work problems.

Why is work the single most annoying thing in my life? I'm not sure if it's because of Adventures in Clotting, Round 2 or if it's the insane amount of ambiguity around my role right now, but I'm not sure how much longer I can really do this. There are so many things I love about my job and so many things I love about my company, but is it really enough? I don't know if it's enough to sustain me. I still don't have a boss, which let me tell you, isn't as great as it sounds. I'm never really sure who I'm supposed to be reporting back to and I just feel this massive disconnect. I don't need or like to be micromanaged, but I think some degree of management is good. I feel a little adrift.

I'm also beyond pissed at one of my former managers, who I asked for a favor and got rejected. I *knew* I shouldn't have asked her. I knew she wouldn't be accommodating, but several people on the team encouraged me to go out on a limb and so I did. Now I feel like I've given up a piece of my power since she knows there's something that I want from her. I swear to God, working at large corporation can feel like the fucking Game of Thrones sometimes. I'm a huge grudge holder (FYI, ya'll!) so I hope to God she never needs anything from me because the answer will be a loud and resounding NO. For all the work and shit I did for her and for how good I am at my job and how much the team likes me, I think she could haven't taken a moment to consider helping me out. But, no. There are a lot of terribly awful and mean things I could say about her as a person, but I'm trying to just let it go. I don't need that kind of negativity in my life. Plus, in a way, she did me a favor. I now know where I stand with her and where my loyalties should lie.

Anyhow, that shit is annoying me and reminding me of a great Chris Rock clip (skip to 1:20). Because at the end of the day, everything comes back to black comedians (BTW, I'm seeing CHAPPELLE tomorrow! CANNOT WAIT):

late night musings.

Oddly enough, I am not tired. I don't know why. Maybe I slept enough this weekend. Maybe it's the infusion of exercise that I've been doing over the past two days. I did a 2.8 mile walk on Saturday and a 2.4 mile walk on Sunday. Today, I got on the rowing machine for 2 minutes (to see if I could stand it) and took an hour-long restorative yoga class. I'm trying to rehabilitate my body through exercise. I miss it. That's a post for another day, though. Anyway, I feel like rambling and need to get my thoughts out, so here we are.

1. Real Housewives of Atlanta. OMG GIRL. Words cannot express how insane tonight's episode was. I don't normally get wrapped up in reality shows - I save most of my fangirling for tween things like Pretty Little Liars and Ravenswood or for more adult shows like Criminal Minds, but this episode slayed me. 
2. Gaby Hoffman may be the best thing about Girls (well, besides Adam. Love Adam). I hope she never leaves the show.
3. I didn't suck too much at yoga today. I liked it and I think I'm going to go back! Excitement!
4. I am in a weird little slump. I don't know what exactly is going on, but I am definitely not at a high point right now and I'm trying to work my way through it.
5. CHAPPELLE! He is coming to SF and I'm going to bust my ass to get tickets. It's also at the new SF Jazz Center and the event manager in me is dying to check out the venue.
6. I'm obsessed with this book I just bought, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. ::fans self:: It is not for the prude and I am eating it up with a spoon.
7. I'm thinking about a conversation I had today - I can't get it out of my head and that bothers me. It's hard when people hold up a mirror to you and you either don't like what you see or don't see what the problem is with what the mirror is showing you. I'm currently trying to decide if I feel the former or the latter. I'm not really sure, though.
8. I'm tired of caring what people think about the life decisions that I've opted to make. I think I'm just tired of everything. I feel incredibly exhausted and I'm not sure why. Maybe blood clot. Maybe stagnation/ambivalence at my job. Maybe it's just one of my moods. I just can't deal right now. I want everything to just sort itself out in a nice little package, but I'm also aware that life is not like that.
9. I'm thisclose to crying. Blah. I hate crying. 
10. I need to stop sleeping with the TV on. I woke up in the middle of the night to an episode of American Horror Story and nearly crapped my pants with fear.

That's all for right now. Work is going to be brutal tomorrow if I don't get my butt in bed now.

xoxo

Adventures in Clotting, part II.

Emotions are pretty brutal for me. I don't like them - I find them messy, inconvenient, and useless. They've never really served me well and they don't do anything. There's no action in them, no solution, just feeling. They're fine for other people to have, and I respect other people's connection to them, but I'm a fucking gangster and I don't have time for that shit.

