near death experiences

my grandma almost died tonight. somehow...and i have no idea how...i managed to stay calm and rational and helpful. even afterwards, when she was shaking because she was half in shock over it, i was still calm. it's not until now, that i try to go to sleep and can't get the look in her eyes out of my mind, that i'm beginning to really take in what could have happened. 

we were eating dinner and she got something stuck in her throat. one second she was eating, the next she made this horrible gasping sound and looked at me with absolute terror in her eyes. she literally couldn't breathe, she was making sounds but i couldn't hear any air coming in or out. i started smacking her on the back, not knowing what else to do...i wasn't about to attempt the heimlich on a 92 year old. i don't actually know how to do the heimlich, anyways. so i did all i could, i patted her on the back and told her she was fine, and not to panic. told her to breathe, which was a ridiculous effort because her face was starting to turn blue. i went to call 911 but she shook her head no and motioned for me to keep patting her on the back. i thought i had lost her...i mean, everyone chokes...but when she's almost a century old and her eyes are bright red and her face has the same awful blue tinge that my mom's had when she was laying in her casket...ack. but i kept patting her on the back, telling her to cough, telling her to breathe. eventually i heard tiny bits of air coming in and out..she could just barely breathe. so i just encouraged her. told her i could HEAR her breathing, so she wasn't going to die, to stop panicking. and then, slowly, she started to breathe normally. and once she got her first full breath in, she kind of collapsed against me and just shook...she was so terrified. we talked about it later...she thought she was going to die, too. 92 years old, and she had a near-death experience. 

scary stuff. i kind of take my grandma's health for granted. you'd think with all the death i've been around that i would just be WAITING for her to die. and i was, for a year or two after my parents died. i slept in her bed, in case she needed me. every weird sound she made was because she was dying, every sneeze was a death sentence. but she's so healthy for her age that i rarely think about her dying. old people die when they get sick, or stop being able to function, that's how i think about her dying. i forget how fragile she is. how when my dog jumps on me, i get a scratch that doesn't even bleed, but she gets a bruise the size of a golf ball and bleeding that takes minutes to stop. how even a piece of chicken going down the wrong tube could be the end for her. and what the fuck will i do when she DOES die? 

rescue riders

Something this epic cannot afford to be forgotten, so i'm putting it online :) Heather, you're still the only one that knows about this blog and although I know you care about what happened this weekend this is more for me not to forget :) 

On April 25th, I hopped on the lightrail at 3pm to head to the abduction site at Hayden Flour Mill. The first group of kids I met were from Corona, all wearing handmade tie-dye Rescue shirts and all willing to befriend a lone Rescuer on the lightrail. When I got to the abduction site, I met up with Scott and the other Schools for Schools kids. They were all busy volunteering, so I grabbed a piece of rope and started my own little group of soldiers. The girl that grabbed onto the rope behind me was Ada, and she quickly became my rescue buddy. We marched down Mill Ave, down University, over the bridge, down Palm Walk. Walking over the bridge was amazing...seeing the mile-long long of Rescuers, waving to cars, and hearing their honks of support. 

When we got to the SRC field (our LRA camp), Ada and I built our humble little camp next to the Schools for Schools kids and waited. And waited. We went to Chuckbox for dinner, we wrote our letters, we played frisbee. And then Steve-O came to rescue us at 8:30! He gave an awkward talk, applauding us for staying out here overnight...and then he left. Right away. I'm thankful that he rescued us, but he could've put a little more effort into the movement. All the excitement from being rescued so quickly caused an impromptu dance party, and a good fourth of the Rescuers started a huge mosh-pit/ train/wave/ whatever we felt like doing. It was so much fun, but the Roadies eventually shut off the music and told us to go call Albuquerque moguls. At 9:30, we got the Rescue Rider talk...very few of us had heard of this part of the event and were totally unprepared. The two Phoenix Roadies and whoever else wanted to tag along were headed to Albuquerque...an 8 hour drive. I had nothing with me besides my cell phone, some markers, and a sheet. But I hopped into an SUV with 6 strangers and we caravaned with 10 other people to Albuquerque. 

The 16 Phoenix Rescue Riders got to Albuquerque at 8:30 am to see a pretty hopeless situation. There were about 50 Rescuers left in the park, 4 Tucson Rescue Riders, and a very infuriated Parks and Recs guy who claimed we had misrepresented our event to him. Sleeping in his park is prohibited, and so the Albuquerque kids were not allowed to sleep the night before. The Parks and Recs guy threw in the towel when the media got there, screaming about how he was going to lose his job over this and he ordered us out of the park. There are about 70 of us at this point, so we decide to make the 2 mile march to the City Hall. So we walked, holding out city signs and screaming at the cars that passed by. 

