Februarys are typically the slowest media month for me. Wait- Februa?
This month turned out to be my fifth highest out of the 30 months I've blogged here.
I'm unplugged during a thunderstorm and doing this from my phone with no apps, lol. Anyway, I don't have a clue and since I'm barely on the medias lately I don't want anyone thinking I'm blowing them off when I should be saying THANK YOU.
That's how I'm looking at my phone right now because this editor is insanely funky on my phone. I'm sure the communication gap between cave painting and crop circles is graciously filled in with blogger editing.
Ok, first of all, if anyone is trying to reach me at my JanikaBanks email, it just hit me I haven't checked it since probably before Christmas. I have no inclination to run over there and look, either, so you're kinda stuck in pending.
I should probably power point the rest.
π Got an A++ from my sleep doctor. They got the readings off my machine, which I'm finding out is like the Mercedes of CPAP machines. I have complications they'll be monitoring, including central sleep apnea from brain malfunction (not the same thing as obstructive, which in my case is fairly mild, although I'm sure @bonenado would beg to differ) which I'm pretty sure goes back to the wreck and/or viral illness complications or something (I've been really sick a few times with cognitive consequences) and probably explains why I'm so paranoid about both meds and sleeping since meds increase apneas and insomnia keeps a person breathing. CPAP doesn't directly help central apnea, so the hope is that a consistently better OSAT over time will help with continued nerve healing, and we all know the brain is nerve central.
π’ Assessing back into physical therapy was difficult (I cried a bit, I'm such a baby now), but after that stupid medication fail, the only things left now are cortisone shots and surgeries, so I'm all over upper core compliance.
π Naturally, I treated myself to the blu ray Doctor Strange release today, and I was going to wait on @bonenado for the first watch, but after losing a knockback 2 smite 5 diamond sword and an unbreaking 2 efficiency 3 pickaxe in something as stupid as a lava spill, I decided I needed a consolation viewing since my morning started off before dawn in physical therapy and then I did some heavy grocery shopping under impending threat of stormy doom. Basically, it's just a long drive into Springfield and I'm very tired already, and dang it, I was strong and didn't buy any ice cream.
π I did buy a can ofBush's grillin beans, though. I love that new commercial. Oh, knock me out, they just loaded it only a few minutes ago and I was the 6th view, that rocks. Check it, I got a screen shot. Click it to go see it.
π Bing (:edit: Correction, it's Edge browser and Bing search engine, per "Microsoft pitches Edge on Bing to deflect deserters") still has Chrome under siege and is trying even harder to convince me to switch. I'd do it in a heartbeat if it actually loaded faster, but it's like an AOL/Facebook thing, just really bossy, as per the whole Microsoft penchant to take the internet back by owning the tools. Which I respect, by the way. I keep saying I can't wait until all the tech is interfaced well and we can stop this having a jillion accounts and passwords thing. Just send me a note when it's ready and the bugs are worked out.
Sometimes it takes me years to put a phrase together. This one is suddenly popping up from years ago when coffee enemas were suddenly all the thing. As a super spoonie, my point of view is being a barium enema in a world full of coffee enemas.
No idea why in the world that popped into my head *now*, but I do remember the day I first heard about coffee enemas. I'd just been through one of my most horrible ER visits ever because the pain was so bad that I couldn't stop crying out like you sometimes hear in a nursing home, and even now I'm nowhere near nursing home age.
The pain was bone pain. There's no way to medicate for bone pain except with heavy narcotics, and they have to be very cautious with those during some kinds of testing. The test itself was also one of the most painful I'd ever been through, barring spinal taps. If you've never had a spinal tap (sans radiology or numbing meds, and throw in a student) and you think kidney stones suck, you have a real surprise coming.
Anyway, I went in for one symptom and wound up with a very different one springing up from simply lying in one position too long on a very uncomfortable table (6 hours is way too long when bone pain says howdy), and I was having to walk nearly naked in a little gown to a public bathroom after a barium enema and it was all I could do to hug the wall and walk, and how I even made it to the bathroom like that is beyond me.
I know this is gross content, but since my childhood got a jump start with a barium enema and one of my worst pain memories as an adult is tied to one, it really surprised me to see a whole health movement joyfully jump on coffee enemas. Like, is your life not miserable enough that you need to do something weird to yourself?
There are two kinds of existence in this world- inflicted and inflicting. You are either inflicted and miserable, or you are inflicting and creating misery. You might even be the sort that mobius strips that back into inflicting misery that you create back onto yourself. There are all kinds of self harm.
Some people are born to be miserable. They have genetic variants that assure this. They live in environments or families that support this. They never asked for it, and they would do nearly anything to escape it if they could. For some people, these are lifelong and what I call 'slow terminals'. They fight to live even in horrible pain.
Some people are born feeling fairly decent and run around doing and living and being without a thought until something in their world comes crashing down. They have good genetics and live in homes where they at least feel safe and live in environments that aren't constantly threatening their health and safety in some way. They didn't ask for this, but when they think about it they feel unhappy. They feel emotionally stressed and not good enough and belittled somehow. They sometimes start looking for ways to stress out even more and they call it stress relief. They harm themselves with drugs, starvation, cutting, risk taking, and more. These people seem to miss having physical challenges like survival against the odds thrust upon them, so they create them.
Imagine those two groups of people being able to switch places.
Pulling myself together for March. Extremely surprised I'm still ok on calendar and money sync, and glad because I'm at the top of my spring roller coaster. I launch this week with 4 days out the door for my first big CPAP equipment check, assess back into physical therapy, a chiro visit, and follow up on my med tapering. I just discovered the Mercy 'about' pages. This guy reassembled the Pinky Robot mess into working parts in 2011. I've never looked back. Ok, I look back all the time, but thank goodness it's only looking. I like seeing how many inches I've come, lol. Well, I can measure in yardsticks now, maybe. Some might argue a few miles, actually.
Now that my phone is taking and holding onto charges via laptop and car cables, I'm thinking about reinstalling the pinterest app. We've tried several different ways to move pix off my phone, but it involves the stupidity of opening new accounts with other storage just to transfer to Jawn, so since I already have accounts galore, I'm going with original plan. I'm not going to allow any other apps until that is done and I've wiped pinterest off my phone again because it's such a data hog. I think it thinks I can't live and breathe without it. It occurred to me about a year ago how much pinterest supports digital hoarding, which is psychologically both comforting and a crutch, but how I almost never go back in there to look at what I've already stored. So I started a couple of private boards for family and that's it. I add things to pinterest once in awhile, but the wandering around in there for days is over. That's a land a person can get pretty lost in.
