Or, how to take care of me when I'm in a lot of pain and can't see anything.

Yeah, well known, I am one of those 300 million people worldwide who suffer migraines. Most people who have migraine headaches have just an incredibly awfully bad headache where the the intense throbbing, often on one side of the head, makes life somewhat unpleasant until it goes away.

"Just."

As if a migraine could ever be "just" a headache. They are horrible awful things, sometimes as bad as "Oh, just kill me now, please" bad, said with complete sincerity. I have a couple friends who also have migraines. They aren't part of the 15% lucky few who have migraines with auras. Now, if you want a really rockin' fun time, that's the way go to.

Did you know that three fourths of migraine suffers are women? Yeah, a fact I find somewhat ironic, as migraines in my family run up the patriarchal side of the family tree from my dad to his dad. Suckasaurus for the Hodsden line.

Yeah, well, this morning, I woke up to another migraine. I've been doing fairly well this year, a far cry from my worst migraine year that included one batch of four days in a row of migraines and just under twenty for the year. That year sucked.

Today, as I was with family, I was surrounded by people who knew what to do, how to take care of me, what I needed to make it through this batch of crap, I wasn't overly worried. There have been some crazy bad migraine timings, though (say, when I was driving my car up the 101, and realized I couldn't see the tires of the car in front of me, that was fun), so I figured, hey, if I'm ever around you and tell you, "I'm having a migraine," you'll know what to do.

1. Safety.

The first thing I need is to be safe. If I'm going blind, which I do with my auras, I want to sleep through as much of it as I can. Losing one's sight is a traumatic experience and defiinitely not one I would recommend to anyone. I will also want to sleep through the worst of the pain that's about to happen. To do this, I need to be able to relax enough to sleep, and the fundamental need at this point is safety. I may be at a friend's house on his couch, in the back of my car pulled over at a rest stop, snuggled in my mom's bed, or curled up under my desk at the office, but I need to believe I'm safe.

2. Pain killers

If I'm still coherent and not asleep yet, I'm going to want pain killers. Rare is the time when I don't have my bottle of acetaminophen, ibupofin, aspirin and combinations of such (excedrin migraine, which has caffeine in it) handy. If I'm lucky, I may have some stronger, left over painkillers from a friend (thanks, Tyler and Adam!). As much as I hate taking drugs, trying to bear through migraine pain is just rather dumb.

3. Darkness

Like most people with migraines, I become somewhat to very photophobic. Normal light from a lamp can become too much very easily. A dark room, or even a darkened room and a pillow or cover over my head is going to work. In desperation, I'll probably have my sunglasses on if I need to be moving, even indoors. Every little bit helps!

4. A bowl

Yeah, if I've eaten in the last two hours, it's not staying down. Much of my body goes numb, and my stomach is going to roll. The numbness is usually pretty awful, starting in my fingertips and moving up my arm in a 20cm segment until it moves from my shoulder to my face and my face goes numb. Usually during that process, my stomach starts, and there isn't much to do but let anything that's down come back up. Yeah, did I mention this is a fun process? I thought I mentioned that detail.

5. Quiet

I remember one time during a migraine when my dad was working on the upstairs bathroom of the house. He was on the other side of the house. He was on a different floor. He was hammering away and each blow sent a reverberating concussion through my head. I eventually called to him and asked him to stop. I remember his looking disappointed, but his expression was also full of understanding. He stopped, and I slept. Reason for that story? I really want quiet, and no noisemakers.

6. Sleep / time

The last things I'm going to need is to handle the worst of the migraine are sleep and time. Sleep to avoid the worst of the pain, and time to recover from the pain. I'll probably be out of commission for anything remotely exciting for the next 24 hours at a minimum. Exercising is out. Anything requiring a physical effort is out. The lingering pain is one that isn't like any other pain I've had, but it's well defined and it sucks.

7. Soup

Yeah, if I've been in pain for hours, and nauseous for most of that time, too, when I'm finally able to eat (eventually!), I'm going to be ravenous. Unfortunately, the only food I'm going to be able to tolerate is going to be something easy to swallow, but still tasty. Soup fits the bill, even in 100˚ heat (just make it a chilled soup, if it's that hot out).

