A friend posted this today which struck a chord:
https://unguardedweb.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/behind-dark-clouds-and-silver-linings/
I'm doing better than him. Mentally at least. But I have a whole host of problems, physical and mental, and every day I run up against blocks that remind me I'm forced to adapt, and in many cases, limit, my life.
There's the daily pills that keep my immune system from collapsing.
There's being audibly wheezing from he stairs to my friend's place after going up and down them twice whilst helping them move out.
There's the constant question in the back of my head, that maybe I have to accept that a mid level 9-5 office job is the best that's sustainable for me mentally, despite how that infurirates me in its own ways.
There's the days when I sit for 2 hours at a train station because I'm in so much pain I can't move to get home and I just have to wait it out
There's learning, long ago, how to get through 2 or 3 days at a time on no sleep, because it happens so regularly I couldn't classify it as sick time and keep a job.
He's right - you just accept it. You have to. You occasionally wonder at all the things you could do if you didn't constantly adjust your life just so you can get through your days without breaking down in some way. But that doesn't stop it from being the case.
I tweet about my cramps
But I sit there, for 2 hours, in the cold and the wet.
Until I can move again.
Showing posts with label Sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sleep. Show all posts
Monday, 15 May 2017
Tuesday, 5 August 2014
The jury in my head
I haven't really know what to do with this blog for ages.
Occasionally I have ideas, but I'm not near a PC to blog them, and by the time I am the idea is gone. The way my thoughts come out is far more random than my presentation of them suggests - a lot of reordering, and editing happens before I post that you don't see, and this means my writing doesn't lend itself to a pen and notepad format. Even for those ideas I do tend to get onto a screen, for most of them I get half way through before realizing that what I've written says nothing like what I want to communicate, I'm in no way happy with it or even willing to accept it as a good effort - again, behind the scenes of this blog is an endless set of draft posts that remain in an unfinished limbo that no matter how many times I return to I can never quite get what I want to say out.
So the blog lies here dead and quiet until something pivotal enough happens I'm compelled to commit something to binary form just to alleviate some of the pressure in my head.
Well tonight is one of those times....
Tonight I'm intentionally staying awake, because the thoughts in my head are so bad that sleeping would only grant them full-colour, stereoscopic natures.
I had a 4hr long nightmare in a series of dreams this afternoon. It wasn't a nightmare in the sense of horror-movie elements of terror and suspense. It was a relatively 'normal' cinematic rendering of the thoughts plaguing my head. The worst thoughts I have, leaving with me the feeling of being trapped, of failing, of not having control, with no escape and being right back where I used to be. Frustrated and unable to make anyone understand how I'm dying inside. This was a nightmare in that it was a representation of my worst fears and experiences, that leaves you with those terrible sensations and feelings all day after waking, you can't shake them; the memories you'd suppressed and left behind, the scenarios you've imagined and suddenly had to live and experience in your dream. And the fact I couldn't wake myself up on it just serves to prove how much I'm struggling with mental control right now.
Right now I'm stone cold terrified of the concept of 12pm.
12pm is the the best culmination of years of trying to find something that can help the runaway trains of thought tearing through my head 24/7. A journey arguably started 6 years ago, and has been in it's most recent iteration for 18 months and counting now. I'm trying. REALLY trying to get some help. Because it's so bad it scares me.
It's hard to explain how much of trial just 1 appointment is in itself because it seems so trivial. There are barely a handful of people who actually understand how severely I have problems pursuing mental healthcare, by virtue of being the ones who have been around long enough, and close enough to me, to see the effects it has on me - the immediate suspicion of their questions, the manipulative line of my responses to test the psychiatrist's intelligence against mine, the violent shaking, sometimes retching, in the waiting room and making it worse by trying to suppress and control it so I can look 'normal' (which is clearly absurd given the entire reason why I'm there, but hell I don't want to actually appear like an uncontrolled raving loon to them do I?!), the hyperventilating on the bus to get to the doctors, the nausea and panic I feel for 3 days solid before my appointment, the bad dreams and insomnia I have for weeks before it, the anger at myself for each and every one of these sensations, that they exist, that they are so ridiculous and counter productive, that they are so necessary and obvious.
And at 12pm I have an appointment with the man who gets to decide whether I'm eligible for drugs to try and help this or now. Whether my symptoms are bad enough. After falling through the system or being refused without actually being told such 3 times recently.
It's not that I want to be on drugs. God, who WANTS to need anti-depressants, or anti-psychotics, or anxiety meds, or any of those options?! For years my healthcare providers and I both agreed that drugs were not the answer for me - the way my mind works and copes with my mood swings means things like anti-depressants and mood stabilizers are pretty much the worst possible option for me.
The reason I'm now asking to consider them, the reason I've pursued treatment repeatedly this time despite numerous setbacks and constantly falling through the gaps of the system, is my current coping mechanisms don't work anymore.
I get memory blanks, I have visual hallucinations that interfere with my ability to do things, I get inexplicably and uncontrollably angry - a kind of unprompted anger I haven't had since I was 17. I find myself so overloaded that the simplest additional stimuli - like a friend on a phone in the same room, makes it impossible for me to focus on the world around me.
These are all problems that developed since my current coping mechanisms stopped being effective in helping me to manage the various bits of crazy I experience.
And the fact of that scares me so badly I'm willing to say: "okay, I need help, I don't know what to do, I can't deal with this, when you're struggling this much with this kind of stuff you're supposed to go seek help so here I am, won't someone please help me do something about this, so slowly, bit by bit, I can maybe get back to a place where I can manage myself?"
But at 12pm, the answer may be no. I'm not saying drugs should be the answer. But I've never found counselling style therapy to be that useful, or CBT, because I tend to be quite aware of my own behaviors and how to recognize their incipient state and how to develop and instigate coping mechanisms to help alleviate them where necessary and by and large, I've already done that And they're not working. I've been told repeatedly I'm not eligible for them anyway. So at this point drugs to forcibly restore some kind of barriers in my mind seems like the option that's left.
And if I get told no, I'll understand. Because they have to draw the line somewhere, because I'll have gone through that process of assessment and the people qualified to make such a judgement will have done their jobs and appraised me accordingly.
But then, I'm habitually bad at emphasizing the severity of my medical situations. Digestive pain to me that I just accept and deal with because its a daily occurrence would probably have someone not used to it in tears and considering A&E. These mental symptoms have been there in increasingly worse states for approaching 2 years now. So even with the failing coping mechanisms, I've just got used to them.
And objectively, I go to work, I eat, I maintain social relationships, I didn't come to them through the A&E psych team, I haven't been sectioned, and they have to prioritize, so I understand.
Subjectively I'm just a good liar, who puts up a great front because most of my life involves appearing in complete control of any situation. Without a serious alternative, its saying "you're falling apart inside, you're hallucinating, you are probably going to get progressively worse or it might blow over in another few years, but we wont or can't help you. You are in fact, on your own, you have to deal with this without professional help." And that raises a further problem beyond the immediate repercussions in that it's likely to create an association in my mind of "okay, when you need help you ask for it, and you expect it to be given one way or another, but it wont, so there's no point in asking, no matter what happens in future."
I really wish I wasn't good at putting up a front. Because its one of those horrible situations where because I'm trying, and objectively having partial success, it in fact works against me. Did you ever wish you weren't the A-student, because then you wouldn't have to get A's all the time? If I could lose that constant holding back of the worst of it, if I attacked someone, or myself, or if I just ran off till someone came looking, or climbed into a dark comforting crawlspace and refused to come out, then they'd say "you're sick, you need help, come with us."
...But for the next 8 hours, I just have to hope that my sleep logs, the mood diaries, writing down all the voices in my head is enough to justify not having to be on my own
N.B. By 'on my own' I am not ignoring my support network of friends etc. I know you are there. You are part of the coping mechanisms that no longer fully function because things are worse than you can help me these days. By 'on my own' I mean without professional help. I mean stuck with the strategies and coping mechanisms I devise that certainly involve you, but are no longer sufficient.