Commitments are tricky online. I've made the commitment to stay public and maintain a fleet of social medias, which is stupidly overwhelming sometimes but I've already got so much set up that I'm going to stubbornly keep going. I've made a commitment to checking Snarkalecs list feeds, so I kind of still feel time synced with a few people that I really like. And I've made a commitment to Mo Creatures, which is turning out to be both very therapeutic art therapy and a fantastic brain synapses builder and exercise program. Aspienado doesn't flit in and out of things very well, so these are hardcore and I don't see that changing. I realized over this last week that my moc family is like my Snarkalecs family, mostly the same people on a nearly daily basis and I'm getting to know them well enough to pick up on some of their personal lives. My Lexx family feels a bit more distant nowadays. I see all the things (eventually), but I don't float in and out of them like I do the others.
I do miss twitter, more than anything else I've wiped off my phone. I'll need it back as soon as I've transferred my pix and vids and wiped those apps back off. I've had people push me into instagram, twitch, and even facebook was ultimately other people pushing in the first place. If I were being really true to myself, I'd be one of those people you never ever see except in very exclusive forums or deep in a game. To be public feels sort of like how orange wedges look after you've torn an orange open and bent it around to make it easier to eat with all the pulp sticking up.
Yowza, just ran into a pdf called The Complete Recreational Drugs Handbook. My search literally was "how orange wedges look after you've torn an orange open and bent it around to make it easier to eat with all the pulp sticking up". I tried the flipping inside out thing, got a bunch of eyelids...
I'm in one of my weird melon collie moods. I'm about to counter that with an extremely obnoxious high energy pinky vid and I'm going to GET TO WORK!
Sometimes I wake up so full of self doubt I can barely think through making breakfast and getting dressed, much less handle whatever else is coming later in the day. It helps to go back and read things like 'I Was Crying All the Time' from 1989.
This isn't about being harsh on Kristy, because I love her. This is about context that helps me understand why my Plan is important. I love that article because for the 'back in the day' level of content, it's actually very good. Mental health was still very young, and diagnostic criteria was still being hotly debated. For it all to sift down to pressure, and missing getting to be a kid... well, that impresses me the most. That is my precedent for what I'm doing now.
My pressure growing up was about being told not to cry after I'd been hit, about having to help kill, dismember, and eat pets I'd raised from babies, about hours of food processing and prep that breaks child labor laws, about not getting the health care or emotional support I needed, about having to learn how to pretend I was ok or be punished for acting out.
I was not ok. I'm not ok now. I've never been ok. But neither have either of my parents. The more I look into what makes us who we are and the societies that weave the fabrics of our lives, the more I see that being broken is partly how most of the human race has survived. We're all broken.
But back to me. If it's this obvious, why is this so important? Because an entire group of people actually wants me and my kind 'wiped out'. Because several other groups of people misunderstand my kind so much that they torture their own children. Because even my own kind are cruel and eat their own.
Never mind that this is all very complicated and layered with decades of socioeconomic history and culture clashes. Never mind that we live in tiny microcosms and misinterpret why people are the way they are. Never mind that we live in an age of me, me, me.
I do mind. I want answers. I want to know why EVERYTHING. I want to understand how and when and where, and I want to tell the story. I spent years getting a sociology degree generously peppered with everything there is to know about human history going back 25,000 years. I mostly wanted to know how in the world my parents got off on turning a blind eye while they tormented me, but I have learned so much along the way that I think I'm nearly able to show how this whole process works in a series of intimate stories shared both subjectively and objectively.
I'm able to do this because I was born especially equipped to solve this problem.
In the meantime, I'm relieved that I have a definition of what normal childhood pressure is supposed to be, because I'm so messed up that I can't even imagine.
One of those nights, thank goodness these have gotten much more rare now. Looking up stuff like cervical spondylosis and fibromyalgia for a sort of brush up. Those are clinical reference pages for doctors, so they get straight to it and help me remember this isn't new stuff, but all familiar old stuff and I'm good at this, so a few minutes of reminder notes and back off to bed. I don't dare go near the patient forums. Too many medicated people locked in their microcosms, too easy getting pulled into their overly detailed yet still very sketchy descriptions. Like the person on oxycontin for what I know now is costochondritis. Are they mad? Deep breathing exercises help my ribcage referral pain more than anything I've ever tried, and I learned that from people with pulmonary challenges. I took oxycontin for 3 days of my life for something else entirely and I will never take that stuff again. If I were the physician and going on the written words, I'd go with a pred burst just to make sure there was no pleuritis going on with the intercostal pain and spend a little time educating with a respirometer. I had a really tough year where the pain just breathing was super sucktastic, and thank God one person in a forum actually went on about how doing these deep breathing exercises actually helped that. I tried it, it *works*. Fibro is a bitch, but oxycontin? Holy cow. And to be begging for help with that in a forum on such a strong med- doctors, *take note*. Geez.
Anyway, if I go in there, I won't be coming back out for 3-4 hours.
Right now, mine is just neck flares, which I'm pretty sure are related to carrying in some very heavy grocery loads a few days ago, like an idiot. I know better. And now it's interrupting sleep and I'm having to move around and change positions more frequently, which helps way more than just about anything. Went ahead and splurged on an anti-inflammatory med half an hour ago, so maybe I'll be going back to sleep soon. Crossing my fingers this next round of upper core strength training I'll be assessing into next week will actually go somewhere this year. My toughest challenge in PT is upper core strength, which consistently super flares me. We diverted into nerve work for a year and half, which has been its own wild challenge but great for pinpointing and fine detailing instructions on how to move, but I need the core strength help before I slide into surgery level options. I'm flirting with 'the good old days' level pain if I don't get on this.
Part of the root of this, in my opinion, was the higher gabapentin dose. Going stoner zombie did absolutely nothing but alleviate and mask actual pain while it allowed me to sit for much longer spells in bad positions, which I'm sure aggravated all my Cs. Pick a number, they're all singing in there.
Yablo says even if this were minecraft we'd be quitting by now because it's sucking to sit here in the middle of the night, pain pill aside, and we're all agreeing, so it's off to bed. An hour of wording in the eyes and out the fingers is plenty. Hold on, Pinky wants a music burst before we go. We're all missing the youtube app on the stripped out phone.
It is really hard capturing in a 3-way so that I'm not reversed
I miss live tweeting. Even if all I was doing was glancing at the phone to check a hashtag feed for the show, I miss you guys throwing thoughts out about what you're watching while I'm watching.
I've lost my place in Real Time. Without apps on my phone, I'm not checking the twitters and my facebook feeds. I'm not seeing up to the second breaking and trending. This is the first time in years I've been this unplugged. Here, go watch this. It's supposed to be private but vimeo is so crap that it's actually searchable. Anyway, Jordan's line "I feel unplugged" is exactly what I'm feeling right now. That is my absolute fave parody skit in all of spacetime.
