A Day^H^H^HWeek, With Navel Gazing
Nearly everything I've managed to accomplish since returning from Conterpoint, I've done in the last six hours. But hey, I did at least get something done -- the drums are moved away from the basement door, so I can do laundry once I catch my breath; there's finally a path to the vacuum cleaner that I'm too exhausted to use; and I even managed to clear all the stuff that I'd temporarily piled up on the front stair and blocking the front door in order to have "swap space" for the evening's effort, so if my housemate returns eighteen hours earlier than I expect him to, he'll be able to enter the house. Most of the stringed instruments (and the woodwinds case) are still stacked along one side of the front hall, and the half of the living room that I plan to use as a music room is still too cluttered to set up the drum kit, but at least now the next time B. has a spare afternoon and offers to help me sort/rearrange/winnow stuff, I'll be able to see where to point him.
My back, alas, is killing me. And I'm tired, and haven't been able to sleep well all week (the weather finally broke but then my legs started doing their almost-cramping-won't-let-me-sleep thing, and when my legs gave up my back became too painful -- argh!). I still need to hike out to the drug store to pick up prescription refills phoned in earlier in the week, and figure out the best way to the clinic by bus to get new prescriptions for the drugs I'm out of refills on -- I could face dealing with the house a little (a wee percentage of what needs doing) by telling myself I could take a break as often as I needed and not worry about un-blocking aisles until tomorrow if it came to that; staying on my feet long enough to walk to the drug store and back, I'm not up to yet. Maybe tomorrow, if I'm lucky, or Tuesday. We'll see.
Earlier today, I was depressed (yes, I've chosen that word quite deliberately, thank you, based on my symptoms at the time) -- the not-sleeping and the resulting number of unresolved iterations of "I want to do this thing that requires concentration but I'm too zoned, so maybe after I get some sleep", the too-long unbroken stretch of worse-than-usual pain (the usual is no picnic, but there's a point at which my usual coping skills get exceeded), the intense frustration at not having been able to do any of the things I'd planned for this week even though most of the things on my to-do list were things to do at the computer, and feeling overwhelmed by all the things I really do need to get done ... it was too much. Fortunately one of the important differences (the most important difference?) between acute situational depression and endogenous chemical depression is that with the former you have at least a fighting chance of being able to pull yourself out of it (or even just wait it out). That doesn't work with the years-long, brain-chemistry-glitched, "no good reason for it" type of depression, which is, ironically, usually the only kind that lasts long enough for anyone else to think of giving you the terribly broken advice to "pull yourself out of it". The kind of depression that advice might (or might not, but it's worth trying) work for, doesn't seem to naturally last long enough for your friends to get impatient enough to say things like that, as far as I can tell. (As usual, I welcome corrections from my friends with actual psych training if I'm way off the mark here. Right now I'm trying to remember whether "just like depression but doesn't last very long" is technically called a brief, mild form of depression, or "technically not depression because it doesn't last long enough". Maybe if I'd had more sleep ...)
I identified the condition, hoped it really was \the short-term sort (given my body's intolerance of antidepressants, if I do wind up with chronic depression, well it's a scary enough thought that I'm just not going to think it right now), wallowed in self-pity a little while, convinced myself to give in to a pizza craving and ordered one delivered (and with the "difficulty making decisions" symptom being rather pronounced, that took a while), and picked a single task/problem -- fitting the drums into the living room -- to get stubborn at. Now I'm no longer depressed; I'm just in a kind of bad mood. If I can get a reasonable-ish amount of sleep tonight, I should be in a vastly better mood tomorrow. All the more so if I actually feel well enough to walk to the drug store and back (is the pharmacy counter open on Sundays?). My perfectionist streak kept wanting to Do The Whole Job At Once, not being happy at the number of points where I told myself, "I don't have the energy to deal with this sub-task right now; I'll settle for making note of it and where all the parts are, to get back to later." Now that I've stopped for a while, it occurs to me that having identified but uncompleted tasks like that is what's going to let me accept help the next time it's offered instead of saying, "thanks, but I don't even know what I need you to do yet." There are people who want to help me (and some as well, I'm sure, who don't especially want to per se, but feel they "ought"; if I can tell them apart, I'll try to make use of the first category first), so I should try to remember that and not feel as though every overwhelming mega-task has to be a Solo Feat to be accomplished in the mythical Someday.
(As some of my friends have noticed to their annoyance, I pretty much suck at accepting help. It's a flaw I've been struggling with for a long time. Progress is slow, but I do recognize the need to improve.)
In other news, the toe I sliced up is healing, and I haven't noticed any frightening smells when changing the bandage yet; it was deeper even than I'd realized, so it's taking a while for the nearly-sliced-off part to fully grow out to the ready-to-fall-off point. It's less tender now, but still a bit sensitive (I was able to wear regular shoes for much of Conterpoint, by the way, having been able to reduce the padding in the bandage enough to fit my foot into something other than (remarkably comfortable) slipper-clog-things (like Crocs but a different brand) that anniemal gave me. When I changed the bandage last night, I considered cutting back to just a Band-Aid, or at least leaving off the cellophane armour layer. ("Cellophane armour"? Yeah. When I sliced a wedge out of the tip of my little finger in college one night, I improvised a bandage with Kleenex (or one of their competitors) and Scotch Tape (pretty sure it really was 3M/Scotch, so there). The next day I went to the school nurse, who tut-tutted at my homemade bandage and dressed it up real nice with a big fluffy bandage of right proper gauze and real bandage-tape. Well, I quickly found out exactly how often my fingertip made contact with various surfaces in a typical day -- no, wait, it was an atypical, trying not to let anything touch the [expletive]ing finger day, and it was still painfully often. So I covered the gauze bandage with a shell of Scotch Tape, and that made all the difference. I even managed to armour that sucker so hardily that I could fret the guitar with it! So I remembered that trick and have used it a few times since, though in a less extreme form -- now I'm using bandage/first-aid tape for holding the bandage on, but there are three strips of cellophane tape (generic nowadays) crossing each other looping over the end of my toe, with a loop of bandage tape lashing down the ends, and the bandage extends far enough beyond my actual to to serve as a useful bumper. That's enough to make the end of the bandage just rigit enough to shift the force of most blows from the end of the bandage to where it's anchored at the base of my toe, instead of pushing the end of the bandage into the injured tip of the toe, as long as I don't go try to play soccer or something.) ... Well, while I was fussing with stuff in the living room, I managed to whack my foot into something heavy, and yup, I hit with the pinkie-toe of my left foot (in the slipper, but still hard enough to feel through that). So I was really glad I'd gone ahead and included the armour again. As it was, the effect was merely, "Oh wow, that really would have hurt..." *whew*
Okay, time to program the VCRs, eat another slice of pizza, and see whether tonight I finally manage to sleep, so I can manage to write a bit more coherently on the morrow.