Occasionally I have ideas, but I'm not near a PC to blog them, and by the time I am the idea is gone. The way my thoughts come out is far more random than my presentation of them suggests - a lot of reordering, and editing happens before I post that you don't see, and this means my writing doesn't lend itself to a pen and notepad format. Even for those ideas I do tend to get onto a screen, for most of them I get half way through before realizing that what I've written says nothing like what I want to communicate, I'm in no way happy with it or even willing to accept it as a good effort - again, behind the scenes of this blog is an endless set of draft posts that remain in an unfinished limbo that no matter how many times I return to I can never quite get what I want to say out.
So the blog lies here dead and quiet until something pivotal enough happens I'm compelled to commit something to binary form just to alleviate some of the pressure in my head.
Well tonight is one of those times....
Tonight I'm intentionally staying awake, because the thoughts in my head are so bad that sleeping would only grant them full-colour, stereoscopic natures.
I had a 4hr long nightmare in a series of dreams this afternoon. It wasn't a nightmare in the sense of horror-movie elements of terror and suspense. It was a relatively 'normal' cinematic rendering of the thoughts plaguing my head. The worst thoughts I have, leaving with me the feeling of being trapped, of failing, of not having control, with no escape and being right back where I used to be. Frustrated and unable to make anyone understand how I'm dying inside. This was a nightmare in that it was a representation of my worst fears and experiences, that leaves you with those terrible sensations and feelings all day after waking, you can't shake them; the memories you'd suppressed and left behind, the scenarios you've imagined and suddenly had to live and experience in your dream. And the fact I couldn't wake myself up on it just serves to prove how much I'm struggling with mental control right now.
Right now I'm stone cold terrified of the concept of 12pm.
12pm is the the best culmination of years of trying to find something that can help the runaway trains of thought tearing through my head 24/7. A journey arguably started 6 years ago, and has been in it's most recent iteration for 18 months and counting now. I'm trying. REALLY trying to get some help. Because it's so bad it scares me.
It's hard to explain how much of trial just 1 appointment is in itself because it seems so trivial. There are barely a handful of people who actually understand how severely I have problems pursuing mental healthcare, by virtue of being the ones who have been around long enough, and close enough to me, to see the effects it has on me - the immediate suspicion of their questions, the manipulative line of my responses to test the psychiatrist's intelligence against mine, the violent shaking, sometimes retching, in the waiting room and making it worse by trying to suppress and control it so I can look 'normal' (which is clearly absurd given the entire reason why I'm there, but hell I don't want to actually appear like an uncontrolled raving loon to them do I?!), the hyperventilating on the bus to get to the doctors, the nausea and panic I feel for 3 days solid before my appointment, the bad dreams and insomnia I have for weeks before it, the anger at myself for each and every one of these sensations, that they exist, that they are so ridiculous and counter productive, that they are so necessary and obvious.
And at 12pm I have an appointment with the man who gets to decide whether I'm eligible for drugs to try and help this or now. Whether my symptoms are bad enough. After falling through the system or being refused without actually being told such 3 times recently.
It's not that I want to be on drugs. God, who WANTS to need anti-depressants, or anti-psychotics, or anxiety meds, or any of those options?! For years my healthcare providers and I both agreed that drugs were not the answer for me - the way my mind works and copes with my mood swings means things like anti-depressants and mood stabilizers are pretty much the worst possible option for me.
The reason I'm now asking to consider them, the reason I've pursued treatment repeatedly this time despite numerous setbacks and constantly falling through the gaps of the system, is my current coping mechanisms don't work anymore.
I get memory blanks, I have visual hallucinations that interfere with my ability to do things, I get inexplicably and uncontrollably angry - a kind of unprompted anger I haven't had since I was 17. I find myself so overloaded that the simplest additional stimuli - like a friend on a phone in the same room, makes it impossible for me to focus on the world around me.
These are all problems that developed since my current coping mechanisms stopped being effective in helping me to manage the various bits of crazy I experience.
And the fact of that scares me so badly I'm willing to say: "okay, I need help, I don't know what to do, I can't deal with this, when you're struggling this much with this kind of stuff you're supposed to go seek help so here I am, won't someone please help me do something about this, so slowly, bit by bit, I can maybe get back to a place where I can manage myself?"
But at 12pm, the answer may be no. I'm not saying drugs should be the answer. But I've never found counselling style therapy to be that useful, or CBT, because I tend to be quite aware of my own behaviors and how to recognize their incipient state and how to develop and instigate coping mechanisms to help alleviate them where necessary and by and large, I've already done that And they're not working. I've been told repeatedly I'm not eligible for them anyway. So at this point drugs to forcibly restore some kind of barriers in my mind seems like the option that's left.
And if I get told no, I'll understand. Because they have to draw the line somewhere, because I'll have gone through that process of assessment and the people qualified to make such a judgement will have done their jobs and appraised me accordingly.
But then, I'm habitually bad at emphasizing the severity of my medical situations. Digestive pain to me that I just accept and deal with because its a daily occurrence would probably have someone not used to it in tears and considering A&E. These mental symptoms have been there in increasingly worse states for approaching 2 years now. So even with the failing coping mechanisms, I've just got used to them.
And objectively, I go to work, I eat, I maintain social relationships, I didn't come to them through the A&E psych team, I haven't been sectioned, and they have to prioritize, so I understand.
Subjectively I'm just a good liar, who puts up a great front because most of my life involves appearing in complete control of any situation. Without a serious alternative, its saying "you're falling apart inside, you're hallucinating, you are probably going to get progressively worse or it might blow over in another few years, but we wont or can't help you. You are in fact, on your own, you have to deal with this without professional help." And that raises a further problem beyond the immediate repercussions in that it's likely to create an association in my mind of "okay, when you need help you ask for it, and you expect it to be given one way or another, but it wont, so there's no point in asking, no matter what happens in future."
I really wish I wasn't good at putting up a front. Because its one of those horrible situations where because I'm trying, and objectively having partial success, it in fact works against me. Did you ever wish you weren't the A-student, because then you wouldn't have to get A's all the time? If I could lose that constant holding back of the worst of it, if I attacked someone, or myself, or if I just ran off till someone came looking, or climbed into a dark comforting crawlspace and refused to come out, then they'd say "you're sick, you need help, come with us."
...But for the next 8 hours, I just have to hope that my sleep logs, the mood diaries, writing down all the voices in my head is enough to justify not having to be on my own
N.B. By 'on my own' I am not ignoring my support network of friends etc. I know you are there. You are part of the coping mechanisms that no longer fully function because things are worse than you can help me these days. By 'on my own' I mean without professional help. I mean stuck with the strategies and coping mechanisms I devise that certainly involve you, but are no longer sufficient.
Tuesday, 28 January 2014
Turn it off...
So I have this wierd thing about when I sleep. - I sort of exist on 3 levels while I sleep.
There is dream-me. The me that completely believes in the dreamland it inhabits and doesn't argue with whatever quirks of dreamlogic choose to present itself because of course it's completely natural than bunnies suddenly turn into zombies or whatever.
Then above that there is a god-me, that sees and controls everything within the dream world and is completely aware of the fact that it's a dream. It's why I don't have a lot of nightmares. 90% of the time if something is about to turn nightmarish, god-me can instantly create a convenient door to elsewhere, or put a wall in front of oncoming charging zombie bunnies or whatever it is, and dream-me will instantly understand what has happened and use said door to escape into a completely different dream. I can, if I so choose, exercise almost total control over my dreams. In practice, I tend not to, just because otherwise it gets kind of dull and boring when you force and dictate every aspect of the environment and narrative every single night. I tend to let dreams run naturally, unless I want to avoid a nightmare, or find a cute boy in my dream and decide I now want to have sex with him in my dream. And sometimes this ability to control my dreams is hampered if im particuarly stressed or my head is feeling particuarly crazy that night (this has admittedly, been an increasing problem the last few months).