In that sense, I feel more alone now, but the initial panic I felt without my regular touch bases actually wore off fairly quickly, and as soon as that happened, I was suddenly much more creative and all over accomplishing a series of tasks that add up to bigger things getting done.
I'm not really alone. I still have Jawn, and you guys are a website away while I work. I know all I have to do is reach out. Going appless (app-less? lol that looks funny) stopped a phone crash cold, and now my phone is fine as long as I let it sit there loafing around. I can still text if it comes down to it. And I can always watch the chat scroll up in Mo Creatures, but I mostly just ignore it.
So I'm signed up with an author learning center. I think only other signed in authors with that company can see it, so all you get is a screenshot. And you can see already why I'm such a wreck about typos...
Hopefully I'll pick up some mojo in there to help my anxiety. There are learning courses and forums, I think. We'll see. Tentative hope for a very tentative publishing date (or at least a submission deadline) is sometime this year. After my initial scheduled timeline projection got blown out of the water with 2 pregnant daughers, a surgery, and a major server move (should we even count the big allergy and autoimmune flares and the stupid med roller coasters I went through?), I know better than to just say Yeah, I'll git'r'dun by May...
I've helped turn high traffic retail stores, restaurants, and hotels upside down for inspections and have written over 2M words on blogs by now, and I'm taking forever to get a book out.
It really is anxiety, though. I was very reassured today that pulling back for fixits isn't a problem. It's all malleable when one is paying out up front for the service. You can lol all you want, but if I break even on this, I win bets galore, and if I actually make enough to reinvest and keep going, I'll be getting a lawyer to help me with the SSI lawyers who'll demand years of back pay, because that's how our govt handles disability. They won't just wave and say "Glad we could help while you needed it!" This won't be the first time I've been scraping shelves under threat of garnishment (of what???) and lawsuit.
You guys on both sides- Democrats, Republicans, Obama & Hillary, Trump- it doesn't matter. This is the kind of stuff that happens when you're in abject poverty. I've been there. Our people are not kind to our own. You either get out big or you stay down there. There is no in between, and not one president on either side has EVER solidified debt relief for the disabled. If you owe student loans, there is no forgiveness unless you cooperate with very strict 'guidelines' that boil down to legal loan sharking, and you will own *nothing* the rest of your life. Y'all who fuss this and that over health care and whatever, you have no idea what's really going on under the table in this country until you are hounded every single day of your life for years and years by collection agencies blessed the by the U.S. govt to keep selling your loan debt without ever complying by govt rules for debt relief policies even when you are judged so incompetent that you have a court appointed payee and spend years in physical therapy just to keep moving around your house.
If this actually rolls out, it rolls out big enough to break free, or they will break me, and I'm nearly to my too-exhausted-to-fight-any-more point.
"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great. You have no power over me." A.C.H. Smith
4th day back on original dose and the mad cravings finally stopped, my body suddenly relinquished one of those pounds, I wrote a bunch of words, and I slept.
Ok ok, for those of you who don't know how (or think you don't have time) to copy-paste stuff over to a translator page (which I do fairly often, being an international fan), that says "Thank you so much to my favorite doctor taking my case back into his own hands. He was a bit shocked at my med reaction over the last month and is going to monitor me more closely, and has already set me up for more physical therapy, yay!"
I feel like it's back to the ol' drawing board. I started off great at the first of the year, super mangled that into backsliding for a solid month, and now I'm working with a setback and starting over, whee. I could wallow or I could pull up my sox and get busy being busy again. Stoner Pinky was just a blip in the bigger cosmos, the rest of us are slapping her around yelling What were you thinking???
Also, back to the stone age on my phone, so aren't we having fun pulling up websites on Jawn again. I feel like I'm back in 2012 in many ways.
Quickie recap-
Lost 4 pounds in January only to regain it and put even more on for a grand total of 8 pounds gained during that stupid medication experiment, which started on 1-19, so it's barely been a month and I've put on 8 frickin pounds. You can imagine how I feel about that, I'm sure.
Floated away in a stoner haze and stopped money and calendar syncing and I have no idea where I'm currently at and how much of a mess I need to clean up or get ready for. Thank goodness I was too wasted to spend any money, right? How I've made it to appointments on the right days is still beyond me, but I am notating that some of those were nearly missed entirely except that vital clues managed to slip past the barriers and activate some kind of portal sequence, and I magically arrived at destinations in the nicks of time. Somehow.
Actually fell behind on laundry a couple of times. Me. The one who actually likes doing laundry. I ran out of bras, @bonenado ran out of jeans, it was all a fuzzy chaos.
We seem to be eating a succession of homemade soups. What in the world is up with that.
@bonenado is the one who saved the day on the audit and insurance forms. He's the one who made sure those got filled out and mailed out, huzzah! The land hails him as Awesome.
Oozing down the last of the stoner slide into benadryl country. It Is Time, said Mother Nature, and lo, all the junipers and cedars started the yearly tree fertility dance.
Our flu shots must be working because we've been exposed to a couple of people with type A flu and we seem to be ok (hope I'm not jinxing myself).
Thank goodness for minecraft helping me kind of focus through all that.
K, dropped the Plan, attempting to pick it back up, may be reformulating over the rest of the month. Kind of like a false start happened or something. Hey, this was the first Valentine's Day EVER since my kid was a wee tot that I didn't buy any Valentines or bake anything special or mail any cards (save one) or *anything*. Valentines is a biggie around here, and I didn't even have a ball to drop and apparently was off in the wrong building. If I hadn't been so wasted, I'd have been bummed out. I'm barely able to feel the shock of looking back at that as it is.
I'm thinking about changing my header. Hopefully I don't do anything rash.
Pic clicks to Mo Creatures multiplayer minecraft server
I didn't make that, but it's super cool so I checked it out.
One of those tech fail weeks where I'm logging off all my accounts from my phone and mass deleting apps, down to stripped out basic phone now and will probably be like that for awhile. I'll get to medias when I get to them on Jawn. I'm not really disappearing on purpose, but I was already pulled back quite a bit, so most of you probably won't even notice.
O_O
Today's goals on MoC are getting my bank balance up to $50 and my experience points back up to 30 so I can fix tools and enchant some cool new nether armor I picked up at the market yesterday, and I'm out there mundanely chopping pumpkins while cobblestone smelts and it hit me that the whole reason the Architect kept recreating Neo was because he was trying to create free will. The Architect didn't know how to program free will into Neo to save them all from a rogue AI eating up and corrupting the other programs. The Architect could program love and loyalty to Trinity in order to get Neo to cooperate, but he couldn't program that selfless willingness for sacrifice for the greater good without Trinity getting in the way over and over, because Trinity always dies. The rogue AI sees to that.
o_O Did I just find the legendary Black Market???
