Yeeeeeah, no post today either.

I could lie, I could say that the sun is out, and I just feel too lazy to write. But the truth is that Friday was one of the worst days of my life from an emotional health point of view, and so I am nowhere near the right head-space to be able to write anything worth reading. So that being the case, and considering how sick I’ve been for a full week now, I’m going to take a break until Tuesday week. Hopefully by then I’ll be back to something approximating myself.

Thanks for your ongoing patience.

No Blog, oh gods no bloooooooooooooooooooooooogh…

Yeah, stomach bug. It turns out there is a difference between a tummy bug and my normal health. That difference is a really bad headache, and fever. So…find your own damned entertainment today. *Blows raspberry* Laters.

I love your voice, just please enunciate properly darling.

I find myself in a quandary where many singers are concerned. I want to like Imelda Mays music. It’s bright, bouncy, often cheerful, and wonderfully old but new. However there is one pretty major problem. I just can’t make out half of the fecking words she sings. I mean she is singing in english, right? Because sometimes I wonder.

I feel the same way about a lot of singers, everything’s great apart from not being able to make out the words. For example, it took me 20 listens to Pinks latest song “Just give me a reason” to realise that she was saying “Just a second we’re not broken just bent”. Up until then I swear I heard “ended”, “rent”, “sent”, I mean “sent”? What the frikkin fuck? How does that even fit, and yet that was genuinely what I heard.

“But Amanda, there’s always been misheard lyrics.” Yes, I know. I can remember someone in my family really believing that the chorus from Enyas “Orinoco flow” was and I quote

“Save a whale,
Save a whale,
Save a whale.”

It happens, the sung word is admittedly not a precision musical instrument in the same way as a flute, or piano. It has near infinite variations of inflection, tonality, duration. But sometimes I wonder do singers actually belong to a secret order whose sworn goal is to drive every person on Earth in to mindless slaves via confusing lyrics? ‘Cause, damn it singers, sometimes you really do leave me scratching my head.

For a lot of my teens I was kind of in to rap for this reason. Say what you like about Technotronic, and their frontwoman Ya Kid K, but at least you can always make out what’s being said in their songs. Same goes for MC Hammer, The Fresh Prince and even *swallows bile* Vanilla Ice. I hate not being able to make out what someone is saying, much less singing.

It jars my sensibilities, irritates me beyond all belief, and it was only the discovery of Queen, Pat Benetar, and Level 42 in my mid to late teens that brought me back to being a fan of the sung word. I’m thankful for this, and that there are at least some musical artists who can sing a perfectly pronounced song that is still emotionally affecting. But dear gods, sometimes I just want to shake certain songbirds, and scream at them.

“ENUNCIATE GODS DAMN IT!”

And now, Queen.

Yes, this was largely just an excuse for me to post some of my favorite songs.

Very short blog today. Mostly a question actually…

I have this idea, that maybe I should record videos of what I’m going through right now. Sort of show people what I’m coping with, what caused it, how it manifests, the stages I go through and how I finally end up dealing with it. Think of it as “This Girls Guide to Surviving PTSD Caused by a History of Childhood Sexual-Abuse.” I’m going through Hell right now, and I want it to be for something, but my getting better doesn’t feel like enough. I sort of feel like there should be something more at the end of all this than just having more peace with myself.

So the question is this, do you as my reader feel that this is something I should do? Straight question so please feel free to give a straight answer. All answers will be read, and replied to. I need to ask this now because for this to be valid if I do it I have to start pretty much today. These videos will be recorded, and dated. But not edited or uploaded for a while, until I feel able to cope with the seething mess of YouTube.

And with that I am off to town for a day with my best friend. Bye, bye.

This week I’m off to sunny…Cork?

Yup Amanda Harper is on the move. It’s time to visit my mom, meet up with a little sister or two, and then come back home relieved to be with my puppies, and my XBox. But packing this morning (Thursday) got me thinking about travel-kits for people who are chronically unwell.

As any regular reader knows by now that in addition to a rather convoluted mess of emotional problems I also have fought with increasingly bad bowel problems for many years. To put it plainly even my diarrhea has diarrhea, and my stomach pains write long eloquent tragic epic poems about the cramps they themselves suffer from. Yes, I spend a lot of time on the toilet, clutching a hot water bottle, with YouTube running on my mobile phone.

But when I want to travel alone for much of any distance I have to assemble a kit. And for the most part its contents are pretty much common sense.

