Paranoid Or Pattern?

Seriously.

There are at least seven items missing from my house after the move.  I shall describe them for you.

• 2 floating shelves, walnut in color, bought originally at WAL-Mart, still in their original packaging with hardware, never opened.
• 2 curtain rods, black with decorative crystal balls on the ends, originally bought at the Christmas Tree Shoppe, still in their original packaging with hardware, never opened.
• 2 Large U-shaped floating shelves, walnut in color, bought originally at Target, didn’t come in any kind of packaging or with hardware.
• 1 decorative Christmas card holder, silver, shaped like a Christmas tree, originally bought at WAL-Mart, still in original packaging, never opened.

These things simply aren’t in my house.  I know I myself brought the curtain rods into the house and put them in the Music Room closet before the movers arrived but no one remembers seeing them again.  No one remembers seeing any of the other items once they left the apartment.

Now, maybe these things looked like they weren’t being used but I actually had plans for them.  The U-shaped shelves were actually in use.  The card holder was bought on sale at the end of the holidays.  The other things weren’t put up at the last place in anticipation of having a new home.

Not to mention, they were my things.  I paid for them.  I loved them.

Someone clearly has taken them.  I mean, I don’t think I’m being paranoid here.  There’s obviously a pattern.  I don’t even think I’m reaching.  It’s not like my mother’s unicorn she never found after she moved to New Mexico five years ago.  These are all clearly things that are still in their store-bought packages (except the U-shape shelves) that could be returned to their stores or given as gifts.  Let’s face it, WAL-Mart will take anything back.  And you can sell anything on  e-bay if it’s in good condition.

Last week, I tried to call the mover’s office because my dad thought they might have accidentally picked up his channelpliers, which turns out to not have been true because it turns out he didn’t bring them with him at all.  I called and left messages three times on their machine.  They’ve never returned my call.  I didn’t sound accusatory or anything, just said who I was and asked for them to call me at such and such number.

I think it’s very suspicious.

My dad thinks I shouldn’t rule out the cable guy or the telephone repair man either, but I think they didn’t have quite the free run of the house and we might have noticed them carrying boxes about.

Thing is I can’t prove it and it’s driving me quite mad.  I keep wandering around my house looking for my missing things like they might suddenly appear — you know, like you do when you misplace your pen or scissors.

It doesn’t help that Pugly keeps barking at boxes I randomly bring up from the basement to unpack for Christmas decorating.  If he doesn’t see me put it there, it’s as if it’s invaded the home and it must have magically appeared.  He will bark and bark and bark even after I pick it up and show it to him.  Then he will look at me like I’m crazy for picking it up and he’ll back away.

This only helps to instill in my paranoid brain that maybe there is a ghostie in the house hiding my things in some secret spot and giggling at my madness.   Granted, the curtain rods were kind of gaudy but what does the ghostie have against floating shelves?

Tags: paranoia, robbers, movers, ghost, the puppy

Is It Me Or Are Bloggers Snobs?

Technorati has been acting a bit on the odds the last month or so and I’ve been getting really weird incoming links at random.  Yesterday, I got this one, which I had to search the whole page to find the reference to my own website which was last Fall sometime.

Looking back at that, I vaguely recall the whole affair.  There was a whole uproar in the blogsphere about “The A-List” which I didn’t get and I still don’t get.  In fact, I still haven’t figured out what the “A-List” is and who’s on it.  In fact, shortly after writing the post refered to in their post, I kind of forgot about “The A-List” because it was a bit too much like high school and cliquish to me.  What I think I got out of it was that it isn’t who you know or who knows you but who links to you and who acknowledges to you and who refers to you.

The strange timing of this is that recently I’ve started trying to be more active out in the blogsphere.  I’ve tried to start joining in on “conversations” on other blogs, but what I’ve started to notice is that you can’t just jump into a conversation even a virtual one on the web.  Apparently, that’s just like real life.

It’s a little bit like high school too.  I feel like I’ve just contributed to the conversation and rather than have anyone respond or agree or disagree, for the most part, I feel ignored or “unheard”, just another face in the crowd.

Maybe I’m just expecting too much or flashing back to high school insecurities.

