In other words, I’m depressed.

Same as before. I feel heavy and beat down and just plain sad. Dunno if there is a physiological cause or if I am just processing some leftover emotions.

Yes, I know, that would also have a physiological cause, just one in the brain. Shut up, pedantic materialist in my head.

The periodic assaults on my coping structures from earaches certainly doesn’t help. I did eventually go get the antibiotics for them, though. If it is some kind of ear infection, that should take care of it. It’s what took care of it before, those times when I had swimmer’s ear.

My doctor didn’t seem to think it was swimmer’s ear. Looking at the Wiki page, I am inclined to agree. This is definitely not that. At least it explains why my GP tugged on my earlobe and asked if that hurt (it didn’t). Swimmer’s ear is an outer ear thing. I would have a red, inflamed earlobe if that was my condition.

So now I have no idea what it was I had before. A middle ear infection, maybe? It can’t be inner ear because there are no auditory effects. And honestly, just a guess, but I figure if it was my inner ear, I would be in a lot more pain.

I mean, there’s pain and then there’s pain. Compared to everyday life, these earaches are very painful.

Compared to when my gall bladder went kablooey, they are a mere pinch.

All I know is that I have had this before and it always came about as a result of fluid in my ear. And antibiotics did solve it. So, fingers crossed there.

Skylos, if you are reading this, I can’t thank you and Dhugal enough for taking care of me those two times I had an ear infection when I lived with you in Silicon Valley. I owe you guys so much. Yo and Ross, of course.

The moving is going okay on my end. I am probably going to pack up and move my main computer today. It’s not like I am using it much lately, what with it being Internet-free. Funny how in this day and age, that renders a computer useless.

Well, nearly useless, anyhow.

I have figured out how I can fix it on my own, though. Once I get my check next week, I will buy a USB WiFi receiver. I figured those must exist, so I Googled it, and yup. I can get one at NCIX for just 10 dollars. And that way, I don’t have to prevail upon William to come fix our Ethernet cable.

It’s about time I gave up the hard line anyhow. It’s so pre-millennial.

I will have to make sure that my computer is as close as is reasonable possible to the WiFi router, though.

Dealing with WiFi signal variability is bad enough on my tablet. On my actual PC, it would be intolerable.

I am somewhat stressed about the rest of the move. I dunno if we are going to have everything in place by Tuesday. I am going to offer my help for the rest of it once I am done with blog and video.

Committing to a blog and a vid a day doesn’t seem like such a big deal when you largely have nothing else to do with your time. But when you actually have things to get done, it becomes kind of a pain.

Still, I am looking forward to the move. I have been wanting something to come along to shake up my life for a long time, and I guess I got my wish with this whole eviction thing. Because of it, we are moving to a new place which has a different set of drawbacks and virtues, and the resulting chaos can be harnessed and used as both the energy and the opportunity for renewal.

And boy, do I need renewal.

I will do my best to be more responsible in the new place. Keep things cleaner, including my body. Get into the habit of looking around for things to do when I feel bored and stressed out. Fuss over stuff.

And flip my damned mattress. It desperately needs it, for both comfort and sanitary reasons. So much sleep sweat in it. Gross.

Maybe I will even start using my CPAP machine again. Anything’s possible. Who knows, maybe they have masks that reduce the claustrophobia factor now.

My claustrophobia is largely what made my relationship with it so… complex. The feeling of the mask over my face and having to remember to breathe through my nose (if you open your mouth, it breaks the seal) and such really made me feel trapped and restricted, and I would have trouble breathing even though another part of me knew that I was actually breathing way better than normal.

Throw in an allergy attack and the resultant stuffed up nose, and the thing becomes unusable. When you can’t breathe through your nose, the only options left are to breathe through your mouth or through your ears.

And my Eustachian tubes are usually clogged up too.

So I guess I can count myself amongst those who tried CPAP and it just didn’t work for them. My sleep apnea has gone untreated for like five years because of it, and because, well, depression is an ugly illness that makes people do ugly things just because they lack the motivation to do anything else.

The thing is, in order to go to the next step of treatment (probably surgery), I will have to admit to people in authority that I have let things slide for a very, very long time.

And that is a major barrier for a socially anxious person like me.

