The Darkness is Not Just a Band

I'm an adult.

I'm an adult with a slew of problems, both physical and mental... and sometimes spiritual and so on.  

I'm an adult...

And I'm, apparently, still afraid of the dark. 

Also, I seem to have a cold, so I currently have tissues shoved up my nose and look like this:

 

The snot.

Ew ew oh god, it's everywhere.

But, that's not important right now.

I'm gonna briefly relate what happened last night.

It's Rob's birthday, so I wanted to be helpful to him yesterday.  This mostly failed, since my body decided I was going to be sick instead. 

However, he still got a great art piece done and we had a nice relaxing time.  

OH!  Also!  He finished playing Madness Returns.  This pleased me.  Incredibly dark, but beautiful and-

*ahem*

Right.  

The darkness...  

I wanted to start a new little mini notebook.  I use them for to-do lists and to jot down ideas, and my old one was all filled up.  

So, the idea was to transfer what little was still on the to-do list from the old one to the new one.

The problem was that we had already settled into the bedroom and I had left the notebook (one of many) on my desk in the office.  

What was meant to be like Mission Impossible quickly turned into a survival horror.  

   

 I made it to the door and saw only black death.  There are no light switches beyond the kitchen, so one has to walk into the dark, fumbling and helpless, in order to turn on the goddamn light.

To rectify this, I whacked my keyboard to wake it from sleep, in hopes of lighting the room via the computer screen.  

I would have pictured the computer sleepily saying, "Wha?  Oh.  Okay." but I was too busy being in a completely unnecessary, flailing panic to think of cute things.  

The light was fairly useless, but I managed to find the notebooks.  Not knowing which color was which, I grabbed them all.

 And then I ran like I was being chased by the Boogeyman.  

Cause, you know, I'm a not entirely fully functioning adult. 

Yep.

 

It's a Snake!

Over the years, my family had a lot of pets.  This was mostly because of my sister.  

This means that some lived well past the age that anything should be alive, and others dies really horribly.  I have a thousand stories about guinea pigs, birds, dogs, cats, fish and so on...  

This post is reserved for snakes and rats... and a gerbil. 

That poor gerbil. 

For snakes, we had Trent, Lilith and still Wally.

Wally is a Western Hog-nose and he has lived WAY LONGER than they are supposed to live. 

He looks like this: 

Trent was a Burmese Python.   He got to be about ten feet long, I think, before we realized that we couldn't really take care of him, lest he eat the other animals.  

He was named for Trent Reznor of NIN and at one point bit my mom in the face.  

Mom was fine.  

I was terrified. 

Lilith was a Ball Python and you can actually read about my special relationship with her here! 

Mom has always been fearless when it comes to the snakes and actually takes them in to show her students.  

nooo...

One of them got stuck in a couch at one point.  It was one of those fold out bed couches.  

There was an adventure getting the snake out.  

In any case, at some point, we started breeding rats to feed the snakes.  I don't know if this was always on purpose, but either way, we wound up with too many.

This was partly caused by late bloomers.  

See, we'd separate the male from the female, but every now and then there would be a male who's balls hadn't dropped yet, and we'd think it was a lady rat:

Until he was going around screwing his mom, sister and aunts.

Even before the breeding happened, I was getting accustomed to hating snakes based on the fact that I didn't like worms and I loved rodents.  Rodents are fuzzy and cute and don't do this: 

It became a common thing when friends were over or just because my sister assumed I'd want to watch this happen.  Since I had trouble talking in a clear enough way to make a point, I'd just kinda suck it up and cry as I sat for the show.  

I remember being extra confused because my sister took great joy in feeding the snake, but claimed to love the rats too.  

She was such an animal lover that she was a member of animal rights groups and talked about throwing red paint on fur coats.  

(Which would actually be really stupid because a well kept fur coat can last for generations, whereas someone who had one already would probably just buy another one if theirs was ruined, so those animal rights activists are actually murdering more creatures every time they do that.  Just saying.) 

