Category Archives: Health

Hello, I’m old and it’s weird

Admissions, Health

In which I’ve gone and turned 51, of all things, and here is a short paragraph about it.

I’m fat as hell, my feet always hurt even though I only work part-time, my skin has no elasticity and is just drooping like fabric on the bias, I have a nearly constant stabbing pain in the index knuckle of my right hand, my hips hurt, I have nerve issues in my feet due to, according to google hospital, either menopause or neuropathy that occasionally drive me bugnuts when I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep, sometimes I can’t sleep, or I wake wide up for no goddamned reason at all, my teeth are yellow, my desire to go out and hang with people is nearly as low as my introvert better half’s, I’m more or less running out of British TV shows to watch, I’ve been so sedentary for so long that popping up two flights of stairs here in the house makes me pant for three minutes, whatever symmetry my face may once have enjoyed is well and truly over, HOT FLASHES, sometimes everything from ovaries to vestibule feels weird as hell because hormone changes and so-called sexual atrophy, there’s no fat at all on the balls or heels of my feet, vericose veins, I’ve actually sharted, something I always thought was either a joke or an affliction affecting only young, stupid beer drinking males, twice in the past three years, my hair is thin and brittle, my nails are ridged, I think about death a lot and find sex scenes and courting plots juvenile and annoying, I have actually heard myself say “nobody’s writing any decent sci-fi these days,” I’m freaked about the fact I’ve never made any money and owe more in student loans than I’ve saved for retirement, my nose and ears are enormous and are just going to keep getting bigger, my eyebrows have discovered what it is to be tufty, my ass has changed shape to such a degree that I now fart like a man, and my sweat smells weird and old.

But it’s also true that I’m not on any meds at all*, which I’ve been told by a doctor friend is “unusual” for “someone my age.”

*yet

You’re not a skeptic, for fuck’s sake, you’re anti-vaxx

Health, Soapbox

In which I know they can’t be persuaded until they’re ready so I’m not bothering to post this on Facebook, where I wrote it in response to someone’s anti-vaxx post, but I didn’t want to delete it.

The risks of being exposed to diseases are known, and they are horrible.

The risks of vaccination are vanishingly low, verging on non-existent outside of allergies or contamination (generally associated with lack of refrigeration).

We have decade upon decade upon decade of proof that vaccines are both safe and effective. Vaccines truly are one of the best things humanity has ever invented! They’re amazing and wonderful and gorgeous! Vaccines have saved millions of humans from disease, disability, and death! Unlike so much of the shitshow that is modern life, VACCINES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH CELEBRATING.

We know that vaccines do not cause autism. We know they do not cause “immune disorders” (this term is vague and medically meaningless). We do know they prevent disease and that they save lives.

To be a vaccine “skeptic” — without actually being an epidemiologist or biologist or in some way genuinely qualified to meaningfully contribute to the science — is to be anti-vaccine.

And to be anti-vaccine is to actively contribute to disease and death. Full stop. You don’t get your shots, you don’t get your kids their shots, you encourage others not to get their shots, and then we get ants. No, sorry, not ants: we get FUCKING MEASLES. A disfiguring, miserable disease that can not only kill you, but depresses your immune system for years, making you susceptible to diseases you’d otherwise fight off.

Your decision to cling to ignorance because it feeds your ego to “know something” the unwashed masses do not is the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of loving compassion, and the height of hubris.

“My intention is to allow others to make their own choices” is a pat set of anti-vaccine weasel words. What you’re really saying is this: “I mistakenly (and probably in good faith, for what it’s worth) believe outright lies, and I cling to them. And, even though my beliefs are demonstrably wrong, I expect my privilege to be respected in spite of my ignorance, the whole of the scientific process, and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.”

People on chemo are catching measles because of the anti-vaccine movement. Babies are literally dying. Not very many yet, true, but this suffering IS PREVENTABLE.

The idea that letting a few people die in order to retain the privilege of flaunting one’s google university degree is AWFUL, and it absolutely breaks my heart to witness so many otherwise intelligent and loving people using their free time to be so-called vaccine-skeptics.

It’s a hobby that is LITERALLY killing human beings.

