I’ve done nothing useful this weekend.

Friday I went to lunch at the ashram with the girls (C & NLW) and they were wonderful as ever and I’m absurdly grateful to have girlfriends to go to lunch with. After, NLW gave me a cape she was getting rid of and I’m excited to wear it next Fall. I hit the grocery store on the way out of town and made it home around four.

Saturday, yesterday, I slept in. When I got up, I worked on a website a bit. When I went downstairs, Bread was asleep on the couch, sleeping the way he always sleeps: with total abandon. He sleeps like a little kid, sprawled, with a fine sheen of sweat on his face. Very little wakes him up. I don’t know how he can sleep with the TV on, but he does it every day of his life. He’s cuter asleep than he ever is awake because he’s such a man when he’s awake, so macho and crass. *giggle*

We went to town around three-thirty for malts from the Dairy Bar, and cigarettes, and so he could clean his truck. There are scratches beneath both windows from dogs’ nails as they used the windows for entry – he said it happened a couple of weeks ago at 1-Stop. It’s a bummer; the paint was so nice before. There are a few other scratches on it too, because it’s a work truck, but the dog scratches look like shit when the truck’s washed and clean. He’s really pissed off about it. I mean, you’d have to see it: the door panels both have about a hundred deep vertical scratches from dogs’ back legs as they scrabbled up into the cab.

After cleaning his truck, we drove home. Bread made noises about pulling the dump truck up to the house and cleaning out the junk in the future kitchen/Truck’s old room, but then said, “or I might just do absolutely nothing.”

He pulled a muscle in his lower abdomen earlier this week. It’s hurting him, so he should probably take it easy anyway. He was a little worried about it because it’s a sharp pain he says, but I looked up Gray’s Anatomy over at Yahoo! and where he’s got pain there’s basically nothing but muscle and some small intestine. I think he’s got a mild groin injury from the work he does – there really isn’t much else there to hurt but the muscles that hold the pelvis together. So I think he should lie around in front of the glass teat and rest.

The weather is fucking gorgeous. My dad took the cold to Tahoe with him, thank God. I’m always amazed at how tropical Iowa can feel – humid, lush, loud with birds and insects, and how disturbingly fecund it is. One week the trees are bare; you go to work a few times and one evening coming up the driveway you realize all the trees are fully in leaf again and you can’t see the rooster shed from the driveway any more. Nature in this part of the country is on steroids. I love it for its vitality and inevitability, but it’s a little spooky. And it’s a pain in the ass to try to keep anything weeded, since weeds grow so fast here you can actually see it.

When I woke up this morning, it was to a thousand birds chatting in the woods outside. And a stupid Junebug, walking down my arm. I grabbed it and threw it across the room. It bounced. Over the years, Bread’s yanked the screens out of most of the windows in the house for some reason or another and he sucks at putting things back. I ask him to put the screens back in, he says he will. He doesn’t. It’s just how he is. I do take unladylike joy in saying, when he complains that there are bugs buzzing around the living room, that it’s his own damn fault for never putting any of the screens back. He ignores me, because that’s how he is, and swears up a blue streak about the fucking bugs.

Since this is window-open weather, they are, and if there’s a light on the dumb Junebugs come in and bash themselves against things. Last night one spent a few minutes walking around on my keyboard and was inevitably on the letter I wanted at any given moment. I finally flicked it off my desk, but of course it buzzed back to crash itself into my monitor over and over. I used to be really freaked out by them, Junebugs that is, but I’ve lived in Iowa long enough to know that their hard shells and sticky feet are just annoying, not truly gross.

Ticks are gross. I hate ticks. I’d never seen a tick in my LIFE until I moved out here. The Northwest is virtually bug-free, compared to the insanity that is the Midwest. But I guess ticks are nearly balanced out by fireflies, another bug I’d never seen ’til I moved here. I mean, fireflies are gorgeous.

