Reviews day Tuesday Leviathan Wakes

So I've been thinking about ways to create more content, and I figured bringing back Reviews day Tuesday.

This week I'd like to talk about Leviathan Wakes. I first read this years ago, it was on display at the local library, and I'm so glad that I checked it out. I recently picked it back up again seeing as SyFy started creating a TV show based off of it.

So this book is based on the near future. Humans have colonized the solar system, but have hit a road block leaving it. You can travel to the moons of Jupiter if you'd like, but it's going to take a few months to get there. 

It's a true sea voyage among the stars. 

The main characters, Holden and Miller, couldn't be more different from each other. Holden is an XO on an ice hauler traveling from Saturn, Miller a contract security officer on the asteroid Ceres. I wouldn't call Miller a dirty cop, he's far from it, but he does 

Holden is honest to a fault, which causes problems for the local governments. He's the type of person that thinks that taking the moral high ground is always the best solution. It's very interesting to watch him realize how his actions have consequences.

My favorite thing about this book is just how realistic it is. This is how things will be in the not so distant future. How gravity effects the human race, how the space politics work. James S. A. Corey does an excellent job of properly describing and breaking everything down without it feeling like he has to hold our hands through it. That's always been a pet peeve of mine. I love authors that realize and expect their readers to be smart enough to pick up on things quickly.

Well, that's my review of Leviathan Wakes, by James. S. A. Corey. If there's any other books that any of you might like for me to review, leave a suggestion in the comments below. It'd be fun. =D

Rants and Musings

So I made a small post on my tumblr about something that really bothers me, and I wanted to go into it more here.

My biggest 'pet peeve' is people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions and how it effects them.

This is something I've gone over with my therapist before, and I feel like it's a good idea to fully put it down.

I just can not honestly understand how someone could go through life and think that every single thing that happens to them is someone elses fault. I mean, some things, yes, but everything? Every single bad thing that has happened to you has been because of someone else? I know someone that is constantly getting evicted from their rentals, and every single time it's because 'the landlords an asshole'. Well yeah, he's probably pretty pissed at you for not paying your rent.

I mean, if you've been fired from 6 jobs within as many months, how can you not, at some point, think that maybe you're just a shitty employee?

I know where my strong feelings about this comes from. This is what my mother does. To the T. This is also one of the reasons I don't speak to my mother any more.

Story time. 

When I was thirteen, my mother took my younger brother and I and moved us a thousand miles away to live in Vermont. As if that wasn't bad enough by itself, it was to go and live with someone she met on the internet. My dad was absolutely heart broken about his, but he figured that children belong with their mother and didn't fight it. That is seriously a concept that just needs to die.

So she moves us up there in November. We went from 90*F to a foot of snow on the ground in less than a day. It was shocking to say the least.

Anyway, we moved in with this man, that we had never met before, and who my mother had only spoken with via internet and phone. So things were pretty tense to say the least.

We lived in this tiny 2 bedroom basement apartment out in a very remote area. The school I went to was the absolute worse place I have ever been to. I'd been bullied all my life, but these kids were just down right vicious.

This was my first time dealing with depression. It was so bad that I wouldn't even change my clothes. I would just come home, go straight to bed, and wake up and change my shirt before going to school. There were ink stains on the sheets because I didn't even bother to take the pens out of my pocket. It was that damn bad.

So of course, I wasn't exactly a ray of sunshine. Things were bad for my 8 year old brother as well.

After being there for 4 months, my mother and this man broke up. Not exactly a big surprise there. I mean, this whole thing was destined to fail, you could see it from a mile away.

So then he kicks up out. Straight up tells us to pack our shit and be out before he gets back from work.

We did that, and moved into a hotel until we could get tickets for a flight back to Texas. While we're sitting at the airport waiting for our flight, my mother than tells us that we would be taking the flight to Texas on our own, because she was taking a different flight to California to live with her dad.

Now here's the point of this story. She goes on a huge tangent about how we wouldn't have to be doing all this if we'd just behaved ourselves. It was OUR fault, mine and my brothers, that her relationship failed. Because we, being brother and sister, cooped up in a tiny apartment and had to share a room for the first time in our lives, fought too much. We did what every freaking brother and sister has done for all of time.

It wasn't because their relationship just didn't work out, it wasn't because (as I found out later) he had FUCKING AIDS!, it wasn't because THEY fought all the time, it was because WE fought all the time. WE were the ones to blame. WE were the ones that did wrong.

This is the first time (that I can remember) of many that my mother did this to me.

I could probably write a book on all the shit she's done to me, and maybe I should, to be honest, but this is with out a doubt why I have this very intense hatred of people who act like this.

It is also probably the reason for my intense anxiety that I have. I've gone full reverse from what my mother does. Rather than blame everyone else for my mistakes and problems, I feel like I'm responsible for everything that goes wrong, even if I'm not.