And yes, it’s a hobby. None of you are doctors or scientists or qualified in any way to do anything more than read shit online. And yet you “know” better than a over century of scientists and doctors and the self-correcting whole of scientific process?

No, you don’t know better. You’re not in on some secret. What you know is what you’ve read, and what you’ve read is garbage written by snake oil salesmen who want you to buy their cleanses and herbs and books and unregulated, useless supplements. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine not because he knew too much, but because he was an unethical bastard trying to sell an alternate vaccine he would have made money from. All the rest of the anti-vaxx brigade are shady at best, from Oz to Chopra to Mike Adams to Scudamore, and they’re all selling you something.

Supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry, as are “alternative” health books and retreats and seminars. The ridiculous irony of the anti-vaxx movement is that it makes more than actual vaccines do, but screams “Shill!” whenever presented with facts.

The anti-vaxx movement is like Trump: everything it accuses others of is something it is doing itself.

The Plague

Health

In which I got sick as hell.

Sunday I got off work, came home, had some cape cods, Skyped with my friends, and went to bed. Monday I woke up late morning feeling normal, and within a couple-few hours I was sick.

I thought it was influenza. Fever, cough, aches, pains. Exhaustion.

Oh, it was nasty. And it kept getting worse: night sweats. The fever would break, then it’d come back again. Temperature was between 99-102F. Chills, then too hot, then chills. Kept waking up drenched and then freezing immediately.

Also had a number of really esoteric fever dreams, so that was cool.

Friday I made S. take me to urgent care because it was my 4th day in a row to wake with a fever and I felt sick as hell. So he drove me out to Saint Louis Park, the nice place he goes with his insurance, but they don’t take mine. They had a nurse see me real quick to make sure I wasn’t dying and then sent me to my own network.

I wasn’t dying. Temperature was down to normal (my fever had broken just before we’d left), blood oxygen was in the low 90’s, blood pressure excellent. He told me it could be the flu, or maybe bronchitis or pneumonia. So we drove back to Whittier clinic, which is literally four blocks from our apartment, of course, and I went in a made an appointment for 2:30 that afternoon.

Then back home, bed, and back to sleep for a few hours.

Then up, teeth brushed, back for the appointment.

Nurse got me from the lobby and took my vitals. Great blood pressure (everyone who takes my blood pressure tells me it’s “great,” so apparently my fat ass looks like she’d have high blood pressure), five pounds down (hadn’t eaten for shit in days), please wait here for the doctor.

Doc came in, asked me questions, looked in my nose, looked in my mouth, felt my throat/lymph nodes. My tonsils have disappeared sometime in the past few years without my even noticing, which is WEIRD AS HELL (doctor asked if I’d had them out. I said no, and later, at home, when I remembered, I stuck my fingers into my mouth and they’re just gone).

Flu swab came back negative, so diagnosis is acute bronchitis. (“You’re literally wheezing,” she said.) Doc gave me two painkillers (Advil and Tylenol), an Albuterol inhaler, and Tessalon (apparently a cough suppressant). They didn’t do shit. Well, other than the ibuprofen; that did help with pain, but my lungs were still super fucked and I didn’t understand the point of a cough suppressant when all I really wanted was a productive damn cough. Acetaminophen doesn’t do shit for pain, apparently? I’d never taken the two back to back while experiencing pain, but only the ibuprofen worked for me.

The Albuterol appears to be packaged for non-asthma users. I don’t know enough to know if it’s a different product or if it’s just like a regular inhaler, but it offered no relief, which was disappointing as hell. I took the meds for about 24 hours, then just dropped it all because fuck it.

So, more sleep, more aches and pains, more wheezing; more dry, unproductive cough. I ended up calling out for four shifts at work (luckily, they were fantastic and supportive, bless ’em) and was seriously considering another appointment on Monday because shit was not fine.

Oh, and five days of constipation, too, because no nicotine-via-vape, but that was really the least of my issues.

Finally, Sunday night, the cough came. Well, shit started coming up, finally, and that horrible tight, dry feeling began to ease — I’d been coughing the entire time, of course. But finally, after an entire fucking bedridden week, some progress! It was glorious.

