I haven’t been posting in the last few days because I’ve been feeling a little down. I worry that if I say anything about feeling down, people will want to ask what they can do or offer advice or suggest therapy or something, and I don’t really want to feel like I have to turn comments off again, but I don’t want to hear about it. You may not want to hear about what I have to say, either.
I guess I don’t have much to say. I have no justifiable reasons to be feeling down right now that I didn’t have a week ago when I was feeling fine. Or maybe I do, but I don’t think of them as good reasons. School started today, which is not only an incredible burden of time, taking up every Monday through Thursday afternoon entirely and dedicating me to quite a bit of work outside of class as well, but also a financial one with tuition at around $800 and art supplies probably additional hundreds of dollars. Beer Club looks to be going the way of the dodo, with Zoe giving up drinking coinciding with my classes pushing even the possibility of my availability back several hours, some regulars moving out of town, and others long gone. Maybe I’ll buy the new T-Shirt in the December/January, when I have a few weeks off school and Zoe’s started drinking for the holidays. The Mac event that I had hoped would lighten my spirits was disappointing at best, and the three extra hours sitting around for my computer to be ready ‘any minute now’ I could have done without. I haven’t started working out yet on the Bowflex, and that’s looking like a vicious two-step; I don’t work out because I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good because I don’t keep in shape. I guess I could go on like this for a while…
But that really isn’t it. I feel down inside, and feeling down I become introspective and negative and cynical (and I overspend) and I take the time to find all sorts of little things that aren’t the greatest, but when I think about feeling down, none of those things seems particularly the cause. Those things feel like justifications or rationalizations for an emotional state I don’t understand. I don’t even understand it with my heart. I just … it’s just a part of me for right now. Like a guest in my chest (or a wocket in my pocket), I didn’t ask for it but I’m not asking it to leave either, and I certainly don’t know what it is or where it came from.
Site traffic has been going up again the last few days. Unique visitors to Modern Evil broke 100 for the first time this year today. Not as many people have been visiting as did over the entire course of last month, but the peaks are getting higher. What doesn’t help is that the traffic started going up when I started posting less. (Or was it when other people started posting more?) Will traffic start going down again when people see I’ve posted about my emotions instead of about my phone or my exercise equipment? Who knows? Who cares?
From here, I think I’ll start complaining about medical conditions I haven’t bothered to contact a doctor about, so if you’re not interested in that, don’t read on:
Right before I started posting this, my nose started bleeding. No predication, I just had a tickle like I was about to sneeze so I grabbed a handkerchief and brought it towards my face just in time for it to catch blood coming out of my nose. I’ve been blowing my nose pretty hard for a long time without a nose bleed in years. This was weird. That handkerchief is pretty red. (Good thing I bought that Maytag Neptune Washer/Dryer. I’ll be sure to put it through the right cycle for blood stains. It’ll be good as new in no time.) So, nose bleed. One is no big deal, but it came as sort of a shock, so I’ll keep my eye out for more.
My left knee is giving me a lot of trouble and pain lately. I can’t recal a specific injury to it, but my knee and all the connected tissues seem to be very upset with me. All the muscles attached to the knee seem to have been pulled or strained in some way, the tendons… I don’t know what one does wrong to tendons, but they don’t seem happy, and outside of a small range of motion I can’t use my knee for much right now.
My wrists, as you know if you’ve been keeping up, have been giving me a lot of trouble from mousing. I tried switching from a right-handed to a left-handed mouse at work (where I do most of my mousing), and that helped a little with the right wrist, but now my left wrist is starting to feel the effects. I remembered to take my old graphire pen tablet with me to work and used that today instead of a mouse, and that seems to have helped, since you move the whole arm instead of the fingers/wrists. We’ll see how that goes, but there may already be damage done to my wrists.
Some of you are aware that I occassionally get unusual shortness of breath. I wanted to be able to say that I haven’t had trouble with it lately, but as I was typing this I remembered that it came up just a couple of days ago because I remember being glad that no one around me seemed to notice. I only recall it occurring when I was at rest and not in a particularly stressful situation, often hours removed from strenuous physical activity of any kind. It is like what I imagine an asthma attack is like, and may in fact be asthma, though I did not experience symptoms until the last 18 months or so. It is like a tightening in my chest and I can’t seem to draw any air in no matter how hard I try. I assume that’s what shortness of breath means, since at the times of the problem I am unable to take deep or long breaths or get enough air. So far it has not lasted longer than 30-60 seconds, but I don’t look forward to it getting worse.
I won’t go into details on this, but continuously for the last couple of years with almost no change in condition (not getting any worse, though not going away), I have had a small area (about the size of a quarter) of lesions in the middle of my chest. Nothing gross like puss-filled sores, just itching and redness in the range of a solid red area to a few sparse red spots.
Oh yeah, and the migraines I’ve mentioned here before. Every once in a while I just get this deadening headache. I’ve been doing pretty good; I’ve worked out what doses of over-the-counter medicines I can take to numb it to about the level of a run-of-the-mill bad headache… most of the time. A lot of bad things could be causing the headaches…
I think that’s why I haven’t really contacted a doctor about any of this; I don’t want to know what’s wrong with me, because what if it’s a Brain Cloud? (Will I have to go jump into the volcano?) What if it’s cancer or some incurable disease? What if my insurance doesn’t cover whatever needs to be done for my knee or my wrists? What if there’s nothing wrong with me and I’m just turning into my mother, imagining ailments? How much pain and sufferring do I have to go through before it’s worth it to find out the cause of it all?
