A few excerpts from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (2) I took last night:

8. My hands are usually warm enough.
74. I would like to be a florist.
115. The sight of blood doesn’t frighten me or make me sick.
138. I believe I am being plotted again.
186. I am not afraid to handle money
230. I can be friendly with people who do things I consider wrong.
267. I have periods in which i feel unusually cheerful without any special reason.
303. Most of the time I wish I were dead.
344. I enjoy gambling for small stakes.
426. I used to like playing hopscotch and jump rope.
478. I hate my whole family
555. I can’t go into a dark room alone, even in my own home.

Some of them were very easy. It’s true: I would like to be a florist (more than say, a firefighter or an auto-mechanic) and the sight of blood does not frighten me or make me sick. It’s false: I do not wish I was dead and I don’t enjoy gambling, even for small stakes. And I still like to play hopscotch.

Some of the questions demanded a complete sentence answer though. Some of them might have deserved paragraph response. I answered false to “I am not afraid of fire,” but I feel like my fear of it is reasonable. I know it is useful, so I use it, but I am wary of it and careful with it. I am not phobic. There are obviously several questions where the interpreters could say, “Ah! A pyromaniac! A nymphomaic! A paranoid schizophrenic!”

If I know myself, I am none of these. I’ll show up on the anxious side of normal, just barely obsessive-compulsive– usually able to keep my anxiety to myself if not control it and at this point in my life, my compulsions affect no one but me and are not dangerous or even time consuming. But it had to be taken, just as the sleep test had to be taken, just as the IUD had to be inserted.

Sometime in the early summer, I’ll have gastric bypass surgery. There is a six-month waiting period and a battery of tests to pass, including here a psychological evaluation, which my current therapist is doing. I have a couple more months (it feels like ages) and a couple more tests including a chest x-ray, which seems very daunting, as I started the process right before I got whooping cough last fall. And this is all contingent on my ability to dot my i’s and cross my t’s and the pleasure and mercy of the good people of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama.

It’s not magic. It’s worried or frightened a number of people I’ve told, so I’ll answer questions if you have them. But I’ve found people who have been very, very supportive of me– Josh’s wife in particular. My family has been. It’s hard to admit it. I feel ashamed that I’ve come to this point. But I have, so I will. The way I see it, I need an extra-powerful tool that maybe some other people don’t need. It’s a little dangerous, a little frightening– like fire, really. But I cannot do the work I need to do without it, so I’m acquiring that tool. True.

Every once in a while, I start to hate computers. I feel chained to them and in a rut, and it makes me frustrated and angry. Christopher, unfortunately, must endure my frustration, because it was he, practically, who started on the damn things. I didn’t play a computer game other than solitaire or Boggle until after I was married. Christopher showed me the beauty of an afternoon spent drinking cheap beer and playing cooperative Doom 95, though. I liked it. Then he showed me how to play Heroes of Might and Magic III and I have been a junkie ever since.

But a few weeks ago, I’d had it again, so I got down on my knees in front of his chair. He was playing chess. “Dear,” I said.

“Let me make this move,” he replied.

I sat back on my heels and raised an eyebrow at him. Your wife is on your knees in front of you, man! But we’ve been married a long time now and he knows I’ll do whatever, whenever, so he’s unduly confident about putting me off. Finally, he turned to me.

“Dear,” I started again. “I have to talk to you. I need….” I took a deep breath. It felt like the world’s biggest request. I felt like I was asking, seriously, for a thousand dollars cash. “I need two nights a week to spend with you without computers. Please.” I winced a little and waited.

“Okay,” he said.

So we’ve been spending a little more time with each other and a little less time playing World of Warcraft (though I am 3/4 of the way to 49, Skillzy). I revised the Netflix queue and we’ve watched movies and some TV shows on DVD. Next up is the Godfather and Battlestar Galactica.

