Maggots

Earlier this morning, before I made it to the shrink's office, I went out to the curb to retrieve the garbage cans. Normally, we perform the courtesy of dragging our neighbor's garbage cans up to the top of their driveway... but today, there were maggots in the can. Big ones. Making that crisped rice cereal sound that maggots in quantity seem to make.

Now, I look at pictures of dead people online several times a week. I watch 'Forensic Files', 'New Detectives', you name it. 'Forensic Files' shows real crime-scene photography & footage. A lot of this imagery contains maggots. They are really a hero in the eyes of forensic entymologists... by identifying the specie of fly they will turn into, they can help pinpoint the time of death & location a body may have been in originally before the killer may have moved it. They also clean away the dross of human existence when it is no longer needed, be it human remains or rotten garbage.

My brain, my conscious brain, said, "Ew, maggots." I think it's a conditioned knee-jerk reaction to a time when I was a little kid & put my hand in a squirming mass of them under the couch... but I was still going to reach down, pick the garbage can up gingerly by the handle farthest away from the larvae & perform my neighborly duty. But my hand wouldn't move. I literally became frozen in place. It was odd. I felt like I was going to have a hysterical fit for a moment. I could not move closer to the barrel... My feet wouldn't move. It felt like eternity, me struggling w/my own body to just reach down & pick up the garbage can, but instead my feet turned me around & I ended up facing Rob, who saw my distress & had come down to see what was wrong. I said, "There are maggots and I can't pick it up. I feel really bad." Rob just said, "Ew, gross, don't pick that up! And let's go before either one looks in the can!" He then mentioned that he didn't think they got that big & considered me brave or crazy for even moving our cans - that sort of maggoty by association concept.

When I was little I used to eat bugs... mealworms, pill bugs, ants... anything that looked benign, really. I want to work with the dead... even told my therapist that was my long-term unreachable goal... and I couldn't get past a weird physiological aversion to picking up a garbage can w/a few maggots in it. I was embarrassed & disappointed at myself.

Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can talk Rob into taking me over to Borders so I can sniff around for a day-planner type thingie to write down my mood-scale, diet & quickies.

Re: My 10 Minutes

Here it goes... my kitchen timer is busily ticking off my 10 minutes... I really don't feel like typing right now, but here I am, typing anyway... Rob & I went to Borders today to find a new organizer for me to keep track of my shrink stuff. They didn't have anything, but they did have a very cool wall banner involving Ed & Al from FullMetal Alchemist. Next week, when we're closer to payday, I'm probably going to go get it. We've been trying desperately to get rid of knick-knackage, but damn, it's got Ed & Al on it. I've really gotten into that particular show. They also had some manga comics - FMA, Inuyasha, Trigun, a few others. None were as dirty as we hoped for. It was kind of neat because most of them, even tho they're translated into Engrish, read from right to left - in other words, the books are backwards. Even the covers open the wrong way.

My computer makes me feel stupid. I'm not good enough to use it. I finally got the adapter to hook a VCR up to the computer to download movies onto it. Rob fucked around w/the sound cables so I could get sound as well as video. So I managed to save an episode of Trigun on my hd (only 980mb!). Then my DVD recorder wouldn't, for whatever crack-monkey reason, record the movie onto the DVD. So I blew up & had to remove myself from the immediate proximity of expensive technological equipment, and at about 4 am. reloaded the DVD burner drivers. So I managed to dl the movie onto the DVD, and of course our DVD player wouldn't play it. It just sat there making grinding noises & flashing 'LOADING' at me. So now I think all I've got to do is figure out exactly what format our DVD player plays, because it's not MPEG-2.
Or if it is, it's not Windows Media Player MPEG compatible. I don't know, I'm not a programmer.

I don't want to go to work tonight. Yesterday I ate everything we had in the house in a sort of anti-dietary-suggestion snit fit. Carbs, carbs & more carbs.

I offered my m.i.l. my copy of Merck's Medical Manual & Rob happened to mention that I had ordered a replacement copy - so now the m.i.l. wants the new copy, not mine. There is absolutely nothing wrong w/the one we have, but she thinks we've got the plague or something. Cooties, I don't know.