Only recently, with the help of the (finally) perfect cocktail of drugs and therapy have I been able to stop thinking like that. That I stop blaming myself things that are out of my control.

The unfortunate thing is that I have to deal with this a lot in my job. I work in driver licensing, what many states call a DMV. I have to speak to people that have their license suspended out the wazoo because of stuff they did, usually drunk driving.

Do they feel responsible for it? No, It's the officers fault for giving them the ticket. It's the states fault for having there be fines attached to DWI's. It's my fault for not just making it go away for them. Don't I know they have stuff to do? That they need the license to get on a plane tomorrow? That work is going to fire them if they don't get it taken care of TODAY?

I have been told, so many times, that I have ruined that persons life. I have been called the 'rudest person in all of Texas'. I have been called a 'cold hearted bitch'. I have been called so many different things, from so many different people, all because they don't want to except the consequences of their actions.

So I guess, it all being wrapped together, this would be why I can't stand it.

Trying to deal.

It's hard to describe what exactly I've been feeling these past weeks. I've been cycling through my highs and lows and an incredible rate, and things have been all around shitty.

I think the hardest thing for me right now is that I have all these ideas in my head. They keep coming and going and it makes it really hard to focus on day to day life. I've actually missed a fair amount of work because of it.

The problem with these ideas is that I have no way to follow through. I want to make this and do that, but in reality I'm just not as creative as all that.

Even this blog is kind of a shout out into the void, hoping that something will come to me.

The simple fact is that I just don't have a lot to talk about. Literally, the only thing going on in my life right now is my mental and emotional state, and that really isn't all that easy to write about, and I'm sure it's pretty boring to everyone else.

Part of me feels like I should try to improve my life, cause then I can improve everything else. Part of me just wants to give up on it all.

I guess that's why it's called bi polar disorder.

Maybe one day I'll get there. More than likely I won't. I know that I need to try though. So I will. I hope that someone out there would be willing to help me though all this ranting and raving.

Knitting Therapy

So, for the past couple of months, there have been a lot of articles about using knitting as a form of therapy. I'm really glad that this is getting the notice that it deserves.

There are all sorts of different theories about why this is and how exactly it's helping your brain, and I think it's worth a look into all of them.

Some say it's the repetitive motion that helps soothe the brain. Much like sitting in a rocking chair would. While I think that might have some merit, I don't think that by itself could be it. I mean, how many assembly line workers think that their job is peaceful? The same motion, over and over again, at some point will get boring. That's why we knitters have so many projects going at once. (Example: side bar to right of all the projects I have going on right now.) I, personally, don't find boring to be very soothing. Something simple like a garter stitch scarf can be nice, even meditative for a while, but then it just starts to drag, and then you don't want to work on it any more, so you start something else, then you go back and look at that scarf and just start to feel the guilt of never having finished it.

So for that theory, I say yes for the short term, but over time, not so much. A knitter needs some sort of mental challenge. Throw some cables or lace in there!

This gets me to why I think knitting really helps in terms of dealing with anxiety, and even depression. It's the having to focus on something other than what is going through your mind that is causing those feelings. A simple knit stitch isn't going to cut it! Once you've been knitting for a while, you can do them without even looking down. That lets your mind wonder back into those thoughts. I've had times that I've been working on my Featherweight sweater, which is just a mind numbing amount of stockinette stitch, and the thoughts just start rolling in.

I know that the main cause of my depression and anxiety is me, myself and I. It's my brain going off on tangents thinking about things I've screwed up in the past, or things I could possibly screw up in the future. These are the times I need to take myself away from my brain. I need to focus on something else. I do tend to spend a lot of that time playing MMORPG's, but while that does help, again, not for the long term.

When I take that energy that I use to hurt myself, and focus it into this thing that will be a beautiful thing that I can have forever, that is where the peace comes from. No guilt over wasted time or effort, just a thing to look at and say 'I made this!'.

Just my two cents on the matter. If' you have any other thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them!

Ladies Craft Night.

So my lady friends and I got together for a late night craft party the other night. We got together to make tiny hats. There was plenty of wine and laughs to be found. 

Bonus: My hat was freaking baller. I mean look at this

 

 That's some Mad Hatter shit right there. 

 

My friend Heather made an adorable EXTRA tiny hat. 

Heather was the only one who remembered to buy hair clips, so she's the only one actually wearing hers. I didn't get any pictures of my friend Steph because by the time she got done with her hat we were all way to drunk to remember to do that. 

Spending the evening with them made me realize several things. One, these ladies are very much my best friends right now in my life. Which is a little weird because they're both coworkers. Secondly, they are the first friends that I've actually realized that they really like me as a person, rather than someone who just was being nice to me because they felt sorry for me. 