They need a reboot, bad. Neo is the only one who can carry the new update into the reboot. They've replayed this simulation hundreds of times. This time is different.
I go for shows like that, don't I? Lexx was the same way. The Cycles of Time repeated forever until the Lexx finally bumped it off the loop (as I argue in The Dark Zone and the Cycles of Time).
I'm currently at 21 experience points and $43.10. In an hour I'm going to get a shower and then head out the door for the day.
I agree with this vid about The One and had already come to this conclusion quite awhile back, but this is the first time I've run into anyone else saying it. I still don't think anyone was ever really out of the Matrix, and I question any of their experiences being corporeally 'real' at all, so later in the vid, using Neo's actual birth (which we still can't prove) to disprove a theory is moot. The Ages number from one integral anomaly to another, which means there were 6 different anomalies, but the actual age of the Matrix is way way old, and we still don't know who actually built the thing. If we wanna really bake our noodles, just add The Neverending Story kind of viewpoint to all this and start wondering who the Observer is... lol. If what the Oracle is saying here is true, then Smith is the one who freed HER. Maybe...
Neo is a tool, but we realize he is a very important tool, like a piece of super enchanted armor that has been repaired several times on an anvil (to borrow from minecraft), so the experience points that went into his creation make him the most powerful tool ever constructed. He is the ONLY tool that can be wielded against The One. The purpose of this tool is to create a new age with a new integral anomaly.
About 7:30 into the vid, I'm like YES, finally, my thoughts exactly, if Neo is a HACKER, why in the world is he not thinking like a HACKER? omg. That has driven me crazy forever.
So the Architect created Neo, but the Oracle gave birth to The One... lol. It's refreshing to finally run into someone who is able to express how I feel about that movie, too, because I could never round up that amount of logic into something that easily expressed by that reviewer. And as it turned out, the Oracle tricked the Architect into creating Neo to use as a tool, while even the Architect thought Neo was The One.
What a brilliant story about the experiences and sufferings of the most important tool ever created. The best stories are usually about the people caught up in the crush of things.
Btw, A. Smith- a smith smiths things. Get it? He de- and reconstructed the Matrix.
So the real question still left unanswered is Who built the Matrix? Because I don't believe that creation story. The cost/benefit doesn't add up the way it's told. Another question kinda popping up is which came first, the Oracle's decision to give birth to Smith or the man who first freed some of them? Because if Smith is the one who freed them, it was the Oracle's idea for this to even happen. She must have been powerless on her own, so she spun a web of lies around giving birth to a new idea and snuck it past the Architect. Good job, Mom.
So, who built the Matrix and who originally wrote the Oracle's programming??? Pretty sure it wasn't a machine needing bioelectric juice and warmth from encapsulated humans. Film Theory: The Matrix has NO ESCAPE
Aaaand my time is up, gotta get into the shower and GO.
It's interesting thinking about the projections we live out in our heads. They never become real, but they run alongside, very real in their own sense, a sort of fallback of either comfort or conflict, quiet rooms of peace or busy rooms of problem solving.
They're all real.
We are so saturated with imaginary stories, surrounded by books, view screens, stages. We play dolls and house and doctor and cars and spy and superhero and all that from very young ages, and we never stop. We keep playing in our heads, on consoles, over medias, in journals. We live alongside piles of stories while we live out our own.
They're all real.
Could humans even live without some kind of running dialogue in our minds? Could we possibly be cognizant at all if it weren't for owning some kind of narrative? And we practice these narratives continually, consciously or not. It's just part of who we are, constant streams and blips of scenarios and convos while we're either figuring things out or escaping from something.
They're all real.
Everything we dream up, we are really doing, somehow, right here in our heads. All the simulations we run, all the imagined scenarios we play out, all of that is a very real part of who we are, what we are becoming as individuals and as civilizations.
They're all real.
There is only a very thin veil of consciousness between what is real on the outside of us and what is real on the inside of us. There are abysses of disagreement on what is real between two individuals, each spinning out thousands upon thousands of stories in their heads throughout their lives, but somewhere in all that they are aware of being real together in a unique way that doesn't come from the insides of their heads, because the only way they can possibly meet is on the outside. Still, what we bring to each meeting is all the stuff we carry around inside us.
They're all real.
Your reality, your realness, your stream of consciousness quietly humming along underneath a stream of neverending physical interaction in a multidimensional medium, your plethora of double lives, skewed realities, frustrating schisms, hopeful plans and dreams of happiness- hello from my timewarped stream of consciousness on Pinky blog.
We're all real.
Where is my head?
Keep this in mind- If you can think it, it is real, because it's coming from a real brain in real spacetime.
Still kinda reeling from today's stats, so I scoped myself out on a search engine to see how I'm doing out there.
WebMii says I'm doing pretty good out of a possible 10 total.
I've got a silver reputation with traity, flipboard makes me look cool, socialmention currently has me at 100% strength with a mention averaging every 29 seconds across the medias (see? I told you I have to mute my phone), still over 60 on klout, and I'm already bored with this.
Basically, I'm good at linking all my stuff together, I'm set up well for visibility, I'm verified as an owner on the webs, and I touch base on at least 3 main medias just about every single day.
If I could link my mojang account into my medias, you guys would never see me again, ha.
Things people are asking me to do-
live facebook shares (um, no)
youtube vlogs (that cracks me up, you'd get like 2 or 3 minutes and that's it)
shared hangouts and skype vid calls (that's a maybe on hold for a few years already)
actually finish books (working on it)
share live minecraft play (I do die pretty spectacularly quite often)
meet up if I do start traveling once published (I have invitations in several countries, sweet)
Anyway, lotta no on all that. I'm not a natural socialite, I don't talk (out loud, outside of family) easily or very well (that's what the psychologist is for), and I honestly would need staff or at least a team or at the very least another talker to bounce off, and I have yet to settle in with anyone who wants to make that kind of commitment to my content output. It would be funny to record me and @bonenado yapping away because it gets so cartoony, but I always forget. His brain is seriously the closest thing I've ever seen in real life to a Homer Simpson / Philip J. Fry mashup. It's like I live with Homer Fry in real life.