Some day, I'm going to draw up a picture of what my auras look like. Having studied them in depth, oh, JUST THIS MORNING, I can saw, wow, those pictures will be lovely. Until then, hey, if you want to help me, or anyone really, who is having a migraine, yeah, these seven items will give you a good head start. Gentle head rubbing wouldn't hurt either.

Six years ago, my mother's husband's sister died. Really, though, it's easier to just say, "An aunt of mine died."

An aunt of mine died. There. I said it that way.

She died.

One of the things that annoyed me most about her death, I mean, aside from the whole death thing itself, was the callous nature of the dissemination of her death. Look, I understand that her death was "unnatural," and I understand that sugar coating what happened doesn't change what happened, but it's still hard when a loved one passes away and people are callous about the whole thing.

(Wow, my site is all about death recently. Maybe a "Kitt, better to embrace life going forward than mourn its loss looking backward" is in order.)

I think the hardest part of Karen's death, wait... here, let me cease sugar coating it, if only for myself. She killed herself. She committed suicide and not in the Japanese honor sort of way. The took her own life, and left her family to clean up afterward.

And that, I believe, was the hardest part of her death: the cleaning up afterward.

I watched my mom and Eric and his parents touch every object Karen owned and decide what to do with it. Their grief altered between well-hidden and overwhelming. I didn't stick around long enough to measure the relationship between what stuff they were going through and the grief, did something particular bring back a strong memory, or just thinking of the loss? It was hard going through someone else's belongings and being asked, "Do you want this? How about this?" or being told, "Take anything you want."

It's hard to wear a dead woman's hat.

Three years ago, Beth Liebert, a teammate of mine, did the same for her grandmother. Her family went through her stuff, picked out the meaningful items, then had a garage sale to divest themselves of the rest of her things. Anything left over at the end of the garage sale was thrown away.

This past week, I've watched my neighbor's sons do the same with her belongings. She died when I was in New York at Brooklyn Beta. The moving truck was next to the house for most of the week, with one of the four sons, Dennis, Daniel, Jim or Jerry, waving to me as I passed by, going about my life, because even after death, the rest of things continue, somewhat oblivious to the pain your death may have caused for your loved ones.

I'm not quite sure how old you have to be, or how many people need to die around you, or how many times you have to clean out a house or help clean out a house or go through a dead woman's belongings, before you realize that when you die, someone else is going to be going through your shit, and just how mortifying such a thought can be. Sure, you'll be dead, how much will you care? Probably not much, but, well, do you really want to leave that giant pile of crap you call your stuff to someone else to go through? Are they going to appreciate all of the nuances of those things? Are they going to know the history?

Nope.

They are just going to throw it out.

Garbage.

Dump.

Land fill.

Maybe reused somewhere else, but probably not. More likely ground into little pieces and burned or buried or some such.

Right.

It is a well known fact that I have one of everything.

Okay, not really, but close enough that the joke has been made many times over the years about how I seem to have one of everything and anything you may need. And that is way too much stuff.

I've tried over the years to purge, but I've never managed very well. I tended to do what most people do, which is ask myself, "Will I ever use this?" The answer is invariably, "Maybe," at which point the item goes back into the garage or closet or box or whatever, and isn't discarded or purged. These items are like comfort food, they make me feel more secure, I've already invested time and money into it, why would I want to be rid of it?

And that's exactly why I still have a closet full of crap, a garage full of garbage and a house full of unfinished projects and forgotten dreams.

I've been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, "Do I want to keep this?" (of course I do) or "Will I ever use this?" (of course I will) or "Is this worth keeping?" (of course it is), I started asking myself, "Do I want to move this to Phoenix?"

The answer is suddenly much much different. Suddenly, and remarkably often, the answer is "No."

Flat out, "No."

No well-maybe's. No I-might's. It's a straight No, followed by, "Okay, then how do I get rid of this?"

Some items are easy. They go straight into the trash.

Some other items are also easy. They go to a donation pile. Or to the crafts supplies pile to be donated to Liza's school. Or to the electronics recycling pile to be picked up next Wednesday from my curb. Or to the Freecycle pile that is fast becoming the "post on Craigslist and just let people come take stuff away pile instead of trying to give away this stuff one piece at a time" pile.

