... the interraction of opposing forces...

i've been staring at the screen for the last half an hour and after general frustration kicked in went and deleted the drivel i'd eked out on the page. i don't seem to have the words today. i think i've been more pissed off with myself than anything else. i always get most frustrated when there are things i can't do anything about, or things i can't control.

last night i reacted to my inability to articulate my meaning by throwing my phone across the room and spending the following 20 minutes beating at the inside of my skull in utter frustration, after which i had yet another of what has become my typical sleep patterns:

fall asleep.
wake up in the wee hours convinced i'm somewhere else.
spent the following quarter hour or so tossing and turning, reacquainting myself with reality.
finall wake up properly.
fall asleep again and enjoy peaceful, rest until my alarm goes off.

today i woke up in a lobotomised daze. becoming insanely hungry by 10AM didn't help. i'm hungy a lot lately. my weight's back down below 100kg again and every time that happens i wind up having to graze otherwise i stop being able to concentrate unless i eat every 3 bloody hours. now THAT is pissing me off. delaying eating once i start feeling hungry leaves me braindead and i'll sit there on the couch staring at the wall until i manage to get up the willpower to move and find food.

that doesn't explain last night... although i didn't have much for tea last night so it might. i'm losing grip on myself and my self-control has been chipped away over the last few weeks so i'm having more and more difficulty reigning myself in at the moment. i think i know what i have to do about that, but of course i won't be discussing it here. let's just say i'm lucky enough that for once the course of action i'd consider the "easy" is also the one most likely to result in my preferred outcome.

meanwhile, there's work this week so i'm going to see if i can get the halucinations and waking dreams out of the way early so that i can get a decent amount of real sleep.

oh, and it's entirely likely that you'll never know explicitly what the hell i'm talking about here. if i wanted to talk about it i would have already.

how long can i keep this up?

a month ago i was riding the needle on the gauge from tired through to weary. 5 weeks later and it's starting to nudge the red-line of "exhausted". for no sensible reason i can discern i'm pushing myself too hard again and it's getting to the point where i'm starting to lose my cool. no in the "getting hot under the collar and losing my temper" sort of way but in the "it's difficult to be cool, calm and collected when you're swaying on your feet with the blood draining out of your face trying desperately to not pass out until you get home... which won't be for another hour or so" variety.

on the surface of things i can say that
"there's a lot i want to get done" and
"i've made promises that i intend to honour" and
"there never are enough hours in the day"
but if you scratch that surface you'll find
"i've over-extended and over-committed myself" and
"i can't seem to put anything down" and
"i've injured myself, healing is taking a lot of energy and i've not allowed myself the time or physical resources to recover and while i'm completely cognisant of this i'm going to keep burning energy i don't have."

when i noticed that one it no longer surprised me that while i've been eating far more than i usually would over the last week and done very little real exercise i've managed to LOSE weight. ok, the result is good, but really, this means that the chemical energy i need to... you know, heal myself, is coming from what little fat reserves i have left rather than the food i've been cramming down my through which has, instead, been used to keep me moving.

yesterday was a little different. after weather a few nights which have involved a lack of sleep in the last week or so i decided that i'd go out and wear myself out. Rapunzel and i went out for a nice day together - a visit to the Art Gallery, then some shopping in Civic. 4 hours, most of them on my feet. i had to exhaust myself - tire myself out so that i could be sure that i'd sleep. unfortunately this also meant 4 hours of near-constant agony as my knee, leg and lower back protested the abuse. i was about ready for bed by 9PM and when i did finally fall asleep i slept for 7 hours straight. motherfucker did it hurt though.

today i've alternated between "fine" and "falling over". the exercise helped to loosen up my knee, and i'm spending more time walking unaided than with the cane, but i've found that i have a decent energy boost for an hour or so after i eat, then i'm spent again. part of this is the lack of low-GI food in my daytime diet at present, but a lot of it has to do with how quickly i'm burning through the fuel.

meanwhile i'm still running around like a mad chook. i have a 3-day weekend ahead of me which won't include my favourite distraction, so i might actually spend some time bumming around doing very little. the week i spent between jobs came and went too fast. a long weekend won't be enough, but hopefully it'll stave off the eventual collapse. hmm... i'm going to have to tell Work that i'm not going to participate in this weekend's Overtime. it was tempting to say yes, but i have the feeling that it'll just be tooo much.

what i really need to do is say "no" when someone asks whether i want to do something. i managed to bail on going to the pub with the boys. i didn't want to - a couple of beers with M and T would have been great, but half an hour or so out and i knew that one beer and i'd be passing out at the table. i'll have to make it up to them. i seem to have some sort of complex where if i CAN do something... build a computer, chisel the the tiles off a floor, set up a home network... i'll instantly agree and go off and do it... as if the ability to do some thing compells me to do said thing. if i say that i can do something then OBVIOUSLY i have to continually prove it to myself on request.

interestingly, even when i'm dead on my feet i have some sort of compulsion which forces me to keep trying to stand straight and pretend i'm not. it's a little disturbing that after a month and a half i've found that around Rapunzel i'm managing to force myself to stop, shut up and let myself fall over a little. in the three years (on and off) with my previous employer i never really managed that. perhaps that has something to do with Capability - i don't think the previous could have held me up. seriously this girl continues to freak me the fuck out.