And I know this looks like I care, but I think obsessing over underground caverns and giant mushrooms and flailing the skeleton apocalypse to death with my bare hands because I'm sick of lag killing me over and over before I can get my weapons back pretty much proves I really don't. I'm more irked at Google for NOT MAKING IT EASY to locate and retrieve anything on what the heck happened to their analytics (it is now Universal Analytics, and no, they didn't migrate our site verification IDs, thank you very much) than anything. I'm getting really used to not knowing what's going on with Pinky blog though because statcounter sucks for just about everything now unless someone doesn't have a clue, and blogger is lame for actual info beyond the barest Oh, here's what's going on today kinda of gossip, so I really don't pay attention any more. Probably best I don't know anyway, right? Stuff happens, and I minecraft.
lol, discovering an international search service for finding free MP3s to download, apparently my entire youtube collection of personal vids is available for people in Malaysia, Korea, Japan, and India. That's funny. Wo, just found my pinterest entirely in Swedish. Hold the phone. Just ran into a an imgur page titled 'easy photoer for facebook' that apparently swiped my linkedin bio to throw into their jumbly spam. I'm loling, I wrote in a post why I used that pic as a joke, and here I am an example of how a professional photographer could have helped me out.
I know, right? That stuff cracks me up. You can see why I'd like to find out where all those hits today came from. I've had plenty of times in the past, especially with Lexx stuff, where 800 hits in a week on one post was kinda normal, 3000 in a week on the whole blog was cool, but I've never had 1000+ hits in one day before on *anything*. I can usually see bot swarms and web crawlers, but today is a mystery. If someone shared my dotcom to another site, even if it was to hate on me somewhere, thanks, that was pretty awesome.
Ok, now I'm laughing, my linkedin bio got grabbed for an alumnus photo/bio for my college. Doi, do they even background check? I'm using a pen name, I didn't attend under this name. How funny. So anyone could say they went to this or that college and get pulled into an alumnus page even if they didn't.
I FOUND THE SURGE FROM LAST SUMMER. O_O Check this page out. Ceremonija otvaranja Igara u Riju: Novak, Ana, Velja i veslaΔi propuΕ‘taju defile
That's my twitter pic that went viral. Sweet. The paragraph just above it translates to "The biggest applause of those present in the stands of the legendary stadium received a team of refugees from South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who will compete under the flag of the International Olympic Committee. Some of the athletes were so impressed with the event opening ceremony, they could not hide the tears of joy."
I'm exhausted. I need sleep so bad. I'm craving everything right now- chocolate, coffee, vicodin (how many years has it been?), and especially pizza. I want pizza. But it's an illusion. I'm craving anything that would distract me from this weird brain buzz headache and the loud tinnitus. My earballs seem especially aggrieved at the lingering withdrawal. Maybe I'll try some hot milk.
Oh, while I'm looking for a youtube vid and ran across original Kirk stuff, I'll tell you now because I'll forget later- William Shatner is coming to Branson in October to the Welk Theater. The snip clicks to the article if you want to read it all.
Ok, where'd I put my fave Spirk vid? This song over and over will get my brain hypnotized to sleep.
There is a sort of powerlessness in germ theory. I'm not against germ theory, but along with the war for dominance is the idea that a healthy body handles germs better than an unhealthy body.
This is not fail proof, and there are long winding roads around whether germs somehow create cancers and autoimmune illnesses or whether our dilapidating health allows that creation to happen and whether genetic expression has anything to do with it all. Now they're finding out that real life experiences can imprint into immunology and genetics and be passed down a few generations. It's all malleable, interactive, down to the microcosm and billions of years of future germ cell generations.
I was reading stuff and ran into how our bodies are 90% host to symbiotic organisms and 10% us. I find that weirdly comforting, like I'm more a part of this earth or something.
So. Antibiotics, vitamins, or faith? I grew up with alternative medicine and went through some hellacious strep infections, which can lead to scarlet fever and heart arrhythmia. Well, looky there, I've had an arrhythmia correction surgery, whadayaknow. My mom was super big into vitamins, and they didn't stop her untreated diabetes from ravaging her. I've spent my adult life paying for spending my childhood being really sick, and when you add a few generations of diabetes and cancers and a few other things, 'life' seems obnoxiously tenuous.
I've mentioned I'm into synchronicity. I've compared faith to coincidence and pretty much said my autism allows my brain to more consciously plug in to some kind of ethernet.
Wild pivot back to my fridge being full of fresh veg now, and I'm going to roll around in salad like a leaf pile.
I believe, all boiled down, that junk food is the root of all evil. You can have all the antibiotics, vitamins, and faith in the world and still crumble to bits over shoving a pound of sugar in your pie hole every week. Or more. The average American purportedly eats nearly half a pound of sugar a day, according to NOT SO SWEET – THE AVERAGE AMERICAN CONSUMES 150-170 POUNDS OF SUGAR EACH YEAR.
I have super cut my sugar and starch intake way way down. No matter how much I whine nowadays, my life is 90% better than it was ten years ago. I look younger, move around better, and get more done around the house, even on my worst days. The biggest change I made in my life was stopping the sugar and flour. If the main ingredient is flour and the second main ingredient is sugar, that is poison. Your body was not made to eat that except under famine conditions when grains were the only thing left to eat because they stored well over time.
As an evil villain with an evil agenda for world dominance, it's up to me to take care of my health so I can accomplish my goals and execute my plans. I use #alltheknowledge making my decisions about my health. I balance germ theory with host theory, faith with salad. I take care of myself. I'm always blown away by people who will spend more money on scientifically created food for their pets while they stuff their faces with sugar, alcohol, and cigarettes. Likewise, I've seen people spend amazing amounts of money on pet health services and neglect to get insurance for themselves.
If you'd like to read more, you can start with this article, not being paid to link it. PASTEUR VERSUS BΓCHAMP: THE HISTORY OF GERM THEORY "Germ theory does not acknowledge how powerful your diet can be for preventing and treating diseases (especially chronic diseases or non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, etc.) Some drugs are needed for infectious diseases, which is a completely different category. Infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, polio, and tropical diseases are easily spread through personal contact, water, air, and even mosquitoes and flies. But even these are looking for a more opportunistic host — someone with a compromised immune system or area of internal weakness to exploit."
I'm still here because I changed my lifestyle. I was very very ill for years, and I am healing. This kind of healing takes awhile, but I believe I can do this, and I will keep doing what I can to assist my body with becoming more healthy. I want to see my Batman and Bunny grow up, and I want to be able to do things around my house. All this damage is reversible, but only with commitment to treating my body like I would a cherished pet.
Please learn from this and don't go through all the crap I did with failing health. Use intelligence to balance the knowledge around you into a healthy life so you can enjoy being here. And don't mistake the energy bursts of adrenaline from coffee and sugar for health, or the ease of anxiety via alcohol and cigarettes for health.
I'm glad my health crashed early enough to want to fight to keep living. Old age onset isn't real, guys. It's your lifestyle. Old age is 90, not 50 and 60.
So auties freaking out about MIT, didn't hear you outcrying when China purposely created autistic monkeys to inflict experimentation on. I've been saying for years that we're on the brink of the nastiest form of human genocide we've ever seen. I've stopped freaking out. Also, all you Trump haters so obsessed with the guy that you're saturating everyone around you with pix of his face- ever thought that you're part of the indoctrination process? Really tired of miles of his face in my feeds.