Some items are harder. Sunglasses from years ago that still look good on me? The expensive paper I bought and still use for writing letters (yeah, I write letters and mail them to people, how's that for archaic?). Items from around the house that I meant to deal with but haven't yet dealt with (those are being dealt with, though).

So, each item gets the question, "Do I want to move this to a new place?"

The other rule I've put in place is that each item is asked this question only once, then dealt with immediately. There are no surprises in dealing with this stuff, or lingering doubts. The pictures that have been in the garage for ten years are scanned then shredded. The electronics are disassembled, the harddrive copied then crushed, the rest donated. The clothes are donated, I haven't worn them in years, why do I think I'll wear them in the future? Emails to various people for larger items are sent.

I can see the garage floor for the first time in a long long time. I feel less weighed down, lighter in spirit as well as footprint. It's a good feeling.

Once the first pass is done, I plan on repeating the process a second time, asking myself, "Do I want to move this to Chicago?" Items that seem movable now may seem less movable the second time through, given they'll be going a longer distance away.

The upside of the box processing is that I've found a number of items that had "gone missing" in the blackhole of the garage. I now have my 1000fps camera back. I also have my favorite backpack back.

Whether they make it to Chicago, however, is a different question.

This morning, as Kris and I were getting ready to walken the doggen, I heard a loud THUMP as I walked into the kitchen from the living room. Kris commented immediately after the sound, "Oh, he don't feel too good," a comment we make as we kill spiders and flies, or when something bad happens to some animal on the discovery channel.

"Bird?" I called out.

"Yeah."

We have these lovely large windows in the living room. every once in a while, a bird flies into them. The windows haven't shattered, but I wonder sometimes when they will. The thumps from some of these birds is amazingly loud.

I wandered back into the living room and looked for my camera. When birds hit the window, they often leave a interesting splat marks on the window. I find them amusing, and figured there would be one to view.

When I looked up from grabbing my camera, I saw a bird hopping around outside, as I looked out the window through the gap between the table and treadmill. It would jump and flutter, or prance and shake its head. It kept moving around as if dazed. I smiled at the bird trying to shake off its thump against the window, and stepped forward to take a picture.

To see the other bird lying on the ground next to it.

The first bird kept jumping around the second bird lying on the ground. As I watched, the bird who had hit the window and was just lying there, started twitching. One of its legs stuck out straight then started vibrating.

"Is it alive?" I asked.

"It's still moving," Kris answered.

"I don't think that's alive movement."

I set the camera aside, suddenly not really interested in taking pictures of the tragedy I was watching. The first very-much-alive bird started nudging the second not-so-much-alive bird. It would bounce in, nudge, jump away, lift its wings and chirp, stand still, then repeat the process. It was heart wrenching to watch the bird not understand its loss.

I went outside and watched the first bird fly away, and went up to the second bird lying on the ground. As I crouched down next to it, I looked closely and saw no movement. I managed to sit there for about ten seconds before my nose triggered red, and the tears started coming down.

I stood up, walked into the kitchen, Kris watching me puzzled. I grabbed a dog poop bag, walked back outside, and picked up the bird.

It was warm. It was light, so very light. I was worried I was going to crush it, it was so light. A silly worry, to be sure, the bird was dead, I wasn't going to hurt it any more than I would be hurting a branch.

Holding it, looking at it, realizing that the bird was, then suddenly just wasn't, was overwhelming.

I started crying.

I started crying with the sobs of loss, as all the hurt and pain and frustration I'd been holding in for the last few months just came gushing out. I sat down and sobbed at the loss. I cried and cried and cried. When rational thought at how silly I might be at that moment intruded, I cried even harder that I would care how silly I looked in that moment. I cried at how something can be, then just not be a moment later, and the rest of the world goes on. I cried at the thought that at some point in the thinkable future, I will not be, and I can't say I've done anything amazing yet.

Kris stood in the house, probably completely confused. It was just a small little bird who flew into the window, what the heck is wrong with this woman?

Still sobbing, I stood, took a couple pictures of the bird. Bella came rushing up, mouth open to bite the bird, reminding me that we were going to walk the dogs. Kris and the dogs were ready to go, so I bundled up and walked out the door, crying the whole time.

