For the last couple of weeks, I have been Missing in Action otherwise known as MIA. I have had a LOT of stuff going on. A co-worker has been ill and was put into the hospital, so I have been, along with other co-workers, picking up all the extra work. Extra work that I really do not have the energy for to be honest. It has been wearing me out.

Then, Saturday night, I went to a friend’s little sister’s birthday party. When I came home that night, I had started itching around my waist extremely bad. Sunday morning, I woke up with two small dime-sized rashes on my waist. So, I did what any normal pharmacy technician would do, I bought some hydrocortisone cream and benadryl. Monday morning, I awoke to an intense itching, and to my absolute HORROR, I saw many new welts had developed, all along my waistline plus one on the bend of my leg. I knew it was not poison ivy or oak because it does not weep nor spread like that.

Some of my friends suggested I had shingles because of the band it had made along my waistline, so I went to the doctor. He ruled out shingles due to it passing the midline, although it does look similar to it he said. He ruled out poison ivy and oak, but stated that I had contact dermatitis. The doctor has NO clue to what is causing it, and prescribed a prescription strength topical steroid cream, along with Claritin in the morning and more Benadryl at night. He told me I may have to actually take steroid medication or get a shot. I personally vote for the shot. The pills caused tremendous weight gain in me last time, not to mention severe nausea.

So far, the cream is helping a little bit with the not so severe spots, but new ones keeping popping up. The only thing we can think of that changed was washing my clothes at my parents in the new 2x detergent. Since I am allergic to a lot of stuff as it is, I am having a hard time figuring out just what exactly IS causing this. I honestly am absolutely miserable, so if anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears and eyes at this point….

To see the intro to this story, please read The Ice Castle Within – Part I

I tried to plug-in every nook and cranny so that no one got through my defenses. I think I probably had even dug a moat and filled it with alligators too, if I wasn’t so cold..perhaps polar bears instead. It was better that way because if I cared, then I would get hurt. So instead of bonding with people, I learned to bond with animals. I was a strange child in that I could make friends with feral animals as well. Animals that no one else could get near, I could love and be loved by them. They gave unconditionally, never made fun of me, nor did anything to hurt me. Whoever said children are cruel is correct, so I believe it must be in our innate nature that we are born with to push out the competition. But animals gave me the love and attention that I was secretly craving and desperate for, so I have forever more had lots of pets around me. They give me something I am missing, something apparently my heart thinks I need, although my brain likes to argue with it at times. On another plane, my mother would get onto me for crying if something upset me, saying I would get sick and my sinuses infected if I did not stop it. If I wanted to watch a sad cartoon such as the original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, in which the Little Mermaid actually passed away by becoming foam of the sea and air, she would threaten that I would not be allowed to watch such things if it made me cry. So by this time, I had learned to A) NEVER show emotion, B) NEVER to allow anyone to think I cared about someone else, and C) to internalize everything. No one must know the inner me is what I believed. In a way, it’s an irony that she thinks I am a cold-heartless person because if anything, she made me what I am today. She never got onto me though for loving animals.

As time progressed, I slowly saw how other unattractive girls were treated by the popular kids. They were laughed at, called names, etc. I did NOT want to attract any unwanted attention to myself, so I steered clear of the whole liking another person scene. I tried once to give out Valentine cards while in elementary school and to give a guy I was friends with and kind of liked, a special one. He poked fun at it, wanting to know why I gave him that one…I just shut down and said it must have been a mistake, that I didn’t mean to do it. He blew it off, and that was the end of it. As I moved up into junior high, I developed several crushes, but did I dare share it with anyone…? no, not for a while, and then I finally told one of my two best friends. We had fun with it, but I would NOT let her tell him, nor would I tell him either. While hiding in my castle within, I had developed a fear of rejection as well. See my parents were going through their SECOND divorce to each other. In fact, my father left us on my 13th birthday, and I refer to that year, as the year from hell. Anything that could go wrong, did.

