A little better

That is how I feel today. The grinding pain of the last few days seems to be gone for now, and I am left with just the usual amounts of unpleasantness.

Slept a fair bit today. Don’t know if that is a factor. Got up to pee around breakfast time, but once more was too damned sleepy to go eat and so I went right back to bed and slept till around 11:30 am.

And then I got up, had lunch, and then went back to sleep again, Not sure if I needed that last bit of sleep bit now that I have had it, I want more. Funny how that works.

It is like those odd times when I am not hungry at all, then I eat, and suddenly I am absolutely ravenous and could eat an entire buffet restaurant, steam tables and all.

Right now, I feel like I could sleep for a year and be quite happy about it. And if I did not have things to do and was not looking forward to going to Boston Pizza tonight with friends, that’s what I would do. I would just go right back to sleep, and dream away until I rose refreshed.

The plus side of this is that other than the sleepiness, I feel fine. No grinding pain, no tension, no feeling like I can’t quite breathe properly. I am not sure where that shit came from but for the moment, I am willing to accept that it has passed for now, and that I should be grateful and just carry on.

So, no, I will not be making an appointment to see my GP after therapy on Thursday. Not unless whatever the hell that was comes back again. Then I will definitely go to see him, and find out what’s what.

But enough about me, let’s talk about the news for a change. And no Hurricane Sandy stuff because honestly, I want to forget about that for a while.

For instance, check out these radical fashions for the budget traveler.

The idea is that since airlines have started charging their choice of arms and legs for checked baggage (the bastards), these wearable luggage garments will fight back by really pushing the envelope (as well as your muscle tone) and refining what it means to carry luggage onto the plane in your pockets.

Here is an example of the striking look you will be wearing in order to get everything you want to take into what are still, technically, your pockets.

Sort of a “bondage at the Ren Faire” look. But ugly.

So yes, technically, you will look like a bloated sack of unnamed brown substance on your flight, but then again, you evaded some pretty hefty and unjustifiable charges, so it might just be worth it.

Myself, I think it might be cheaper, easier, more comfortable, and definitely and definitively more fashionable to simply pay UPS (or whoever) to ship your stuff to your destination.

Plus, I seriously doubt it is possible to sit down in those outfits when they are full. True, they transform into luggage and you could then stuff them in the overhead bin, but then where does your more conventional carry-on luggage go? And if you do manage to sit with all that stuff on you, I would bet dollar to dinars that whoever is sitting next to you will come to resent you.

Seeing as you have basically transformed yourself into a fat person like myself, trust me, nobody will want to see either of us coming.

Still, it shows just what these crazy airport fees will do to people.

Then we have the burning question of our ages : are all beautiful women boring?

The article asked two women, one pretty, one plain, to answer, and they voted pretty much along party lines. The plain woman said YES and the pretty one said NO.

But it was a stupid question to start with, and the wrong question entirely. It is a classic Black Swan scenario. All it takes is one interesting pretty woman to disprove the theory, and either way, it is besides the point.

The real issue is whether or not being beautiful makes it more likely that a given woman is boring, and conversely, does being plain make it more likely that a given woman is interesting.

And I think there is some truth to the idea, as long as one frames it as a tendency and not a rule. Beautiful women tend to be more boring. That is as far as you can take it.

And I say this as someone with two beautiful and very interesting and intelligent sisters.

But the basic concept is sound, that people who are beautiful tend to focus their energies on that and pursue that avenue of development, and that tends to make them more conservative and conventional because they have so more more invested in the beauty-loving status quo.

But I also think that being beautiful is a real skill, and one that some people hone to perfection all their lives. Sure, there are the genetic lottery winners who truly have everything handed to them in their early life simply because looking at them makes people happy.

But that does not last, and the ones who are savvy enough to understand this learn to master beauty as a skill. It may be vanity, but it still takes a lot of knowledge and understanding in order to make sure you always dress right, eat right, wear the right makeup, and so forth just to look right.

Myself, I pay next to no attention to my appearance (and it shows!), but I can understand that a lot goes into beauty (especially the female variety) and so for us ugly people to assume they have a free ride is a little bit unfair.

Still, all in all, I would rather have personality, wit, warmth, and charm than all the beauty in the world. I personally can’t imagine valuing something so superficial very much.

Your results may vary.

What a day

By all accounts (or at least, by mine, and that;s really the only one that counts), today has been wild.

First off, of course, we have all the Hurricane Sandy mania teeming through the etheric medium and making me worry about my relatives back home on Prince Edward Island, a continent away.

Normally, I suppose, us West Coast types would feel only the normal humanist worry about all those people in the northeast US and the Maritime Provinces in the path of the storm.

It is not that we wouldn’t care, it is just that we would be worried about people in general, which is never quite as potent as worrying about specific people we know.

And after all, here in BC, we got earthquakes going off like Halloween fireworks off Haida Gwai.

(By the way, I loathe the local tradition of fireworks around Halloween. I am not in favour of the general public having access to flying incendiary devices that make sudden loud noises. I guess we should be grateful that around this time of year it’s always very damp around here. Back home, we have Dry Fall half the time, and all those leaves would go up pretty fast. )

And speaking (parenthetically) about back home, that is what has me worried. It looks like the northern edge of Sandy will smack into the Maritimes, and I can’t help but imagine what a tidal surge could do to my little old home town of Summerside, what will it being right on the water, having no seawall at all (we have never needed one… until now?) and the house I grew up in being only six blocks from the Atlantic and how pretty much everywhere I hung out as a kid being right on the waterfront…. plus lord knows how many relations I have there….

