Two Truths and Countless Lies

I LOVE the show Lie to Me. Love it. Fixated on it. It's one of those shows that makes you feel smarter, at least inside your own head, it makes you feel like you can see the world differently. That you can read people better, and that you've learned something.

Pompous assumptions of course. The science and the vocab may be real, but it's jut a TV show. It's got incredibly charismatic, REAL feeling people who are fabulous at their jobs, do it in the blink of an eye and tackle cases that strike us right where it hurts.

Murder, rape, war, injustice, racism, the loss of hopes and dreams, family, love, crisis. It's got enough action and heart pounding music to satisfy the adrenaline rush, and enough real emotion to bring out a sense of relating to the events and characters.

As I'm watching it today though, I found that I have learned something...

...I am an incredibly poor judge of emotions. Sure, in the show, I can see what's coming. Lines and emotions are set up to play out in a way that allows the audience to follow along. Leave your audience confused or left behind and the show falls apart quicker than my boyfriend will at the NOFX concert we're going to see in June.

In real life though...I tend to see in faces really two emotions. Worry, and anger. People wearing neutral expressions, I tend to associate with feeling something they aren't. Meaning when people are say, listening to a presentation and actually concentrating as opposed to sitting and thinking (which we all know can generate a lot of different emotions). Boredom can be a fairly flat facial expression. I always attribute it to something it's not.

Now, this revelation could be for a lot of reasons. I know I have a lot of social anxiety, so it could come from my own fears that anger/worry/disgust are things that I WILL see in people. So I attribute any facial expression that seems nondescript as fitting what I'm afraid of being judged by.

I could be a mild form of Aspergers Syndrome, which falls on an autism scale at the high functioning end of the continuum. Obviously just having trouble recognizing and correctly identifying facial expressions isn't the only symptom to diagnose, but combined with:

- Social awkwardness / no friends
- Obsessions / focused on one subject
- Lack of eye contact
- Sensitivity to noise / touch (textures/being touched by others/uncomfortable with unexplained/sudden contact / feel of clothing
- Odd speech / extreme logic / very proper speech
- Anger / aggression / hitting others- (when I was younger, I had some trouble controlling small contained physical outbursts. As I got older, my anger turned inwards and I developed a pretty crippling aversion to violence or physical outbursts. Good for society I think.)
- Craves ROUTINE!
- Appears lost / in own world

Is a possibility and one I've suspected for a long time. Not necessarily that I HAVE Aspergers itself, but I certainly show signs (which is what a Syndrome is, a collection of symptoms in varying numbers and degrees that tend to cluster and lead to a more or less singular diagnosis).

I could also be selfish. That's possible too. I'm very inward focused. Maybe I'm just....poorly socialized. I'm like a dog that doesn't understand how other dogs behave because I've spent so little time with others. Though since I haven't started sniffing butts yet, I clearly am not a total lost cause in the human world.

I also have very little control over my own emotions. I think and brood a lot, so that explains a lot of my quick flash expressions that don't ever fully manifest. People catch me a lot, I usually have no idea what the emotion was. I sometimes have inappropriate emotional responses to things. Laughing in places I shouldn't, being overly concerned/saddened by something that really isn't all that important. I've learned to be very conscientious of my behaviour, to think before I formally assign an emotion to something. It's tiring, I tend to be very flat with my facial expressions and emotions. I prefer the stability of not emoting when I can. People don't always like that once they get me alone. I think I throw them off guard. My social face is very expressive.

Anyway, it's 4:45 am and I'm having some Lie to Me guided self-reflections. But I do get concerned sometimes about what it all means.

I plan on getting a psych assessment done as soon as I find a new family doctor who can get me a referral. I'd like some warning before I do something as destructive as my dad, if that capability is in me. Who knows, maybe I'll find out some interesting things.

But for now? I'll just pretend that I'm working with Dr. Lightman. And that I can see your deceptions. Sure would make it easier to see the bad people coming. Unless they come from behind. Guess I also need to start watching something like Alias. Women kicking butt and taking names.

Energize Me Baby

Ahhhhh spring is FINALLY found it's way up to the middle of ass-hat nowhere. There are leaves on the trees, the apple blossoms and lilacs have started blooming, and there are ADORABLE little red squirrel babies scampering away in the remains of what was a nice bbq until HE let it run down to nothing (he was good at that).

The best part? Besides the longer hours of daylight (which of course, I rarely see being relegated to the deepest depths of banality and head-shaking-mind-numbing-soul-searing-homicidal-rage-inducing-human-idiocy of the night shift), the warmth (my semi-permanent blanket toga? NO MORE BABY) and the signs of life? THUNDERSTORMS!!!!!!!!!!