Amanda Harpers travel kit.

Two pairs of spare panties.Two heavy flow sanitary pads. (In case of accidents, they won’t stop a flood, but might just save you from a little squirt.)
Antiseptic wipes.
Antispasmodic medication.
Imodium/Lomotil.
Codeine based painkiller.
Doggy poop bags. (It’s better than nothing to go in, believe me.)
Deodorant.
Mouthwash. (To cool the burn.)
Spare cash. (To get my burning ass home.)

Pretty much common sense, right?

Now admittedly I’ve been rather bold lately and haven’t had much of this kit with me when I go out. I should. I know I should. But it kind of started to feel like a ball and chain that I dragged around the place with me. However after the past three days I will be reassembling it in the next week or so, and it will be coming everywhere with me.

Anyway, packing got me thinking about my kit, and wondering if other people with different problems have their own kits. Do for example diabetics have a kit they travel with? Coeliacs? Migraine sufferers? People with mobility problems, or emotional problems? So, I’m asking those of you who have such problems to reply here, and if you use such a kit tell my readers and myself about it. Because when you have bad health even the smallest of things can make a big difference, and information is most definitely one of the not so small things.

And with that I’m off to Cork. Huzzah!

I love Borderlands, just not for the boss fights.

Borderlands is possibly my favourite first person shooter of all time. It seamlessly blends the looting fun of Diablo style games with the fun of scoring head-shots against non-player characters from truly ridiculous distances. It is in a word, awesome, and on Saturday morning I finished my first play through of it. It took me about 20 hours of play time to run through the game, I insisted on doing every single side-quest, and I can say I enjoyed 99% of the game.

But am I alone in feeling that after the first level boss fight that they quickly became…unsatisfying?

In the first area your weapons are kind of weak-sauce, they generally do very low damage, rather anemic elemental effects and the fact that you have built up precisely no level of proficiency in them means you’ll pound away forever at both the mini bosses, and the end of level one. You shields are laughable, and your health-points vanish so fast that you almost want to scream out “I’m melting, I melting! What a world, what a world!”

By the time I found myself taking out an insane boss and his equally insane rocket firing car at the end of the second main area there was no struggle. One death on my side, and he fell. The third boss I didn’t even die, I just scored a few very long-range head-shots against him with a rocket-launcher and boom, the loot be mine.

And you know what? I was alright with that. They were just level bosses. Important story-wise, but not much more than that. They were after all simply overpowered versions of the standard bad-guys. I knew, just knew that the end-game boss would be EPIC!

And I was both right, and wrong. I won’t spoil much, just in case like me there’s someone who is a latecomer to both the worlds of Xbox, and Borderlands out there reading this. But I will say that the last boss is frikkin’ HUGE. It’s e-fucking-normous! It has multiple attack forms. Multiple damage types. And a pool of health-points that Cthulhu would be proud to possess.

Some reviewers feel that this is an example of lameness, are they mad? Borderlands was better for the inclusion of eldritch horrors such as this. And yes, there are more including a giant living nest, with a vagina for a face. I fuck you not, a vagina for a face! (image via www.gaminglives.com )

It also unfortunately, for me at least, has a fatal weakness that is incredibly easy to exploit. I died twice attempting to kill this monstrosity. Twice. The third attempt I never once worried about my character dying.

And so I walked away from my favorite FPS, to date, feeling unsatisfied. The ending movie was…sweet I guess. I mean I still know nothing about the hot chick with the blue eyes, though I am reliably informed that I will by the end of game 2. And yup I still have four whole DLC levels to play through, as soon as I get them. But Borderlands itself let me down with its bosses, though strangely not the mini-bosses most of whom were utterly bad-ass.

Area one = Sheer Terror, multiple deaths, and loot I cheered for having.

All other bosses = Load up, cross-hair on target, squeeze trigger, don’t let go til you hear a click. Repeat if, and I do mean if, needed.

All that said, if you have an Xbox, or other machine that Borderlands is available for you should buy it. And you should, while saying goodbye to a full day of your life, play the ever living crap out of it. It is insanely fun, stylish, beautiful, and just incredibly playable. But the joy of it is definitely in the areas themselves, and not in beating the bosses.

Anxiety is not a reason to feel guilty.

