Personality Flaws

I don’t think it will surprise anyone to know that I have a bit of OCD.  In some ways that is very good.  I always check my knot before climbing.  I’m super attentive to certain procedures – requiring that all steps are followed – even when I don’t want to.  And I pick paint.  I also peel wallpaper.

My first house had these fantastic wood doors that somebody had painted over in the early 60’s.  The original finish was shellac.  Which often has a waxy finish.  The lead paints that were used to cover the wood eventually lost their bond and after years of repainting – the final coats with acrylic latex paint that has mediocre adhesion but awesome stretchability – meant that there were layers of paint just bubbling and waiting for me to peel them off.  And I would.  I would spend hours peeling paint from the doors in that house – while I was talking on the phone or waiting for the laundry or just thinking.

Wallpaper fairs no better.  I actually cannot put wallpaper in my houses because I can’t resist picking at the seams.  At my old church I peeled all the wallpaper off the walls around the toilet – because that is where I would go and hide after church was over so that I wouldn’t have to sit by myself while the rest of the kids talked and played together.  Yeah.

The same goes for stickers.  I had stickers all over the top of my old laptop.  It was fine as long as the edges stayed down, but the first time a corner started to peel and it took every last bit of my willpower not to start picking away.  I  may yet succumb.  And when I bought my new laptop, the first thing I did was peel all of the stickers off – all but the microsoft sticker with the operating system code.  All the stickers on the palm rests are gone.  Actually, that is true for all of my computers.  Same goes for books.  I always peel the price stickers off.  When I was buying used books from the college bookstore, I would peel off the often several layers of used stickers as I was reading.  And if there was glue left, I’d use mineral oil to remove it (note: mineral oil as in baby oil or body oil does a great job at removing sticker glue without damaging most surfaces).

Now I pick at my dog.  Fate would have it that my dog sheds in a way few non-Akita owning pet owners can understand.  Her fur comes out in handfuls.  It has been coming out in handfulls for almost two months now.  It will continue to come out in handfuls until June.  I can fill a trash bag with fur in less than 20 minutes and not have made a dent in her shedding coat.  But what is worst is that she gets these tufts of hair that have totally released from the skin and are sticking up and out but that are held in place by the curly nature of the adjacent hair.  See, her undercoat looks like somebody took their toddler’s super fine hair and put it in one of those ’80’s hair crimpers.  It’s all kinky and wavy and super thick.  And it sticks together.  Except for the little tufts which come loose, and which I cannot resist pulling.  I cannot resist.

Dog is trying to figure this behavior out.  It isn’t petting.  It isn’t playing.  What it is is a kind of primate-esque grooming where I pick at the tufts of under coat and pull the not quite loose hair loose.  I don’t think it hurts her, but this is our first full shed-season together and I know she has never had this kind of scrutiny.  And I can’t help it.  She walks by with a tuft sticking out and it turns into a fifteen minute grooming session where I’m picking at her undercoat and making neat little piles of hair sorted according to color.  White and coarse for the underbelly, white and soft for the chest and legs, gray for around the neck, and black for the back and head.

Tonight I started to pick at her hair and realized that she was so dirty that I couldn’t sort the piles.  To the bath we went – note dragging a 75lb dog by the scruff of her neck is much easier on hardwood and tile floors than on carpet – the sliding, while somewhat distressing to the animal I’m sure, is actually fairly easy.  Poor dog.  So I half carried and half drug her into the bathroom, lifted her into the tub and gave her a bath.  By the time we were done it looked like a small animal had exploded in there.  The amount of hair in the tub and one the floor and the walls and the mirror and the window and the toilet and the sink and the cabinet is almost enough to pet.  I was half thinking of filling her next toy with her own hair – except for the mess that would make when she tears it open.  I have yet to clean it up actually.  Procrastinating.  Or waiting for it to dry enough to be sweepable – your pick.

You’d think that after that kind of activity all of the loose hair would have been loosened.  Not so.  I’m still being taunted by tufts.  And poor Dog has no patience for my manhandling left.  I don’t blame her.

Last night the rats came back – but with interesting results.  The first one started screaming from his perch on the plumbing pipes right under by bed at 2:30 am.  I think he fell of the pipes at that point and beelined for the exit – which I heard him fall out of and then squeal again before climbing the fence and running off.  The second rat was about an hour later.  It didn’t squeal, but I heard it both enter and leave the crawlspace – the first leisurely, and the second in a hot hurry.  So the pepper-spray jelly seems to be working.  I took the day off work to work on my thesis – made significant progress – today so I wasn’t so anxious about waking up in the middle of the night to listen to the rats.  I was almost amused even.  If I go two nights in a row without activity, then I can seal up the entrances with relative confidence that I haven’t trapped anything under the house.  I do not want to trap anything under the house.  The fact that I’m now attuned to their noises means that they’ll have a hard time coming and going without me knowing it.

It’s one of life’s little ironies.  I’ve always been a light sleeper, but I became very easily awakened when I lived in my first apartment/cottage.  People would deal drugs and steal from the cars parked next to my little house, and I learned to listen for the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside.  It got so that even with the windows closed and the wind blowing and the rain coming down I could hear someone walking by my building at night – no matter how deeply asleep I was.  My first two apartments in Sacramento were situated so that I had no direct access to paths of travel – and it was wonderful – I almost never woke up because something was wandering around outside.  But this house is different.  I hear the people walking by on the street at night – and they are walking by at all hours.  I also hear the dogs and the stray cats as they move about at night.  And I hear the rats.  I can hear them when they are on my fence.  I know when they cross the gate by my room and I know when they climb up the water heater enclosure to get access to the roof.  The sound of a rat on the fence will wake me up.

