Just stuff

I really obviously have some weird aversion to sitting down and blogging at times. I get the idea I want to do it but then that idea disappears about as soon as it comes along and I tend to end up doing nothing. Yes. nothing. Well, besides schoolwork and that sort of deal but that's understandable. School comes before blogging, comes before friends, comes before work, all that good crap. Unfortunately when you're in school you give up a lot. But on to the next "subject" or multiple subjects that I might end up coming up with. lol

I met a little boy with a cleft palate at Cold Stone, where I work, and I talked with his mother about it because I saw it as a good opportunity to show her exactly what it was like when you're a young adult with a cleft palate. I was surprised and, quite frankly, amazed when she mentioned she couldn't see that I had previously had a cleft palate. All those surgeries and all that pain paid off well and I felt very nice that I got a compliment like that. Even now I'm constantly wondering if people can tell I've had 35 surgeries to fix my cleft palate and if there is anything that they can see or whatever. I think that's just the nature of the beast, you never can get over it no matter how much older you get. But I learned that Vinnie, as I learned his name, was not much older than... 5 I think, but he looked good. The surgeons had done a great job already and I talked with her about a pharyngeal flap that both he and I had done. I can't remember what it really does but both he and I had surgery on it. The only problem for him was that the surgery site started to bleed. You don't have to be a genius to know that a bleeding surgery site that's supposed to be healing is a bad, bad thing. They took him back in and found cancer. Wow. This little boy had gotten cancer as well as a cleft palate. I hadn't even noticed the lack of hair, I thought it was just the hairstyle that they had given to him but he had been growing it back slowly and they had to wait a year after radiation and chemo to see if it would come back. Apparently this version of cancer isn't easy to get rid of and you have to wait to see if it'll stay in remission for a year before continuing with the surgeries. But he had already had some of the similar ones that I did and had a list of surgeries that were going to be the same as my own.

I don't know what it is when I see another cleft palate child but I just feel like I should talk with the parents, or just talk in general. I feel like there's some kinship with him and I since we're both going through the same thing. She shared with me some of her fears about her child growing older and about teasing and such. I told her I did get teased and apparently when I was younger I'd come home every day crying because of what the kids had said about me or to me. Kids can be harsh, they don't have the same ability to censor that adults have (some adults need to put that more into practice) and they pick up what's said at home and project on the kids in school. So, I get the brunt of that being the most different. Then I become the bully to get the attention placed on another poor student. I was never outright making the comments but I would sit with the kids that were the bullies and point out people and make jokes about them and such. Its horrible but that's how I survived. Vinnie had already been teased about his lack of hair but he was doing great aside from suffering from cancer that's in remission now. I remember talking with his mother and seeing all those fears that a mother has for her child and the desperate need to protect him, to make sure that he doesn't end up feeling like crap or having problems when he gets older. But I tried to give her a few pointers without revealing too much about what I've been through as I don't know her and I didn't feel comfortable revealing too much, but I tried to tel her as much as I could.

Unfortunately in the middle of our conversation my boss's wife rudely thrust some papers in my face, waved them about and informed me, under no uncertain circumstances, that we had cakes to build. Apparently my coworkers with me that day are dunderheads and can't build cakes and I'm the only one. That kinda irritated me but I apologized to the woman I was talking to and told her that I wished her well and she said she would be coming back, yadda yadda. My coworker told me that she would have been politely asking me but my boss's wife rolled on up there with fire in her eyes that I was, gasp, talking when there was no one there! Apparently she thought this woman and I were friends, we aren't, I just randomly met her. Then I go to apologize to her, telling her that I'm sorry if my speaking with that woman made her angry but since her child had a cleft palate and we weren't busy that I felt inclined to talking with her and she tried to cut me off several times but once I said my piece she told me she wasn't angry. Excuse me but I'm allergic to bullshit, let me go have my sneezing fit now. But that was beside the point and I just left her be to stew in her own anger and went about my business. To put it plainly, I don't take kindly to rudeness, even if it is my own boss, and when I step up to be the bigger person here, don't be stupid, accept it and move on. You look juvenile if you don't accept it.