Oh, and let us not forget that Summerside sits at one of the two points where Prince Edward Island gets very thin, so that there are points where you can see both the North Shore and the South Shore… and so a tidal surge could come from both directions at once…

Oh well, at least my mother and brother live together near the very top of the hill, so the water would have to travel a long ways uphill to get to them either way.

Plus, this is just the edge of the system, far from the core, so I am probably working myself into a state of hysteria over nothing.

Ironically, it looks like this thing will miss the Maritimes by a mile and instead hit Toronto.

I am not even going to make a joke. Too damned easy.

Meanwhile, closer to home, I am still suffering from those aches and pains I was dealing with yesterday, and it is like unto make a man go mad.

It left me alone for most of the day, but then tonight it came back with a vengeance, and just when I was having an important discussion with an online friend about a future job prospect for myself.

(No more info on that. If it happens, you will hear about it. Until then, zipped lip. )

So right now, I have that wonderful feeling that every bone on my body is grinding against whichever bones they are connecting with and I am beginning to seriously worry about this shit.

So I have decided that if it is not gone by tomorrow afternoon, I will make a phone call to my GP and set up an appointment to see him on Thursday, after therapy.

Tylenol helps some, but not a whole lot. I just recently took a 24 hour anti-histamine, and that seems to have cooled things off on my joins by a fair bit, which is… interesting. Generally when I am in a bad state, I start to ponder if my hay fever is playing some sort of part. So I took the histamine on spec, more or less, or at least, somewhere between “on spec” and “on a hunch”.

Could I be having some sort of reaction that attacks my joints? Or could it be that pressure building in my sinuses is making me feel tense all over? That has happened in the past, so it’s a a strong lead. I have been trying my best to keep both my nose and ears clear, but it is an uphill struggle and I may not be keeping up with the flow.

Hopefully my 24 hour anti-histamine (Loratadine, but her friends just call her Laura) will not just soothe the fires but slow the flow too, and so I will be able to gain some ground against this affliction.

And then I can stop having the urge to smash random objects just to relieve the fucking TENSION. Argh.

Anyhow, due to that important conversation I mentioned earlier, I ended up not having supper until 9:30 pm, which is much later than usual, and who knows, low blood sugar might be part of the problem now. If so, it will fade over time as I digest.

I doubt that is part of it, tho. Usually that makes me feel weak and sad. Right now I could gladly try my luck against Mike Tyson in the ring, if only to shake the rust off my joints.

I wonder if this is how arthritis feels. If so, it confirms what I have always thought, that arthritis is a horrible, horrible disease and we do not spend enough time and money fighting it simply because it is not a life-threatening disease.

Maybe not, but it can make your life a living hell without remittance, and that has to count for something doesn’t it? There is more to medicine than reducing morbidity.

Anyhow, time for me to go rest and try to recover from all this crazy shit. If this post shows up as being posted on Tuesday instead of Monday, rest assured, I completed it on Monday my time, it is just that my web host and I have a difference of opinion on time zones.

See you tomorrow, folks!

Aches and pains

There is something up in this battered and bloated body of mine, and it ain’t good.

It started last night. I was lounging on my little couch and watching stuff on Netflix when I suddenly felt sort of weak and like I could not catch my breath.

I immediately sat up straight (I had been sort of slouching into the couch) and calmed myself with breathing exercises, namely first emptying my lungs of air (to prevent hyperventilation) and then breathing slowly and calmly in order to get my body to slow down a little.

This is what I usually do in these circumstances as a panic-management technique I learned in order to deal with my anxiety attacks, way back before I was ever on Paxil. I more or less invented it and learned it on my own, although I was pleased when I later read something similar in the literature of anxiety and panic survival skills.

And so eventually, I slowed down and felt a lot better, although I have to admit, I was a little worried there for a while. But I had just been talking to someone else who was going through a very bad panic attack earlier that night, and so I thought it was maybe a delayed reaction panic attack of my own.

Darn that empathic healing. It works but you have to absorb the other person’s wounds in order to do it. In this case, I absorbed their panic. Or, if you want to be more prosaic about it, talking her down from her anxiety touched the part of me that used to have panic attacks and activated it.

Either way, she feels better and I feel worse. But I would still do it again, a million times over. When I am in a situation like that, I have to try to help. It is compulsive. It would be more stressful for me to try to ignore it. I can’t sit idly by while someone goes through what I have gone through. I have to do what I can to help. It is more than an impulse. It is like a calling.

Whichever way you look at it, I was in a bad state for a while and I am not sure why. Being a big fat diabetic pushing 40, thoughts of cardiovascular issues always arise at times like this, but I keep those thoughts very firmly locked down because if you start thinking about things like that during a panic attack, you will end up in a kind of hell of terror and panic that I would not wish on anybody.

Not even Mitt Romney.

So anyhow, I got myself calmed down, and made a mental note of the experience because it might turn out to be important, but then put it out of my mind and went to bed, and got some Quetiapine enhanced sleep.

And when I woke up around 6 am and went to pee, I decided I was still too damned sleepy to bother going to eat some breakfast and just went back to bed. (I have resumed a bad habit of skipping meals lately, which is never good for someone with diabetes. This time, I chose sleep over food. Maybe that was wrong. )

And when I woke up again at around 10 am, I felt fine. A bit dragged out and drained from intense REM activity sleep, but that is pretty normal for one of these periods where I am catching up on sleep.

