litch | Entries tagged with my problems

When I woke up this morning I discovered I couldn't turn my head right. Evidently I slept wrong last night and some how pinched/pulled or otherwise fucked up something in my neck such that every time I try to turn my head to the right it hurts tremendously right where the back right side of my neck connects into my head.

I really hate crap like this, it doesn't hurt at all unless I try to move my head right, then it hurts so much I want to cry. The most fiendish part of this is when something moves in my periphery or I hear something on that side and do the reflexive twitch to see what it is.

It's a gorgeous day out and the dogs are restless and I had really been looking forward to going out to the park but I'm not sure I will be able to cope with all the dexter action out there. I think I have some muscle relaxant sample somewhere from the last time I did something like this. I am going to take some of those, ice my neck (once it warms up a bit), try some simple stretches to get everything lubricated with sinovial fluid and hope it get workable.

So you know what sucks?

To see a change in size of something (without looking for it) it usually has to change by about 15-20%.

So for there to really be a change in the way I look, I gotta lose 50-70 pounds.

And, last time I checked (earlier this week), I've lost a whopping five pounds since I began making a concerted effort at losing weight over a month ago (actually it's been longer than that because I started from when when I was having kidney issues, that's just the first time I talked publically about it).

It's depressing as hell.

I know a part of it is that I am putting on some muscle mass. When I spend the day exercising at the park I don't get nearly as tired and feel a lot more healthy. But that's very small and insignifigant, a couple pounds, tops.

My intention was to eat less than 2500 calories a day, if my calculations are correct I've been averaging about 2000 calories/day. In a wierd kind of way it's kind of comforting, I've always suspected but never been able to prove I have a fairly slow metabolism or even measure it really. It has suprised people how spend a lot of time with me how little I eat, especially since according to the stuff I have read I should have to eat close to 3k/calories/day to really maintain my weight. I've always supposed that I just don't eat as much in public (assuming I was ashamed of eating) and did most of my calorie intake in private. That really doesn't seem to be the case, apparently I just don't burn many calories. I have always had a low resting heart rate, ~60, and that is another datapoint.

I don't want to cut my food intake signifigantly, I already get these wierd events every once in a while at night where I feel deprived (and usually wind up sending my calorie count up 300 or so to assuage it). I would like to incorporate a regular daily aerobic activity into my life since that will both add another calorie burning activity in my day and increase my overall metabolic rate. But jogging is really hard on my feet and knees at this point, and I can;t think of anything else that would really be satisfying.

So I got my mail the other day and noticed a bunch of transfers from savings to cover checking overdrafts. That shouldn;t have happened so I went in and looked at my online statement:
09/05/2005 Withdrawal @ On Demand Internet Transaction Trace #4814160167 Transfer "DTM" 645.80 to MC Loan 1 -$645.80 $1,229.29
09/05/2005 Withdrawal @ On Demand Internet Transaction Trace #4814270154 Transfer "DTM" 645.80 to MC Loan 1 -$645.80 $583.49

So I seem to have paid my mortgage twice, which then caused a cascade of overdrafts, and then worst of all bounced my check to nancy for the loan she gave me to pay off my share of the credit cards and gave me a $25 NSF fee.

I called UFCU and the two entries are 15 minutes apart so it doesn't look like a double tap or something. I only remember making one transfer but who knows. They withdrew the NSF charge and we'll call it even. I think I might need to start paying my mortgage out of my paytrust account.

Ever without the double deposit I still would have had to do a overdraft for nancy's check but it wouldn't have bounced.

I haven't been saving the money I need to in order to pay my property taxes at the end of the year and it's worrying me. During the divocre I was expecting a raise and to be out of debt by now but that raise keeps getting pushed back. It was supposed to happen in july, then they said august, then it was the end of august, and now, well Maybe the end of september.

I got the loan to pay off alan, so now I have lots of cash in my account and 200$/month more in bills to pay off.

Current Mood: lost

So, to keep my head from exploding I started seeing a shrink again back when I was working for Lotus in 2001. I've seen shrinks off and on since I was in 6th grade when the school sent me to one for anger issues. Saw one again in college for more anger issues (not to mention the entire degree in psychology thing) and I tried again after I got married and we had our anger issues come up. Saw yet another after a couple years at lotus, about some anger issues that had come up at work.

