Feeling low right now. Sort of sleepy, kind of tense, and suffused with a feeling of cold, hanging weight.

Didn’t end up baking last night. In fact, last night went sort of… weird. I found myself in on of my dissociative states where I feel like nothing is real and I am only barely hanging on to existence myself.

Those don’t bother me nearly as much as they used to, because I know it’s just a feeling and it will pass. But it leaves me little choice but to retreat further into myself and that is never a good thing.

So I ended up playing an Android game for two and a half hours straight. It’s not even that great a game, it’s just that when I am in that kind of mood, it is very easy for me to fixate on something small and rewarding and put my energies into it while shutting out the rest of the world.

And that is how I survived that particular mood storm. Dunno what comes next, but whatever it is, I will get through it okay.

Today me and Le Gang will be going to ABC Country Kitchen for supper. Hopefully exposure to fresh air and the caffeine from the Diet Coke I drink will help perk me up and feel more alive, because right now, I feel an inadequately animated corpse and all I really want to do is crawl back into my grave for another century or two.

Yup, I am really really sleepy. I got a normal amount of sleep, but my body wants more. And it can’t have it. When I am done with my words for today I will have to get a shower and get dressed, and by the end of that, it will probably be 3:30 pm and we will likely leave for supper at like 4:30 pm or 5 pm at the latest.

Nor enough time for a nap.

But we will see how I am doing after supper. Odds are I will have actually filled my sails with wind by then, and I will feel up to going to the BCSFA meeting afterwards.

But if not, I will come back home and get some sleep and hang out with Le Gang when they get back from the meeting. I don’t like missing the meetings because they are usually quite enjoyable, with all us fans having wide ranging intellectual discussions peppered with anecdotes and goofiness. My kind of party.

But it may come to that. Of course, my inner drill sergeant is yelling “It doesn’t matter what you feel! Do it anyway!”. And I do want to encourage that voice as much as I can because it could do me a lot of good.

However, I do have legit medical conditions and I suppose I can’t always override them. Although who knows. Maybe those are false limitations and if I just powered through them, they would crumble like sandcastles before the incoming tide.

And I haven’t done all my little health checks yet either. For one thing, due to a recent cold snap (and someone turning my room’s thermostat down without telling me, grr) I have both my windows closed. Could be that part fo why I am feeling crappy is that the air is stale in his little box of mine and I need to punch some holes in the top.

Resisting sleepiness has always stressed me out. I am just not used to having so much of my mental capacity drained away and I get freaked out and kinda paranoid. It would be so easy to just give in to the desire to sleep and it is so hard to stay awake that it does quite a number on my emotional state. Makes me feel very strained.

And of course, it gets ten times worse once I lose the option of falling asleep. Once I am out and about in the world, I can’t just flop into bed and snooze any more. I have to stay awake, and I end up bouncing off the barrier I have had to erect between me and sleep over and over again.

I remember going through this in my school days. I am pretty sure I have never even fallen asleep in class, but I have come damned close. I would be almost asleep then I would jerk myself awake, and feel all paranoid and conspicuous.

In a way, I wish I had just said “Fuck it” and gone to sleep those times. Other people do it and it doesn’t wreck their lives. It just turns into an amusing story of an embarrassing moment.

I doubt I would have gotten away with sleeping for long, though, as I snore. Plus I always sit up front because I want to be able to read the board/slides/video/whatever, and because I like to ask questions (sometimes specifically to keep myself awake), and because it keeps me from feeling too claustrophobic.

So falling asleep in the front row would not have gone well. Imagine seeing a student snoring in the front row of a class you were teaching. You would feel pretty insulted, even if part of you might understand that the student didn’t do it on purpose and might have a very good reason for being that sleepy.

I would totally be the kind of teacher who made a show out of waking those people up. Gently…. but with the whole class watching and hearing my shtick.

“Ding Dong! This is your The Middle Of My Class wakeup call. ”
“Hey, wake up! Today’s lesson is way too awesome to miss! Of course, I might be biased. ”
“You are dreaming that you are flunking the next quiz in this class because you fell asleep. You wake to find that IT WAS NOT A DREAM! But wait…. is there still time to change your fate? Yes. Yes there is. ”

I would definitely be the kind of teacher you either love or loathe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, not fever really. But my tummy was upset earlier, and those of you who know me know that when I say “tummy” I really mean “lower digestive tract”, known at home as “the bowels”.

