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08.05.03 ~ Health Hazard The world is grown full of peril It is no longer safe for me to be out in the world on my own account. Due to a unique combination of stress, sleep-deprivation, vitamin deficiency, clumsiness and good old-fashioned absent-mindedness, I have become a hazard to my own well-being and that of innocent bystanders. Today alone I have managed quite an impressive list of examples why I should be kept confined to cushiony quarters, or at the very least, forced to take the short bus to work: I got into the shower with my glasses on and then wondered why my vision was obscured by strangely stationary droplets of water for several fractions of a second before figuring out the problem and shedding my ocular accessories. I called everyone at work by each other's names, and managed to call the guy who sits in the cube closest to me by the name of almost every male family member I possess, plus the Captain's name, and the name of the guy who ran the comic-book store that I bought most of my collection from over a two-year period before the store went out of business over a year ago. I put a load of dirty laundry directly into the dryer without washing it first and only realized that something was amiss as I was tearing out a softener sheet. I walked directly into a cubicle wall on my way out of the office, then looked around in a bemused manner while everyone laughed at me and asked if I was okay. I replied that I could have sworn that the hallway turned a few feet before it actually did and apologized to the woman in the cubicle, who I'm sure was slightly startled when a girl carrying a huge bin of mail and wearing sunglasses inside (I have to put them on before I go out to my car otherwise I'll never fish them out from the abysmal depths of my purse) ran headlong into her wall and knocked over her picture of her last high school reunion. I managed to put all of my ballpoint pens and a highlighter into my tea, which sits next to my pen jar, before I realized what I was doing. +++++ On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I would like to point out that the major traffic arteries in my area during rush hour are a perilous and inconvenient place for someone to be if they are sleepy and not, perhaps, entirely paying attention. That is all. +++++ I think my brain, reflexes and sense of direction have been on sabbatical lately. However, I did manage a rather spectacular (if I say it myself) performance of quick thinking and reaction time today. Merlin, the Captain's massive black cat, who has spent the past year and half moving across my apartment floor at the pace of a particularly sluggish glacier, decided, in a rare burst of energy, to make a break for freedom this afternoon when Bill came home. As Bill came through the door, Merlin slipped out, and Bill yelled for him to get back inside. This has always worked before, the cat is ridiculously easy to control, a clap, a raised voice, he slinks back into the house, it's all good. Today, though, he was more determined. He actually made it to the bottom of the stairs before I stopped him. You see, I was watering the flowers on the balcony (the ones that the felines haven't killed by sitting on them) and in an uncharacteristic burst of reflex, I doused the fleeing feline with my watering can. He spun on the spot and tore back upstairs where he spent the next half hour licking himself off and loudly telling me that I shouldn't go outside because there was water falling from the sky. +++++ I would like to take this moment to announce to the world (in case anyone missed it the last five hundred and seventy-three times) that I love my husband. He is an endlessly sweet, supportive and amusing man. True, he hogs the covers, he torments my cat, he listens to awful disco remixes of Nintendo theme songs, and he has been known to wear black with earth tones, but he is truly the eighth wonder of the world. I woke this morning, feeling very demoralized and stressed. I am getting overwhelmed with a combination of things happening at work and this morning as I was getting in the shower and I realized that I probably have something like six years left at my job before Bill has his degree and I can start going to school full time or having kids or writing or a combination of the three, or whatever else I feel like doing at the time that does not involve going into an office and a desk and a time card every day. I know that getting Bill through school first is more practical, and that I am working towards a time of never having to work a job again, but it was just unutterably depressing to think of those six years in the office looming ahead of me. The thought to toiling on and on and on with no real rest of more than a few days to look forward to is soul crushing at a quarter to six in the morning when one's alarm goes off for the third time, and one is not particularly inclined to get out of bed after a less-than-restful night. I started talking to Bill a little about the things that have been getting to me lately and he asked if I had any D-stress left. D-stress is this fabulous ginger-flavored drink that Hansen's makes. It has some herbal combination or something going on that enables me to calm down a little bit and stop obsessing about work in order to go to sleep and not dream