juushika

I am finally feeling better. There was a turning point last night so distinct that I could almost mark the hour—and it came not long after Devon brought me orange juice and a brownie, so I am now convinced that this is the cure to all ills. I'm still coughing, still a little snuffly, but this is my body shedding the last of its illness—rather than wallowing in the production of more. I even slept well and had good dreams, a rarity at the best of times but particularly impossible as of late. I am pleased, because it's about damn time: I started noticing my first throat-itching symptoms one week ago come tomorrow. Apparently, that's my version of a "little sick." Do I feel like I'm being punished for the fact that I'm getting out of the house more often? A bit.

Jumping back to the subject of sleep: I've been thinking on the disconnect between my self-as-human and self-as-cat again, this time as it relates to sleep—and to obsessive thought. Thinking on—and bemoaning, to be honest, this last week while I needed sleep to rest and heal but found it even more cruel and fleeting than usual.

And so I'm going to talk about (among other subjects) my therianthropy. Confused as to what the hell I'm on about? Review my first post on the subject and/or my therianthropy tag. Think this stuff is just too weird? Feel free to skip this post.

I've had issues with sleep since middle school—I used to sleep as little as possible, as self-punishment but also to avoid dreaming. These days I'm more at peace with the need for sleep and the nature of dreams, although my dreams are more often than not nightmares, but these days I'm also plagued by problems with sleep. My sleep is never predictable—I get it in three hour cycles, sometimes as few as one cycle a night for weeks on end, sometimes sleeping half the day away although I tend to wake every three hours for a little while.

Getting to sleep—at the end of a long day, but also after each mid-night wakeup, is the hardest part. Some of it is physical, the simple discomfort of a bad back and a curvy body that demands an artful arrangement of pillows to keep everything aligned and unstressed. Much of it is the fact that I'm prone to obsessive thinking.

I've mentioned my obsessive thought before but I don't know if I've ever tried to explain or describe it. It's an aspect of my anxiety, but it's also a simple part of how my brain works—an aspect of my nature that sometimes causes anxiety. It's like having a song stuck in your head: a phrase set on repeat. It can be anything, hurtful or harmless (I obsess over sour memories, troublesome conversations, problems which are huge to me but would be foolish to another; I obsess over video games, over sentences, anything at all, though I've particular fondness for that which contains repetition or rhyme). Sometimes it's a small annoyance at the start, but after hours (sometimes years; I still obsess over mistakes I made as a ten year old) of incidental repetition or minutes of unremitting repetition it grows tiresome—moreover it's so resistant to change that it grows stressful: I can't stop obsessing. That's a simple statement with a vast import: I cannot stop obsessing. I can't think long, coherent thoughts. I can't concentrate. As a result I can't enjoy, engage, even distract. I am stuck obsessing—repeating a sentence fragment, rearranging letters, hating myself for an offhand remark—indefinitely.

It's painful. And that's what I go through most nights when I try to sleep—and that's how it's been this last week when I was more-than-usually physically uncomfortable and found it that much harder to fall asleep, and so had that much longer to wait for an obsessive thought to arise, settle in, and keep me awake.

The only cures I've found are to stop thinking or to intentionally pick an obsessive thought. This is why, in the worst of my depression, I sometimes do nothing but watch Law & Order reruns and why I often watch movies as I fall asleep: if I can clear out my brain and replace it with the passive occupation of consuming familiar media, I can smother obsessive thought under a blanket of white noise. The problem is that as soon as I stop, as soon as I free my thoughts, the anxiety can return. So I have obsessive thoughts I turn to intentionally. I sing Donna Donna to myself half a dozen times in a row. I go through the alphabet, alternating English and French, over and over. These are repetitions too, but they are familiar and sometimes comforting, and because I chose them I can control them—so that they are not negative, hurtful thoughts; so that I have a calming illusion of control over my own mind. If my obsessive thinking hasn't kicked in yet, I sometimes plan my dream house, tell myself short stories, or visit my meadow*—familiar but longer meditations which keep my thoughts focused so there's less chance that a pause will open the door to obsessive thinking.

