Feeling pretty crappy today.

Mostly because I have a chest cold of some sort. Been coughing now and then, not a lot, and my throat is sore and swollen, and my nose is running, and my lungs are sore and scratchy and kinda raw feeling.

So, the usual, really. The same shit that keeps coming back now and then before disappearing in a day or so to lurk some more.

It’s also making me quite tired. Fighting infections takes a lot of energy, after all.

This caused me to miss my Wound Care appointment this morning. Slept right through. Had to call them up and offer my mea culpas. Next appointment is Saturday at 8:30 am.

Though with symptoms like mine, even if I had woken up on time, I probably would not have gone in. What would the point me? As soon as they asked the corona screening questions they would have sent me home anyhow.

That ended saving me money, at least. Would have been one of those mornings where I had to get there n’ back on my own, via taxi. Julian was busy dogsitting.

No big deal, really. Ten bucks each way, twenty total. I can handle that. But it’s nice not to have to spend it and even nicer not to have to pull myself together and like, interact with normal reality enough to call and take cabs.

For me, that takes effort.

But I am very pissed off that I keep missing Wound Care appointments. I have missed three in the last month and that is very unlike me.

I’m not a flake, god damn it. I’m punctual and reliable. Life just keeps fucking with me!

I’ve also been feeling quite depressed. Not that I care.

It’s just the usual bullshit. Feeling low, all dragged out and bogged down. Everything seems to take so much effort. Like someone turned up the gravity.

And the air viscosity, which is a phrase I instantly regret coining.

But I don’t care that I am depressed. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing has changed. I am still the same awesome and amazing person with mental superpowers and a whole world out ahead of him to explore and conquer once he’s well again.

I might feel like shit, but that doesn’t mean I AM shit.

I’m just an amazing person in a shitty place right now. This too shall pass. I haven’t always felt this way and I won’t always feel this way,

It’s just the stupid fucking weather.

In the meantime, I guess I will sleep a bunch. Whatever. I probably need it anyhow.

Oh, got a call from Doctor Teal’s office. The stroke prevention dude. He wants to see me in a month. Left a voicemail. I still need to write down the details from it.

I figure that CAT scan couldn’t have revealed anything too dire if they are willing to wait a month to see me.

I was worried the message would be more like, “Dear Michael’s next of kin… we’re not sure how to put this…. but have you seen Scanners?”.

Well that’s it from me for now. Time to go back to sleep.

God I hate having to sleep all the time.

More after the break.

---

A fluid sense of self

As patient readers know, I’m a shapeshifter.

At least, that’s how I currently describe my flexible sense of self. It can assume any number of metaphorical shapes given the needs of the moment, but that comes with the drawback of very little in the way of long term stability and resilience.

The cost of being able to be anything is that it requires being nothing most of the time.

I’m working on that.

After all, I could have BEEN somebody by now!

What occurred to me today is how hard it is for me to imagine having a fully fixed sense of self. A rigid and inflexible sense of self where you are one well defined thing forever.

That just seems so weird to me.

Adaptation is my primary way of handling things. And it is central to all my fabulous superpowers. Being able to look at the lock and become the key is key to everything I do, and I have a hard time imagining myself doing anything else.

But I know that’s how most people live. Most people don’t have Mars in Pisces^[1], they don’t flow into a new shape to deal with things. They develop their sense of self and that is it and they have to learn to deal with life that way.

So it must be a matter of moving into positions where your pre-existing shape works rather than adapting to the situation. That requires a great deal of the exact sort of long term thinking I have only ever excelled at theoretically.

Presumably that’s where instincts come in. Through acting on one’s gut feelings, one gets deep input as to what works and what does not and it is this deep sense of how things work, not that slowpoke the rational mind, that guides them.

Seems like a lot less work than my cerebral bullshit. But I bet I’m better at crosswords.

And all because they never decided that they knew better than those voices nature put in our heads for a reason.

Those voices I decided must be wrong because they didn’t “make sense”.

I never even entertained the idea that maybe they knew something that my cocksure rational mind did not.

I mean, how could they? Emotions don’t know anything! Right?

I have been such an idiot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.