No one really tells you that one of the hardest parts of recovering from an illness is all the emotional baggage and shit that it brings up. You worry about how your body will function - how you'll breathe, how you'll stand the pain, how you'll be able to go back to your day-to-day operations. You never think about how it's going to make you feel and the emotional toll that having a failing body can take on a person. My first pulmonary embolism destroyed me. It caused a major upheaval in my life - I mean, I moved 3,000 miles for Christ's sake! It was gut-wrenching and terrible. I cried every night for like 2 months, terrified that I was going to die of a stroke in the middle of the night. My mother called me every day at noon to make sure I wasn't in the middle of a mental breakdown. I didn't eat for like six weeks and lost a ton of weight, to the point where my then-boyfriend would get super concerned and practically force-feed me. It was not a pleasant time. I don't ever want to go back to that space, and as a result, I think I may be acting a little bit recklessly.

In the 18 days since my episode, I've gone out 9 times and I've gotten insanely drunk at least 4 or 5 times. I've said yes to nearly every invitation I've gotten to go out and do things. I know why I'm doing this - I figure if I go go go and keep drinking, keep hanging out, keep socializing, I won't ever get to that place where I'm depressed. The first night after getting back from the hospital, I had a mini-meltdown, complete with tears, yelling, and all sorts of other craziness. I just felt sorry for myself and truly felt so alone. I'm a really strong person, but some things just break you down and that night I was not in a good place. I don't ever want to be in that place again. So I drink, I party with my friends, I do all the things that I probably shouldn't be doing just to stop up that empty space that exists inside me. I don't really know how to cope with this. Maybe therapy? Maybe meditation? Maybe yoga? I don't fucking know, but I need to get a handle on it before I make things worse.

Adventures in Clotting, part I.

Ugh, blood clots. They really are the worst. About three weeks ago, I started having these mysterious pains in my lower left back. It didn't feel like back pain - it felt like something internal, like my kidneys were on fire. I also started having difficulty breathing while I was walking. I like taking 4 and 5 mile-long walks, which don't usually exhaust me, but it was like I needed to sleep for 3 hours every time I took one. Not cool. So the first day back from winter break, I went into work and made two doctor's appointments. One to get this mole removed from my face (holla, mole is gone!) and the second to see what was up with this pain. I kind of had a feeling that it was the whole pulmonary embolism (blood clot in lung) thing, but I wasn't in excruciating pain, so I figured maybe it was something else. The doctor I saw was terrible and basically discounted all of my symptoms and history, ordered me some blood tests that I could take whenever (aka he felt there was no urgency) and sent me for a chest x-ray. I could go into how terrible he was and how I'm not going to use One Medical ever again, but that's a story for another time. I got home and I couldn't even lie down the pain was so unbearable. So I trusted my gut and I went to the hospital. Long story short, the doctor was like, "You have a ton of clots all over both of your lungs and you have bits of your left lung that are dying. You're going to be on blood thinners for the rest of your life. Have a nice day!"

I had to spend the night in the hospital, which was a little bit scary. The hospital was pretty nice, but I was next to a meth addict and his visitor until I could get a room, and then they brought this old black man in who was shrieking bloody murder, so that was disorienting, but eventually I got my own room. I wanted to cry when they first told me. It was really fucking hard to hear. I'm not afraid of death. I made my peace with God the first time this happened and if I die tomorrow, I'll be okay with that. Life has been pretty fucking sweet ::cue Drake's 'Started From the Bottom':: and while there are a few things I'd like to do before I die (reach self-actualization, fall in love, etc), I'm okay if I don't get to do them. This is life - nothing is guaranteed. However, I'm pretty fucking scared of dying. The actual physical act. Will it be painful? Will it be sudden? Will I suffer? I also don't want to live the life of an invalid. I had big fucking plans for this year - YEAR OF FUN - and it just seemed like that was all going to go down the drain. It upset me, but I was able to hold it together. I mean, I didn't want to become a spectacle in an environment where there was already a lot of crazy shit going down.

The next day, my amazing doctor friend, L, came to visit and was there while the doctors discharged me. She took a look at my CT Scan results and made a face like SHIT THIS IS SERIOUS. Which was good because I don't like to take anything seriously, and now I know that I have to. I had lunch with her and Vest, and then headed home to self-imposed exile for a bit. I'm feeling much better now. I took two weeks off of work to recuperate. I don't have any pain, really. Sometimes I get short of breath and my fatigue is out of this world, but in general, I feel okay from a physical standpoint. Emotionally, well... that's a story for another entry.

that hangover life.

