Our Town

The Oakland Police Department has a neat little widget that allows you to create an interactive map of anywhere in Oakland, by crime and location. Here is MPK ground zero for the last three months. It's like a TV crime drama writ in JPEG.

Yay!

Two months today of not smoking!  I am so proud of myself!  I had a really horrendous crave episode on Monday night, but I had some Habitrol which really helped.  Someone was smoking outside and the smoke just wafted in everywhere.

I was gasping for a cigarette and I was afraid I was never going to get past this stage.  The whyquit website resets people's counters back to day one when they break down and smoke "just one" or take a replacement.  But this is my website so I'm going to celebrate!  I hate being addicted to it.  I've missed so much in life because of smoking.  Being so anxious over at visits to friends that I couldn't enjoy myself because my whole day was timed around the "first one".

Not going to places because I couldn't smoke there.  Being foggy and ill with constant sinus problems.  Not being able to be fully creative in my studio because of the background concern of lowering nicotine levels in my brain taking up unconscious and then conscious mental space.  The fact that I don't have health insurance and smoking is like russian roulette for someone with my genetic background.  (My poor grandma was so sick with cancer, her cancer had cancer, practically :( )

Now I'm back to my childhood addiction.  Eating pretzels in a ritualistic manner that involves carefully nibbling off the round parts and then eating the remaining triangle.  

Anyway.

Thanks for letting me share.

MPK

W00t!!

A great day for human rights! Link

Just woke up

A dream about my last day of class this year. Of course, odd changes...class is outside on picnic tables and I have a super talented kid who is a mutant that only has hands.

For some reason this year I had considerable anxiety about the end of the year. I had a lot of seniors and I felt like I hadn't done enough for all of them before they went off to graduation. I'm frustrated that my class sizes are so large that I can't spend more time with each student. I'm afraid my shyness will make it impossible for me to ever be able to speak before a large room full of people.

I guess this is why I dream about it, to try to get it right in my mind.

It was a fantastic year actually. I think I just didn't want it to end, even though I was very tired and was tottering around like a little old lady. I was also functioning under the thinnest veneer of humanity since I had just quit smoking.

I'm rambling. Maybe I'll post a link to some pictures from this year later today.

They're Made Out of Meat

A good lunchbreak read

Here's an article that looks great just from the first few paragraphs. It's from The Agony Booth, which is a sort of MST3K/Rifftracks inspired website, only with longer (humorous) analysis. This one is about the Incredible Hulk Movie of 2003. I've only seen bits of that one and that was enough to keep me clicking through the channels.

The Agony Booth is one of my favorite distractions. I don't always agree with their choice of "bad movies" but the writing is clever. It's actually inspired me to seek out some of the "worst" offenders and a couple I've actually enjoyed. But maybe that just means I'm one of the few people who can count themselves a member of the "Zardoz" target audience.

Anything to distract me these days.

I quit smoking. There, I said it.

I've been trying to compose some deep, meaningful insights into this process. I even considered blogging the whole quit from beginning to...hopefully, never smoking again. I don't think I'm there yet. I've isolated myself because my personality is still in free fall and I'm snapping out at things like a psychotic 8 year old. The physical side effects have been an affront to dignity. The mental ones were expected but still dismaying.

There's a scene in Iron Man where Tony Stark is fighting to get that part out of the glass box in his workshop, sweating and emoting and grabbing blindly at stuff to get stuff going so he can keep breathing...that's pretty much where I was a month ago.

Now I'm just living on cough drops and 4 hours of sleep a "night" hoping to get to some version of normal soon. I know I should be getting busy, getting in touch with friends, and exercizing. I'm not ready for all that yet. I pretty much had to quit drinking coffee as part of this thing. Not a happy camper.


Anyway. The new Hulk looks pretty cool.