And then a layer above all of this, is sleep-me. Except that's a bad name for it. It's a me that is very well aware that it's asleep, and that it's dreaming (or even if I'm not dreaming sleep-me still knows it's asleep). It's the me that when I wake shifts to conscious me. But when I'm asleep, that stream of consciousness is still there for me. It overruns everything. This me doesn't have regulate breathing or anything, just as conscious me doesn't. But it's far more aware of what's going on than it should be. Dream-me is very much sleeping, it has no ability to turn my dreams on or off, or control my awareness, it is simply a god architect that controls the sandbox that dream-me plays in. Sleep-me knows how much time it slept. It knows how close it is to waking up or how long since it fell asleep. I know when dawn happens. If things go horribly wrong and I genuinely do start having nightmares, sleep-me simply says "wake up", and my eyes open. This sounds like a great ability. And being able to avoid nightmares is. The rest of it is horrible.
I know how much time I slept. Because I was thinking throughout it. I get some rest from my body shutting down a lot of externally focussed processes whilst I sleep, but I'm not unconscious; my brain doesn't actually switch off. So that period of my day (night, whatever) that is supposed to be respite, is only a sensation of being halfway there. I'm deeper out of it than the equivalent of lying on my bed for several hours with my eyes shut, but my brain hasn't shut off, that stream of consciousness never really stops.
I've had this 3 layered sleep-consciousness ever since I can remember, which is to about age 6, before that my memory gets rather patchy unless it tends to be about school friends, and I also know from my parents that until about age 3 or 4 I slept fine, in fact getting me to do anything but sleep was an issue! Maybe I did have this even then, but I have no memory of it and it certainly doesn't seem to have affected my sleeping like it has since. I remember lying in the bed at 6 years old, struggling to get to sleep, and learning to control my dreams when I did. And I can remember the bed I did this in at 7, 8, 9. 10 years old (I moved a lot, so different beds for each year, handy for marking things like this at least).
Like I've said before, I seemed to fundamentally miss the day at evolutionary school where they taught you how to shut off your brain during sleep. There are admittedly times when it does shut off, because of large amounts of alcohol (yeah depressants will do that!); because of sheer, unavoidable exhaustion (and remember this is me, so that usually means being up for 3/4 days straight); and occasionally when it is happy and peaceful because I'm sleeping next to someone I love (alas it doesn't do it every night I sleep next to them, but occasionally it does and that's the best sleep ever and just makes me love them even more cause I sleep smiling). But the vast majorty of the time, I'm all too aware of the fact that I'm sleeping and it's not just that I wish I knew how to stop this, I wish I knew WHY my brain does this, and has for certainly the vast majority of my life.
Sunday, 19 January 2014
I guess I'll stay awake then.
I'm lonely.
Everything tonight has felt a little off somehow, and I'm not sure why. It's not that things were wrong. Like everything was right, but was somehow soured a little.
I guess I've been in suspense all day and I still don't know where I stand.
I think maybe my subconscious is trying to preemptively shut back down my emotional response in preparation, but it doesn't know how long it has. And even if it did, it seemingly can't decide if it might as well start now or not. I don't know why and no conscious thought process seems to stop or change that.
Of course I'm not sleeping. I get so worried and frustrated with sleep these days. I don't even have the option of knocking myself out. I've tried for years to get pills or something but no doctor will give me anything. None of the sleep hygiene stuff works. Anything that does affect me leaves me out of it for days. I dread bedtime now and that makes the problem worse. What I wouldn't give just for the though of a little silence to look forward to. For all my problems the thing I feel most broken on, most like I failed at being a human being, most like everyone else got something and I missed school that day, is sleep.
Even here, I'm not sleeping easy, and I'm not sleeping well, I've been having bad dreams all week. Normally I'd wake from these and remember a boy hugging me smile and drift back to sleep with new dreams. Now that's not happening. The lies in my head won't go away even though I know they shouldn't be there and they keep cropping up. Like at night, so I can't think of that boy and smile, all I remember is the fake bad stuff that I put in my own head to start with so when i fall back asleep, I'm fearful and paranoid and insecure and my dreams run back to that.
It's better to be here with this, but I still don't sleep, hear voices, have bad dreams, zone out. Just what passes for normal now.
6 months... How am I gonna cope with that. Same way I do every night I guess pinky. Smile and lie and pray you can keep going another day on nothing. I hope it goes away after that. I hope I can eventually send half of this to some distant corner of my head marked the past and go back to what I was, which wasn't great by any means, but it was so much better than this. I'm not that hopeful though. Which is scary. I don't wanna get stuck like this.
*sigh* ...I'm never gonna get to finish that conversation am I?
The formatting via the blogger app is terrible.
Friday, 8 November 2013
Macbeth hath murdered sleep, and so Macbeth shall sleep no more.
Yes, I know that's not the word for word quote.
Some of my friends and I have a running joke
that we were SS officers in a past life, who somehow avoided being reincarnated
into dung beetles, and so the universe punishes us constantly in myriad other
ways.
I've decided another of my past lives was
Macbeth. It would explain the whole not sleeping thing.
I'm notorious for not sleeping well.
Basically my body clock doesn't work properly. Most people's reset when
necessary, or struggle to keep going past the usual circadian cycle. Most
people's reset every night, the standard circadian rhythm (i.e. your internal
body clock) is usually a little over 25h. We operate a 24h diurnal cycle
so most people's just reset a little every night. It's usually quite easy
for people to reset their body clocks. It's how jet lag works. It's
also very simple for most people to shorten their circadian rhythm given they
tend to do it every night. This is why travelling east and adjusting for jetlag
is a lot easier than travelling west - you just go to bed earlier rather than
having to stay up late.
My body clock has very little ability to
adjust it's 0-hour starting position. It's pretty much set around 4am UK
time. Sure, some nights I'm tired and it's 3am and some nights I'm up
late and it's 6am, but it's more or less set around 4am. With enough
determination and access to appropriate diurnal stimuli (i.e. what time
the sun rises, streetlights being on etc), I can move it about an hour or two
in either direction. This means I can cope with the clocks changing
for summer time, though it takes me about 3-4 weeks to really get used to it from
a sleep pattern perspective. My body clock doesn't adjust that well as I
move around the world either. This means on the US East Coast, 2300
ET hits and I'm pretty much done and ready for bed (which everyone just
takes as yet more proof that I was in fact, born in the wrong country).
When I go to the West Coast, I force it to a little, but my body very
obviously still starts to wind down around 2130/2200 local time. When I
travel to Malaysia, it's not just a simple case of mid-afternoon slump for me;
I find it nigh on impossible to keep awake in afternoons, no matter how bright
the sun may be. Luckily being equatorial/tropical in climate things like
siestas are quite acceptable there, and afternoons are often more sedentary due
to the heat, especially in the dry season. I will happily find myself up
all night and into the morning in Malaysia with no problems
whatsoever. In the US I'm a morning person because I naturally wake up
rested then. In Malaysia I'm morning person because that's evening and
time to go out as far as my body is concerned.
The other major sleep issue I have, is that
probably by decades of experience (I've had the above issue with sleep times
since I can remember as a child) I'm used to running on empty.
Practicalities of living in the UK means I rarely get full opportunity to let
my body do what it likes with sleep. Whilst the theatre industry helped
because start times are generally not 9am in the morning, there's inevitably
something that needs doing, a chore I need to run, which I have to run before
work during the day because at 1am when i finish a show those places aren't
open. I'm permanently tired. And my body is used in a state of
permanent sleep deprivation, to greater or lesser degrees as it varies
throughout any given period of time. I'll go out with friends and we'll
be out all night and the next day they are wrecked. And I'm tired, but
I'll go shopping, I'll meet my parents for lunch, I'll go to work, I'll do all
that, be up for 48h, and I will STILL not get to sleep until around 4am the
next morning. My body has stopped recognising sleep debt, tiredness, and
sleep deprivation as indicators that something is wrong. I can go to bed,
and feel tired, but my body just won't sleep despite the fact it
clearly needs to. It's just desensitized to the normal factors and
warning signs.
