Here we are. One week after I got my booster. I still feel like shit. Here is what I wrote yesterday. I was hoping that today I would feel better. And I do. Marginally. But not nearly enough. I have said this about flu shots before. Why should I get the shot when it’s this bad? I know what the actual answer is. It’s insurance in case I actually get the thing I’m innoculating myself against.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t go out much at all now. The chance of me getting Covid is slim to very slim. It’s not none because I do go to Cubs and my brother comes over now and again. So, yes, I could get Covid. Theoretically. And, yes, it’s better to be innoculated if that’s the case. Theoretically.
It’s basically gambling and throwing the dice. Do I want to take a chance at getting the COVID. At this point, honestly? Yeah, I do. I understand why the vax is necessary and a good thing. But I am not ok with the fact that my reaction to these kinds of shots is so terrible.
Sweat and chills, check. Still getting both, alternating. I would be less annoyed if it were one or the other. I’m at the end of my rope. Don,t feel like writing so I’m going to end this now.
Yesterday, I wrote about sleep and how mine has been getting more erratic in the past few months. I was not sure why because it’s been pretty consistent since I left the hospital. A tight eight hours, waking up once to pee. Yes, I had been pushing the time back later and later, but I was still getting my eight hours. In the last month or two, however, it’s been reverting to how it was before. Waking up and not being able to fall back asleep. Six-and-a-hlaf hours total instead of eight. I have no idea why because it’s not as if my life is very different.
Then, I realized why it might be. I have started to do more Bagua than I have before. It’s still an internal martial art, yes, but it’s way more energetic than Taiji is. It gets my blood going, and it makes me so hyped. My Taiji teacher told me to do it in the morning when I first wake up because it really pumped up the blood. I try to do it early in my Taiji routine, but it still seems to keep me agitated hours later.
I can’t say it’s a direct correlation, obviously, but it seemed to have started at the same time as when I got serious about Bagua. When it was just walking the circle, it didn’t get my blood up as much. In general, the walking the circle did not get to me like that. It’s the teacup move that does it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s moving your hands in a certain pattern while holding your hands flat as if a teacup full of tea is on each one. The drill is for each hand forward, individually, then bothtogether. After, it’s each hand backwards, individually, then both. This is what gets me going, and I’m pumped.
If this is the reason that I’m having more trouble with my sleep, then so be it. It makes me feel better in general, and that’s what is important. I am still getting eight-ish hours on a regular basis. I’m just waking twice and not falling back to sleep as easily.
I’m ok with it, though, because I’m still getting enough sleep. It’s weird, though ,that some days I’m raring ot go and other days I just want to constantly nap. I’ll wake up, struggle to do something for five minutes, then fall back asleep. Other days, I just sail through everything I need to do without a second thought.
For whatever reason, today is a blah kind of day. I had a rough sleep night, which…I’m worried. Before I ended up in the hospital, i had shitty sleep. I was legendary for it, honestly. When I was in college, I got four hours a night and was barely functioning. With Taiji, I inched my way to more sleep. Better sleep was debateable, but it was certainly more. Before I ended up in the hospital, I was up to 6 1/2 hours a night. But.
Here’s the thing. I’ve always been a night owl. The time I feel most awake and productive is between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. It used to be even later, but I’ve been trying to hold it down to 2 a.m. as my bedtime. I’ll get to that in a second.
Even as a child, I never went to bed before midnight. My mother would put me to bed at eight or whatever, and I would stuff a t-shirt under my door so I could read until midnight. Reading was my escape from a brutal world that had no place for me.I was an alien in an alien world, and I wanted out.
It didn’t help that there was something really wrong with me. When I was fourteen, My mother took me to the doctor because there was obviously something wrong with me–but we were not sure what. I had a resting pulse of over a hundred. Plus, I was depressed as fuck, but that was not part of the physical problem. It turned out that I had Graves’ Disease. Back then, it was not understood well. I had to take nine pills three times a day, which meant twenty-seven pills in total. I had to get my blood drawn every month, which not fun. I have terrible veins, and the phlebotomists missed with astounding consistency. This was in the days before the butterfly needle, so it was basically being poked in the elbow over and over and over again. There was one guy who insisted that he was great in finding veins. He was not. he missed, but refused to take out the needle. He kept wiggling it in my arm, saying that he would find my vein. Meanwhile, I felt as if I had a hot poker jabbing me from inside my arm, and the pain almost made me pass out.