The sound of a person outside my window will actually get me out of bed.  It’s happened.

So last night I got to listen to the rats as they navigated their slightly altered environment.  I’m looking forward to closing them out of my house.  Not that I’ll sleep all that much better – there is always some noise in this ‘hood that needs attention – but at least I won’t be wondering if something is going to be crawling across my bed as I’m trying to sleep.

My next home will be in a townhouse or apartment up above the street level.  I feel a lot more secure when I know that whatever it is that may want to come visit me needs to navigate 12 or 15 feet of vertical space first.

So yeah.  OCD Paranoia.  And you know what?  Those are the personality bits that I’m actually comfortable with.  They’re useful.  Kind of.

Cost Benefit Analysis

The thing that they don’t tell you when you are filling out the grad school applications is that if you are accepted into a program and if you intend to complete that program in a timely manner, your relationship with time will change completely.  This happens gradually with different phases, but with the same result – all those things that you used to do for the simple pleasure of doing them – those things that did not render up a finished product or did not immediately and meaningfully contribute to a current project – those things become unsustainable.  Suddenly there is no time for them.  No time at all.  Even when there is time, it is not linear time that can be used as one would like, but time that is connected to the time necessary to complete each and every unfinished assignment.  A web of time and first and second and final drafts and incomplete research and unprepared lectures and piles of reading and more piles of writing all interconnected until it is impossible to know where one stops and the other starts and no matter what, there is not enough time for it all.

I spent years of my life just wishing for each day to come to an end so I could be done with it – never looking forward to the next, but simply satisfied that the time was passing.  Those days time couldn’t pass fast enough.  In my foolish 20 year old heart I assumed that it would never change – that I would be passing time for the rest of my life.  I was so wrong and yet right that I am sometimes amazed at my own path.

Yesterday I took a day for myself to spend some time with a friend doing something that I love – playing in the snow.  I had an unorthodox childhood – my introduction to the suburbs was late and lacked any of the sense of “safety” that originally drove families out into the hinterlands.  Instead I spent my childhood living on the edge of some of the last truly wild land left.  Winter was serious business in the little town I called home.  The town itself was nestled in a shallow but expansive valley up in the mountains.  The horizon was framed by mountain peaks on all sides, and the foothills to the next range were within walking distance of the one traffic light in town.  They would close school on snow days, and on days when the temperature dropped so low that it was dangerous for kids to walk the few blocks to school. The town was mostly poor, and many kids didn’t have good cold weather clothes.  I remember girls walking to middle school wearing light jackets on below 0 days, their hands and faces numb and pale from the cold.

And I remember the times I got so cold that I was sure I would never be warm again – the times I got ice in my boots – that never melted even though it spent hours against my skin – the times I lost all feeling in my hands from the elbows down, the times I would come home with strange patches of white on my nose and cheeks and ears.  I remember the times it ached to stand next to the wood stove.

There are also parts that I have tried to forget.  Like the mornings I put on a dress over my tights and winter boots and long coat and went and stood in the cold on a neighbor’s porch to explain the bible to them.  The mornings that the car holding the missionary group would get stuck in the snow and I would be out with the women in their nylons and the men in their pressed slacks trying to push it until the tires could get traction on the dirty brown ice.  I remember feeling almost naked in my JC Penny dress and white nylons as the cold wind blew right through me – chilling to the bone.

Yet when we left, the thing that I missed most – more than the mountains or the people or the town or the home was the weather – the seasons – the snow.  I missed that unambiguous cold.  I could not get used to days of 40 degrees that felt so much colder than the below 0 I knew.  I desperately missed the wood stove with its obvious heat source – its “stand here and be warm simplicity”.  I missed standing out under the huge pine trees – the ones so old and sturdy that the first heavy snow would create surprisingly warm caves around the trunks.  I missed the frozen ground and the clean whiteness of the cold.  I was not prepared for green grass in winter and mud mud mud everywhere.  It felt unnatural.  Wrong.

It has been over 20 years since I left the snow country.  Yet every time I get a chance to return to the snow I feel like I have reconnected to that child who used to dig snow tunnels from the front door of her house to the mailbox on the street.  This year I have decided to make an effort to allow myself some of that time.  Yet the expense…  Oye the expense.   The monetary expense is one thing.  Nothing is free.  Nothing should be free.  And I accept that.  But the time expense?  The time that is so intrinsically intertwined with my every waking moment that I can never forget what I “should” be doing?  That expense is usurious.

I’ve come to realize that a major part of my current malaise regarding my studies has nothing to do with the topic or the teachers or anything so simple and accessible.  It is because I am tired of living without creativity and intrigue and fascination and curiosity and danger.  I need change and risk and time to squander figuring out how stuff works and how to make the things I find interesting.  I hate feeling guilty for reading literature or studying 19th century costumes or sliding down the mountain as the falling snow absorbs every unnatural sound into a kind of natural white noise.

There is irony in this guilt.  My intellectual stores are empty.  Creativity and fascination and adventures are my intellectual nourishment, and the less I have given over to these pursuits, the less I have had to spend on long-winded papers and in-depth studies.  I feel like I’ve been regurgitating the same things over and over – a sort of superficial moral outrage cloaked in academic language that I pass off as analysis.  It goes nowhere.  Yet I have nothing to supplement it with – no art, no music, no emotion.

Only memories.  And those are… tainted.

