Category Archives: Uncategorized

Falling down a mental black hole.

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I’ve been dealing with a situation that’s been somewhat traumatizing to me and has gotten me very depressed and experiencing feelings of self-hatred and shame (having SAD doesn’t help).   I became so depressed all I could do was lie in bed and sleep or just mope around and do nothing except wallow in self pity.  I lost all motivation to write anything at all.    I prayed for answers and clarity on this situation, and now that I finally understand the reason this thing triggered me so much, I’m finally starting to feel a little better about it.

I’m sorry, but I’m not prepared to say what the situation is.    I’m not ill nor is anyone close to me sick.  I didn’t lose my job. No one died. Nothing “bad” happened.   It’s purely a thing that has to do with my mental disorders and is probably something that wouldn’t bother a normal person nearly so much but sent me hurtling down a mental black hole.

I have therapy tomorrow where I will be talking about it.  The only person that knows exactly what’s going on with me right now is my therapist.    I hope I come away feeling almost back to normal.

I still don’t know how much I’ll feel like posting, though.

I’m taking a short break.

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I probably won’t be posting for the next couple of days.  There are some other things I need to catch up on, including answering some of the emails I’ve been neglecting to answer (if yours is one of them, my apologies and you should be hearing from me).  There’s also a situation I need to gain some perspective on and I can’t do that by staying online.   This doesn’t mean I won’t post (I still might if I have a “lightbulb” moment and just have to write about it) , but I probably won’t for a couple of days.

See you in a few!

 

Words of comfort for the scapegoat.

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6 ways to turn things that annoy you into hilarious blog posts.

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This ever happen to you? Yep, it’s beyond annoying. I bet you could write something funny about it.

Let’s face it. Annoying things are funny.   If you can look at the humorous side of the things that drive you crazy,  two things happen:  (1)  it no longer seems as annoying; and (2) you can write a great post that makes your readers laugh.   Some of my most popular posts–such as “12 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Autumn“– have been biting jabs at things I don’t like.

Here are 6 ways you can turn something that makes you want to stick white-hot steel pins in your eyes into something that makes your audience (and you) laugh.

1. First, try to find the funny side of whatever it is that annoys you.

Come on, you don’t have to dig that deep.  Almost everything has a funny side to it.  Most things that are merely annoying (as opposed to, say, tragic, where it might be hard to find a light side) are very funny indeed.   Hate morning radio shows? (I do.)  Make fun of them!  Talk about how idiotic they are or the way they never play any music.  Rant on about the way there’s always a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers female sidekick who gets paid to do nothing except laugh idiotically at Bubba and Ed’s lame jokes. Lampoon the way all the jokes are about celebrities and sex.  Or celebrities having sex.  Like anyone cares.

2. Don’t be afraid to use sarcasm.

If you’re good at it, that is. You should know if you are.  I’m one of those people that is not.  Snark and sarcasm don’t come naturally to me.   But if you’re good at it, that’s a plus because it can make your funny posts even funnier.     If, like me,  you’re not good at sarcasm and snark, skip it because you’ll seem like you’re trying too hard, and worse, come off as nasty and mean instead of bitingly funny.

3. Exaggerate!

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“That Turbo-sized mug of Pumpkin Spice cappuccino she forced on me against my will smelled like cinnamon-and-clove-scented sewer” is a lot funnier than “that large mug of Pumpkin Spice cappuccino she gave me smelled terrible.”   You’re not lying; you’re embellishing the truth with colorful imagery to enhance its humorous effect. (Oh, and almost everyone  I know is fed up with Pumpkin Spice everything).

4. Profanity can be useful, but use it sparingly.

I try not to use too many profanities in my blog posts, not because I’m some prudish church-lady afraid of “salty” language, but because most of the time,  it just makes you sound low class, mean, and uneducated. It’s also lazy.  There are usually better ways to  express frustration, anger, surprise, or whatever strong emotion you’re trying to convey.  That being said, sometimes a well placed expletive gets your point across more effectively than anything else, and you don’t have to worry about Those Words making you sound pretentious, as a euphemism might.   You can usually get away with naughty words if you’re writing something humorous–especially if it’s about something you find f***ing annoying.  It’s the surprise factor of seeing a four letter word there that sometimes sets off the guffaws.  Everyone can relate to the F-bomb (and well-placed,  it does act like a kind of bomb!), even if they don’t admit it.   Only use it once or twice though.  If you overload your post with profanities, you’ll probably just turn off most readers instead of making them laugh.