of course, come tomorrow i'll be back out there forcing myself to believe that i am in fact unstoppable and in the process grind myself further into the dirt to prove it to myself. either i'll start sleeping properly again and slow down enough to recover, or in another month or so i'll find myself keeled over face first on the floor with a 5'11" form standing over me saying

"You know how you thought you could keep that pace up? Well it turns out: not so much..."

demolitioned man...

it's been a week since my knee decided it didn't want to play any more. on week of near-constant pain and i'm demolished. completely fucking wrecked. last night it all got a bit much and at 5AM i sent an email into work politely advising that due to extreme lack of sleep (why the fuck else do you think i was up at 5 in the fucking morning?) i wouldn't be attending. nice work - a sickie in my first two weeks after starting a new job does NOT look good. still, i'm playing by the philosophy of "well, you've SEEN me hobbling around on my goddamn walking stick all week so you can't really think that i'm faking it or something. i'll have to take that day unpaid? whatever. watch me care."

today's been one of the worst. it's not so much the knee which is hurting anymore. the swelling's way down and i'm starting to get flexibility back. around 40degrees at this time. granted, it's usually closer to 160degrees but WTF? it's a start. it's more the muscles around the knee which have been compensating and are now heartily sick of it. add that the a night where i spent far more time awake than asleep and... i'm in pieces.

i'd actually managed to forget what it was like to live in constant pain. when i was at uni i went for years. YEARS. my back was a shambles and there were times where i couldn't walk more than 50 metres without having to stop and sit down for a minute or so. eventually a nice chinese man fixed it in about 2 hours with needles and electrodes and hot cups (no, seriously - 7 years of back pain gone in 2 visits to the accupuncturist. nice little guy who operates out of Nedlands, Perth. if you're in perth and you need help see this man.) after that sort of thing i would have thought that i could handle a week, but no. i've turned into a fucking pussy. "ooh, my knee hurts! i'm limping around the place!" and so on. my Pain Management just hasn't coped the way it used to. i can't really explain how my Pain Management works. i didn't even know i was doing it until i realised that when i get tired or hungry whatever it is that's broken hurts more than it did earlier. it seems to drain my energy reserves and in return it handles the severity of the sensation.

today, after a night of no sleep it had nothing to draw upon, which is part of the reason i've been so screwed today. on the plus side, i've also been sedentary as hell this week and i've lost half a belt-size. the problem is that i have reasonably little to lose and those reserves are going to be gone awfully soon.

i'm recovering though. i have a lot more strength in my right knee than i did even 2-3 days ago. i can walk unaided, although i'm only doing this around the house at present. i can drive without being in constant agony and i was able to hobble around the shopping centre for about an hour earlier today before i lost the ability to speak English and my communication devolved into tonal grunts. another week and i reckon i'll be back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, although it'll be a month or so before i'll sign off on anything involving extended walking. life and its challenges, i suppose. at least i can now be reasonably certain that it'll all be well and truly good by October...

it's waning raven...

i've never been particularly good at doing the things that are good for me. at the moment it's all about sleep, rest and regeneration. i think it's fair to say that i've been busy. i've been pretty much permanently on the go since late november. there was a brief period in January where i spent any time i had spare lying in bed reading books, but apart from that it's been go go go. while i was overseas the last time i kinda forgot how to sleep, which knocked me around for 3 or 4 weeks until i remembered how again. this means that i got some rest, but didn't slow down the pace of activity any. this last week's been so damn busy that when i try explain it to people i go into oratory hyperspeed, and even then people have to shut up for 12-14 minutes before i get to the end of it all. by the time i'm done with my monologue they're usually sitting there with their mouths open while they process just how much i've been fitting into my days.

not that i'm trying to brag here. i've been busy, and a lot of what i've been up to has been really interesting, even for people who aren't me. the thing is that at some point i know i'm going to crash out and get really sick because my body will decide that enough is enough and pull the pin. it does that on occasion. i'm already feeling the shutdown in my head - the thoughts come slower and less crisp. like they've crawled through treacle and then a sandpit before they get to me. i know that i want to take a break and chill out but then... there are things i "have" to do. i make commitments which get called on. i miscalculate when things need to be done and wind up shoving them into my schedule. and then there are the opportunities which crop up which are too good to miss out on. the next thing i know, i've organised my week through to sunday by tuesday afternoon.

this is taking a fair amount out of me. i've been "tired" for a while, but i'm rapidly moving into the zone of "weary". i'm hoping that i can survive the next 2 and a half weeks. i have a week off. the first week in April. the back of my mind is already looking for ways to fill it with activities it considers productive, which means that i'm fighting a read-guard action so that i can fill it with as little as humanly possible. play a couple of games that have been piling up. read a few books. drink some beer. that sort of thing.

in a week and a half i move, thus negating a chunk of the joy of the coming Easter Long Weekend. a week after that i finish up at the job i've been in since July. at 5PM on March 28 i'm officially free as a bird for 9 days. if pieces keep falling into place the way they have been up until now then maybe, maybe i'll get some rest. maybe, maybe i'll last that long. there's always a price to be paid. i'm just hoping it defers until then.