Occasionally, I get insomnia on top of all
this. My body stays up for around 3 days straight. On the third
day, I start to be notably sleep deprived. Maintaining focus in a 1 on 1
conversation in a quiet room is difficult. My muscles get a very specific
type of ache that tells me they've been going for too long and my body's
cannibalizing them for energy. My body either can't eat and will only
accept about 500kcal throughout the day, or it's desperate for energy because
it's in overdrive so much with no rest, and I'll eat about 5000kcal to get me
through the day. What's concerning about this, is not the fact that it
happens, it's the fact it happens regularly enough that I can highlight specific
symptoms.
All this, means sleep is one hell of an issue
for me. I've ranted previously about how getting to sleep just doesn't
work for me. My brain simply won't ever shut off. The thoughts in
my head during the day just coalesce into more tangible dreams at
night and continue going. Staying asleep isn't too much of an issue for
me thankfully. Sure, I often wake up in the middle of the night, but I
turn over and fall back asleep. It's just my body doesn't go to
sleep properly. And I have severe trouble getting up. I mean
with enough determination and willpower (i.e. I have to go to work and get
paid), I can just about do it, just like anyone can get up early when they
really have to, but it's very obvious that my body doesn't start to ramp up the
gears like most people do after waking up. I have problems eating
breakfast without causing horrific stomach cramps. Which them means I'm
low on blood sugar all morning making me even worse. My mental processes
obviously don't function properly. I've lost count of the number of times
I've almost been run over by a bus because it simply wasn't there as far as my
brain was concerned. It's not that I wasn't looking, or that it was in my
blind spot, my optical processes just didn't process the existence of traffic
on the road, or forgot that they move and didnt' factor in momentum
accordingly. Techies aren't designed for getting up in the morning, but
we can do it, load-ins or events can require very early starts and you just get
on and do it. EVERYONE is tired. It's why a good crew
chief/production manager makes sure there is coffee around 10am.
What techies as a whole are not good at, and
bearing in mind all the above, what I'm really not good at, is
9-5hours. Regularly getting up early and having to function and function
well. A few days, sure. Even for 2 weeks straight in a mad run up
to opening night of a production. But day in, day out, no.
I'm currently averaging 3h52m sleep per night
over the last 7 days and trying to do an office job. It's not that I
don't want to sleep. It's not that I don't try. I go to the gym for
2h each night till I'm EXHAUSTED so I make sure I get about 3.5-4h each
night instead of 2-3h. Tell me in what world that is sustainable.
And drugs aren't an option. Sedatives have one of two effects on me: they
make me tired, but not actually sleep, exacerbating the problem; or they have
to be of such a strength that I'm either knocked out or feeling groggy for
days. Eventually after long enough I sort of pass out in a rather
unexpected narcoleptic manner and sleep for between 36-48h. The best I
can do is hope and pray that with my current job, that falls on a Friday
evening.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
By tomorrow morning I'll have this thing beat.
Points for reference.
My mind is currently in a very specific haze where it loses all ability to process any higher level thoughts. Not because those thoughts are too trying or oppressive or anything, it just loses the ability to do it. Like trying to do complex tasks when you're drunk for example (though actually, i'm pretty competent at that particular skill).
This haze only comes about in certain circumstances - basically when my brain effectively completely shuts down without warning and reboots itself. It takes a good few days to get itself back to fully functional each time. When I'm less crazy, this is usually characterized by my body without warning or indication crashing out for 18 - 36 hours at a time, usually causing me to miss work without notifying them which as you can imagine is all kinds of fun to explain afterwards.
Unfortunately, I'm beyond batshit crazy these days. Crashing out still forms a part of the circumstances, but this particular instance was also characterized by a 3 hour memory blank in my head. It's a memory blank that feels very much different to the block of absence of awareness you get from sleep. I can't remember anything from 3pm - 6pm today. I appear to have tweeted during that time, so I was obviously awake. To be honest I can't remember anything until 11.30pm. But there's a good block of a few hours that definitely does feel like the absence of awareness that happens during sleep I mentioned above. And my activities I can track using computer logs dry up around 5.30pm, so I'm guessing not long after I crashed out. I remember being at my friends house at 2.30pm, hence why I've managed to pin down the memory blank down to 3pm - 6pm.
I've managed to work out a few things about my mindset during these hours. I was clearly going very very crazy inside my head. The sort of crazy that makes me curl up as tight as possible it hurts so much. The sort of crazy that leaves me crying, as I have done at several points in the last 4 days. My ability to deal with reality completely broke down, and when this happens I know what the safest place my mind considers is. A small, warm, dark place. The smaller, and more minimalist the space, the better. So I will curl myself up into a tight ball, pressed up against a wall so hard it hurts my back. Or under a desk space. Or bathrooms. Bathrooms are generally the smallest and least furnished rooms in a house. Often with no natural light sources especially if you live in a city. And they have a lock on them. I can shut the world out and not let anything in I don't want to deal with. I find the dark comforting too. Most people don't, but what I don't see, I don't have to accept as part of my reality. The darkness helps to delineate a firm boundary wherein I define my reality. The darker the better. Pitch black so you can't see your hand in front of your face. And I have exceptionally good night vision so this requires blocking out practically all light that could possibly enter the space. The place I create for myself is small and defensible. It has virtually nothing beyond myself in it, and so nothing else that I need to deal with on any level. Within this space there are no distractions from just me, myself and I, so I can fully devote myself to fighting the monsters that rage inside my head. Chris could attest to this, he's seen me scramble across the room in fear driving myself into the smallest possible space in a bid to feel safe when my crazy has been in full overdrive. It terrified the crap out of him.
At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. Except the problem is, when I'm that crazy, my ability to comprehend and process reality has become so dysfunctional, that I have to reduce my concept of reality to this artificial, practically non-existent state, so equally, my ability to deal with the thoughts in my head, even then, is still so poor that eventually my head just BSOD's, and I crash out wherever I happen to be,
Which is how I came to find myself, at 11.30pm tonight, on the floor in the corner of my bedroom up against the door, the lights switched off, and the door firmly locked (luckily for occasions like this, my bedroom has a lock on it, so I didn't end up commandeering the bathroom for the entire evening mysteriously), my head in a haze that immediately told me it wasn't working properly, and a distinct feeling that some of the missing time that had passed was not just because I was unconscious. Given this was a Monday night, I was supposed to be running Exalted, which means that the front door (which my bedroom is right next to) was opened and shut at least 5 or so times, my phone rang, people probably knocked on my door; when I crash, I really crash, and not even the fires of hell will wake me (seriously I've slept through neighbours' houses in the same block being on fire, engines outside with sirens blaring, firemen all over my house checking for damage etc). I did not notice a thing.
Worst of all in all this, the random memory blanks I'd been having for about 2 months up until 4 weeks ago had pretty much stopped. It was one of the few improvements in my crazy recently. Then again, maybe not so improved.
This also took me 1h36 minutes to write. Writing is HARD when your thought processes simply don't aren't operating.
My mind is currently in a very specific haze where it loses all ability to process any higher level thoughts. Not because those thoughts are too trying or oppressive or anything, it just loses the ability to do it. Like trying to do complex tasks when you're drunk for example (though actually, i'm pretty competent at that particular skill).
This haze only comes about in certain circumstances - basically when my brain effectively completely shuts down without warning and reboots itself. It takes a good few days to get itself back to fully functional each time. When I'm less crazy, this is usually characterized by my body without warning or indication crashing out for 18 - 36 hours at a time, usually causing me to miss work without notifying them which as you can imagine is all kinds of fun to explain afterwards.
