Blogging to a text document because my webhost is stupid.
Stupid because for some reason, instead of just charging my monthly fee to my credit card automatically like it has done for years, now it suspends my service and sends me an email telling me that it hasn’t received my payment, and then I have to log in, click the thing that says make the payment, and then wait for my account to be reactivated.
The thing is, they have my credit card info. They could totally keep charging me automatically. But for some reason, for the last two months they have made me log in and click “OK”.
It’s like they lost confidence in themselves and need validation now.
If so, I can relate.
Had an odd thought about myself and my predicament recently :
“It never should have been allowed to get this bad. “
That’s an unusual sort of thought for me because there is not a lot of logic to it. Allowed by who? Who was supposed to intervene before my life got the way it is?
The easy and insufficient answer would be “me”, obviously. But that’s not congruent with the emotions attached to the thought. There is definitely a sense that “someone” should have intervened.
Someone who is not me.
And I suppose that is true, if you go back far enough. I could certainly make a case that someone should have intervened when I was a very depressed and lonely child – a robot who went to school.
But I know myself too well to be able to accept such a pat narrative. Truth is, I am very good at putting out a “leave me the hell alone” vibe while not overtly doing anything to push people away.
Started out as a defence against bullying, I suppose. A doubly destructive defence, because I learned both to hide away from everything and to push people away passively.
No wonder I was such a lonely kid.
So it’s hard for me to imagine how someone could have intervened. It would have taken someone of extraordinary strength and perseverance to overcome my shyness and my swiftness of mind and my facile ability to hide everything behind superficial friendliness long enough to reassure the authority figure that everything was fine so they would leave me alone.
Feels strangely good to confess that last bit. Weird.
I can’t help but feel like this is all a consequence of having all this mind power from such an early age. Of being “smarter” than most adults when I was a tiny child and thus having all the strength and resources to really fuck myself over in the long term.
And at a time when education had fully embraced a non-authoritarian model which precluded the sort of confrontation and struggle that might have benefited me.
No wonder my favourite teacher was Mrs. Rogers, who still had a lot of then unreconstructed schoolmarm in her.
She was the only one who bothered to really try to reach me.
I wish I had appreciated it more at the time.
So sure, someone should have done something at the time.
But could they have?
More after the break.
Fuck, my blog is STILL down. I am still blogging into a LibreOffice document.
I do NOT have the energy to hop into my webhost’s live chat to deal with this right now. So I guess it’s going to have to wait till tomorrow.
I’m going to try clearing my browser history et. al. Maybe that’s the problem.
Because the website itself is up, just not my usual input screen.
Turns out, clearing your web history of everything that was ever in it takes some time.
Curse my need for thoroughness!
Jesus, I think it would have been faster to have them removed rectally.
More fun, too.
Bored now. Moving on.
Now it can be told!
Okay. Now let’s talk about what happened last night.
I lay down for a nap around 8 pm. At around 8:30 pm, I felt a twinge in my digestive tract.
This was soon followed by a pain, then a sharp pain, then the kind of gut-wide pain that tells methat Something Is Very Wrong Down Below.
What followed was the worst irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) attack I have had in years. Lots of cramping, a fair bit of nausea, a soupcon of gas. And pain. Lots and lots of pain.
Felt like a weasel was trying to gnaw its way out of my gut.
Oh, and it’s on fire.
This pain pretty much made me its bitch. Took me an hour just to get from lying down to sitting on the edge of my bed. Probably at least as long to get from the edge of the bed to the toilet.
Part of that was the pain and part of it was waiting till it felt “safe”.
So that was a pretty rotten time to be me. But I am proud of myself because despite being in a lot of pain, I stayed calm and even a bit cheerful throughout.
I just kept telling myself that this was just something I was going to have to let run its course and that it would all be over soon.
And of course, the great thing about a prediction like that is that sooner or later, it’s right.Eventually it was all over and I was happy that I had stayed calm even when I felt the flames of panic start burning away at the foundation of my calmness.
Panic only makes an attack like this far, far worse. Staying calm, detached, and philosophical about the whole thing let me come through the whole thing safely.
And that got me to thinking about (what else) the difference between normal people and someone like myself.
Maybe part of what they have that I don’t is that their highest priority is getting on with life, and not the ultimate truth of things.
Maybe what they have that keeps them sane is a series of neural pathways that fill in whatever their mind needs in order to remain balanced.
Maybe the real secret to happiness is not to worry too much about what’s true.
And maybe that is something I can learn to do.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.