Might have to modulate the insulin dose a little.

This morning, I woke up feeling pretty bad. I tried just drinking water and catching up on Facebook till it passed, but it only got worse and I eventually came to the conclusion that my blood sugar was too low.

I had all the signs. I felt cold all over, I had tingling in my extremities, and most importantly, I had a wobbly, unsteady feeling when I walked that I tend to use as the core sign of low blood sugar.

It is highly distinctive to the hypoglycemic state in me, and hence easy to recognize even when blood sugar issues are making it hard for me to concentrate.

So I wobbled by way out to the living room and ate basically a double meal and now I feel better and can think about what it all means.

One conclusion is that I definitely need to stop skipping meals. I have to return to being quite assiduous about eating every six hours like clockwork, no matter what. When my blood sugar was high all the time, I got out of that habit and now it is costing me. When I had my little attack, I had not eaten for around ten hours and that is clearly too long.

Lowered blood sugar caused by more insulin has sped up my metabolism and I need to respect that.

Secondly, I need to wonder if I am taking too much insulin. No point in ending up with dangerously high blood sugar instead of dangerously high.

So I am pondering lowering my daytime dose (the 11:30 AM one) to 40 units and seeing if that still does the trick re: keeping my sugars from being too high.

Just to be on the safe side, I skipped this morning’s dose. Well, safety and laziness, to be honest. I only have one dose left, and when it is gone, it is time to go for a big resupply trip to the Shopper’s next door. I will not only be out of insulin but nearly out of all my other supplies as well, like the needle tips and alcohol swabs I need for my insulin injections and the test trips and lancets for testing, and some of those I will have to pay for myself (sigh), so cheapness enters into it as well.

Sadly, I cannot be absolutely sure that I was experiencing low blood sugar this morning because I could not quite get it together enough to actually test myself.

I was in Feel Bad Must Eat mode, and in that mode, I am practically a zombie.

All this while I am also enduring a period of troubled and complicated sleep as well. As usual, it was easy to be philosophical and relaxed about it in the first few days, but the longer it lasts, the harder that sense of detachment is to maintain.

This shit really wears down my emotional coping resources, and right now, I feel tired and worn out and depressed and deflated.

Which, of course, makes sleep a perversely attractive prospect. My sleep might be wearing me down and wearing me out, but it is a lot easier than staying awake when I am so damned tired.

And there is always the hope that the more I sleep, the sooner I will catch up and/or burn off all the excess creative energy and be done with this particular period of deep dark disturbed slumber.

But mostly, it is about being really sleepy and deciding to just plain give in to it.

Meanwhile, let’s listen to Q singing about bronies.

Seriously. That is John De Lancie, beloved amongst fans as the lovably petulant and flamboyantly omnipotent (ish) being known as Q from Star Trek : The Next Generation and subsequent shows.

And yup. He is singing a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque tune about bronies, the adult male fans (some of whom are female) of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic.

The Internet is truly a strange and wondrous place. Apparently, the animated sequence is from a documentary about bronies coming out soon. Whatever.

I find this “some bronies are ladies” thing pretty interesting. You take a show clearly intended for little girls, and it turns out to be so wonderfully good that it attracts a huge number of adult male fans who instantly form their own unique “brony” culture around the show, and this culture attracts the attention of the mainstream media, who understandably think adult men water a girly cartoon is news.

This attention comes at just the right time to only further cement and expand the culture’s reach, so that “brony” becomes the word for all adult fans of the show, necessitating the female adult fans to have to clear their throats and remind everyone that they are still there and that “brony” culture includes them too, although they are clearly not, well, “bros”.

And so someone came up with what I will spell “pega-sister”, which does the job, sort of, but is clumsy and does not exactly trip off the tongue easily and so I can understand why only some adult female fans of the show choose to use it.

And all because a show aimed for little girls and with a mostly female cast, through the power of the Internet and its own innate quality, attracted such an enormous adult male fanbase that they quite innocently ended up kind of co-opting the whole thing.

I say this without sarcasm or snark : clearly, there was a lot of adult men out there with a strong need to get in touch with their feminine side and reconnect with simple, childlike virtues like friendship, caring, compassion, understanding, and teamwork.

The fact that such a thing as My Little Pony : FIM should come along to fulfill that need seems just a little magical to me, to be honest.

It’s the sort of magic Disney used to have, and that Pixar still has, and that I hope to put into my writing some day.