But then when I actually got up out of bed to face the day, things started going pretty weird. I got this incredible feeling of tension and stress throughout my entire body, like every muscle in my body has been wound up like a rubber band and I can feel my bones grinding against each other as a result.

I have been in this state before, and it is not fun at all, and I have no idea what causes it. But luckily I know something that helps, and that’s exercise. So a couple of times recently, I have done a rapid burst of 100 reps of my “standing push-ups” where I basically do push-ups against a wall instead of the floor.

It is a good exercise for a fat fuck like me because it does not strain mt weak cardiovascular too much and make me feel ill like normal push-ups would, but still revs the engine and drains tension, and that tension dissipation is vital at these times, otherwise I would go insane from the pressure.

And even as I sit here, I am not out of the woods. I took a big dose of Tylenol Extra to try to quell the aches and pains, and it is helping somewhat, but I still feel weirdly tense and tired at the same time.

So my plan is that when I am done with the blogging here, I will put on some hard rocking music and exercise until the bad feelings go away.

Hey, maybe that is all any of us need in order to be motivated enough to work out : have it be the only treatment for agonizing body wide pain!

Just take one pill a day and you are guaranteed to get into the best shape of your life, or go mad from the pain! It’s the ultimate exercise routine! No willpower needed, no fancy diets, no expensive diet foods, just take one of our patently illegal pills a day and let the brutal fucking agony do the work for you! Or at least, inspire you to do the work for it.

Results guaranteed, or your money back! Or if not exactly your money, then somebody’s money. I mean, once we get the money we just put it in a big pile. It’s not like we keep it in its own special place just in case you want it back, Princess.

I mean, sheesh!

Also, if you want an amount of money equal to what you sent us, just pay separate shipping and handling to send the product back to us, and remember, neither shipping and handling charges are refundable, and ha ha ha no you are never getting your money back at all, dumbass.

OK. Now time to exercise.

Check this shit out

Maybe I should start a separate blog with that as it’s title, just for links and other cool shit I find. Surely there would be enough stuff from my Twitter and my Facebook alone to justify it, and it would give me a place to share things and comment upon them.

But nah. In general, I prefer unity to separation. I am against compartmentalization and prefer to keep everything in one basket, and then keep a close eye on that basket.

What can I say, I have a one track mind. True multitasking is beyond me. I task swap very efficiently in order to compensate, but despite the breath and depth of my intellect, a side view exploded cutaway of my mental processes would show that for the most part, on the conscious level, only one thing is going on at a time, and I have to cut my mental diet into the right sized pieces to accommodate.

I wonder how more compartmental types manage. They must find it easier, at least emotionally, to put everything in its own little box and file those boxes away in different parts of their minds and have a mind like a well run museum. In a way I envy that. But it makes it much harder to correlate the contents of your mind and see if you have any conflicting beliefs.

For me, it is all one big amorphous blob of thought. I often think of my mind as a kind of amoeba. There is great power and scope to it, and being amorphous it can take many shapes and even make itself into the tools it needs to figure something out.

But it lacks rigidity and focus, and has a tendency to conform to the shape of its container and be unable to hold its shape for long. And it has to spend long periods of time in completely liquid form, like Odo from Deep Space Nine, in order to regenerate its strength.

So not an optimal shape, despite the many tricks it can perform. But to be otherwise would be to pick one shape and commit to it, and how could I know it was the right one? Part of the shapelessness of my mind is chronic indecision, and that leads to fear of commitment and that leads right back to being amorphous.

I guess I would prefer to do all shapes poorly rather than have to pick one and deal with the consequences. I could never choose.

Or at least, that has been how it has been so far. Perhaps as I ooze through life, I will find a skeleton I am willing to inhabit, at least for a while. There is a lot to be said for rigidity. For one thing, it lets you stand up tall instead of being down in the dirt and the filth all the time.

And it makes it easier for you to go for what you want, because you have daith in your hard outer shell to protect you, instead of being a vulnerable blob of goo all the time.

Anyhow. Today has been one of those sleep days I go on and on about. And like I always say, each time I get a little better at not letting it get me down.

I had nothing to do today, so no schedule to keep. Saturday is a good day for one of these. I will sleep until my body and mind are refreshed, and hopefully I will be back to my usual state of semi-alert lassitude by the time it is time to hang with my friends on Sunday night.

A perverse side of me is tempted to take a Quetiapine right now just to see what happens. Would I sleep for 12 hours? Would I have freaky solid nightmares? Would I wake up in the hospital? Or would I just dream that I had?

I had a sort of neat dream earlier today. I say sort of neat because it began with the rather impulsive decision (in the dream) to shoplift a box of vaguely Ferro Rocher looking chocolates. Almost immediately, I am set upon by security guards, one of whom totally saw me put the chocolates in with the stuff I had already paid for.

What follows is a highly improbable, but very exciting chase, where I am running away from the security guards through floor upon floor of what seems to be an underground mall, coming incredibly close to getting caught many times and even shrug off a flying tackle at one point like I am a linebacker and the chocolates are a Super Bowl football, until I finally make it to the surface, where I hail a taxi and make good my escape.

Pretty slick, really. Of course, it would not work in RL. But hey, it’s a dream, and it was damned fun.