The evening before last, I got hives. On my lips. My lips swelled up like fucking crazy, like Botox crazy. I don’t know if it was a drug reaction or just more Aging While Female, but it was weird as hell. I sat on the couch for an hour checking my tongue to make sure it wasn’t going to kill me and then gave up and went to bed. (Most of the swelling was gone in the morning, but it took all day yesterday to go away completely, and then last night I had two more hives, both small: one on my right index finger, and another on my right foot. Then I remembered I’d had one the week before, on my right wrist. So maybe not meds-related.)

Sunday I managed a couple loads of dishes, with lots of resting. Monday I actually cooked a meal for the first time in ages. Now it’s Tuesday evening and I’m feeling much more human; the tree is up, there’s a string of lights around the living room window, and I’ve made the bed. Still wheezing and coughing, but much, much better than Friday.

Long story short, BEING SICK SUCKS!

Okay, everything’s just getting weird now

Admissions, Health, Work

In which I vent about the strange side effects of surviving for five decades.

I’ve been unusually healthy most of my life, I think.

Always felt robust and fine the majority of the time, barely even noticed my body. Had one surgery, wisdom teeth out, and a root canal. A ganglion cyst on my left wrist that cleared up on its own, as they do. No major broken bones or ER visits or in-patient hospital stays, or anything, really, beyond colds and flus. Have never had a regular GP my entire adult life.

I’ve felt truly fucking miserable, yes, but save the puke-inducing pain of a prolapsing uterine tumor it was always the mental pain of panic/anxiety rather than genuine physical malfunction.

Well, now my whole body is turning strange and foreign!

I have actual pain, low-level and fairly frequent: feet, knees, hips, and back. Usually from strain or extra activity, but sometimes just because I slept or moved weird. My hands have ached since I started banging them around at the cheese shop, and now I find it hard to squat during a 6 or 7 hour shift because it actually hurts to stand back up.

My hands and lower legs swell, especially at work (but also in a fairly predictable way throughout my cycle these past few years), and I now wear compression socks.

Today I walked home from work just past four o’clock — it’s a five minute walk, about two blocks — and, even though it’s mid-September, it’s 91F and humid and very sunny. The side of my body that was both sunward and exposed/not covered by my dress is burnt. Burnt! In five, six minutes! My left forearm and the outside of my left hand, and my neck and upper shoulder on the left side are red and hot and sunburned!

I mean, I do have very oily skin, and I’d just been working food service for seven hours so I’d been perspiring and was additionally covered with mist and damp from doing dishes, but damn! I used to tan; had to be out for hours to burn.

The other day I thought I had had an allergic reaction to some cucumber-aloe facial mist, but now I wonder if it might have been a reaction to the sun? I sat in the sun outside the coffee shop to write in my notebook, and was dark red everywhere the mist — and the sun — had been when I got home. (I rinsed off in cool water and the red cleared away, but now I’m not so sure it was the mist. I really don’t want to develop allergies; they sound like a pain in the ass.)

Aging is so, so strange. Total lesson in non-attachment, having one’s reliable, rarely-changing body come up with new and strange ways of being. I remember the first time my lower legs and ankles decided to swell up toward the end of my cycle (it was in my early 40’s), how freaked out and distressed I was at the idea that Something Was Very Wrong; now I’m used to it, more or less, I guess, but it doesn’t look particularly attractive.

And now instant sun burns? Really?! What the hell.

I’m also slowing down! I’d rather get up earlier and plod through my getting-ready-for-work process than haul ass through it, and I never thought my Type A ass would ever turn into such a person. And at work, well, now I’m glad I’ve always been focused on efficiency because I need that efficiency more than ever now. I find it hard to really rush, at least in a sustained way. (Most of my cheese shop co-workers are older folks, thank God, because I don’t think I could keep up with a bunch of 20-somethings anymore, and MAN is it fucking weird to say that.)

Being lazy and maybe working a bit slower than one should or could: that’s a decision. Now, my very best rush, when making sandwiches, for example, is not what it used to be, even if I do have a big cup of coffee in me. I have a hard time hauling ass like I used to, because I end up dropping shit or being messy and also I don’t really have the energy or ability to fully do so like I once did.

