An Open Question Re: My Sanity

[veazey21]

Recently (read: within the past three months), I was talking with several friends about my time in the hospital in Michigan and about some of my experiences there. One of the medicines that they tried to help with my headache was some kind of steroid that, apart from not doing anything to the headache at all, kicked in my fight-or-flight response

Comments

[veazey21]

That emergency cash reserve & the updated passports are not a bad idea at all. Just remember to wrap the passports in tinfoil to block anyone from spoofing your RFID information.

[redesigner]

Better answer: Wrap the passport in a tea towel and thwack the RFID chip a few times with a hammer to kill it. The passport authority will accept a passport with a non-functional chip as long as it isn't visibly damaged.

[veazey21]

Best answer: yours.

[radiantthought]

sounds fine to me. Now, if you begin to hallucinate or imagine things that never happened, then we might be heading into murky waters. In the end you seem like a logical person dealing with a debilitating situation which is outside of your control and thinking about complex things which can distract you from the pain. As you said, a coping mechanism.

Although I will say, as one lottery dreamer to another, your plans sound good, but relatively small-scale... I mean, I guess if you're only giving yourself a $1m jackpot or something. I generally don't consider much of anything under $10m, cuz below that you've gotta start thinking about practicality and such. The problem I've found is that $10m is just such a large number that it's hard to get a handle on. It's so much that with no interest, if you wanted to spend it over 10 years, you'd have to spend $2,740 every single day. To put that in perspective that's a brand new car, every week... for ten years.

[veazey21]

The house is just step 1. I'd also like to trick out a 1957 Chevy Bel Air so that it looks completely stock (except for the paint job, which will have ghost flames) but is full of modern technology.
Plus, I'm going to invest a large portion of that money into seriously developing and shopping around some of the ideas my friend Ryan & I have had, like "Trailer Park in Space" or a serialized drama series that's still in the early stages of development. The ideas are good, but we haven't put much serious effort into it in a long while because he's been busy having a job and getting his masters, and I've been busy staring at the wall.

[radiantthought]

One of my lotto fantasies was similar, opening up a business that normally would never be able to make any money, run it at a loss, and don't worry about it, you could set aside a small portion of your winnings and just let the interest on that bit cover the operating costs and you get to do something you love and spread happiness.

[veazey21]

I should, shouldn't I? Like, soon.

[weezel365]

Your level of sanity is based entirely on exactly how much you retain your grasp on the "real" world. You know the real world as pain, therefore as a distraction, you find a palace of sunshine, lollipops, and zombie apocalypse.

Use your legal pads to write a book.

[veazey21]

Somewhere around here, I've actually got a story that's about 3/4 written on a legal pad that I need to do something with. I need to find that.

[redesigner]

I think what you're describing makes you sound like an ideal candidate for trying hypnosis, as it's similar in principle.

[veazey21]

Which reminds me: where did I put that big list of things I needed to do? Because I wrote down to look into hypnosis & oxygen therapy, plus all the other stuff that I want to investigate.

[redesigner]

I thought you'd put it into your phone.

[veazey21]

My to-do list in my phone is getting a little bit long, because I've got a couple of reminders in there that I never check off, so they show up every day to remind me to do things like take my medicine. Also, since the beginning of December, I've had a reminder to get a certain letter out of my parents' safe deposit box, but I need a parent to go with me, and that just never seems to materialize. So, that's still in there. Plus, having it on a piece of paper next to my computer usually increases its visibility. And while I was typing that, I looked through some stuff on the table behind my desk and found the list.