I also had another dream that my best friend and Inner Beauty Pageant Queen Felicity were in some nameless foreign country, somewhat Asian, and we were looking through the shops and not really finding anything we liked, but then we found this place with a truly massive display of DVDs, video games, movie posters, and all other kinds of nerd friendly stuff, and I decided I was going to seek out a currency exchange place because I did not even recognize the names of either of the currencies on the price tags.

Felicity thought about it, but decided not to do so. I figured, what the heck, this way I will find out if I have lucked into one of those places where the currency exchange rate makes everything super cheap.

If so, I was going to buy a lot of games for the Wii.

There was some dream business then where I tried to convey to the Asian lady behind the counter what I wanted but she seemed to be speaking exactly one have English and one half… something else, and so I was very confused. Plus, I often find I suddenly become very thick-witted in dreams, probably cause the really smart parts of my brain are asleep.

Well, that was today. Objectively very quiet but subjectively I had some pretty amazing shit going on.

Such is my life.

Friday Science Geegaw, October 26, 2012

Man, what a week in science. WAY too many cool science stories to cover, so I am going to have to steel myself and take the weakest ones out behind the barn and put them down.

OK, maybe that is a bit harsh. But it really doses feel like choosing amongst my darlings sometimes, and that is never an easy thing to do. Not when you have a heart full of love like I do.

But, in the end, come what may, choices have to be made. So think of today’s lot as the Top 4 Cool Science Stories Of This Week.

Here they are in semi-random order.

The Coolest Question Of The Week

As soon as I read the title of this PopSci piece, I knew I would be including it.

It is called Can We Make It Rain With Lasers, and for me, that is an instant winner.

As is often the case in these kinds of science stories, the answer is “maybe?” but that is still pretty darned interesting. A French physicist named Jérôme Kasparian says that he has a method of using a high powered laser to seed cloud and thus set off a chain of precipitation, and thus, make it rain.

The idea is that the laser would strip electrons off of air molecules in the cloud, causing them to ionize and thus attract water molecules, which would then stick together to form droplets, which would then rubn into each other to form larger droplets, and so forth and so on until it’s raining.

This does not come easy. It takes trillions of watts of laser power. But high powered lasers are becoming cheaper, and in farming areas rain is worth a hell of a lot of money, so it might just be able to work as a business model as well as a technology.

I picture a giant laser on the back of a flatbed, traveling from town to town, selling rain on demand.

The Matrix Question

Coming in second in the Question Race comes How Do We Know We Are Not Living Inside A Massive Computer Simulation?

It is a philosophical issue worth pondering, and not just when you are stoned and want to sound deep. The surprising bit is that some scientists think they might have a scientific way to figure it out.

Now to be honest, I do not quite follow their reasoning, at least as it is presented in the article. But it does not matter, because I made up my mind a long time ago that a perfect simulation of reality is, by definition, reality, as far as we can tell. If we can tell it’s a simulation, it is not a perfect simulation. So to pragmatic me, the issues is not important. We have what seems to be objective reality, and until that model of existence fails in a demonstrable and repeatable way, that will do nicely.

Still, I am curious to see what their pursuit of this GZK limit yields.

The Truth Of Sex Addiction

I was quite surprised and a little upset to read this piece about the controversy surrounding the diagnosis of sex addiction this week.

Not that I disagree with their being an official diagnosis for it. Far from it. I just had no idea until now that there was any controversy about it.

I mean, I first heard about it in the 1980s. There’s support groups for it and everything. So I just assumed it was a known and accepted thing.

So to find out now that a lot of people apparently do not think it exists is a little disturbing. What is to dispute? Any pleasurable and rewarding activity can be addictive. People have been known to get addicted to knitting, for crying out loud, or doing jigsaw puzzles.

And I think we would all agree that sex is very pleasurable and rewarding. Plus there are powerful issues of ego being tied in with desirability and sexual prowess to deal with. There is no doubt to me that it is a real thing.

And remember, when separating the pathological from the habitual, you can always fall back on the basic DSM definition, which states (IIRC) that a behaviour is pathological in an individual if it :

a) causes them to be a danger to themselves or others
b) takes over the person’s life more and more over time
c) promotes a feeling of helplessness and loss of control in the person
d) distorts or displaces their ability to have a normal life
and e) is otherwise compulsive to the point of destructive loss of self-control

And I think sex addiction meets this criteria quite nicely.

Any objections would just be bizarre puritan sex-shaming based on people who are getting a lot of sex not “deserving” to be in the same category as alcoholics and junkies.

A Real Life Tractor Beam

Finally, in yet another bit of Star Trek come to life, scientists have demonstrated an honest to goodness real live working tractor beam.

Granted, it can only pick up a tiny ball 30 micrometers in radius that was suspended in water, but hey, all great inventions start out small, right?

I mean, the first telephone could only reach the next room!

So everybody out there, move your Time Till Star Trek clock ahead ten seconds from… um… wherever it is right now, I guess.

Look, I am still working on that part, OK?

Plus One Bonus Item

And finally, a bonus item, so-called because it is not, strictly speaking, a science item. It’s a science fiction item. But I just had to include it.

It is a Tumblr blog called Fashion It So, and in it, two friends go through episodes of Star Trek : The Next Generation and make hilariously bitchy comments about the rather eclectic fashions on the show.

And, on the way, also end up doing a rough plot synopsis, which is also a lot of bitchy fun. I highly recommend it for people who enjoy that sort of fun.

Seeya next week folks!

A dip in the road

A minor setback today. Opened my monthly envelope from the Province that usually has my monthly cheque in it only to find my monthly stub had not be submitted to the welfare office.

