What're you doing up?
It's that time again, Sputin's bi-annual post! It should be fairly obvious already that my mood has swung for the better once more, although there's no telling how long before I just run out of steam again.
Along with my mood and disposition improving, my mental health has too - the paranoia, the whispering, and the panicking are all still there, but... diminished. Weakened. Manageable. The whispering tends to only be a problem - as it has for a while now - when I'm trying to go asleep, although problem isn't quite the word anymore. There's still odd moments where I think I've heard something, but my policy for the last few months has been not to acknowledge if I don't actually see a person talking. I mean, obviously there's exceptions - you know when someone's calling you from another room, for example - but that's the rule, generally. If you don't make sure you have my attention before you speak to me, chances are you're talking to yourself. Fun!
It's a different fix for the paranoia, though sort of related. If I think someone has said something... well, it's not hard to ignore it if I didn't see it myself. That's where the issue comes from... I keep hearing odd words, little snippets of other people's conversations, and my brain tries so hard to tell me they're talking about me and/or laughing at me. Ignoring that isn't so difficult, but I figure if someone has something to say that they can't say to my face... well, it just isn't worth saying, is it? An article on Cracked gave me that perspective, complaining about how everyone gets annoyed at having to repeat themselves, as if the other person deliberately didn't hear in an effort to be frustrating. If what you had to say can be invalidated by needing to take five seconds to repeat it... why the hell did you open your mouth in the first place? If you're only going to say something once, why is it the other person's fault that you said it when they weren't paying attention, without making even the slightest effort to get it? It's not hard to add a single word in front of your sentence, like "Hey" or "Dude/tte" or anything that tells that person you have something to say.
...I'll stop that tangent there, it's largely irrelevant.
As my head's stabilised, my body has fallen apart. My back, hips, and knees are worse than ever. I mean, my knees are alright for the most part, but if I go for a bike ride they do *suffer* for it. My back and my hips are apparently in a contest to see who's the bigger douche, because between the pair of them I haven't had a full night's sleep in... dammit, I can't even remember. My back's only slightly more painful than it was, but flares up more often... that's been almost constant recently. My hips don't almost give in when I get up in the morning, but they do wake me up in the night screaming at me. My shoulders are quickly going the same way as my back - they tend to be sore about half the time, but nothing too major.
So, mentally, I'm back on track... and physically, I'm about ninety years old. Give or take a decade. A large part of that is undoubtedly that I don't exactly have a balanced diet... well, sort-of. I probably get my RDA's on a weekly basis, because my body never tells me it's hungry until it's *really* hungry, and it just flat-out doesn't occur to me to eat the rest of the time. Although, as anyone else with those kinds of eating habits will attest, if you put a meal in front of me I'll probably end up eating it just because it's there.
So, onto news. I've started a two-week course, which will apparently give me a qualification in personal development. Once that's up, I can go for my FLT, CSCS, SIA, or all sorts of other fun incentives. I'm debating with the SIA at the minute, because having that would open up my job prospects by a lot, immediately. CSCS would be of no use to me - we all know by now that medium lifting is not my thing, never mind heavy lifting, and a job on a construction site would murder me. I'm seriously tempted by the FLT, but 98% of those jobs require recent experience, and lots of it. There's also the offer of a customer service qualification (my experience isn't recent, but outranks that anyway), food hygiene certificate, or five driving lessons. The driving lessons really tempted me, but there's no way I'd be allowed to take my test with so few lessons, even if it turned out I was a natural (I expect no such thing).
...so yeah, maybe SIA. Maybe FLT. We'll see how that turns out.
I've been getting back into the piano-ing. Picked up the sheet music for the Via Purifico this week, which is proving a little complex, but only because I memorise sheet music rather than just playing it through. Oh, and all the off-key notes on the left hand... some key signatures are bastards to play in, and then you get a song like that where you pretty much have to think in two key signatures.
I've been mixing it up, though - Vamo alla' Flamenco sounds fucking amazing with a 4/4 dance beat behind it (yes, I know it's 6/8, STFU), as does Korobeiniki. The thing that bothers me most at moments like that is... well, my repetoire of complete songs numbers somewhere around (but a bit less than) ten, which is terrible when you consider I've been at this for over ten years now. The consolation is that I'm one of only two people I know of that can read sheet music, and out of those two the other person isn't exactly confident (but a bit better than he might think).
Aside from that, I lopped off all my hair a few weeks ago. Almost everyone I know with long hair has done it in the past two years or so, for a variety of reasons, chief among which seems to be that you hit a certain age and feel like you've grown up past having long hair. In my case... nah, we all know how much I loved it. It was a love/hate thing, though - washing it was a half-hour job, then drying could take anywhere from all night to never. Too many years of dyeing left it with a permanent red/purple tinge, even when I went over it in black that one time... and oh GOD, the misbehaving. One day it just stopped staying tied back, stopped behaving. Every time I moved, it was there in my face, obscuring everything and being a pain. I think I lasted about six months of that before deciding it had to go, and life is much easier without it.
On the outside, it feels like I've done a lot of growing up lately... but, no. I've definitely changed, but growing up is not part of that equation. I like to think being grown-up is context specific - sure, a lot of the time it's expected, but that doesn't mean it's who you have to be... and so long as the bills are paid and you're not hurting anyone, who gives a damn?
...wait, everyone, because there's always some fucking idiot being all "No! I don't like this thing so no-one else can do it EVER in case I hear about it six months later on the other side of the world and get upset!"
Hark at who's talking. :P