Then there’s also the questions of genes — how much of my experience of aging is just how this body is programmed to age — versus the decisions I’ve made: everything from vegetarianism to never being particularly physically active to partying to smoking for 31 years. Like, if I’d eaten a different diet and worked out, and never gone to Dead shows on LSD, would I still have these cankles? I’ll never know, since this body is the one I live in and there’s no control body to compare it to. But I do wonder, though.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m dying or anything, but I’m more aware of the body than I’ve ever been because it does stuff now, stuff it never used to. It reacts to the world in sudden and mildly alarming ways! It swells up, gets tired, aches, gets varicose veins (!), gurgles, and wakes up four times a night for no fucking reason at all. I think I’m getting a mole on the back of my left hand (?!), and probably age spots. My skin is thin and odd. My right eyelid sags. I might need a dermatologist for possible nascent skin tags on my throat. I may be too thin-skinned to do dishes at work without gloves; I suspect it can no longer tolerate the industrial soap, sanitizer, and bleach.

It’s just weird, getting older. That’s my whole screed: it’s just weird.

In short, I’ll be turning 50 in two weeks, and I totally feel it!

Update: So I’ve put a wet cloth on my burnt neck and after an hour and a half in the air conditioning the red’s nearly gone?

New job! And a UTI.

Health, Work

In which I was able to quit a job I very much did not enjoy and replace it with one that involves CHEESE.

I applied to, like, between 17 and 22 jobs over about a month’s time.

Two declined via email; none of the others even responded, save I think one that sent a “we received your application” message. One called me back for an interview. One.

Luckily, the one job I interviewed for hired me on the spot, so now I have a lovely P/T job right here in the neighborhood! It’s a one-block walk to work! The pay’s the same as the last job, nobody screams at me, and I get to taste yummy cheeses.

I work in a cheese shop inside a big liquor store. We make and sell sandwiches, sell cheeses and a few meats, jarred things like marinara, honey, salsas, bulk olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sweets, crackers, chips, olives, dolmas, pâtés, pastas, martini shakers, bottle stoppers, and baguettes. It’s a really fun little shop featuring a lot of local items — the sandwich breads and baguettes are baked a block away, and there are multiple Minnesota cheeses — plus a bunch of imported European treats.

My job involves customer service, sandwich-making, dishes, cashiering, sweeping and mopping, slicing meats and cheeses, weighing things and putting stickers on them, and keeping cold case temperature logs.

It’s so much better than taking calls for Comcast! Nobody yells at me! I get to eat cheese! I get sandwiches half off when I’m on the clock, and an employee discount on booze!

It’s so great. And I totally need the physical activity, so I basically just look at is as paid enforced exercise with some free socializing thrown in.

Plus: cheese tasting!

All the people I’ve worked with so far are lovely, the work is hard but not that hard (it’s not endless, cascading, unsolvable systemic customer service failures, but my feet do hurt), and I think my training is coming along well. Mostly I just need to memorize the sandwich recipes so I can make them more quickly without having to refer to the directions.

Oh, and tips! Not much, got about twenty bucks my first week, but it effectively made the pay rate a skosh higher than my previous job where people screamed at me half the time and all the employee-facing policies were hostile.

So: whoo! New job!

Yay!

In unrelated news, I went to Planned Parenthood on Monday for a UTI I think I’ve had for a month or more. The last time I had one I didn’t even know until the nurse called and demanded to know why I hadn’t told her I had a UTI two days before a surgery, so I guess my symptoms are typically mild? The dip was negative (they sent my sample off for culturing), but they gave me some pills anyway which I picked up across the street at Cub. I read the insert when I got home and was too freaked out to take them for two days because WHAT IF I’M THE ONE WHO GETS THE POTENTIAL SIDE-EFFECTS. (Anxiety is so stupid sometimes. Also, the last time I had a UTI was when I had that uterine fibroid, so I’m half convinced I’ve got another one, because ANXIETY IS SO STUPID SOMETIMES.)

Took my first two doses today, and believe I’m already feeling better, but I also think my period just started, so that’s another layer of feeling weird to confuse the symptoms. Who knows. Twenty-three day cycle, egad.

