My daily calorie allowance is roughly equal to one of the following:
- 9 bowls of Rice Chex with milk
- 3 big chef salads
- 5 1/2 whey protein milkshakes
- 18 cups of coffee with 2T evap milk & 1/2t sugar
I realized this morning with delight that my brain is grinding around math problems all by itself for entertainment while I do laundry and dishes. I have been using a calculator for the simplest math since 2004, often getting even that wrong because I have so many problems transferring a memory of a number through my fingers to tech and then operating that tech properly enough to execute a correctly structured math sentence. (A lowly calculator is 'tech', lol. I know, that's funny, right? It's like holding part of a robot's dissected brain in my hand, ok now I'm grossing myself out.)
THAT is how hard the last ten years have been.
I was sharing a few excited thoughts with Scott a few days ago and said, "Not to sound arrogant or like I'm bragging" and he cut in with "but you do", and I laughed and said yeah, I do...
No one else brags for me while I spend my days alone for hours and hours amusing myself while he's at work. I rarely talk on the phone, I barely text my own kids, most of my social interaction lies between link tweeting to my blogs and yapping on twitter, which is mostly retweeting and not really interacting. Scott spends his whole day around noisy machinery and nasty ink fumes, tolerating a work crew with different thermostat and radio preferences than he has, and all he wants when he gets home is a quiet couple of hours with the TV and the computer. He would never know what is in my head if I didn't tell him, so I tell him. It's easy for him to forget that only a couple of years ago I couldn't even double a recipe, that 3 years ago I couldn't read more than a paragraph at a time, that 4 years ago I hadn't been able to watch TV for a long time. It is a really big deal that I'm constructing lots of sentences now, and yes, it's a very big deal to me that people read them. Especially given that I have legal cognitive disability.
Loseit has been a lot of drudgery for me. True, it's easy to log on and click my weight every day (even though it never changes) so that I can conquer a daily login challenge. True, it's kind of fun fiddling with new charts. True, it's been really good to point out my eating flaws and keeping me on track. But it's work. Like anything else new that must be learned, it's like starting a workout program when all you feel like doing is flopping on the couch. Except it's a brain workout. I didn't realize that as I was facepalming my way around all that data entry that I was rebuilding some more of my brain.
Yesterday a very kind person on twitter (who is, incidentally, an icon in some fandom circles) let me know that a wordpress link I tweeted was failing to load properly through her phone, and she was so patient with me dealing with uber brain fog through a cold and meds that should have knocked me out, finally reaching a point where the only way to fix it was transfer to another blog host, and that included fixing the formatting all over again because the two hosts have such radically different editors. Yes, it was a lot of work. Yes, it was hard dragging my brain through that in those circumstances. Yes, I felt upset and wanted to throw stuff and just walk away. But. I. Fixed. It. And I learned something- because one person confirmed a suspicion I'd been having about a blog code glitch with mobile interface, I was able to test it several different ways and get real feedback and then at least create a workaround, and I felt every minute I spent on that was worth it because that post was important. She probably saved countless lurkers with similar tech interface the same problem by speaking up and being so patient.
Because of the extra effort I went to, one of my research tweet links was picked up for publication by Android. And because I was dragging through all that and trying to joke about being sick, I got a fun compliment from a Cracked.com contributor, among other things.
Can I brag now? It doesn't seem like much, but those two people made my day because they noticed me and they were kind to me. In a world where bloggers and authors fight to get noticed, all I had to do was be myself, and coming from deep in a cave where I interact only by thought transmission, I really appreciated that.
My brain is pudding this morning. Scott thinks he's a day ahead of me with this virus. I have 24 hours to finish getting ready for burrito to come over and decorate a Christmas tree. I was up early last couple of mornings for the Orion launch, so this is my work music because it's stuck in my head now. I first saw this in Houston in the cafeteria at Johnson Space Center. I think it's cool.
