Not in Kansas anymore…

Oh, life. What a fuckin pain in the ass it can be. And confusing.

It shows that I’m not keeping good tabs on my site when it takes a potential advertiser to point out that I’m no longer page-ranked. I thought it was a glitch that my PR is 0. But no…I checked my Webmaster account and Google basically is telling me that they found suspicious links that look like I’m “selling pagerank” or something. From what I gather, the only way to fix this is add rel=”nofollow”. Until I “fix” things, Google won’t give me my page rank back. I don’t know how to feel about this. This is just another way for them to crack down on links. Many advertisers are gone, slowly falling away. One asked to be removed and replaced as a post sponsor, for sidebar links were counting against them. *sigh* Buy more sex toys, please, to keep my coffee cup full! =/

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I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that I won’t be doing e[lust] anymore. It was honestly a snap decision, but one that feels….mostly right. I’ve always been the gal who did a lot for others and shouldered a lot of obligation, mostly obligation that is brought upon by myself. I kept e[lust] going this year out of obligation. But after 3 years I’m ready to let it die or pass the torch. Either way it’s going to feel a bit odd to me. I’m sure I’ll write a flowery, sappy post about it soon enough. Such a fuckin sap, I am.

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Another thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is wondering how such a shitty turn of events in life can bring me something so wonderful. A door slammed closed and a beautiful window opened. ACK that sounds so cheesy. She would thwap me for that. While I’m not interested in dating anyone now or in the foreseeable future, I’m more than happy to have a friend with benefits. Girly benefits are even better than I remembered! “Fun” stuff aside though, have you ever met someone and just marveled at how alike you are, how many of the same things you just love and how is it you’d not met eons ago? It’s like that. I always used to wish I’d had a best friend of the experimentation sort when I was growing up. A little late in life for “experimentation” now….damn! Oh well. We can always pretend. Ahem. If this were 2009 I’d be going into a lot more details, but these are new and different times for my blog, new directions and all that. SERIOUS BLOG IS SERIOUS. kinda. meh.

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Add another quirky disorder to my long list. I spent my childhood thinking that I truly WAS lazy/stupid, until I learned as an adult that I had Inattentive-Type-ADD. I’ve now finally found that my hatred for certain sounds is real, that many people have it and that I’m not the only person. I ran across an article about the girl who chronicled her suicide attempt on Twitter and it said that she has this disorder called Misophonia. I read it and the lightbulb came on. While my hatred of sounds doesn’t make me depressed or want to commit suicide, it does cause various degrees of extreme irritation or rage. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.  The list of trigger sounds is scary accurate for me in a couple of areas. mine include nearly everything in the “mouth and eating” category:

crunching, sucking, smacking, chewing, swallowing, Gum chewing and popping, Gulping, slurping, water bottle squeezing, ahhs after drinking, tooth sucking, wet mouth sounds, kissing sounds, spitting, nail biting, Toothbrushing, Flossing

When my mother and I would take trips together I would end up driving whilst wearing headphones and blaring music, due to her predilection for foods such as hard candy, carrots, celery, pretzels, dry cereal and gum. And she chews with her mouth slightly open. It drives me insane. When I try, as nicely as possible, to tell her that I cannot help it but I find it irritating and can she please stop or close her mouth, she takes it very personally. Glares at me. Sighs. “I can’t do anything right”. “Everything I do annoys you”. I can’t wait to show her this site. I’ve been known to leave check-0ut or customer service lines in stores if the person next to me is chewing their gum loudly and cracking their gum. I will “internally” plug up my ears (hard to describe – like I can pop my ears myself, it’s similar to that except I hold that and breathe louder so that I hear my own breathing) if there is a lot of kissing on a tv show or movie. I cannot tolerate the opening sequence to Dexter, either.

Frankly if a person naturally does most of the things on that above list, we’re unlikely to be friends. Unfortunately for me I have two family members who cannot be disowned that fit that.  I think back now to coworkers and other acquaintances that I’ve harbored great dislike for and realized that I feel that way about them as a person because they are “noisy”.

As for the environmental sounds listed, some bother me mildly and others make me want to hurt the person responsible. Rumbling bass from too-loud cars is one. Cats cleaning themselves is another….I’ve been known to yell at the cats and throw socks at them if they’re too loud. We had a cat once that was a VERY loud licker and man did I ever yell at her. I feel bad, but I cannot control the irritation.  The last time I had to sit at the DMV, I made sure to bring my phone and I blasted music into my earbuds to drown out the people around me.

Sadly this is yet another thing with no known cause and no “cure”. AWESOME. At least I have a name for it instead of “get over it” and “you’re just intolerant” or “you’re so easily annoyed”. I wonder if this is a dopamine-related thing? All I know is that while I’m not quite as bad as some of what is portrayed in this 20/20 episode yet watching it makes me tear up in empathy.

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I’ll leave you with this lovely image found with these other lovely images. There’s just so much to be said about everything in this ad….so much.