Left for Dead Rising. Two.

I just had an incredibly detailed zombie dream, in which I had to kill Patrick Stewart.

Patrick, I'm sorry!  You'd been bitten!  Everyone was watching you closely, and you were doing what you could as the military leader of the survivors before you turned.  When you felt it quicken, you turned to me and said, "You got this, Tim?"

To which I replied, "Yes."  And you bit down on my shotgun barrel, not wanting to die as a zomblebee.  It was incredibly noble of you, and a poignant scene in the complex drama that unfolded during sleepy time.  Of course, it ended up with some of your brains on the people around us because they wouldn't get away from you, because they loved their Captain.  ...yes, that was a dual reference to your rank in the dream and to your past as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  Should I be sorry about that?  I've decided not to be sorry about that.

***

The dream began as a disjointed thing about me being at an awkward family function, in an extremely awkward house.   The house was awkward in its layout; there were wholly furnished and clearly lived in portions of it that could only be accessed through cumbersome, difficult and patently dangerous ways.  Of course, in the dream I seemed to be the only one who was having any trouble with such things, but that's not the point.  To avoid an internal family conflict, I had gone off somewhere in this giant house to play video games with some cousins.  We were playing something akin to L4D2 (Left 4 Dead 2, for the uninitiated), and at some point during that experience, that became the dream.

It was me, in a mall, running and hiding and shooting zombies.  I began with a crappy rifle.  It reminds me of the .22 Ruger I used to shoot at a friend's farm, now that I think about it.  Right about the time that I found a long lost lady love, we stumbled upon a Sporting Goods store and lucked into two shotguns and a box of ammo each.  The shotguns were five shot, pump action affairs that packed a hell of lot of punch.  She and I stayed together throughout the rest of the dream, occasionally temporarily separated, but always reunited.

I frequently encountered groups of people, tucked away in the very dimly lit stores of the mall, which was huge, by the way.  The mall was enormous, sprawling.   In the real world, it would have occupied kilometers of space (or miles, for you cute littler fellers still using imperial measurements).  There was an expansive basement and tonnes of stores, although I only recall there being two floors, with railed walkways on each side, separated by a huge open space that was occasionally punctuated with fountains.  ...it may have borne a striking resemblance to the mall from Dead Rising, only bigger, darker, and punctuated here and there with Things that were on fire.

Said Lady Love and I moved from place to place and group to group, frequently fighting off large groups of zombies.  Sometimes we fought them alone, just the two of us, saving a whole group of people for the moment.  Sometimes we fought them with a lot of help, with the occasional jammed gun or botched reload raising the heart rates of those involved.  I'm not sure when, but we started moving aimlessly through the mall with a large group of survivors.  In the middle of a skirmish with the undead, men in military uniforms with Big Guns and Precision Aim burst onto the scene from around the bend, taking out the zombies that were plaguing us, and they took us with them to a cordoned off, moderately fortified area in the mall.  Safety.  Ish.

That was when I was introduced to Patrick Stewart as one of the people responsible for the safety of a large group of others, and one of the lucky few to have found a worthwhile gun and ammunition.  He was the leader of these military men, and he introduced me to his lieutenants and included me in the decision making.  And then he began to turn, and I had to blow his head off.  RIP, Patrick.  You will be missed.  Your epitaph will read, "Make it so, my x-men."  Or possibly, "Dude could really rock a chrome dome."  I honestly can't picture you with hair, Patrick.

Afterwards, I fought off a wave single-handedly, because I was the only one at that point in the perimeter with a gun, picking off several zombies at a time with my shotgun, which was closer to a shoulder mounted flak-cannon at this point.  I'm sure that when I walked over to those stairs with the new commander, that he'd been carrying an assault rifle.  In fact, I'm certain that there were a number of men there with Big Guns, but the when the undead came shamble-running up the stairs, it was all down to me.  *Blam*, several more *blam*s, a reload, two more *blam*s and it was done.  I was basically the main character.

And then, a lull.  A long one, in which I toured the refugee area with the new commander, and searched for my Lady, who'd gotten separated from me when we arrived.  The refugee area was huge.  It stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, on both floors of the mall, with thousands of people.  Like I said, it was a really, really big mall.

I can see now that I've left out a lot, like how there were objects and goals that we had to try to find, early on, when the dream was still holding the form of the video game I'd been playing.  I left out almost all description of the darkened, trashed conditions of the mall, and I really didn't even describe the zombies - which were fast movers, but stupid as hell.

Unfortunately, the dream is fading, so this'll have to do.

Teehee

Woke up giggling.



"Help!  I'm trapped in a fortune cookie factory!"

...

IN BED!  Amirite?  Amirite?  Aww, yeah.

brog rog log snog dog frog hog pog remember alf? he's back. in pog form.

This is going to be a little heavier than most of what I put up here.  I don't talk about this very often because I'm usually doing quite well, and because most people can't relate. But.