about work (which is absolutely the worst thing in the world, I might add). I told him I had run out of D-stress and he wanted to know why I hadn't bought more. I explained that the grocery store I go to doesn't carry them, and anyway it was kind of extravagant to keep buying these silly little cans for me to unwind. Now the latest reason why I love this man is because his response was simply "Nonsense! If it helps, you must have it! If it will help you be okay, we will order a pallet of them." And he went to the store on his way home and brought me five cans. This is the man who balks at buying anything without a coupon or a sale, preferably both. This is the man who once refused to let me buy a bathmat because he said we really didn't have money to waste that week. He went out of his way to the one grocery store in the area that carries these things and purchased, at full price, five cans of ginger-flavored sparkling beverage that may or may not be any more than expensive placebos so that I would feel better about something which I have no business feeling sorry for myself over in the first place. So to him I say: WUV!! +++++ I really should get myself to a doctor and find out if my excessive stress problems might not be a chemical issue easily remedied by some kind of prescription. If I'm just off a few enzymes or my serotonin (no guarantees on the correctness of the spelling of this word, Bill does not know and I am too lazy to look it up) production is inhibited or something stupid like that I'd like to just find out and fix it rather than continuing to suffer. If it turns out to be linked to my history of insomnia and if the remedy also solves the problem of how to get to sleep at night, then so much the better. I think it would be hoping for too much to have it also fix mall the weird joint problems in my ankles and knees, but then you never know. +++++ Speaking of chemical imbalances, ankles, knees and my ingoing problems with the set I ended up with, I would like to take the moment to address a pressing question to my parents. Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. How's it been? Everything fine since Sunday? That's good. Listen, I need to ask you guys something a little personal. Are you guys, like, cousins or something? Because I can think of no other explanation for all the genetic weirdness going on here. My body is so badly put together at the joints, particularly my feet, that they're talking about shooting me and selling me for glue at work. The last time I got really and truly stressed out over something at work, I became convinced that everyone in the office was talking about me behind my back and that they were all watching me like hawks and going back over my work after I left in an effort to find a mistake and get me fired. I once was sitting at my desk at work just cruising along when I was suddenly struck by the all-consuming certainty that the day that I had marked on my calendar to go to Phantom of the Opera with Bill was incorrect and that the day that the tickets were for had already passed. I almost ended up driving home on my lunch hour just to look at the tickets to make sure they were for the right day and make myself feel better! What kind of a psycho cares that much about anything? I mean it wasn't as if I could do anything about it even if they had turned out be for the wrong day, which they didn't. Also, Dad, I am here to tell you that if the US endorsed the humane extermination of undesirable gene-carriers from the gene pool, you and I would both be history for our gastro-intestinal tracts alone. I do not even want to discuss the subject of onions and chili fries. +++++ My children are doomed. They will be inheriting several chemical imbalances responsible for a variety of psychological disorders from both sides of their family tree. They will be risking everything from heart failure to bad backs to heartburn to baldness in the genetic lottery. It really is pretty terrifying if you think about it. I mean, sure they could all end up with my eyesight and Bill's teeth and never need braces or glasses, sure. But they could also wind up with severe depression and/or social anxiety disorder, feet like an eighteenth-century Chinese noble-woman's, puny hearts resulting in head-rushes, black-outs and general lethargy, sleeping problems up the Wazu, and spinal chords so out of whack that they need one of those yellow diamond-shaped signs with the squiggly arrow that usually denote a winding mountain road. Poor things are up against some ugly odds. Maybe we should adopt. +++++ The Captain is lying on my floor dictating to Bill who is setting up html pages for their Ebay business. He is making me very sleepy and I wish he hadn't already taken the floor because then I could lie down without actually having to go into the next room. I like being in here with these guys, even when they are ignoring me, which they are doing right now. The Captain is now trying to see how far he can launch a pencil by holding it in his mouth and then expelling the contents of his lungs suddenly. He says he is creating a new Olympic event. He does not know that I am talking about the weird things he does in the sanctity of my computer room in view of an audience of potentially millions. Ha ha. Millions. Chortle. I slay me.
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