Tags: blogs, anxiety, hopeless, paranoia

I Am Alive & Going To England

I appologize for seemingly abandoning this blog. The truth is that I’ve been distracted by more than a few things in my life:

• My grandmother’s death, as you know, took me somewhat by surprise and has caused me to do a lot of self-inspecting. Plus, I want to be there for my mother who I think took it a lot harder than me. Plus, the planning for the memorial service the weekend before Valentine’s Day in Florida.
  More

  Tags: Faith, God, Spirituality, migraine, wedding, England, paranoia, Samuel Alito, discombobulated, fibromyalgia

  2 comments See also in My Life, Politics & Causes, Friends & Family, Wellness, Discombobulated, The World, Faith, Migraine, Anxiety/Depression, Fibromyalgia

The White House War On The Facts

Wasn’t there a book about a world where the government controls everything including the information and the history, where history is officially changed in the archives to agree with what the government wants people to believe, and where people are told what to believe and remember?

People — o.k. Left-wingers — have been making a lot of references to 1984, comparing many of the things the current administration has done to the Orwellian world. Let’s face it, there’ve been a number of revelations of press releases and press ops that appear to have been completely staged or have been suggested to have been, including the Jessica Lynch rescue, the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush’s recent teleconference with soldiers in Iraq, and his photo ops with rescue and restoration crews in New Orleans and Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. Then there have been the efforts by the White House and the administration to hide the American dead, whether it be coffins returning from the Middle East or bodies found unattended in New Orleans.

But those things are just an effort to formulate opinion, to positively shape the image of the President and his administration and their causes and efforts, but where do they draw the line from trying to shape the image they present to the press to trying to change the facts to fit their agenda?

No, ironically, I’m not even talking about the whole conspiracy to misled Americans into a war with Iraq with falsified information, I’m talking about something much simpler.

Wonkette has an interesting tale about how the White House attempted to alter history. Think Progress summarizes:

Everyone agrees NBC’s David Gregory said this:

Q Whether there’s a question of legality, we know for a fact that there was involvement. We know that Karl Rove, based on what he and his lawyer have said, did have a conversation about somebody who Patrick Fitzgerald said was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. We know that Scooter Libby also had conversations.

Congressional Quarterly and FNS both transcribed Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s answer as “That’s accurate.” The White House transcript lists McClellan’s answer as “I don’t think that’s accurate.”

We’ve isolated the clip so you can judge for yourself:

Watch in QuickTime streaming.

If you listened to the clip, it’s clear McClellan says “that’s accurate.” Nevertheless, the White House is trying to get CQ and FNS to change their transcripts. They’ve refused. [” That’s Not Accurate: White House Alters Transcript of Press Briefing (Think Progress)”]

Wonkette also quotes CQ, if you’d like to hear their version of the story.

O.K. So now I’m going to talk the conspiracy to use fabricated intelligence to mislead Americans into a war without win. If the White House is willing to try to alter the facts about a press conference that’s on publically available video feed after the fact, how big a leap is it to think that they might have tried to alter the facts about the intelligence on Iraq beforehand?

Just a little “point to ponder” as a friend of mind says.

Tags: 1984, paranoia, lie, propaganda, Scott McClellan

“Red” Cross?

O.K. So, My mother works for the American Red Cross. I’m very proud of her because she’s nationally known and respected and they just offered her a real paying job. Well, she used to work on one of the city boards and now she’s running one of the city offices and she lectures at conventions and now they’ve offered to pay her to teach.

And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg for my mom’s accomplishments.

More

Tags: Red Cross, communism, paranoia, dysfunctional drama, stupidity

Waiting For The Third Shoe To Fall

My boss had come by earlier looking for fudge that had of course been finished off by the office folk two days ago. He noticed I had cookies but decided not to take them upon discovering they were a gift from my neighbor (btw, she makes good cookies).

So, after FW and I went down to Subway and I induldged myself in buying a six inch meatball sub on Italian herbs & cheese bread and a side of Baked Doritos, FW and I were walking back discussing my work schedule as I’m working the official holidays of Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve and I “jokingly” said “that is if I still have a job next Friday.” He laughed and told me that he was sure I was going to have a job and laughed more when I commented on the odd timing of it being the last official working day of the year. He launched into how my boss is always months behind on his evals and how he’s always in trouble for it.

Anyway, so I came back and went to the vending machine for a Diet Coke and on my way back stopped at my bosses office and said, “So if I bring those cookies over, will that reflect positively on my evaluation?” He laughed and said only if I don’t do it until Monday since now he’s tired of food. He also appologized for waiting so long to do the eval and was actually surprised to find out it was next Thursday as the secretary scheduled it, not him.

So, I’m feeling a little better but I’m really not good at criticism and I really don’t want to hear bad things about me, though my father said that when he was a manager, he was told that he had to find at least two things wrong with everyone for their evaluations. I’m still not estatic about the timing. I keep trying to remember to think about the things that contridict the out-of-control panic attack like the shrink told me.