As usual, I had entrusted it to my roomie Joe, who, being the awesome guy that he is, usually drops it off at the office after I fill it out each month. This saves me from having to make a trip to the office and is greatly appreciated by yours truly.

Quite unusually, this month, he forgot. So I do not yet have my cheque. I went to the office and filled out a stub, and in the old days they would have just handed me the cheque at that point.

But now, they mail it. It will go in the mail tomorrow, and hopefully arrive Monday or Tuesday. This might seem odd, but I can see why they had to change things. I bet that in the old days, a lot of people just got into the habit of showing up at the office to pick up their check on Check Day and did not bother to fill out the stub beforehand like they were supposed to do.

Thus, the office was a madhouse on Check Day and the day after, and it overworked the poor social workers and caused a lot of ruckus.

This way, nobody gets instant gratification. You show up late, and it gets put in the mail the next day. And the next day is Thursday or Friday, so the odds are good that you will not be seeing that cheque until after the weekend.

And so you won’t have any money for like, days, and so you won’t be able to go drinking with all your reprobate friends and they will laugh at you for being lame, and that should be enough incentive for you to get the damn thing in on time next time.

And seeing as this normally does not affect me at all, I must say I approve. Sure, it will be a pain in the ass this month, but I could not help but notice that the welfare office was not a madhouse today, and security guard (they always have them on the heavy days now) looked bored.

And ridiculously young, but that is just me being old. (Seriously, he looked 16 to me. 18 tops. )

This was also a therapy day. A productive session. Talked about the whole idea of raising one’s baseline mood. Right now, my basic mood is depressed. Not severely depressed, because that is something we dysthymic depression types tend to avoid via extreme sedentary lifestyles. But our apparent calmness and lack of drama compared to a more anxious depressive comes at a heavy price, that of a heavily proscribed lifestyle.

So I am chewing over this whole raising the base mood idea. It has a lot of appeal. I have thought for a long time that the right way to live would be to somehow set your default mood to “happy” and so you are happy except when something absolutely forces you into some other less pleasant mood.

Thus, inertia would be on the side of happiness, and you would build up a deep thick layer of happiness that would protect you from small things making you unhappy.

You would just roll right over the little bumps and jostles of life like a steamroller, while you sit in the driver’s seat, unperturbed.

And there are people like that out there, so it is definitely possible. Psychological studies show that these are probably some of the healthiest people in the world, both physically and mentally. They often have some kind of religious faith, but not always. And the religious faith is just part of an overall vigorously optimistic outlook on life.

So if it is possible to become more like that, it seems like a worthwhile goal. Instead, so many of us walk around with an enormous hole to fill inside us, and that makes us think that happiness is something you get, or have to earn, or acquire through possessions.

Happiness as a default state would strike a lot of people as cheating somehow. Why do anything if you are already happy? But that is a very narrow and unrealistic concept of happiness.

Happy people feel motivated by life, and enjoy it so much that they are quite content to engage with it very energetically. They find life rewarding. They see life as an endless smorgasbord of delights.

So far from just sitting there, blissed out, they do a lot more than unhappy people.

That is the sort of person I would like to be. I suppose we all would, really. But I feel deep down that this is a real possibility for me. Maybe not soon, but some day, when I have cleared a lot more of the psychological dead weight from my psyche and thus can let my natural levity buoy me up.

And then just bounce through life like a happy balloon.

Certainly, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I am increasingly aware, however, of the exact nature of my problem. There is this heavy weight of icy cold fear inside me that cancels out actions before I can even think about doing them. Its terrible gravity keeps me way down in my own hole, the one in the middle of my soul where a warm and beating heart should be.

And there is no shortcut to getting rid of that. It can only be burned off or dumped a little at a time.

I am learned to see my life as a small but constant pressure towards the good. It can be a frustratingly slow process sometimes, but over time, it does produce results. I become a more solid, more confident, more “together” version of myself, and the impurities are burned away.

The secret is to stay in touch with my emotions and let the steam out slowly. I am going to a slightly lower Paxil dose, 35/mg/day instead of 40, which should help.

It is time to slowly dial back the anesthetic and learn to walk again.

The cool side of the mountain

I feel somewhat better today. I have gotten some decent sleep and I feel calmer and smoother and less tense and paranoid and defensive.

I am hoping that this means last night’s blog entry helped excise whatever it was that had been bothering me and keeping me from being able to relax enough to sleep.

Of course, more prosaically, I might just have been constipated. Don’t worry, not going into details or anything, just putting that out there. I think the seat of a lot of my emotional problems might well lie in some of my physical problems, and not just the other way around.

In a way, though, for a sedentary philosopher like myself, it is a lot easier to deal with emotional problems and psychological problems than philosophical ones.

After all, physical problems require action.

Psychological problems can be tackled just by thinking about them. Or at least, you can fool yourself into thinking you are tackling them by just thinking about them, and that is what matter, right?

So today has been a pretty sleepy day, but for the most part, it has been the pleasant kind of sleepy. The kind that makes me feel relaxed and happy and lazy and dozy and good. Not the other kind, where I feel tired and miserable and weighed down and drugged and bad.

You can get really tired of sleep after a while, and then you just want to wake up and do something instead of being dragged back to bed by sleep, heavy as an anchor that drags you down to drown some more.

