Yes, gross me out and gag me with a spoon. I really should have photos for this, but I was so grossed out I just wanted to get away from it. I am starting to feel like I should never go out to eat anymore. At least not at any fast food place. But, I never like to cook. My parents offered to go to KFC. I don’t really like KFC, but what the hell. They have these chicken wrap things that I thought were decent enough…chicken, lettuce, tomato, cheese…all wrapped in a tortilla. So, I ordered a couple of those. Lucky me, I take a bite of one and then I look at the thing again in horror! Something PLASTIC is sticking out of it!!! At first I was like “oh my god! is that a syringe!” But then I opened it up and it was a ball point pen! Now, I am sure this can happen easily. Someone bends over and a pen falls out of their shirt or something. On the scale of things that are gross it really isn’t that disgusting, but when you are eating and you already feel like maybe the place isn’t that great and then there is this foreign object in your food! OMG! Sooooooooo disgusting! Oh. I can’t ever go back there. This goes along with my horror story of eating a baked potato with cheese and broccoli from Wendy’s and finding a BUG in it!!! Oh yes! It was totally disgusting! I can’t go back there either! I think maybe I will stick with Starbucks drinks where I can see them making the thing…I don’t know. I don’t even want to go out to dinner any more. I’m always afraid I’ll find a finger floating in my pop can AFTER I’ve had the entire pop too. And you know there are asshole kids who actually spit in the food or worse! Shudder. I don’t know I’m pretty hesitant about places anyway. You never know what is really going on in those kitchens and you always hear how people don’t wash their hands. Okay, yes, I border on having OCD and this just makes me want to walk around with some germ inspection tools! A PEN in my friggin’ food!!! Well, at least I didn’t bite down on it! I really would have freaked out then!

Well, since I have watched all of America’s Next Top Model, I moved on to Dexter, because iTunes just uploaded season two. Let me tell you, season two was just GREAT! If you haven’t seen Dexter, it is a show that is on Showtime normally. Well, I don’t get Showtime, so I have to download the episodes from iTunes.

I started watching Dexter, because the main character is played by Michael C. Hall who I like from a show called Six Feet Under. Six Feet Under is now completely over, but you can find it in its entirety on DVD. It is another great, although somewhat morbid show. Anyway, Michael C. Hall plays Dexter and I thought I’d check out his new role. I was really happy to find another great show to watch! Dexter is just your average serial killer/forensics expert who solves crimes by day and kills the bad guys by night. It is a bit gross in parts, but not really too scary nor too gross. It just sounds really gross, but it isn’t. And, I don’t like shows that are way too scary, so this one isn’t. It is suspenseful though. And, ironically enough, it is even amusing in parts.

Kudos have to go to Michael C. Hall, because he gives a stellar performance and he couldn’t be more different from his character on Six Feet Under. The entire cast is really pretty great and the writing is wonderful. There are some things that I never really expected and then they all fit into place nicely.
As with any show from Showtime or HBO, the show takes more liberties with language and nudity, but I really don’t care. If that kind of thing offends you, then you’ll probably be offended by this show. Whatever.

So, I finished watching season two and am now trying to finish up The Sopranos, season six. In case you are wondering, yes, I do watch too much TV, but I really do like good TV. I’m definitely not an anti-TV person. Anyway, if you like good TV, you should try to check out Dexter if you can find some way of watching it. It is just fabulous, dahling!

I just finished reading “Manic: A Memoir” a few days ago, so I thought I’d share my opinion with you. The book is the memoir of this high-powered female attorney from Los Angeles who has bipolar disorder. I’m usually really interested in most books related to mental illness issues, so of course I was excited to read this book. First I should say that overall I thought it was a pretty good read. It kept a fast pace and it kept me from drifting off. Sometimes I can’t pay much attention to things when I am reading, so it was nice to just leisurely read this book without much effort. The author’s story was compelling and the writing was okay, but there seemed to be something missing. I felt like the author was still very detached from her illness and couldn’t describe her emotions very well. It seems like she talked about what was happening at particular moments, but didn’t extensively get into her inner struggle. And, it was kind of strange, but I didn’t really empathize with the “character/woman” in the memoir. Maybe she didn’t want us to empathize with her or maybe she didn’t care one  way or the other. On a scale of zero to five, I would probably give this 3.5 stars and I would say if you are at all interested in mental illness memoirs, do pick up a copy, but you might want to wait for the paperback edition. Also, if you are interested in a book that seems to be written in a more compelling way, check out Elyn R. Saks’ “The Center Cannot Hold.” It is her memoir of her life with schizophrenia. Also enjoyable is “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison who is pretty much considered an expert in the field of mental health. She writes about it, she has problems of her own, and she is a psychiatrist herself!! Anyway, a lot of good reads out there this year. It is good to see mental illness getting some shelf space!

