Brief (ish) note regarding the previous blog entry : please remember that sometimes I just need to vent all my negativity into the blog in order to calm myself down when I get all stressed out and frustrated. When I do so, don’t take anything I say about hating my life or wanting to jump out the window as meaning I have the slightest intention, or even a true inclination, towards any form of self-harm.

I am not suicidal and have not been for a long time. I want to live. Life is fun. It has video games in it. I want to stay.

I just get really fed up and pent up and crazy sometimes because I lack sufficient outlet for my emotions and they pile up pn me real quick.

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Alright, that taken care of, let’s talk mood.

Mine has improved since writing that previous blog entry in the wee hours of the morning. That means writing it did its job, so… yay that.

I still don’t care for this life of mine very much, but I don’t feel like a trapped animal about it any more.

Catching up on sleep has helped a lot. I did not sleep well in the hospital. It’s too weird an environment, with things beeping and people moving around andthe  flourescent lighting does weird shit to my circadian rhythms. .^[1]

Plus I had fun neighbors. There was this one guy who screamed, I am assuming involutarily. But it wasn’t normal, horror movie screams. It was more like one long monotone scream, without emphasis.

It’s like, if a normal scream is “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”, this was “Aaaaaaaaaaaah.,”

And I know what it going on there. It’s a brain function thing. It is not a scream, exactly, because it is not necessarily expressing any fear in the person. Rather,  it’s more like while they sleep, their brain wakes up that part of the brain responsible for our primal emotional vocalizations but then fails to give it any meaningful input, and therefore what comes out is the aequivalent of the background hum from an amplifier.

This poor person presumably (as they are in the hospital) has some kind of organic brain issue, of which the “screaming” was but one symptom. It’s certainly not the sort of noise that comes from anything voluntary a person would do.

But not all shared my enlightenment. Myself, I could tune the poor guy out, more or less. But for someone, that was not an option, and that someone would scream obscenities at the first person at the top of his lungs at random moments.

This was, of course, far far worse than the screaming. I wanted to scream back, “Dude, you are not helping!”, but ya know, didn’t want to get into a whole thing with the guy.

But that was really hard on the nerves.

So I am getting caught up on sleep now and that, of course, makes everything better. Plus I am back to my normal diet, which also helps a lot.

And my appetite is back. Thank goodness for that. As I have mentioned many times before in this space, eating when you have no appetite (or worse, negative appetite) is a bitch and a half and so I am at least glad I am not wrestling with that any more.

Come to think of it, though, I ate heartily in the hospital. I ate most of what I was served, even though the food was bland as fuck and they wouldn’t give me salt.

I think the artificial scarcity helped there. By which I mean that I couldn’t eat what I wanted whenever I wanted. I was going to get the food they gave me and that was it.

But more than that, I think my body really wanted the nutrition. So in a sense, my appetite wasn’t even involved. At least, not the conscious kind we normally associate with the term.

It was something more basic that bypassed conscious reasoning entirely.

The proof of that is that I actually ate the oatmeal that came with breakfast.

And it was horrible. Tasted like glue. Adding my precious packet of sugar substitute made it just barely edible. But it was still nightmare fuel.

But I ate it anyway, because I wanted that nutrition, dammit. I needed those complex carbs and fiber. So I scarfed that slop down anyhow.

Now if only I could be that smart with my own diet.

Oh well. I am home now, and have some of the usual kind of appetite. Which is awesome. Beats having to fight my body in order to feed it.

That shit gets real stressful. And I don’t always win. Sometimes I really have no choice but to skip a meal because there is no way I am going to be able to eat. Food seems almost infinitely gross to me at those times.

So even though I know skipping meals is one of the stupidest things I could do, I end up doing it anyway.

My life is… complicated that way.

I even have enojugh appetite to mostly finish my meals now. For a while, even when I had some appetite for meals at home, it would vanish about a third of the way into the meal and then I was back to “food is gross” mode.

It honestly felt like my stomach had gotten smaller. Or rather that, like my lungs, my stomach had something in it displacing what’s supposed to be there.

And while my body didn’t miss the carbs, it did miss the nutrition I got from the fruits and veggies I eat.

So I am glad to be back to normal on that scale too.

But there is still a fair bit of work to do before I am out of the proverbial woods yet. I still need to take a super hot shower so I can rinse five days of nothing but bed baths out of my easily clogged pores. I am doing a slowed-down, low-intensity version of my breathing exercises in order to slowly expand my lung capacity.

And of course, I will finish my course of antibiotics.

Slowly, I climb back up the ladder to where I was before.

Hopefully, I will soon put this whole damn thing behind me.

Then I can work on actually improving things!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.