Bartender Geek

If you could get one "do-over"— that is, if you could go back in time and change one decision or action you've ever made, what would it be? What do you think would be different now, in your psyche or circumstances?

I wouldn't.
( Read more... )

So, I'm thirty now. And it was a relatively eventful weekend.
( Read more... )

There is something a little disturbing, and also embarrasing almost to the point of humiliating, about the fact that our downstairs tenant has done more to fix up the house in the past eight days than I have in the past two or three years.

I mean, I understand some of this. I understand that I've had crippling depression my entire life, and, even if I've gotten some of the depression somewhat under control, I've still got all the habits that come with lifelong crippling depression.

But still.

'Sbeen an odd day. Annoyances: I stayed home to wait for a delivery of a refrigerator for our upstairs tenant, and, when they arrived, we discovered that we couldn't get it through her door. But that meant that I couldn't get to my shrink appointment, and had to do it by 'phone, instead.

On the plus side, I made chicken soup and tidied the recipe shelf.

I've been having uncontrolable rage attacks, for no reason I can see. Things just strike me as annoying, and I lash out, either verbally, or, well, for the first time in years, I punched a hole in a wall. And I have no idea why. The truly annoying things, like having my entire day disrupted for an appliance delivery that didn't work -- that doesn't trigger it. Lis lending me her bus schedule, that triggers it. And Lis's reaction to someone getting irrationally angry at her is, quite rationally, to get angry back. So we're both trying to break this cycle, but it's not easy. I'm hoping that making chicken soup will help. Why would it help? I dunno, but sometimes, doing something physical and temporal, creating something real, grounds me. And for me, that means cooking.

I made kreplach, which are Ashkenazic Jewish soup dumplings, and, while they're not bad, they are about the worst kreplach I've ever tasted. The dough is tough, and the filling is bland. Still, they're better than not having kreplach. And, since this is the first time I've ever made them, I'm not too upset about it. Next time, they'll be better.

I feel like my prefrontal lobes are letting me down. Prefrontal lobes are in charge of, among other things, focusing, switching focus, and emotional regulation. I've been unable to concentrate on things sometimes, unable to stop doing things at other times (which is why I'm posting at 1 am; I can't go to sleep yet), and I've been occasionally unable to prevent myself from punching a hole in a wall.

Last night, I had a migrane headache that mostly went away by early afternoon today. That means, I was unable to sleep until 1:30 or 2 in the morning, because I had a massive migrane, it didn't go away while I was asleep; I woke up with the same headache, and had it all morning. Migranes, as I understand it, may sometimes be caused by temporal lobe instability. I have no idea what temporal lobe instability means, but I seem to recall someone telling me that sometime.

My Friday night (formerly Monday night) AD&D game is on indefinite hiatus, because one of the players (the one whose house it is held at) has 1) an extremely heavy grad school courseload, and 2) a girlfriend. My Sunday afternoon Ironclaw game is ending shortly, and I'm going to be starting to teach on Sundays anyway, so that may be going away for me soon. And my Wednesday night GURPS game, the one I was running, is over. So I'm currently gameless. But the DM for the AD&D game has asked if I want to run something until the player whose having trouble making the games finishes the semester. I've been vaguely thinking about doing something fifty years in the future of the game I was running.

I had been running a Tudor fantasy game: 1559 England, but with magic. I'm thinking about running something around 1610 with magic. Maybe something in the New World, maybe something with the West Indies spice wars.

So, in general, I'm feeling rudderless. I'm not doing anything significant or important until October 6, when I start teaching, and, even then, that'll be just one day a week. I need to figure out direction for myself -- something meaningful to do for the next couple weeks, and for the other six days of the week after then. I mean, right now, I've got 4 hours on a suicide hotline a week, and I'm adding 3 hours of teaching first graders, but that still leaves, what, 161 hours when I'm feeling rootless and lost. Okay, really 105 hours, if I sleep enough.

A job would cut that down to 65 hours a week . . .

It's nearly five in the morning, and I just got back from visiting with a friend who was in town for the American Chemical Society conference. I don't see her anywhere near often enough.

Y'know how I was talking about how maybe there's a difference between intelligence and wisdom? I generally remember how intelligent she is (in that "I just finished my masters in biology so I'm now getting my PhD in chemical engineering before I get my MD" way), but I keep being surprised by how wise she is.

Once upon a time, Lis and I really helped her out. She was at about her lowest ebb possible, and we kept her alive, close to sane, and, as she pointed out, kept her from actually flunking any classes. To this day, having helped her is one of the few things that I feel unambiguously good about in my life. Even at my worst, most self-loathing, self-pitying moments, I can remember that I helped her, and feel pride at that.

And now she's returning the favor. Because I was able to be there for her at her most vulnerable, she's one of a very few people that I feel comfortable really being emotionally vulnerable with.

She's doesn't have a whole lot of tolerance for self-pity or such, coming from me, at least. Talking to her, I find that I have to attempt to live up to what she thinks of me. Which is tough. And . . . different.

See, I saved her life once, by telling her what to do and being firm and smart and decisive and loving and all these other things that I'm not, usually (except loving). And that's what she expects of me. That's what she needed to believe I was, when she needed me to be that, and she sees no reason to think less of me just because she's sane, healthy, and stable now.

I mean, she's not stupid by any definition of the word. I think she's completely aware that she somewhat idolizes Lis and me because of what we did when she was a freshman in college. But . . . while she's smart enough to know that her opinions of us may not be true, she's wise enough to know that they are.

I'm still processing all this, obviously. But I'm realizing that, all my life, I've surrounded myself with people smarter than me -- which isn't a bad thing -- and I've allowed myself to be teased and joked about and so forth. And I don't mind that and don't really intend to change that.

But it gets into your skin, y'know? My friends tease me and mention how worried they are about me and talk about the things that I can't do and so forth, and that's because they love me.

But this woman . . . she believes in me. Just because I once saved her life by being competent and decisive and compassionate and organized, and all sorts of things that I just basically am not.

But . . . I did save her life. And I did do so by being competent and decisive and compassionate and organized . . . and so I am those things.

She has no patience for the sort of self-destructive whining that I did in two posts on this journal which are not actually up for public perusal. She'll listen to it from me, for a little while, but not for that long. She doesn't believe it.

And that means a lot to me. She looks at me like I'm Clark Kent bitching about being cheated out of a byline.