me") and the er couldn't tell me anything on the phone and i wasn't about to rack up $700-800 on a potentially pointless er visit. so i'm just going to assume it's fine unless they say otherwise in my mychart messages.