I never found any of the people I saw up until I started seeing my current shrink very useful (the grad student I was directed to in college actually did help point out a lot of things, but our personalities never meshed). Some of that was I just wasn't in a place where I was capable of working on the underlying issues. A lot of it was lame ass incompetent shrinks.

Unlike them, the guy I am seeing now, Alan Griffen, has been really useful. He's retiring at the end of the month & I am not planning on seeing anyone else. I feel pretty good with where I am, and want to keep my own counsel for a while. I miss the anger sometimes though, that sounds so pathetic to my minds ear like I'm incapable of sustaining a hearty emotion anymore. But I've bought into the idea that the anger I had depended on for so much of my life is ineffective for getting some things I want and that the sense of power and strength and control it brought were illusory.

I am trying to look behind the anger these days, at the fear and the sadness that underlies the rich, verdant landscape of rage. It makes me feel wimpy a lot, but then that's a part of why I started getting so mad in the first place. I feel much less in danger of having my head explode.

Alan really rocks, he saw me through my two years of unemployment and been really cool while I have gotten my debts under control. But since he's retiring he'd like me to pay off what I owe him, so I applied for a 6k$ loan from the bank this morning

I'm 6' and weigh 350 pounds, wear size 56 pants and I'm tired of it. I've decided I'm going to lose weight by dieting and exercise. When I lost my appetite for few days after my kidney issue it help set the tone and so I've been trying to moderate my food intake since my birthday. It's harder than I thought, I've been trying to be aware of my emotional & physical sensations when I eat and noticed how often I eat out of boredom and lonliness. I've known that but I thought I had gotten passed that, guess not.

I need to get a scale and start recording what I eat and the exercise I do but I am uncomfortable with the thought of doing that here. I am afraid of losing people's intrest, no, I am afriad of failing and having to confront that. That's a subset of my larger fear, I've tried losing weight before & (as is painfully obvious) never suceeded in keeping it off.

I had given up on trying some time before I married Nancy, the evidence against yo-yoing was pretty clear and I was doing too much "once I lose weight I'll..." & never doing anything. I changed my goals to just trying to eat nutriously and stay active. This was actually a pretty viable strategy for me, my weight settled at 333 and stayed there no matter what I ate & did. Then in the last year of our marriage I ballooned up to 360ish and bounced around within 5-10 pounds of that ever since.

Now I am going to get back on the weight loss horse and I'm terrified of failing again. Not about failing to lose weight so much as failing to be able to manifest my will. I believe that if I can't keep the weight off this time it will be my last attempt.

Current Mood: scared

So I cleared out the area under the sink and took a closer look at the disposal (I've always called them disposal's but most of the hardware website seem to call them diposERs, according to dictionary.com I'm right and they're wrong nyah-nyah). First thing I noticed is there is a small puddle under it. Not good but all sinks I've ever seen leak a little occasionally so I wasn;t too worried.

Found the reset button for the disposal

pi3832 mentioned. Pushed it and it hummed for a bit then popped again. At least it's not the house wiring (my dark nightmare), it's the unit itself. Got up and waggled a plunger handle in there and ran water to see if I could free it but when I pushed the reset it just hummed again and then popped. This time I noticed there was a drip from the bottom of the unit, but not from the plumbing connection point as I had been expecting but from an inspection plate.

I looked around the house for 15 minutes trying to find a flat bladed screw driver to take it off (who the hell uses flat screws anymore?) and finally had to use a screwtip in a nut driver. Took the plate off and confirmed that the leaking was coming from inside the unit. Pushed the reset button again and it hummed for a while then I saw a flash and it stopped. So something is shorting out inside. I was about to poke at the wire connections to the house romax the access plate was there for but then realized the line was still hot, there thing was damp and I knew it was shorting and apparently made my save against stupidity roll.

Current Mood: working

One of the women in group recently was talking about an issue that meshed with me from the other side. She was upstairs and saw her toddler walking around with a sharp pencil, got scared and hollered down to her husband to take it away, he looked up, looked at the kid, and said "he's fine" so she ran down stairs, took the pencil away and was upset that he would ignore her fears like that.

I had that fight dozens of times with nancy.

