The conversation I had with my girlfriend today:

Me: I’m going crazy. I’m having this intense anxiety and nausea. I actually threw up yesterday I was so nervous. That’s never happened to me before.

Friend: Let’s talk about it. What’s going on in your life that might be making you feel that way? Have you changed any of your medications?

Me: Now that I think about it, I switched my birth control to Yasmin a couple weeks ago.

Friend: You should call your doctor and ask about that.

Well, I talked to my doctor today and confirmed that, yes, extreme anxiety is a potential side effect of Yasmin. I’ve never had really bad side effects like this from a birth control pill. I thought I was one of those people who could handle BC pretty well. I guess not with Yasmin! The timing totally makes sense, and I’ve also been having trouble sleeping through the night, which is another potential side effect, I found out. And I’ve had a complete loss of appetite, which is YET ANOTHER potential side effect. (Honestly if you can handle the constant panic attacks, this stuff would make a great diet pill. The thought of eating makes me ill.)

I can’t believe I didn’t put it together sooner. I guess my knee-jerk reaction is just to assume I’m going crazy, not to look at external factors. Thank goodness I told my friend about it and she mentioned medications, otherwise this probably would have gone on for months and involved a trip to the psych ward. This is why I bother having friends, I suppose. ;)

Anyway. I’m going off that shit, STAT.

I have been UBER CONSUMED with anxiety today. I mean, it’s been going on for a few days, but today it was just SO BAD ALL DAY, I actually came home from the office and puked. I’ve had no appetite lately, but I’ve been forcing myself to eat anyway. But I’d just been feeling so nauseous and anxious all day, and as I was riding up my elevator to my apartment I was like, “Holy shit, I’m gonna puke.” I think this is the first time I’ve actually thrown up from nervousness. I don’t even know exactly what’s causing it. (No, I’m not pregnant, don’t even start).

I think it’s a variety of things. I think it’s variables.

Here’s the thing: Life starts out simple, and then you introduce variables. You introduce choices and possibilities and unknowns. Some are broad and some are miniscule and some are somewhere in between, but it’s the cumulative weight of them, over a lifetime, that becomes almost crippling. As a child, they’re introduced slowly, simply. As a teenager they become more complex, heavier. And in adulthood, in a career and in relationships and in a home and in a family, they explode all over you. You can’t even see through all the variables. That’s how I feel right now. Too many variables. Too many choices. I’ve heard this called “problems of privilege,” and while I agree with that label in a denotative sense, to me they just feel like problems, plain and simple.

I recall back in my days as an engineering student, sitting in the lab chatting with a young female classmate from India. She was telling me about the men her parents were considering having her marry. I was aghast.

“Your parents are choosing your husband?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s how we’ve always done it.”

“But don’t you want some say in it? Doesn’t that seem horribly unfair?”

She laughed. “I watch you American girls and your dating. You are always so unhappy. It sounds terrible. I don’t want that.”

I’m almost envious of the days when women had no options, no careers and arranged marriages. I see the insanity in that, but I don’t feel it. I’m tired of options. I’m exhausted from heartbreak and doubt and risk-taking and failure and maybes. I just want to see the path I’m on, get a copy of the maze with the solution on the back.

Later tonight, I went to see an improv show directed by the guy who teaches my improv class. It was a full-length show called Objection! It’s set in a courtroom, and with some guidance from the audience, the actors take you all the way through a murder trial, completely improvised. For the actors, this is entirely a game of responding quickly and deftly to variables.

I was blown away. The ease with which they crafted the story, played off one another and managed the variables was astounding. It was way smarter than anything I’ve ever done. These people have to keep so much in their head at one time, consider so many possibilities, contribute their own variables, thread together a cohesive story and on top of it all be funny? It’s phenomenally difficult. I had a lot of respect for those actors. Maybe what I need is just more improv classes.

First off, thank you so much for all your suggestions in the comments and via email for my post yesterday. I’ll be following up with some of you and with some of your suggestions, and I appreciate you taking the time to think about it and to help me out. Y’all are amazing.

Tonight I hit up an awesome media networking event with my friend Staci, also from RealNetworks. Look at me! Networking! Except it wasn’t networking at all, since Staci and I got our drinks and then hid in the corner and gabbed about my love life, her love life, and then the love lives of everyone else in our immediate or tangential circle of friends, because that is what we do. Other people were exchanging business cards with total strangers, negotiating potential deals, sniffing around for a job. But me? I was with a girl whose desk is on the same floor as mine, who comes over and hangs out at my apartment sometimes, being like “OMG they did not break up! That’s insane! They seemed so perfect together! Tell me more.” So, yeah. This is why I don’t normally attend networking events. Luckily, I had to leave way early to hit up my improv class, so hopefully Staci got some actual useful networking in after that.

