Monitor Me ~ Rilla's Blog

We are nearing a full week of my time away from work, and I'm sure you're all dying to know what's going on with me.

1) I'm postponing my return trip to the office to pick up spare shoes and the book that I am in the middle of reading. The book that I would have dearly loved to read while in the midst of dizzy fits. Reason for postponement? Only my psyche holds the answer to that.

2) I've recovered (more or less) from the dizzy fits. Now it only really strikes me when I'm in super busy places, wherein I usually get disoriented anyway. Coincidence? Probably not.

3) Kaz and I have been watching season four of Battlestar Gallactica. We still don't know who the final cylon is, but I have a few theories. Frankly, this seasons (thus far) has been pissing me off. Most episodes entail me yelling at the screen, "WHO IS GOING TO KILL BALTAR!? WHY IS HE STILL ALIVE!?"

4) I am dreaming up things to do with my spare time: roadtrips, knitting projects, writing drafts, organizing my archives. Mostly, I play computer and do housework. It's a weird combination of nesting and self-insulation. Ask not what the Rilla can do for the house, ask what the house can do for the Rilla. (of course that made sense)

5) The cats have taken to my additional time at home like flies on shit. No matter how often I swat them away, they always come back. They seem a lot less bad than they did when I wasn't at home, though. So, perhaps their desire to snuggle all the time is taking away from their desire to wreck stuff and eat things that ought not to be et.

6) I've been writing letters again. Don't be surprised if you get one.

7) "The world has turned and left me here, just where I was before you appeared, and in your place an empty space that filled the void..." I've been listening to music a lot too.

I had my first massage this morning. It's part of my whole let-go-of-my-stress plan. It hurt, but it hurt in a good way. She found some pretty tense muscles in my jaw and neck and I had a little flashback to the first time my jaw locked. I was 21 and it was shortly before Rob and I got married. I was eating those little baby ritz crackers with cheeze goo, and all of a sudden my mouth wouldn't open.

I can't remember why I would have been feeling tense, besides the fact that I was sitting in a car for several hours, but when the masseuse started working out those aches and pains today, I wondered if I was worried... if my twenty-one year old self was feeling alone on a long journey, but was not yet aware enough to understand deep-seated loneliness and tension. Feeling those pains so precisely agitated and soothed, it was as if my body was trying to let go of an old emotional wound.

So, I started naming all of my knots and specific pains. My masseuse relaxed my fear of writing, my feelings of inadequacy, my over-reacting tendencies, my divorce. She found all of these spots that I could tie memories to, and then, slowly untie them and let them leave me.

Of course they're all still there, but I'm trying to help my body let go of them. Help my mind un-dwell, if such a thing is possible. I feel stretched and tired, but I feel a little more free too.

In a good way... not in the I'm dying and floating into oblivion sort of way.

Yesterday was my last day at work in the Optometrists' Office. For a variety of reasons that job, more than any other, caused me extreme anxiety and stress and the combination of feeling like an overwhelmed piece of crap every day was pretty much making me a depressed lump.

My last day of work was supposed to be today, but like so many things with me and that place, it didn't go quite as planned. I had had vivid dreams of snapping and telling people off and storming out, but in reality I was going to go along until my final day like a civilized and worthwhile person. Instead, I got so dizzy yesterday morning, I practically blacked out sitting in the staff room. Just sitting. This was not a normal symptom of my anxiety attacks, nor was it standard every day occurrence, and frankly it scared the shit out of me. So, Kaz took me to the hospital where a kind Doctor told me that I needed a week off to recover from Benign Positional Vertigo, which is a fancy way of saying I get dizzy when I move around because a tiny little hair inside my ear canal calcified, broke off, and is now bouncing around in some fluid in there.

So, I'm done work, and it wasn't on the terms that I wanted, nor does it make me feel very proud of myself to be beaten by a workplace where I am fully capable of performing the tasks set out to me, but I'm tired of being unhappy, and this seemed like the logical first step towards improving my state of mind.

My schedule has opened up, if any of you want to get together, I'm free... all the time.

