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Posts Tagged ‘insomnia’

Long stretches between posts are now commonplace for me.

I learned a new phrase (and concept): uncanny valley.

I love the sound of it tremendously, but I don’t like the meaning. It’s a theory, nothing provable, but certainly it sheds light on the way I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by plastic surgery.

I am glad to know that I can still learn new things. Maybe I’m not hip, that I never knew the concept uncanny valley. The world is too big for any one person to know. We keep chipping away at it, gaining knowledge in pebbles.

I fell away from my writing and into an uncanny valley

I notice that my sleep is very disturbed lately. This is due in part to the fact that I have to wake up every weekday morning at 6:30. I still get up to help support my kids in that transition between home and bus and school. I am happy to do it, but I hate my lack of sleep.

I’ve pretty much given up on cooking. I still clean the few rooms which are not filled floor to ceiling with clutter. I couldn’t even clean when I was in the worst of the pain and immobility.

I still love the laundry. I like my fridge to sparkle white and bright inside. I organize to an extent. But I don’t give a crap about cooking for the most part. I feel so burned out. Maybe this is only since I’ve been injured, maybe longer. I can barely remember a time before this injury.

Instead of my summer schedule when I may wake in the early morning hours and can fall back to sleep until as late as 9 or 10, I wake around 4 am, am up for an hour, then have to wake up at 6:30, but I barely fall back to sleep most nights. I am getting about 4-6 hours of interrupted sleep–that’s it. I’m not too happy until I have my coffee but I can fake it most mornings til then.

When I feel good from good and long rest, I forget that I’ll ever be a victim of my insomnia again; and yet after all these years, it still rears its ugly head.

It’s been 5 months since my initial injury and I’m still not able to do yoga or to bike or swim. It’s been draining, frustrating, painful, disturbing. I am getting better, but I have really bad hours and days and nights. Soon, I hope, soon, I will be back to my old self. I know the sleep will change once I’m not in pain throughout the night. I am seeing a new physical therapist who does a particular kind of work that is unlike most physical therapy. After one session, I was monumentally better, but now my body is fading back into the habit of injury. For the next 3 weeks at least, I will have 2 sessions per week and I am hoping that will turn the tide for a good long while.

This is only the beginning. I need to write here. I hate to have such a long body of text without any images to break it up. I hate to write about the minutiae of my life and subject you to it, though you read by your own free will and I am grateful for your presence.

I will try to do better from now on out. I think my active mind will calm if I write more regularly and I won’t wake up at 4 am thinking the words.

I have so much to tell you.

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IMG_1356

Tweedy

I have only ever had one dog, my baby, Agatha Bean Glatter 1992-2008. She was an 8-week old pup when I got her and I crate-trained, housebroke, and leash-trained her. It wasn’t perfect and she was never great on the leash, but she was good and definitely manageable. We tended to hike exclusively in places where no leash was required and that’s how we rolled; “city” walking wasn’t too important. Also, for her entire life we had a fenced-in yard. Digging was a bit of a problem when she was a pup, but she quickly gave it up.

This one? He is 7 months, a rescue of sorts (he was turned over by his owners from Virginia and shipped north to Massachusetts; not an abandoned or abused dog like many of the “Dixie dogs” that find their way from several Southern (RED) states to our true blue Massachusetts. I am tired of the ignorance that seems to extend from the political climate in the South even into how people care for their pets (or rather don’t care for their pets)—no spaying or neutering, over-breeding of certain types of dogs, abuse.

Anyway, he is getting a bit used to the leash after 4 days. Has been peeing outside fairly successfully. Pooping? Def not an outdoor activity in his mind. Whining in the crate and being let out immediately because the family cannot sleep? Yup. We are instilling a BAD BAD habit.

I don’t know how to get through the feeling that I have an infant again. I hate the feeling of being chained and controlled by HIS needs and schedule. I hate being sleep-deprived. And even though I love him, I need a lot of encouragement to remember that it’s temporary, that sleep does eventually come, that creating a bad, quick-fix habit is no substitute for a few days’ suffering to gain a lifetime of better behavior. Yup, just like babies.

Dog-adoption PPD? I’d say that’s about right.

IMG_1350Who’s a good dog? Not yet. But soon, I hope. Soon.

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I love you too much!