When you’re going through a lot sometimes the smallest of things can make a huge difference, and I am going through a lot right now. My period of extreme physical ill-health rolls ever onward. But on top of that, as I mentioned in my last post, my past has finally caught up with me. I find myself struggling each and every day with immense anxiety, fear, and both flashbacks and panic-attacks triggered by the most random of things. You know, things like a guy whistling in a certain way, the smell of a certain brand of cigarettes, and the sight of a Ford frikkin Granada.

Now I’m a pretty smart cookie, even if I still don’t understand how time-zones work, but I keep finding myself falling in to the most insidious of traps laid by emotional health-issues, guilt. Of course being born, and bred in Ireland at the tail end of the rule of Catholicism over the Irish gave me a really excellent head-start in turning feeling guilt in to an art-form.  I can feel guilty over, well just about anything.

Watched a movie? Guilty because I didn’t walk the dogs instead, never mind that they’ve been walked already.

Lay awake all last night because my stomach hurt too much to sleep? Guilt because I slept late in the morning, or guilt over being a zombie for the day.

Guilt is silly, random, and not healthy. I mean don’t get me wrong, if you murder someone you better be experiencing feelings of guilt. But feeling guilty over not sleeping, or for kissing someone, or for enjoying a few hours of a computer game? Yeah that’s not only dumb, it’s just not healthy.

But when you’re physically or emotionally at the end of your tether, it’s all too easy to plunge in to truly unhealthy guilt. Guilt for not being 100%. Guilt for being a burden. Guilt for being bad company. For being grouchy. For not being the partner they deserve. For needing to be helped.

Yesterday morning I needed my Partner in Crime to wash my hair for me. It was one of the best feelings I’ve had in weeks. Sensual, and loving, and gentle, and just…wonderful. She did it for me because she knows I HATE washing my hair over the bath, and because she knew I’d spent the entire night awake, on the toilet. I just couldn’t do it for myself. And all day I felt utterly wracked with guilt because it was her doing it for me, not me for her. Because I needed to be helped, when I’m supposed to be the one…well anyway last night a friend posted this on her Facebook wall…

I’m not depressed, though Goddesses know I would be entitled to feel that way at this stage. I’m also not schizophrenic, I mean I’m pretty sure I’m not. But I sure as Hell am anxious, and that image is right. I shouldn’t feel guilt over anything I’ve done, I’ve done nothing wrong. I shouldn’t feel guilt over anything I’ve felt. And I shouldn’t feel guilty for needing help.

The simple truth is I’ve been too strong for my own good for far too long, and now when my body is at the lowest ebb it’s ever seen the emotional damage a childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood inflicted on me has finally caught up. And that’s nothing to feel guilty about either. The guilt won’t vanish overnight. Like the scars my heart carries, it will take time to find the causes, and root them out. But even recognising that I feel this way, and that I don’t need to, is a large step in the right direction.

And that’s the key to getting better. Taking each small step, one by one on the road to getting back to being me.

So who exactly am I?

Lately this is a question that’s been on my mind, and for once thankfully it’s not a question which is related to my gender, after all I’ve already mostly answered “What am I?” pretty well. It’s a question that’s cropped up now, because I find myself going through a period of very intense emotional upheaval. I’ve spoken before of my history of childhood sexual abuse, well no matter how well you’ve dealt with it in the past, that sort of history is always waiting in the long grass for a chance to pop up, and at the very least make your life extraordinarily difficult. And that’s pretty much what it’s doing to me these days, it’s kind of hard to walk the dog for instance when you’re sitting with your head in your hands, sobbing through a truly enormous snot-bubble.

But it did lead me to wonder if we ever really know who we are.

I can give examples of who I am. Sort of personalised stereotypes to show who I am as a sort of “what I am”. But that just leaves me wondering which of them is the real me.

Some of your reading this know me by my real name. I write with a pen-name, though not to protect my secret identity from my evil arch-nemesis. You see the real me likes being a writer, likes the feeling of accomplishment when a piece is finished, loves dreaming up the stories and articles. But she doesn’t particularly like the process of writing. It involves far too much of things like punctuation, grammar, and hard work. No she would much rather do the daydreaming part, while she plays with her dogs, makes love to her partner, and plays Borderlands on her Xbox. To her writing or drawing are simply a way to be what she really likes being, a storyteller. So Amanda Harper was born, or created, or always existed but needed a chance to come forth…uh yeah, it all gets sort of meta here.

Basically Amanda Harper is a part of me, in the same way that I’m sure deep down Indiana Jones is an unexpressed part of Harrison Ford. She’s me but a different expression of me. If that makes sense.