Anyhow, lately I've been slammed with school, Karate, work, just anything you can think. I have almost no time to myself and what little time I do have to myself I tend to be allocating it to doing schoolwork or spending time with my family. Which isn't bad, mind, but I just wish I could have a bit more time.

I have such a long to do list now. I think I'm just going to try and find a good way to vanish and maybe live life in a vacation setting for the rest of said life. :) That sounds like a plan to me! Oh man, I think the worst part of being a female right now is having a crush on a guy and knowing that you will never tell them or ask them out because you're terribly old fashioned and refuse to go tell him or ask him out. I was talking to a friend who asked me what I would do if he was the type who needed the girl to ask him out and I told her that if that was the case then I wouldn't ever have my crush move on from just that, a crush. She then said you should live a little and I said I'm living I just happen to be living inside of my own values and standards and that's one of them that I won't be breaking for anyone. Yes, even for my "soul mate".

I still have to do an online consultation for this doctor in Texas and getting everything figured out where that's concerned. That'll be fun... Okay, so to-do-list:
- Online Consultation (must)
- More blogging!
- Freeing up some time for myself
- Trying to meet more cleft lip/palate survivors/parents
- Make a website (god I hate HTML/CSS -.-)
- Get better, being sick sucks
- Become more proficient in Karate

Hopefully I can actually start doing more blog posts in the future. I think part of my problem is that I've made this into more of talk only around me and my cleft palate and haven't actually decided to go into my daily life which I'll start doing. This post was part of that. I'll be getting more and more into my day to day life as I continue to blog and I'll hopefully end up with more posts.

Oh but I must go off to get ready to go to work. Yipee.

New year post?

I've finally managed to get to typing in my blog once again now that I'm next to fully healed and pretty much good to go from here on out. Thankfully my lip is healing and I can eat anything that I want now. Not to mention its the best look after a surgery that I've ever had. I don't remember having such favorable results before, its been incredible. I suppose for this blog I'm supposed to include what I've learned over the past year and make some long and rambling post about how I've managed to grow throughout this year. I have learned a lot and I've made some good friends and lost the one friend that was becoming nothing more than a malignant tumor growth. But seriously, typing out all that I've learned I would end up going on and on and probably never stop. Luckily you're spared this and I'll be condensing this to just name those big things that I've done.

As far as being self conscious that has pretty much disappeared. You can almost say that it never was there since it doesn't appear to even have bothered me. I went out the Sunday after my surgery to go watch my Panthers team and cheered them on to victory even in the musky smokey bar that my friends and I congregate at every Sunday to watch them. I couldn't believe that I really did it because its just so near out of the ordinary before but I did it. Sure I was kinda shy about the fact that I had two lines of stitches coming from under my nose but that didn't stop me from going out and spending time with my friends.

New Years was soon on its way and I went to the first party I had been to since I was... probably around my 9th birthday. It was a great experience, meeting new people and having fun with people that I know. I surprised even myself when I barely hung out with the people that I knew and instead decided to hang out with those people who I didn't know. My social life has begun to explode and I'm looking back on the past life and realizing how much i held myself back because of that so called friend who was sucking most of my life away and I allowed it. And I still was feeling self conscious over the fact that I had scars on my face. But scars are just other marks on your body and they aren't that big of a deal. With my scar revision surgery I have two scars instead of many and yeah, I went through pain to get rid of the majority of the scars but that decision was made through careful deliberation. I had decided that I wasn't going through another surgery again because I didn't want the pain but after sitting down and thinking about it even more I realized that I actually wanted to do it and nothing was going to hold me back.

