anxiety – Page 50 – Oh Fair New Mexico

Born Under a Bad Sky

Posted on November 18, 2011November 18, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
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This was what the sky looked like yesterday evening as I left work for the day at my company’s Sacramento office.

Was it just the high winds as they blew across the Sacramento valley that caused this look? Is it simply the jet stream of late fall?

Either way, as I got into the Jeep, I was humming a little Creedence Clearwater Revival.

“There’s a bad moon on the rise….”

(click for full size)

This morning I drove home to the Bay Area where creepy dappled clouds are replaced by solid gray dripping clouds.

Welcome to a cold, rainy weekend.

*sigh*

Think the cat will let me squeeze onto a corner of the heater vent?

Photo taken with my iPhone4s and the Camera+ app. Photo subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page.

The First Time – NFL Edition

Posted on November 14, 2011November 14, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
6 Comments

Sunday rolled around and The Good Man and I had something special on the agenda. We had a date with Candlestick Park and a dance with the San Francisco 49ers football team.

The Good Man had attended professional football games in the past, but I never had. I’ve spent much time inside Candlestick, but it was back in the late 90’s, watching my beloved San Francisco Giants get brutalized. The Giants moved to their new yard in 2000 and I hadn’t been to Candlestick since.

I wondered how the ‘Stick had held up over the past eleven years. The answer? About how you’d expect.

Once upon a time I was a huge 49ers fan (going back to living in New Mexico where they were my team of choice). But over the past decade they kept stomping on my heart over and over, so I had to break up with them.

But this year…with their shiny 8-1 record…I might have been woo’d back to their side.

I think I’ve finally worked out my issues with this guy (that’s the long suffering quarterback, first round draft pick, Alex Smith).

I gave up on him when I kept shouting at my television “THROW THE DAMN BALL ALREADY!!!” and he wouldn’t throw the ball. And then he’d get clobbered.

On Sunday, he threw the ball. Oh he threw it, indeed. And he ran it, and he handed it off and did everything a calm, cool quarterback should do.

Oh, hello Kendall Hunter. Welcome to the end zone.

This morning, the local sports radio show keeps talking about the amazing atmosphere at the ‘Stick on Sunday.

It was crazy.

Isn’t it always like that?

For the non-baseball fans, I hear a lot of talk about how baseball is so slow, there’s waiting around, blah blah blah.

You know what? There is a lot of waiting around in football too.

But there is an awful lot more blood in football. Yikes.

I guess that tends to happen when your whole intent, play by play, is smashing into very large people. Our seats were great and I sure did see a lot of men crash into other men. Sometimes I had to close one eye and look away. That’s usually when the guys around me would shout “yeeeah!”

Boys. Hmph.

Football is a crazy sport. A crazy, fun, outrageous, holy cow YEAH baby kind of sport.

In short…I loved it. Seeing it live was really something spectacular.

All photos by Karen Fayeth and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page.

Oh, November

Posted on November 2, 2011November 1, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
2 Comments

Masochism! It’s what’s for Thanksgiving dinner!

Yup. November means it’s National Novel Writing Month, a fun event where writers around the world challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel in just thirty days.

And after taking last year off, I’m back, baybee!

This will be my sixth year through the ~~meat~~ word grinder.

Along with blogging every weekday. And holding down a full time job. And having some semblance of a life.

Apparently I like the pain. 1667 words a day, here I come.

Nightmares

Posted on October 31, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
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In honor of Halloween, the scariest day of the year, I figured I’d do a little mental deep dive and reveal some of my most scary nightmares.

Perhaps in the light of day they won’t seem so scary, right? Maybe I can take some of the fear out of them.

I had one of these dreams last night and found it hard to shake off. So let’s start with that one.

I’m in my car, driving too fast, and suddenly, my brakes don’t work. The pedal feels right, I’m pressing on it and it gives resistance, but the car isn’t slowing down. I grab frantically for the handbrake but that does no good. I try to take the car out of gear, but that doesn’t work….often I’m rolling down a hill. Sometimes it’s in San Francisco.

Only once in my life did I had something similar happen. I was in college and driving my dad’s old ’72 full size Blazer, and the master cylinder was going out. I rolled to an intersection, hit the brakes, and it went all the way to the floor. Yipes! I was able to get my toe under the pedal, lift it, and kept pumping the brakes until I finally stopped. I was scared, but thankfully got through that safely.