I'm listening to my itunes list, and I had it sorted alphabetical by song name, and I just now realized that the shuffle setting is still on. It's been a couple of hours, and it struck me that I had heard "Rain King" by the Counting Crows from two different albums, one forty-five minutes ago, and one two minutes ago. And I thought, "Wait a second... how am I already on the r's, and why didn't I get two Rain Kings in a row." And then I thought that I have too much Counting Crows in my itunes playlist, and I was reminded that this is the exact reason why I don't organize my songs alphabetical by artist... because I'd get about three hours of Counting Crows, roughly 1/10th of that taken up by the Rain King himself.

I get more comments on my blog from facebook than I do from my blog and this somehow angers me. It's not like I put a little tag at the bottom of each post saying, "Listen facebook friends, just navigate away from your precious facebook and justify the existence of my blog." I don't do that because it seems foolish, and because I know nobody can justify the existence of something, unless they are justifying their own existence. In which case, this blog can never truly justly exist unless it justifies its existence on its own. Blog. I'm waiting.

Chest Pains Shmest Pains: I've been getting anxiety attacks every now and then, and I've even gone to my fabulous doctor to say, "hey... my heart occasionally feels like it will explode out of my chest. What's up with that?" Long story short, he prescribed me some stuff that I've had in my purse for about a month now and I haven't taken a single pill. At first I was all, "Oh good, I've got an emergency plan if I can't calm the fuck down on my own," and this actually helped me calm the fuck down. And then I started reading all of the potential side effects of said pills, and I started to get worried that if I took any, I'd pass out and forget who I was... since then I've had anxiety about my anxiety medication. And no, I can't seem to calm the fuck down. The other night I had an attack that lasted, oh, around fourteen hours, but I was all, "I'm sure it'll stop on its own, la-de-da~ I'm not gonna take my crazy pills." I didn't. Take that prescription drug companies. But seriously, it sucks. And no, I'm not exaggerating. Fourteen hours.

The cats puked on my bra in the middle of the night on Sunday. It's not the only bra I have, but it's my favorite and I feel like it's the only one that actually supports me and keeps my enormous nipples from poking through a dress blouse and a suit jacket. That's about fourteen smarties, FYI. I had to wear my strapless bra all day, and I had to restrain myself from fishing my hand down my shirt and readjusting that bad boy right at my desk for pretty much the entire day. I'm pulling out an old school idiom here, bear with me: We can send a man to the moon, but we can't make a decent strapless bra? For that matter, why can't we breed cats that don't get hairballs already? Scientists, get on those two things.

I got a new camera a couple of weeks ago. It's one of those fancy Digital SLR thingamajiggers that I'd been putting off getting for a while because I rather like the sorts of pictures I get from my automatic/manual/no flash dealy. Anyway, the camera folks at the local camera store explained how I could still get blurry, out of focus shots with my brand new Nikon D60, so I was persuaded. I told myself that on days when I don't feel like blogging, but I still wanted to post something I could take a walk with my camera and take pictures of things that showed how I feel.

What I really really wanted to take a picture of TODAY was this totally bad-ass guy wearing a black leather jacket and a bandanna with super long 80's hair walking his little white puppy.

Not that I feel like that... I just saw him walking his dog and thought sweet! But I'm not up to the photographic stage of taking pictures of strangers, especially when they look completely bad-ass despite the cuteness and smallness of their pets. I'm not about to get my camera smashed on the sidewalk for that sort of visual oxymoron.

Anyway. This is how I feel today.

Well.

About two weeks ago I got a little phone call from Rob, remember him? The fellow I used to be married to? Yeah. And he was all, "Why aren't you blogging? Is everything okay? Are you alright?"
I poo-pooed him and told him I was fine and that my life is a little dull right now and I don't really like my job, and henceforth and therefore I hadn't been blogging much.

And I thought, "Huh. If it's getting obvious enough to Monsieur Robert that something's not quite right, then it might be time to give my head a shake and figure out what the fuck is going on."