I've had that a lot in my life. That happened a lot in my childhood. Once, when I lived in Vermont, I had a girl who would be nice to me, but then she told me (via in a note in a Junior Mint box filled with rocks) that she never really liked me, and for me to stop talking to her because everyone else was making fun of her about it. 

That one hurt. It hurt a lot. I was at a very low point in my life then. My mom and dad had just split up, my mom moved my younger brother and I from Texas to Vermont in the middle of winter. No one there liked me, and they were all very very rude. I still remember how those little shits talked to the teachers up there. That shit would NOT have happened where I was from. You just didn't do things like that. All and all, it was the worst 3 months of my entire life, and I will never get over it.

That may have been the big one, but other things like that have happened over time. I think that scarred me quite a bit. I've always had that feeling, that people aren't saying nice things because they mean them, they say them because their nice, and that's how we are here. 

In Vermont, people just didn't care about your feelings, which is why no one was nice to me. Here in Texas, most people are raised to have manners and to be polite to others, so the thought of just coming out and saying horrible things to people (whether I think them or not) is really foreign to me. 

Anyway, getting back on topic. I don't get that feeling from these ladies.  Heather out-and-out said to me that if she didn't like me, she would not be hanging out with me. She would not have invited me to her house. That made me believe her. No one has ever put it to me like that.

So yeah, pretty much the point I'm trying to get across here, is that if anyone is reading this, and you have the same fears of rejections, come out and ask them. Think of them and how they are. Are they the type of people that would ever do that? If you know these people who are genuinely good people, do you really think that they would invite them into their life all while thinking venomous thoughts about you?

My therapist said that kind of thinking is to protect yourself. I would think that about everyone in my life (my husband included, who honestly could have left me years ago and not have felt any shame in doing so) was only trying to be nice to me because when they came out and said it, it wouldn't hurt as much. 

This is one of the big things I need to work on. 

 

Word have meaning.

So the other day, I wrote in my journal something that I should say to myself, kind of as a mantra:

Never be ashamed of the things that give you joy.

I thought it made sense, and would be a good thing. It wasn't until I was thinking about it today that I realized there was something wrong with it. That word, ashamed. That's not a good word. That's not a motivating word. 

That statement is me trying to be defensive against some mysterious force. That is me having to defend myself again what others might think about me. To protect myself from something that it's really there, or at least something that I shouldn't really need to protect myself from. 

That is the opposite of getting rid of the anxiety. I think that feeling on needing to protect myself like that is exactly whats CAUSING my anxiety. 

I thought at first that maybe saying "I'm proud of the things", but that's still from the same thread of thinking. The need to prove to someone that what they think of me doesn't matter, but then, the fact that I have to prove it means that it really does matter to me.

So maybe something different. Maybe something that I tell myself to REMIND myself, rather than having to DEFEND myself. So I came up with this:

Love the things that give you joy. 

I know it's not exactly the newest line of thinking. It's that little change that makes all the difference, It's that little bit that makes me have to remember to give myself joy, rather than protecting that joy from some perceived threat that's not even really there. 

Working on things.

It's been a busy couple of weeks. There's been stuff at work going on and I'm been having some in-law issues, so trying to find the time to sit down and really think on how to change my life gets kind of pushed back. It seems silly to think that just sitting here typing out my thoughts would make a difference, but it really does.

So I had another visit with my therapist yesterday, and she sort of got onto me for not doing my 'homework'. The biggest thing was that I really need to go somewhere that's (at least slightly) crowded, and sit down, and be okay being there by myself.

I got some points for going to a 4th of July party where I only knew two people, but when I mentioned that I kinda stuck by their sides the whole time, she said that I need to try it without a crutch.

She suggested a coffee shop would be the best place. I've always kind of wanted to be one of those people, though I don't exactly know why. Maybe because that's what I perceive as normal? Anyway, that would be an ideal place because there would be people, but they're all kinda focused on their own thing, and if I needed to make a quick exit, I could without any problems.

I kind of always feel weird is these kind of situations. My main coping mechanism is knitting, but I still always feel weird knitting in public because it's different than what other people do, and might attract attention.

I spoke about this with her, and she brought up a very good point. I live in Austin. Knitting is not exactly the weirdest thing anyone's ever seen. I mean everyone is almost immune to the weird.

Example: At my work, we see a lot of people who have just moved here from other states. We've had a bunch of people comment on it, particularly about the dude that rides his bike wearing nothing but a G-string. My first response? 'Oh yeah, him. He rides around here a lot'.

If someone can ride around being as close to naked as you can get, why do I think that people would judge me for sitting in a coffee shop knitting. So yeah, that thought helped. So now all I need to do is actually go and do that. Maybe I'll post pictures.