Harnessing the healing power of snark
Regarding my obsession love affair with the number 8, a friend called me yesterday and said, “I just read your latest blog post right before I called you, and now I’m sorry that I didn’t have time to arrange my thoughts into groups of 8 syllables for you.”
Which of course, made me laugh.
However, knowing that, had she had the time, she actually would have done that for me, just to make me laugh?
Priceless.
Image courtesy of Free Foto.
I think my past week can be summed up pretty well in the following two vignettes.
1. I have had my CPAP machine for almost a year now, and I am STILL excited every day about the fact that I can now actually sleep through the night without multiple episodes of near-suffocation.
Sadly, my poor little machine started having trouble over Christmas, and ever since it has been making noises not unlike those of a water buffalo attempting to squeeze itself into an extra-small bikini.
In what I can only describe as the cruelest of ironies, I was once again kicked out of our bedroom by my husband, this time due to the horrendous noises made by the machine I specifically got in order to stop being kicked out of the bedroom because of my snoring.
2. Ever since last Sunday night I have had a mysterious, and fairly excruciating, pain in my right side. I kept hoping that it would eventually go away, but of course it didn’t, and by the time I finally decided to get some help it was Thursday night. And my doctor doesn’t work on Fridays.
So I went to the urgent care center by my house, if only to be reassured that I was not seconds away from dying due to Spontaneous Explosion Of Your Internal Organs Syndrome.
After a thorough questioning regarding my symptoms the doctor moved on to the physical examination, tapping and poking away to see exactly where I hurt. Then she checked to see whether or not I was bloated.
“Oh my god, you’re like a drum!” she exclaimed. “I could play music on you!”
And then, for just a little bit-she did.
(So happily (not to mention embarrassingly), the pain turned out to be nothing that approximately 75,000 Gas-X dissolvable strips and a couple of bottles of Mylanta couldn’t help.)
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Over the past couple of months, we here in this little piece of Georgia have been experiencing what I can only describe as a bizarre attempt at a coup d’etat. I could totally understand someone attempting to grab power if the end result involved something big, like, say, uncovering buried pirate treasure, or, I don’t know, the chance to become the despotic ruler of your own entire nation. But no, this power struggle-which has now escalated to the level of lawyers, and judges, and mass mailings of PR “spin”-is all about our garbage collection. People are fighting to the death over who has the right to pick up our trash.
I’m not clear on all the details (which probably means that I’m flunking conscious citizenship), but as far as I can tell from my exhaustive reading of 3 whole paragraphs on the Internet, one group of people apparently believed that they had the right to entertain bidding for new contracts, and then awarded a contract to a second group, but then a third group sought a legal injunction on the grounds of, who exactly did that first group think they were, foolishly believing they had the right to exercise control over our solid waste disposal, and now we, the citizens, are very confused. And also, having to spend WAY more time thinking about garbage than we would really like.
All we here in the Ryan household know is that we were happily discarding away, trusting in the services of the company who has faithfully removed our trash every week for the past nine-and-a-half years, when suddenly we received a letter informing us that this service would now be performed by someone entirely new. Someone we hadn’t chosen. Someone who hadn’t consulted with us before making this decision. And, by the way, could we please send them money RIGHT NOW.
[Read more…] about Revolutions: They’re Not All They’re Cracked Up To Be
This is a cool exercise that my awesome friend and coach, Lynne taught me. We call it, “Both/And”.
Today…
-The car broke down because I forgot to get gas, AND a wonderful Good Samaritan stopped, help me get the car out of traffic, and brought me back some gas.
-I have had a migraine off and on for the past five days, AND today the sun returned.
-I have been having a flare-up of my fibro pain, AND I found out my CPAP machine is still under warranty, so they will fix the motor and give me a temporary replacement.
-I am really, really tired, AND my husband bought me DVDs of “Top Gear” for Christmas, so I can watch Jeremy, Richard and James make asses out of themselves to my heart’s content.
-I have been feeling some sort of pain for many days in a row now, AND the word “ass” still makes me laugh.
-The cats now spend all their time harassing me for canned cat food, AND my husband is totally fine with being the one to shove Bailey’s thyroid medicine down her throat twice a day.
-I have felt like breaking up with my blog again, AND I have gotten a number of really nice comments from readers about how they are enjoying it.
Image courtesy of Free Foto.
I really, really hate this time of year.
Specifically, I detest December 26 through the Monday in January when everyone goes back to work and school. Just like agoraphobics break down in the face of wide, open spaces, I am paralyzed with anxiety when I am forced to endure great swaths of unscheduled, unstructured time.
