Friday, June 21, 2002  12:55 am  <|>
<149> Constant state of update: So I didn't write much in this last week, but I have a good reason. My laptop decided to crash the day I lasted posted. Nice huh? Just in time for my birthday (which was nice by the way). So since then I've been battling between computers to use and finding files while trying to keep them updated. Now I can use my mom's laptop at home to go online and such. Now I have to use it for everything when I'm home. The real scare was the days that I didn't know what was wrong with my laptop. Well, I still don't know, but I know it WASN'T the hard drive and if it had been that would have been bad. I would have paid the hundreds to get it recovered, but would I have wanted to do this? Of course not. So now, I just have a broken laptop instead. I don't know what's wrong with it, I'll probably have to send it away to Sony, but at least I can still access my files. My brother loaned me another laptop with my hard drive in it so that I can get my most important stuff off. So far I've been doing this with my external zip drive, but the task will be much easier once I have my external hard drive. Speaking of which, I did decide on one... of course I picked one that isn't out yet, but this one looks like it'll be worth the wait. 120GB of portable hard drive space should last me for awhile I think. For now, it'll just make my life a tad bit easier with all the floating around I've been doing myself between Philly and NJ. Iomega promises me it'll be out by the end of the month. They have 10 days remaining and I'm counting down... they'd better hurry up.

Otherwise, what else has been going on... well I am pretty ready to move back to my place in Philly. I know I've mentioned this in probably every one of my last few posts, but perhaps that will just show you how much I am missing it. Well, this weekend I plan to go back, starting tomorrow night. I have so much work to do for one, both paying job related work and school make up work. I also want to design that cover for my book so I can get that submission process going. Not to mention that I just want to be back in my own place with my friends hanging out because I am there, not because I am "visiting" for the day. I know plenty of people in college go home for a large part of their summers, but when you get a place of your own this changes a bit. I'm not home from "dorm life" where all of the people you know depart for the summer. I am in the minority of people I know who is at home while everyone else remains in school / city life mode, minus most of the school and add in a whole bunch of free time to just chill. This is what I'm missing and it's what I need the most. So I am returning. This return is backed up by something else too. One of my good friends who has been home in CA since the day after I got out of the hospital is coming back to Philly to visit for a few days before he joins my roommate (who happens to be his girlfriend) in Italy, so I want to be there to see him at least for a day or two. I'm planning on staying for most of the weekend, especially since he's not getting in until Saturday and I'm not even getting in there until later tomorrow night. But it'll be nice to finally sleep in MY bed again. I haven't for well over a month, almost two, and it's hard to believe I've been away that long. This is definitely the longest I've spent away from my place since we moved in almost one year ago. Tomorrow is also the first day of summer. A fitting day for me to start taking back my life I suppose. Even though it'll be the first day, we've been out of classes for awhile and it already feels like the summer is flying by without me, that I'm missing so much, and I hate it. No matter what too much of my passing week is taken up by dialysis, as it tends to take up most of the day the 3 days a week I have it. It gets in the way of things, like the mini road trip I had planned with my friends to go see my good friend in NY on his birthday. It would only have been for a couple of days, but the way the days fall there is not really any easy way I could go without missing two dialysis sessions, which I just cannot risk to do. So even though there is still perhaps a 5% chance of me going, as you can see it is not at all promising and so I've pretty much already given up at this point. So slowly I accept that there is going to be little excitement this summer most likely, yet at the same time once I get out of NJ this might change. I have a few close friends here in NJ whom I love to hang out with, but that doesn't change the fact that there is very little to do here and my missing of my home in Philly is overwhelming me lately to the point of just not wanting to be anywhere else. If I hadn't been forced to be away for so long, I'm sure I'd feel a bit differently, but this is how things have gone so this is how I feel right now. I think I just need some time to be back there and then maybe NJ won't look quite so bad again because it's really not, it only is when you've been gone so long and then are forced back into it for a long period of time. I'm working on all of it though, really, and I'll figure out some happy medium eventually.

Now the latest thing with the kidney situation... I found out that people can't get tested to be a donor until my lupus quiets down (meaning it stops attacking my kidneys because actually I still have some function left in them and it hasn't stopped attacking them during all this time). This is because the donor test could come back as a non-match because of the lupus activity when it really is a match, and we wouldn't want to be getting incorrect results. So they really can't control that at all, it just will stop at some point, up to months which I don't like to hear. So I'm waiting on that now to get the transplant process really going, which of course has been my goal since I found out that was going to be the ending option. There are a few people interested in being tested outside of my family, but those are unlikely matches at best (though still possibly matches) so I know the more interested potential donors the better for my case. But it's not that easy to find people who want to rip out their organs and give them to you, you know? Hmm, maybe I should stop describing it that way. ;) Seriously though, simply the fact that the people who have already offered have done so really means so much to me and has shocked me at the givingness of some people. It's not an easy decision to make and to be honest it's hard for me to imagine being in that position myself on the other end. But all of this can only be straightened out in time and so that's where I'm at, waiting, as usual and so what else is new?