We got to City Hall and almost immediately, everyone pulled out their sleeping bags and got ready for a much needed nap. And then we saw the Parks and Recs guy creeping around...apparently he had followed our whole march and then alerted the police that we were camping in front of the City Hall. 

The police told us that gathering in front of the Hall was only allowed during business hours, and, being a Sunday, we weren't allowed. The cops were being very understanding, however, and told us that they would allow us to move to the sidewalk in the side of the building, under a few conditions. First, we had to keep the sidewalk completely clear, which meant we were all sitting flush against the wall on our stuff, not allowed to stretch our legs out or hold up our signs. Second, we could not have our sleeping bags or pillows in sight. Which not only meant that we couldn't sleep, but that we had to freeze our asses off. The third condition is that we make no noise at all, and the fourth condition is that we be gone by dark. One cop threatened the Albuquerque Roadie with jail if even one of us broke a rule. She was a nervous wreck for the rest of the day. 

So we sat. and we froze. and we slept for 5 minute intervals on our neighbors shoulders before being yelled at. We called our moguls. The creepy Parks and Recs guy called the media to tell them to watch for us getting arrested. 

The cops finally stopped watching us around 12, so we moved into the sun and curled up to go to sleep (still no sleeping bags or pillows, but sidewalk naps are better than nothing). We held up our signs and talked to people passing by. We kept calling the mayor. Turns out that he was scheduled to come rescue us the night of April 25th at the park, but stood us up. He didn't answer our calls all day, and even some of his councilmen stopped by to talk to us and try to get him to come to us, but he wasn't having any of it. We even told him that all he had to do was give a statement over the phone, and he said no. We were camped right outside of his office, and he was ignoring us. Finally, by the end of the day, he blantantly told us to stop bothering him, he was not going to come out to see us. 

At this point, we give up on him. We don't want him anyways, if he's such an asshole. So we concentrate on celebrities. We got a professional boxer to come by, but he wasn't famous enough to count. We figured out that Korn and Devil Wears Prada were in town, but Korn doesn't send the right message and DWP aren't famous enough. We tried to contact The Shins, who are from Albuquerque, but couldn't get through. 

By 7:30, there are 25 of us left....only 4 people from the original Albuquerque group, everyone else is from Arizona. The IC headquarters has put us first on a list to receive a US senator in the morning, but that still means we need to stay another night. And we aren't allowed to sleep anywhere. One of the Albuquerque guys told us of a vacant house his parents owned, and gave us permission to sleep there. Everyone was so grateful...how many other cities got SHOWERS??? The bad news was that about half of the Arizona team had to return home. My SUV (8 people) and the Tucson crew were leaving Sunday night. Another Phoenix car was leaving Monday morning. We wished our teams good luck, we cried, we hugged, and we loaded up the SUV to come back home. 

We got in at 3:30am, and I was literally so dehydrated and sleep-deprived that I could barely walk. I'm not sure how I made it home, as I could barely see. I fell into bed (no shower...ha), and slept through my alarm the next morning, waking up only a few hours ago to see that I had slept through 3 appointments today....good thing they weren't important. I'm really grateful that I didn't attempt to come home Tuesday morning and go straight to my job interview. Now at least I have 24 hours to rest up, get clean, re-learn all my native Arizona fishes and animal skulls, and get healthy....because it seems like 36 hours (it seems like so much longer!) of very little sleep, super cold temperatures with not enough clothes, junk food and dehydration is exactly the way to rekindle nasty viruses that one is trying to get over. 

The first thing I did after waking up was check Twitter...Albuquerque got rescued this morning! They are headed to Wichita right now, and I am insanely jealous. I actually feel pretty depressed that I can't go, like I'm missing out on something huge. And I totally am. If I get cut from the hiring process tomorrow, I really want to head out to Wichita...even though all the friends I made are back in Arizona, and I'd have to start from scratch. And find some extra money laying around. 

But hopefully, all the cities will be rescued by the time I have to make that decision. 

I just really don't understand how there can be 7 cities left. How can people not care? How did the mayor of Albuquerque say no to us? It literally would've taken 10 minutes of his time, and he said no. It was a very interesting experience to be on that side of apathy. To just sit around and wait for someone to care...it's awful. 

