With no particular inspiration or desire impelling my writing process tonight, I figure it is time for me to just pause and write down whatever is going on in my life, and give a sort of The State Of The Me address, as it were.

Right at this exact moment, I have a sinus headache. It is of less than crippling intensity, but still fairly bad. It feels like it is loosening my teeth. But I have my usual methods of dealing with it and so I suspect that I will soon subdue the beast trying to drill its way out of my temples via a long sharp steely horn pressing directly between my eyeballs.

My sleep is still being weird. Weirder than usual, that is, and its base weirdness level is pretty high. But I feel as though I have lost all my ability to predict or control when I will be sleepy and when I will be alert, and this lack of control is stressing me out.

Stress is probably the reason for the destabilization in the first place, come to think of it. I have been stressing about money a lot, because I am in the midst of the dreaded Five Week Month, the malign calendar phenomenon where there are fives weeks instead of four between my disability cheques.

It would be funny if it was not so harsh. Sometimes, due to a trick of the calendar, we poor people who are unable to work through no fault of our own, we victims of the cruel and callous hands of Fate who are forever doomed to a meaningless subsistence due to infirmities of body or mind, who are already operating far, far below the poverty line, are cruelly expected to make the exact same amount of money last a whole week longer than usual.

I do not get another cheque until the 27th of this month, which just happens to be when the fourth Wednesday of the month falls this time. Even in normal months, I am just barely limping along, so you can imagine how well I am doing with five weeks to cover instead of four. And I am not the sort of person who can take this kind of financial stress philosophically, even though realistically, I know I can probably cope with it one way or another.

But I am just too keyed in to my money as a source of stability in the world, little of it that there is, to be able to take this sort of chaos calmly. It eats away at my calm and raises my stress level, and there is just not a damn thing I can do about it.

Well, that is not true. I can make that damn phone call to try to get the higher disability level thing going. But my disability makes that very hard to do. Hah hah hah, Life. Very funny. Your Catch-22 is both clever and devious, as will as cruelly sadistic. Great job. But joke’s over, OK? I cry Uncle. I submit. You win. Now let me up so I can run away. That is how it is supposed to work.

What else… therapy tomorrow, so I suppose I will tell Doctor Costin about the whole five week month thing. It will feel good and be therapeutic to tell someone about it. Most people have absolutely no idea just how bad it is down here at the third lowest rung of society. Below me, there are just people on welfare, and the homeless.

Most people have absolutely no idea just how little we are expected to get by on. I bet if you asked a hundred people who have never been on disability how much we get a year, they would not guess that it is less than $8K/year. Most people who have never been at the mercy of the System would not, in fact, think it was possible to live on so little. I envy their innocence of such things.

Certainly nothing in my middle class upbringing prepared me for this kind of life. And I have not known much else in my adult life. My disability has kept me this poor my whole adult life, or worse. At least I have some cash like this. When I lived off friends, I had none.

Still playing a lot of Facebook games, although I can feel myself growing disenchanted with them. I am hoping that addiction cools to interest, so I can keep enjoying them but not in quite such a feverish way. And not in a way that exclude other things.

On the other hand, all the stimulation and occupation of mind at least keeps me awake. I take a lot fewer naps now… not sure if that is a symptom of the sleep destabilization, or a cause, or what. Probably a meaningless distinction when dealing with such a intimately interrelated system as the human mind. All output is also input, and so on.

And in a weird way, I am making friends, or rather, Friends. All these games encourage you to hook up with other players to swap virtual whatsits and so on, and so I have at least a dozen people from all over the world on my Friends list just because of all these little Facebook games I play.

And even though I only hooked up with these people to get ahead in the games,they are still on my Friends list and hence their status updates appear on my Timeline and mine on theirs, and so we are part of each others’ lives now despite being widely scattered over the globe.

And so, in pursuit of my solitary vice of video games, I am actually very slightly piercing my veil of loneliness and, who knows, maybe it will actually lead to me socially interacting with a wider group of people, and actually turn out to be a positive thing for my recovery.

Better living through Facebook game addiction. Who knew?