Top 5 Heroin Songs

1. Heroin

2. Lust for Life (Hubby calls it “the happiest song about kicking smack ever written!”)

3. Needle and the Damage Done (not my fave NY song, but what the hey hey my my, it qualifies!)

4. Comfortably Numb (I’m not too fond of this, but it makes the list, OBVIOUSLY)

4.5. Bridge Over Troubled Water/Hey, Jude OKAY, so these aren’t really about smack, but I like the urban myths anyway

5. Honorable Mention: Sister Morphine

Top 5 Reasons I Can’t Sleep

1. itching on bottom of L foot

2. clutter

3. house too small/brain crowded

4. depression

5. went to bed after 11

6. new sheets felt scratchy

7. too hot/too cold

8. cat on bed, cat on head

Top 5 Haunted Things in My House

1. my remote mouse

2. my body

3. cat

Top 5 Reasons to Move out of This House

1. too small

2. on 116

3. on corner of busy road; fear of air pollution from too many cars and shortened life span from stress of traffic noise and bad air

4. 2 cats killed by cars

5. bad basement smell from Day 1 of purchase

6. it’s a ranch

7. it has no character

8. the bedrooms are next to the kitchen

9. hollow doors, not worth replacing considering 1-8

Top 5 Reasons to Stay

1. price

2. most convenient location in the world

3. must clear out clutter if we move

Top 5 Hottest Male Stars of All Time

1. Gary Oldman

2. Paul Newman

3. Javier Bardem

4. DDL

5. DDL in a loin cloth or as Bill the Butcher

6. Johnny Depp, but let’s drop the cigarettes already, Johnny, okay?

7. Anthony Hopkins

8. Heath

9. Leo di Caprio, especially that sex scene from The Beach

10. EWAN!

11. Alan Cumming

Top 5 Numbers of All Time

1. 3

2. 449

3. 25

4. point O O one

5. 225

Top 5 Vegetables

1. sweet potatoes

2. kale

3. that clean, local, nitrate-free bacon

4. some forms of chocolate

5. any perfectly-prepared coffee-blended

Top 5 Vacation Spots

1. Hanalei Bay, Kauai

2. Truro

3. P town

4. Paris

5. Prague

6. Amsterdam and Venice

7. the ocean

8. all the lakes of my childhood

9. Boulder

10. Annecy

11. New Mexico

12. New England

13. not camping

14. almost anywhere with my Hubby

Top 5 Friends

1. women

Top 5 Meals

1. Canada on a farm, long ago, I was 16, maybe 17, in high school, but I remember the peach pie and the homemade bread. And I don’t even like pie.

2. 2 meals at Parisian restaurant run by Greek chef, not sure which arr. I ate there once in 1991 and once in 1992. Around the corner was one of those free-standing Haagan Daaz ice cream stores and I got a chocolate-chocolate chip (cone?). It was SO good, not at all what you get in the pints any more. I really do remember it.

3. my mother’s spaghetti before she started to lose her memory

4. papaya with lime in Hawaii

5. Amsterdam open market

6. trdelnik

Worst Place to Pee EVER

1. darkly-lit hole in the ground (granted there were metal foot plates) when I was on my period behind best meal ever in Paris

Coolest Public Bathroom Experience Ever

1. Prague self-cleaning, automated, public loo (is it environmentally sound with all of that water use? I do not know)

Top 5 Worst Smells

1. the pee of Paris

2. poop of blind dog I took care of for a week in high school when owners were away

3. paper mill

4. driving through Gary, Indiana

5. big cities combo of exhaust and garbage when you’re just grooving around on foot

6. dead things in the woods

7. chemical detergent scents. REALLY? REALLY? Is this what you want to smell like?

8. mildewed clothes

9. pee clothes (I know it’s sad and some people can’t help it, but I do not like it)

10. boy pee vs. girl pee (boy pee is stronger (until menopause) and they get it all over everything. This is one reason why having 2 daughters, as opposed to any sons, works out pretty good for me)

11. cat pee/litter box

It Would Be Impossible To Put Down Top 5 Movies

I do love Rushmore, as you know. And Gangs of New York until the plot falls apart at the end and of course the unfortunate choice of Cameron Diaz.

There Will Be Blood except for Paul Dano. Elizabeth because it is so dramatic and Cate Blanchett is so beautiful and amazing. The Front, which we just saw for the final film of the Woody Allen revival at Amherst Cinema. Unforgiven—totally entertaining. Not a big fan of Spielberg, but I loved Catch Me If You Can for the fun of it. American masterpieces: Hard Time; Five Easy Pieces; Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; A Woman Under the Influence.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The Fisher King.

The Godfather I and II because they are also masterpieces of American cinema. Nostalgia, though I don’t remember it.

Pennies From Heaven and Days of Heaven; Heavenly Creatures (okay, it’s not one of my favorites, but it does have the lovely Kate Winslet and keeps the theme of movie titles with the word heaven in them. And it’s Peter Jackson and very very trippy).

Some of the images from The Fall, especially the opening sequence.

Top 5 Rolling Stones Songs

1. Sweet Virginia

2. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking

3. Loving Cup

I give up already. This shit just got real, yo.

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