Emotional Umbrella

It is super cool having new visitors stop by here.  That is a side effect of sending those cartoons that I totally wasn’t thinking of at the time, but it’s nice.  …You see how I made a point of saying that there?  Because I realized at some point today that people might assume I was trolling for traffic.  And I worry about things like that (because heaven forbid that someone I’ve never met should temporarily have a mistaken impression of me.  I also dislike Rod Stewart, cram my freezer full of crap I’ll never eat again, and have a thing for goats.  Because they’re wily.  In case that helps to clear anything up.).  Anyway, there were no ulterior motives.  My brain just grabs onto things and runs with them in strange ways sometimes.   Which is probably better for my popularity than if it was the rest of my body grabbing things and running with them in strange ways.

And since I try very much to be sincere here, I will also mention that I do get a bit of a crazy high from feeling socially validated in even small ways.  …Probably more than I should (Shhhhh…don’t tell the new people!).   I think I may also get smarter.

My little burst of energy has made it a bit more difficult to keep myself from overworking, though.  Remember how I had mentioned that having been so low previously, I was having difficulty keeping a reasonably accurate relative scale for how I’m doing now and what I should be expecting from myself?  Yup.  Still am.

At the beginning of the week, I was hopeful that maybe, possibly, I could try to accomplish some task during a day (one whole thing – wouldn’t that be nifty cool!).  Yesterday, I scheduled car maintenance, had my tires changed, researched mosquito repellants, read a chapter in my self-help book, purchased new furnace filters and miscellaneous hardware supplies, purchased ant and mosquito killing supplies, purchased tea tree and citronella oils, got groceries, implemented the anty death, did the household laundry, phoned my doctor, rescheduled a massage appointment, spoke with my mom, mixed up a batch of essential oil bug repellant based on the morning’s research, made dinner, and probably did at least a few other work tasks that I’m not thinking of right now.  And I was about to do a bunch of putting things away when I was forced to pause.

But we needed the mosquito repellant, see, because we finally got some cheapy patio furniture for our back yard, and we had these grand visions of us eating dinner out there, carefree and laughing, with a steak knife in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, talking about the high points of our day, and maybe politics or philosophy, as the warm spring breeze kissed our hair, and the subtle scent of flowers wafted by.  Except that a couple of evenings ago, when we were out there around dinner time putting the stuff together, we discovered a tiny, itchy, West-Nile-carrying flaw in our dramatic plans.  Important, right?

My husband had to tell me firmly last night that I should not do anything work-related for at least the next couple of days.  No mail, no paperwork, no phone calls, no errands, no shopping, no laundry, no cleaning, no organizing, no work of any kind.  I can see his point.  I’ve been feeling almost able to get things done lately, so I’ve been naturally falling back into go-go-go mode, and getting guilty twinges when I pause to do anything unproductive.  A lot of the time, I live in a state of chipmunk-on-crack activity.  That is a lot of my problem, though.  I need to learn to balance, and to moderate, and not to push myself too hard too fast.  This seems so obvious looking in on the situation that it’s laughable.  In my head, though, woo-boy, I better get on that laundry or the hubby will think I’m a slacker.  And hello?  I can’t work less than an eight hour day now that I’m off work for medical reasons!  And there are things.  And they need doing.  How can I not do things??  I had to think his proposition through for a moment, as I already really had been (unintentionally) creating potential to-do lists in my head for the next few days.  But I agreed in the end.  No work.

At which point, he promptly told me not to fill that time doing nothing but light therapy, and visualization, and meditation, and yoga, and tai chi, and reading self-help books instead.  Because my baby knows me well.  And I was totally mentally crossing out every administrative item and replacing it with something I feel like I “should” be doing from the getting better list instead.

And I may have ended up just sitting down now, at 6:13pm, for my first focused bout of “relaxation time.”  But I had good excuses, I swear.  Okay, maybe not good ones, but excuses.  Okay, maybe I can’t remember what I did between 3 and 6 today.  But I’m sure it was important.  It’s just so freaking hard to STOP when I think I can manage to GO.

I think I currently only come in the flavours of Burnt Out or Hyperdrive.  All poetically cyclic, I know.

Also, in answering comments on the previous post, I realized that stick people cannot hug and kiss at the same time, nor can they look at each other during sex.  Poor stick people.  That would be sad for them.