Welcome to Gaia! ::

Life. It has certainly turned interesting. I'm not sure I like who I'm becoming, to be completely honest. But, I've been quite depressed lately, so... that might have something to do with it.

Let's see. I think I'll go back a ways, because I don't know who knows what about my life. In January, one of the most awesome things ever happened. I travelled to Portland, Oregon, and met aretoo, Kusa, Lin, and Mr. Jimmy in real life. surprised It was far too short, only a weekend, and I was all sorts of exhausted and out of sorts, but it was immensely fun. I spent $100 on books and found a copy of the first book my favourite author wrote, which I'd been looking for for years. I ate aretoo's cooking, and snuggled Kusa, witnessed how very freakishly fast Linny can type and ate a delicious and adorable caramel apple penguin that he hand made for me, and was witness and subject to the lovely sarcasm of Jimmy. We went on a cruise on the ship aretoo works on, saw someone we were fairly certain was a porn star, were going to go on a hike and went shoe shopping for me (cause mine weren't good for water or hiking) but didn't end up going hiking after all as the weather was too bad. I ate real Mexican food for the first time, too. It was GREEN in JANUARY, which still surprises me. All in all I had a great deal of fun.

I got home, and found I was out of a job. Was unemployed and harassed by my parents until March, where I did a one-day Market Research contract at a mall. Harassed some more. Then in April I got together with Roland, and got another few Market Research contracts (almost at the same time), and was working that super stressful job until... May or June? I'm not sure, I just know I miss the paychecks. I started working part time as a secretary at a church on top of that. Then when the Market Research stopped, I started working at a post office. In August I went down to New Mexico and visited Roland for a couple weeks. It was amazing. I got home and my parents insisted we go to Banff, and... confusion. But to keep it short, I lost my job at the post office, but it wasn't because of Banff, the letter of termination of employment had been written about halfway through my visit with Roland. So, I didn't get two weeks notice. I also hadn't been allowed breaks while working there, which is completely illegal. But I really don't even care anymore, I was constantly afraid of being fired while working there, and I don't like the constant feeling of fear. I'm free of that now.

So in September I started attending the University of Calgary, my major being Anthropology. I started with 4 courses, and dropped one in October because I couldn't understand the professor. I dropped another course about a week ago because I mentally shut down for a month and haven't been functioning well enough to even put clothes away let alone study, and I was going to fail. I'm going to try to take three courses next semester, though. This fall has been full of various mental breakdowns for me, for a variety of reasons.

I went to the doctor recently, got a physical, and he says I have an extreme vitamin D deficiency, and the most common effect of that is depression. Also, my knees are literally wearing themselves away as I walk. The kneecap is catching on the cartilage behind it and wearing away slowly. I can get physiotherapy exercises to do to help, though. It's winter, and I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (fancy term for "you get depressed in the winter). That and not taking medications, with extra stress studiously and personally, it's not really a surprise that I've been feeling so lousy.

So, yeah. Not really a light-hearted post, sorry. I'm just not really having a good time of things lately.