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.

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.