I could imagine being him all too clearly, you're doing something and the kid you are supposed to be watching starts to do something modestly dangerous and then all of the sudden your wife is screaming at you with that voice, that parental scold demanding immediate action from you. I (and apparently he) don't react well in situations like that. There's an immediate sense of shame at someone else pointing out a problem you should be aware of, calling your judgement, maturity, and capability into question and finding it wanting for letting it happen and not doing anything about it. Following that so closely you don't even really become aware of that feeling and just respond defensively, minimizing the danger, implying they're over reacting, and going into full passive mode.

Intellectually, it's obvious that what's motivating the screetch in the first place is fear but emotionally I react like it's a grab for control of the situation. It might not even be a situation with much obvious control content, but especially when the person you're married to has general control issues in the first place the sudden exacerbation that that tone just triggers a knee jerk response in me like someone had just cracked a whip over my head.

The suggestion we eventually came up with is to see if she could let more of her fear through in her voice in those kinds of situations, push up the opportuntity for him to come to the rescue and be a hero. For her to actively cede control of the situation to him.

Current Mood: sad

So the doctor is now thinking I am just suffering from a prostate infection, which can cause kidney pain. Extended my antibiotic script for 2 weeks (bojemoi!). However all the scanning has shown that I have a Porcelain Gallblader. Entirely unlike a glass jaw, it's like a gall stone, though instead of building up into a stone the materiel starts lining the walls of the gall bladder. It has a strong association with gall bladder cancer and prophylactic cholecystectomy is generally reccomended.

I am not sure I am down with that, a casual shuffle through google shows that there is some question about how much linkage there actually is and I am decidely uncool with people cutting me open and removing bits of my guts unless it is urgent.

Felicitation on my day of birth!

Got my cat scan yesterday, it was quick and painless, just lay on the table and hold you breath when the machine tells you while it slides you back and forth through the donut. I had been worried I was too fat to fit in the machine but there was plenty of room. The radiologist is looking at the pix and will call my doctor today and then she will contact me to decide our course of treatments. I expect they are just going to to have me drink lots of water and endure it till it passes, though there is a possiblity if it is big enough, in the right place, and of the right kind they might use the sonic blaster on me.

Right now I am on two vicodin ES 750's and it's still sore and uncomfortable. I can't seem to find a comfortable position to sit in nor does stretching and moving doesn't have any salutatory effect. Every once in a while I get a bit hot and fevery but it's always been pretty mild.

Before my kidneys started hurting I had been considering crawling 6th street this evening, seeing how many free drinks I could cadge with the intention of getting throughly hammered. But with my filtration system in questionable states I don't think that's a good idea. Pity, my soul feels like it could use a good drunk. I've been bitchy and feeling kind of trapped in my life lately. Rationally there's no reason for that, I am living the life I chose. I think I just have psychic junk accumulated in the halls of my mind. Echoes of sadness, lonliness, & disappointment, casual slights I've not completely forgotten. That vague snarl of memories of things undone that I've resigned to the fact I am not going to get to anytime soon.

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: cibo matto - birthday cake

I'm fixing myself one of my favorite snacks, baked frozen breaded cream cheese stuffed chipotles. They are a bit spicy but not too bad and very much worth the burn. I am expecially pleased because they're the first thing I've been hungry for since friday, all I ate yesterday was half a seafood salad sandwich, a cup of yogurt (to help cope with the anti-biotic I'm taking) and some crackers. Wasn't hungry this morning but my back was aching enough for me to eat some more seafood salad so I could take the vicodin (tends to make me nauseous on an emtpy stomach).

I was getting worried about not getting hungry, primed the pump a bit but finally I actually have an appetite. Now I can take a second pill cause my back is still a bit woogy.

Current Mood: worried

Monday I noticed my lower back was starting to hurt and peeing felt wierd. I'd suddenly need to go so badly it hurt, then not being able to generate more than a couple good splashes.

I started drinking more water and hoping it would pass but it has been escalating pretty steadily. The other night I woke up with a need to pee in the middle of the night with a sharp ache like someone had kicked me. Finally gave in and called the doctor yesterday and got to see her this morning. Damn good thing, I had a bitch of a time getting to sleep last night night, not just my back but my front hip too.