Aging while female is really no joke, no, not at all.

I want to bitch, so I’m gonna

Health

In which LOL HORMONES.

As you wade deeper into perimenopause, well, there are these looooong lists of exciting symptoms to experience!

I’m at least halfway through the list now, if not more, and it SUCKS and I want to complain:

Thinning hair. Skin elasticity loss. Irregular (in my case, shorter) cycles. Anxiety. Arrhythmia. Tingling extremities. Muscle aches. Fatigue. Sleep changes. Hot flashes. Weight gain.

Fuck it all! It’s unpleasant!

I’m fat and dieting no longer works for shit. Over the past decade half my hair’s fallen out and been replaced with fewer, finer strands. My skin’s saggy. I have wrinkles on the bottoms of my feet, AND the fat there has thinned, so they get sore for no reason! Sometimes they tingle like they’re in a sack of ants because of low estrogen! SOMETIMES I CAN’T SLEEP, which never, ever happened to me before, and weirds me the fuck out. Going to pee and producing only a thimbleful is incredibly annoying. Mood swings, aka walking into the kitchen to get some water and suddenly feeling suddenly and inexplicably sad. I spend lots of time just not really wanting to do much of anything, which is foreign to my extroverted personality so I always feel vaguely guilty and lazy. Fucking acne!

Hot flashes, if you’ve never had one, are fucking stupid.

Trying to be grateful I’ve lived long enough to experience all this is not working. I want to be 35 again! Shit, I’d settle for 43, even!

This sucks!

Can’t tell you how excited I am for NIGHT SWEATS.

Fuck.

In unrelated news, social media still sucks but I keep looking at it anyway.

March

Admissions, Introspection, Life, Panic & Anxiety, Spiritual

In which there’s a blog post! Because I still blog! Occasionally!

Fat:

On a diet now, again, again-again, started weekend before last. Basically a combo of calorie-counting and slow carb. Haven’t had any pasta or baguette, pizza or flour tortillas, but have had a couple of potatoes. Mashed last weekend, and roasted tonight. They do have vitamins and minerals, after all, your potatoes do.

Doing the tiniest little exercise routine, but doing it daily! Have a couple of old wine bottles filled with water for weights for curls and arm lifts. Weird thing is that squats are easier when fat; something about balance, I imagine? It’s the smallest exercise routine ever, but it’s 100% more than the nothing I was doing before!

Have already lost a full inch of my thigh and breast measurements, and a quarter inch off my ankle. Maybe more, but I’m only measuring on Sundays. Don’t happen to own a scale. Feeling distinctly better, even. My feet look less like dead fish! More energy, even!

Sol:

The light is getting better, of course, as our gorgeous planet tilts the way she does, but it’s still in the 20’s here with absolute piles of snow all over. The weather doesn’t matter much to me, as I go weeks on end without leaving the building, but I love that it’s still light out now when I sit down at my desk to login for work at five o’clock.

Employment:

Work is, well, stupid. I work for a call center who contracts with cable company, very large. Many employee-facing policies are, for the most part, absurd, and the produce of management who apparently have little to no idea what’s really happening on the ground, and their training videos are absolutely cringeworthy corporate bullshittery trapped in a past of long-term employment and employee-employer loyalty. Their flagship software suite is forever being updated to be less useful, constantly rearranged to make it harder and harder to deliver service to their customers.

Most of what I do is secretarial. In the main, my job is comprised of clicking Next and copying and pasting blurbs. Once in a great while I have to think, briefly, about a customer’s issue and actually solve a problem, but mostly? I just follow a flowchart. Any competently produced piece of software could do 90% what I do (they pay me for that extra 10%, I imagine). Fucking Alexa could do what I do, were it tied into the appropriate data.

My direct employer is, as far as I can tell, very broke and very struggling. Stock value is a downhill slalom since 2013. I’ve been there two years and have seen various functions removed or outsourced, and have never had a raise, plus, well, I sense that peculiar kind of urgency failing companies exude.