Well, my birthday is coming up. On April 24th I’ll be 35 years old! Ouch! So old! haha. I can hardly believe that it will be 20 years since I’ve been 15 years old! 20 years since I first went crazy. 20 years of getting to know schizophrenia. How did I get to be so old? I still act like a kid and still feel like a kid in many ways. I still remember those first days of illness. It seems like time has stood still in many ways, like I’m still that 15-year-old sitting on the cold cement leaning against the brick wall of my high school watching the sun come up and not really being aware of what time it was or where I should really be. I remember some sense of unreality, like the world was opening up to me in some special, weird way. It was weird, the illness just seeped into me and into my life. I didn’t suddenly become schizophrenic one day. Maybe I was really always schizophrenic. Was it inevitable? Was I put on this path during some malfunction in my mother’s womb? How did I get to be this way? I often wonder if there was anything I could have done differently to prevent this. Maybe if I hadn’t gone on that crash diet or maybe if I hadn’t gotten chicken pox so late in life. What if I hadn’t been fat while growing up? Would that have tipped the scale to the other side? The side where I turn 15 and 16 and 17 and nothing goes wrong and I don’t go insane? I’d almost like to know that from the moment of conception I was put on this path and that there was nothing that I did to make things worse. I don’t want to go around guilty and feeling like I caused this all myself. Like, what if I accidentally did one thing wrong and I ended up like this because of it?!? Damn that would suck!

Anyway, I’m turning 35. Birthdays are always good for pondering your existence and wondering about life in general. I’d write more, but I need coffee instead. I need to get some before I completely collapse here. Here’s to 20 years of schizophrenia! Maybe the next 20 years I’ll deal with it all a little more gracefully!

I just wanted to thank each and every one of you who visits my little blog here. I would certainly try to do the blog even if no one stopped by, but truthfully, the fact that people are stopping by to see what I have to say has really made this experience so much richer! I know people are really busy and don’t have time to do a lot in their day, so it means a lot to me that you would even spend 30 seconds looking at my blog. Thank you so much and I’m going to see if I can make an effort to post more often. Sometimes laziness consumes me!!! AHHH!!! Well, thank you thank you thank you!!! And if you have any suggestions for what you’d enjoy reading about, just post a comment below. :) Hugs to you all! :) kristin

Well, I just thought I’d post this song that I sang. I felt kind of awkward singing to the camera, so please forgive the closed eyes! heh. It is my rendition of Suzanne Vega’s song Caramel. Thank you for listening. I hope you like it.

Okay, you may wonder where I have been hiding. I’m sort of stymied for topics to write about right now and I have become addicted to America’s Next Top Model via YouTube uploads. Right now I am on Cycle 8. For me, watching ANTM is a complicated issue. Why? Because of the whole fat thing of course. How can I willingly spend my time wrapped up in something, really a whole industry, that has nothing but contempt for someone like me? If there ever was an industry out there that was anti-fat and anti-anything-but-rich, it is the fashion industry. There literally is no place for someone of my size in the entire industry. Right now there are people just fighting to be “plus-size” models at size 12. They have a hard enough time getting the fashion industry to take them seriously. What I think it really boils down to is complete elitism and rampant discrimination against people who are not stick thin and against people who don’t have money. The fashion industry has been able to get away with this elitist behavior and attitude for a long time, because it is basically the same rich, thin people and all of their underlings towing the line and perpetually reinforcing the same bad attitudes. The fact is, they could do fat couture if they had the skills or desire, but they choose not to.

I remember watching Project Runway and in almost every season they have a competition where they have to make an outfit for someone who is more “normal” in their proportions…meaning, they have some meat on their bones and are fatter than a waif model. The contempt that most (not all) of the designers show for having to dress a regular woman is unbelievable, but what it really proves to me is how untalented the designers are who cannot create a simple garment for someone above size zero! They sit there and bitch and complain and pretty much only come up with sack dresses, because they are completely inept.

So, for me, this kind of leaks out the real truth about the fashion industry and why top designers refuse to make clothes for real women–they don’t know how to do it. Quite frankly, if I were a fashion designer, I would be designing clothes for fat people, because it is a bigger challenge to try to make something beautiful and exciting for someone who has a lumpy, non-hanger body!

And really, what would it mean to have an entire industry turn on its ear and start developing lines for people who are larger? What would it mean if magazines had photo shoots of fat people too? It would mean that we would have to re-envision our ideas of beauty. THAT would be MAJOR!!!