This weekend was a hot, holy mess, but ultimately fitting with the theme of Year of Fun (#YOF). Currently, I'm sitting on my couch, nursing the mother of all hangovers with a bottle of water and the most gigantic pot of pesto pasta ever created. I woke up at 3am wanting to murder any and everything in sight. I'm truly testing the limits of my liver this week. I don't even know if I can so much as look at a bottle of anything alcoholic without vomiting. On the plus side, though - I did not vomit! So there's that! Ladies and gentlemen, I am still doing this shit at 28. What is my life?!

On Friday night, I had dinner with a few friends at a cute restaurant in the Marina. We proceeded to drink a ton of wine and I started spewing the most ridiculous shit ever. I don't know what it is, but I get drunk and all of a sudden all of my sexual stuff is on the table. All of it! I mean, I'm a fiercely sexual person and I'm not ashamed of anything, but there's a time and a place. I'm also fairly certain we ruined dinner for the table next to us (which happens to me all the time... ask me about the time I pulled out nipple clamps and a butt plug at a Korean restaurant. The table next to us was SCANDALIZED). Anyway, I proceeded to talk about the penis of this dude I'm trying to get with (it's amazing, fyi). I also talked about anal sex, oral sex, facials --- omg it was a hot mess. I'm cringing right now thinking about it. The boys were really mean to me - like they always are, teasing me about random shit. So of course, I had to hop on the offensive, which only eggs them on more. I know this and yet, I can't stop. I'm one of those girls that everyone loves to tease and I have no idea why. It's usually my default role in any friendship.

Post-dinner, we hit up a bar, where I talked one of the guy's ears off about more sex things and prostitution and starting my own escort service. The fact that this boy actually listens to my shit, asks questions and doesn't ignore me is insane. He has the patience of a saint. Especially after I berated his color-blindness and made him ID various colors on signposts to prove he could see them. I am a terrible person. Later, he texted me after they all dropped me off and I called him a worm and told him that I was going to make it my mission in life to destroy him. WHO THE FUCK AM I?! I'm not fit for human consumption.

Saturday was the usual bingo date with Vest, followed by dinner with JazzGirl and L&S. They all went off to be hip and cool and I came back home to snuggle in bed with my laptop and watch Flowers in the Attic. Yesterday, I did football and it destroyed me. Drinking from 11am til 9pm is never a good look. Luckily, there was much less sex talk, but more Snapchatting and Fireball shots. I'm pretty sure I drank my weight in whiskey, and I'm currently paying for it at 6pm the next day. One day, I'm going to be a mature woman who doesn't do crazy shit like this and has all of her ducks in a row. Today is not that day. #YOF

I HAVE RETURNED!

It's me - the blogger formally known as Pillow Talk Is Extra (God, I still love that name - RIP), also known as Cleopatra Jones. It feels SO good to be back on Blogger, after an ill-advised switch to Tumblr for a hot minute, and a mini-meltdown over whether or not I wanted to continue writing. During that time, I've learned that writing and blogging is in my soul. It is what helps me process my shit, and I greatly enjoy sharing the intimate details of my life with the interwebz. However, I can't do that on a Tumblr account that has my photos and name on it. So I am back, in a new incarnation to spread foolishness and poor decision-making to the masses.

For those of you who don't get the reference, my new blog title comes from a sketch on my all-time favorite TV show, The Chappelle Show (RIP to that, too!) - The Racial Draft. It's also a fairly apt description of me - black girl T&A with a pristine criminal record. Maybe that's why all these white boys wanna holler at me? Anyhow, I'm ready to start writing on the (semi) daily, and there have been a lot of updates since I've been gone.

1. I went to Europe for a month. Had a steamy hookup with a hot 23 year old Italian pilot. Highlight of my life thus far!
2. I lost all motivation to do work - basically, I'm in the middle of a real career crisis and I'm not sure what's going to come out of it. It's scary. I'm scared. AHH!
3. I had a lovely NYC New Year's Eve with some of my favorite people (old friends and new!)
4. I declared 2014 the Year of Fun #YOF
5. I had *another* pulmonary embolism. Multiple actually, complete with Lung Death! Yeahhhh... fun... more on that to come...
6. I learned that sometimes you gotta keep a flirtation at just that and not try to advance it in any way, shape or form. So much maturity!

So yeah... I'll keep posting and hopefully people will start reading. I've missed you all!

xox