I’ve been… Off, lately. It’s got mostly, if not everything, to do with that other side of my day, the one where I’m neither a student nor a writer, but rather a cancer patient. On that side of things, my treatments have been hitting me harder, I’ve been sleeping incredibly poorly, I’m all screwed up dietarily and frankly I’m pretty damn tired of the whole process. I’ve got roughly a year left on most of my treatments before I’m essentially free and clear, based on our current estimates, and I don’t think knowing that is helping me at all. Rather, it’s a tantalizing fruit, hanging just out of reach. It is a watched pot. It is toast in the toaster, while I stand there waiting to spread my topping of delicious choice.

This is compounded by a couple of breaks in my treatments in the last few months, to make room for finals, to deal with side effects, that sort of thing. I got a taste of what it was like to actually be me again, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. Going back on my interferon, resuming my phototherapy? Sucked very much bad.

I’m going to let you all in on a little bit of my life.

This is what I bang into my subcutaneous fatty tissue three times a week:

It’s called Intron A. More properly, it is interferon alpha 2b, prescribed as an immune system remediant. What that means, essentially, is that through repeated injection, it will force my body to hit the reset button on my immune system. Why is this important? Because that’s what’s wrong with me. I have a non-Hodgkins lymphoma called Mycosis Fungoides. The technical version is that the CD4+ recruiter t-cells specific to my dermis have an indeterminate tissue residency time; this means that when an immune response is prompted in my skin, it never fucking stops. This is why I have had significant trouble with my skin for the last decade, and quite possibly why I’ve had skin trouble my whole life. When I say trouble, I mean big red patches that tended to flake skin and itch like it was my job to scratch. Yes. Sexy.

These days, I am doing rather well from a dermatological standpoint. Or rather, the net damage from my phototherapy treatments is much less pressing than the damage from my cancer. I moisturize a lot. Much of this recent progress is due to the interferon injections, of a certainty.

So why am I so put out by this medication? Aside from the obvious fact that I have to inject myself with it? Which isn’t that bad because, in spite of the panic attack I almost had when doing it the first time, it’s just a little dial-a-dose pen like you get for insulin these days; just a little prick, really. No. The reason I’m talking about interferon is because of the list of side effects. There are three kinds:

Reported by most (7/10)

Reported by some (7/100)

Rare but troubling (7/1000)

I'd list the side effects individually, but that would add another page to this thing.  

The most prominent and persistently troubling side effects are temporary depression and massive irritability. I have days on this stuff where I would just as soon glass you in the temple as say hello, because you are In. My. Way. And that’s not like me. I’m not violent, I’m not angry. In fact, I’m tolerant to the point of detriment to my own well being.

But then there are the sleep requirements. Even though I am on what has been described to me as a very low dose, it still requires ten to twelve hours of sleep to deal with the primary effects: Full body muscle aches, persistent sinus headaches, and general crap-assing malaise. I basically feel like I have influenza three times a week, minus the fever and chills. Though, there were fever and chills for the first two weeks, while my body was getting used to the stuff. That’s because your body naturally produces interferon of its own in response to viral infections, and interferon is the stuff that is largely responsible for the symptoms you feel when you have the flu. It makes me pee a lot, too.

On interferon days, I am tired, irritable, depressed and generally disinterested to varying degrees. I don’t want to do anything, and moreover, I don’t care that I don’t want to do anything. That’s three days a week where the only saving grace is knowing exactly why I feel the way I do; having something to blame eases the burden.

I have One More Year left on this stuff. The treatment arc is almost always two years long.

One more year.  What's one more year, really?

Boycott? Really? REALLY?

Have you seen this "don't buy gas on X date" crap that has resurfaced on facebook, again? Am I the only person on the internet who understands why this can't possibly work?  Am I the only person on the internet who remembers that chain letter crap like this is always fake and/or idiotic?

1) Pump prices are primarily derived from crude oil prices, which are insane because the Middle East is imploding on itself. You not buying gas for a day won't fix Libya or Iraq.

2) Just not buying gas for one day will not affect anyone's bottom dollar as long as you are still using the same amount of gas over the same time period as you always do. All you're doing is shifting it around.

3) ARE YOU RETARDED?

Imaginary Temperatures

Oh, and also this:

http://fuckyeahnouns.com/

It's currently this times root i.  Yeah.  It's math joke cold.

Laced With Vague Annoyance

Whoever it was that managed to get shoelaces changed on the vast majority of shoes from flat and willing to stay tied into round little Che Guevaras of shoelace independence, I hate your face. I hate you in the face, and I have done so since that first pair of round-shoelaced shoes that refused to stay tied when I was an annoying little pubescent thing. You raised my pudgy thirteen-year old self’s ire that day, and it has continued to this day (though I am markedly less pudgy and also less thirteen).  Why should I have to spend extra money on functional foot-strings if I don't want to stop to tie the preexisting strings at an increased rate?  Fail.  Blah.