She said I'm bleeding into my urine, it's probably a kidney stone and I need get a spiral CT to verify that, find out where it is, how big it is and if there is an infection with it (that would be bad). Since I was only gimping around and not writhing on the floor she figured it could wait until monday and gave me an antibiotic and some vicodin es to keep me until then with instuctions that if I spike a fever, start puking, or otherwise get much worse go to the nearest ER.

I took a couple vicodin this morning and felt much better, Good enough I went out to take care of a couple things this afternoon, unfortunantly after a while I started feeling like crap and sweating profusely. Went home scared, but after lying down a bit and cooling off I felt better. There was a warning on the antibiotic about sunsensitivity and I think that was what that was about, but I can't find a frigging thermometer.

Current Mood: sick

You are a fucking asshole and you know why
You're a fucking jerk, asshole and you know exactly why. From the friend of a friend you do not deserve.

I am. I allowed myself to act in a cowardly, craven manner and I really hurt a friend of mine's feelings.

A friend of mine (the one I don't deserve) stayed with me last weekend then went to stay with some other friends of their's in the hillcountry. They were hoping and we'd planned to spend their last night in this part of the country at my place. I was supposed to call them after I got home from work and arrange the details and I didn't. I just spaced on it and completely forgot about calling. It was almost the prototypical guy thing, I was feeling a my space threatened and rather than be a man (or at least an adult) and call them and talk about it honestly and forthrightly I just "let myself forget" and left someone that has been a friend of mine for years in the lurch.

Current Mood: dispicable

I stopped by whole foods on my way in to work in a fruitless search for a meat pastry. As I left I found myself pondering the question of "do I love myself" and the knee-jerk reaction I have of saying "of course I do", wondering if I really do since it sounds a bit defensive in my minds ear. Tried "do I like myself" and had the same reaction (maybe a bit less vehemently) so I tried to fomulate it in a positive way and had a bit of a breakthrough.

I realized I do like and love myself but I am disappointed in myself, I just didn't turn out as good as I was hoping. Serious internalization of my parents apparent perceptions and mindset. While I like myself, I would like myself a lot more if I were just a bit more successful, disciplined, brave, accomplished, thin, energetic, eloquent, and all the other things I aspire towards.

It's particularly nasty since I have the sense that no matter how good I do something I am never going to be good enough, there is no level of performance I could reach where I could not wonder if I couldn't do just a little bit better. Writing about this is tough, it triggers so many memories from my adolescence and post-adolescence, how frustrated I was I could never seem to satisfy my parents (and I wonder now how much of that was me projecting this on them).

So how the hell do I get rid of the disappointment?

My current theory is that I need to try to set reasonable, rational expectations for myself. Respond postitively when I meet those expectations, and if I become aware of one of a lurking disappointment, drag it out of the shadows and laugh at it derisively. I have little ope this will work.

Current Mood: disappointed

I just talked to a guy with a cool name, "Bruce Strange". One of the cheap amusements of my chosen professions is encountering cool, unusual or otherwise interesting names.

Two and a half hours ago when i started this message I was irritable, no reason I could figure out, just easily irked. Now I am just pissed, everybody seems to be out to annoy the fuck out of me.

I was feeling irritable last night when I went to group therapy, and talked about it. One of the tropes I have learned there is that when I am angry at everything in the universe it's probably that I am angry at myself and I was trying to figure out why I am angry at myself and what the sadness or fear that underlies the anger.

The only thing I can come up with that I might be angry at myself about is my failure to do all my chores, like changing the a/c filter every month or getting my truck fixed/inspected/registered. The fear beneath that is that I can't competently run my life, do all the chores I need to do to get through my life without something I could prevent exploding in my face.

The stupid thing is that I am actually pretty good about doing that sort of stuff, better than most people at least. I just have this terror I am going to forget to do something I know I need to do and it is going to burn me and it will be all my fault. And it's a rediculous terror, I know shit happens and I am capable of taking care of it and getting out the other side with minimal scarification but the idea of failing some simple chore and having that lead directly to something worse happening just fills me with dread.

Current Mood: annoyed

so I was trying to watch tv and I started hearing this buzz, I'd put a fan in the in the upstairs window and I thought it might be the fan vibrating against the sill but when I went up I heard it coming from the HVAC.