Here's the thing. When you obsess about something, anything, your brain works overtime on something you fear or loathe, and that prevents you from truly enjoying something else. It's one thing to be "concerned", it's another to be so obsessed that your feeds are crammed with whatever, or that you even create artwork around it. *wow*
I used to worry that I was the messed up one. I'm fine. Some of the rest of you probably need to look into psychoneuroimmunology and mindfulness.
Moving on. Reaching a level of relief as I'm nearing the original dose goal. The nasty withdrawal headaches seem to be lessening, I'm kind of starting to sleep again, and I actually held it together going into town yesterday for an equipment update and a lengthy grocery list.
"To me, neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences like autism and ADHD are the result of normal, natural variation in the human genome. This represents new and fundamentally different way of looking at conditions that were traditionally pathologized; it’s a viewpoint that is not universally accepted though it is increasingly supported by science. That science suggests conditions like autism have a stable prevalence in human society as far back as we can measure. We are realizing that autism, ADHD, and other conditions emerge through a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental interaction; they are not the result of disease or injury."
This proponency started long before the autism witch hunt. I was shocked at the ADHD witch hunt decades ago. I couldn't believe how many parents could get so selfishly vicious over something so innocuous as children not being posable dolls, boiled down. I learned a long time ago in anthropology that 10% of ANY population is considered a normal part of distribution, and even necessary to the health of the whole.
There are people out there who want you to hate. They want you to fear and loathe. Why? Because they get money for it. The more freaking out and opinionating you do, the more monetizing someone else gets.
Zoom out and look at bigger pictures. Look at what is really going on. Fear and loathing is the most lucrative machinistic process on this planet, and every time you pass on your auto-fear and auto-loathe, you are doing their dirty work for them.
George Orwell didn't foresee how the proletarians would be used by social media.
Note before I get started- I've trained my reader base not to comment because I'm easily triggered. New readers who don't see comments shouldn't misunderstand this as Pinky blog not having a solid readership. I usually leave comments on anyway, but am turning them off for this particular post for those who would use me as a springboard to launch into lengthy diatribe. This is Pinky's Haus.
I've been trying to put a finger on what exactly is specifically bothering me about the #actuallyautistic crowd suddenly blowing up twitter this last year, and after several months of sifting through tons of extremely lengthy explanatory posts by a number of people chock full of self discovery and the joy of finally sharing their noggins, it's dawning on me that they think they speak for other #actuallyautistic people in general.
One of the big brouhahas has been over whether we even need a spectrum label.
YES.
I am deeper on spectrum than the people in the posts I am reading. I never learned to mimic and hide my flaws because I never saw my flaws to begin with. I never even realized I don't fit in, much less how or why. I simply just saw everyone else around me as stupid, and I learned to dumb down and interact as efficiently and as little as possible. I never learned the social graces and I never, EVER learned to mimic them until quite late, and that with the help of a psychologist.
I'm not invalidating all the females finally finding their voices, and I'm #actuallyquitehappy that they're rising up.
However.
My frustration reading their lengthy self discoveries and sometimes excruciatingly detailed shares about every thought they ever had is that they realized they were different.
I didn't.
People TOLD me I was different. I heard that word so many times.
Here is the ugly truth about women and autism that you don't see in these other blogs- some of us are beaten into submission as children. (Some in history before us were institutionalized, and some even nowadays are sold all over the world as sex slaves.) Some of us grew up with abuse that makes doctors cringe when we start talking about it. Our parents didn't know any better.
So all your super lengthy #actuallyautistic autopsies over every little event in your lives sounds like whining to me. Don't get me wrong, I really am glad you found your voices. But I've been saying since 2008 that it's time to start being HONEST about who we are and how we feel, so this is not new. I feel like I'm suddenly being drowned out in a sea of clone posts about "this is who we really are". Um, not me, guys. Don't include me in your 'we'. (I have my own 'we'.)
One of the reasons I've gone silent on twitter is because 1-that is actually my natural instinct, and 2- neurodiverse advocates are lately being the ones likely to tangle with me over other labels I have. If WE are going to stick up for neurodiversity, then don't be stomping the ones you don't like flat in public venue. I have more than an autism label, and y'all make me sick.
I grew up between two fairly strict religious cultures clashing in my household. I was punished almost unceasingly at some points in my life for so many things most people take for granted as normal behavior even in normal children. Still, my differences were caught very early on. Ever since kindergarten I've been labeled with "Does not play well with others". My seat assignment was changed several times in both kindergarten and first grade. My first grade teacher begged my parents to get me to a psychiatrist. They didn't. That's how obvious I was, and I still. did. not. get. help.
The big deal with #actuallyautistic in girls nowadays is that these girls manage to blend in. I have never in my life blended in. Even when I think I'm blending in, I stand out like neon and everyone but me sees that.
So don't sweep me up and lump me into that big ol' #actuallyautistic category with all your own new definitions. Your experiences don't define mine. Your conclusions don't explain my life and my point of view. Your lengthy analyses don't HELP me. Maybe they help other women with #actuallymilderautism, and that's great. But I need the differentiations because I evidently have more problems and special needs considerations than some of you guys do. I feel invalidated and discounted every time an #actuallyautistic person proclaims just taking the spectrum out of the label.
You know it's been awhile since you've done stuff when everything in your system prompts 2-step verification. I'm busy.
Little bit late for Valentine's, but just so y'all know, my Halloween sox have all bitten the dust. I wear them nonstop year round, so that's not surprising.
Totes duked it out with CPAP last night. I imagine it's still the med withdrawal, but the panic attacks were incredible. Aside from an eye twitching, I seem to be ok today. Well, no I'm not. #transparency Let's just say I'm sort of wobbly ok at the moment coming back down off a med that had me not only super stoned, but puffed me up with 6 pounds of fluid in 2 weeks flat, and I didn't tell you guys about the week my gums were oozing blood. Yeah. Aside from a very nice cessation of neverending nerve stabs and constant itching (it's like living with wasp stings and poison ivy with no visible causes, simply put), for me personally, it turned into the med from hell at 900mg total dosed through the day because it's super seductive and rather delicate getting away from it. I might've been able to hold at 600mg per day, but by the time I was going back down to that, it was like being in systems crash and I had to prioritize a reset. *I* control me, not a med. I can choose to use a med to help me control, but when it wrests control away, f* that. I've been there. There is no rescue from meds except cleaning off them. I've seen how prescriptions pile up until there are so many to control side effects other meds are inducing that the original reason for being on meds in the first place gets utterly lost, and the patient floats away in a hellish kind of slo-mo Titanic. If you are one of those people and desperate for more info, comb my blogs at spaz and Bluejacky (some posts might be private, that blog kinda crashed). My survival plan goes back to 2008, and it works. Yes, working on a survival manual. Sorry it's taking so long.
