Done yesterday

( to.done 20090227 )

A little better at noting emotions today, though I see that I totally failed to note my walk, which included a phone call to cflute, at the time. Not slowing down helps. It also included a second call, to AT&T's technical support, to see what could be done about telling the phone to favor the edge network over 3G, which has crappy coverage.

I was delighted to find out that both pocketnaomi and cflute liked The Owl and the Mountain Goat, my first song of the year. A bit lightweight and far too full of in-jokes for general consumption, but a lot of fun.

River: Seeing the fnords

Over the last month or so I've realized that most of what I thought I knew about myself is simply wrong. That's unsettling. The most recent epiphany, as of yesterday, was realizing that much of my behavior is explained as avoidance of conflict rather than embarrassment.

(This seems to explain a lot: some of my hatred of sports, lack of competitiveness, inability to ask for things where I might have to argue for them, inability to talk with Colleen about finances and some other matters, excessive apologizing,... More on this later, perhaps.)

I've also realized that I still have no idea what most of my real problems are. I know that they're mostly a set of habits I've developed to avoid things I find painful: conflict, embarrassment, thinking about my (depressed) mood... I don't yet have the tools for identifying them, much less fixing them -- it's hard to see all the fnords.

OK, new tag: fnords.

Once I see one of these problems I can start thinking about how to fix it. Or deciding whether or when it's a problem: avoiding conflict is probably a good thing, much of the time. So is avoiding embarrassment. But sometimes they get in the way of other goals; I can't make an informed decision if the avoidance maneuver is so automatic that I don't have time to think about it. It's like a kid who automatically replies "no" to every question -- I remember being that kid once, when asked whether I wanted to go to the zoo. Oops. Probably lots of other times that I don't remember.

I have enough trouble trying to figure out what my mood even is. Discovered a couple of days ago that I can't always distinguish reliably between anxiety and depression, which ought to feel different somehow. And how do I tell whether my mood has gotten better than "just OK" when I don't have anything better to calibrate it against? How, for that matter, do I distinguish between what I actually feel and what I think I ought to be feeling given my analysis of the situation?

This has gotten disjointed, and appears to be turning into a mere list of "this is hard" complaints. It is hard, but I should probably stop now.

The last place you look...

We've been looking all over the house for Colleen's MP3 player, which has been missing ever since she came back from her last Remicade appointment. She wanted me to figure out how to put it into shuffle mode, which I thought I had done.

As it turned out it wasn't in the purple tote bag under the table, which she was positive was the one she'd taken to her appointment. It was in a green Whole Foods tote mostly full of empty Coke cans, which someone had hung up next to the washing machine on one of the hooks we use for bags of cans and bottles to be recycled. There was also a bag of peppermints in there.

I am simultaneously overjoyed that it's been found, mildly annoyed that someone (undoubtedly trying hard to be helpful) would have put it where it didn't belong without looking or asking, and considerably amused.

Colleen: update

Colleen's had rather a tiring afternoon -- I arrived to find her exhausted and hurting after an unsuccessful attempt to get out of bed. Apparently the flow rate on her epidural was still too high, and she can barely move her legs (though she can feel them). This is, however, an improvement over this morning, when she couldn't move them at all.

She does have the nose-tube that was draining her stomach out, and is no longer getting extra oxygen. Not having tubes taped across her face makes her a lot easier to kiss, and on the whole she seems a lot more comfortable.

Her room is looking more and more like a florist's shop, which of course is just the way she likes it. Spring flowers, please, not red roses.