Unfortunately, I'm beyond batshit crazy these days. Crashing out still forms a part of the circumstances, but this particular instance was also characterized by a 3 hour memory blank in my head. It's a memory blank that feels very much different to the block of absence of awareness you get from sleep. I can't remember anything from 3pm - 6pm today. I appear to have tweeted during that time, so I was obviously awake. To be honest I can't remember anything until 11.30pm. But there's a good block of a few hours that definitely does feel like the absence of awareness that happens during sleep I mentioned above. And my activities I can track using computer logs dry up around 5.30pm, so I'm guessing not long after I crashed out. I remember being at my friends house at 2.30pm, hence why I've managed to pin down the memory blank down to 3pm - 6pm.
I've managed to work out a few things about my mindset during these hours. I was clearly going very very crazy inside my head. The sort of crazy that makes me curl up as tight as possible it hurts so much. The sort of crazy that leaves me crying, as I have done at several points in the last 4 days. My ability to deal with reality completely broke down, and when this happens I know what the safest place my mind considers is. A small, warm, dark place. The smaller, and more minimalist the space, the better. So I will curl myself up into a tight ball, pressed up against a wall so hard it hurts my back. Or under a desk space. Or bathrooms. Bathrooms are generally the smallest and least furnished rooms in a house. Often with no natural light sources especially if you live in a city. And they have a lock on them. I can shut the world out and not let anything in I don't want to deal with. I find the dark comforting too. Most people don't, but what I don't see, I don't have to accept as part of my reality. The darkness helps to delineate a firm boundary wherein I define my reality. The darker the better. Pitch black so you can't see your hand in front of your face. And I have exceptionally good night vision so this requires blocking out practically all light that could possibly enter the space. The place I create for myself is small and defensible. It has virtually nothing beyond myself in it, and so nothing else that I need to deal with on any level. Within this space there are no distractions from just me, myself and I, so I can fully devote myself to fighting the monsters that rage inside my head. Chris could attest to this, he's seen me scramble across the room in fear driving myself into the smallest possible space in a bid to feel safe when my crazy has been in full overdrive. It terrified the crap out of him.
At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. Except the problem is, when I'm that crazy, my ability to comprehend and process reality has become so dysfunctional, that I have to reduce my concept of reality to this artificial, practically non-existent state, so equally, my ability to deal with the thoughts in my head, even then, is still so poor that eventually my head just BSOD's, and I crash out wherever I happen to be,
Which is how I came to find myself, at 11.30pm tonight, on the floor in the corner of my bedroom up against the door, the lights switched off, and the door firmly locked (luckily for occasions like this, my bedroom has a lock on it, so I didn't end up commandeering the bathroom for the entire evening mysteriously), my head in a haze that immediately told me it wasn't working properly, and a distinct feeling that some of the missing time that had passed was not just because I was unconscious. Given this was a Monday night, I was supposed to be running Exalted, which means that the front door (which my bedroom is right next to) was opened and shut at least 5 or so times, my phone rang, people probably knocked on my door; when I crash, I really crash, and not even the fires of hell will wake me (seriously I've slept through neighbours' houses in the same block being on fire, engines outside with sirens blaring, firemen all over my house checking for damage etc). I did not notice a thing.
Worst of all in all this, the random memory blanks I'd been having for about 2 months up until 4 weeks ago had pretty much stopped. It was one of the few improvements in my crazy recently. Then again, maybe not so improved.
This also took me 1h36 minutes to write. Writing is HARD when your thought processes simply don't aren't operating.
Wednesday, 27 March 2013
Murdering Sleep
A twitter rant I posted the other night regarding my sleep...
You know what I hate most about being tired? This whole getting-to-sleep thing. It's supremely time consuming and I'm crap at it :(
Unless I'm pass out style drunk it takes me at least 2 - 3 hours to get to sleep. Every single night. Since I was 12.
It doesn't matter where I am, how tired I am, what time it is, what side I sleep on, I close my eyes and my brain just doesn't turn off.
I've tried music, reading, meditation, breathing techniques, counting sheep, none of it works.
Hell even sleeping pills don't seem to work on me properly half the time.
I know other people have problems sleeping, but 2 - 3 hours just to get to sleep every night for 14+ years?
It feels like everyone else learnt this ability and I somehow just missed it.
Like how I don't walk right. Somehow it just came out wrong in me and it's too late to really do anything about it now.
I don't understand how everyone else can sleep so easily and sometimes I want to practically cry about that it's so bad.
I just want to be able to sleep properly. One night every 2 weeks even.
At least then maybe I wouldn't feel going to bed was such a battle. That at least once every 14 days I could sleep right.
And I'd have that to look forward to. But somehow, I'm broken. Again.
Monday night/daytime I actually slept about 12 hours, including a solid period of 8 uninterrupted hours. This is the first time I've done this in over a month. |In fact over the last month I've been averaging less than 3 hours sleep a night and the most I'd had in one 24h period was 5 hours. Of course the 12 hours were completely full of bad dreams but at least some kind of proper sleep was something. And then naturally Tuesday night I was wide awake at 5am and unable to sleep again.
And yes, I've been to the doctors, I've told them about this, I've told them I work with high voltage electricity and a month's severe sleep deprivation (relatively speaking by my standards, technically I'm probably always sleep deprived given how bad/absent my 'normal' sleep patterns are) is having noticeable effects on my ability to do things, reaction times, thought processes etc. They refused to do anything about it. Well technically they told me to come back in 2 weeks (this already being 2 weeks since I first went to them with the problem). So I went to book an appointment. The doctor has no appointments before 4pm for the whole of April. I start work at 4.30pm each day. I love the NHS, but I really hate my healthcare at times, it's a constant battle against the multitude of ways in which I try to seek some actual help. And people wonder why I hate going to the doctors.
You know what I hate most about being tired? This whole getting-to-sleep thing. It's supremely time consuming and I'm crap at it :(
Unless I'm pass out style drunk it takes me at least 2 - 3 hours to get to sleep. Every single night. Since I was 12.
It doesn't matter where I am, how tired I am, what time it is, what side I sleep on, I close my eyes and my brain just doesn't turn off.
I've tried music, reading, meditation, breathing techniques, counting sheep, none of it works.
Hell even sleeping pills don't seem to work on me properly half the time.
I know other people have problems sleeping, but 2 - 3 hours just to get to sleep every night for 14+ years?
It feels like everyone else learnt this ability and I somehow just missed it.
Like how I don't walk right. Somehow it just came out wrong in me and it's too late to really do anything about it now.
I don't understand how everyone else can sleep so easily and sometimes I want to practically cry about that it's so bad.
I just want to be able to sleep properly. One night every 2 weeks even.
At least then maybe I wouldn't feel going to bed was such a battle. That at least once every 14 days I could sleep right.
And I'd have that to look forward to. But somehow, I'm broken. Again.
Monday night/daytime I actually slept about 12 hours, including a solid period of 8 uninterrupted hours. This is the first time I've done this in over a month. |In fact over the last month I've been averaging less than 3 hours sleep a night and the most I'd had in one 24h period was 5 hours. Of course the 12 hours were completely full of bad dreams but at least some kind of proper sleep was something. And then naturally Tuesday night I was wide awake at 5am and unable to sleep again.
And yes, I've been to the doctors, I've told them about this, I've told them I work with high voltage electricity and a month's severe sleep deprivation (relatively speaking by my standards, technically I'm probably always sleep deprived given how bad/absent my 'normal' sleep patterns are) is having noticeable effects on my ability to do things, reaction times, thought processes etc. They refused to do anything about it. Well technically they told me to come back in 2 weeks (this already being 2 weeks since I first went to them with the problem). So I went to book an appointment. The doctor has no appointments before 4pm for the whole of April. I start work at 4.30pm each day. I love the NHS, but I really hate my healthcare at times, it's a constant battle against the multitude of ways in which I try to seek some actual help. And people wonder why I hate going to the doctors.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
The tigers come at night.
One day, I'm going to make a bed. And this bed shall have a motor in it. And the motor shall cause the bed to vibrate. Kind of similar to those massage-vibrating beds you get in tacky roadside motels in the US that make the sound of pneumatic drill for 30 seconds per 25c. Except mine will obviously be quieter, and the vibration will be only slight, and also somewhat irregular.