I learned from my parents that married people just fought with each other, that all men must be jerks, and that they will only hurt you. Why? Well, my dad had developed a gambling problem. When he would go out with his buddies and gamble, they would all drink to being past the point of drunkeness. My mom gave him the option of choosing his family or choosing his friends, so he left us. During that time period, I only visited my dad twice. I refused to have any contact with him, although my little brother chose to. But my little brother did not understand the way I felt, nor was he ever told about it until he was grown up. He never saw dad come home and pass out in the front yard. He never came in and saw dad put his fist through the wall in a temper-tantrum. My little brother has a bit of a hearing problem, so he’s very hard to wake up via sound. He inherited it from our father, who is actually deaf and hears through only one ear via a high-powered hearing aid. He never saw dad try to choke our mother to death, and never had to beat his father off of his mother. I did. Dad never laid a finger on me, but I would do anything to protect my mother because deep down inside this cold-heartless person, I love her more than life itself. That was the last straw, and why mom made him make a decision. She said that sometimes love just isn’t enough. I shortly thereafter vowed to never marry and that I did not want children, although somewhere deep down, I had this weird feeling that I wouldn’t be able to have kids anyway. I had seen first hand what I thought relationships were about, and I wanted no part of it.

Over a year or so, my dad straightened himself out on his own. He quit the toxic friends (borrowing the term from NK), quit the alcohol, and quit the gambling. He turned his life around, and eventually, my parents remarried each other for the THIRD time. Mom jokingly told him there would not be another divorce because three strikes he would be out, and she would just kill him and get it over with. She would never really do it, but let him know that she was done with any games he wanted to play, get serious, or she was done forever with him. We had all became a family again, but I had learned to hide things from family and friends. I never told them what was going on at home with the exception of my best friend (T) that lived next door. She had gone through similar things and understood where I was coming from. She was the sister that I never had, and that I needed. She was never cruel or mean to me, no matter how fat and ugly I was. I did use to tease her about being short..and then one day, she became taller than me, and roles were reversed…but I was okay with that. The teasing was the only form of affection that I had ever learned to show because it could be played off if I needed my defenses and then shot back down. We were as close as two peas in a pod. She was only 19 days older than me..although technically, I guess I am the older since I was born at past 10 months… LOL. We liked the same music for the most part and just enjoyed having fun together.

Throughout high school, I slowly became “one of the guys.” My other best friend (C) had grown toxic on me. At the time, I internalized everything so much that I couldn’t see the light for the trees, so to speak. She would wheedle and needle me until I would share who I had developed a crush on. We would make up nicknames for the guy because I was so fearful of him finding out. She would then constantly barage me with teasing about it. During this time, I was not allowed to date because I wasn’t yet 16. Everyone else I knew, had already had a boyfriend/girlfriend. I simply felt ignorant and stupid, besides naive. Although I was a band nerd, I was also popular in my high school. I was the strange, but unrelenting and unjudging person that could actually mingle with any group or “click” I chose. I didn’t pick on others and did not tolerate injustices against anyone. Although I could hang with the popular crowd, I really chose not to so much. They just wanted to party, have sex, and drink all the time. I didn’t see that as a good form of entertainment. I hung out with my friends from the other schools and my band friends. We had such good times.

Then, one day, I realized that both C and T really were into dating guys. I was kind of left in the cold. It wasn’t intentional, I don’t think, on either one of their parts. They both knew I had crushes, but that I really didn’t do much about it. I finally decided to take a chance on a guy, and tell him how I felt… it turned out, I had grown up around him, and he was T’s other best friend. Unfortunately, where personalities were alike between T and me, the similarities end. Where I was fat, acne covered, and ugly, she was slim, tall, and beautiful. Guys just followed her like puppy-dogs. She NEVER rubbed it in my face though. She, however, was not pleased that I had a crush on her other best friend. Her other best friend was in love with her, and thought since T and me acted alike, that I could be her…so naturally THAT didn’t work out. Plus, on the side-line, C started calling him up and talking to him as well. He did NOT like C at all.

Since it didn’t work out, I moved on, but everytime C would find out what guy I liked, she would go after them for herself. She would then ask me if I wanted to know what he thought of me. For some idiotic reason, I would say yes, because deep down, I was forever hopeful and optimistic. Then she would tell me that I should have NEVER liked the guy because all he would do is talk about her fat and ugly friend. That he didn’t want me hanging around all the time, that I was a third wheel. Well, needless to say, I figured out in the end just how toxic she was. And these guys, almost never went to our school because my fellow guy classmates referred to me “as one of the guys” and would protect me like a sibling. You just can’t date your siblings, it isn’t right..no matter if they are related to you or not.