And then I ran into my friend Alli in a restaurant, and I used to see Alli every few weeks, and then I realized that I hadn't seen her in, oh I don't know, a year. And she came up to me and hugged me and told me I looked fabulous and asked, "Why aren't you blogging?! I check your blog a billion times to see what's going on?"
And I poo-pooed her and said that my life is dull and I don't like my job and I haven't felt like blogging.

I went through the same sort of thing that I had done after chatting with Rob; I tried to consider just what the hell was going on with me, and tried to convince myself that something should be done because sooner or later I wouldn't really be able to hide the fact that I'm pretty much miserable 90% of the time, and that even though I'm not writing about how I'm freaking miserable about 90% of the time, eventually everyone's going to figure it out anyway, even if I never see them... because I have the best friends in the world, and that's just what you get when you have friends who really care about you.

SO! One day I was on my way home from work, and I was taking a short-cut through the mall so that I didn't have to walk outside as much, and I passed by an enormous inflatable bubble-gum pink colon. It was made of that same stuff that those jumping fun-houses are made out of, and it had all these fans hooked up to it keeping it puffy and, supposedly inviting. There were these people giving out brochures about colon health, or something, and they were standing by the entrance to the colon asking people to go in and take a look around. And I wanted to go in it and look at what sort of display they would have inside a colon the size of a train car, but I thought, "Why would I choose to go inside a colon. That's idiotic." And I started to laugh a lot, and the brochure people gave me a funny look because I was laughing alone in a public place, but I would hope that they get a few people laughing as they walked by their display because it was absurd in every sense of the word.

But I was laughing because it struck me, finally, exactly why I've been feeling so unlike me. I'm in the colon, whatever that means, and I've gone in there because I thought it would be a good idea, but now I realize that no matter how pink and puffy it looks, it's still a colon. Sooner or later life will shit me out of here, and Things will be Better.

Anyway, I've felt better ever since I've been able to look at my circumstances with some humour, and I'm certain everything will turn out okay. I even seem to be able to enjoy myself at work more now. The idea that this is not a permanent condition has cheered me considerably.

Wow. I just hit enter accidentally and published this post before typing anything. Talk about your ironic post/title combo.

I went out to Ye Aulde Mexican Bar last night, and surprisingly I'm sick today. Or, maybe not so surprisingly as we went around the table giving yea's or nay's about whether we had ever gotten sick from eating there before. Why do I keep going back? Because it's delicious, and the atmosphere is fabulous. Besides, this feels more like a why-did-you-eat-that-many-nachos stomach ache instead of a we-never-wash-our-hands stomach ache. Nacho consumption was inspired in part by catching up with a grad school friend who ran away to Ontario to take a PhD, Deaner. Em, and I try to see him whenever he's in town, and what better way to remember him as he leaves again, than gut-wrenching pain. It's like a haunting memory of grad school compressed into one day.

By my troth, I once wrote a whole eighteen-page essay about how many times "by my troth," or "my troth," was spoken in The Paston Letters and then discussed what it might mean. Memories better left repressed. So, by my troth, I've been doing my best to hang out with friends in my evenings and week-ends because I'm attempting to reverse the damage to my self-esteem that I occasionally experience at work, which, by the way, is improving steadily. Thus far, I've gone with Em to see A Midsummer Night's Dream, at Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, gone on a girl-date -- complete with a trip to the Art Gallery -- with my gal Nana, and rented various terrible movies with Kaz to cheer me up and spend important snuggle time together.

The whole co-worker stress at work is getting better as I feel more confident in my job, and I think they've seen that I'm not an idiot. The days when I have to ask someone how to do every single thing are ending, and I think I'm not really a thorn in anyone's side at the moment. My 3-month review is next week, and I'm debating whether or not I'm nervous or looking forward to it. Probably a combination of the two. I still have days when I feel incompetent and confused, but I'm getting better at figuring out the questions to ask that will actually help me to understand stuff. The human eye is a complicated things, and spectacles aren't exactly easy either. I'd wager that Progressive Lenses have been invented specifically to piss me off.

And that's about what's going on in my life right now. How are you?