Writing is Magic.

Today’s diary entry has a soundtrack, and you can find it here.

Today has been pretty nice, overall.

But let’s back up a minute. First, old business.

I did go to the BCSFA meeting last night. No big psychological apotheosis or amazingly illuminating decision point necessary. I just found that, when the time came, I felt like going.

And what more do you need, really? I am doing a lot of hard thinking about simplicity lately and I think my brain is moving from the “ripping out old plumbing phase” into more of a “sorting through what is left and figuring out what to do with it” phase.

It is just like cleaning a room. First you throw out all the garbage, and that feels really good, because eliminating waste always has a clearly Freudian pleasure to it. You look at those big bags of garbage and think “Wow, I am getting rid of this much stuff! And the room is so much cleaner and nicer now! I am really making progress here! Yay me!”

And that lasts for however long it takes to take the garbage to the curb (or dumpster, or whatever), and then you come back and see all the stuff that now has to be sorted and put away, and you realize that getting rid of the garbage was the easy part, the cheap thrill, and now you have to do the hard part.

You have to figure out where everything goes. Dammit.

And I don’t know about other people, but I always have way more stuff than places. I might get more into the whole cleaning and organizing your life thing if I had enough places.

Then again, that would just lead to another kind of option paralysis.

But back to the mental thing. I do feel like recovery, for me, is a long cleanup job. A slow and thorough process of cleaning out the garbage, deciding what is necessary and what is just getting the way, and moving things closer to one another so they can be connected again.

And so every day, I become more whole, integrated, connected, and intact, and less.. broken.

I am putting myself back together. Feels good, more often than not.

Had a pleasant evening with the people of BCSFA. I sometimes tell myself, tongue in cheek, that I only go there for the free food (and when I am feeling socially anxious, the prospect does help), but really, the food I seek there is food for thought. I am highly motivated by intelligent conversation, and I can always find it there. The local nerds are all intelligent and interesting people, and talking with them is always a treat for an intellectual manque like myself.

I hope that does not make me sound cold. I like these people too, and enjoy their company. I do not just see them as sources of mental stimulation.

But I am extremely intellectual in nature, and as such, always looking for mental sustenance. Our cerebral metabolism is extremely fast and demanding, and so mentally speaking, we are restless and easily bored.

Speaking of sustenance, I was a terribly bad boy when it came to the dessert offerings at last night’s meeting. I had been such a good boy since Xmas, but last night, the easy access to a stimulatingly wide variety of sweet things shattered my self-control and I had quite a bit of it.

So when I tested my blood sugar this morning, I expected the worst. How badly had I shattered my hard won progress over this last month? Was I redlining?

Imagine my delight when the reading was not just normal, but 7.0^[1], which is the definition of normal. Greater than that is diabetic. Less than that is hypoglycemic. It was not just normal, it was hilariously normal. I laughed out loud.

So I really feel like I got away with something last night. And being a prudent type person and not a risk taking type, I am going to count that as a blessing and not press my luck, as opposed to seeing it as a signal to throw caution to the wind and eat whatever the hell I want from now on.

But it is a sign that 50 units of insulin twice a day is doing the trick, and as long as I do not start to have hypoglycemic incidents or other ill effects, I will just keep it up.

It does mean, however, that I will be going through those tubes of insulin rather fast. One tube holds around 300 units of insulin, and therefore, one tube will last me three days. There are five tubes to a pack, and so one pack of tubes will last me fifteen days.

So twice a month I will have to go next door for more. Big deal. I need more reasons to move. Healthy blood sugar or no, it is still damned unhealthy to be almost completely sedentary like me.

Besides, I am tired of being fat. Perhaps healthy blood sugar will help me lose weight, which would be awesome. But moving more would be nice too.

Oh, and lastly, I am still exploring Stencyl. Right now I am looking at all the neat pre-made stuff they have out there for it. The people making the program quite wisely included a fully integrated content sharing system in the program, so there is a large library out there of bits and pieces other people have programmed just waiting for me to snap them together however I like.

I just want to make sure I understand the program well enough to use other people’s stuff to make the sort of thing I want, and then I will be happily downloading this and that to play with.

I have absolutely no pride as a programmer. I am a creator. I want to make what I want to make with as little fiddling about as possible.

If I can make fun, catchy little games entirely out of other people’s work, fine by me.

The final product will still be mine, mine, mine.

Seeya in the funny papers, folks!