The final straw with C was when she called up the guy I liked and was planning to ask to the prom. He didn’t like me for more than friends, but had stipulated that if I called and asked him on my own, he would go as friends. That he wouldn’t go if someone called and asked for me because he wanted ME to do the asking. He and T went to the same school together, so that is the reason I knew. Well, C had called and asked if I had a prom date yet, and I told her not yet and what I had to do. As soon as I got off the phone with her, I tried to call him..and his line was busy. Hours later, I told T that I couldn’t get a hold of him, so she would find out what was up the next day at school. Turns out C called him as soon as I got off the phone, and asked him for me..oh purpose. Why I still wonder? jealousy? competition? I’ll never know because she could have any guy she wanted, but just had to always ruin MY life. C just said she was sparing me the hurt, and it turns out, that I believe she asked him as her date as well, but he gave her a flat out NO. That was the final straw, and I cut my ties with C at that point. Our whole high school..which was SMALL, had already decided to hate her to begin with. She got away with stuff because she was a school employee’s daughter, stuff that no one else was allowed to get away with. She enjoyed flaunting it in their faces, and had done such awful things to me in the past, that my classmates would not forgive her.. Everyone always thought I was just too nice, and I always appeared to them as the happy go-lucky, super-nice, super-understanding person that would do anything for a friend.

But I had learned my lesson the hard way, that you can’t trust anyone, not even those that are closest to you. That the saying, “3 can keep a secret if 2 are dead” was as real as it got. By this time, T had dated a guy from my school that just didn’t want me hanging around. After they broke up, and some time had passed, I set T up with another friend from my school. At first, it was great. We all three hung out together, and then he brought one of his friends along so I wasn’t so much a third wheel. Then his friend started dating others, and there wasn’t enough room for me to tag along. Because that is all I had become, a tag along. We started fighting a lot when she would break plans to hang out with me. I didn’t know that she was with a guy that had said she had to choose me or him..and she chose him.

After that, I developed friendships, but just tried not to get too close because I discovered that in the long run, the only one you can depend on is yourself. As I moved on with my life, I went to college and developed new friendships. I dated a few guys. Some of them turned out to be jerks, and some of them did not. Those that did not, I remained friends with. I was fooled by one guy that seemed so nice. Turns out that while we were at college, and dating a bit, he ALSO had a serious girlfriend back home that he made no mention of until much later. I felt like such scum, but then realized that they only scum was he because HE was the one who did that..not me. I have seemingly had very many unsuccessful relationships..well at least a few LOL. I have learned quite a few lessons that I will keep with me.

Currently, I have not found my mister right. Perhaps I never will, but I will not dwell on that. I still try to bottle things up a bit too much, and some of my friends have learned when I am not happy or thinking about stuff that I shouldn’t. It must be too telling on my face. I am still afraid to let the walls melt just a bit to let others in..but hopefully, that will eventually change….

As many of you may have figured out by now, I am a bit of a nerd. I LOVE the hard sciences with the exception of physics. I just don’t understand it so well, although I can apply it to everyday life..I know… WEIRD. I never really have understood what they call the soft sciences. For those of you I have REALLY confused now.. the hard sciences are your chemistry, biology, biochemistry, physics, etc. The soft sciences are sociology, psychology and I usually put philosophy in this category as well. I am sure you are now wondering what the heck does this have to do with shopping…? well, I am getting there, give me a minute and you too will see just what it mentally DOES have to do with shopping…

As long as I can remember, my mother has tried to force me into shopping for clothes and enjoying it. I do not ever remember enjoying it in the least little bit. I especially hate having to go to the dressing room, try on something, model it for her to tell me, “no, it really isn’t you.” Duh, I tried to tell her that. Did she listen? Obviously not, but you know how mother’s are.. mother’s know best

Not only do I not enjoy shopping, but I am an Uncle Scrooge when it comes to my money. I HATE to spend it, I always have, and honestly get it straight from my momma’s daddy’s genes. It has to be inherited because everyone says I act just like he did. I know I didn’t get it from my father or his side of the family, they spend money as soon as they make it if they don’t have a spouse that is willing to watch their finances. My brother is unfortunately a spend-thrift as well, although he is now learning the hard way about credit card finances. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean I won’t spend the money if I NEED to, I just don’t like to spend it.

When I go to the grocery store, I may come home with only 20 items, but I promise you I have spent no less than an hour and a half deliberating if I reallllllly needed those items or not. I also learned that to keep from buying a bunch of junk food, I will allow myself one treat, and one treat only. If I see something I want more than something else…then I have to put the other item back. I know it sounds crazy, but it does seem to work for me, and keeps me from eating only bad stuff which tastes just ooooh so good. The experts also say never to go to the grocery store hungry, and this is true, but if you MUST do so, then what I mentioned above will actually help you from buying up the whole store. I also create myself a preset limit on how much I will allow myself to spend for each trip, and try to keep a mental tally on it, so that helps as well. You have to do, what you have to do on a tight budget.