Now why do I think of sleep as being like drowning? It must be the apnea seeping into my consciousness again. I do drown a little in my sleep, or something very like it. I stop breathing. It is like being slowly strangled in your sleep. It is a harsh thing to even think about, let alone imagine.

And yet, it makes sense. I have a terrible fear of smothering and that is where it probably comes from. It is also probably the reason I have been a “fresh air fiend” since I was young. I will keep the window open in my bedroom until the cold of winter absolutely forces me to close it, and even then, I will open it for short periods in order to freshen the air in the room.

Anything to get more air, more air, MORE AIR.

So you would think the CPAP machine would be a godsend. That forces air into my lungs! It even moisturizes it first (otherwise, I assume, it would dry my lungs out, eep!). And it is true, there was a time when I was using the thing that it almost felt like dialysis for my lungs. It felt like it was clearing the bad air out and replacing it with good cool clean air. And that was before I even went to sleep.

Did I sleep better with it on? That is hard to say, and that is part of why I abandoned the thing. I got pretty angry when I would still have really bad sleep days when using it. I figured, if going to all this trouble does not even keep me from having terrible sleep days, fuck it.

That seems shortsighted now. Maybe it just needed a pressure adjustment in order to do its job better. Maybe I just needed to give it more time. Maybe if I had stuck it out, I would be in a much better place in terms of health, both physical and mental, by now.

It is worth a thought, anyhow. But strapping ymself into that machine every time I want to sleep is not easy. Despite what I know to be true, some anial part of me is always sure the thing will actually smother me somehow. It takes considerable emotional control to suppress that part of myself and in essence submit tot he experience, and that kind of thing takes its toll after a while.

As I have mentioned before, I have even resisted wearing an oxygen mask when I was on the way to the hospital in an ambulance because that primitive part of my brain felt like the mask was smothering me.

Never mind that it was doing literally the exact opposite of smothering me. In fact, it was probably giving me better air than I have ever had in my life. (Even better than the awesome air in New Mexico.)

Nope, i just wanted to rip that thing off my face the minute they put it on, and only my disinclination to get into a physical scuffle with two burly EMTs kept me from doing it.

There has to be something to all this fear of lack of air. I sometimes wonder if I have problems that go beyond just sleep apnea. Maybe I have some kind of waking apnea too, something that causes me to not quite get all the bad deoxygenated air out when I exhale, and so it build up over time, taking up space that the new oxygen-rich air want to use.

It is only a theory, and one I have entertained for a long time without acting on it. There are certainly times when I feel short of breath and can’t figure out why when my life is so damned sedentary.

Sort of thing I should mention to my doctor, I guess.

Anyhow, the good news is I feel better today. I think all the brooding is doing me some good. I have decided I like brooding. Brooding processes emotions, albeit as a slow steady burn as opposed to some big raging storm of catharsis.

But I am not a raging storm kind guy anyhow. I am too clamped down. So maybe a steady brooding release is the most realistic and effective way for me to let the bad stuff out anyhow.

I just have to remember to keep the pressure on to push things out and not bury them again.

And remember that I don’t always have to take everything on at once.

I can just let it burn, slow and even.

A season of unrest

Still can’t seem to get any proper sleep.

And the weird thing is, I am sleeping.

And dreaming. Had some weird dream that seemed to revolve around making homemade donuts earlier. So apparently I now bake in my sleep.

So it’s not a lack of REM time that is the problem. And yet, I don’t feel rested. I feel like no matter how much I sleep, some part of me just plain does not relax.

And when I try to think about it and puzzle it out, I get these hints of some kind of deep terror hiding between the layers of my consciousness. Some part of me is extremely frightened of sleep, or something about sleep, and I think that is what is holding me back and keeping me from getting restful sleep.

So far, I have no idea what that is, although I suspect it has something to do with my sleep apnea. Some part of me realizes that sleep means smothering, more or less, and resists going to sleep out of that fear. And until I can ease that scared animal part of me, I will not get anything like good sleep.

Which means it is probably time for me to use my CPAP machine again, which has been sitting there gathering dust for over a year now, possibly even two years. I may have said otherwise on here before. If I did, I apologize, for that was a lie. I fabricated a story about the Province not paying for it any more and taking it away in order to cover my shame that I have just plain not been using it.

It sits there, accusing me, like my video camera and my MIDI keyboard, saying “Why don’t you use me? I am right here. You could use me right now and maybe make things better for yourself. But you ignore us. Why? What the hell is wrong with you? ”

Good question, Voices Of Inanimate Objects In My Head. Why not? I don’t know. Maybe I just fear change so much that even positive change seems like too big a change to take on. Maybe taking advantage of certain things means opening up a part of me that is full of emotions that I am too scared to deal with.

Maybe even if I won a million dollars, I would end up just sitting here, typing away at this here computer, thinking “I will use that million bucks soon. No need to rush. ”

And in the meantime, the money would just get dusty in a corner. And eventually, I would just stop thinking about it at all, except for the occasional pang of guilt I felt when I looked at the pile.

But hey, easy cure for that : just bury myself in my distractions like usual, and stop thinking about it.

After all, stopping thinking about something which upsets you is always easier than doing something about it. It might not be better, as those neglected things have a way of accumulating over time, but it is always easier, and you always do what is easiest.

Like a liquid seeking the lowest level, you have no choice, or so it seems.

Still, while I might not feel wonderful lately, I do feel like this unrest is serving a greater purpose. I feel like things are in motion within my psyche and that I am building towards another layer of metamorphosis, maybe even my biggest one yet.

