Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

At 02:00 I tried to go to sleep because I felt sleepy enough that I thought I might be able to. At 03:00 or so, I finally fell asleep. At 04:30 I was very much awake with no idea why. At least it wasn't one of those really abrupt "ripped from sleep" moments. I was just ... #blink# Awake ... with no particular impression or memory regarding the waking up process, much like many weekend mornings felt way back before the fibromyalgia if I'd had a good night's sleep.

I'm still waiting for paperwork from somebody else before I can proceed with Plan A for buying the house. I'm still waiting for paperwork from somebody else before I can proceed with making sure Plan B for buying the house is ready to trigger if we run out of time to implement Plan A. Back to Limbo. A couple more potential buyers have shown interest (one came out to look at it and wants to send his contractor out later; the other scheduled an appointment but never showed up). I'd like to get a step or two further along in the buying process before the first guy's interest becomes more serious. At least he's looking at it as an investment property instead of as a home, so there's some chance I could stay as his tenant if he gets it instead of me.

I haven't forgotten that I'm way behind on stuff I said I wanted to get around to posting here, including my Pennsic report. The way I've been feeling physically the past several days hasn't been conducive to catching up. I'll get there eventually, I hope. I'm a little worried about the long drive I've got for a performance on Sunday because of how I've been feeling. Actually, yesterday and the day before I felt drugged. I hadn't taken any painkillers, but I felt more of a drugged feeling than I get when I do take them. Disconcerting. (That's not counting getting a "speedy" feeling from my athsma inhaler on Monday, which doesn't usually happen (the same drug does do that to me at the dosage they give me in the emergency room, to the point that I feel all panicky and really hate it, but I don't usually feel it at all when I use my pocket inhaler). Then again, I've needed to use my inhaler (Albuterol) several times over the past few weeks, which is disconcerting in and of itself ... and perhaps I've got some sort of acquired-sensitivity thing happening?)

The Sheepie got me hooked on The West Wing sometime last season, so tonight I'll have a VCR dilemma: do I tape that, or the premiere of Birds of Prey while I'm at Homespun Ceilidh Band rehearsal? I'm already putting off this season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer until I can borrow tapes from other people or repeat season starts, because I've been taping Gilmore Girls. And to think that a few years ago I watched nothing on television but the occasional football game and ... one other show, but I've forgotten which one.

Sunday night I fell asleep before the end of the Ravens game. They were ahead, but it wasn't completely sewn up. When I woke Monday morning, that kid had been shot in Bowie and the news was nonstop serial-sniper coverage, so I never did get the final score (I'll go look at a sports web site in a couple minutes). Now the sniper thing is certainly way more important than football scores -- I'm not complaining about newscasters' priorities -- but it was still this irritating/amusing aside to the whole morning: I never heard the score of the came I fell asleep in the fourth quarter of.

Then again, they were repeating themselves over and over on television. New details were slowly emerging, so they had to wait around for new stuff to tell us, but while waiting for each new detail they had little to do but repeat what they'd already reported and keep repeating it until they had anything new. And of course, anyone just turning on their television would want to know about this Breaking Story, so they had to make sure that's the story people would see as soon as they tuned in ... Eventually it got to that "It's Breaking News because it's still interesting enough to have remote crews out there, even though there's been no breaking to it for the past couple of hours, but we have to call it Breaking News to keep you here" stage. *shrug*

About the sniper: I've lived in Aspen Hill, Silver Spring, Rockville ... I've been to or by the places where people were shot, several times in the past, but my emotional reaction to hearing where things happened was very different as soon as they mentioned Bowie, where I grew up. I did a stint as a volunteer computer teacher at Benjamin Tasker Middle School. Before that, my siblings went to school there. I used to ride my bike at the school's parking lot once I was old enough to go outside of Heather Hills (the part of Bowie in the angle between 197 and 50 -- on the other side of route 50 from the rest of Bowie) on my own. It was the difference between "I've been there" and "I Know That Place", with a dollop of "Mom lives there!" stirred in.

I'm still examining that emotional response. It also made a difference in my emotional assessment of risk. As someone pointed out at Thrir Venstri Foetr rehearsal last night, out of the whole population of Maryland, this shooter has hit eight people, so even though the odds of getting shot are higher this week than they were two weeks ago, there are still a lot of things more likely to kill me instead... so my intellectual assessment of the risk-to-myself is pretty low. My emotional perception of that same risk was a little higher than my intellectual assessment of it, of course, but when Bowie came up, the difference between my intellectual and emotional interpretations of the risk got larger. (At least so far, the emotional perception of the risk is more of a self-analytical curiosity than anything else -- a chance to look at typical human responses to this kind of information -- and I'm allowing the logical to dominate. The fear isn't so great that it's intrusive.)

Oh bother, I'm babbling again.