But seriously.  I am procrastinating writing a up a case presentation for school because… here I make a confession… my work is currently so poor that watching the tapes of it actually causes my heart to stop beating.  (One cannot write up one’s session, including transcript, if one does not watch the fucking tape.  Obviously.)  It’s true.  I actually die from watching my work.  Die to death.

And can I also say this: it is unspeakably frustrating to know, let’s say, fifty units of knowledge about one’s field, but be only able to whip out and apply four when in front of an actual client.  I have this rather large gap between what I know and what I can do.  It makes me want to, I don’t know, fling myself off the balcony.  Or eat a steak.  Perhaps both?  “Oh my, this is delicious!” Splat!

So… instead of working on this write up, which will not write itself, ha ha, I am reading archives of a blog I like.  And contemplating a tub.  Husband has taken to tubbing with me, which is lovely, but does make it impossible to read.  Not only is it a little crowded in the tub now, but it is awfully distracting to have that cute bottom snuggled up right there (don’t judge, we’re married!).  So I have to have extra tubs, solo, to get in my quota of tub reading.

And to put off this work I should be doing.

Tonight was Husband’s poker night, playing in a tournament at a friend’s house.  I elected to stay home and read on the couch, which somehow turned into cleaning the bathrooms and the kitchen as well as reading on the couch - more productive but surely a waste of a quiet evening home alone?

In any case, I noticed a little while ago that it was getting later than is usual for Husband’s return, and in one of those otherwise unprompted instances of paranoia, I suddenly started to worry that something had happened to him.  Does this ever happen to you?  You become convinced, without any evidence, that your loved one has had some terrible fate befall them?  Of course I decided to just call him and check - and even as I reached for the phone I ran through in my mind what it could mean if he didn’t answer: car accident, mugging at the Skytrain gone wrong, etc.  And then I’d be widowed and miserable, consigned to a life of loneliness, doomed to never meet another partner who could enrich my life as Husband does and forever bitter about his amazing potential snuffed out too early.

It all sounds very silly now but I tell you, at the time, it was very compelling.  I could actually feel my heart rate increase!  (Seriously, does this happen to you or am I in need of therapy?)

But he did answer when I called, and he is thrilled because he won the game tonight, and everything is fine.

So I just got back from moving my little brother to university.  The trip was exhausting, not only because my little brother is going away, but because my dad was in pain and tired and that turns him into crabdad.  Crabdad is unable to see the upside of anything, particularly my brother’s decisions to forget some necessary paperwork and failure to scout out the campus in advance so we’d know where we were going.  Among other things.  The less said about this trip the better.

The other thing I thought I’d mention is a great little talk I saw on Edge today.  (I’m sorry, the link leads only to the introduction.  You have to scroll down past another little article to get to the actual video of his talk.  Sorry.  Edge has weird navigation.)  The speaker is a professer called Clay Shirkey, and he talks about how people like to produce and share in addition to merely consume, using Wikipedia and television watching as examples.  It’s really interesting for many reasons, but the one that stood out for me was the shocking, enormous volume of hours people waste watching TV every year.

I think TV is an enormous waste of time, 99% of the time.  Of course I find paying to be pandered to with advertisements unpalatable.  (Really television networks are selling audiences to advertisers, not shows to audiences.  The shows are merely hooks.)  Most shows are crap anyway, even so-called news or educational material.  There is almost nothing on TV you couldn’t learn better with the internet or a library card.  Or a phone and a bus pass if you’re gutsy enough to go meet someone who knows about the field you’re interested in.  And entertainment shows are worse - if aliens come to earth with a cosmic death ray and use TV programs as the criteria by which to judge our societies, we’d have no grounds for complaint if they blast us to mist.  There’s no way around it - most shows are mind bogglingly stupid.