And she’s not the only one.

There’s the me who was a Scout, who’s really good at map and compass navigation, and the sort of stuff that Bear Grylls would find fun. She took it all frightfully seriously, and did all sorts of advanced courses in everything.

Then there’s the me who was a moderately successful rock-climber for much of her teens and early twenties. Rock-climbing is, (like many sports) a manifestly silly pass time, (golf anyone?) and the me now sometimes finds herself a gibbering wreck at some of the risks I took. I wasn’t a stupid risk taker. I almost never climbed without proper safety equipment. I was careful to only stretch my skills to their limits, not for me the climbing 3 grades above my skill level and finding myself falling head first for a mouthful of gravel, or stones, or stunned climbing partner. No instead I usually put my safety line in the hands of the least reliable creature known to humanity, the teenage boy. You know the ones who can look at a blank wall and still find on it a reason to be distracted by an erection. Man, I should be dead.

And they’re far from alone.

Probably the most important one is the shield-bearer. The shield-bearer is the one who appeared when I was being raped. She was strong enough to fight, strong enough to not have her mind shredded, strong enough not to show weakness, while the rest of me huddled in a quiet corner of my mind, and did its best impression of a gibbering wreck.

The thing is that they’re not separate, or split personalities. They’re more like masks, pulled on when needed, so I can do what I needed to do.

Need to be fearless, the climber.

Need to be reliable, the scout.

Need to be badass, the shield-bearer.

Need to write a book, Amanda.

Need to beat Halo (again), geeky me.

But these days I find myself wondering sometimes which of them, if any, is the realest version me. They’re all real, they’re all me, but one of them must be more…me…I think that makes sense. And lately I’m starting to think that the hurt, frightened, crying 8 year-old girl in the wrong body. The one who was betrayed again and again, who was abuse body and mind. The one who still sits inside of me crying her heart out for herself, when she isn’t shaking in fear of the people she loves being hurt the same way she was. That one. I wonder if really she’s the realest me of all.

So who exactly am I?

I don’t know if I can answer that question. I don’t know if there is a singular answer. I guess there’s probably lots of versions of me, all facets of a hidden core personality. But I suppose I shouldn’t worry about it, maybe if I could answer it life wouldn’t be so much fun. I should probably just enjoy wearing all the masks that are all different and yet still all true to me.

Hmm, not a lot of sense in this article. Maybe I should try this again after I’ve healed.

Why Dr Who gets on my tits.

Okay, so there’s one thing really annoys me about the modern Dr Who. The tagline for it since they relaunched the series has been that The Doctor is “The Last of The Timelords.” Which is cool, and awesome sounding, and shit. But it’s also not to my mind as a life-long Whovien in anyway accurate.

Even if all the other Timelords are now dead (which they’re not, they’re along with The Silver Nemesis and all the other Gallifreyan living weapons, timelocked, whatever that means), but that still leaves the TimeLady Romana. Who, as of the last time she was seen, was quite alive and healthy in Y-Space. Admittedly she was supposed to be trapped there for all eternity but she was alive, and only on one of her earliest regenerations.Remember when Timelords only had 13 of those? Or when alternative dimensions stayed closed off once their storylines were finished?

Also does anyone actually believe that we’ve seen the last of The Master? Really? I only ask because that guy has died more times than Daniel Jackson, and correct me if I’m wrong, but he is a Timelord. Evil (sort of), dangerous, psychopathic, but a Timelord.

So there’s two right off the bat.

But the original Doctors often faced off against other rogue Timelords. They were a staple of the series. Are you really telling me that the ones he faced of against and defeated were the only rogues? Or that those rogues would have obeyed a call to arms from the the council, a council that they refused to answer to in the first place?

Next of course we have Jenny, the Doctors daughter-self. She died, she regenerated, that at the very least makes her more than simply Gallifreyan. Regeneration is after all a key part of being a Timelord, simple Gallifreyans only get to live one life. And speaking of characters who can regenerate.

River Song. She gives The Doctor all of her regenerations. And she’s a time-traveler, which admittedly does give her a better claim to Timeladyship than simply having the ability to regenerate.

Or how about the fact that the Timelords are TIME-TRAVELLERS! They’ve effected all of history. But after the Time War they apparently were taken out  of history? How the Hell does that work? So all their works in our history are erased? Because that’s what’s implied. And yet, if that’s the case then why isn’t our universe crawling with Rachnos, Great Vampires, or Daleks? For that matter how can the The Doctor exist?