Being a part of this movement has been unforgettable, and I will be eternally grateful to the girl that stood behind me as I was saying "noo...i can't go to Albuquerque, I didn't feed my cats and I don't even have a sweatshirt with me..." She tapped me on the shoulder, gave me her sweatshirt and said "your cats will be fine. GO. you will never regret it."

i'm not going to lie.

i am completely useless. i am doing nothing with my life and it is making me feel like shit. i try to make myself wake up in the morning, if only to grab a book and relocate to the living room. but when 10 am comes, i can't seem to remember why that was a good idea, and i end up sleeping all day. i did make myself go running today, if you can call it that. i was a pathetic attempt and only made me feel worse about myself. i'm not actually depressed yet, just bored. but every other thought that crosses my mind is something along the lines of "you're lazy", "you're useless", "you can't even run a half-mile", i can't imagine it will be long before the depression hits. 

can't wait. i need one of those jobs. please, universe? 

in an unexpected act of decency, zack gave all my shit to matthew, who felt compelled to wake me up at 1:30 am to give it back to me. he gave me my 8 dvds and a mini-lecture on how not to date assholes.

duly noted. 

and then he asked me out for saturday. oh, irony. 

it's your life, but our way

i have a hangover. again. i used to never get hangovers. fuck, i'm getting old. 

but it was worth it, i burned like 700 calories dancing up on the bar. 

and bartender bought me free drinks all night, because i wore a boobshirt. 

the result of all this fun is that i am just now getting out of bed, and i have 5 hours to get ready for mexico, and then i am going to a party that i do not have the time or energy to attend. but such is life as miss popularity. it's matt's birthday, and his ex-girlfriend decided to come as my guest and crash the party, like he did to one of hers. i am an accomplice in a dramatic lovers spat, and i am none too happy about it. but i don't want to tell kim not to come, because she is the one lady in tempe that i can actually call a really good friend. girlfriends are hard for kristi to come by. 

i just dropped $250 on a camera because i'm a spoiled little bitch who has to have the best. i could've gotten a perfectly good camera for $125, but it wouldn't have been waterproof, dust-resistant, drop-proof, freeze-proof, and all sorts of biofun capable. it will be nice to have a bio camera, but really...i'm fucking unemployed. the worst part is that i have a perfectly awesome/pink camera. i just broke the button that pops the battery in and out, and so the battery is drained and stuck inside. but the camera is fine! nikon said they can't fix that part...i'm sure i'm the only person in the world who has managed to break something so ridiculously unimportant, yet vital to the camera's existence. FML.

me and my camera (it deserves a fucking name..i'll have to think on that) leave for mexico at 8 am and will be there, sans interwebs, until wednesday. of course, all the jobs i applied for will pick those 4 days to want to get in touch with me. and then thursday i leave for pittsburgh with my heather. i am deathly excited for pittsburgh....i view the mexico trip as more of an inconvenience. i'm sure i'll have a blast, but i just hate being away from my comfy bed and my snugglekitties. and except for a 12 hour break, i will be away from them for 10 days (!!!!)

time to be productive. i need to....buy mexico car insurance, apply for one more job, grocery shop for grandma, clean my house, pack.... ahh, balls. 

the following is not a test

i got an interesting drunk text on saturday from zack. i haven't heard from him in a few weeks, and it's been about 6 weeks since we talked about anything other than getting my shit back from him. but, at 2:30 am, i got a "heyyy super-slut :-)" i'm sure i wasn't supposed to take offense at his chosen pet name, but since i spent a good 30 minutes going down on him the first time we made out, and then never saw him again, it hit a little close to home. mother fucker. i must admit that i did a little dance in my head at being the target of his drunk texting. he still thinks of me? 

i am trying to decide if i should go on my trip to mexico next weekend. four days of beachy bio-fun with people who get as excited about tidepools and wetlands as i do is a welcome treat, but dying does not seem like so much fun. i'm not worried about it myself...maybe i should be, but i can't find it in me. we have been reassured by CEDO that their facilities are safe, and rocky point has had no trouble lately. and we are not going through the dangerous border towns. but i'm worried about my grandma worrying. she's pretty upset about letting me go to mexico, as is my roommate. 

also, i have been writing. this long lost love of mine has not been allowed to rear itself for 4 or so years. I have always loved writing, and had been doing it since I was a toddler. I wrote my first book when I was 5, called "Kittns" and I was absolutely certain that I would grow up to be an author. But it frustrated me. My problem wasn't a lack of ideas or an uncertainty on how to get them into words. I did so almost effortlessly. My problem was that my ideas turned into the perfect words at the least perfect moments. While I was laying in bed trying to sleep. While I was in class. The words formed themselves into perfect dialogues and so quickly that if someone were to tap into my head, it would sound like I was reading a book. And the results would be so perfect to me, that when I sat down later with a notebook and tried to recreate them they would disappoint me, because the first time was so much better. If I didn't immediately capture what I had just created in my head, it was lost. And that was unbelievably frustrating, since I couldn't very well put off sleep for 3 hours while I wrote, or bust out my fatty notebook in the middle of a biology lab. I can't schedule my writing. It comes to me when it comes to me, and I wasn't OK with that. So I got frustrated and stopped, never finishing anything. I found boxes full of loose leaf and unfilled notebooks at my grandma's house, of 5 or ten page story bits. All written in 8th grade or high school, and, if I do say so myself, remarkably good for someone so young. But nothing finished. Besides "Kittns," I have never finished a story. 

