jay

First Buffy has a lesbian fling, and now Angel and a fricken pet dragon!

Joss Whedon is god.

The rules on this meme seem to pre-suppose that these books are great because they have been read by many people. I think there should be a stike-through option for books you did NOT love.

100 Books

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (working on it..)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (What can I say? I went through a Hardy phase in high school)
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Amazing!!!!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

"The body does not die because you believe in death. The body exists, or seems to, because you believe in death.

Body and death are part of the same illusion, created by the egoic mode of consciousness, which has no awareness of the Source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under threat."

Eckhart Tolle

Beauty!

I have always been a big believer in the mind/body/spirit connection, and I have become even more aware of it these past couple of months. I've struggled with anxiety for most of my life, and things have been pretty crazy these past couple of months. I have experienced what the mind can do to the body, and vice versa, and I've been trying to figure out what I need to do to change things. I've been caught up in a vicious cycle of pain and anxiety, trying to figure out which is causing which and what I need to deal with first. I've come to the conclusion that I need to work on both at the same time, and be persistent and patient. Most importantly, I need to nurture and take care of myself during this stressful time in order to have the strength and motivation to see this through.

There is a lot of our biology that has changed very little since our caveman days, and things that were helpful during one point in our evolutionary history continue to function today. When the body is in pain, it triggers a chemical/neurological process to motivate the person to isolate and protect themselves while they are vulnerable. It made a lot of sense when we lived in caves, but it is more of an inconvenience than a protective mechanism in the modern world. I've been dealing with chronic pain for years, and I don't think I ever really acknowledged how much it has affected me, especially my emotional self. It wasn't until recently that I started to make the connection between pain and anxiety and the fact that my anxiety level was at its highest when I was in the most pain. I actually became consciously aware of how vulnerable I felt when I was in pain or having a raynaud's attack, especially when I was in public. I don't think it's a coincidence that I started having panic attacks around this same time last year, when the weather is coldest and my raynaud's symptoms are at their worst.

I don't think that pain is the only reason for my anxiety. Like I said, I've always been an anxious person, put it certainly plays a part. If I want to get my life back on track, I need to take a more pro-active approach to dealing with pain AND handling stress and anxiety in healthy ways.

My mullet is almost complete!! Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaa!!

It kind of itches though...

First of all, I really want to apologize to Brian and Lou for last night. Lars and the Real Girl IS an amazing moving, and I didn't get taken to the hospital in an ambulance just to avoid your scorn at it being a horrible movie. I hope you get a chance to see it, or at least rent it when it comes out.

I'm doing okay today, though I have a lot to think about. Last night Brian, Shizu, Lou and I decided to see the movie (2nd time for me)after about ten minutes in, I wasn't feeling so hot. At first, I thought it was an panic attack so I decided to keep sitting, breathe deeply and remind myself that it will be horrible but it will pass. There was a really funny part and when I laughed at it, pins and needles started shooting down my arms. Again, I figured it was anxiety and I continued to talk my self through it. The tingling got worse and spread up the left side of my face and into my eyes. The throbbing in my arms spread to my hands and intensified to the point that my fingers curled in on themselves and I couldn't move my fingers. It was extremely painful at that point and when I went to get up to leave, my knees became stiff and started to lock.

I've been told by numerous specialists that I am a high risk for stroke because of the severity of the Raynaud's disease, so I was worried that that's what I was experiencing. Amanda left with me to the lobby and she called home. My symptoms worsened and I asked her to call 9-1-1, despite my fear that I was overreacting. When my arms started to curl in and become rigid and my face went numb on the left side I thought "Oh my God, this could be it."

It was the scariest ordeal in my life, and I can remember coming to the suddenly horrifying realization that I am an atheist, and I was on my why to oblivion. Words cannot describe that kind of horror, and it continues to linger despite the fact that I'm feeling physically much better.

I was taken to the hospital by ambulance and when the wheeled me into the resussitation room, I was terrified. They hooked me up to monitors and covered me in warm blankets as my body continued to go into painful tremors. I was in tachycardia and they were trying to bring my heart rate back to normal. My hands were so cold that all of the colour in them had gone and they could get a proper O2 reading for quite a while. Mom and Amanda were finally allowed in and I was incredibly grateful. The doctor finally came and told me that I had experienced a bad panic attack and he gave me medication to bring my heart rate back to normal. He told me to make an appointment with my family doctor, and I saw him today.

Apparently, I had experienced a severe raynaud's attack, which then triggered a nasty panic attack. Normally, people feel pins and needles and experience numbness during a panic attack, but it was the Raynaud's attack that caused the muscles and tendons in my hands and legs to go into such extreme spasm that they contorted and twisted inward. The two conditions triggered each other in a vicious cycle and resulted in a horrible experience. He suggested that I start taking Effexor, an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medicine to prevent such an attack from happening again. He also have me Xanax in case such an attack did start again. He also mentioned that my hyperactive thyroid could also be playing a part in the triggering and the severity of the episode. In other words, it was a collection of factors that contributed to the episode.

