Sometimes that’s all you can do.
The heat has been fucking with my health like it usually does. Can’t believe it took me till today to realize why I was so damned sick. I inherited my father’s tendency towards heat stroke, and so being too hot as about a lot more than just feeling too hot.
There is something wrong with some part of my head [1] such that when it is hot out, this part swells up and presses against something important in my brain and the bad things, like nausea and headache and dizziness, start to happen.
This often comes with the very kind of difficulty in thinking that I was talking about in yesterday’s blog entry. Not so bad that I enter total panic mode, but definitely bad enough to impair my judgment and reasoning skills.
Including the ones that would let me both recognize my situation and remember that I actually know what to do to fix it.
Formally, that would be metaconsciousness (hey, I recognize this mental state as a full and intact thing separate from other mental states) and executive function (that mental state is linked to this list of steps and known principles that alleviate it!),.
How did that manage to come across as cute?
It’s probably the exclamation mark.
And this is where actual, genuine grown-up thinking comes in,. because by the time I am in the bad mental state where my judgment is impaired, my judgment is too impaired to be able to do anything about it.
So the best bet is to keep from going there in the first place.
That means good hydration. And that can be a bit of a tricky wicket because it’s about more than just drinking lots of water. You also have to make sure you have the electrolytes to actually retain the water long enough to use it.
Otherwise, it goes right through you, and while that works for some things. hydration ain’t one of them. That water has to hang around long enough to become sweat.
Hmmmm. Come to think of it, my pores are probably clogged right now. Mental note : my next shower should be very, very hot.
Some day I am going to have my own sauna. The “gym” (three shitty exercise bikes) in this building has a “sauna” (a highly claustrophobic box the size of a walk in closet) but I ain’t going near that thing.
Unless there are secret sexual hijinks in there. In which case, I want in.
But until my fabulous wealth finally shows up, the closest I can get to having my own personal sauna is the occasionally steamy shower.
I don’t do them much because they have a tendency to set off my heat sickness, for reasons which should be obvious. That’s why I like saunas because deliberately getting into a hot box is dangerous enough for me without adding humidity.
With Both Barrels
The universe appears to have decided to stress test me today.
First, I was about to happily sink into the world of Fallout 4 after adding a few mods when the program I use to manage the mods, Vortex, asked me if I wanted to update and restart the program.
Sure, why not, I thought. FAMOUS LAST WORDS.
Because it only looked like a Vortex update. In reality, it was an update to the executable for Fallout 4 itself.
I found this out the hard way when the game refused to run. See, the program that allows for modding now needs to be updated before I can play with mods again.
So I go to play the game and it goes bleh at me and this is so goddamned unexpected that it totally knocks the wind out of me and I am left dazed for hours.
You read that right. Hours. It’s pathetic, I know, but this blindsided me so badly that I literally did not know what to do with myself for a while.
Obviously, there were millions of things I could do. There are plenty of other games I could play, or gasps, I might even do something productive with my life.
Perish the thought.
But patient readers know that this sort of thing really gets to me on a psychological level. I just don’t take sudden change well. I never have and never will.
This is exactly how people like me become obsessive planners. We try to anticipate every possible outcome precisely so we don’t have to deal with sudden change.
It is a futile endeavour but it keeps us busy.
Anyhow, just as I am getting over that, I find out that tonight’s Paragon meeting is canceled due to Garth’s living room being overrun by pagan NBA worshippers.
Go Raptors, I guess. As a Canadian, it is my automatic and unwavering duty to support my country in any and all battles in which we can beat the Americans.
Trust me on this. That kind of thing is really big for us.
So now I have been disrupted twice, each time leaving me stunned for a period. That’s la mot juste : stunned. As if I was the dazed survivor of a bomb blast.
Metaphoricall speaking, I am.
I know I shouldn’t beat myself up for this difficulty in dealing with the totally unanticipated. Some of us are just like that. I have many mental gifts. Responding well to the unanticipated just isn’t one of them.
I think I obsess over it after because it makes me feel so vulnerable. Like I am some bizarre and delicate species of fish that dies if the water isn’t exactly right.
In other words, it makes me feel like I am not really suited for survival. I am just plain not a robust specimen. The world is hostile to my being alive in it.
Then again,. maybe somewhere out there is an enironment in which I would thrive. There are so many things I could do if I was just in the right place.
But I can’t seem to get there on my own.
I think someone’s going to have to carry me.
I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.