I just feel like last year in late fall, I had just started to get my life together. I was saving money, paying off my debt, thinking of buying a house, investing in myself as a kitchen consultant (O.K. that didn’t work out well…), my medical condition was improving and I’d finally gotten an appointment at the Tulane Headache Clinic…Life seemed to be on the up side except for who I was working for and how insane the job environment was.

So, here I am a year later and my life is starting to sort itself out again. I’m saving money, paying off my debt, considering replacing my cheap junky furniture with decent grown-up stuff, have embraced my inner neat freak, my medical condition is improving again on new meds, I’m going to therapy, and I’m in the process of reiventing/rediscovering myself…

Things feel a little too good, a little too comfortable, a little too like something is about to go horribly wrong. After all, in the past, every time I’ve saved up a little money, nasty horrible things have happened like uninsured root canals, car trouble, trips to the ER…This month I did have $600-worth of work done on my car and had to pay $100 of a $1300 medical bill (not as good as the old insurance but still pretty good). Seems like I’m waiting for the third shoe to fall…though that $200 grocery bill last night felt a bit excessive…not to mention the crime against nature of having to buy wine in a box. I was so embarrassed.

So, anyway, for the moment, the world has stopped spinning, the six inch meatball sub is gone, there are still Baked Doritos and Christmas cookies on my desk and I kind of feel like I’ll be employed come January 1rst. Sometimes I’m too paranoid for my own good.

I still might bring fudge to work next Thursday just in case.

Tags: anxiety, paranoia

I’m Not As Paranoid As I Think I Am

Well, I had another chat with my new shrink. She told me that I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic, which is good since I really didn’t think I was. I do think I’m unhealthily paranoid, but she told me I wasn’t as paranoid as I thought I was. She basically said that my paranoia appears to be based on my life experiences, which apparently have been warped enough to make me honestly paranoid. She wants to work on retraining my mind not to think that way, not to go into a panic attack at a perceived trigger, to find out what the thought process is and what the root of the thinking is that makes me nuts.

Last night, we discussed the obvious things about my fear of losing my job. I told her that to be honest, I really thought I was hot stuff at my last job. I believed that I was irreplaceable and that I was so good that they’d never fire me. While I sometimes would have the passing thought that I might be fired for some bizarre reason, I honestly never in my heart of hearts believed that such a horrible thing would happen to me. I really had a high opinion of myself and my skills.

Being fired has practically decimated my ego. Certainly I’m not the diva I once was. My personal opinion of my computer skills and knowledge now is that I don’t know anything worthwhile and I’m practically unhireable. In fact, I’m sort of amazed that I got this job at all. I sometimes feel afraid that they will suddenly realize what a con job I did on them during the interviews. I mean, I’ve always been able to talk the good talk. My mom said I was conning old ladies out of candy at a very early age.

So I worry that I’m in a limbo waiting for the next devestation of job loss, waiting for another reminder that I am nothing, a failure, everything my old manager led people to believe. I misinterpret and question everything my boss says in my mind. I take everything personally. I can’t breath when my boss closes his door for some reason. I know my schedule is flexible but I feel guilty if I’m not working more than 40 hours a week and if I have to leave early or come in late. Not a single day goes by that I don’t question my abilities, skills, and performance. Not a single day goes by that I don’t worry over some perceived wrong I might have done or said.

And yes, I realize that the facts are that they paid $2000 for me to relocate to Maine. They made me permanent before my six months of probation was up. They’ve given me two raises since April 5th and one was a merit raise. They have me on a pager 24/7 and are rotating me through a second pager every 4 weeks. Certainly these are not things that they would be doing if they had doubts, right?

It’s just that losing my job a year ago was so unexpected though subconsciously I guess I knew it was coming. It was a shock to me and to everyone in my department (or so I was told later). It was the day of the Christmas luncheon and I had participated in the pooling of money for gifts for the Manager and the Director (money I’d like back now). They fired me before I had a chance to sit down with my morning muffin and read my email. They wouldn’t let me go back to my desk to collect my things (and I now suspect that I didn’t get my radio adapter back). They humiliated me by having me escorted out by security…all while I was wearing my Christmas sweater and just before my vacation.

I had been to the ER earlier that week and had been out two days due to a mis-diagnosed sinus infection. I’d had trouble with my manager because of my migraine absences and my FMLA status. Now, I’m afraid to call in sick. I’ll throw up in my cubicle trash can before I’ll call in sick. I don’t even like scheduling vacation time and have decided to work Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to partially make up for the three days after Christmas I’ll take off to visit with my family.