Eventually, one of our snakes started to tire of rats.  That was how I got my pet rat, named for the star of Willard. 

See, my family put the rat in the tank with the snake, but the snake did nothing.  

They drank the same water and just kinda hung out for a few days.  The rat would even sleep on top of the snake. 

So, the snake moved on to gerbils for a bit.  

And once, my family fed the snake two gerbils at once.  

The snake ate one while the other looked on in horror.  

 ...and then it freaked out and ate half it's own tail off. 

Well, the tactic worked, because the snake didn't want anything to do with that gerbil.  I called him Frodo from then on out.  

It gets worse.  

My family had no sense of what torture really was, so they set up this gerbil to also be a pet, having been rejected as food...  

And put the tank right next to the snake. 

Before all that, we "briefly" had a Garter snake and a Grass snake.  

...We don't talk about those much, as one was a little traumatic for my poor father.  

There was tape involved.   It was a learning experience.  

Anyway... 

I'm not a fan of snakes. 

Duck Season, Rabbit Season, Allergy Season

As you may know by now, I'm allergic to everything.

This season is particularly bad and it is affecting every part of my body.

Even my hair looks particularly shitty for no reason:

And then, of course, I'm just constantly leaking:

In fact, by this point, it's less my nose and eyes and more my ears:
 

I am so very attractive!

Between that and the puffiness and the dry skin, I wind up feeling like I look like a Cro-Magnon made out of clay:

A week ago, I was at my friend's house for gaming.
I like to roll dice and hit imaginary things.

The problem was that allergies had hit me HARD and I wasn't willing to take an antihistamine.  My logic was that we game pretty late anyway and I'm always half unconscious by the end of it.  I didn't want to add to that by being half asleep from the beginning.

So, I decided to tough it out.  This meant bringing a trash bag and a roll of toilet paper for my snot:

I actually went through that whole roll in a couple days.  So much snot.

The other side effect of not being entirely prepared for my seasonal allergies is that I got loopy:

 

And then passed out anyway:

 


In fact, I was so very loopy at this game that my roll of toilet paper became my favorite toy.  This happened because I realized when it was smooched, it was smiling:

Then, I managed to somehow dissect it, taking out it's cardboard to create a stand:

This was also, at one point, a hat.  …Later on, Rob also used it as a hat almost instinctively.  Yes I <3 that man of mine.

Speaking of my Knight in Pinstripes, he considers himself to be immunize to any damage.  He proudly states this often and every time he does, I think an anvil is going to cartoonishly fall on his head and break his whole body just to prove some Karmic point.  It has not done this so far.

However, he is an ex-smoker.  This means his face used to be pretty much clogged with random chemicals and he wasn't breathing so well, but he was used to it.  Now that he can breathe and smell, suddenly places he used to tolerate and parties that were bearable are now just as utterly disgusting to him as they are to the rest of us.  On top of that, now he suffers from seasonal allergies.

He is a little like Captain Hammer in that since he doesn't generally experience physical discomfort, it's a big freaking deal when he does.

So when he started to have a few cold-like symptoms from allergies, he flipped out and kept asking if he had a fever.  He acted like he might be dying. 

Mind you, his symptoms were over in a couple days.  Me?  I've been having migraines, my body and my mind are all affected.  Of course, I'm also allergic to everything.

It seems the big culprits affecting people this year are mostly:

Dust is not such a big deal for me.  My indoor allergies are not NEARLY as bad as my seasonal outdoor allergies, and those in turn are not as bad as a couple of my food allergies.  Still, there is something to be said about the overall allergy load.

If I'm already having a set of reactions from one thing, I don't want to add to that.  My immune system is already in over drive.  It winds up like the straw that broke the camel's back.

...
 

By the end of this season, I typically have just melted into a puddle of semi-recognizable goo:

BUT!  In this crappy allergy season, at least I'm not suffering alone!


*cry*