I get these hints of a greater kind of solidity within me, like I am reforging myself into something stronger and more coherent, and ridding myself of impurities.

If so, then I am willing to pay the cost. No change comes without pain. I know that I have a deep dead-eyed determination to grow as a person and evolve my way out of the morass in which I live. I know that I am willing to destroy whatever gets in my way and that I am willing to rip out my own heart and stomp it to death if that is what it takes.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I am just so damned tired of living in this tiny little cage. And yet part of me thinks maybe the smartest thing to do would be to make peace with the life I lead and enjoy it for what it is instead of constantly roiling against the walls of my prison.

And maybe that is, indeed, the smart thing to do. But as I age, I am increasingly aware of just how futile the constant search for the smart thing to do can be, and how it leads you into traps and illusions and cul-de-sacs of thought that lead you nowhere new, just keep you spinning round and around trying to catch the star at the end of your tail.

Knowing where you should go is futile if you lack the will to get there. Knowing the smart answer is less than futile if it is the wrong answer for you. We cannot expect to just magically become whatever our intellect says we should be.

We have to be who we are, and only then can we reach for something else. After all, you cannot get where you want to go unless you know where you are first, right?

There is a deeply damaged part of me that simply freezes up under certain circumstances, leaving me emotionally paralyzed and completely passive.

Somehow, I want to reach that part of me and soothe it, calm it, tell it everything will be OK and it can stop with the icy injection of paralytic fear now.

The danger has passed, and it is time to live and breath and grow again.

Even just writing that, I can feel the fear in my heart trying to shut me down and say “No! Hide in our hole! Danger! Danger!”

But that is OK. It has to come out of its hole in order to tell me that, and that means I can see it and maybe some day understand it well enough to embrace it, and make it feel safe.

Until then… I will sit on the doorstep of infinity, and wait.

Some video for you

Got three videos to share with you tonight, plus the usual psychobabble brouhaha.

( I already did the joke about “Brouhaha” being a great name for a combination brewpub and comedy club, right? I thought so. )

It’s been a quiet few days. I have been fairly successful in converting what might have been a depressed mood into one of quiet contemplation.

After all, I am, more or less, an introvert. Perhaps I just need time to sort my thoughts sometimes. A lot of mood has to do with how you interpret your basic emotions and physical state.

One man’s depression is another’s quiet mood.

Anyhow, on with our cavalcade of videos.

First, listen to what a bunch of millionaires want to say to you this political season.

Probably not quite what you expected, right? Now these people are patriots. They are willing to go against what traditional nearsighted capitalism would call their best interests and demand to be taxed more.

And when you think about it, what more can they do? There is no way to refuse a tax break. You can’t give the money back to the government. There is no mechanism for voluntary taxation.

Perhaps there should be.

So all they can do is use their voice, and presumably their money, to say “I don’t need this and I don’t want this, please repeal these tax cuts. ”

And the more people who are willing to break with the received orthodoxy that says TAXES BAD LESS TAXES GOOD NO MATTER WHAT, the faster we can break the back of the cycle of naked decadence and restore some sanity and order to politics.

Heck, maybe we can even get to a place where true conservatives, the grownup kind who understand that society costs money even when you do not feel like paying it, and who are interested in sober, simple, sincere solutions shorn of any ideological restrictions.

Warm-hearted pragmatists in power. Just imagine.

So bravo, you patriotic millionaires. Wanting to get your USA without paying for it is the exact opposite of patriotism. It is like stealing from your mother’s purse.

It’s like fighting for your right to gnaw on the hand that feeds you.

Had a pretty interesting dream this afternoon. It started off as something else, I think, but it totally turned into an 80’s Ending type dream.

Me and my friends were passing the table of these three douchebags in blazers and ties, and I stopped and told them all about how despite their best efforts, me and my friends would be back for our fourth and final year of college.

I even got to give this big speech about how maybe we were a little strange and unconventional, but it would be a crime not to get the most enjoyment out of these last days of our lives before the big bad world of which they were so fond scooped us up and made us behave.

And the whole crowd cheered, and a big bearded biker type got up and belched long and hard and I said “I think he speaks for all of us, don’t you?”.

And the crowd cheered twice as loud.

I think that has to be one of my best dreams ever. Way to go, brain! More like that!

Here’s another fun video. It is a simple concept but executed well.

Plus, of course, I absolutely had to include it because I am awash in Lovecraft lately. I am almost done of the second of two big compilations of Lovecraft-inspired works, my friend and roomie Joe is reading a comic strip called Young Lovecraft, Lovecraft has come up completely randomly and without any prompting from yours truly in conversations a half dozen times lately, and it is the Halloween season, a great time for spooky shit anyhow.

So when a reasonably well executed Lovecraftian spoof of those Get Your Bible Today type ads came along, I knew it was clearly a sign from the Old Ones that I needed to pass it on to you.

Plus, reading all this horror has reminded me of something about myself.

I am one creepy motherfucker.

And I am cool with that. I’m not just morbidly obese, I’m obesely morbid! I absolutely love a good scare, whether it’s from a horror movie or a spooky story or some of my favorite episodes of X-Files. I love reading about serial killers and murders and other true crime. I have watched a hell of a lot of murder mysteries and police procedurals and so forth.

I have a platonic crush on the Ask a Mortician lady.

So I hereby give myself permission. Go ahead, be strange and morbid and macabre. It is part of you, so own it and enjoy it.

Especially this time of year! Halloween is like Christmas for creepy people!