It felt like this enormous thing, to ask him to back away from his favorite pasttime to do something with me. I said we could just eat dinner at the table (we almost never do) or play scrabble together or anything. We’ve ended up watching movies though, sitting on the couch together. Gwen likes to jump up and be petted some. Often she gets in the way of seeing the TV across the room and Christopher announces, “Down in front!” and it makes me laugh. She’ll make several passes, never settling down until whatever it is we’re watching is pretty much over. And then she’ll sit down and purr and close her eyes.

Last night, Christopher scratched under her chin and asked, “Gwenie, why do you always wait until the end of TV time for loving?” And it made me so happy. I had to tip the cat off my lap, but I had tv time with my husband where we just spent time with one another. Should I ever wonder if he’s really listening, or really caring, or really appreciating, I have that. I know he’s ready and willing to set time aside for me to spend a way we both like. He keeps showing me new things and it’s wonderful.

Just when I got a prescription for Ambien, turns out it’s a nice little crazymaking drug. I am not an insomniac. Nor do I have any sort of sleep disorder, other than what I think is a perfectly reasonable inability to fall asleep quickly an easily with a silicone cup over my nose that attaches my face, via long plastic tube, to hissing little machine on my nightstand.

Ambien (which I am not supposed to take more than two nights in a row and last night it didn’t do the trick, exactly, so shit) apparently causes sleepwalking. Also sleepdriving, sleepeating (including sleepgourmetmealpreparation) and I just read, sleepfucking. I don’t need to be doing any of those things. I can’t really, as I’m attached to the nightstand. And having sex with that mask thing on makes me want to turn inside-out and vaporize, it makes me so mortified.

But in all the Ambien news (and hype), I found one really good essay: Let’s All Get ADD! It’s a funny take on the massive chemicalization of people and how there is no end to what we will do to feel like we’re getting the correct amount of something: work, sleep, sex, blog comments, indie cred, whatever.

I think his thesis is that the Internet has made life into one big Short Attention Span theater. Like the author of the column, I am writing this, IM-ing with Spark, talking to my husband, reviewing the article, looking at pictures of Alan Tudyk and reading, paragraph by paragraph an SS/HG story that I think I may have read before. There are four empty cans of diet coke next to me and I just took two muscle relaxers.

Two weeks ago, #firefly watched Pollock. In addition to enjoying spending time with one another and talking about mid-century art and culture, we marveled at a film portraying people who could relax without the internet. It was night, they were done working, so they sat down and drank beer and listened to the radio and had actual conversations. It was just so motherfucking quaint. I can’t even use the internet recreationally without additional recreational internet use. I have a dual-monitor configuration ostensibly for multimedia scripting programs, but really I just want to read smutty fanfiction in three second installments between casting fireballs in World of Warcraft.

So I’ve been thinking about the location and indeed centrality of the self in all this. Perhaps if I were more in touch with myself, I wouldn’t have such a hard time wearing a device that admittedly allows me to sleep better. I hate to admit, but it does. To what extent is my anxiety about said device a reflection of my greatly external concept of self. I am not Sarah wholly so much as I am a series of figures representing Sarah that can be manipulated to reify or destroy perception, and hence self. Or is that a bunch of nonsense, too, that I’m only writing in order to put off sleeping because I can’t take any Ambien tonight, lest I get up, disconnect myself from the machine, and miss my seven hours of constantly positive air? It’s nonsense.

I’m going to hang on to my internet-induced ADD a little while, too. I wouldn’t keep it up if I didn’t like it, and neither would you.

*And, since I’m not sure about putting pictures of Julia’s grandparents on the internet (though she and Mr. Doofus look spectacular together), you get bonus photos of Ford!

I keep a notebook at work– task lists and quotes and errata. I got to the end of the current one yesterday and found this strange bit:

like a fork in the eye
corrective dentifrice
none of yours showed up
the dip is particularly viscous

All by itself. I have no idea what any of it means. It’s all written in the same in, so I must have written it all at the same time but it makes absolutely no sense. The next page, in the same ink, I have written:

“Something smells like frosting.”

Was I trying to communicate with someone? Was I feeling a new and strange emotion and this was the only way I could express myself? I have no idea. I think I’ll call my next notebook Mysterious Not-Haiku Sequel.

p.s. Something smells like frosting.