So, what now? Well, it certainly has brought a lot of issues that I've been struggling with on some level to the surface. Someone once told me that anxiety is a symptom of change, good or bad. There are a number of things that I have been working on changing in my life, and perhaps this "moving away from the comfort of what's known" added to this event.

One thing for sure is that I realized how important other people are in my life. Usually when I'm struggling with anxiety or health issues in general, I pull away from people and isolate. This time, I allowed myself to be comforted and supported by those I love dearly and it was an amazing experience. At that moment when I thought that I was dying, All I could think about is the people in my life who I've pushed away--the people that I love who I never allowed myself to be intimate with, to allow myself to be loved back by.

Now that the episode is over and I'm alive and well, I find myself grieving for the bridges that I've burned and the opportunities that I allowed to slip away, perhaps for good. Life is short, and instead of taking advantage of the time I have and living life to the fullest I've been a prisoner in my own protective world, simply existing. Last night, I left that world and allowed myself to feel really connected to another person--to feel save and protected by the person that I love. For the first time in my life, I really understood the importance of feeling connected to another and to just exist in the moment with them.

I have a lot of work to do.

I have to get a needle in my knee tomorrow and I being a real wuss about it. I saw the surgeon today and I have a lump in my knee from the surgery he did last year. There has been a lot of swelling since the proceedure so he's giving me a steroid injection to settle things down. I figured I wouldn't have to worry about it until at least after Christmas but someone cancelled their appointment tomorrow. Lucky me...

The last time I got a steroid injection it was in my hip. It was crazy painful and when I got down off of the table, I passed out cold.

I think I'll bring my helment this time.

I went to see Lars and the Real Girl tonight with my uncle. It was amazing :)

I believe that I shall grow a mullet.

We all have our calling in life.

I have found myself, lately, with an overwhelming urge to join a cult.

Interesting.

I decided to join the International Taoist Tai Chi Society last week and it is the best decision that I have made in a good long while. I have finally accepted the fact that I need to steer clear of impact activities like Karate and settle for something better for my health. I've been curious about Tai Chi for a while now, and I've always had an attraction to Eastern philosophies and religions, but I couldn't seem to muster the courage to attend a class. I guess I got to a point in my life where I decided that I needed to stop allowing fear to prevent me living life to the fullest, so I took a chance and went to my first class.

Not only is it great exercise that doesn't cause agony the next day, but the spiritual aspects are very much in tune with my own beliefs, and I've been searching for a way to get back in touch with my spiritual self. It shares a common ancestral root with Karate--Chinese temple monks--so a lot of the stances and hand movements are familiar to me. I miss Karate a lot, so it's nice to have a way to practice a similar art without putting my health in jeopardy.

It also gets me out of the house, which is a definite bonus. I'm taking a couple of counseling courses and I think I may have a job at Zellers, so things are going pretty well for me overall. I even got an e-mail today from a publishing company that has accepted my manuscript proposal, which is really great. I have to wait and see if they will agree to read the actual manuscript itself, but at least the first step is done. I've submitted proposals to a number of publishers and they are the first ones that have gotten back to me. I realize that there is an extremely slim chance of getting my book published by an actual publishing company, but it is certainly worth a shot. Self-publishing is an expensive endeavor, so it is certainly worth the effort to continue to submit proposals. Who knows?

I'm off to Moncton tomorrow for a family trip.

It couldn't have come at a better time.

I've been in hermit mode lately, so I haven't posted anything for a bit. This was no ordinary Janaya is feeling sorry for herself and wants to hide from the sunlight kind of hermitage, but a very productive kind. Thirteen days ago, I decided to start working on the book I've been meaning to write for years. I figured that It would take me until January to finish if I set a good pace for myself and made a commitment to stick to it. Little did I know that I would come down with a nasty case of finger diarrhea (it took me four tries to spell that right)and I would have the manuscript finished in less then two weeks.

The book is a little on the small size at just over 30, 000 words, but it's enough to be considered an actual book. I was planning on writing about my views on a number of topics like God, sexuality and the meaning of life, but I ended up writing about my struggle with being gay and anorexia. I did dedicate a chapter to my views on some of those big topics, but most of it is about my life.

Now that the bulk of it is finished, I'm going to start editing it and then I'm sending it off to a friend of mine who is an author and can get me into contact with a local publisher. I still can't believe I had 30,000 in me, let alone the fact that I wrote it all in such a short period of time. My hands are in pretty bad shape, but it's been more than worth it. Even if nothing comes of it, it was an amazing experience and it was good to take stock of what I've been through and what I've learned along the way.

I got my new laptop yesterday, so I can finaly take videos on my camera. This is my first stab at and it's pretty dark. I didn't realize it picked up sound.

Fear the almighty ROBOTYRANNUS!!! He eats BABIES and PLAID SHORTS!!!!

Man, I wish I had a vibrator...