Here I am, in my favorite White Spot, waiting for my fewd and typing to you nice people.

I just cashed my monthly cheque and after meal I will walk over to the PriceSmart  (shop smart. Shop PriceSmart.) and get some decent food for myself.

By that, I don’t just mean more nutritious, although God knows I need that too.

I also mean food that will seem like a treat. Stuff that makes me look forward to the next meal. I might not be the sort of person who can generate their own goals and rewards yet, but I csn still motivate myself with food.

Obesity CAN be hacked.

Maybe I will get some flour and Spends do I van resume my sugar free dessert baking. That would definitely give me things to look forward to, and making enough desserts for the week every Saturday would not be that much work.

Maybe two, maybe three recipes, tops.

Aww crap,  an allergy attack. I am sure I took my antihistamines last night. Maybe they only last “up to” twenty four hours. That would figure, wouldn’t it?

As usual, the sneezing and runny nose are only the most obvious effect. The more pervasive problem is the body wide inflammatory response. That causes all kinds of problems down the road.

Back home now. Took a cab home from PriceSmart. .. Five bucks, big whoop.

Where was I? Oh yeah, inflammatory issues. The inflammation can make my joints ache, my head hurt, my eyes red and watery, my IBS go nutzoid, and drains my energy.

All from a sneeze. Motherfucker.

This is why I get bent out of shape when my antihistamine doesn’t do its job. There’s far more than sniffles and sneezes on the line. There’s a whole cacophony of pathology tied up with those sneezes, and I would really, really rather it never EVER went off.

I wonder if taking an aspirin or similar anti-inflammatory analgesic would help in these situations. Is Aleve anti-inflammatory? We have those.

According to the Internet (oh wise and mighty lord of us all), it is! I will go take one.

There! Wow, those are big. Good thing they’re soft and squishy.

Been pondering the whole smartness issue again. That old bone. You know, how to be smart without being an obnoxious asshole. Funny how that’s immediately think of when I imagine letting loose.

But I know what I could potentially be like if I didn’t watch myself. Obnoxious, pushy, manipulative, sarcastic, mocking, dismissive of others, and all in all a diabolical pain in the ass to all who encounter me.

But maybe that’s only one side of the equation. Maybe if I made the jump into genuinely not caring what people thought of me and not worrying about whether my expressing my personality and intellect at full power bothers people would lead to a better, more rounded and grounded me.

The superego always uses the id’s worst impulses as an argument in support of its draconian oppression. But maybe the id wouldn’t harbor such dark impulses if it was not so tightly repressed. Maybe a freer id is a happier and healthier id.

Maybe people would even like me better. It’s not exactly like I am racking up the buddies being meek and sensitive. In fact, I think my nurturing deficit has left me in “attract care” mode, which works great if you’re a kid but just makes you pathetic as an adult.

It’s a case of learned helplessness. I have a strong impulse to surrender my problems to others. I guess I never really made it out of the “take it to mommy who will kiss it better” due to the harshness of my childhood. PArt of that harshness was having people take tasks away from me because I wasn’t doing them right and they made the short term decision that it was easier in the moment to do it themselves rather than teach me to do it for myself and thus build my self-esteem and competence.

Instead, I got the direct opposite message : that there was something deeply wrong with me that made me incompetent and a burden on others and there was nothing I could do about it because I was just plain broken.

And if you can’t do it for yourself, what choice do you have but to get others to do it?

I wonder if everyone was so impatient with me because my father’s impatience rubbed off on them. There was definitely a point at which everyone got tired of me. The metaphor I have used before of being a pet people are sick of is apt. Once I stopped being precociously adorable and once the school system took care of me during the day, people just plain lost interest in me and I became that dumb dog that everyone is sick of cleaning up after and walking and feeding, and whom everyone wishes would just go away.

And he’s the same dumb ol’ dog he always was, friendly and excitable and desperate for attention and affection. He doesn’t know why nobody pays attention to him any more, but he can tell when people are angry and impatient with him and it makes him very sad. he tries to do everything right, but nothing helps. People are always mad at him, and nobody pays any positive attention to him, so he just hides from everybody.

And that dog is me.

Damn. I don’t think I have ever summed up my childhood so well before. I’ve officially bummed myself out. But in a good way, a way that lets me process stuff that has needed processing for a very long time.

Growing up is like the measles : the older you are when it happens, the harder it is going to be on you.

I feel like I spent twenty years in a kind of suspended animation and I am still only half alive. I fumble towards the sunlight, making steady but not linear progress as I go.

Maybe someone will love this old dog after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.