I have one vein that is passable. It’s in the crook of my left elbow. It’s the one that I always offer to phlebotomists when they needed to take my blood. Most of the time, they accepted my offer and tried to take my blood from that spot. Once in a while, they took a look and said they wanted to see the other elbow. I would show them my rigt elbow even though I knew it was futile. Yes, my left elbow is bad, but the rigt one is even worse.
As the news about the coronavirus variants continues to pop up on a daily basis, I find myself becoming increasingly numb to it. I know why this is; it’s because my brain is shorting out and can’t take it. I’m so angry at the assholes who refuse to get vaccinated out of defiance (not those who can’t or POC who have reasons to be wary). We had a chance to get this thing on lock, but, no. We couldn’t be arsed to do that and I’m furious.
The fury is buried under layers of numbness, however, because I simply cannot. It’s the cumulation of the last four years and it’s my self-defense mechanism. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not proud of how Americans are acting right now. It’s American individualism run amok and it’s a disgrace. I’m also pissed at the Republican leadership for fomenting the dissent strictly as a political move. A week ago, 50% of the Republican members of the House of Congress refused to say whether they were vaxxed or not. While shouting about how it was personal choice and no one got to tread on their freedom.
Riddle me this. If they truly believe that the vaccination is from the devil and to be refused at all costs, why won’t they say they’re not vaxxed? It’s simple: they’re vaxxed. They just want to keep their base riled up as a way to get at the Democrats. I don’t doubt there are some who are not vaxxed, but I’m pretty sure they’re fine with saying so. One of my Twitter people tweeted about a kid (well, late teens) posting on his Facebook that he was getting the vaccination, but don’t worry, he was still a Republican. This was in an article about the faces of the anti-vaxxers. I tweeted to her, “Tell me that the Republicans are terrible without saying the Republicans are terrible” because the vaccination should not be political.
Side Note: The CDC has not handled the messaging well at all. I understand when you make a message to the public, you want to be as definitive as possible. I once had a doctor (the best doctor) who, when I told her I smoked two or three cigarettes a day, she said it wasn’t that big a deal. I asked why the message around smoking, then, was that it was the very worst and if you inhaled one lungful of smoke, you were doomed to die before the age of thirty? She said because if doctors said one or two cigs a day was ok, the nuance would get lost and most people would take it to mean they could smoke a pack a day.
I saw her point, but there had to be people like me who would prefer the unvarnished truth. It was the same during the pandemic. At the beginning, the message was that masks were unnecessary for the hoi polloi. Supposedly, that was because they didn’t have enough masks for the health care providers. I call bullshit, but even if that was true, it was the worst way to get the message across.
It’s been hot lately. Like nearly 90 degrees hot. That’s not my jam at all and I just want to snooze. I can’t get my shit together today so here’s a video of Asian teen girls/Latinas screaming against the patriarchy in a public library. Here’s the story in NPR. I give to you The Linda Lindas singing Racist, Sexist Boy. I love everything about this. Rock on, girls!
I’ve written before about the upside of being an outsider. This is not one of those posts. I have seen people on social media blasting the whole ‘introverts living their best lives’ themes, saying that they were introverts, but who is living their best life right now? The tone is ridicule/anger, and it makes me uncomfortable because while I’m not living my BEST life, I’m not suffering like other people are. Meaning, I’m not visibly more distressed. Yes, my sleep is more fucked up. Yes, I randomly want to kill myself, but it’s not an active feeling, and I have it during regular times as well. It’s not as intense then as it is now, but it’s there. Yes, I’m having way more family time than I want. Yes, I’m having a hard time focusing. But in general, I am less anxious than I am during regular times.
In addition, I don’t really miss hanging out with people. Granted, I didn’t do it much during normal times, but the reduction isn’t bothering me. The fact that I couldn’t do it chafed at the beginning of the lockdown because I don’t like to be told what to do, but in general, it doesn’t bother me now. The state is doing a soft open tonight at midnight for very depressing reasons (Americans suck as self-denial and no political will to go hardcore), and we haven’t even hit our peak yet. I’m resigning myself to another spike after the soft reopen, and I’m just grateful that I can do what I’ve been doing and ignore the soft opening all I want.