But whatever, sometimes people just want to veg out or be mindlessly entertained, and I guess that’s okay.  I do that too.  What gets me is the amount.  Watching TV all night is such a disservice to yourself!  Watching TV all night, every night, and on weekends?  My god!  Think of all the things we could accomplish as a race if we didn’t spend sixty hours a week in front of the tube or using the computer as a TV analogue.  If we tried to learn, or do projects, or spend time with other humans in collective endeavours. Or if we relaxed by taking a walk with a friend?

I mean, what is your life for if you spend half if it in a state of passive reception for American Idol and its spiritual siblings?  Why are you here?  What will be your legacy to humanity? “Here Lies Bill: He Sure Liked CSI.”  Even if you are a talentless nobody who will never create beautiful music or art or cure cancer or anything of lage scale value, isn’t it better for you to engage with your life than drool onto the couch cushions every night?  Great societal outcomes are great, sure, but on the intrapersonal scale it’s your effort to be and to engage that engenders personal greatness.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be written about in history books.  Lord knows no one would ever buy a painting I made.  But it’s really important to me to live my life in an active way.  That precludes spending five hours a night watching TV.  And that’s okay!  Crowding out TV to read and quilt and spend time talking with my husband is exactly the point!  (If you find this paragraph interesting, this is a neat book to start thinking more about related issues.)

Anyway.  It would certainly be a massive improvement if we all worked on projects like Wikipedia rather than spent all night watching TV.

And that’s what I think about that.

Yesterday was one of those complicated, sad, difficult days that I can’t talk about here.  The only thing good that came of it was the feeling of connection to Husband, who as it turns out can crack me up even when I’m in distress and getting sick *and* hungry all at the same time.  I can’t say enough about how much my quality of life and happiness are increased by his presence.

Side note: we tried to go out for dinner last night, and had our first total veg flop.  We went to Nick’s Spaghetti House, which I fond memories of, but it turns out there is not a single vegeterian option on the menu!  All the pastas are meat sauced.  It was very hard to leave the delicious smelling restaurant in search of something else.  Of course the dinner we ended up having was a disappointment.

Today I might post a recipe since I’m going to be making one of my favourite soups of all time (fennel and white bean), but first I have to whip myself into a cooking frenzy because I am actually sick and my energy is poo poo.  If I end up reading on the couch all day, I guess I could post pictures of that instead.

Today is shaping up to be a great day.  It’s sunny, my house is in great shape (the office is clean!), and as a result I am filled with energy for doing projects and making stuff.  I have a bunch of quilt squares that I think I’ll dig in to today - I’m making a very simple quilt top for a couch blanket.  I’ll watch downloaded TV programs or listen to podcasts and just putter around.  Husband got called in to work, which generally means he’s going to be gone all day, so it’s going to be just me today.

And I was thinking, you know what would be good?  It would be good if I had someone who would just come over and hang out.  Like we used to do in high school, where you didn’t need a plan or a destination or even an activity to visit.  You just came over, and we put on Much Music, and we loafed around drinking Slurpees and talking about boys.  Now that I am an adult, it seems like no one does that any more.  And it’s a shame, because today would be the perfect day for companionable loafing.

We could even talk about boys.

I’ve been thinking in the last two days quite a bit about negativity, mine, and how I’m not liking it very much.  I see it here a lot, because somehow writing blog posts distills all of my negative feelings into these posts that, after I write them, I am sometimes surprised at how angry I sound.  I don’t feel like an angry person.  But the proof is right here - post after post.

Sometimes I feel more a slave to the post than the post a slave to my reality - I think I’ve felt an expectation to be (or at least try to be) witty, and somehow I got the idea that witty is all about sarcasm and snark.  I still enjoy reading other people’s snark… but writing my own is beginning to exact a toll.  You know what they say about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.  This blog is kind of a downer.

So, I don’t know that I want to keep going in this vein.  It’s kind of a shame, because let’s face it, vitriol is much more entertaining than virtue.  But let’s also face it, I have a tiny readership, and even if I alienate every one of you, that doesn’t represent much of a loss (In numbers, people… your value is beyond measure and not to be trifled with.).