This whole experience has been humbling. I sort of long for the days where I thought I was hot stuff, but honestly, I don’t ever wake up dreading going to work (even if I’ve gone to sleep panicking that I’m getting fired in the morning). I haven’t ever been late to work because I was crying in a heap at the top of my stairs because I hated the very thought of going to work and facing that madness. I always suspected that if you weren’t already crazy, working with those people would make you crazy. The crazy people at the new job are more like living in Northern Exposure while that old place was like some insane assylum.

And looking back over my job experiences, I realize that I wasn’t always the best employee, but I also think that each and everyone contributed negatively to my life in such a way as to bring me to this stage of paranoia. And, yes, I realize that possibly I did things that acted as catalysts. Certainly, I didn’t always make good choices. It seems like I fled from one bad work experience to another repeatedly. I wonder if anyone really has wonderful work experiences, but then I wonder what other people think about since surely no one else can possibly be over analyzing every little thing every minute of the day like I do.

I’ve been on the Prosac now for almost a month. The shrink asked me how I felt since I’d been on it. I told her that I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to make me feel but I didn’t think I felt a whole lot different. I still feel listless. I still just want to sit around in my PJs all weekend stuffing my face with Twizzlers and Starburst Jellybeans. I still would rather watch a movie I don’t like on T.V. than straighten my room. She told me that it would probably be another couple of weeks to a month before we really see how the Prosac is going to affect me, ie hopefully balance things out. I can’t imagine it making me perky though. As I told her, I don’t recall ever being a particularly perky/happy person.

However, thinking more about it this morning, I have noticed a couple of things in the last week. I’ve started waking up earlier (though I have no desire to get out of bed earlier) and when I do wake up earlier, I feel rested. Granted, I take Ambien and Amitryptiline at night to help me sleep, but I had been waking up groggy even when I slept the whole night through. (One of my big issues is that my brain never seems to “shut off” and so I wake up all night long thinking and worrying about this and that.) Plus, I’m starting to feel restless. I don’t particularly care for just sitting still during the day. Plus, I’m starting to be a lot more talkative. I’m sure my mom would be surprised that PP once commented about me, “You sure don’t talk much but when you do it’s a zinger.”

The truth is that I managed to hide the depression for as long as I have because my friends and family are all far away and the people here didn’t know me before my arrival so they have nothing to compare my current behavior to. I also managed to pull of acting somewhat happy and social during the day and hide my issues with focusing on the discussions in meetings (probably that inner con artist at work).

And I had been afraid to really seek help or mention it to my doctor. I saw it as another sign of weakness and failure. My father seems to imply that he thinks I should just be able to stop the panic attacks at will and make myself happy. I feel like I’ve disappointed him a little because I needed the help of pills and therapy. However, it’s odd that he appears to feel that way as his mother is bipolar and must take meds. She obviously has OCD and a few other mental challenges. He must have grown up with it. You’d think he’d be more accepting.

Then again, every now and again, my father surprises me. I’ve said often recently that my father has turned out to be far more liberal than I ever thought he was when I was growing up. It’s almost as if he has one set of conservative rules for how the family is to live our lives and another set for the rest of the world in general. It’s a strange aspect of open-mindedness I suppose.

So, maybe I’m reading my father wrong again. Maybe he understands more than he’s letting on. Maybe I’m not disappointing him as much as I think I am. Maybe it’s just the paranoia, but then isn’t this how the thought process began? If my paranoia is the result of my combined experiences, and I’m paranoid that my father thinks I’m a failure, what does that say?

Tags: paranoia, anxiety

The Elections

Well, I know this might just flabberghast some people, but I didn’t see the debate on Friday. It’s the first one I’ve missed this election period. I meant to watch it. I had planned to watch it but between not feeling well and trying to learn how to use Photoshop, I just simply forgot until it was over.

However, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything said that would have surprised me or made me change my mind.

Also, I am very interested in the Afghanistan elections over the weekend. They seemed to have gone well, better than expected. Though there has been some allegations already of voter fraud. I did kind of hope the elected wouldn’t be the U.S.-backed canidate, but that’s just a little stubbornness and paranoia on my part. I would hate to think Afghanistan is going to have a puppet leader of our Bush Administration. Also, I’m slightly aware that we helped put Sadaam Hussein in office and perhaps we should know better by now that we shouldn’t be helping make these decisions because we apparently don’t make good choices for other countries.