I'll let you in on what happened between myself and that friend. Basically we had been friends only through the internet for about eight years. The friendship began to fall apart as we got older because she and I had very different ideals on how a person should act and how said person should respond. It got to the point where, after we had sent our own rather nasty emails to one another and had apparently made up, that things were well beyond repair. I began to allow her to have way too much control over my life and ended up to the point of near obsession because she was my only friend at that time. Sure I had other friends but I had pretty much made her the central focus of my life and had all but alienated myself because I didn't seem to care. It didn't just affect my social life, it affected the relationships all throughout my life and my mom and I nearly ended our amiable relationship over this girl who didn't need to have such control over my life. School also took a nosedive and I allowed my grades to slip because of all the stress that she gave me. One moment we're fine and the next she's barely talking to me wondering what in the world I had said or done and that should never have to happen. It got to the point where I was forcing her, I felt I was, to talk with me just to keep it from changing. Basically I was holding onto the friendship only because of some characters that we had made through roleplay (basically you're writing a story but with someone else). It had come down to that and that was pathetic, it had to end. I decided back near the end of April that I was going to cut it off totally and that night I wrote an email to send off telling her that it was over and that I wasn't going to be allowing what was left of the friendship to continue. I let several other friends read it for me because I wanted to make sure that it sounded professional and left things out that could possibly come back to bite me or could make the email overly long. I sent the email when she signed off for the night because I knew that I wouldn't be able to do it if she was still on because I hadn't built up enough of a backbone in that short span of time. I disengaged myself from all the sites that we were on together and blocked her via all messengers, sent the email, blocked all emails and then went to bed for the night. I refused to look at any text messages that she might send me and I managed to find a way to block her number through changing a few settings on my phone and didn't talk to her again since that night.

When you're in a relationship that's basically de-evolved down to verbal and mental abuse (there are other things that I left out, those are for another blog entry if I feel like it) then its hard to break free of that relationship even if you know its not healthy. Basically you're afraid of the unknown and change and while this isn't helping you there is no other way because for so long you've given this person the benefit of the doubt over and over again and its easier to do that when you don't know this person except off the internet. Hearing about their life and if their life is hard then you tend to believe that you need to make it easier but that doesn't do anything good for you and while you may realize it, there's another part of you that says no. Lets not forget the roleplaying that was involved. Roleplay is a great way to release stress and escape into your own little world with people who actually have something of the same hobby as you do and while it is you must make sure not to make it all of your life. With this person I made it my life because this particular couple was eight years in the making so of course I was attached but I was way too attached to this roleplay and needed to distance myself. As with anything that is a hobby, you need to make sure that it remains just that; a hobby. Unfortunately I didn't come to realize that until my life was heading towards a combustion. Once I did, it took even longer to do something about it but you have no idea how many people were happy for me kicking her out of my life for good. While I still have friends I know only from the internet, there is a distinct understanding that we aren't the central focus of each others lives and its stayed that way, not to mention these people are definately different from the person I just mentioned.

Now that I've managed to ramble even while I said I wouldn't, I've done well ever since then. I got a job, my grades are on the positive side and my social life is blooming more than ever. I will be able to graduate from therapy this coming February and will hopefully be coming off the medication as well. I've got great friends and an even better life now that I've moved on from there and taken my life and directed it the way I want it to go. I'm going to graduate college in 2010 hopefully and then find my job and make money, move out of my parents house and find my own place. I'm pleased to be able to go out and do what I want to do and have found myself drawn to Karate after not doing anything like a sport for years after my knees went bad. I enjoy it and love the people there because they are quite like me with their desire for some sort of discipline as well as just getting out and enjoying some exercise and getting self defense tactics as well.

This upcoming year is as much a mystery to me as it is to my readers and knowing what will happen only takes the fun out of life. I'm not really anxious to know what will be going on but I do want to get out and about even more now. My 21st birthday is coming up and I can't believe that I'm about to be turning 21, born on my grandfather's birthday with quite a bit of birthdays in March. I'm excited to see what this year is going to bring and to see what the Playoffs will be bringing as far as my football team. Go Panthers!