Hopefully, I will work up the nerve eventually and go get this shit fixed. The next step is likely surgery, and I am willing to go under the knife if there is a good enough chance that it will result in better sleep.

Time to resume this whole moving thing.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Yeah, more about moving. You’re getting it from both the text and the video lately.

This afternoon has been filled with me packing up the rest of my stuff. My lord, do I have a huge number of miscellaneous cords, plugs, and connectors. I have absolutely no idea what most of them are for. For now, I am just boxing them up with the rest of my random stuff. But when I am unpacking, I will get all of them into the same place then try to sort through them and figure what the heck they all are and whether or not it even makes sense to keep them around.

Today I really had to get down and dirty and sort through all the various things that had accumulated on and around my computer desk and separate the wheat from the chaff.

It was mostly chaff.

But now I have pretty much everything in my room packed except for the stuff I use all the time. Tomorrow, or maybe later tonight, I will get my bathroom sorted out and maybe tackle the prop closet.

We got fun stuff in there.

I am pretty worried about all the stuff from here that, at least in theory, has to go there. Looking around this apartment, I realize that our new digs are a lot smaller than these and we are going to have to get used to less space for stuff.

And we have so much stuff!

Myself, I will be fine. My new bedroom is quite roomy and I don’t own all THAT much stuff. Not compared to the other residents of this apartment. I have no worries at all about where all my stuff is going to go.

But as for the rest… I think I never truly appreciated just how big this place is until I had something to compare it to. It has been a good apartment for us, despite its issues, and we would not be leaving it if we didn’t have to. We got a very roomy apartment at a very reasonable price, and it is a low down crying shame that we are being forced out.

But that seems to be the fate of all affordable housing. Some developer comes along and says “My word, there are some poor people here who are not getting screwed nearly hard enough on rent. What a golden opportunity.”

And the next thing you know, what was cheap affordable housing that afforded people without much money a little comfort and dignity is turned into something more in keeping with making absolutely sure poor people feel as poor as possible.

After all, the poorer the poor are, the richer the rich are by comparison. And what could possibly be more important than making the rich feel rich?

So I guess it could be worse. The place we are moving might be smaller and more expensive, but at least it is in a nice Strata building with a concierge and a gym and a rec room and a nice view off the balcony.

And a killer location, of course. Once we move, I am going to make a point of exploring our little area. It’s a high density neighborhood and so there might be all kinds of things right outside our door that we don’t know about.

I might even be able to find a GP closer to me than Doctor Chao, and Chao is only three city blocks away. But I am both lazy and not all that happy with Chao, so I am open to change.

I am tired of Chao’s always being super late, and I get the feeling that he is too mild-mannered to be an effective GP, at least for me. He seems almost to defer to me when I make a suggestion as to what might be wrong, and that is the last thing I need from my doctor.

I need a doctor who will ignore my suggestions in favour of a direct examination of the facts. I mean sure, I am bright, but I am no doctor. They are the ones who are supposed to be figuring this shit out.

From now on, I will just report my symptoms. No theories, no suggestions. I want to see how he handles that.

Speaking of things he’s handled (sort of), my earaches continues to plague me. I am experiencing one right now and it really hurts. Part of me wants to curl up in a ball in a dark corner and whimper for a while.

Chao gave me a prescription for amoxycillin to maybe treat it (not that he gave me anything as useful as a diagnosis) but I have not had time to fill it. I should do it ASAP but the thing about chronic intense pain is that it is very depressing, and so I am having trouble finding the motivation.

One would think that the pain would provide the motivation. And that is perfectly logical thinking, if you are dealing with a mentally healthy person.

But we depressives work by an entirely different set of rules. It’s part of what makes depression such a bastard of an illness. When it comes to depression, the very nature of the disease makes it harder to seek treatment for it, or for anything else that might need fixing.

Hopefully I will go next door to Shopper’s soon and get the antibiotic and maybe some sort of earache medicine, or at least something to treat the accompanying dental pain, like Ambesol.

To be honest, it could be that it’s a dental problem causing an earache and not the other way around, but I am sticking with the earache thing for now.

God this fucking hurts. Why did this have to happen when I am dealing with the whole issue of moving as well? It’s fucking unfair. I feel so damned broken lately.

Oh well. Back to packing, as best I can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.