There is method to my madness.
I have terrible troubles sleeping. Always have done, except before I was 3, when I slept permanently. But since 3, I don't sleep well. Unless I'm exhausted to the point I can't actually hold myself standing up, it takes me about 2 hours of lying in bed, rolling around and trying to get comfortable and not overheat, to shut my mind up and fall asleep. This doesn't really change if I'm with Chris. And in fact it's then more infuriating listening to him be asleep for 2 hours whilst I'm not. Chris is one of those people who can fall asleep in 5 minutes just by getting into bed. I wake up easier and much much quicker when next to Chris, but getting to sleep is unaffected.
My sleep pattern also tends to change every 2 weeks or so. I've had every pattern imaginable My 'standard', insofar as I can be said to have such, is go to bed 0400 - 0600, get up 1200 - 1400, and that generally suits me fine, except the world doesn't work like this. By the time you're up and showered and breakfasted (lunchded), the call centres and shops in the UK are closing up, especially by the time you got the bus into town to go to them. Jobs, also, do not tend to work like this, and so I spent most of my life in a state of perpetual sleep deprivation with an average 4 hours sleep a night, and then crash out at weekends. Every once in a while, I'll sleep for 36 hours, often missing days of work as a result. Luckily that only tends to happen once every 3-4 months, so it's not too bad, but still. Other sleep patterns I've had include a feeling of complete draining exhaustion just to get up and get a cup of tea before going back to bed and sleeping most of the week; sleeping one day on, one day off; sleeping only every third day; multiple naps required per day, sleep only giving me energy enough for approx 3 hours of awakening; reverse sleep schedules so that I sleep 0900/1000 - 2000ish and so forth...
What's odd, is that when I need to sleep, I'm practically narcoleptic, and no activity, stimulant, or urgent need, beyond that of survival reflex and adrenaline, can keep me awake, and even so, the adrenaline will only keep me up so long as its freshly pumping through my system; 15 minutes later I'll be collapsing again.
But despite all these sleeping issues, I have never had a problem sleeping on planes, trains, or automobiles. In fact I can do it exceptionally easy. I am a master of the tube-sleep, never having missed my station, and being able to do it on 2 stop journeys. In the busy rush hour where there's enough people around to keep me standing, I can even do it without needing a seat. I can fall asleep on transportation no matter what time it is, or how tired I was previously. It's the vibrations, they gently rock me to sleep within 30 seconds, engine hum is the way forward for my sleep issues. And hence, I want a bed, that can imitate a slight, but partially irregular vibration with which to send me to sleep whenever I want without hours of thinking random thoughts.
I have no idea how Chris would cope with a slightly, partially irregularly vibrating bed though...
There is method to my madness.
I have terrible troubles sleeping. Always have done, except before I was 3, when I slept permanently. But since 3, I don't sleep well. Unless I'm exhausted to the point I can't actually hold myself standing up, it takes me about 2 hours of lying in bed, rolling around and trying to get comfortable and not overheat, to shut my mind up and fall asleep. This doesn't really change if I'm with Chris. And in fact it's then more infuriating listening to him be asleep for 2 hours whilst I'm not. Chris is one of those people who can fall asleep in 5 minutes just by getting into bed. I wake up easier and much much quicker when next to Chris, but getting to sleep is unaffected.
My sleep pattern also tends to change every 2 weeks or so. I've had every pattern imaginable My 'standard', insofar as I can be said to have such, is go to bed 0400 - 0600, get up 1200 - 1400, and that generally suits me fine, except the world doesn't work like this. By the time you're up and showered and breakfasted (lunchded), the call centres and shops in the UK are closing up, especially by the time you got the bus into town to go to them. Jobs, also, do not tend to work like this, and so I spent most of my life in a state of perpetual sleep deprivation with an average 4 hours sleep a night, and then crash out at weekends. Every once in a while, I'll sleep for 36 hours, often missing days of work as a result. Luckily that only tends to happen once every 3-4 months, so it's not too bad, but still. Other sleep patterns I've had include a feeling of complete draining exhaustion just to get up and get a cup of tea before going back to bed and sleeping most of the week; sleeping one day on, one day off; sleeping only every third day; multiple naps required per day, sleep only giving me energy enough for approx 3 hours of awakening; reverse sleep schedules so that I sleep 0900/1000 - 2000ish and so forth...
What's odd, is that when I need to sleep, I'm practically narcoleptic, and no activity, stimulant, or urgent need, beyond that of survival reflex and adrenaline, can keep me awake, and even so, the adrenaline will only keep me up so long as its freshly pumping through my system; 15 minutes later I'll be collapsing again.
But despite all these sleeping issues, I have never had a problem sleeping on planes, trains, or automobiles. In fact I can do it exceptionally easy. I am a master of the tube-sleep, never having missed my station, and being able to do it on 2 stop journeys. In the busy rush hour where there's enough people around to keep me standing, I can even do it without needing a seat. I can fall asleep on transportation no matter what time it is, or how tired I was previously. It's the vibrations, they gently rock me to sleep within 30 seconds, engine hum is the way forward for my sleep issues. And hence, I want a bed, that can imitate a slight, but partially irregular vibration with which to send me to sleep whenever I want without hours of thinking random thoughts.
I have no idea how Chris would cope with a slightly, partially irregularly vibrating bed though...
Monday, 10 May 2010
Ce bel amor qui ne peut mourir...
I miss you so much. It hurts. Like hell. Every single day. I know you're busy, and out of sight is out of mind, and neither of us have had time or money and your life requires the whole of you. And that's fine, but I still miss you. I still love you. I still want to be with you even though I can't. I miss the feel of you. I miss your smile. I miss the way how you melt into me when I hol you. I miss the wonder and amazement in your eyes, at every little thing in the world. I miss the way nothing is the same around you. I miss the need to try and kill you, because if I don't you'll actually kill me. I miss being the strong one for a change. I hate the fact you're so close and yet so far. I hate you live in the middle of nowhere. I hate that I have virtually no way of contacting you, ever. I'm scared that you hate me. I'm scared you don't actually like me that much anymore. I'm scared I'll never be included in your life. I'm scared you'll be gone before I get to see you one more time. I wonder why it takes us so long to admit we love each other every time we meet. I wonder why we eventually do admit it each time. I wonder when I'll next see, of if I'll even have that option.. I love you. I miss you. I need you. I want you. Please be mine.
Ce bel amor qui ne peut mourir...
I miss you so much. It hurts. Like hell. Every single day. I know you're hurting right now, and me, and us, and all that is probably exactly what you don't need to deal with at this moment. And that's fine, but I still miss you. I still love you. I still want to be with you even though I can't. I miss the feel of you. I miss your smile. I miss the way you'd hold me. I miss the way you look at me, like I'm the one in a higher league. I miss your cocky, arrogant bullshit. I miss fighting with you. I miss you beating me. I hate the fact you're 4500 miles away. I hate the fact I can't just jump on a bus, or a train and come and see you. I hate the fact that will never change. I hate that loving you is just something that will always be in our heads. I hate that too see you even once more, the entire universe would have to shift for me. I'm scared that you'll fall out of love with me. I'm scared you'll forget about me. I'm scared I'll always have to sit on the sidelines and watch. I wonder why you love me. I wonder why you told me you loved me. I wonder when, if ever, I'll next get a chance to see you again. I love you. I miss you. I need you. I want you. Please be mine.
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Over & Undersleeping
2 days into the new term and I've already missed a lecture.
I overslept through maths today. Well that's not true, I woke up halfway through it. This is not entirely suprising, as I had no sleep Sunday night as I mentioned in my previous post, and so I crashed out at 2300 completely. But still irritating. Still, best to miss the introductory lecture I guess, and to miss maths where there is no lab I need to find out about.