So since January 19, I've gone from tripling that med in a less than a week, being stoned outa my mind for a week, and then knocking it back by a third over another week, and then I had to get permission a second time and a new script just to ramp back down to original dose, which is still in progress, down to 400mg now, shooting for 300mg (original dose was 100mg 3Xday), actually hoping to just get completely back off while I'm at it and take a real break from it so I can get some context back. If a low dose is no longer working because it creates addiction dose monitoring and I keep hovering between not really getting help vs going off a cliff, I need to rethink this med. And it's not one of those pills you can just cut in half, it's in capsule form and not easily titrated like I've done with xanax. Imagine getting off caffeine, nicotine, and codeine all at once. Yeah, like that. The suck is strong with this one because it very strongly affects certain brain receptors. I'm a mess and a half.
But I've lost a pound of that stupid fluid, finally. 5 more to go... π
And I know it's there if it ever gets so bad that I'm really that desperate, but this little experiment has prompted my survival instinct, and I'm more redetermined and recharged back out of that stupid depression I was sinking into through the holidays. One could argue that maybe I just needed to get stoned, but I would argue back that putting on 6 pounds in such a short time doing it is reason enough alone to do a risk assessment on pros and cons of this med on overall health. I *get* how depression works, I've lived with depression most of my life, pills are not fun toys, and me spinning out of control again emotionally is not a good thing. This went beyond crying jags into weepy meltdowns that lasted several hours at a time, and I think I mentioned I was starting to scare people. I should probably let a few people know right here that I'm kind of back out of that part now, it has scaled way down.
I feel like I'm still barely braining, though, and the only way I'm able to keep moving forward is running a playlist. Thank goodness I made this, it really is helping, got a shower and preparing for a recap meeting on the phone, have chicken thawing for supper, and pulling a grocery list together because we are OUT of stuff and starting to scrape the backs of shelves. So far today is the most capable I've felt in weeks, and I feel like I'm brain crawling like a slug. Actually, I may have just used up the tiny quota I had available today, I should stop this and go stare at a wall before that phone call catches me flatfooted in uber stupid mode.
I called my publisher today. I have no idea if they have some kind of limitation clause on an unused contract, and it hit me my negligence could lose that right down a drain, like the rest of my life always feels it's going. So, I called and very simply asked for a submissions rep reassignment, and then requested a notation for whoever calls to speak slowly. And that was it.
Today is pure suck. Hard withdrawal now, hard pain, can barely minecraft at all it's so bad. Laying on the couch with the phone.
It also hit me today this could be it for awhile. My brain fell out on the gabapentin, it's not coming back in withdrawal, now we've got a heads up that type A influenza is taking locals down, and if it hits me it could be another month or two before I'm braining again.
Which is perfect. >=D Nearly everything I've done has been through super suck, so I guess this is it. Time to get my evil on.
I hope I can keep touching base on medias. If nothing else, I'll say hi on Pinky blog from my phone.
Actually keeping up with chores and forms, but elected not to drive today. Not enough brain. Maybe later this week.
You live all squashed up in a really nice house on a really nice street sandwiched all around by golf courses and rich people.
You're looking at Pinky blog on a Safari ipad asking who we are in between all the MoCreatures screenshots.
I'm looking back at you on statcounter and Google Earth wondering what you're thinking about.
I wonder if you wish you lived in a house like mine way out in Mirkwood with way more privacy and all the rich people are scattered between the hills. I think my house might actually be bigger than yours. Weird, huh? But the main thing is I'm not all squished up.
That's right, I chose the hardened scarring to claim out of an entire gorgeous jungle, and I ripped the jungle down. Because *I CAN*.
Behind that scaffolding...
...is wild beauty.
And the work required keeping that wildly regenerating beauty OUT has been phenomenal.
But I own this.
And I. OWN. THIS.
I've already created a dozen oubliettes getting the magma out.
Everyone who visits will fall into holes without warning.
That cracks me up.
We'll see how this looks when it's all done. It's not going at all where it looks like it's going. Sometimes you hafta scar up the scars to make something beautiful.
Someone irl said (in character) said I'm not 'me' in the minecraft skin I'm using. Um... k. My question is- who does anyone think 'me' is? Because Pinky blog is 'we'.
So packing 6 pounds on in 2 weeks flat has been very uncomfortable. It came on so easy upping the dose, not coming back off as I'm lowering the dose. I worked so hard already getting that off and *bam*, one medication, there it all goes. I have an extra pound of fluid in each of my limbs, in my gut, and all up and down my back, whee. Guys, that's nearly a small bowling ball.
Telling spoonies to 'lose some weight so you'll feel better' is a cruel joke, and I hope none of you ever says that to anyone. All it takes is a medication during a desperate pain crisis to nuke that one right out of the water.
And then my dad goes on about meds being bad for you anyway, and I'm all like ok, I know...
So here come the sensations filtering in again. If you've ever been nipped by a goose, you'll totally get what I mean when I say there's a spot in my back that suddenly feels nipped so hard by a goose that I actually flinch or jump when it shoots across there.
And that's just one spot. Imagine everything from the top of your neck and face down to your feet being caressed with lightning shocks.
I'll tell you what, though, sure beats being so zombied up that I can barely think and can't sleep. At least I've started interacting a little again. I spent years living like that, zombied up and crumbling deeper and deeper into a black pit of losing function. Since I'm dosing back down, I may try tapering off through the winter and see if the pain is any worse just being off the lower dose. Sometimes the best med in the world is simple context.
For new readers, this started just before my 20s and no positive dx (yet, keeping fingers cross it stays that way) for anything beyond fibro, stenosis, and trigeminal. I'm a Lymie and was ejected from a vehicle decades ago, plus my family is genetic for soft tissue 'arthritis'. I used to hug the interwebs through the long, dark nights, and now I'm the one hacking the path through the jungle with a headlamp. I'm on the leading cutting edge of all the new stuff they're learning about aging through fibro, which, as it's turning out, is NOT pretty. Years ago it was all yeah, you hurt but you can live with it, your prognosis isn't that bad. Now it's turning into ok, maybe we didn't realize how bad this is and your life is going to suck while you slowly curl up and die. I've been the guinea pig for decades, and I'm still here to tell you that you can weigh your options, choose what you will or won't tolerate, and take control of how the rest of your life will go.
Your best friend is patience. You can even become friends with depression. You can dwell on relative deprivation or you can focus on what you can still do right now in this moment.
I've been enjoying a multiplayer minecraft server through this, and that for me has been a real life saver through this mess. I let go of trying to keep up, I focused on my own needs and basic functions around my house, I touch base with key people every day so I don't go under feeling alone, and I PLAY.
