For those of you that don’t know yet (this includes my parents), I’ve quit smoking.  That’s right.  I’m done.  Finito.  **insert fireworks here**  It’s already been a week and I’ve been trying my damndest to stay out of those painful social scenes that just beg me to smoke.  But the worst part by far is trying to sleep.  I’ve had issues with that already but now it seems to be multiplied three fold. 

Last night I went to bed around midnight… woke up at 3am.  Crappity crap crap.  I got up, worked on some songs, wrote an e-mail or two, and then tried to lay back down around 7am.  I’ve been on the nicotine patch and it’s been giving me some really fucked up dreams.  WELL, I started to drift back into some really odd dream about penguins and bicycles and people wearing really really white pants hiked up into their crotches when I hear…   CRASH!!!!!

Being in the semi-cognative state that I was in, you’ll have to imagine how dissoriented I was when I heard the noise.  Instantly I thought someone was trying to break into my apartment.  My front door has this massive glass window that I’m completely paranoid of.  Not for my own safety, but for my guitars.  I’d rather a burglar take me on one-to-one rather than some sneaky bastard coming to carry away my babies.

So tired little Jami hears this MASSIVE crash of glass breaking.  I jump out of bed and start yelling “Hey!! Hey!!”  I mean really loud.  So loud that I think I may have scared myself a little.  I look at my door and everything is still.  The shade is still down.  Nothing is amiss.  I check all the other windows and there’s nothing there.  I’m standing in the middle of my room looking at all four corners trying to figure out how I can’t find the source of the crash in such a small room.  I finally convince myself that perhaps I just dreamt it.  It’s possible, right?

I shuffle over to the bathroom before I try to get a few more winks of sleep.  Flip on the light and…   oh dear god.  My full length mirror had fallen off the door and crashed on top of my toilet.  Glass everywhere.  On the floor.  In my bathroom mat.  In the toilet!  Great big chunks of glass in my damn toilet.  I seriously thought for a second that maybe I could just hit the little flush handle and it would all disapear into the magical place all the other stuff goes.  But at least I found the source of my panic and was relieved that it wasn’t all in my head.

So, please, I need all the support I can get with this non-smoking thingy.  But I’m ready.  Everyone, put your hands in the middle.  “Boo to emphysema” on three.  1… 2…. 3….

P.S.  While recording today I noticed that the busted up mirror leaning against my wall reflected me in a neato way.  I set up my camera to take continuous pics while I was recording and got some awesome looking shots!  I have one of them posted on my myspace account here.  Check it out!

http://www.myspace.com/TheCombatBaby

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I woke up this morning at 6am and just couldn’t fall back to sleep.  Luckily my internet got hooked up yesterday so I’m not going crazy just staring at the blank white walls.  So here I am going clickity click click in the wee hours of the morning.

Yesterday was also the day of my “crazy scary doctor visit”.  A couple of weeks ago I found one of those lumps in my breast that seem to be all the rage these days.  I was scheduled for tests on the 26th…  the day after Christmas…  and a reading of those tests on the 29th.  I found myself in an odd bind.  It’s a heavy mental burden to worry and think of all the “what if’s”.  But I didn’t find it appropriate to worry everyone during the holiday season especially considering that I didn’t quite know what the deal was with it.  So besides the release of unburdening on a very select few, I’ve felt quite a lot of anxiety this last week.  Add to that anxiety moving to a new place and holiday obligations….   sigh.  I’m exhausted.  Yet still can’t sleep the night through.

The tests came back negative by the way.

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Alright kids. I’ve gotten a hold of a haji copy of the L Word 3rd season. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term “haji”… it’s my generations equivalent to “charlie” of the vietnam era, or “kraut” of WWII era.) I’m not usually one to gab about television crap. BUT…

A character in the show dies of breast cancer. It’s not an uncommon theme nowadays. But I gotta tell ya, it really put me in a panic.

I fell asleep a few hours after watching said episode. I woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding in my chest. I knew that I had the most horrific nightmares but I couldn’t remember any of it. I couldn’t figure out why the scene of her dying tormented me so much. I had seen shows like this before. They were all equally dramatic and tragic. But what the hell was it that really unsettled me? And then it hit me.

The character died from the “cure”. She died because the chemotherapy knocked out her immune system and she developed an infection. She didn’t die of breast cancer… Everyone did everything they were supposed to do. But she died anyways. For some reason that just completely astounded me. I realized that her character would have actually lived a much longer life if they would have just left the cancer where it was. If they hadn’t pumped her veins with radioactive material, she wouldn’t have slipped away so suddenly.

Then, of course, I started thinking about how we all try to make the right moves in our lives. We try to make the right decisions… the proper courses of action. But the reality is that none of that might not even matter in the long run. The right decisions may actually be the one thing that knocks us out of the game. I see now that that was what my nightmare was about. And that’s the reason why I couldn’t remember any of it because it wasn’t anything I could visually imagine.

Fate. Stream of conscious. Destiny. The rise and the fall. It’s really quite madening to realize that so much is out of our control.

gah.

If I thought I had sleeping problems before…. lol. Here’s just another shovel full of manure to load onto the pile.

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