This is the thing: my life has a lot that is good in it.  More than good, actually, and also more than a lot.  I wonder what would happen if I stopped spending so much time each day really focusing in on what bothers me (which is what blog writing almost always is for me), and spent that time instead on what makes me happy, or makes others happy.  It’s not like irritation is a precious resource which must be carefully stewarded lest world stores of it become depleted.

It’s getting on to bed time and I am always most thoughtful at this time, and most serious, so maybe I’ll be back to feeling cheerfully ranty when I get up tomorrow morning… but I don’t know, maybe I really won’t.

And then I have to figure out what to do here.  Anybody got any ideas?

Today I did a little work on a presentation, and then I sat propped up with pillows in bed and read my book all day.  Husband and I went for sushi dinner, then we came home and tried to watch a movie with our new ethernet setup, but alas it didn’t work.  The streaming or whatever was chopping, cut out, and finally just quit entirely.  I’m a bit disappointed but after such a lovely, calm day, nothing can get under my skin.

I needed to take today and just relax, and that’s what I did.  I feel much more centred and calm.  I’ll see my doctor on Friday and until then, plan to keep taking it easy.  Maybe I’ll even get my take home final done by the weekend.

Seriously.  I am a frazzled mess.  Who the fuck calls in sick on the day when my Entire Fucking Life Forever And Ever is being decided?  Or rather, announced.  Shit.  You know what I mean.

Here are things I am good at coping with:

-A lack of clean socks.  Steal some of Husband’s.

-No food in the house.  Go to Subway.

-It’s too cold out.  Get in the tub.

-I am trapped in a leg hold trap in the forest.  Chew off own leg and hop back to town.

Here are things I absolutely cannot cope with:

-FURTHER DELAYS IN FINDING OUT WHAT MY DIAGNOSIS IS.

I am going batshit crazy sitting around the house all day, but also recognize I haven’t the brain capacity to successfully tie my own shoes nevermind venture forth into the world in search of distraction.  If you were here, you might be amused by the hummingbird-like manner in which I have been starting, losing track of, and abandoning activities all day long.  I waffle between irritation, frustration, weepiness, listlessness, and a urge to just get it all over with the jump off the fucking patio.  So far I have failed to read, fold laundry, do dishes, nap, eat, and even watch TV.  You know you are in a hard way when you can’t even achieve TV watching.

Honestly.  I am sure I am making a much bigger deal out of this than is strictly required - after all, as previously discussed, I’m sure I haven’t got any tumours or cancers or other actually serious problems.  In fact I was just telling Husband, over crepes which were lovingly hand warmed by our slaves who then fed us morsels with their pristine fingertips, how nice it is to live in utter luxury as we do.  In between attending gala balls and deciding which colour of marble to install in our eleven bathrooms we really aren’t faced with much in the way of hardship.  Yet I suppose all of us are entitled to the occasional freak out.  Today is my turn.

My god, I’m not even making sense any more.  Someone kill me.

I have allergies, and this morning I woke up with Terrible, Awful sinus pressure.  I just want to say that it is incredibly, deeply unfair to have to suffer through months of headaches and sinus pain and itchy eyes just because there happen to be trees on the planet.  I mean, come on!  It’s actually sort of pathetic - hay fever, I mean. You’d think my body could come up with something better to do to me.

Oh wait, it did.  This Tuesday I go for the results of months of testing (which culminated in the never-to-be-forgotten three hour MRI) to see what my pesky nerves are getting up to.  However, I am pretty sure they’re going to tell me they don’t know.  The reason I think this is that my care has been handed back from the neurologist to my GP.  If you have something serious like MS or whatever, the neurologist keeps you.

Also, when I finally broke down and called the neurology clinic on Monday to see when my results would be available, it became clear that they’ve been available for a while, but no one bothered to call me.  So it can’t be anything too serious.  Right?  They call you if you have a brain tumour.  I’m sure they would call if my brains were about to leak out of my ears or something.