Walking has a meditative quality, which helped me calm down by the end of the block, so at least I wasn't sobbing. I took pictures of flowers on the walk to help console me somewhat. Between the walking and taking pictures of bright colors, I was feeling somewhat better, but still very sad.

Last Tuesday, I submitted my YCombinator Winter 2010 funding application. Since then, I've thought about it a lot. Not too much, I don't believe, because it asked a number of questions that were important for me to think about, but enough that I have now have an opinion on what I submitted.

My new opinion is tempered by my understanding that I am my most severe critic, yes, but I feel it's still an honest look back.

My opinion is that I screwed up.

Not in the idea. Not in submitting the application. Not in the process of better defining what I want to do with the project.

I screwed up in waiting for so long to apply, not only with waiting until 2010 to apply, but also with waiting until Tuesday to finish up the application. I had viewed the application a while before it was due, had saved the questions to my desktop, had viewed them daily and thought about them. I didn't, however, write everything up, ask for feedback from various people, and hit SUBMIT until Tuesday.

Aaaaaaaand.... I screwed up with some of my answers.

In particular, I tempered my answers with spins I felt YC would want to hear.

Which was stupid.

Really.

Why? Well, I don't know what they're looking for 100%. If I did, I'd be running my own startup fund. I know what has been posted, I know the tenacity part. I know the multiple founders love each other part. I know the smart part. But I don't know the secret sauce, so why would I not put down what I really wanted to say?

Take, for example, the question, "Please tell us about the time you, kitt, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

My conversation with Kris about this question went something like:

"Well, I could tell them about X."

"Wasn't that illegal?"

"Uh, yeah. Well what about Y?"

*blink* *blink*

"Yeah, okay, maybe that was a bit illegal, too... Okay, I can tell them about W."

"You sure you want to admit to that one?"

"I'm sure I don't. What about Z?"

"Really? Did we not just discuss this? Illegal?"

"B?"

"Not really a hack."

"C?"

"Seven years aren't up yet."

"Crap."

Okay, it wasn't that bad. And not that anything that was outrageously illegal. Going 66 miles per hour on a freeway with a 65 miles per hour speed limit isn't outrageously illegal, but it is illegal. It's not morally outrageous either, but you don't really go around bragging about it on blogs (well, unless you want it to be used against you in a trial, but that's a different post on a different blog by a different person).

So, yeah, I came up with some happy positive thing I did that enabled me to succeed even though I lacked the talent to do "the right way" (in particular, I won the track team's MVP award my senior year in college, even though I wasn't the best athlete, who was usually who won the award ). It was a safe example, I played the system to my advantage, but I didn't really *hack* the system the way I would have preferred to say if I hadn't been tempering my answers.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the only question I held back with. I'm sad to say I screwed up on question, "If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?" which is followed by the question, "If you have an online demo, what's the url? (Please don't password protect it; just use an obscure url.)"

I tried to play off just how obsessed I've been in the past with this project. It's hard to say, "Wow, this project consumed my every waking thought for three months straight, and most of my thoughts for the next six, and I still don't have something ready." I was more worried about having spent so long on the project without having a working demo.

I shouldn't have been. I'm not tackling an easy problem. That hard part means it may take a while to solve. Rather than try to hedge my answer, I should have just let my work speak for itself and sent them the link.

What I didn't screw up with on the application form was, however, the single founder question (answer: yes). There's a good chance I shot down any chance I had of being in the program with that answer, but I know that was the right answer. I could have asked Mike Gull or Kris or a host of other people to sign on with me. Could have. No matter how uncomfortable I feel about my answers in the other questions, this one is the one I know is right, even if it causes an immediate dismissal of my application.

Probably helps that I've already started a couple companies, the current of which lasted the five years that most companies fail (Yay me!) and rather know how much help I'm going to need to make this new idea really successful. A "the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know" sort of thing.

So, I shot myself in the foot for this funding program before I even started. This will be okay, because I have a Plan B. It's a different way to the end. It's a harder way (meeting weekly deadlines, focusing on only the single project, letting go of everything else, generating exposure), but the endpoint it not barred from me.

Because, really, in this area, the only true failing is not trying hard enough.