One winter, when I was 12 I was riding one of our horses in the far pasture near the marsh.  She was not my favorite horse – but I was one of the few people who could exact obedience out of her when she was feeling obstinate.  That afternoon she was unusually nervous – a storm was coming, and the temperature had dropped remarkably fast in a very short time.  I was ready to turn back to the barn when she started bucking on the ice.  We both went down hard, my leg under her side, and my head hitting the solid ice with a crack that echoed in my ears.  I was lucky that I did not get tangled in the saddle, and that she did not crush me in her struggle to stand.  She was the largest horse we had at the time.  She was long gone when I came to – the second time I had been knocked unconscious (adventure and I are close companions) and I remember lying there on the ice, very aware that I needed to move, that I was so very cold, that my head hurt and my ears were ringing and that nobody would know where I was or would come looking for me for hours and that it was getting dark and that stupid horse was still wearing my saddle.  But I so wanted to sleep.  For just a little while.  Just a nap really.

I didn’t sleep there on the ice.  In the end, it was the saddle that made me get up and walk back to the barn.  I broke a cardinal rule that day.  I did not get back on the horse that had thrown me – and I was never confident on that animal again.  But I did unsaddle her, water the rest of the horses and walk home just as the wind picked up and the temperature dropped well past freezing.  I fell asleep on the sofa in front of the wood stove.  I didn’t tell my mother until later what had happened.  I’d likely had a concussion.  Not the first or the last.  Still, not something to take lightly.

These days I feel like I am still lying on the ice.  I know that I cannot stay where I am.  The list of concerns running through my mind are long and serious and paralyzing.  I just want to rest.  Just a quick nap.  But the time to move is coming.  I just hope that this time, when the time comes to finish what I need to finish, I’ll have the motivation to get up off the ice, and walk through the frozen pastures to the barn and finish my chores.

And hopefully, when my time is mine again, it will all have been worth it.

Adrenaline and the Dog Walk

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had since Ryder came to live with me is making sure she gets enough exercise.  She spends a lot of time alone.  And while she seems to mainly sleep during that time, it means that when I get home she wants to play.

She loves the walks at the park, especially when I’m tired.  This is because when I’m tired, I tend to stroll and let her have a loose leash and stop when she wants to smell something and pretty much let her determine our pace.  She is less impressed with the brisk walks where I make her mind her manners.  And she downright pouts when I make her run.  It’s almost impossible to pee on everything that smells peeable when we’re running.

For the last two weeks my ankle has been bothering me.  Mostly it is fine, but then it will suddenly have this sharp shooting pain that will make it very painful to even walk.  Sometimes I can limp through it and it will quit.  And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.  It is very sporadic, but getting worse, and it is because I need new running shoes.  And also probably a break.  But mostly new shoes.

Today the pain in my ankle was so bad that I was limping by the time I got home.  I put ice on it for a while, but when it came time to take Ryder to the park, I left the ice at home, took a couple of advil and decided to see how it would go.  It hurt at first, and then got better for a while and then started to hurt again when we were at the baseball diamond at the far end of the park.  I decided to sit for a bit to rest it, and she was tugging at the leash to smell the trees and kept getting tangled in the table and in the garbage can and in my legs.

So I let her off the leash.

I’ve done this twice before and both times she came back when I called.  Both times she never got more than about 30 feet from me.  Both times everything was fine.  So I assumed this time would be fine too.  It was late, there were no other dogs around.  Traffic had died down, there were no people about, I thought it would be fine.

It was not fine.

She wouldn’t come back when I called.  She’d stop and look at me, and then turn and keep trotting away.  When she got to the edge of the diamond I realized that she was just about out of my range of control and got up to follow her, calling her all the while.  She just kept trotting away, looking over her shoulder to see if I was still coming, and then continuing on.  I started jogging after her because she was getting close to the edge of the park and would soon have to cross the street.  When she saw that I was jogging, she started to really move.

This is when I realized that she wasn’t going to stop or listen or come back to me by command.  This is when I realized that she would probably run all the way back to where we usually park the car – which meant crossing two streets and a parking lot – and then who knows what would happen when she remembered that wasn’t where we parked the car this time.  This is when I realized that I would have to catch her by then or else…

This is when I started running for reals.

Now, running is a thing I do.  But I seldom go all out for more than what it takes to cross the finish line.  It has been a long time since I tried to see how long I can run at top speed.  Apparently it is a lot longer than I used to.

I had almost caught up with her when she crossed the first road.  Thank god there was no traffic and I thought just maybe she’d get distracted by the duck pond and everything would be ok.  We passed a cyclist who said something in Chinese as he passed me.  And then we passed the pond – she didn’t even slow.  By this time she was loping along, glancing to make sure I was following and having a grand old time.

If I hadn’t been afraid of the cars and the potential that she might hurt someone or that someone might hurt her, I would have handled this differently.  If, if, if.  As it was, I’d run one of the fastest half miles of my life when she cruised on past another runner going the other way.  Apparently she liked him because she stopped for a moment.  This is where I made my mistake.

I started to sprint.

I didn’t know I could run faster than I was, but then there I was almost flying.  I was having visions of her pulling some sort of snarling biting thing – though she has never bitten anyone.  Killed ducks and chickens and goats, yes, but never bitten a person.

There was a couple of seconds where she looked like she was going to approach this person.  He crouched down and called to her and she seemed taken by this.  And then she saw me coming fast and she took off again.  The guy stood up and saw me coming and asked if she bit.

I told him no, but that she didn’t know about cars.  He took off after her too, running as fast as he could.  He had about 60 feet on me so he was closer, and Ryder, well, she thought this was the bestest game ever.

I was right about where she was headed – straight for the usual parking spot.  I also lucked out.  He got there right after she did and when she stopped to wonder where the car was, he called to her and she went right up to him.  When I came gallumping up a couple of seconds later, he had her by the collar and was scratching her ears and she looked all sorts of pleased and a little confused.

