All muzzy headed from bad sleep. All the usual BS going on. Dizziness, disorientation, mental fog, lightheadedness. Bleh.
At least I still have ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) to play.
Otherwise, not a heck of a lot on my mind right now, which is going to make blogging pretty tricky. Well, all I can do is open my mind and see what comes out.
Oh hey, it’s that loonie I lost. So that’s where it went.
The goo in my lungs seems to have become agitated and wants out. This is good news and bad. The good news is that it means my cough is more likely to be “productive” and I will finally be getting rid of the stuff.
The bad news is that before that happy day when my lungs are clear, I am going to be doing a lot of coughing and hacking and hocking and horking and other fun things.
And be “fun” I mean “disgusting, unpleasant and vile”. Ya know. Fun.
Still, I wish there was a respiratory equivalent of sticking my finger down my throat so that I could just get it all out and be done with it.
Been taking my antibiotic, Cephalex, which would make a great name for a world-dominating computer. All hail Cephalex.
A lot of modern antibiotics have a sickly sweet smell like rotting corn to me, and this one has it in spades. It’s not really an unpleasant smell, just a tad cloying, so it doesn’t bother me much. Notable but not important.
Right now, I wish I could just wander off to some place sunny and bucolic. Somewhere with blue skies, green meadows, yellow flowers, and an ambient temperature of about 20 degrees, with a light breeze.
I would find a cozy spot to flop down on my back in the grass and gaze up into the endless blue yonder and let my mind drift without a care in the world.
Just watching my thoughts go by, really.
I know damned well that more time spent outside would do me a lot of good. But my agoraphobia and/or social anxiety makes that impossible.
I could only do it if there was a way to get to a nice park without having to pass through streets filled with people.
Maybe this upcoming summer will be the one where I finally get it together enough to go to the beach at Garry Point Park.
I love the beach. I love being near the water. I find there to be something quite soothing about being near the ocean. It’s like all my stress and pain and fear dissolves in that huge body of water as the heat from the sand bakes the toxins out of me.
Maybe I could give Joe $10 to drop me off and pick me up. At least the first time.
Of course, I would have to be well slathered with sunscreen. Being a latent redhead, I do not tan well.
In fact, generally, I have to burn once, then I can tan.
This kind of sucks. I don’t want to burn. Then again, I don’t want to tan either. I just wanted to enjoy the sunshine and work on my Vitamin D.
There’s always our patio, of course. I could rearrange all the stuff out there and make a little nest of some kind for myself where I can go to get fresh air and a bit of sun.
I could even take naps out there. Might do me a lot of good to sleep in cool fresh air.
But knowing me, I will likely just hide from everything as usual.
But I might not.
More after the break.
The Reluctant Chameleon
One thing I have been pondering recently is the idea that I am just too adaptable.
Methinks that requireth some explanation.
In life, there are many challenging changes which can be dealt with in one of two ways :
- You face the challenge head on and defeat it, resisting change, or
- You simply adapt to the new situation
Both of these can, of course, be the right or wrong response to any given situation.
However, I have always erred on the side of adaptation. If one has the mental and emotional flexibility for it, adaptation is, quite simply, a heck of a lot easier.
And I have always felt a sort of pity for people who lacked that fundamental flexibility and had no choice but to fight what comes along to challenge them because adapting to it was simply not an option.
That always seemed like a terribly stressful way to go through life. Tiring, too.
But like I said, there are times when fighting is the correct response, and as I look back on my life, I can think of many things where I wish I had fought instead of merely assuming fighting would not change the result and adaptation was my only option.
In fight, there are times when fighting definitely would not have changed the result and I still wish I had fought like hell.
There is great value in knowing you did all that you could to stop something bad from happening to you, even if it was utterly futile.
And that’s a truth that did not come to me easily because it’s foreign to my usual strategic pragmatism, which would assert that you evaluate your odds in every situation and if the odds are against you, you give up and conserve your strength and energy for fights you can win
And that’s perfectly logical, but that does not make it correct. To be correct, it would have to conform to reality, and the reality is that life is not a game of chess, and trying to live as though it is might reinforce a certain sense of control (I know it does/did in me), but it ignores a lot of important emotional truths and therefore yields bad results.
And part of the deal with all pragmatism is that there is no such thing as a correct method that yields bad results.
So clearly, there is something very wrong with looking at life as a chess match. It’s another case where the purely logical route yields results that seem right, but feel wrong, and seeing as the point of all this is my happiness, if it doesn’t feel right, then it is wrong, no matter what the logic says.
Felicity has been trying to tell me these things for years but I guess I had to figure them out in my own terms. Sorry, dear.
Now where was I? Oh right, fighting the inevitable.
For instance, I wish I had fought like hell when my parents told us they were taking my brother and me out of college so they could take early retirement.
My mother said that they would only do it if my brother and I agreed to it, and to my eternal chagrin and massive guilt, I agreed to it right away and that made my brother feel like there was no point in him objecting and so I, in a way, doomed us both.
I was a different person back then. I agreed to whatever my parents asked of me. I thought that was my role back then. I was used to sacrificing whatever was needed in order to make life easier for my parents.
Things would go a lot differently now. I would fight like hell. I would tell them they promised all us kids that they would pay for our undergraduate degrees and they had already done it for the two girls and they were damned well going to do it for me and my brother and if that meant not retiring yet, so be it.
Tough it out for another two years, god damn it. You owe it to us.
But no, I just rolled over and told all my friends that I wouldn’t be at UPEI next year like it was no big deal. Later I learned that this lead to my group of friends falling apart.
Turns out I was the glue that held it together. Go fig.
Meanwhile. I was falling apart as well. That was what led directly to my psychological collapse in my early 20s. And while I did eventually manage to drag myself back from being utterly insane, I still haven’t recovered fully from the massive psychological rupture that my parents caused by taking me out of college.
So yes, Mom. That’s exactly why I fell apart and never put myself together again. When you asked me whether you and Dad pulling me out of school was the reason I was such a mess, I said no, but I was wrong. That was exactly the reason I fell apart.
And even after all these years, I still haven’t recovered from it.
Starting to think I never will.
So…. great move there. Mom and Dad.
You broke your kid out of pure selfishness.
And I am the one who has to live with it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.