I didn’t want to go to my improv class tonight, because I’d been so uncomfortable and felt like I sucked so bad last week, but I went anyway. I was really glad I did. I had more fun this time, and, more than that, I noticed an improvement in myself since last week. I’m still by no means good, but I could tell that I’d been learning. I could tell that my classmates had, too. That’s still such a cool feeling for me — to know that I’ve grown better at something as a result of instruction or practice. I’m by nature an all-or-nothing kind of girl. Like, if I can’t rock at it immediately, I should give up right now, because I can never improve. But that’s not true, it’s just a lie my brain tells me. I did improve since last week. Who knows what a good little improv improver I might be by the end of the course?

It was really sad, though — at the start of class we were playing some silly games, and this one girl just kept messing up or getting confused. She’d been one of the girls who was really cool to me last week and who I really liked. Finally she was like, “You guys, I can’t do this. Something really bad happened today.” And then she started talking about her friend, who was shot four times today by her ex-boyfriend, who then killed himself. The woman had two kids. She died soon after at the hospital. What the police are admitting they know about the story — which is less than this girl knew — is here. I was just so heart-broken for her, I gave her a big hug, and then she decided she should probably leave. But it was just so crazy — you hear about these stories on the news, but these random shootings never seem to impact anyone I actually know. It just got me all angry at guns in general. Like, why are they legal again? I understand why they were important in a different time in American history, but do we still need them now? Are your hunting trips really as important as this woman being alive to care for her children? I think no.

I’ve spent the whole damn day writing. Not on Evil Beet, not on Zelda Lily, and frankly I don’t even want to be writing on here. My writing engine is sputtering, to say the least. I’ve been writing and writing to try to figure out what I want to do with my life in the next year, and how best to go about doing that. I met with Dr. Wiggles. I met with another advisor. Both told me to write. So I’ve been writing. I’ve been writing my goals and my hopes and I’ve been writing my resume. As I’ve said earlier, I feel like there’s a change on the horizon for me, I just don’t know what it is or in what form it will come. I’ve been told that if I have a clear sense of what I want for myself, the universe can deliver it. But if I’m all wishy-washy inside, the universe doesn’t know what to do. I’m trying to create this clear sense of direction and desire, and it’s been tricky for me.

And no, I’m not planning on shutting down Evil Beet, nothing like that. But I’m toying with the idea of perhaps setting someone up to manage EB and ZL full-time, and then taking a normal full-time job myself. There. I said it. I’m toying with the idea that perhaps a highly structured life would benefit me. There is zero structure in my life right now, and it’s not healthy for me. My brain needs firmer rules in place, otherwise it just wanders off and thinks about whatever the hell it wants, and it’s never anything good.

But if I’m going to take on a “real” job in a “real” office, it would have to be something challenging, engaging, interesting in a corporate culture I like and with people I enjoy being around. Otherwise I’ll just wind up worse off.

It’s hard, though. I don’t know exactly what kind of job I’d want or be good at. I don’t want to go back into software development, but I think it would be fun to oversee strategy for a software company. I want to be in a big company with a lot of ideas, to help mold those ideas and to help them grow and improve and to help them find a market. That’s what I’m good at. It’s hard, though, because my resume basically just says that I, uh, run a couple of blogs. It’s hard to ask someone to hire you into a senior-level business position based on that, despite the fact that I have an MBA. I was trying to write my resume tonight and I realized that I have absolutely no idea how to even describe all the bazillion things I do over at Evil Beet and Zelda Lily. I know I bring the skill-set necessary to the table, but I’m sure how to phrase that in the context of a celebrity gossip blogs.

So here’s where I’d like suggestions:

1) What kind of job do I want? Be specific.
2) What would you say, for a resume, that I do at Evil Beet and Zelda Lily?

Help would be MUCH APPRECIATED.

(Oh, and when I wrote “Find a relationship” on that list, I stared at it for a minute and then I crossed it out. It occurs to me again and again: In my gut, I do not want a relationship right now. I’m not ready. I’m busy with other stuff. Interesting.)

Hello lovelies. Today was exhausting, and not in the least exciting and I don’t have much more about that to say.

On Sunday I spent part of the aftenoon with Candice, her husband, and Baby Audrey, who is now six months old. As Candice pointed out, she looks more like a little girl than a baby now. And it’s true. She can eat real people food, she feeds it to herself and picks up her own sippy cup to drink; she helps Candice pick out her outfits in the morning; and she’s learning basic sign language to communicate how she feels and what she needs. She can walk pretty decently (as long as someone is holding her hands). It’s crazy. She’s definitely not a baby anymore. I hadn’t realized how quick the baby years (months!) go by. Audrey is not a baby anymore. The baby time is gone. Now this is a little girl. It happened so fast.

Not much more from me. I still feel as though I’m in such flux. I don’t have a feeling that I know where I’m headed, exactly. But I know change is a-comin’.

Remember how I said yesterday that I couldn’t write much about the hilarious Hazmat suits we used to attack the rat-poop storage unit because I didn’t have pictures? I was wrong. They took pictures before I got there. Unreal.

I’ve also included a photo so you can see the level of rat-poopery we were dealing with. This was on everything.

And this is all of us posing proudly in front of a rat-poop-free storage unit. Mission accomplished!