I haven’t been that afraid since I don’t remember when.  It was my fault, my stupidity, my assumptions and it could have been a disaster.  When I finally had her leash back on her, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug her or kick her.  I was so relieved and so angry.

I profusely thanked the man who caught her.  I felt like such an idiot – taking the leash off of an Akita in a public space was an incredibly stupid thing to do.  All because I was feeling tired and sore.  And there I had just run a mile at full speed and I hadn’t even noticed my ankle, or the fact that I was running in sandals, or that I was so tired.

I can tell you I’m noticing it now.

He was generous and told me it was ok.  No harm done, he’d got a good run out of it.  And when he stood up to leave, I had the very strong urge to introduce myself – which is not something that ever happens, especially when I’ve been caught being criminally stupid.  I found that even in that short of a time, I had a positive impression about him – apparently my dog has good taste – that initial impression is never wrong.  Sometimes I ignore it, but it is never wrong.

I have learned my lesson.  This dog will never get to be an off leash dog.  Next time she gets all wistful watching some other dog playing fetch in the park, I’ll remind her of this little adventure and why she cannot be allowed to play fetch in the park.  Or sniff things unattended.  Or participate in any of those other off leash adventures that more responsible dogs get to do.

God, I sound like a parent.

Things I have learned:

Leashes are forever.

I need to do more all out running intervals – I was thinking today that I wasn’t going to make my time goal for my next race – if anything was going to change that some serious speed intervals would be the trick.

And I need to take a couple of days and let my ankle heal.  Maybe while I wait for my new running shoes.

Oh, and one more.  I think I might start running at night.  🙂

Ephemeral Control

That last post is about as close to pathos as I want this experience to go.  I did not create this to be a chronicle of “poor me”s.  All things considered, and that is a lot of things, I’m doing pretty good.  Except for the hives.  And even those will go away eventually.

I took the day off of work yesterday.  I turned off my phone.  I checked my email once in the morning.  And the rest of the day I spent getting my life in order.  It was a very productive day.

Memory Log!

Yesterday morning I had a peanut butter and honey sandwich for breakfast.  Took some energy drugs, and did that cleaning thing where your hands are never empty – you know the thing, where you are always carrying something to put away in another room, even when it isn’t pertinent to the exact task at hand – cleaning the bedroom meant carrying laundry to the laundry room and then taking the long way back so I could move the snow boots from the dining room to the hall closet.  It is good cleaning – indirectly efficient cleaning.

I finally tackled the office.  I’d been dumping paperwork in a box for the last five months.  Before that it was a paper bag which had ripped and spilled all over the office floor.  And the top of my desk had become so cluttered that there was barely enough flat space for a coffee mug – let alone books and papers.

Tangent: It is amazing how much impact the environment has on me.  While the basic tools of my office have not changed – I still have the computer with the internet and access to the online libraries and I still have a chair and my music and a little heater for my feet and I still have my coffee mug and printer and stapler – before, when it was too cluttered to even move around in, I couldn’t concentrate.  I would come in here, sit down to work, and immediately feel zapped of any motivation or desire.  I’d end up farting around on the internet the whole time.  Sometimes without even pretending to access my school-work files.  This morning though, I woke up early, and for the first time in weeks I’m looking forward to working on my assignments.  Which is about time – I’m behind and if the malaise of the last few weeks had continued much longer, I’d be in big trouble.

Cleaning the office included emptying my file cabinet and storing all of the old documents and then filing the new stuff in its place.  It was very challenging and I now understand fully my reluctance to attack that particular task.  It was the equivalent of reviewing the last few years.

Tangent 2:  Before I had my car accident I was pretty good about keeping on top of my paperwork – bills and what not got paid on time, stuff that needed to be filed got filed, stuff that needed a response got a response.  After the accident, I quickly deteriorated in my ability to manage my paperwork.  Part of this is because it increased in volume.  But more than that, I found that I simply couldn’t manage.  Bills went unpaid – sometimes because I didn’t have the money – usually because I didn’t have the money – sometimes because the insurance was supposed to pay them but hadn’t.  The barrage of insurance documents and collections documents and hospital documents took me to a point where I simply couldn’t manage the rest of my paperwork – the utilities and the phone and my car insurance and the credit cards.  I’d pay what I could when I could and dump the paperwork into the file drawer loose.  Eventually the file drawer became full, and I started using bags and boxes.  Seldom sorting, often leaving letters and bills unopened (particularly if I was paying them online), just stuffing it all away.  Last year when I finally decided to get my tax situation resolved (or at least the federal portion of it) I dumped a lot of this paperwork on the floor so I could shuffle through it to find the documents I needed.

And I never picked it back up again.

Yesterday, as I was sorting through the file cabinet, putting the old stuff that I need to save into storage, roughly sorting the two and a half years of paperwork that had accumulated, and filing away everything from this year, I realized that I was looking at the physical evidence of my breakdown.  It was so vividly apparent, written in the dates of the bills and letters and demands, in the logos and language of the corporate medical machine, the impersonal insurance denials, and the varied collection of rejection letters from my last attempt to find a job.

I have a vast collection of letters stating that while my application is impressive, they’ve decided to go with someone else.  Thanks for my time.  Good luck.  Suck it.

Getting all of that sorted out was incredibly relieving.  It is also a testament to how far I’ve come that I would even consider taking on such a task.  And I have a good foundation to build on for this year.  A whole new organization, and a file just for the next crop of rejection letters.  Except this time they’re going to be from a much higher caliber of employers for a much higher caliber of jobs.   End Tangent.