I guess that my problem with the Who-verse, is that what a Timelord is has never been properly defined. And by that I don’t mean “had the mystery removed”. Timelords by their nature would be mysterious anyway. They take titles, and never reveal their names. They live multiple lives. They’re…more than anything else in that universe. They could easily be written as mysterious no matter what. But, for me, this sharpest written modern televised science fiction falls down only because of niggles like this. Define, at least vaguely what a Timelord is so you can justify The Doctor calling himself the last of his kind, especially when there are plenty of reasons, within the vague outline you insist on using, for him not to be.

I know, I know, it’s all a wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey thing with loops and strings, and time-space is very complicated so there’s some rationally irrational reason for all this to work within the story-verses laws of nature. But as a science fiction fan, and as a writer I have to admit that this does put me off of watching the show.

I’m sick of mystery for the sake of mystery.

I know that The Doctor is meant to be frightfully mysterious.

And the Timelords are meant to be frightfully mysterious.

And it’s all supposed to be a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, topped off with an enema…or some other word starting with “e”.

But it is in all honesty starting to get on my wick. I’m not asking for all the mysteries to be solved. But an occasional insight into all of this, preferably one that isn’t retconned out again later, would be very welcome.

Klean Prep, how I fucking hate you!

Last Friday I was the semi-willing recipient of an Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan, this being just about the only step left open to the doctors who are trying to find my Angry Bowel Pixie and kill the little fucker. I’d never had one of these scans before, so being something of a techie I was, weirdly, kind of looking forward to experiencing it. After all how often do you get stuffed inside an immensely powerful, and expensive magnet…for highly personal medical science!

There’s just one problem with having your innards scanned with an MRI, that being making your innards actually visible to the scanner. However it turns out that medical science has a solution to this, well it’s a suspension actually but…ya I know, bad science joke. That solution is known as Klean Prep. Let me tell you a little about Klean Prep.

Klean Prep is this powder that’s mixed with water. You then drink 1 liter of it per hour, 4 liters in total.

Klean Prep tastes kind of like…well actually I don’t know anything that it tastes like. But I can say this, with the authority of having drank 40 liters of it in the past 10 years, it tastes disgusting. The 1st carafe of it is kind of bearable, but by half way through the 2nd I’m gagging at every taste, and by the time I start the 3rd I’m plotting the horrifically painful murder of the inventor of Klean Prep.

Klean Prep does exactly what the name implies. It cleans out your insides in preparation for some medical procedure. Usually a colonoscopy, or endoscopy, or to put it another way the internal use of a telescope big enough to pick out a single waving Venusian in a parallel universe, but all they actually end up seeing is Uranus. But cleaning, or Kleaning does imply a detergent like effect. And yup, in essence that is precisely what Klean Prep is. It’s an industrial strength detergent for your bowels, which just happens to also make your bowel far more visible to an MRI scanner.

“But Amanda, what’s so bad about that?”

Oh dearest reader, imagine the worst case of the runs you’ve ever suffered through. The cramps, the burning, the raw skin on your tush. Well, this is so much worse that words actually come close to failing me.

First, as I mentioned above, you get that indescribable taste. With it the certain knowledge that by drinking the foul-tasting, liquid bowel blowout you’re in fact setting yourself up for a miserable days living.

Then you start to get the cramps. And these are real cramps, not your namby pamby day-to-day cramps. The type of cramps that leave you lying on the floor sweating, moaning, and wishing for a speedy death.

Then the first gush of diarrhea. And you think to yourself “Hey, that wasn’t so bad.” No burning, no stinging, just “gush” and it’s gone.

By an hour later you’re wishing for death again, yours and your doctors.

By hour 2 and trip 4 or 5 to the toilet your just daydreaming about all the ways you can torture someone in a white coat to death.

By hour 4 and trip…”who the fuck knows?!” to the toilet you’re not thinking anymore. All you can feel, or think about is how much your ass, and bowels hurt.

By the end of hour 5 if you’re lucky you’ve just passed the last of the Klean Prep. Of course it’s been running through you completely clear for the last two hours, which weirdly hurts even more. But those two hours do beg the question. “Why the fuck do you have to drink all of it?”

Anyway, I only had to drink 1 liter for my MRI…lucky me. I still couldn’t have fought off a day old kitten. I still only barely made the toilet 6 times. And I still want 10 minutes alone with the inventor of Klean Prep, with a baseball bat.