I have no idea what this inability to stop is about but it *freaks* me out. I was all jittery driving to work this morning.

I’m in danger, I turn to run, but my legs are heavy and I can’t run. I’m making a running motion but moving slower than molasses in January. I bend over and use my arms to help me run/crawl, scratching at the ground trying to get away.

I think this one is a fairly common dream. A lot of people have it. I’m not much of a runner in real life and I think this dream plays on my own insecurities about that fact. Like, if I was ever really in trouble, could I run away?

Yeeeks!

I’m in college. It’s finals week. Trouble is, there is a class that I haven’t bothered to attend all semester. I’m freaking out! What am I going to do? There is no way I can pass this class! I’m going to fail!

The class I forgot to attend is usually a math class (my absolute worst subject). Sometimes it’s accounting. Lately it’s morphed into that god awful advanced Economics night class I had in grad school.

This is such a weenie nightmare. I can’t believe how much it totally freaks me out. Oh dear, I might fail a class. Big deal!

But I wake from this dream *frantic* and freaking out.

The monsters of the mind are far worse than any creepy Halloween story, I guess.

I’m staying in a really nice hotel. I go to my room and check in. Then I leave my room for some reason, I need ice, I need to find something to eat, whatever. And then I can’t find my way back to my room. I go up and down stairs. I wander through hallways of the hotel. I keep taking the elevator and it puts me on floors I don’t recognize. The more I try to find my way back, the more lost I become. I start getting more and more frantic.

This dream often takes place in a huge Las Vegas casino (ever felt hopelessly lost inside of a huge casino in real life? I sure have.). Sometimes it takes place on a college campus or a high school building. It’s a dream of chasing my tail ’round and ’round.

Whenever I check into a hotel in my real life, I inevitably try to find landmarks so I can find my way back, owing to my whackadelic brain and this dream that recurs month after month, year after year.

Tornados. Enough said.

I’ve chronicled my own Really Bad Day dancing with a tornado in Carlsbad. I think that one afternoon left me irrevocably scarred.

Ok, of all of my frightful dreams, at least this on and the brakes going out are dreams that I can go “well yeah, that’s actually scary!”

I think the rest of my nightmares listed are pretty much crazy machinations of an over emotional brain.

To misquote Emerson, simply hobgoblins of my little mind.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Devil graphic by Viktors Kozers and used royalty free from stock.xchng.

The Marketing Department Needs a Hard Slap Across the Chops

Posted on October 27, 2011October 28, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
26 Comments

Several years ago I did quite a riff on stupid car names. It’s good stuff, go back and read it if you get a chance.

In that same vein comes today’s post.

Stupid cell phone names. Yup, the mobile phone manufacturers have gone well past idiot car names and have slipped into ridiculous.

Since I work way, way too much with mobile phones, I have to not only see these dumb names, but utter them aloud.

Here’s my personal top eleven list of “Someone Should Get Slapped for that Brand Name”

HTC Salsa: Seriously? Salsa? Because I’m going to dip a chip into the device? Bleah. Just Bleah!

Palm Pre: The suffix pre means before. So this is the phone that’s what? Before the actual phone? Before the demise of Palm? Before HP killed it?

Samsung :): Oh how I wish I was making that up. The actual name of the phone is :) How do you even go to the store and ask for that? “Um, yes, I’d like a sideways smiley please?” Lame. Lame. Lame.

HTC Rhyme : Rhymes with stupid.

Casio G’zOne Commando: First of all I can’t get over Casio, maker of tacky Dad-watches is also making phones. This is a kind of cool looking device, but godDAMN it’s a bad name. First of all, what the eff is G’zOne? And second of all, commando makes me think of going without chones. I don’t think my mobile device should evoke that.

Motorola Citrus : Mmmmm! Lemony!

Motorola Photon : I tested this device and I actually liked it a lot. But neither The Good Man nor I could stop pointing the device at each other and going “pew pew!” It is, after all, a photon. Pew!

LG Remarq : One, you misspelled it. Two, my remarks are “WHAT THE SEVENTEEN KINDS OF SAM HELL ARE YOU THINKING with this name?!?!” That concludes my remarqs.