I did take a little time to go to the gym and get a workout in.  I was very lax this last week about working out – I ran on Monday, hit the gym on Thursday, and then hit the gym again on Saturday.  That is a lot of down days for me, and I can feel it.  The workout was good, but it exhausted me more than I thought it would.  And afterwards, I came home, had a snack, finished cleaning the office, zoned in front of the computer for a while, practiced guitar for a bit, and went to bed early – or at least early for me.

I slept ok last night, quite a bit of tossing and turning, and when I did wake up the couple of times that I remembered looking at the clock, it was quite a while before I fell back asleep.  But it was more than I’ve been getting.  And there was no rooster crowing at the butt crack of dawn to wake me up and make me actually get up and go outside.  That was a huge bonus.

Friday afternoon my youngest brother stopped by on his way home and caught Urban Chicken and put him in a box and took him away.  My relief was so palpable and I was so exhausted from the whole thing that I just went inside, turned my brain off, and sat for several hours.

End Log.

The last two weeks have been very difficult.  Yard Chicken was part of that.  The lack of decent sleep also played a role.  But I think that eliminating the office clutter and the rooster is a good start to regaining some of that illusory control that we all find so necessary to function.  Or at least I do.

Today I’m going to do the last long pre-race run.  I’ll be glad when the race is over, though I don’t think I’ll be really cutting back on my exercise regimen all that much.  I need it to keep an even keel – and my emotional instability and increased stress level this last week has only underlined how important it is that I get enough endorphins.  But not having the race looming will be a good break.  It’s really interesting how when I first sign up for these races I dread them – and have to keep reminding myself that I have plenty of time, then as the training continues, I really enjoy it – enjoy having an excuse to take two hours on a weekend day to go outside and run the trails, and then as the race nears, I start to dread it again – thinking about all the stuff that could go wrong and wishing it was over already and wondering if I did enough training and my mantra becomes “why the hell do you do this to yourself?”.  But if this race is anything like the last, it will all be worth it.  And I’ll probably sign up for the October race again.  Because that middle part and that part where it is over are worth the stress and self-doubt inherent in the process.

Ok, time to work now.  A band that I like very much will be playing this Monday night – during the last half of my class.  I’ve promised myself that if I get on top of – and a little ahead in – my classwork that I can leave to go see them play.  A little reward for pulling my shit together.  Even if it did take a day off work to make it happen.

Stress Test

I would like to think that I’ve always been a pretty cool customer.  I can actually only remember a handful of times that I was actually agitated to the point of outburst – even as a kid it took a lot to get me riled up.  I’m good at holding whatever I’m feeling in – and only expressing it to people I know I can trust to not take me too seriously, people who know I just need to say the words and then I’ll deal with it, people who can do a little validating, provide a little perspective, and then tell me (kindly or not-so if necessary) to pull my head loose.  It has come to my attention that I may be a little too good at this emotional repression.

I have hives.  Again.  My heart has been racing at night.  Again.  I have chest pains.  Again.  And I’m drinking.  A lot.  Again.

So, in the interest of getting it out so I can hopefully get a little relief, here’s the current state of my existence.

Despite many varied (craigslist, neighborhood canvassing, TV) efforts to get rid of the rooster that moved in almost two weeks ago, he is still in my yard.  He still crows a good hour or more before sunrise.  I am less nervous around him.  But he is making a huge mess that is going to take a lot of time to clean up.  Anything that takes time causes incredible amounts of stress.

The computer that my parents decided they wanted updated is still sitting in pieces on my dining room table four months after they realized that it needed more than they knew how to do to get it running again.  The first replacement parts were stolen from my mailbox.  The second set arrived last Monday.  It will take four or five hours to get it up and running so that it can go back to them.  More time.

The speech therapy sessions are going well, I think.  However the neuro has put in a recommendation for an extensive learning disabilities test – one that costs $24oo.  Up Front.  And that will require at least 6 hours to conduct.  I do not have the money.  I do not have the reassurance that I will get reimbursed by my insurance.  I do not have the time.  I’ve been put on a waiting list to take the test in another 6 or 8 months with insurance approval.

I do not know if I will have a job, let alone insurance at that point.

My memory is still for total shit.

My insurance is conducting an inquiry into the brain injury visits that I’ve been making.  They do not want to pay for it, and are going to file a suit against “responsible parties” if at all possible.  They want me to provide an in depth explanation of the whole issue.  Again with the time. 

My employer has re-organized and my position eliminated.  Though they have promised that there will be no net loss of jobs, there has been nothing available in my area.  This is not a field that I want to continue to pursue.  It was an interim job while I worked on my degree.  Yet any job is better than no job – no insurance – no income. 

My job is in a constant state of flux.  I went from having way too much work to having almost none, to having way too much to having almost none.  None of it is interesting or challenging.  Nor is it consistent.  I find out that my tasks have been eliminated or deemed unnecessary only after I’ve completed them and sent them out.  I’ve been relieved of all ability to fix and help – not because I didn’t do a good job, but because I am simply too low on the totem, and the supervisor whose authority I was using is now gone.  The whole thing is demoralizing, depressing, frustrating, and exhausting.  I have to get mad to go to work in the morning.  Anger is the only motivator that can trump the depression.  I spend most mornings on the verge of breaking down.  All this time spend doing nothing, and all these things that I simply don’t have time to do – it kills me. 

I have been job hunting.  It is time consuming, energy consuming, and has a very low return rate.  So far I’ve submitted 6 or 7 applications with absolutely no response.  I do not have the time or the energy to do this with the vigor necessary to actually get a position – it causes me much stress.  Yet not applying for jobs significantly increases my anxiety level as well.  It is a catch-22.

I’m falling behind in my classes.  I simply do not have the energy or the mental focus to work effectively.  I spend far too much time sitting stunned in front of my computer trying to do research, but mostly trying not to allow myself to get distracted by every little thing.  Reading is almost impossible.  Focus is a joke.  And I can see the deadlines coming at me like bullets – traveling much faster than I can track.