I suffer from IBS. For the most part, the symptoms are trivial and easily managed. But now and then, I get a flare up, and it is not exactly a fun time for all ages.

Nobody knows what causes IBS, though I expect a certain temperament plus a certain body type makes one more susceptible.

But it has a lot fo do with your nervous disposition and you diet and current emotional state and blah blah blah. Any time I have a serious emotional blow, I know my bowels will provide a highly unwelcome aftershock effect. If I have been eating the wrong things, that also can set off an attack. Such things include food that is too spicy for my (increasingly) (dammit) delicate digestion or things that are just too hard to digest, like Pho or beef jerky.

And I am increasingly convinced that it is related to the sort of low level inflammation that is making all the medical news lately as it might just be the root cause of a lot of extremely pesky medical conditions.

My anecdotal person evidence show a definite pattern of my bowels getting worse after I have had an allergy attack. And I had one last night. Sneezing, runny nose, and most tellingly, a sort of odd feeling of heat in my major muscles.

It is my theory that these attacks set off a body wide inflammatory response in me, with histamines going nuts everywhere, and ergo can cause a wide variety of effects like joint ache, dizziness, and of course, digestive difficulties.

If so, then I should really take my antihistamines all the time rather than just when I have had problems. Keeping my histamines happy might just make me a much happier person in the long run. That, and some Tylenol for inflammation.

Tonight’s festivities started after I went to the bathroom. When I got up off the porcelain throne, I felt okay, but by the time I had washed my hands and sat down in front of the computer, I knew something was a-stirring Down South.

Basically, I felt the sadly all too familiar feeling of being “backed up”. It’s a very distinctive form of nausea. Basically, somewhere along the line, my bowels/lower intestine cramps up and that causes everything from that point back up to the stomach to jam, and the body, quite correctly, makes sure I don’t add to the problem by making me nauseous.

Sadly, this all happened around 6:30 pm, and made me too nauseous to eat until 8, so I ended up eating supper way later than usual and my whole timing is thrown off.

Theoretically, I should be baking in an hour and ten minutes. But I don’t know if I will have the energy or not. Usually there is three or four hours between blogging and baking. Tonight I am lucky if I will get one. And I am still not feeling wonderful, although the ginger in the gingerbread I had earlier helped a lot.

Nothing like ginger for soothing an upset tummy. Back home, the folk remedy for nausea was flat ginger ale. You made it by taking a bottle of ginger ale, poking a tiny hole in the cap, then very carefully shaking the bottle. Thus, the carbon dioxide escapes and your ginger ale gets flattened.

Why ginger ale? For the ginger, of course. Why flat? Because bubbles are not good for upset tummies.

The good news is, of course, that I got over it. The bad news is that I now feel very tired. So it will be up to me to decide whether I bake in an hour or not.

I can’t imagine that I will feel like it. But then again, it’s not all about how I feel any more, is it? And it never should have been. So whether or not I feel like it is not nearly as important as whether I want to do it.

Those are not the same things.

And part of me definitely wants to do it. I never bake on Sundays (even God rested then) and so if I don’t bake tonight either, I will have gone two days without baking in a row and I worry that the necessary discipline that I have worked so hard to build will crumble if I go that long without reinforcing it.

And then you have to build the discipline of baking 6 days out of 7 AGAIN. And that sucks!

So I imagine I will end up baking tonight… nothing big, just biscuits, easy peasy… but I doubt it will be at 11 pm as is my custom. Probably a lot closer to 1 am, because after I finish here, I am taking a nap.

Or at least lying down with the lights out to rest my eyes. Too much staring at screens!

Started watching a show called Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. I’ve had it on my Netflix instant queue for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to watching it yet because its Netflix user ratings were pretty low.

Well those people are morons because the show is a lot of fun. Basically, the Hulk creates his own super hero team with Red Hulk, A-bomb (a Hulked up Rick Jones), Skaar (a Hulk from another dimension), and… wait for it… SHE HULK!

And admittedly, the animation style is a little over-shaded and jumps around a lot like a Michael Bay movie, but that works quite well in the big fight scenes. And it has a fun jokey wacky sense of humour about it which is more charming than funny but makes the whole thing more fun.

I have only seen the first two episodes which form, I think, a two-part pilot for the show, so it remains to be seen how it looks and works once they are on a smaller budget. Hopefully, that will result in them ditching the out of control shading (seriously, it’s like a deranged inker got hold of the cells) and using fewer camera moves.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.