Sasha Is a Monster

This weekend Will surprised me with a trip to Poulsbo. I’d heard the name before, and I knew it was near Seattle, but my perception of it had been as a really worn-down depressing industrial area. I have no idea why I’d thought that. I think it’s the name. Doesn’t “Poulsbo” just sound like somewhere you don’t want to go? We took a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, which is one of my favorite little getaway areas surrounding Seattle, and in my mind I was like, “Can’t we just stay in Bainbridge?” But Will lived in Poulsbo as a teenager and was set on taking me there.

It turned out that my perceptions of the place could not have been more wrong. It’s a charming little Scandinavian village lined with Norwegian flags and high-end gift boutiques. We browsed the shops for awhile and had a lovely seafood dinner. It could not possibly have been more adorable.

We went by a house that he’d lived in as a kid, and I pretty much spent the whole time making Bachelor jokes. You know on The Bachelor when he does the home-town visits and the girls show him, like, where they went to elementary school, and where they had their first kiss, and where their dead grandmother lived, and he’s always like, “I’m just so happy that I’m getting to see all this. I feel so honored.” And you know that he couldn’t possibly care less about her dead grandmother’s house because she’s totally not getting the final rose and EVERYBODY knows that but her? Yeah. So I spent that portion of the day grasping my heart and saying things like “I’m just so honored that you brought me here. I can feel the passion that you have for this fence and this rock and this tree swing, and now that passion is within me. Is it time to sit down with your family and talk about the abusive ex you divorced and cry? Because that’s really what this day is missing.”

All joking aside, though, it was cool to see where he grew up, and I just love the areas surrounding Seattle so much. The old homes and the rocky beaches and the tree-covered hills. I never want to leave this part of the country. It’s so good for me. Perfect weekend!

A service that tracks all parking tickets for your vehicle and pays them on time. I just give this service my credit card information and pay a nominal fee, say, $10/mo, and then they automatically pay all my parking tickets. Does such a service exist? If not, why?

I mean, really and truly, how cute are they? They were all cuddled up together on my bed this morning and I just about died of the cuteness.

Also, you guys, I think the nausea from the Trileptal may be getting too much for me to handle. I have to email my doc and see if there’s something I can take to calm it down a little. Now I understand what pregnant women go through. I just wander around all damn day feeling like I’m gonna puke, but I never actually puke. It’s really uncomfortable. But I’m still loving getting up at a decent hour, and I don’t want that to go away.

The nausea does not stop me from eating. I went to dinner tonight with my friend Nick at my fave Seattle restaurant, Purple Cafe, and we ate like five pounds of cheese. I am going to weigh a million pounds soon. That’s okay because then I can go on The Biggest Loser and get a second chance at life, which has been my lifelong dream for several months now. (Actually, Biggest Loser is kind of boring me this season. Anyone else?)

Nick organized the bill when it came. “N” is for him, “S” is for me, “NS” is for dishes Nick and I shared, and “A” is for our friend Alex, who showed up late and so didn’t share the early dishes with us. This is amazing and I am doing it with all future dinner bills, even if I’m the only one at dinner.

Things are good. Really good right now.

It’s so strange — now that I’m off the Seroquel, I wake up at 7:30 or 8 am, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’m just up. I went from getting nine hours of sleep a night to six. For the first week, that was really rough and I felt tired a lot, but now I’m fairly well-adapted. I like it. I mean, think of how awesome and full my life could be if I had those hours of the day to spend with the rest of society! I’m psyched on the possibilities. Morning activities! WOAH.

The uber-compulsiveness that happened at the start of the switch to the Trileptal is becoming a little less overwhelming — manageable, even — and the only other side effect is some annoying nausea during the day and occasional and minor loss of balance. It’s actually kind of funny — every now and then, perfectly sober, I just kind of topple over a little. I’ve decided I will start acting like it is something cute that I do and then everyone else will believe that too. It’s a feature, not a side effect.

On another note, this is something that happens when you make the transition from dating in your early 20’s to dating in your late 20’s: suddenly, everyone has baggage. He’s been married before and they have a kid. Or he’s never been married before, but he has a kid from a previous relationship. Or he’s been married before, no kids, but then he had a kid with the girl he was seeing right after the divorce (but never married). Or, ya know, he has a kid he ignores in Germany, and some psychopath on Facebook makes damn sure you know about it.

I have never been married. I have no kids. You’d think I’d be a shining beacon of kid-free, first-marriage-eligibility hope for the twenty-eight men in the city who meet the same criteria, but somehow those are not the men I find.

I find the ones with the kids.

There’s a teenage girl I mentor. She recently turned 18, and she started hooking up with a 27-year-old man. (At first she lied to me and said he was 26. “26 sounds a lot less old than 27,” she explained later. Which, as a 27-year-old, was a hard pill to swallow, although I agreed.)

I was ranting to her about how I’ve reached the age where all men have kids or marriages or both and she was like, “Oh, God. Is that what it’s like in your 20s? I’m going to call my guy tonight and ask him if he has any kids. I never even thought of that! Wow, dating people in their 20s is so different.”

You’re tellin’ me, little girl.

But they made this video tonight and it’s, like, basically the most awesome thing that’s ever happened. MUUUUUUUST SHARE WITH IIIIIIINTERNET!!!! It’s a compulsive behavior. I can’t help it.

In the past few months, I’ve made a concerted effort to keep the most personal parts of my private life off the Internet. I’m trying to have something that’s just mine. It’s worked well, generally, and Operation Private Life has seen its intended results. I don’t have any overwhelming desire to start talking about meds on here again.

But something interesting’s happened. They finally tapered me off the Seroquel, which makes me tired and fat and apathetic about everything, and put me on a drug called Trileptal, which is indicated for epilepsy but it’s seen good results in bipolar patients with minimal side effects.

In the past, when I’ve gone off the Seroquel, I’ve gone pretty much straight into manic episodes. Thus far, with the Trileptal, I haven’t had any manic episodes, really (although my sleep has been weak at best). What’s happened, instead, is that I’ve become totally OCD. Things about the way my closet is organized, dirt on my car floor, my refrigerator, my laundry pile suddenly bother me. Everything needs to be clean and organized and it has to happen now. I’m frantic. I’ve done more cleaning in the past week than I have in the rest of my life combined. But it’s cool, though, because I get to understand how other people think. I get to understand what people are thinking when they’re like, “No, you absolutely must take off your shoes at the door.” It’s a cool experience and, once I grow into it, I don’t think I’ll mind this side effect. Everything’s getting all organized and I don’t even mind! My mother would be so proud.

I’ve stopped being angry at the meds. I’ve stopped being angry at the doctors who fuck around with them, who spent the better part of my life prescribing medicine that made me sicker. The cool thing about having been on a billion different psych meds that effect you in a billion different ways is that you really get to appreciate the way other people think. You get to understand a lot of different mindsets. And it’s awesome — in the literal sense — how a simple change in brain chemistry can so completely affect the way one believes one must interact with the world.

I’ve started thinking of it as a beautiful experiment. I get to be a lot of different brains in this life! And I get to appreciate how truly separate our brains are from ourselves. There’s an observer — there’s a me — watching this brain interact inconsistently with the world, as me. I am not my brain. There is a separate me, watching. That observer is consistent.

Anyway.

My apartment’s on its way to being very, very organized.