My house is in total disarray – particularly my office.  The tax/insurance debacle of 2008 never got cleaned up, and the floor is littered with official papers that need to go back into the file cabinet.  I’ve got sacks of mail that I’ve never opened.  Stacks of files that got pulled and not replaced teeter on the spare bed.  Piles of computer parts litter every flat spot on my desk, printer, and end table.  The rest of the room is a tangle of unfinished projects, bits of arts and crafts, clothes, and more paperwork than can even be imagined.  And this is the room where I try to do my research.  I can’t even write on my desk, it is so covered in trash.  I need a day to sort it all out and put it all away.  Again.  Time.  (Caveat.  I have had days that I could do this.  However, it is the kind of task that I really struggle with.  I’ve started half a dozen times, and gotten so overwhelmed that I’ve given up each time.  This may be one of those tasks I need drugs to complete.)

On top of the house disarray are the leaks.  I still have not put my living room back together after the storm that dumped a bunch of water down the wall behind my fireplace and broke a new crack in the ceiling to drip more water on my floor.  I thought that maybe I’d fixed the leaks.  This last storm proved me wrong.  There are water stains everywhere. 

Even the things that keep me calm are causing me stress.  The race coming up seems like it is going to be fine, but I’ve been having issues with my guts – intense stabbing pains – that have put a damper on my last couple of runs.  I also feel like I haven’t had the time to train that I need.  So even though I’ll run the race just fine, it will hurt, I won’t do as well as I’d wanted, and I’m afraid I’ll end up spending the after race alone again, and that was kind of depressing.  (Caveat, I did ask people to go out.  Everyone was busy – the bane and the pride of my friendships – they all have equally intense lives.)

My climbing has suffered greatly from the surgery, the required down time, and my current inability to get enough of my life together to have a reliable schedule.  I wouldn’t even be able to pass the lead test at my current level.  I worked so hard, and now it is all gone.

Same with weights.

Same with martial arts.  I’ve been practicing more, and it is good when I do practice, but at the same time I have forgotten so much, and all I want is to have the time to do the practice, work from the videos, get my skill back.  Time.

I don’t even have time to practice my music.  I do try to get a little guitar time in every night, just so I don’t lose my calluses.  But it is difficult.  I’m not actually learning anything new.  My singing is getting better, but I’m not able to do the things I want to do with the music.

And that’s the basic list.  It does not include the tasks that are required for daily life – the food shopping and laundry and toilet cleaning and dishes and sweeping and oil changing and and and.  Nor does it include the things that I really want to be doing – the hiking and snowshoeing and skiing and photography and travel and reading and research on my projects.  I have a half finished electric/acoustic upright bass that I would love to work on.

I spend so much of each day standing in my hallway turning in circles as I try to figure out what I should do next, what is most important, what would be most efficient, what has the closest deadline, what would be easiest.

So I have hives.  I’m depressed.  I’m exhausted.  But I’m trying to stay upbeat and easy to get along with and pleasant to be around.  I’m trying to be reliable and resourceful and calm and consistent.  Really, I want to fly off the handle, get in a fist fight, and then get stinking drunk – for three or four days.  Ok.  Two days. 

I’m taking tomorrow off of work.  It will be good.  I don’t know what I’ll get done, but I’m going to aim high.  Hopefully by Monday I’ll have enough caught up that I can quit itching.  Hopefully!

Memory Tracking

As part of the therapy I’m currently undergoing for the brain injury from four years ago, I’ve been instructed to create and maintain a memory log – a daily list of things that happen so that I can learn to refine and eventually trust my memory again.

Memory is a funny thing.  It can be working just fine, but if you don’t trust it, it is just as bad as if it weren’t working at all.  I would say that mine works correctly about half of the time.  The other half is all ghost thoughts and suspicions and insecurity.  What was I supposed to do with this?  How did that sentence start?  Who?  Where?  Ugh.  I’m trying all these new methods to try to get on top of my memory issues.  I’m keeping a date-book and a mini calendar.  I enter everything into my phone.  I write everything down at least three times. 

So far it isn’t really helping all that much.  The biggest improvement has come from doing things right when I’m thinking about them.  Yet that is just not always possible.  And so there is fail.  Massive amounts of fail.

Yet, I have to do something.  I feel like I’m operating with a handicap – or at least a larger handicap than normal – whatever that is.  So, I’ll do the memory tracking.

Last Night: After class I came home and had soup and a grilled cheese sandwhich for dinner.  No alcohol.  Instead I watched a little Samurai Champloo, played some guitar, and did my best not to think about school.  Oh!  I did notice that there was some sort of strange bird feces on my back porch when I first got home.  Too much for a pidgeon or crow.  It was confusing. 

This Morning: I’m still out of cereal because I forgot that I was going to go to the store this weekend.  So I had eggs and toast for breadfast.  As I was doing my dishes I noticed that there was a huge live chicken on my back porch.  Hence the bird shit.  I took pictures with my phone to prove that it was there, but I couldn’t send them or upload them because the phone company has put a data lock on my phone.  I guess I asked for it?  I don’t know – the girl’s accent was so thick that I finally gave up and just said yes to whatever she was asking me.  But still.  There was a chicken in my yard – in the middle of the ghetto – in the middle of the city.  So I forgot my textbooks for class tonight.  I probably forgot other things too, I just don’t know what yet. 