But they did, at least, move me off phones into a chat pilot! Chat is better, by a lot of markers, than getting screamed at by infuriated customers, but management has the chat platform software set to feed us as many as three chats at a time, so it makes it impossible to deliver excellent, or even good, service when it’s busy.

Not that it would be overtaxing to chat with three customers at once; could do that easily if the goal were just to fix things, solve problems, give the people what they want. No, it’s the required logging/documentation and abysmal tools we’re also using that make it a nightmare.

It’s been busy lately because a lot of the team are out for a variety of reasons: illness, internet outages/weather, time off. Oh, and because management can’t seem to figure out how to stagger breaks and lunches on the schedule. It’s a disaster, when five agents all go to lunch at once, and your team’s down to a dozen.

Received my tax refund so I currently have more in savings than half of America. I’ll use the bulk of it to see Amma this summer, of course, and am contemplating what else I might want. Set of sheets, maybe, or a new office chair, since this one is sprung.

Input:

Bought some old treeware vedanta and have been doing daily readings of the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita. Only takes a few minutes but I’m really enjoying it; does help to keep the head right.

Have also sucked down a few fiction novels this year, after hardly reading at all last year. Spend a shitload of time watching streaming TV at my desk in the evenings after work, which is fine, but after all my years being pro-reading and anti-telly I feel rather full of it.

The Dread:

Still suffering from anxiety, but (knock on wood) haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since Walla Walla last September. Although, hmm, my anxiety is so bad, and has been for so long, that maybe I now consider what I once would have called a full-blown panic attack just “anxiety.” I’d probably be on meds if I had to work outside the home, but I’m just so resistant to the idea of going to get some, for some crazy fucking idiot reason.

Actually, I know the reason: the idea of going to the doctor for anything but the flu gives me anxiety. I’ve been meaning to go in for a checkup since I got insurance, but I keep blowing it off because WHAT IF I’M DYING. It’s batshit, I know, but hey. I’m batshit. I often sit and twitch for hours while I’m at work. Cool with it.

The Boy:

The relationship is solid and wonderful and the best I’ve ever had. I don’t deserve it, but hey, there you are. God is good.

The dead fish:

I made a delicious dinner tonight: parmesan encrusted salmon, oven roasted potatoes, cabbage gratin, cucumber salad, and homemade tartar sauce. I used a lot of parmesan! Here’s an unflattering photo:

IMG_20180309_164728

Just having a little trip down memory lane

Admissions, Life, Miscarriage, Soapbox, Whining

In which there’s The Past.

Here’s me, 16 years ago, standing in my kitchen.

2001

See how rough and unfinished that shit was? The whole place looked like that. It never got better, just worse. It was barely a step above living in a car. (Well, a very large car, with a bug-infested shower, but still, roughly the comfort and insulation of living in a car. Or maybe a super ghetto mobile home.)

That secretary desk, on the left? Was really cool. Wish there’d been some way I could have kept that. It was old and in shitty shape, but it had cubbies and a hinged desk and I adored it.

I feel that way about a remarkably small number of the things that I had in that house and lost. My grandfather’s table. A couple of leather coats that molded. And I did rather like that samovar. My hard drives, the ones he left in a filthy, shitty, open-to-the-elements “room.” But that was later; I digress.

leak

That house was a piece of shit. We never should have bought it. I never would have, except my husband was a professional fucking contractor and said it was a good idea, it was fine, he could handle it, no problem. And, idiot I was, I chose to believe him. I thought he had expertise!

We bought it on contract, and, like fucking morons, we used the same lawyer the sellers used. I don’t think we even had it inspected, because I was home when an inspector showed up after we’d bought it and moved in, and he told us the electrical was nowhere near code and that we’d be fined if we didn’t correct it. (Husband’s solution was to just destroy the entire mud room/porch, rather than correct the issue. Huzzah.)

We hadn’t even been there a month when the roof leaked and a bunch of ceiling fell in. Oh, and then the well-head pole fell over while I was in a hot shower in a literally freezing house.

The kitchen was in the basement and you could see dirt through the cracked concrete slabs of the floor. Cobwebs in the unfinished ceiling. Main bathroom had a countertop on a raw 2×4 frame, cement floors, and unfinished brick walls with no cupboards. Kitchen “cupboards” were the same: just unfinished, open 2×4 shelving with salvaged countertops stuck on by hippies. There had been cloth curtains on the front when they showed us the house; when we moved in, just raw shelves.