Gah, there is so much I want to say about this issue that I’m not putting into words correctly! And I want to say why I still love watching ANTM and Project Runway and other fashion-oriented things. Heck, I remember when my parents bought me a subscription to YM magazine when I was a teenager and I just LOVED looking at all the cool outfits the girls would wear in those fashion pages. There is something about it all that is creative and exciting and expressive and theatrical and I love it all. I love the transformations that are created with make-up, hair, clothes, light, and even one expressive glance of the eyes! I guess there is just something about me that makes me want to play dress-up and wear exciting, fun clothes just like other people. Maybe it is my inner drag queen, but I want to look fabulous and fierce just like everybody else!!! I love clothes and putting together outfits, despite the fact, or maybe because my size has been an obstacle to cute fashion my whole life. How many times have I felt terrible for not being able to fit into a smaller size? A million? Billion perhaps.

And, it isn’t only fat that holds me back. It is the money too. I guess I could design and have my own clothes made to order if I was rich enough. What I wouldn’t give to be able to just go to a discount store or thrift store and stock up on simple items too, but I can’t.

So, damn, the industry hates me. I can barely find clothes that are even big enough to fit me! If I gain any more weight I will be out of the clothing realm all together!! I am rejected from an entire industry, but I still look from the sidelines. I don’t know why really. I know it is silly, but there is something glamorous and fun that I just love about fashion!

Hi There! I just wanted to let you all that are interested know that I am working on a new website specifically for my Bearista Bears! I thought that I didn’t want to load down this site with too many bear things, but that I did want to have a forum for discussing bears and having their photos! I will have a website (bearistacollection.com) and a blogsite (bearistablog.wordpress.com) so that hopefully I can discuss the Bearistas with other people who are interested! I will also be showing some of my other Starbucks collections. The sites are not really up and running yet, so if you check on them, they are under construction. Anyway, when the sites are finished, I will come back and post something to let you know! :) Thanks for stopping by! :) Oh, and one last thing: I am not affiliated with Starbucks in any way.

Here I am posting another photo I took of myself with my laptop. Then I messed around with it in Photoshop. It is my belief that every human being on the planet has some kind of beauty about them, even if to most people they appear grotesque. I think that a good photographer with access to Photoshop could make anyone look good and compelling.

Well, I was just messing around with taking my pic with my laptop the other day. Actually, I must confess, because I am constantly taking weird photos of myself with PhotoBooth, the photo application that comes with Macs. I take lots of ugly, unsightly photos with it and some okay photos. This one I took in color when I was actually wearing some make up and then I took it into Photoshop and made it black and white and adjusted the lighting and saturation and stuff. My eyes were also a bit puffy from my allergic reaction, so I tried to take that puffiness out. Aside from having no neck, I think this is a pretty good photo!

Another thing I enjoy collecting is Converse tennis shoes. Some women collect expensive designer high heels, I collect tennis shoes! heh A few of my Converse are missing, because they are lost in my room right now. Also, I do have shoes other than Converse. Maybe those will be for another blog.

I did just make a video of my Winter Holiday Bears, but some people might like to see the photos outside of a video, so I decided to put the photos up here as well. In addition, I am putting up the Valentine’s Day Bears that I have. I hope you enjoy them! :) The reindeer bear pictured above is actually a bear that was only available in the Barnes & Noble Starbucks several years ago. He probably isn’t normally counted among the regular Starbucks Bears.

Oh, so I haven’t blogged about this yet, but I went up to Seattle with my family about a week ago and participated in the National Institute of Mental Health-funded research project regarding schizophrenia. I had a really great time and the research team was totally fabulous and wonderful!

So, we arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. They took blood samples from my parents and brother and they tried to take it from me, but they couldn’t find a good vein, so I had to get the blood draw the next day in the lab. That first day they only talked to my parents for a short while, then they sent them back to the hotel. My brother and I stayed on and did some interviewing. They asked us some questions about family and my situation with having schizophrenia and stuff. General background info. We also did a couple of tests, like remembering some words and counting backwards from 100 by sevens and that kind of thing.

My brother and I took a cab ride back to the hotel and the cab driver drove like a maniac! I was clenching the seat the whole ride back, convinced that we would end up in a wreck on the way! hehe. We had dinner with my parents and I even got a wonderful piece of oh-so-chocolate cake with raspberry and caramel sauce! Delicious! After dinner I went up to my room. The study paid for my parents to share a room and my brother and I to have our own separate rooms. I wanted to relax, so I took a shower. Unfortunately, when I got out of the shower I slipped and fell all over the bathroom floor. Luckily I didn’t get hurt much. I mainly just bruised my shoulder. I was very lucky the bathroom door wasn’t closed, or I probably would have broken the door or my head!

Anyway, the next day we got up to get to the hospital around 1pm. Of course, we got there very early, because my parents always insist on being extremely early for places. Well, I tend to run late, so that always drives them crazy! heh. Because we were early I was able to get a nice iced espresso drink. Ahh! Just what I need when I wake up! Yes!