My mother suggested that I chase the chicken out of my yard through the gate.  My problem with that is that the chicken would last only a few minutes on the street before a stray dog/car/miscreant/drug-addict killed it.  I may have a certain amount of antipathy towards chickens (the result of trauma caused by excessively aggressive roosters a decade and some ago) but I am a vegetarian, and I don’t like the idea of killing animals wastefully.  This chicken could be an egg producer.  Or improve my yard.  Or fertilize veggies.  Anyway, I didn’t want it’s blood on my hands – literally or figuratively.

(caveat.  I have killed chickens before – with a .22 after which they were cleaned, tossed in a boiling pot, plucked, and eventually served for dinner – which I generally couldn’t bring myself to eat.)

Work has been a pretty standard Tuesday.  I realized that I forgot one of my big weekly tasks last week, so I completed it today. 

There are still no more jobs that I am willing to/can apply for.  I have hives from the stress.  And all I want to do is sleep.  Except there is a chicken in my back yard.

And that’s what I remember.

New Doors and Old Lessons

Tonight, for the first time in nearly three years, I sat down and started watching the instructional videos that my sensei made 25 years ago.  He died two years and six months ago.  Last October, when I ran my first half-marathon, I was able finally break through the wall that had blocked my meditation.  That race changed me – he was there with me, and I spent much of the 13 miles talking to him, telling him the things I wished I had said before he died.

Last November I received my black belt.  It was not given to me based on my current practice.  I have not lost what I learned, but I have not increased my learning either.  The instructors – masters really – who gave me my belt do not just hand out rank.  If they believe I earned it, then I earned it.  And I am so grateful.  But I never went into this for rank.  It has been and always will be about the skill.  I think I’m finally ready to pick up where I left off and resume my practice.  More than that, I think I need to resume my practice if I am to have any chance at successfully continuing my education.

The more time I spend tracking down the results of my brain injury, the more I’m learning that it has had and will have a direct impact on my ability to learn and remember.  One of the greatest things that I ever got from studying martial arts is the ability to improve my learning curve.  Even after the accident, the things I learned in the dojo stayed with me in a way that so much else didn’t.  I need that advantage now more than ever.  And while I’ve had access to the resources – to his training videos – for almost two years now, it is now that I finally feel ready to watch them, and use them.

For the first time my throat didn’t close when he appeared on the screen.  For the first time I didn’t feel like I was falling into a dark hole of grief.  For the first time I could watch him move and remember how it felt to translate his motion to my body type – longer legs and arms and torso, longer strides, less direct strength, more range, less snap more whip, less of his sharp almost snake-like strikes, more of my long, deceptively relaxed cat-like strikes.  He was always the better fighter, but one of the best things he taught me was to accept my body for what it was and to learn to use its strengths and weaknesses to my advantage.  We all move differently.  That is not a bad thing.

Tonight, or tomorrow, as tonight is late, I will put some of his videos on my laptop, and next week, before work, I will take it to the gym and use one of the yoga rooms and I will practice.  The muscle memory is there.  I just need to engage the memory memory – a much more difficult task I’ll admit.  And as my wrist heals and I work on my memory I’ll decide where I want to go with this next.  I’m thinking jiu-jitsu.  Or Iaido.  I’ve long wanted to develop some skill with the sword.  Maybe both.  I’ll have to ask my sensei about it this March during my next half-marathon.  Somehow I know he’ll be there with me.  After all, he’s the one that taught me it was possible in the first place.

Midweek

It is difficult, sometimes, to know what to do about the blues.  I’m not talking the 12 bar or the Delta, or even the Hill Street.  I mean the melancholly that sneaks up for no good reason and then lingers – tainting everything with a tinge of sadness.  There’s no real explanation for it – no identifiable reason for these feelings, no trigger, no source, and no real solution.  This is the risk that comes with managing depression without chemical assistance.  Sometimes even the best tricks don’t work.  Exercise?  Check.  Happy music?  Check.  Fresh air?  Check.  Things to look forward to?  Check.  Yet everything feels blunt and heavy.  My body aches as though my frame was carrying twice my weight.  Even the slightest motion is exhausting. 

Someday I hope that someone figures out why this happens – the origin of sourceless sadness. 

I walk a fine line between self-improvement and self-destruction.  I’m alway working on myself – learning new things, pushing my limits, improving my abilities and ranges.  Yet at the same time I’m prone to self-medication, excessive deprivation, and irrational risk-taking.  I grow frustrated with the slow pace of improvement and find perverse satisfaction in how fast and how easy it is to destroy – months of work gone in a single night of binge and purge.  And then I have to pick up the pieces and start over, laborously rebuilding what I so effortlessly demolished.

I am slowly learning to curb the most destructive urges.  I can see the small signs of success around me, yet even that yin is subject to destruction’s yang.  Burn it all away.  Go to nothing.  Be nothing.  The little voice in the back of my brain cackles at me constantly, sometimes audible, sometimes muffled in my subconscious, always present.  It is tempting.

It is sometimes difficult to tell where the depression merges with my actual personality.  I am the quintessential Gemini – a realization that has caught me somewhat by surprise in the last couple of years.  The duality (and often plurality) of my nature is something of which I am increasingly aware.  Yet, there are few defining lines – few borders from which I can choose a side and set my boundaries.  Is the depression depression?  Or is it part of me?  Internal or external?  Are my attempts to manage it actual management or simple self delusion?  Where does one draw a line when the colors bleed together? 

I went in for my first conscious MRI yesterday.  It was not unlike spending 20 minutes listening to really bad techno music.  I actually didn’ t mind the scan at all.  But I’m increasingly curious about the results.  I’m worried that they won’t show anything and the memory and cognition issues that I perceive as problems are actually all in my imagination (or the result of over-work, or aging, or whatever else – which is the same thing as my imagination – unvalidated).  But I’m also worried that it will show something – a flaw, a scar, a remnant of dammage that will never be fully repaired and what that will mean.  Worried is a strong word.  Concerned?  Curious?  My mental thesaurus is currently inoperable – which is not an unusual occurance these days. 

