Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The recorder workshop starts much earlier than I had previously thought. Fortunately, I was also told that it's "show up when you can and leave when you have to", so maybe I can still make it to part of it. That's the plan anyhow. The way I've felt the last few days ... wish me luck.

Crashing now.

From Overheard In New York, 2004-11-06:

Kid #1: Paper beats rock. BAM! Your rock is blowed up!
Kid #2: "Bam" doesn't blow up, "bam" makes it spicy. Now I got a SPICY ROCK! You can't defeat that!

Did not make it to recorder workshop. :-( My body vetoed that plan. Frustrated. (In theory I could go now and attend the final two hours of it. [less, now that I've spent the time to write this.] But I'm still feeling kind of half-here, so I'm not sure how much of what I learned in those two hours would stick.)

And once again I recognize the familiar trap after I've fallen into it: for the past several days, instead of giving up and saying, "This week isn't working, I should rest and recover and start trying to accomplish things only after I've accumulated more spoons," I kept trying to do things and failing and using up the few spoons I had to no avail. If I hadn't tried to "be responsible" on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I might have had the energy for today. But it's hard to make that call when in the middle of noticing one's to-do list slipping, being frustrated, and hearing those cultural-background voices whispering that not pushing oneself harder is "laziness". I sometimes manage to "give myself permission" to rest before I get to the point that my body will force it on me, but not often enough.

I could spend many paragraphs of omphaloskepsis examining what I think the reasons are for my having so much trouble learning this set of lessons. But until I've either got some startling insight or come up with a way to make that analysis interesting (or, I'll admit, just get bored enough with everything else in my skull to inflict it on y'all anyway), I'll keep this short (okay, "what passes for short when I write more than a sentence") for now. I've got something else long-winded to squeeze out of my brain anyhow, once I, ah, er, give myself permission to spend time writing instead of doing the "more responsible" things on my to-do list, and simultaneously have the energy to craft that essay.

It probably doesn't help, that I've got too many things I want to do, so that whatever I'm doing I feel like I'm neglecting something else important.

It probably also doesn't help that I've been in an "I don' wanna" phase WRT painkillers lately. I get tired of relying on them, and I get scared of becoming dependent on them or building up a tolerance, and I get worried about running out of them, and sometimes I just get plumb annoyed at needing pills at all. And then I start trying to out-stubborn the pain, or convince myself that I just need a nap, not drugs, and wind up being a lot less productive than if I'd given in and taken them. Then I spend some time viewing them as tools to manage my body for a while, until I once again start getting scared or worried or feeling like I'm "copping out" instead of "being tough" and return to the resenting/fearing drugs phase again. So it's a pendulum. Not having a doctor to talk to about what constitutes reasonable patterns of use makes it worse, but even when I was seeing a doctor, I had this back-and-forth pattern.

Something as powerful as Vicodin but as safe as Ultram would reassure me, except for the fear of running out. (Where "safe" refers to my perception of a bunch of factors, possibly misaligned with objective measures of safety, of course.)