I don’t feel like I can say that I’m not any more stressed or anxious now than I was before. I know it’s because I had an unreasonably high amount of stress and anxiety before and that everyone has risen to meet my level, but it still doesn’t sound great when I say it outside. I also don’t miss being around people except sex. For whatever reason*, I want to fuck the next ten people I see. I’ve been rewatching Chiodini’s Kitchen (from Eurogamer, well, he was, now he’s at Dicebreaker and a DM extraordinaire), and one of them has the actual voice of Geralt from the Witcher series. Doug Cockle. Johnny was brewing a beer from the games at an actual brewery, and he sent a sample to Doug Cockle. Cut to the end where Doug is sitting in front of festive stuff, wearing a Santa hat. He talks a bit in his regular voice, tests the stout, and then says something in Geralt’s voice.
Full disclosure: Geralt is one of my vidya gaemz boos. I have the hots for him, and it doesn’t matter that he’s a video game character.
When Doug Cockle was talking in his regular voice, I was like, he’s a nice guy and he’s fine, but whatever. The second he slipped into Geralt’s voice, however, I wanted to bone him. I’m a sucker for a deep, husky growl.
I say this as if it’s news, but it’s not really. My sleep has been shit all my life for varying reasons. I had gotten into a semi-regular sleeping habit recently of going to bed by 2 am and getting up around 8:30*. Then, I got sick again as is my wont and my sleep schedule got all fucked up again. The sleep time started getting pushed back further and further until I found myself going to bed at 5 a.m. Then, two days ago, I could not stay up past 11:30 p.m. I crashed, but kept waking up every few hours. I finally got up at 6:30 a.m. or so, and I felt shittier than if I had gone to bed at my regular time.
If I could have one wish come true, it would be that I could get a solid eight hours of sleep a night. That I could sleep without tossing and turning for a half hour first. That I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding uncomfortably fast. That I wouldn’t have nightmares, or more recently, anxiety dreams. That Shadow wouldn’t be in my face howling when I woke up in the morning/afternoon. That I would feel actually rested when I woke up. That my immediate response wouldn’t be, “God, I wish I could sleep forever.”
Some of that has to do with depression, of course. I don’t want to be alive, and that makes it harder to get up and go about my day. There was a program on MPR (or perhaps NPR) about suicide and how to talk to someone with suicidal ideation. The doctor said you had to first find out why the person was feeling suicidal. She mentioned there was a difference between someone who coped with the thoughts on a daily basis and someone who might have those feelings in response to a bad situation. She said in the former, it doesn’t help to tell them it’s going to be ok or to look at the bright side. She said it made them feel more isolated and as if nobody understood them. I wanted to shout an ‘amen’ from the rafters because fuck that bullshit.
I hate spring. I hate summer more, but spring is almost as bad because everything is coming to life, and I’m allergic to all the green things. In addition, I’m still visiting Ian in upstate New York, so there is a bunch of native flora that doesn’t live in Minnesota. This is my long-winded way of saying that my allergies are on high. At least I hope it’s allergies. I think it is. My eyes are itchy and my throat is tickling. There is a drainage situation that is coagulating in the back of my throat. I’m feeling logy, even more so than usual.
The reason I’m hoping it’s allergies? Because the alternative is that I have a cold. Again. Or sinus issues. Again. Or any of half a dozen things that are worse than allergies. Allergies are a low-level energy drain. Sinus infection? That’s a massive hit in the gut. I also have a medium-grade headache that really intensifies right before I go to bed. I’ve taken two Excedrin Migraine (generic) almost every night I’ve been here which keeps the headache at bay, but it’s not something I want to do too often.
I have zero motivation when I’m sick/allergy-stuffed as well. I know I have shit I need to do, but I just can’t make myself do anything. Writing this post feels unbearable, and I’m just writing nonsense. I know I’m not, but that’s how it feels. I woke up about an hour ago, and I want a nap. That’s what makes me think I’m on the cusp of getting sick and not just suffering allergies. Allergies are annoying, but not soul-sapping the way getting sick is.
I’m flying back tomorrow, and I really would rather not have to do it while being sick. I’m sure the other people on the plane would be happier without me spreading the sickness as well.
Side note: Delta has this thing where if the flight is full, they’ll have you bid on your seat, meaning saying how much it would take for you to change your flight. Ideally, everyone would ask for the highest bid so someone will get that amount. Gamification theory indicates, however, that someone will lowball everyone so they will at least get something.