Then he tore the already shitty disaster up even more. Refused to fix the decent bathroom on the second floor, the one with walls and a bathtub and ceilings. Destroyed the only decent or useful spaces in the house — the finished attic, the mud porch, the greenhouse.

Oh, the greenhouse, where it was sun-warm in the winter and one could have grown herbs and sat to read!

He covered most of the basement windows with a massive porch he never finished*, so the main living space became not just dirty and unfinished, but lightless as well, and we had an unusable porch!

I mean, he did re-roof the house, which was actually necessary and good, and a lot of incredibly hard work, certainly, but even that was embarrassing as fuck because I later saw him refuse to honor the markers he’d traded for his friends’ hard work on it, because he was honorless and lazy.

It’s not like he didn’t do shit; he did a lot of shit. I realized later that he just did shit he wanted to do. He was good at getting firewood, for example, but he’d spend inordinate amounts of time on it — cutting down whole trees, hauling them, cutting them, splitting them, renting machinery to do so — rather than just fucking buying it and working on the house. He made it so much more complicated and involved and time-consuming than it needed to be; we could have just worked on the furnace, and maybe, I don’t know, installed some fucking insulation?, and bought more propane. But no, he’d spend months of weekends “getting us firewood to heat the house.”

Firewood I had to haul from the barn, in a wheelbarrow, through the snow, half a city block. Yeah.

He did do a lot of work, sure, but he never did what we needed or finished anything. He’d do shit like spend tons of time building a really cool but ultimately unnecessary trailer for the riding lawnmower, or sawing holes in the roof to frame in dormers he never actually completed (covering shit in plastic sheeting for a year is not completing something), or putting in external doors that didn’t actually go anywhere yet and wouldn’t for years.

And then those fucking hippies had the balls to threaten to sue us! They sold us a total piece of shit of a house [caveat emptor], then forced us (well, not us, because I’d bailed just before then, and not him — because he had no money, per the usual — but J., who paid it off for reasons I will probably never understand) to honor the entire mortgage over a decade early!

What a fucking shit show!

Continue reading Just having a little trip down memory lane →

The Dread

Admissions, Panic & Anxiety

In which there’s The Dread, aka my anxiety disorder.

Had anxiety pretty bad yesterday, and during the night.

Pretty anxious today, too.

I know I’ve said this before, but the problem with anxiety and panic is this:

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

In the same way, being deeply terrified that Something Is Wrong with your body and that you’re About To Die does not necessarily mean nothing’s wrong with your body or that you’re not about to die. There is no law that says you can’t die — from other causes — while having a panic attack.

Which is why it’s so hard to tell yourself that you’re “just” having an attack.

Stupid brains.

Combating panic and anxiety

Panic & Anxiety

In which I have a morbid new approach that really seems to be working.

I have developed a new litany.

Whenever there’s A Sensation my mind desires to become frightened of, I tell it this:

You have a fatal, untreatable, inoperable disease. You are dying, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. You’re bound to have sensations. As long as you’re not in pain, there’s nothing that can be done. Let it go.

Weirdly enough, it’s working. Apparently the hook my mind has been using lately to tumble me into hell has been “DO I NEED TO DO SOMETHING? Is this A Real Sensation? Do I need to See A Doctor? Is this just a panic attack or do I really have [heart disease/organ failure/diabetes/stroke]? What shall I DO?”

With this little story, though, the answer to that is “nothing.” It makes the sensations non-actionable (and have the added benefit of increasing dispassion and decreasing attachment). I can just go, oh, yeah, a sensation — flutters in my chest, dizziness, laziness (er, fatigue), shortness of breath, tingling hands and feet, all the shit I have when I panic — and not be caught up in a whirlwind of mental bullshit.

Yes, I tell myself, you are actually dying, we all are, nothing to be done about it. It comes when it comes. It’s working great; I haven’t had a full-blown attack in a couple of weeks!

Being crazy is hard work, but sometimes you manage to hack your own brain just enough to get by.