The cat doesn't do this. My self-as-cat can feel anxiety: mistrust, skittishness, fear of stranger and of dangers. But as I've written before, my self-as-cat doesn't feel the sort of anxiety that my human brain is prone to, these obsessive rounds of thought. In fact, my self-as-cat wants to spent hours and hours doing nothing more resting. That's another simple sentence with great import: The desire for rest and sleep, for thought-empty stillness, is a vital part of my therianthropy, and that's a vital part of myself. A cat that can't catnap hardly feels a cat at all.

Madison has a sweater, a red chenille business which no one would wear but she loves to sleep on, and since it got put down within her easy reach she's done little but lay on it. She purrs and kneads, suckling the fabric; more often she just sleeps, curled up nose to tail in a neat small round. As she did when she discovered the guinea pigs's bedding, she's been forging her usual outside excursions just to stay there, comfortable and pampered and often asleep.

I have a passion for modal which rivals my passion for chocolate—there is no fabric softer or smoother, and after I fell in love with it Devon got modal sheets for the bed in a subdued spring green. I have a pillow-top mattress and a down pillow, I have A/C to keep the room cold, I have a little den of comfort which I rarely leave. But when I pass Madison in her curl of sleep I still envy her, because I can't do that. I need to wrangle pillows into a back-pampering pile to be comfortable for long, but more importantly even with every comfort arranged just for me I need a book, a film, a conversation; I need a b c d running repeats in my head or "on a wagon bound for market" for the fifth time—I need these things because if I don't have them, instead I have a word, a sentence, a "should have said," a "can't believe I did," a "do they remember?" in a loop so endless that running it has fatigued my thoughts, a repetition so insistent that the trap of it frightens me. In the middle of the night, when I've slept for three hours and wake again like clockwork, if I immediately try to go back to sleep it's even worse—because on the liminal edge of dreams the repeated thought is even more immersive and I can have mental images (which, at other times, escape me) and so I can also obsess over that sight, that action, as well as those words. At those times I can find myself trapped in obsessive thought for a solid half hour, which ends only if I get up for a while or if I finally fall into dream—a dream more often than not tainted by some obsession.

I know that there are far greater complaints out there—I'm not the most miserable of the miserable. I know that I'm not the only one that wishes: oh, for the simplier mind (and life) of a beast! This is not about my status as a special snowflake. It's not even entirely about my obsessive thoughts—they can be hellish, but ever since I discovered the little tricks that help me deal with them they've become a more manageable evil.

What pains me is that how my brain works defines me-as-human, and it separates me from me-as-cat. My self-as-human and self-as-cat are not separate identities, but sometimes there is a wall between them, sometimes they are at odds. I wrote before that "in order to be myself, I have to move beyond myself"—that I have to overcome some aspects of myself-as-human in order to be myself-as-cat, and there's a certain pain in realizing that, in experiencing the disconnect within myself; there's more of a pain in the long nights of sleeplessness and anxiety where I'm not only suffering from those miserable repetitions, but also because I am not myself, you see; because I cannot be who I ought.

* The comfort, sometimes the saving grace, in all of this is that my meadow—an open field with a single large tree and a single small house where a single 60-some woman resides—is the realm of my meditation and where I let my mental self-as-cat run free. It's the most difficult of my mental distractions because there's so many levels of complexity (immersing myself in cat-body, trying to imagine the meadow when I can't image images, etc.), and I can't indulge it unless I'm in a pretty healthy mental state; if I'm not, it soon disintegrates into obsessive thoughts. But when I can manage to run there, it's a blessing: an escape from the troubles of my human brain, and a chance to experience a more complete version of myself-as-cat.

My back pain has been particularly bad lately. A week and a half ago was Devon's Swedish family reunion, which was a long day spent in Portland; the next morning I went to my house for breakfast and then we ran errands. I got little sleep in between and, in short, the weekend wore me out—and all the standing and sitting set my back pain off in a bad way. Despite hotpads and muscle relaxants and massages, the back pain lingers. It starts in my lower back, creeps up my spine, tenses my neck, and leads to pounding headaches. The neck pain and headaches make it difficult to read, or write, or sit at the computer; the back pain makes it difficult to lay down and sleep.