Generally, I like bugs. I rarely kill them. I don’t kill spiders because they eat other bugs (and it’s supposed to be bad luck to kill spiders in your home). Junebugs are too stupid and earnest to be angry with. Box elder bugs have such a short season and are so ubiquitious that it’s a waste of time to be pissed off at them either, because there’s literally nothing you can do about them – they will be everywhere and that’s all there is to it. Ants are too small to care about. And I’ve always rather liked roaches, because once I caught one in my dorm room and told it that it and its family had to move out or I’d wage chemical war upon them (and I visualized the location of a kitchen and a nearby dumpster they could relocate to), and I never had a roach problem again. I think they might be smarter than most people think.

I kill ticks, fleas, and houseflies. I HATE HOUSEFLIES. Lord of the Flies? Oh yes, the fly IS the symbol of evil. They are stupid, horrible, annoying little fucks. God, how I hate houseflies. Bzzz.

I listened to the answering machine this morning. I do it about once a month, if at all. We don’t use the land line for anything but dial-up and faxes, and we keep an answering machine on the line so it only rings four times instead of ten when telemarketers call. My mom left a message that she’s moving to Wyoming. As soon as my cell finishes recharging I’m gonna call her up. Plus it’s Mother’s Day and I haven’t spoken to her in over a year. We’re not phone people.

Now I’m going to finish an MT installation for a client, and then maybe take a blanket and go lie in the yard while it’s still nice out… in no time it will be too hot and too sticky to be outside for fun.

Now you’re sorry you didn’t rent my dad! Last night Brett wasn’t around when I got home, and my pop wanted to “go do something” since it was his last night here. He and I stopped at the Dew Drop for a couple of cocktails, then he took me out for Indian food. (Although, lemmie tell ya: cocktails and Indian food do not a happy G.I. tract make the next morning!)

After leaving India Cafe, I picked up some drive-thru for Mr. Brett and we returned to the farm a little after nine. I had a great time.

I’d promised dear ol’ dad a pair of felted wool slippers, back when he was going to be here longer, and they weren’t done. So I sat myself in the recliner and knit like a mad woman until ten of eleven. Ta-dah! They’re done! I put the slippers and felting instructions into a plastic grocery bag, debated taking them up to dad’s RV right then, but went to bed instead.

Mr. Brett had had a few beers at Libertyville after work and then gone to a friend’s house that evening, so he was pretty much passed out drunk on the couch by the time I went up to bed.

Dad took off this morning for Tahoe, but I didn’t give him his slippers. I’ll have to mail them when I forward the rest of his mail next week. But when he gets them, they’ll be so superior! (I love felted wool slippers; I wear mine all the time. But I think I like the heathered charcoal I used for his better. I might need a new pair.)

Great news… not. They’re from my dad. The panic attacks! HE’S HAD THEM SINCE HE WAS A TEENAGER. (I had had no idea.)

Dad thinks it’s some kind of congenital brain malfunction that sends out bad signals to the old adrenals. (He doesn’t call them “panic attacks,” of course. He has the same strange judgement against panic disorder being a “mental illness” that I used to have. But his episodes sound the same as mine: double-beats, skipped beats, rapid beats, sweating, adrenaline, the works.)

Today I had a little surge during my morning commute, but it was brief and I was fine until after lunch when all hell broke loose. My heart was racing and I was so terribly uncomfortable… I kept leaving my desk to walk around the block. I couldn’t just ignore the episode because my heart was beating so hard I couldn’t NOT be aware of it. I’d tell you what my BPM was, but I was too chicken to count it. Take my word for it, it was just absurdly hard and fast. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. (It was what your pulse would be like after sprinting as hard as you could for a hundred yards, but I wasn’t doing anything.) My breathing was too fast, trying to get oxygen into my rapidly-circulating blood. I felt amped and freaked out – that’s the adrenaline and/or attendant hormones – and I just wanted it to stop so much that I was stuck in a negative feedback loop. I’d think it was easing off, then my chest would hammer and I’d have a little spike of “oh shit, it’s NOT over,” and that would be enough for my brain to tell my adrenals that I was afraid of something, and then there’d be another hormone flood.

Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.

I must have sat down at my desk and gone back outside at least six times. Finally I gave up and paced ’round the block again and then I sat in my car. The attack eased up a little after ten minutes of my mental litany (“You’re not dying. Your heart is strong. This is inappropriate application of fight-or-flight hormones. You’re not even in PAIN for chrissakes. This has never killed you before, and it won’t kill you now. You don’t even really think you’re dying, you’re just reacting to all the symptoms, which while uncomfortable are neither painful nor harmful. If you were gonna drop dead you’d’ve done it by now. You’re hyperventilating, which isn’t helping, by the way.”). I went back in to sit at my desk. Jordan took one look at me and blurted, “Are you okay?” (I said I wasn’t feeling well. He said he was sorry.) By now I’d been fucking around with the stupid thing for 45 minutes. I tried to do a little work but all I could do was fidget and bounce my knee and try to breathe normally… Finally I just grabbed my purse and walked out.

I visited the chiropractor – sometimes it helps quite a bit to get my ribs and neck adjusted – and, feeling like an asshole, I gave up on feeling better. I was amped and exhausted; it’s hard work maintaining that level of intensity and it makes me feel drowsy. I drove home where I waited it out, then I meditated a wee bit, then napped. When I woke up all the symptoms were gone… for about an hour. Now they’re back. Mild, but still there. This has been a shitty week as far as symptoms go.

Having done tons of ‘net research on this crap, I’ve learned that the old school approach is to consider panic syndrome a mental problem and treat it with antidepressants and therapy. The new pardigm is that there’s some underlying physical malfunction that creates the original symptoms, but then the sufferer develops fear of the attacks themselves and that anxiety is what causes more attacks. It becomes a mental issue, but not a mental illness. (Having suffered numerous panic attacks, I’ll tell you that being afraid of them is SO a normal reaction. They SUCK. Believe me. You really do feel like you’re gonna die. A lot of people actually end up in the emergency room the first time they have one because they feel so terribly unnatural and scary.)

Anyway, this guy thinks the offending brain structure in question is the amygdala, part of the lymbic system, which controls panic responses to dangerous stimuli. He says:

Anxiety disorder and panic attacks are not mental illnesses, they are behavioural conditions. They’re caused by a tiny change in the way the brain handles anxiety signals from the sensory organs.

The ‘anxiety switch’, (the Amygdala), is either ‘anxiety ON’ or ‘anxiety OFF’; when the switch is anxiety off it can be activated only by real danger, when it becomes ‘stuck on’ it can produce anxiety disorder symptoms, panic attacks, OCD, PTSD and phobias.

The symptoms of anxiety disorder are so real and so frightening that they can cause us to become scared and wrought with anxiety and panic attacks.

I don’t like the term anxiety disorder. Your increased anxiety isn’t actually a disorder (the word disorder suggests illness, panic attacks and anxiety are not illnesses!). The Amygdala has become ‘re-set’ at a higher ‘resting’ level of anxiety and it is this that causes your condition, whether that be General Anxiety Disorder, Panic Attacks, OCD, PTSD or phobias. This ‘re-set’ happens through a process called Operant Conditioning – it’s the same process that happens when you learn new activities – like driving or playing an instrument – learning through repitition.

This is why the slightest anxious thought or sensation sends you into anxiety and/or panic attacks mode. It’s why you don’t cope with normal situations like you used to, it’s why you have constant anxiety disorder symptoms or panic attacks (anxiety attacks), strange thoughts, pains, sensations, phobias and emotions…

The idea that you can train yourself to a better operational level is a fantastically hopeful one, but the question remains: what the hell caused the problem in the first place?

I wasn’t stressed out or unhappy when I developed these symptoms. Now that I have them, I’m very unhappy about them, yes – but what was the beginning? The beginning, I’m convinced, was a plain old physical malfunction. Can behavioral therapy fix THAT for me?

*wanders off, muttering obscenities*