But now, technology and my shitty sleep schedule seem to be working for me. My laptop is always by my bed while I try to sleep, and when I'm awake I'm rarely not in front of my computer. Whenever I get an idea, I immediately open my computer and type away into the early hours of the morning. Or when I'm driving, I flip open my Gphone and text away into my  Notebook application. And the result is quite a bit of story development, more than I've ever managed before. However, I have noticed a pretty decent decline in my writing...talent? Maybe since it's been 4 years since I've written an essay that's not scientific in nature, or at least that long since I've done any sort of creative writing or dialogue. So I don't expect this to turn out amazing, and I doubt it will ever be shown to anybody.  But its a nice hobby, and something to keep my brain busy during this complete lapse of productivity I'm facing in life. 

i don't want to run. just overwhelm me.

the coffee bean at tempe marketplace is making me fat. knowing a delicious and fattening frozen beverage lives less than a mile from my house has been a daily struggle for me for well over a year. i know everyone that works there, and they all recognize me. a few months or so ago, i caught eyes with a boy working behind the bar. he's exactly my type...baby face, sloppy skater-ish hair, dorky. most other girls would overlook him. but i'm consistently attracted to the underwhelming portion of the male population. greg is a perfect example, and tim to an extent, although i think that boy has potential to be devastatingly handsome. anyways, coffee bean boy is not at all devastatingly handsome, but he attracts me nonetheless. this might be due to the way he looks at me. it's a shy look, and he keeps it for just a tad bit longer than he should, and it holds a lot of interest and reverence. almost like he's afraid to look at me. it drives me nuts. it makes me feel like a super model. 

so how do i deal with this? talk to him? flirt? nope. that would be my usual approach in this situation, but it doesn't seem right. and to be honest, he makes me feel shy. we've never talked. he's always behind the bar, he doesn't take my orders. just peeks at me from over the espresso machine. 

through my frequent visitations, i have figured out that he comes into work on saturday at 11. so for the last few weeks, i've been lugging my laptop over to the coffee bean at 10:30 (yes, this requires kristi getting up early) and studying for hours. even if i have no work to do, i just sit there, sipping my delicious beverage, surfing facebook, and peeking at the boy. i try to look as nonchalantly cute as possible. and i am hopelessly shy. i couldn't even get up the nerve to ask him for a cup of water today. it's very uncharacteristic of me. 

i made new strides today. he asked for a rag and one of his co-workers threw one at his face. he laughed and looked over to me, and i gave him a big happy smile. he blushed. it was precious. and as i left, i stared at him to make sure he knew i was leaving. he caught my eye and said "have a good day." he might as well have said "i want to fuck you senseless in the back room" for what it did to the butterflies in my stomach.

it's kind of romantic, in a sickingly unproductive way.

on a less cute note, i heard some news about zack last night. he had been staying at his best friend's parents place while he got on his feet out in arizona. turns out that he had been stealing quite a bit of stuff from them, so they kicked him out and he moved back to utah, where he is being hunted by his psycho inmate brother and his drug lord friends. i wonder if he'll give his girlfriend the jewelry that he never gave back to me. it's always the bad boys, the ones that are trouble, that make me fall the hardest. chase and zack. maybe it's the excitement of knowing it's a bad idea? i had hoped i was smarter than that.

and i got a compliment last night. two, actually. the most obvious of the two was when i walked over to my friends heather and kim, and heather said "we were just talking about you...how you are the most consistently cool person we know. you never pull any shit." d'aww. but the other one, and yes i'm bragging a bit here, but only because it meant so much to me, was that when i walked into the party, i was greeted with cheers and squeals and "omg kristi!"'s and hugs and, even though i made a beeline for the keg, it literally took me over 1o minutes to reach it because people wanted to say hi to me. even ric steele and mark. knowing that people still like me always helps to cheer me up a bit :)

no babies '09

i'm starting to consider that maybe my debilitating supercold is not a product of botched energy work, but that i may actually be sick. in the normal sense. like a normal person. 

i can't decide if i should go to the doctor. 

i should. i just decided. 

but i can't decide if i will. i think i need antibiotics, if the monet-esque artwork of white lines and bubbles that has been on the back of my throat for 5 days is any indication. also, the fact that my ears are starting to ache. also, the fact that no amount of family-sized kleenex boxes can keep up with my niagra falls nose. 

but i don't wanna get out of bed :(

when did traveling doctor's go out of style? get that shit back. 

also, i'm going back on birth control. ill risk screwing up my hormones, and there's a chance i'll survive the imminent breastslashovarian cancers. but i will NOT survive a child.

or the guilt that would accompany the damage control. 

maybe i should go to the doctor. i need to get a wart removed anyways.