So what I expect to hear is this: “We have no idea what is wrong with you.  Your body is a special snowflake whose mysteries we cannot hope to unravel.  In the meanwhile, take these pills when you get an attack.”

Okay.  There was a time when that would have been a disaster.  I really wanted a diagnosis, because the uncertainty was killing me.  I figured if there was a diagnosis, it would mean there were treatments - and, it would mean I’m not just crazy and somehow doing this to myself.

Now I realize that a diagnosis actually isn’t good at all, because the kicker of neurological diseases is almost all of them can’t be fixed.  And, if I have something significant enough to have been defined in the medical literature as A Disease, it’s probably pretty bad, right?  So I don’t want a diagnosis now.  I’ve learned more about this stuff and apparently it’s not uncommon for nervy stuff to stay mysterious in origin, it probably doesn’t mean I am crazy, and even without a formal diagnosis, there are lots of different medications to try to treat the symptoms.

So I’m all ready for the no-diagnosis diagnosis.  I’m a little nervous about the medication because a doctor I know figures there’s one certain pill I have a very good chance of being prescribed, and one of its side effects is “cognitive blunting.”  I asked, “So, like, I have a little trouble focusing or something?  I forget where I left my keys, that kind of thing?”  And he said, “No, like you can’t count backwards from ten.”

And though he went on to explain this particular side effect is rare and only happens in chronic users, I will be very suspicious of that med if I get it.  Quick - would you rather be in pain or stupid?  It’s actually a pretty tough call!  The pain is, no question, terrible.  But so would being stupid, ya know?  I don’t know.  Obviously I have been prescribed nothing yet and know nothing yet, I’m just ruminating over here.  As you might guess I’m pretty nervous about this appointment on Tuesday.

So until then I will stuff my traitorous body with antihistamines and try to keep my imagination reined in.

I have a friend who is dealing with a major crisis in her life.  And it is turning her into a jerk.  A jerk whose calls I am no longer taking.  I do not know how to navigate this problem.

The last few times we’ve talked the conversation has turned into a Blogosaurus-bashing event.  She said some things that really aren’t acceptable (bashing me and bashing Husband).  She also said some things that really weren’t fair either (using private and painful things I’d told her in confidence as ammo in the bashing).  And I was totally surprised and taken aback.  She’s gone way over the line of Things You Are Allowed to Say to Your Friends.

But I didn’t say anything to her about this because really, she has huge shit going on right now.  Her shit makes my shit look like no shit at all.  I can’t justify adding to her pile of shit by complaining to her about my shit.  Clearly she it at maximum overload, totally stressed out, totally afraid, and totally unable to maintain normal and healthy interpersonal relationships.  Crisis is not bringing out the best in her.  I feel guilty for being upset when she has things to much worse.

But the truth is, I can’t let it go.  I would like to be the sort of person who is so understanding and resilient that her bad behaviour just rolls off me, and I forbear with saint-like understanding and caring.  I would like to really not be bothered, to really be a good support to her.  But I am discovering something somewhat unpleasant about myself, which is that I am not nearly that good at being a friend to someone in crisis.  I think I had this fantasy of myself as her supportive rock, the one she could count on no matter what.  Well ha ha, turns out she can only count on me until she starts pissing me off, at which point I start screening her calls.  Can you smell the guilt.

Though here’s something else: just because she has it bad doesn’t give her permission to make my life miserable, especially when I have been trying to help.

So I have no idea what to do next.  I know she’s in bad enough shape that there’s nothing to be gained by confronting her on this issue.  She’s not open to feedback right now.  But I’m not open to being shat on by her any more either.  Another niggling problem is that, as I learn more about her through this process, I am seeing a lot of things I really don’t like in her.  I’m no longer sure how committed I am to maintaining this friendship at all.

What a mess.