In short, I've been pretty miserable lately. Some pain, like my sway back or my tension headaches, I can cope with and almost ignore—like I stop hearing Devon's computer fans, always running in the background, I stop feeling those constant pains. But pain spikes are more severe and less familiar, and I don't know how to ignore them. Some—the sudden spasms of my lower back, or the binding tightness of my neck—just can't be forgotten. I'm in pain and I'm sleeping poorly and I can't find an escape, so for now I hide in the bedroom and devour a book a day and try to wait it out. I normally spend a few hours on the weekdays on Second Life, but I just haven't the pain nor people tolerance for that right now.

Meanwhile, far stranger than this pain spike and rather distressing, I spent the past two days shaking and lightheaded—in a state not unlike a panic attack, but without a panicked mental state. I took a caffeine pill (to see if it helped with a headache—which it did) and a muscle relaxant on Sunday morning. I was already shaking, which I attributed to low blood sugar because I hadn't eaten. We went out, and the shaking got so bad that it was affecting my torso as well as my limbs. Half an hour after eating the severity decreased, but minor shaking kept on—and continued, well in to the evening. No matter what I did or ate, I felt increasingly feverish and lightheaded. My pulse was racing. My stomach felt empty. I had difficulty breathing.

I've only had one panic attack (my anxiety usually presents itself differently) but this felt just like it—just like it, except that my mental state was just fine. I was contently watching video games and reading as it all went on, and was cheerful and a bit sleepy. The symptoms continued for about a day and a half, although the last few hours were progressively better. I'm premenstrual, but never had PMS exhibit similar symptoms. There's no way that a single caffeine pill would have such a lasting effect—and anyway, caffeine has never so much as made me hyper. I'm not unduly worried or concerned with what caused it, because it did me no lasting harm, but it certainly was just the strangest thing.

Other than that, I'm fine. Reading, as I said—and some great books, at that (you all should pick up Black Ships). I'm teetering right on the edge of breaking the top 10,000 reviewers on Amazon, and eagerly watching for the thumbs up that pushes me over. I saw my sister, and we went out to dinner and had a grand time. Ninja Gaiden II is borked thanks to an ironic new game patch, so the boy has switched to Halo 3 and Devil May Cry 4 for a bit (this affects me because I am the strange sort of video game girlfriend that rather enjoys chilling out and watching other people game). I am a bit withdrawn and quiet, desperate for a full night of sleep, and the back pain has me a bit short tempered—but on the whole, I'm doing well enough.

I'm no longer sick! I think the death of the cold can be timed to about midday yesterday (it's 4a? now the day before yesterday), but it was certainly gone by this morning (now yesterday morning). It left as quietly as it arrived, though much faster, thank goodness. Period has also passed, and with it my cramps. Back still hurts, but it's normal hurt now, and so easy to ignore. So, on the whole, I am back to my old self: achey and whiny and headachey, but without the chest cold or the dizzy spells. Yay! Thank you to all of those that wished me well. ^_^

On the other hand, the boy has been complaining of congestion and sneezing, and it seems to be more than just my piggies, so he seems to have picked up my cold. But he looked better today than he did the day before, so methinks he's fighting through it well enough—and definitely faster than I did. Fingers crossed.

What else does no longer being sick mean? I could wear BPAL—and smell it! Today was Jack, because it's autumn (true Halloween pumpkin, spiced with nutmeg, glowing peach and murky clove; this is very light and sweet and innocent on me, almost creamy but mostly waxy, like the smoothness of a candle with a pale orange pumpkin scent) with just a dot of Casanova to bring out the spices (a rakish blend of leather, anise, lavender, bergamot and amber with tonka, lemon peel and lusty patchouli, which still makes me sneeze on the drydown but is my ideal spicey layering scent). It's wonderful what just a touch of Casanova does—it gives a spicy, deep brown edge to sweeter scents, and worked wonderfully with Jack. It's interesting—Casanova was a frimp, and yet I have a deeper relationship with it than almost any other BPAL perfume. From layering it with Antique Lace to having it bite my finger to layering it with other sweet scents like Jack ... well, it certainly has proved useful. And, since I just add the smallest little tiny dot of it, I really never have to worry about the imp running out.