Then, there is the infamous shopping for clothes. You will shortly read just exactly how nerdy I now am. I am very paranoid about trying on clothes. Why? Simply because you do not know who tried them on before you, and you KNOW they haven’t been washed between those try-on’s. I became like this in middle school, so it had nothing to do with working in a pharmacy, but oh, after working in the pharmacy, it is SOOO much worse. Any article of clothes that I see a spot on or make-up on the collar, I immediately rule out for trying on. There are just soooo many contact dermatitis issues out there, not to mention what kind of viral/bacterial/fungal spores are lingering around the collar of the fabric. And let’s not even discuss swimsuits. All I can say is, ARHHH! Well, I think I WILL comment on them anyway since it’s almost as bad as trying on pants or shorts.

Do you KNOW how many people do NOT wear underwear out there? or if they do, only a THONG! OMG, how disgusting is that? Are you now grossed out too? I know most experts say you cannot usually catch sexually transmitted diseases or conditions from such things as restrooms or clothing, but this is not always true. You can actually catch lice, scabies, and a few STD’s through this method. When my little brother had just started junior high, he actually caught a cureable STD from the boy’s bathroom at school. See, we went to a very small school, so the junior high AND high school were all in one building, and the men’s room he frequented happened to be in the lunchroom area. Since my brother was a summer baby, he had JUST turned 12 when he entered the 7th grade (the beginning of junior high at our school). My mom knew where he was at all times when not at school, and then at school, he was constantly under MY foot. So when he finally came to my mom bawling about not knowing what was wrong with himself, she took him to our family doctor. The doctor interviewed my brother, discovered that he had NEVER had sex, but had picked up an STD by using the men’s restroom, which he frequented thanks to irritable bowel syndrome. I won’t say anymore about that, but now I am sure you understand just how he picked it up. I know it is harder for ladies to catch such diseases from toilets, BUT now you see why I am REALLY paranoid about swimsuits, pants, etc.

Moving on to shopping for shoes… this is my final disgust. My mom at least forewarned us kids to ALWAYS wear some sort of sock/nylon/etc when trying on shoes. You just do not know how many people out there have fungal foot infections. And yes, anytime someone has tried on that shoe with no socks on and has athlete’s foot, you have now become a prime target for that dirty little fungus once you have slipped you pretty little foot into the slipper of nastiness. And just to further disgust you, you can also pick up toenail infections this way too. Those little fungi are just waiting and saying, “I’ll get you my pretties, and your little nails too..”

Once I get past the trying-on point of clothing and shoes, I am back to the point of deciding just how bad I really want or need the article in question. I may walk around the store for an hour just to decide. At the same time, I am sure I am making the security personnel jumpy because I walk round and round because I can’t make up my pretty little head. BUT, if I do decide not to get the product, I make sure I put it back where I found it because then I know security has usually watched me enough to see that I have simply decided not to purchase their product. From working in a grocery store, I know that by making a product disappear all of a sudden from hand when you’re not in the area where you picked it up, makes security and managers go nuts and start immediately searching to see just where you either hid the item on yourself or where you discarded it on the shelf.

It’s okay, go ahead and call me paranoid. Go ahead and call me OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). I will not take offense to it, I will just laugh it off. I work a pharmacy, so I have seen and heard it all, trust me. And yes, by-the-way, I AM a little OCD, but I think being just a tad that way makes me a more wary person. I think most people working in pharmacies are that way, we simply like to count things LOL.

And for one little last bit of personal advice, when you get home, throw those new clothes in the washer and make sure you lysol the inside of those shoes before you wear them because you never know who has “walked a mile” in those shoes.

My whole life, my mom has referred to me as “a cold-hearted bitch.” I always pretended not to be interested in anyone because of the redicule and constant picking she enforced upon me. Everytime someone showed a minute bit of interest in me, it was constantly, “how’s your boyfriend?” This began as early as second grade, and she will never know how much it damaged me.

I have always been a shy person, from as early as I can remember. It began with my embarassment in kindergarten. I sat in between two boys that would constantly look up under my dress, and I would go home crying and complaining because my mom forced me to wear that damned things to begin with. I quickly learned to hate being a girl, to hate frilly clothes, and anything else that was associated with being a weak, little girl. 

