I Kinda Went Off-Topic Had one brutal migraine yesterday, and went to bed very early, but set the alarm clock  for midnight so I could chat with my Brooklynguy.  He is back!!!  Woo hooooo!  I am doing a little dance here.     I had to rethink my intended fitness plan.  The sitter's kid has a fever, but my muscles are aching to get used now, and running is out of the question.  In fact, it's looking like my fitness activity of choice may not be the one I can pull off, figuring in the time consraints and the fact child care is needed to accomplish it.  I can't afford a lot of child care; I'd rather use all of it for the time I need to spend working.     Sooooo today I got wiggly and jiggly in the comfort of my own home.  I stretched and did jumping jacks and performed simple step aerobics on my actual lower step of the staircase.  I did whatever routines I could remember from aerobics and ninpo taijutsu and the tiny bit of tai chi I'd witnessed.  I sprinted from hallway to kitchen to living room to hallway many laps.  The apartment is tiny, so it truly was like a hamster in a cage.  I did lots of rounds of the electric slide, quite a bit faster than it's done on the dance floor.  Now that I am too out of shape to do even one push-up, I did what worked for me the few times in the Army when I'd atrophied this badly: I did push-ups against a wall, leaning in pretty far, until my muscles burned and shook.  A week of that and I will be able to do em on the floor again.  Seems to me this all did some good, cuz my skin got all hot and covered with red splotches, my mouth got that metallic tang that comes when running, and the sweat poured off me.  I was bushed but happy when done.  The dogs and kids think I've lost it.     It's looking like the move might be postponed, due to cash flow problems.  This is heavy.  The thought of staying here makes eating a bullet sound very attractive, but I have people who need me, can't escape so easy.  Besides, I haven't decided whether I'm afraid of death or not.  I'm only half-kidding.  The fact that life here makes me even think of it pisses me off so much that my contrariness kicks in.  I'll be damned before I'll check out on account of this punk.  I'd rather kill him.  Heh, can't do that either, for the same reasons, but the idea is nice.     Did I ever mention my suicidal youth?  Sure, every adolescence has its angst and depression, but mine also had a whacked-out alcohol-soaked knee-deep-in-denail mother, a completely insane stepfather who beat her and thoroughly fucked up her children, and the lingering aftereffects of the previous stepfather, who beat me.  Every morning I woke up thinking, "I really oughta do it today."  Hypnotically I stared at the bottles of various drugs in the medicine cabinet as I brushed my teeth, wondering which ones would kill me and which ones would just fuck me up.  The sight of a knife would catch my undivided attention, and I wondered how hard it is to slit the second wrist after you've already slit the first one.  Seemed like if you cut too deep you'd damage the tendons and not be able to use the hand to do the other wrist.  Could you bleed to death on only one wrist?      One thing kept me on the planet:  the love of my father.  I knew he wasn't all that much more stable than I, knew that I was very special and important to him.  I feared that offing myself might trigger him to do the same.  And that is not what I wanted at all.     Things got better after their divorce.  Darkest before the dawn, though; we were stalked by a sidearm-wielding volunteer deputy firmly embedded in the old-boy network.  It got really bad.  The next stepfather was a vast imporvement.  Lousy parent, but he treated my mom with utmost respect, and tried really hard to do the right thing all the time.  By that time, though, the rest of us had learned to play mind games, and while he held his own at them, I just couldn't take it anymore.  I ran away from home for the third time in my life, but this time, into the arms of my father.  The healing began.     It wasn't complete until Army basic training.  The environment was so traumatic, so stressful, that I had nasty flashbacks.  They usually came at night, but sometimes they came in the day, too.  I strove and pushed myself to do everything right, to be perfect, but it seemed like I was in trouble all the time, getting yelled at and punished constantly.  After one really bad bout of flashbacks, which the drill sergeants hadn't known about by the way, I came to be hiding under a mattress behind the bunk, trying to be as small as possible, shaking and sobbing, but utterly silent.  None of the other trainess could coax me out, I didn't even hear whatever they said, just remember their faces and their mouths moving like fishes.  I'm sure they were afraid to go get a drill sergeant, but finally had to, there was nothing they could do.  He came and saw me and swore softly, and I winced.  "Here it comes now," I thought.     I'm crying now.  I hadn't meant for this entry to be so long, and I hadn't meant to discusss this tonight.  It's this far, might as well go all the way now.     So, he began to talk to me, softly, gently.  It took a long time before I could hear the words, but he kept talking and some of them began to leak through.  "Can't really hurt you" and "just want to push you" and "want you to do your best" and "never want to harm you" and "never let anything happen to you" and more of the same kind of thing.  He talked me out of my burrow, and I was so tired, so very tired, and I slept.  The next day he called me to his office and asked me about my past and I told him.  He again reassured me that they weren't allowed to physically harm any of us, and that they didn't even want to.  That the yelling and hostility and stuff was just a time-tested method of getting people to reach deeper inside themselves and pull out the reserves, to break down the barriers to training, to make them find out what they're capable of.  Years later I found out he could have had me removed from the Army for psychological reasons, but he didn't.  Next few days or so all the drills laid off me, then very gradually increased the pressure again, watching carefully to make sure I could handle it.  They saw I was doing my damndest to be the best soldier there ever was.  And this time around, I did handle it.  I may not have been the absolute fastest runner or sharpest marksman, but I felt like the most dedicated soldier the Army ever had.  I felt like a winner.