And the duality comes into sharp focus – part of me saying “it will be good – this finding out – because it will help you get better and do more” and part of me saying “it doesn’t matter either way – what is, is, and it will only get worse from here and why are you even trying?”

Why indeed.

Wish List

Sometimes I wish I could be more stable, not so over-committed all the time.  I wish I could have a pet maybe.  A dog that would like to run with me and that didn’t bark at everything that moved.  Or maybe a cat – not one that threw down the claws whenever it got tired of attention, but that would simply walk away.

Or maybe I should get another fish.  And not kill it this time.

I had a conversation with a fellow at the gym today.  It is part of my new personality – the personality that is far more gregarious and friendly and talkative than I’ve ever been.  This personality isn’t that new, I guess.  Though I know about when it started to appear, and I know what created it.

Trauma can have many diverse consequences.  Not all of them are bad.

So we were talking about life while throwing down some treadmill miles (note to self, put suggestion in box at gym to get treadmills fixed) and the conversation turned somehow to lifestyles.  He has a dog and a girlfriend and wants to buy a house and settle down and I can respect that.  I have a job and school and a severe exercise addiction and more hobbies than are humanly possible to support.  We were comparing schedules and he said, somewhat out of the blue, “you’re single, aren’t you.”  And I responded in the affirmative.  “Yeah,” he responded, “that’s the only way you could do what you do.”  Which both confirmed and denied my general hypothesis – which is that Yes, being single makes it possible for me to throw myself into all these different ventures so completely, but that No, it would be easier if I had some sort of support structure, but that Yes, if I did, I would have to compromise on some of my extra curricular activities, but that No, if I had a partner I wouldn’t mind trading some of my abundance of alone time with some together time.

He was right, though.  I do what I do because I do not have children or pets or a lover demanding my time or my energy.  And by the time I have accomplished enough of my life goals to be able to think about releasing some of the chokehold I have on my time, I’ll be too old for the first, too urban for the second, and too jaded for the third.  That is not a complaint.  It is a life choice.  I’m at the point in my life where each choice is accompanied by the audible closing of doors as alternatives are permanently locked off.  I try to be careful about my choices, but my personality doesn’t exactly lend itself to a lot of careful consideration of all options and consequences.  I’m far too sink or swim for my own good.

So yesterday I had my first speech therapy session for the car accident I had four years ago.  Half way through the session I knew that it was something I should have done right after the accident.  It made me a little ill to consider the three years after the accident during which I completely dismantled my life, and to realize that more of that was probably due to the brain injury than I had ever considered.  It was enlightening, and is yet another testament to just how destructive our current health care situation in this nation really is.  If I’d been able to afford treatment back then, I know I would have taken it.  It would have helped.  If only it taught me that I can no longer rely on my memory, it would have helped.  Instead I had to learn the hard way – curse you the jury duty I’ve postponed four times because I keep forgetting to show up!

The session was revealing in several ways.  First, I realized that I did not fully appreciate the complete range of my intellect before the accident.  I was so plagued with self doubt and low self esteem that I did not know how to make best use of what I had.  Second I realized that I’ve developed several handy dandy compensation tricks to make up for some of the parts that no longer work right.  For instance, I use my natural tendency toward pattern recognition and rhythm and tone to recall specific information – so that it isn’t the item itself I’m recalling, but the sound of the word, the pace in which it was said, the pronunciation of the letters.  The meaning becomes secondary to the sound.  It is almost exactly the same as my approach to music.  The flaw is the same too – in that I can’t recall more than a few measures at a time.  So if the music continues, or the sentence or the story continues, I remember the end or the chorus, but I forget the first verses.  Sometimes I can remember the gist.  Often I can only remember details when specifically asked.

I did a test during the session that required me to provide opposites to the words that the therapist was saying – they were all basic words, common ideas that have obvious opposites.  And for the first part of the test I was quick and agile with my answers.  But as it wore on, I was increasingly unable to respond quickly.  I got slower and slower and found myself searching for words that I knew I know but that I simply couldn’t access.  It is the same thing that happens to me in my academic writing.  It is the same thing that a dose of adderall or ritalin cures – albeit temporarily.  That wall is everywhere.  It happens when I can’t remember the first part of a long sentence.  It happens when I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to do.  It happens standing in the grocery aisle, the post office, the bank, at the stoplight and the crosswalk.  It happens standing in the hallway of my house, as I’m standing at the door before going to work, in the kitchen with the knife in my hand.  It happens everywhere, and anywhere.  It happens all the time.  And at that session, the therapist made it happen on purpose.  It was such a relief to know that it wasn’t just me being stupid – that it is the result of something specific.  Now I know.  Now I can work on improving it.

So many of the people who have met me only after the accident do not really understand my complaint.  Their perception of me is in the present and they cannot know how difficult it is – how frustrating to remember things being different, remembering a time that I could read with focus for hours, that I could write without fighting for words.  They see someone who does well enough.  I see someone who used to do much better with much less effort.   It is disconcerting – at the best of times.

I’ll probably get another two or three speech therapy sessions before my insurance is kaput.  My goal is to learn how to leap the wall – to break through the blank spots, to jump start my cognitive battery when it stalls in the middle of a sentence.  I’m working on accepting that I can no longer do things the way I used to – that my brain functions differently now.  For the last four years I’ve simply been reacting – trying to keep up, never in a place where I could take positive and initiative action for myself.  I need to learn new tricks.

Fortunately, this dog ain’t quite that old yet.