I should preface by saying that I'm a big baby when it comes to bad weather. When I was little (6 or 7 probably), I used to watch Tornado Hunter and all kinds of scary weather shows (yet I wasn't allowed to watch Sailor Moon....) with enough intelligence to understand that these things were BAD but not enough understanding of geography and statistical probability to understand how small the chances were of something like a volcanic eruption or a level 5 tornado were in urban Toronto.

Just like being scared of the dark, the absence of anything bad happening, does little to actually quell the fear of what COULD happen, if the evilness and bogeyman and weather monsters of the world decided to get off their butts and make it happen. Not to mention I get horrible headaches from approaching storms, whether they actually happen or not. Every headache became a very ominous warning sign for me.

Not to mention being trapped in a big open field while a funnel cloud started slowly creeping down from the sky (luckily it sucked itself back up and went to destroy something even further north than us, but it was still scary as hell!) For years, the only praying I ever did, was for whatever force was up there, to keep the thunderstorms away from me. Especially when I couldn't go hide in mommy's bed.

After a particularly brutal thunderstorm my cousin and I sat through (It went from midnight until 6:30am) when we were maybe 11, and didn't die from, I started to appreciate them a bit more. Going off to university and being alone during some of them probably helped too.

We just had a fabulous one today and I realized, that not only am I not afraid anymore? I LOVE them. Even the cat was a bit staticky during this one. I feel energized and alive and free. It reminded me that I've been near death, survived it, and am just as kick ass as ever. It's power and nature and fabulousness that humans can never hope to duplicate (and don't argue, it's just never as good). It's like Cherry Blasters, Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish all got together and had a totally improbable child that tasted like every flavour of the rainbow but didn't have such annoyingly sad commercials of children with trees growing out of their stomachs and the most annoying woman who shows up in EVERY show that needs someone to be saccharinely bitchy.

Considering it's 4:41 am and I can still say that I'm raring to go and on top of the world? I must have needed this storm. Now if I only looked as hot as Halle Berry in a cape.........

A Good News Day

So a little while back, before the incident with my dad, I was worrying about an abnormal cell count that had appeared twice in a row on my regular pap tests. It is almost 9 months later, that I was finally able to get an appointment with the specialist to find out what it could be.

First off, all I can say.....the procedure kind of sucks. It's about 10 times more invasive than a females' normal yearly scan, and depending on what they have to do, a good few times more uncomfortable as well.

Second, although I'm interested in biology and how the human body works, having the powerful microscope their using, also feeding up into a television that is positioned right in front of me....is weird. Not to mention the nurses' rather uncomfortable statement of, "don't worry, the law doesn't let us post anything to YouTube" and the doctors follow up of "Nope. It's just broadcasting through the hospital."

Lucky for them I have a sense of humour. But my anxiety still shot through the roof.

Third, having an over eager med student, who has obviously never undergone the procedure, nattering with overly cheerful concern about how I'm feeling and what things feel like right in my ear? Made me want to find a sharp implement and poke her in the eye with it.

All in all, from parking to leaving the hospital, I was only there 20 minutes, the doctor assured me that I don't have cancer, and I get to follow up in two weeks to see if there's any other treatment plans that become necessary after the biopsy results come back.

So in summary, discomfort, awkwardness, excruciating embarssement, a male doctor, over eager female med student, super sarcastic nurse, stirrups, microscopes and a tv play by play later....No Cancer, is always a good news day.

Now it's just the two week wait for the results to see if it's "something else". Don't you hate when doctors get all ominous?

To Forage? Or to Hibernate. That is the question.

I've hit my spring drearyness. Either that or I'm dying. I'd like to think it's the former. For the past little while, with the beginning of this warm weather, I've felt pretty darn lethargic. If I'm not up and actively doing something, I'm falling asleep.

I've been worried that maybe I'm sick. Maybe this is a flare up of the dreaded Epstein-Barr that's been plaguing me since February of 2010. The symptoms don't quite match up, but the fatigue does. Of course, I've also been under a lot of stress lately. So maybe it's a stress tired?

Maybe it's all the coughing from being around smokers. It seems to give me a sore throat way down at the base of my throat too.

All these symptoms seem to have coincided with the introduction of the beautiful warm weather though. Allergies maybe? Or maybe it's working graveyard shifts all night. My body seems to be stuck between wanting to get up, get out and forage in the sunlight.....and to go back to winter and hibernate until I feel better.

At this point, I'm not really sure what to do about it. When I'm occupied with work, or talking with someone, or whatever, I feel fine. It's just when I'm on my own that I feel like I have trouble staying awake.

Bah. I would just like to feel better. *shakes her fist at the unknown ailment* screw you whatever it is.