Lastly, a video that I present to you as a sort of cultural confession. When I tell people I am from Prince Edward Island, after I tell them where that is and why they should care, they often comment on my lack of an accent of any sort.

Well, both my parents are well-educated and I did not exactly have a lot friends growing up, so I was not exposed to the accent as much as the next fella.

But if you want to know what people sound like back home, here it is.

Oh, fair warning, there’s a fuckload of swearing.

Boy, that brings back a lot of memories, none of them good. Harsh, isn’t it? Like a fricking buzzsaw in the ear trying to cut your last nerve off, for fuck’s sake.

So having heard that, I think we all can agree that I really dodged a bullet when I did not pick up that accent. And if you think it sounds bad coming out of those guys, wait till you hear it from a chick.

Seriously, they talk exactly the same.

The only time I have even a little of that accent is when I am drunk. Then it will come out in bits and pieces and then disappear again.

Note : that is not an invitation to get me drunk so you can hear it!

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

It’s just the weather

Or my bowel health. Or a virus. Or allergies up in my sinuses. Or something.

But I do not feel well today. I feel, in fact, like second-rate crap. I feel tired, and nauseous, and weak, and a little dizzy and confused.

In short, I feel ill, and that is why I am sitting here typing to you lovely people and not where I would prefer to be, which is at this month’s BCSFA meeting.

That is the monthly meeting of local nerds that I somewhat spottily attend. I think I have made it to around seventy five percent of the meetings this year, plus or minus ten percent. Sometimes, i just cannot summon up the necessary thrust in order to escape the gravitational pull of my own issues, and I have to decline. Tonight is one of those nights.

But I am trying not to get bummed out about it. You win some, you lose some. I have been feeling sort of ill since Saturday morning, and then I had a pretty serious Irritable Bowl Syndrome attack this afternoon, and that is when I knew I was down for the count, so to speak.

Meh. I will recover soon enough. I already feel like I have been through the worst and right now I am just recovering my strength. It would have been more convenient for all of this to have happened yesterday instead of today, of course. Then I would have recovered by now.

But whatever. It is just a bump on the road, not the end of the world. I will survive.

I think I have always had a touch of IBS. I had what they called a “nervous stomach” back then when I was a kid. Too much excitement and I would get ill.

Kind of a bummer, really.

But for the most part, I learned to avoid that, I guess by becoming mellow and passive. Yet throughout my childhood, I had the occasional attack of what I now know to be IBS. I would have to go to the bathroom and sit on the bowl and the cramps would get worse and worse until they reached a peak, and then the fever would break, I would suddenly feel a million times better, and I would sweat buckets for a few minutes.

One might think it odd that I never told my parents or siblings about these attacks. But they were pretty rare, and after they were over I felt a lot better (yay endorphins), and when you are young you have a remarkable ability to recover from things rapidly, and so it never seemed like that big a deal to me.

It was just a weird, bad thing that happened seemingly at random. So, you know, whatever.

But all that came back to me when I went to a party for the crappy student radio station I used to volunteer at, CIMN, and had an attack so bad, I kept having to hog the one bathroom, with people banging on the door yelling for me to hurry up already.

Understandable, but not helpful. I figure it was the combination of social stress (I did not actually know a lot of these people) plus cheesy snacks, which have been known to irritate my system.

Anyhow, I was super ill and eventually had to beg a ride home from someone (thank you, whoever it was, I know I knew you slightly then but I have totally forgotten you now) and ended up lying on my bed, in the dark, sitting absolutely still in front of an open window (it was early summer), until my system finally calmed down again.

That is still, more or less, how I treat my symptoms after a serious attack. Darkness, coldness, and stillness. Usually I try to sleep, and I must say, if I manage to get to sleep after once the muscle relaxation and the endorphins kick in, it is some of the best sleep ever.

If there was a pill that would give me that kind of sleep, I would commit crimes to get it.

So after the big attack at the party, things were sort of OK for a little while, but once I went back home for the summer, the IBS just plain went berserk. That is when I ended up in the hospital for a few days because the cramping got so bad that I felt like I was dying.

They did a bunch of tests on me and concluded that none of the other indications like coeliac disease or giardia were present before someone eventually came along and said “Oh…. you’re still here? Um…. you can go now. ”

Gotta love hospital efficiency, right?

And over that summer, a lot of bad happened to me. Hypochondria had me in its jaws. Over and over again, I was sure I was dying, sure I could feel cancer inside me, positive I was going to have a heart attack. I started washing my hands eight, ten, twelve times a day. I had absolutely no appetite and could barely eat. I was anemic, dehydrated, and malnourished.

And it was around that time that my maternal grandfather died. I feel bad because I was such a wreck at the funeral and the interment. I wish I had been able to connect with the loss more strong at the time. But I was very ill.

Thus began two years of getting the medical runaround as nobody seems to know what was wrong with me and the only reason that ever ended was that Summerside finally got its own gastroenterologist and she was the only one with the perspicacity to know it was probably IBS.

Even then, tho, I more or less treated myself. The key was to learn not to panic when an attack came on. That was what made them escalate. Just ride it out, knowing it will pass.

That, plus learning a few more tricks (like always checking my sinuses, because sinus headaches bring my IBS on and make it way worse) is what got me here today. I have IBS, but I have it mostly managed. The severe attacks are rare and the minor ones I handle as a matter of course.

So…. that is the history of my bowels.

You can all stop asking about it now.