Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Losing

I'm feeling like I'm losing all sorts of things.

Right now I'm on hiatus from work, which is what I really needed, since I was losing my mind due to stress at work. The show is doing great with a gazillion fans, and the pressure is on to make it the Best POSSIBLE THING on a very limited time schedule. It takes its toll.

Since I retired from Fight Crew, I feel that I've lost a lot of the camraderie I had with other skaters in the league. It's as if I no longer have skating in common with them because I'm not skating with them as often as I used to. I'm still skating, just not under the same circumstances as they. But it still makes me feel isolated.

One of Fight Crew's members went on a diet recently, and she talked a lot about how she gave up drinking for three months while on this diet. She looks fantastic, so on a whim I decided to go a month without alcohol to see if I also would lose weight. I didn't. Until I also gave up eating Trader Joe's 3-Layer hummus by the bucketload. Then I lost two pounds. DAMMIT.

Workout-wise, I switched from P90x to Insanity while on my break. I miss the weights, but I'm sweating profusely every morning. My lower back complains a LOT with Insanity if I don't suck in my gut militantly. I didn't think anything was happening until I saw photos of myself from Comic Con, which was a month into the Insanity workout. I may not have lost a shit ton of weight, but because of the high cardio, no alcohol diet, I have cheekbones again and I'm not bloated. I still wish I weighed my starting weight when I joined derby, but I don't know if I'll be able to do that.

I went on a great little motorcycle trip through California. Visited my college friends Troy and April and found out that I haven't lost any of the jokes and comfortableness with them. I discovered how much I miss them.

I also visited a couple of Kens: Cope and Hurricane Ken. I met Cope's kids for the first time, and I shouldn't be surprised at how staggeringly intelligent they are, but it's still a little unnerving to talk to them because they're really staggeringly intelligent. They're going to end up Doing Awesome Things. And they seemed to like my motorcycle, which is a Good Thing.

Hurricane Ken held a BBQ that I got to crash. There I met a friendly cat in their backyard named Freya. She was an abandoned cat, probably left behind from people who's house was foreclosed upon in the area. I don't understand people who do that, and my thoughts on them are not kind. Anyway, Ken and his wife couldn't take her in to let her continue being an indoor cat due to their other cats, so they took care of her as best they could while she lived in their backyard.

It just so happens that my mom wanted another cat, as my favorite cat of hers, Kaci, passed away recently due to a stroke. So I took a photo of Freya and sent it to my mom asking if she'd take her in. She did. So Hurricane Ken and the Redhead packed Freya up the next day and delivered her to my parents' house.

Two weeks later, we find out Freya has lymphoma.

I feel horrible for both Freya and my mom. I wanted a happy home for Freya, and now she's going to be on medication for the rest of her apparently shortened life. I feel like I sold my mom a bad bill of goods since she just went through the medical stuff with Kaci. Freya will be well taken care of, but it won't be for as long as we all expected.

Comic Con was...OK. I didn't get to see as much as I wanted to panel-wise because there are SO MANY PEOPLE and seeing anything is such a BIG GODDAM HASSLE. On top of that, I felt SO FUCKING TIRED the whole time. I don't know if I'll go back next year.

Last night I watched a documentary that's been sitting in my Netflix queue for almost a year. It's called, Dear Zachary, A Letter To A Son About His Father. I forget who told me about it, I think someone from work. It was eye-opening for me, and I think I have to stop posting stupid whiny First World annoyances on Facebook because compared to what goes on in the documentary, my life is pathetically boring in a mostly good way. By the way, go hug your family. Just do it.

But watching it made me realize that I may be losing any focus in my life. I just don't know what I'm doing anymore. Derby is changing its status in my life, work is work, what else do I do with my time? I don't know. I just don't know.

In the past two days I've done more drawing than I have in the past six months. Which isn't saying much; I scribbled out two doodles that I want to Do Something With at some point. I've also been trying to finish this beast up:




















A little present for one of my favorite derby pick-up teams: Team CRUZ. It's something.

I don't even know how to end this stupid entry.