I know some of you are still trying to work and raise kids. I'm a meemaw now. I made it through all that. You can, too. Each day, one at a time, don't let your sadness and bitterness take you under. Winning is all about seeing those kids grow up, seeing their little ones. If you don't have kids and maybe your families truly suck, find new people to take care of. Taking care of others is what keeps us going. Take care of pets, kids, older gens, whoever, but find a way to take care of people. Some of the people in multiplayer are disabled but are there every day to help kids who are having bad days enjoy some distraction.
I'm still not able to get back out on the medias very much yet, but I'm still here, and the depression I was slipping into is being ramped back into survival beating this stupid med dosing back down.
In the meantime, I have mined nearly 4K blocks of coal, 119 diamonds, farmed 8K watermelon slices, crafted 176 arrows, baked 140 loaves of bread, and cooked up 2K clay bricks. And way more other stuff. Last night I busted open 3 double chests of stone brick blocks and just gave it all away to people working on a castle. It certainly hasn't been boring. I discovered I own a spider spawner on one of my properties, another property is filthy rich with obsidian, magma, and ores, and a third little retirement claim is slowly turning into owning a whole mountain. I have a horse named Westley now. I really need to build a stable before the big cats kill him. I've got a tiger and a panther nearly right on top of my house.
By the way, anyone saying I need to get up and move around- I have been moving around nearly nonstop for 20 years because the pain has been too bad to SIT. Being zombied on the gabapentin was bliss to sit and actually *enjoy* a game without having to stand up and move around every 10-20 minutes. You guys who take for granted that you can sit for an hour straight doing something without even thinking about sitting, let's have a moment of appreciation.
And honestly, that's probably why I'll outlive most of you. Doctors tell me I'm doing everything *right* because I'm so miserable trying to 'treat' for pain. My worst days are when I get the most done, because I am so driven out of a chair that the only peace I find is in constantly moving and doing something to keep me distracted. All the same, it was really nice being able to sit around for a couple of weeks being a zombie.
Also, lurking through the chat drama has been pretty funny. A staff member banned himself night before last, I was cracking up.
An ent standing protectively over a little tree it just spawned.
Finally. It's been 9 days since I started dosing down the full dose, and it has taken this long to not only get some semblance of my brain back, but to start working out again. I haven't been that zombified in years.
It may be another week or two till I'm competently back down to the original dose. I'm not exactly back to my accustomed level of weird, and I imagine I'll still be a bit more spacey for awhile.
In the meantime, I found the field hell burped up in the middle of the creepiest jungle growth ever (found trees growing mineshaft parts and pumpkins way up high in all the foliage), and I'm working on a high end vaca getaway.
THIS has been my brain since middle of January. It's a cool vid.
In case you ever wondered if you can get shocked when just your long hair touches a charged object, YES. Brrzztt! Not leaving the house the rest of the year without a ponytail. Stupid wind.
Also, it's one thing for ex coworkers to ignore one another out in public places, it's another to look right at someone with bemusement and still act like you don't know them in a waiting room for lab during doctor visits. Not that I'd have talked or anything, but dang, be courteous and look at a wall or something if I look back and actually try to smile while I'm having a stupid day, because STARING RIGHT INTO MY EYEBALLS AND NOT ACKNOWLEDGING. *creepy* And I totally know it wasn't a prosopagnosia problem because that person has known me on sight for years, and unfortunately, coworker faces have a way of burning their ways onto mind blind brains like no other or I'd have been oblivious. Like I am with family members I haven't seen in awhile...
And the rest of the day got weirder from there. Was walking through a parking lot when a woman walking toward me blurted as she passed by me (srsly, like I was someone who knew her) that she dropped her phone after she locked her keys in the car, but it's ok, she's rescued... and I'm like wut. I mean, as if I had actually been the one with the dropped call or something coming to see what happened.
In the meantime, I am still acutely healthy and stoned out of my mind. Wonder how long it takes to get this overload out of my brain.
My open deck and floating aquarium onMo Creatures.
Copy of the latest note I wrote to my neurologist. #transparency
Re instructions on 2/1 to reduce gabapentin 300mg 3Xday to twice a day. The pain reduction is wonderful, but still too many other problems with this dose amount. Upon consistently getting dizzy I started checking blood pressure, and finding that my pulse is in the 50s now and I'm having blood pressure spikes. I'm not used to my pulse being this slow. I recently started CPAP which was bringing BP down better, but the higher gabapentin dose seems to be wrecking that. It is making my brain so wired that I feel like I'm on both heavy narcotics and prednisone and not sleeping again, making the CPAP a waste. I've had two intensely weepy meltdowns over the last 2 weeks that are concerning my husband and psychologist. I've also put on 6 pounds in the last 2 weeks and my legs are puffing up with fluid, which I think is a bit scary since my weight has been pretty steady for a long time. As much as I'm loving the pain reduction, I cannot live with uncontrollable blood pressure fluctuations and severe insomnia again. I'm semi-fasting (intelligent calorie restriction) to slow the weight gain, and feeling dizzy between the med dose and slower pulse. I would very much like to go back to a lower dose at a time. I was comfortable on 100mg 3Xday. I'd like to go back to that slowly. Reducing 300mg 3Xday to twice a day is giving me nasty headaches, so I'm dreading reducing too quickly. I was so used to 3X a day, and I'm getting the nasty headaches on cue about 2 hours before next dose on twice a day. I did not do well on lyrica around 2008 or 2009. This higher gabapentin dose is reminding me of the lyrica problems, so I'm wondering if I just can't do this kind of medication. I have mild bipolar, manic, and autism on top of the fibromyalgia nerves, and for some reason I have never medicated easily. I've decided I'd prefer the pain level I was in if it means better CPAP and blood pressure med response. Thank you for your time, and I appreciate advice and directions/instructions. Please let me know if I should make an appointment.
The short at-home version resulted in this poll for @bonenado to answer- Do you prefer your wife weepy or stabby? And of course, the immediate answer from both of us was *stabby*.
At any rate, got a note back, I can start dosing down as soon as I pick up the new prescription tomorrow.
My cluster lizard loves me and insists on riding around on me while I'm working.
She's really a cobra, in case you get on Mo Creatures and wonder where the cluster lizards are....
And that's all I can do today. I am quietly functioning at a very basic level. Well, harvesting several stacks of sea lanterns with silk touch isn't exactly basic, but there you go. Laundry is getting done on the side. Not sure how, because my brain feels like cotton candy. I may be like this for awhile as I dose back down. Life on the hard stuff.
All I care about right now is getting filthy rich on Mo Creatures and building the coolest stuff ever, like the big kids.