We went upstairs and the first thing they had me do was go back downstairs to get the blood draw done. The blood guy was super-smooth and I hardly felt a thing. What a relief! We went back upstairs and got right to work. A lot of the testing involved stuff on a computer. They tested facial recognition, word recognition, emotion recognition, number recall and recognition, shape recognition…basically all sorts of stuff along those lines. It was weird, because these tests weren’t like the SAT tests or anything. There was this one test where my brain just couldn’t work right! It was like seriously fatigued by the test and there wasn’t anything I could do about it! I couldn’t try harder or fake my way through or anything. It was really strange!

After a while of testing, we took a break and got lunch. Then my brother came back and did the tests that I had done and I did the tests that he had done. So, the second part of the day for me involved doing some eye-tracking exercises, and sitting in a lounge chair hooked up to electrode things that were attached to my face and head. In one test they measured our startle response. That test was completely annoying, because I kept getting scared by the startle thing! Just when I would relax, it would come back and scare me! The final exercise was a measurement of my brain activity when they played this thing in some headphones. To me, the noise sounded like someone tapping on a pane of glass right in the middle of my head. It was quite odd. That test was far more relaxing, but it seemed to take FOREVER! I didn’t much care for the tests hooked up to the electrodes, because they were a lot more boring and irritating.

After one last break, they did one more bit of testing where I had to relate back to the researcher a story that she read to me. It was kind of difficult to remember everything exactly the way she said it, even though she had only said it like 5 seconds beforehand! Well, after that we finished up and went back to the hotel and had some dinner with my parents. Then a friend of ours who just happened to be down in Seattle from Alaska and just happened to be staying at the same hotel stopped by! It was kind of terrific to see her, because I had never met her in person until that night, but I had known of her for years.

In a nutshell, when I was much younger, we were a host family for some kids who played baseball in some tournaments down here in Vancouver. Well, one of the kids who we hosted, Eric, has always stayed in touch and so has his mom! They live in the small fishing village called Ketchikan, Alaska. Well, Eric’s mom still lives there, but Eric has since moved to Seattle. So, my parents have met Eric’s mom, Diana, before on trips they took to Alaska, but I had never met her until this trip up to Seattle. And us meeting was pure coincidence! It was strange to meet her after all these years, because it is like she is practically one of the family already!

So, we met with Diana until she returned to her room. Then my brother and I left to go to our rooms. I stayed up all night entertaining myself on the computer and watching TV until morning. Then I went downstairs and greeted my parents and we had breakfast together before they left to do their part of the research! They were at the hospital all day. My brother slept in, then wandered around the city a bit. I just slept and slept until about 15 minutes before we had to leave. I didn’t even get dressed, I just stumbled down to the car in my pajamas and off we went! I was so tired I even took a nap in the car on the way home!

So, yeah, that was the trip! So, what was it all about? Great question. I guess I should have gotten to that sooner. Ooops! Oh well. Basically, they took our blood so they could see if they could tease out genetic markers as they relate to cognitive functioning in people with schizophrenia and in people who are first degree relatives of people with schizophrenia who may show similar ways of functioning cognitively as compared with the schizophrenic person, but the first degree relatives will most likely not be as impaired to the same degree as the schizophrenic person. Gah! That is a mouthful and I don’t know if it makes sense. Basically, the hypothesis is that schizophrenic people perform with some deficits in certain areas compared to “normal” non-schizophrenic people. The researchers guess that first degree relatives who do NOT have schizophrenia may perform with more deficits than “normal” non-schizophrenic people on these same cognitive tests. So, these first degree relatives perform somewhere in between normal and schizophrenic on these cognitive tests, despite the fact that they do not have full blown schizophrenia. In the end what the researchers would like to do would be to link up these cognitive deficits with actual DNA and specific genes, so that they might better understand the mechanisms for why schizophrenia happens and how to treat it more effectively. The research is really quite fantastic and hopefully it will really open some new doorways in schizophrenia research.

Well, I guess that is about it. I am a bit tired of writing at the moment. If you or anyone you know is interested in participating in this or any kind of schizophrenia-related research, just send me an email and I’ll point you in the right direction. This study even paid for everything, so we didn’t have to dig out of our own pockets! So yah, I highly recommend research participation if you qualify. It is pretty fun and quite interesting! :) And, it really helps out future generations of people. Oh, let’s hope so they will suffer not at all or at least less!

There appear to be some problems right now with WordPress, the place where I have my website, so if you run into issues you might have to try back later. Sorry. :(

I made this little video with photos of my Winter Starbucks Bearista bears plus a couple of other non-Starbucks bears. I’m going to be photographing my other Bearista bears, but I don’t know when I’ll get it done. Whenever I have new photos I will post them on this blog. Hope you enjoy! :)