Anyhow.

I went out on a walk through the nearby wetlands preserve today. ( Of the walk to the preserve, of the preserve itself, and of autumn and death. )

That's enough lengthy and grandiloquent wordsmithing for a bit, wouldn't you say?

Other wordsmithing is going wonderfully well, which is to say I wrote just over 2k words today, typed about 1.5k, and know where I'm going next with the novel. More than that, I'm delighted with my work, and will probably do a bit more of it before I sleep. I was surprised by how smoothly it came today—I could not write fast enough, and only got to an ending point when I ran up on a few paragraphs that I had scribbled ahead of time and now have to slightly resituate into this altered setting. I felt like I could have kept going for quite some time. I also managed to work out a surprising number of kinks without quite noticing: where they are (well, what it looks like and why; I did at least know where they were going ahead of time), how they got there, and what trouble they're in now. There is still some more dekinking to be done before the end of the novel, the biggest of all is, um, how does it end? But on the whole, today's progress was exceptional and I'm feeling confident, again, with where I'm going.

On the other hand, I killed another pen, and now only have one that's comfortable in my hand, and the ink seems reluctant to flow well for me, so—I may need to go pen shopping. I suppose there are worse evils.

Wordcount: 110,000+ typed, 7,500 handwritten.

Previous Accomplishments: Getting to the vampire city, getting writing in general back on track, more male characters (yay!)

Upcoming Challenges: How quickly should they get to where they're going within the city? How long does this New Male Character stick around?

Currently Reading: Dracula, Bram Stoker; Season of the Witch, Natasha Mostert; Tales of the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, H.P. Lovecraft.

I'm looking for another lost book: I'm looking for a book that I remember from my childhood. In it, a werewolf bit someone (on the arm?) to drag them out of a burning building. Other details I'm fairly sure of: it was a young adult book and I think both the werewolf and bite victim were teenagers or younger, it was published before/around 1997, and bite victim becomes a werewolf. That's all I can remember. Sound familiar? Help pinpointing the title would be immensely helpful.
whatwasthatbook crosspost.

Speaking of more immense help: I'm looking for book and movie suggestions to add to my to-read list and Netflix queue. Both are quite full, but I rather enjoy loading them up, so. Feel free to add as many suggestions for either as you would like, either in the poll that follows, in the comments, or both.

[Poll #1068362]

My own most recent suggestions include:

Books — Necklace of Kisses, Francesca Lia Block; The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly; The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, H.P. Lovecraft; The Time Machine, H.G. Wells.

Films — Legend, Perfect Creature (steampunk priest vampires—seriously, this film rocks), The Fountain, Curse of the Golden Flower.

In other brief general-update news: I took a few day unwilling break from writing (and sleeping, and blogging, and SL, and...) while I went through a brief depressive episode, but as of today I seem to be back to it. The writing, that is. I've at least plotted out a bit further, and I wrote 1500 words, so I consider that a promising restart. The depression wasn't fun, and it's been coming with probably psychosomatic symptoms that feel like a constant early cold/flu (constant headaches, throat pain, stomach pain) as well as pretty severe back pain and spasms. These things may not be passing, but I want to get back to my book, so I'm at least starting to ignore them a bit.

I've started taking advantage of the reserve system at my local library with wonderful results as far as getting books go, even if I haven't been entirely pleased by what I've read. I now have a healthy towering physical to-read pile, and I love it. I am woefully behind on book reviews, however. Hopefully I can finish some of them soon. The boy has a shiny new toy—an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, of course, so he and his brother are here often (as this is where the Xbox is set up) and I've watched countless rounds of Halo. I am a very patient gamer's girlfriend, and thank goodness for it. I tried playing the game. It was a failed experiment; I shall stick with word puzzles on Popcap for now.

And that is all. Much thanks to those that can be of any help with identifying that werewolf book, and to those that suggest books/movies.