Doesn't look like I'll be sleeping tonight either. Still I'm being productive and doing play things, I'm about to write an endless number of letters to all the VIPs, lecturers, interested parties etc. On thursday I have to oversee a costumes meeting, and by next week, a lot of the big orders should be processed. It's about 4 weeks to go now, we're on schedule, well we're not we're behind it, but we're ok in terms of time, but at the same time the neuroses are starting to get the better of me and panic me slightly. I'm also acutely aware that I need to stay on top of absolutely everything or indeed, beyond it, uni wise, as the weeks preceding the play, and of it, I will have no spare time whatsoever. And by spare time, I mean the time in which one usually eats and sleeps. I know from experience they become mere luxuries and distant, barely discernible memories to myself and the rest of the production team.
Balanced with this, I don't even have the luxury of skipping lectures this time, as I'm not in the department, or indeed university, doing it, so I shall be going to QMUL bright and early each morning, shooting over to UCL for lunchtime to do shows, get ins, tech runs, etc, debriefing for several hours after each night, going home to plan out the next day and do the work for uni and sort out what went wrong with the previous day, eating pure sugar foods to keep myself going, and then back out to QMUL for more learning the next day. And unlike the UCL people, I don't have the luxury of reading week to crash out with immediately following. No, I have another week of lectures, punctuated by several lab report deadlines, from the labs that will inevitably fall within production week, just to make life a little more interesting than it already will be.
And of course, in all of this, I have to plan something suitably epic for valentines day, as its the 2nd one in 6 years I shall be able to spend with the bf, in fact, the 2nd one in a row. Something is seriously wrong...
In a completely different line of thought, a friend, who got rejected from UCL for medicene, posted on his facebook 'XXXXX is is apparently skittish, socially inept, immature, and inarticulate. Thankyou, UCL interviewers >.>" He then revealed in the comment discussion this is not exactly what they said, but his paranoia reading it like that. So I asked him what exactly they did say. He copied and pasted the feedback to me. And unfortuantely for him, it wasn't his paranoia, they almost did exactly say that. This does not bode well for his continued medical aspirations.
Being truthful here, I have to post something potentially hurtful in the full knowledge he might well read this, but oh well. I am inclined, in relation to the above story, to side with the UCL interviewers. The boy is very intelligent, and has done a lot of extra curricular stuff towards medicene, but he is phenomanlly naiive, with no concept of the real world whatsoever (and I really mean no concept, not the no concept you mean when you talk about oxbridge toffs or the like), and does not have the best people skills. He has also stated, that he would likely turn down an offer from a particular university for medicene, because he doesn't actually want to go there, and just needed an extra place to put on the form. Anybody who says this for such a competitive field is asking for a karmic bitchslap methinks. Which appears to be promptly forthcoming as events turn out.
Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for the boy, I just have to admit I'm not entirely surprised he's currently facing 2/4 rejections, and a fairly damning set of feedback from the easier of the two interviews.
Mood: Weighing the pros of sugar & tea against the cons of the cold downstairs
Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/1u5Wqh6Ya2FrHniR3riKYc
I overslept through maths today. Well that's not true, I woke up halfway through it. This is not entirely suprising, as I had no sleep Sunday night as I mentioned in my previous post, and so I crashed out at 2300 completely. But still irritating. Still, best to miss the introductory lecture I guess, and to miss maths where there is no lab I need to find out about.
Doesn't look like I'll be sleeping tonight either. Still I'm being productive and doing play things, I'm about to write an endless number of letters to all the VIPs, lecturers, interested parties etc. On thursday I have to oversee a costumes meeting, and by next week, a lot of the big orders should be processed. It's about 4 weeks to go now, we're on schedule, well we're not we're behind it, but we're ok in terms of time, but at the same time the neuroses are starting to get the better of me and panic me slightly. I'm also acutely aware that I need to stay on top of absolutely everything or indeed, beyond it, uni wise, as the weeks preceding the play, and of it, I will have no spare time whatsoever. And by spare time, I mean the time in which one usually eats and sleeps. I know from experience they become mere luxuries and distant, barely discernible memories to myself and the rest of the production team.
Balanced with this, I don't even have the luxury of skipping lectures this time, as I'm not in the department, or indeed university, doing it, so I shall be going to QMUL bright and early each morning, shooting over to UCL for lunchtime to do shows, get ins, tech runs, etc, debriefing for several hours after each night, going home to plan out the next day and do the work for uni and sort out what went wrong with the previous day, eating pure sugar foods to keep myself going, and then back out to QMUL for more learning the next day. And unlike the UCL people, I don't have the luxury of reading week to crash out with immediately following. No, I have another week of lectures, punctuated by several lab report deadlines, from the labs that will inevitably fall within production week, just to make life a little more interesting than it already will be.
And of course, in all of this, I have to plan something suitably epic for valentines day, as its the 2nd one in 6 years I shall be able to spend with the bf, in fact, the 2nd one in a row. Something is seriously wrong...
In a completely different line of thought, a friend, who got rejected from UCL for medicene, posted on his facebook 'XXXXX is is apparently skittish, socially inept, immature, and inarticulate. Thankyou, UCL interviewers >.>" He then revealed in the comment discussion this is not exactly what they said, but his paranoia reading it like that. So I asked him what exactly they did say. He copied and pasted the feedback to me. And unfortuantely for him, it wasn't his paranoia, they almost did exactly say that. This does not bode well for his continued medical aspirations.
Being truthful here, I have to post something potentially hurtful in the full knowledge he might well read this, but oh well. I am inclined, in relation to the above story, to side with the UCL interviewers. The boy is very intelligent, and has done a lot of extra curricular stuff towards medicene, but he is phenomanlly naiive, with no concept of the real world whatsoever (and I really mean no concept, not the no concept you mean when you talk about oxbridge toffs or the like), and does not have the best people skills. He has also stated, that he would likely turn down an offer from a particular university for medicene, because he doesn't actually want to go there, and just needed an extra place to put on the form. Anybody who says this for such a competitive field is asking for a karmic bitchslap methinks. Which appears to be promptly forthcoming as events turn out.
Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for the boy, I just have to admit I'm not entirely surprised he's currently facing 2/4 rejections, and a fairly damning set of feedback from the easier of the two interviews.
Mood: Weighing the pros of sugar & tea against the cons of the cold downstairs
Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/1u5Wqh6Ya2FrHniR3riKYc
Monday, 11 January 2010
Plagarism
Academics come out with the best humour at times.
Today's introductory dynamics lecture was based primarily around train problems. You know the ones; train A leaves london at 80 miles an hour at 1900, train B leaves edinburgh at 100 miles an hour at 1930, where does the horrific crash happen etc... There was even an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch based around this, the episode where she (failed initially) to get her Witch's License. So today's lecture provided the following gems.
"You not only have to consider that the banana is moving through space, you have to consider that the banana might be cartwheeling through space." (and yes, this was accompanied by a flying banana hurtling across the room)
"The train going to Scotland doesn't rolly polly down the track 20 times. ... We hope..."
"Plagarism - its not an easy word to say. It's an even harder word to copy!"
I would like at this point to take some extracts from other academics tidbits that I have saved throughout the years.
"This is a world of DEATH! POVERTY! And strange little latin clauses!"
Ovid versus Homer: "Anything you can do, I can do meta."
And for the history afficionados amongst you. Said by a despairing austrian assyrologist after the rather dire turn our seminar had taken: "I tried to become Keith Hopkins but instead I became Oprah Winfrey."
Finally, for Ella and Jack's benefit. Nothing will quite beat 'detumescence'
Today was a fun filled day involving far too much to do and no sleep. For some reason whenever I actually *need* to do things all throughout the following day, my usually already overactive insomnia pattern goes into overdrive, and refuses to allow me any respite at all, usually until 45 minutes before I need to leave the house, at which point it's suddenly perfectly willing to crawl into a bed.
So despite trying to get into uni early, tubes conspired against me, and I was forced into my lecture (the fruits of which are the above). Figuring the other half of it would be equally irrelevant, I completed possibly the fastest AutoCAD design known to the world of first year engineers, taking a mere 45 minutes to find out what the coursework actually was in the first place, draw 3 different views for my project, print it, and hand it in. Then scooting off back to old uni (ie UCL) for a happy clappy production meeting with the theatre. It ended on a story of how someone lost control of their toilet functions in one of the halls lifts last night, which I think tells you just about how well the entire meeting fared overall. And then I had to get over to Angel to go to the studios.