5. Make a numbered list.

Everyone loves lists–or “listicles,” as they have been recently (and annoyingly) called when they refer to lists on blog posts.   The human love of lists is the reason why back in the 1980s, “The Book of Lists” was a huge bestseller, and spawned a jazillion followup books.  It’s the reason why every article about writing engaging blog posts will tell you to “put it in a list.”    If you’re writing about something that annoys you, you can either write a list of all the different things that annoy you, or focus on one thing and list all the reasons why you hate it.

Lists are also a lot easier to write than regular prose, and easier to read too.

6.  Find funny images to illustrate your post.

I love Google Images, and I can almost always find the perfect image for any post I’m writing.   All you do is type in a few words describing what you’re looking for or what your post is about, and click on Images, and voila!  Then it’s just a matter of choosing the one that “speaks” to you the most.    There are some pretty hilarious ones too, for almost any subject you can think of.   Images, memes, cartoons, and funny photographs can make your funny post even funnier, but don’t overwhelm your readers by posting too many.  After all, you want your  own words to stand out, not have their effect diluted with too many funny pictures.  One at the top of your post, and maybe one or two others sparingly placed should be enough.  If you’re good at writing captions, do it, because sometimes those are the funniest things in a post.   If you love funny captions,  check out those on Cracked.com.  Theirs are the greatest.

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You can also turn things that elicit other disagreeable emotions in you (as long as they’re not “serious” emotions like sadness or grief) into comedy gold!   Try writing a funny post about things that disgust, bore, or scare you!    Here’s one I wrote called “25 Things That Gross Me Out.“

Summer’s not over yet!

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As someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), I’m extremely sensitive to the shortening days and increased darkness of fall.    Believe it or not, my disorder actually begins to kick in during high summer–around early August–when the days are growing noticeably shorter, even though the heat and humidity is at its peak.  So it’s really the lessening light, and not cooler weather, that sends me into the yearly doldrums and makes me feel depressed.  I’ve sometimes wondered if SAD might be some kind of evolutionary throwback to a time when we still hibernated.  I know every year I want to go into hibernation and sleep away the fall and winter and  wake up again in early spring.

Another weird thing about my SAD is that it begins to dissipate sometime in late January or early February, when the days are beginning to grow noticeably longer.   Even though February days are still shorter than September days, it’s the increase of light every day that begins to improve  my mood, not the actual amount of light.

But I couldn’t feel too depressed about fall beginning in just a couple days when I saw this little treat in the front of my house.    I don’t know where this vine with these cute little red flowers came from–it looks like a type of morning glory (Bluebird of Bitterness might know what these are).   Maybe my daughter planted some seeds here, or maybe they’re just growing there all on their own.   However they got here, they made me smile this morning.

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Also, my rose bush and the blue morning glories I planted back in April are turning my small garden into a riot of color (and I even spied a few bumblebees in the trumpet shaped flowers), so it seems like summer isn’t quite ready to go anywhere yet!

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ETA:  I found out the small red-orange morning glories in front of the house are actually a very rare variety called “Orange Noah.”  They bloom in late summer and fall, when most other glories are ready to quit for the year.  But where they came from is still a mystery!

Haters.

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The impossible.

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My narcissist hipster upstairs neighbor.

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I live in a duplex with a shared parking area.  I’ve had new upstairs neighbors for a few months.  They are youngish hipsters (probably in their mid 20s)  who seemed okay at first.  When they moved in I wanted to make them feel welcome, so I gave them a bottle of locally made wine (knowing that as hipsters they would probably like such a gift) which was pretty expensive too, and offered the use of my front porch anytime.

It seems like my efforts at goodwill didn’t mean much.  They fight every night (it’s always him I hear) and are completely uncooperative in every way you can imagine.   Or at least the guy is.

I never see the fiancee, who is supposedly an artist of some kind, but the guy has proved to be a passive-aggressive d**k.  His behavior seems to indicate severe, possibly malignant, covert narcissism.   I wonder if his fiancee is so silent and invisible because she suffers from PTSD.

First was the problem I had with their cat.    They have two Himalayans, and for about a month, one of them was always sitting in front of my door and would try to get inside whenever I went to open it.   My roommate told me this cat would be sitting out there all day on one of the porch chairs.  It seemed like they expected us to take her in, and maybe they thought I was a “crazy cat lady” because there are already 3 cats in this small apartment.   My daughter’s cat, BabyCat, has anxiety and territorial issues, and was beginning to act very sketchy and neurotic, compulsively grooming and meowing anxiously whenever the neighbor’s cat was outside my front door, which was most of the time.