In the middle of first grade, we moved to a new town and a new school. The school I had came from, I had lots of friends, and other than those two boys, people were not mean to me. Even as a small child, I was abnormally tall and overweight (tall enough to ride the adult rides as Six Flags at age 5). So at the new school, I was taunted merciously with, “big momma and fat momma.” I didn’t understand why I was being called these names because I had never done anything to these girls. I learned to absolutely hate that school. I was so far ahead of my class coming from a big city to a small town, that I already had been introduced to Spanish, computers, and wrote in cursive. My new first grade teacher docked my papers because I was confused about whether to write in cursive or print. At lunch, when these weird red lights were turned on by the lunch monitors, no talking was allowed, otherwise you were given “licks” as it was called. This meant your teacher paddled your behind with a wooden board for misbehaving in the cafeteria. One day, a kid threw all of his lunch trash onto my plate. I said no, and put it back in front of him, and he proceeded to do it again. Well, sometime during this, the lights came on, so when I told him no and to throw away his own trash, I got licks for defending myself. He just got reprimanded for not throwing away his own trash. I quickly learned how unfair life is, that no one will stand up for you, and you had to be strong and keep your mouth shut and just take it. In no way will I say I never did anything wrong while at that school, but I won’t say that doing anything right got me anywhere either, and besides that I was just a little kid.

The next year we moved into our permanent house, and another new school. This time, kids were friendlier, as were the teachers. I enjoyed my time at that school, but was still a bit fearful of getting into trouble. I didn’t want to get whipped for something that wasn’t my fault again. By third grade, I was at yet another new school because of the convenience for my parents of picking us up after school. I made new friends and I had fun, although I was just wasn’t that outgoing. I had learned the hard way too early on to receed into my shell lest all hell break loose and it be blamed on me. By this time, my brother was old enough to start school kindergarten even though he was a summer baby, and ended up getting spanked nearly every day at school because of his misbehaving. He was also behind a lot of the kids since he had JUST turned 5 when he started school. My mom and the school wanted to hold him back a year, but my dad said no.

I really feel that my little brother would have benefitted from this by giving him time to grow up a little more. He was in trouble ALL the time. I mean REAL misbehaving, not just standing up for himself..and he honestly could have cared less. Because he was constantly in trouble for being too hyperactive and into everything at school, I tried to be the good child, to disappear and stay under the radar. If my brother did well, he was rewarded and if not, punished accordingly. My parents at first tried spanking him, but he laughed at them, so they would take away toys that he loved. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t..and shortly thereafter he was positively identified with attention deficit disorder after the recommendation by his teacher that he was quite behind compared to the other five and six year olds. This was before it was the big “craze” in the schools…when you could really tell who had it and who didn’t. Plus, mom always had this guilt complex because she feared that she personally caused it because she was drinking alcohol on a regular basis when she learned she was pregnant with my little brother. She’s always felt that she was the cause of his behavior problems by drinking when she was UNAWARE that she was pregnant.

See, my mother and my father did not plan on having anymore children. My dad had a son by a previous marriage that is eleven years older than me, so I was supposed to be the one and only. The doctors always said my mother would never be able to carry a child to term anyway, especially after multiple miscarriages, even a late one. There are women out there who do have menstrual cycles while pregnant, and therefore, do not know they are with child. Plus, I was supposed to be born twins. There were two heart beats for a long time, and we stopped moving, and were thought to have passed away. Eventually, I moved, giving my mother hope. This was in the time when sonogram machines were really new and the technology was still being developed so expectant parents did not get to take home pictures of their unborn children. From what I am told, she had a lot of trouble with her pregnancy of me. The doctor’s finally took me a month later than my due date after mom just could not seem to deliver me, but I fortunately had a good birthweight 6 pounds and a few ounces, but I was very sick often as a small child. The doctors did not want her to have anymore children, so that was supposed to be the end, until one day, my parents were surprised with the news of another baby on the way.

As my brother and I grew up, I slowly became the straight A student that was never in trouble, and he became the little hell-raiser. No one could get him to do his school work. My parents did everything they could, finally putting him on Ritalin so he could concentrate. He was on it for years until the point where he begged my mom no more because he felt so weird with it, and not himself. The teachers would berate him about why couldn’t he be more like his sister. That did not help matters. At home, he would get into trouble, and blame me for it, and for some STUPID reason, my mom would believe him..so once again, although MOST of the time, I didn’t do anything wrong, I got spanked or grounded for his actions. I love my little brother and my mom, but I learned to further recede into that nice chiseled, ice castle I had built around myself.

This will be continued in a further segment..so stick around if you want to see how things turn out…