I've had virtually no sex drive for the last week or so, which, as anyone who knows me will recognise, is one of the things that happens after hell has frozen over a good few times first. I can't help it, I have a naturally ludicriously high sex drive. So for me to not be horny is just not something that happens. Sure, I can be ill, passing out from alcohol, or otherwise indisposed at a given point in time to actually having sex, but not looking to get one over, or have one got over me (either's good :P) under the surface of all that? Never happens. So having a complete lack of a sex drive, as well as no sleep the night before, and a busy day rushing all over zone 1 london, had not left me in the best aroused state to show off my first class rating talents to an interview (by which I mean, something VERY casting couch situation) for a very well paying company. On top of this, the porn studio in question, had decided to show on the tv in their reception (you know you're going up in the world when your porn studios start having legal company registrations :P), none other than CBBC Scooby Doo...
Now don't get me wrong, the slightly dimwitted innocent, too clever for his own good blond haired thing that Fred has going on could do something for me. If I thought about it in ways Scooby Doo should never be thought about (I would like to cite Rule #34 at this point). Hell even Daphne has a lot going for her. Especially when being played by SMG. (Seany, or any SB crew reading this for that matter, for once, I do mean the actress, and not the other SMG) ((Everyone else goes off to google what this 'other' SMG might be... or maybe not, maybe my blog is revealing enough that anything they don't understand they realise they really don't want to!)) But anyway, Scooby Doo before going in to discuss the intimate details of your sex life, kinks, habits, positions, roles etc, and then give them the very literal 'moneyshot' - seriously, it was a condition of being paid - makes for a somewhat surreal experience.
I think that's enough oversharing for one night, don't you?
Mood:
Music: Pop Six Squish Uh-uh Cicero Lipschitz... http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/6EGXZGr9DrvgTDm4D9eDrA
Today's introductory dynamics lecture was based primarily around train problems. You know the ones; train A leaves london at 80 miles an hour at 1900, train B leaves edinburgh at 100 miles an hour at 1930, where does the horrific crash happen etc... There was even an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch based around this, the episode where she (failed initially) to get her Witch's License. So today's lecture provided the following gems.
"You not only have to consider that the banana is moving through space, you have to consider that the banana might be cartwheeling through space." (and yes, this was accompanied by a flying banana hurtling across the room)
"The train going to Scotland doesn't rolly polly down the track 20 times. ... We hope..."
"Plagarism - its not an easy word to say. It's an even harder word to copy!"
I would like at this point to take some extracts from other academics tidbits that I have saved throughout the years.
"This is a world of DEATH! POVERTY! And strange little latin clauses!"
Ovid versus Homer: "Anything you can do, I can do meta."
And for the history afficionados amongst you. Said by a despairing austrian assyrologist after the rather dire turn our seminar had taken: "I tried to become Keith Hopkins but instead I became Oprah Winfrey."
Finally, for Ella and Jack's benefit. Nothing will quite beat 'detumescence'
Today was a fun filled day involving far too much to do and no sleep. For some reason whenever I actually *need* to do things all throughout the following day, my usually already overactive insomnia pattern goes into overdrive, and refuses to allow me any respite at all, usually until 45 minutes before I need to leave the house, at which point it's suddenly perfectly willing to crawl into a bed.
So despite trying to get into uni early, tubes conspired against me, and I was forced into my lecture (the fruits of which are the above). Figuring the other half of it would be equally irrelevant, I completed possibly the fastest AutoCAD design known to the world of first year engineers, taking a mere 45 minutes to find out what the coursework actually was in the first place, draw 3 different views for my project, print it, and hand it in. Then scooting off back to old uni (ie UCL) for a happy clappy production meeting with the theatre. It ended on a story of how someone lost control of their toilet functions in one of the halls lifts last night, which I think tells you just about how well the entire meeting fared overall. And then I had to get over to Angel to go to the studios.
I've had virtually no sex drive for the last week or so, which, as anyone who knows me will recognise, is one of the things that happens after hell has frozen over a good few times first. I can't help it, I have a naturally ludicriously high sex drive. So for me to not be horny is just not something that happens. Sure, I can be ill, passing out from alcohol, or otherwise indisposed at a given point in time to actually having sex, but not looking to get one over, or have one got over me (either's good :P) under the surface of all that? Never happens. So having a complete lack of a sex drive, as well as no sleep the night before, and a busy day rushing all over zone 1 london, had not left me in the best aroused state to show off my first class rating talents to an interview (by which I mean, something VERY casting couch situation) for a very well paying company. On top of this, the porn studio in question, had decided to show on the tv in their reception (you know you're going up in the world when your porn studios start having legal company registrations :P), none other than CBBC Scooby Doo...
Now don't get me wrong, the slightly dimwitted innocent, too clever for his own good blond haired thing that Fred has going on could do something for me. If I thought about it in ways Scooby Doo should never be thought about (I would like to cite Rule #34 at this point). Hell even Daphne has a lot going for her. Especially when being played by SMG. (Seany, or any SB crew reading this for that matter, for once, I do mean the actress, and not the other SMG) ((Everyone else goes off to google what this 'other' SMG might be... or maybe not, maybe my blog is revealing enough that anything they don't understand they realise they really don't want to!)) But anyway, Scooby Doo before going in to discuss the intimate details of your sex life, kinks, habits, positions, roles etc, and then give them the very literal 'moneyshot' - seriously, it was a condition of being paid - makes for a somewhat surreal experience.
I think that's enough oversharing for one night, don't you?
Mood:
Music: Pop Six Squish Uh-uh Cicero Lipschitz... http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/6EGXZGr9DrvgTDm4D9eDrA
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
The Theory....
I've had this theory for a long time. That nobody's world is ever bigger than 5 people. 6 degrees of separation probably works off a similar idea. Your 5 people change throughout your life obviously, and sometimes even on a day to day basis, but these are the people closest to you, the ones you tell all your secrets, the ones who if they ever got together, would probably know everything there is to know about you, the ones who support you and keep you going.
When you're a child, your parents are two of them, as you grow up, it becomes friends from school, later your boss, or a partner of some sort might feature. Some of them will be there for a day, and then disappear off again for a few months, some are more or less permenant fixtures.
Currently my world consists of the boyfriend - Chris, a friend named Joel, one of his boys called Seany, another friend called Lisa, and my best and oldest friend called Jamie, who has his birthday sometime around now.
Think of a friend you know really well, you can apply it to them, it might not be the people they talk to or see most, hell I haven't seen Jme in ages, but there's usually not more than 5 of them. Even where couples are concerned, its usually the case that someone is closer with one than the other, because they knew them first, or because they have more in common.
As my 5 people change throughout the year, I'll try and let you know, you might find it interesting.
Music http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/1MR6CjRCd1bceiiKCQWh5i
Mood: much the same as before, with a bit of depression mixed in.
When you're a child, your parents are two of them, as you grow up, it becomes friends from school, later your boss, or a partner of some sort might feature. Some of them will be there for a day, and then disappear off again for a few months, some are more or less permenant fixtures.
Currently my world consists of the boyfriend - Chris, a friend named Joel, one of his boys called Seany, another friend called Lisa, and my best and oldest friend called Jamie, who has his birthday sometime around now.
Think of a friend you know really well, you can apply it to them, it might not be the people they talk to or see most, hell I haven't seen Jme in ages, but there's usually not more than 5 of them. Even where couples are concerned, its usually the case that someone is closer with one than the other, because they knew them first, or because they have more in common.
As my 5 people change throughout the year, I'll try and let you know, you might find it interesting.
Music http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/1MR6CjRCd1bceiiKCQWh5i
Mood: much the same as before, with a bit of depression mixed in.
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