I have everything set to off so I couldn't figure out what could be buzzing, I pulled the front plate and looked around inside and determined it was the heaters electric igniter firing constantly. Tried to pull the power cables and got shocked for my effort, looped a non-conducter around the black and then the white wire and popped them off the circuit board but it kept humming away.

I finally popped the breaker and it quit. This is upsetting me a lot, the I am scared of my house being broke, the heat is just miserable, it's 87 in the house and 86 outside. I worry that my sloppy maintenance has caused this, hell I know my sloppy maintenance has caused this and I feel miserable and like I deserve even more misery.

Crap, it's started again, evidently that braker only controls the outside unit, now I get to play guess the heater igniter circuit, so down the computer

Current Mood: guilty

My a/c wasn't cooling well, so fearing that it had frozen up I checked the filter and found it needed changing, replaced it with a new one and turned off the A/c and left the fan on to melt any ice blockage and poured some bleach down the drain to kill any mold that might be backing up the tube.

It kept cutting out, so afraid it was over heating the fan I turned everything to off. It went off but it kept pulsing like it was trying to turn on than changing it's mind. After 5-10 minutes it stopped that and I decided I'd call strand tomorrow to come look at it (I was wonder what was going to cost me 400$ this month).

After half an hour I tried to turn the fan back on, nothing.

Checked all the breakers, found a gfci that had popped (but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the HVAC, it's something for the bath I believe) and reset it. Still nothing.

Took the front panel off and it looks like there is power getting there (there's an LED on the circuit board that's lit up) but discovered a puddle of water at the bottom. Mopped it up and when I checked the new filter found it was full of water as well, pulled it, poured the water out and left it out to dry, poked around as much as I was comfortable but couldn't figure out the secret to making the fan come on.

It's 82 in the house, 92 outside and expected to rise until it hits 100 sometime this evening.
Edit6:15 and it is 86 in here and 99 outside (according to joebot)
Edit8:30 and it is 87 in here and 92 outside (according to joebot)

Current Mood: hot

Apparently I have been shorting myself sleep lately, I got up this morning, fed the dogs, ate a piece of cold pizza had a soda and fell asleep on the couch watching a show on building deep drilling rigs. Woke up 1ish, realized I was still exhausted and went to bed to nap until 4.

Realized that Pink Floyd was going to play soon and I was curious if Gilmour and Waters were going to kill each other on international television. They didn't. I have been watching the concert since, flipping getween the VH1 and the MTV coverage to see if there was a difference. Amazingly Mtv managed to be more annoying, I really thought the two feeds would be much different but MTv's announcer were notably dumber. mTV did have much cooler commercials though, there was one mtV ad about a kid living in a car & hotel room with his family with the tagline "mtv is still cool".

My back has been sketchy lately, it hurts to bend over, to loosen my hips and lean in a direction. I really hate that, it's entirely too common a coda in my bodysymphony. The last time I did weightlifting it really helped that dramatically and I've been hoping the increaded activity I've been engaging in would help but it sems to have just gone the other direction of giving myself more oppurtunities to strain and hurt myself.

Speaking of, yesterday when I noticed the pain I was really confused because I didn't remember straining my back but this morning driving in to work I was dumbfounded. I had forgotten how hard I had worked sunday on my house. I really pushed myself doing yard work, lots of time running a weed whacker which is the devils own tool of back aches. I even remembered this morning a couple of occasions doing the work sunday when I paused realized I was tired and should go rest and rehydrate but decided to keep working because I wanted to get things done. Interesting attempt at self-sabotage, wonder why working in the yard evokes such antinomy in me.

I am thinking about getting some dumbells to take up weight training again.

This guy from work got fired last friday, for failing to adhere to an improvement plan. I'm sorry to see him go, he was a nice guy, he and his girlfriend were part of the group from work I went to see star wars with on opening night. He's decidedly technically competent but his work skills (getting to work on time, document everything, etc) just didn't cut it. I look at that with a great deal of trepidation, that's how I tend to fuck up at work. I'm not having a problem, but I like what I am doing and the people I work with and my life is pretty good right now. I feel like I could fall down that oiled cascade of broken glass anytime, it's just one loss of balance away.

This was from a work lunch, the girl he's talking to is Carrie, she's our HR person here in Austin. They both used to work at High-End systems at the same time and had a number of common friends.