I found something on Wikipedia that makes a lot of sense to me. When talking about the cause of agoraphobia it says, “Research has uncovered a linkage between agoraphobia and difficulties with spatial orientation.[8] [9]Normal individuals are able to maintain balance by combining information from their vestibular system, their visual system and their proprioceptive sense. A disproportionate number of agoraphobics have weak vestibular function and consequently rely more on visual or tactile signals. They may become disoriented when visual cues are sparse as in wide open spaces or overwhelming as in crowds. Likewise, they may be confused by sloping or irregular surfaces.[10] Compared to controls, in virtual reality studies, agoraphobics on average show impaired processing of changing audiovisual data. [11]” (emphasis mine).
I think that is what happens to me when not just I, but the whole world around me, is taken out of our everyday routine for this extended period of time. No one is where I expect them to be. No one is doing what I expect them to be doing, when I expect them to be doing it. And I am unable to get in my necessary 150 hours of solitude per day that then allow me to briefly interact with other living beings without having a nervous breakdown.
Added to these difficulties is that fact that one symptom of fibromyalgia is that it amplifies all sensations, to the point where literally it can be painful to have air touching your skin. Speaking for myself, I can be in a situation that most people wouldn’t think twice about, say, having dinner at someone’s house, and suddenly I will be overwhelmed with sensory input-the sound of people’s voices, the smell of the cleaning products the host used in the dining room, the way the overhead light shines off the table, the odor of dinner cooking-and my system will just get completely overwhelmed, be unable to process all of this sensory information, and just crash-into migraines, anxiety attacks, severe digestive problems-anything that will allow me to go off by myself, into the quiet and the dark, and completely withdraw into myself until my system can rebalance itself.
I feel like such a baby, and like such a retard. Like, “Oh no, I’m sorry, but we can’t come over to your awesome New Year’s Eve party because Jenny is currently unable to tolerate sound.” I hate that my sensitivities sometimes limit what my husband does. I hate that I really do have so many special needs. It makes me feel like some bitchy, selfish prima donna who will only condescend to eat green MnM’s which are fed to her one by one by a pair of nubile servant boys while sitting on a gilded throne and being fanned with the feathers of specially-raised peacocks.
It also doesn’t help that the weather seems to be experiencing a severe bout of Alzheimer’s and has confused Atlanta with Seattle, meaning that we’ve had a total of approximately 17 seconds of sun over the past six weeks.
My husband, on the other hand, loves this time of the year-LOVES IT! I am completely unable to comprehend how he could possibly feel that way. Not even under the influence of copious amounts of mind-altering, highly narcotic substances would that even begin to make sense to me. Because for one thing, he is pretty much forced to spend this time with me when, to put it kindly, I am not exactly at my best.
When I asked him yesterday how he was enjoying his vacation he said that he was having a great time, but he felt that I had been “brooding around the house.”
I was all, “Yeah. You’re right. I have been. And?”
And…he decided that there would be significantly less hostility for him to deal with if he went back to fighting the crazed zombies on Resident Evil 4.
So basically, between the horrible grey limbo of the weather, and the horrible grey limbo of this “in-between” time, and the absence of my normal everyday routine, and all the stories/expectations out there which tell me that I should be LOVING this time even though it makes me want to curl up into a little ball and weep, and everything involved with the holidays, and having been around my husband pretty much non-stop for over two weeks now, the strain of being able to pretend that I am someone able to keep my shit together is really taking its toll.
Maybe I am a horribly selfish person, a burden on the lives of those around me.
Or maybe, just maybe, I am someone with a pretty severe anxiety disorder who’s doing the best she can during a really challenging time.
(Composed in the style of series such as Encyclopedia Brown, Junie B. Jones, Captain Underpants, and The Magic Tree House)
Volume One: Tigger And The Inappropriate Pee
Volume Two: The Lizard Emergency
Volume Three: The Coriander Episode
Volume Four: Jenny Is A Big Fat Grammar Bully
Volume Five: The Scary Sounds In The Hallway
Volume Six: Oh No, Bailey, What Did You Do?!
Volume Seven: The Unfortunate Verb Mishap
Volume Eight: Tigger And Pip Learn To Share
Volumes Nine to INFINITY: Jenny Goes To The Doctor
Found out that the Christmas bonus will be more than we thought, which is nice, because now we can afford to buy a new mattress. We’ve apparently done something to anger our current mattress, as it now spends all its time attempting to maim us with its strategically placed Springs Of Death.
**
Had to confess to my husband that I’ve broken one of our agreed-upon “Fashion Don’t”s, and admit to wearing white socks and Birkenstocks out in public, where I can be seen by other humans. I’m pretty sure this means I’ve lost all moral authority whereby I can judge the people who wear those horrible plastic clogs.
**
Edited to add: Unfortunately, my husband and I can no longer guarantee the safety of any cheese that enters our home. It’s as if cheese, in all its forms, appears on some sort of Feline Terrorist Watch List, and all the cats have been tasked with the mission to Seek and Destroy.