***On a related side note, I heard Paul Harvey over the weekend and he was talking about how most governments collapse or fail by 200 years, even democracies. Apparently we’re living on borrowed time. I don’t know how true that is. I’d like to see the statistics. I find it hard to believe that we’d have a major re-vamp/re-org of our government, or rather I find it hard to imagine that in this day and age a society such as ours would allow ourselves to slip into such turmoil. Then again, I also fear that this year’s election is going to end up in some sort of rioting across the country no matter who wins.And if you think about it, bills like the Patriiot Act are the stepping stones to changing America forever from the country we loved for it’s freedom and progressivenes. Things like the Patritot Act make me think we are headed for a dictatorship of our own.

I’m probably just being paranoid.

Tags: 2004 election, politics, Afghanistan, paranoia

And Paranoia Pulls Into the Front

In the days prior to my involuntary separation of myself and my previous job, I was quite the busy bee. I had a 2 week vacation coming up and wanted to get everything set up and cleaned up in case someone needed something while I was away because I simply didn’t want them calling me in New Mexico on vacation. I updated documentation that was out of date and no one else would touch. I resolved several long-standing issues and set things in motion to have them moved into the production environment. I documented the things I did so that should someone need to do them while I was away, someone could figure out what to do. In essence, I was preparing things and people in the event that I wouldn’t be there.

It’s an eerie thing to think back on now since I didn’t know that I was going to be humiliatingly escorted from the building by security on that Friday morning two weeks before Christmas. Yet the memories stick with me feeding my natural over-abundance of paranoia.

So, yesterday in a weekly meeting my boss said that he didn’t want me to have to own the documentation I had been working on since I arrived. He felt it was important that others get the chance to work on the interface documentation and share the responsibility. He wants me to share some of the work or hand-over some of the work to the newer gal. At first I was somewhat fine with that, but then as the evening progressed and I was left alone to think on it, well, my paranoia kicked in.

Suddenly I felt like he was asking me to turn over all my work so as to free me up to free me from my position. After all, what all am I doing here? My ED project was pretty slow and mostly stalled to start with and is just now getting to a point where I might actually get to program. I’m trying to take over some of the testing/debugging responsibility from MJ to help free her up as she is extremely overstressed with way too many projects. I don’t know that my boss knows I am doing those things and they’ve been slow to get started too because the people involved in the testing have been out and such and when I finally got something to work on, I had to sit with MJ to cover the basics. I’m really anxious to get into the deep end of the pool but it just feels like I’m not accomplishing a lot and I’m twiddling my thumbs. Time goes by so much faster when there is something interesting to do.

So, this paranoia that I was going to lose my job again started swelling inside me and by 8pm I was in a good old-fashioned panic attack. I tried to think logically. After all, no one has said anything to me about work performance or ethic or whatever. If someone had been displeased, surely he would say something — but of course, my old Director would never say something until it was an extreme moment; she had the habit of telling someone else and hoping that it got back to the person via grapevine, which rarely worked, and my old Manager was such a Putz that he would only tell you something if someone else had complained.

So there I was at 9pm wondering what I did wrong, how to fix it, and what I’m going to do if I lose my job again and now live in a place with a higher cost of living and haven’t been able to get totally back on my feet.

At 10pm I could not shut my brain off. Reading and t.v. would not help drown out the fear and paranoia. I finally took a lorazepam which put me to sleep.

Today I’m better but I’m still not over it. The thumping is still in my chest. The worry is still there.

I had spoken to J a week or so ago after having had a dream where I was still unemployed in New Orleans and got on a bus to go see her in Utah. The busride and Salt Lake City were very surreal and I believe there was a piano and a choir involved (J & I both play piano and I’ve seen the SLC Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake before so it could be those carrying over). Anyway, I told her about the dream and the fact that every week or so I dream about being out of work and it bothers me. She said that even now, years after finding another job (she was unemployed for over 18 months), she still sometimes has the dreams. She said it’s hard to get over and it’s natural to still be upset. Our job losses were not the same. Her company laid off half it’s employees and then went out of business sometime later. While she might have felt personally attacked, I really was since I was set up to be fired by someone who didn’t really like me much as an employee for various reasons ranging from my medical condition to telling him the truth rather than kissing up to him. I suppose he blamed me for the missed deadlines of things I told him couldn’t be done in the time he demanded…I know I’m still bitter.

Anyway, I don’t know how to get beyond these panic attacks. I never thought that the meds the shrink gave me did anything for the anxiety. The lorazepam will knock me out from time to time but it doesn’t stop the racing of my head. If I just had someway to shut off the voice telling me what a failure I am and obsessing on something I can’t do anything about right then, I think I’d be ok but I don’t know how to not obsess and I don’t know how to put things aside until something can be done. Obviously someone needs to get into the code in my brain and fix the functionality so it works a little smoother with a few less destructive loops.

Tags: paranoia, anxiety