I called my neighbor about the problem and he said snottily, “well, we can’t keep her upstairs, because she doesn’t get along with our other cat, and she doesn’t like being inside anyway.”

Well, then, idiot, why don’t you re-home her?   I didn’t tell him this.   He did nothing. The cat was still outside.  She was dirty and unkempt and it looked like she was never fed.  I called him again a few days later and left a message.  I got no response.   Being an animal lover, I hated the fact I had to start chasing her away, but what else could I do?   Even if I could have taken in another cat, which I absolutely can’t,  he probably would have been angry about it.

One day he saw me chasing the cat away from my front door and gave me a look that could kill, so I knew he was mad (he probably thinks I’m “cruel to animals” even though I’m anything but.  But after that, I didn’t see the cat again.

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Not their cat, just one I found on Google but the expression on this cat is epic. 

Now I’m dealing with the parking issue.  They have two cars, and between myself, my daughter, and my roommate, we have 3.   So there a total of five cars parked in a space that can really only hold three.   The neighbors are environmentalists and don’t want to “ruin the grass”,  even though they have never once mowed it (mowing the shared large front yard and the back yard falls on me, or whoever I can get to do it–and their side of the house is covered with 3 foot tall weeds). So what they do is they park both their cars on the gravel, and don’t bother to angle their cars so that I can get out easily in the morning (I have to back up over the gravel driveway to get out).  This guy is completely uncooperative, as you can see from these two phone conversations.   His tone seems snotty and entitled to me and he’s a liar too.

First text conversation:

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He was lying.  I could hear him and a bunch of their friends upstairs.  They never did move the car, and the next morning I almost hit it trying to back out.

In the second text conversation, the last message got sort of messed up, but I was trying to explain that I couldn’t use the other entrance because that goes into the parking area of the apartment complex next door, and they don’t want us to drive through there so it’s usually blocked off.  I would be forced to drive through the yard to get around that. So backing out is really the only way.

Second text conversation (this was today):

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I finally got him to agree to angle his car differently so I can get out, but not until I threatened to call the landlord about the problem (that part can’t be seen in the text conversation, because I told him this over the phone) and that if he didn’t start to angle his car, I would probably hit it trying to get out.

I hate the way this narcissistic brat is forcing me to resort to threats and aggression.  That’s not me at all, but it’s the only thing that seems to work with him, and the fiancee might as well be a ghost because I never even see her at all.  I wonder if they’ll make it to actual marriage.

What should I write about today?

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Any ideas?  I really don’t have any.   I might not write anything today and get out instead.  I’ve been sitting in the house too much, and there’s always so much to do that isn’t inside your four walls.

But I always feel guilty if I don’t post something.  Maybe I can find a nice meme or photo.   Or write about whatever it is I wind up doing today.

Here are some other things I could be doing (that don’t involve things like laundry, shopping, or cleaning the house).

— Reading.    There are 3 books I’m currently trying to finish.

— Reading other blogs and catching up on commenting.  My track record for this is ABYSMAL and it embarrasses me.

— Drive somewhere nice and walk around

–Take myself to a movie or something else fairly cheap and fun.

— Write up a new post anyway.  Maybe tonight though.

What would you like to see a post about?  Put your ideas in the comments.

Seen on an NPD forum.

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This was a real thread started on an NPD forum.

Fire your therapist! I cured myself of NPD in just three months! 

You can too!  I spent ten years in and out of therapists’s offices.  I was considered incurable and most of those therapists gave up on trying to cure me.   I was practically black-listed by the APA!    I didn’t want my narcissism anymore, but what could I do?   I was desperate! I had no choice but to cure myself, and I found out how to do it!  After months of study, I found a proven, simple, PAINLESS, 100% effective method of getting rid of NPD!  I cured myself of my NPD in only three months, and SO CAN YOU!    If you want your narcissism to leave you for good but are tired of being broke from the thousands of dollars you are forking over for know-nothing therapists who only want to line their pockets by making you feel worse, then you have NO EXCUSE not to order my proven ten step program which is GUARANTEED to cure you of NPD in 6 months OR LESS–FOREVER!  Unlike those ineffective shrinks who are getting rich off your pain, my method is FUN and PAINLESS!  

If for any reason, my proven method doesn’t work for you, I will cheerfully send you a FULL REFUND–no questions asked!  

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The ten step method was a set of 12 CD’s and a booklet for $300 (paid in monthly installments)  + shipping and handling

I wonder how many refunds this person had to “cheerfully” offer to gullible narcissists.

The thread was locked by a moderator for “spamming” and “shameless self promotion” as well as for “giving misleading information to the mentally ill.”