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| In Which I Am Always Tired |
I am always baffled when people talk about how sunny days make them feel more energized. I wake up, the sun is shining, and the most I can muster is an "oh, that's pretty" before the urge to burrow under my blankets and not encounter another human being ever again threatens to overtake me.
I am aware that this is a symptom of depression.
I am aware that I have a history of depression.
I am also aware that, while I feel unmotivated and incredibly sleepy, this is not depression. It does not feel like despair. It doesn't feel empty. It doesn't feel bad. I just feel tired.
And I know why!!!
I'm tired because I don't sleep well. I don't sleep well because I have anxiety. I have anxiety because it's a freaking pandemic and things keep. going. wrong. everywhere. all. the. time.
But I have a few secret weapons to make myself be less bed-bound and determined:
I have ~ h o b b i e s ~
Hold on, I have to stop cackling like Old Peddler Woman Evil Queen In Disguise from Snow White...
But seriously, yeah, my hobbies of watercolor and crochet get me to be more active than I otherwise would be one way or another. I'm either crocheting/painting/drawing, or... I'm avoiding them.
If I'm doing the arts & crafts, I'm being productive. If I'm avoiding the arts & crafts, I'm still being productive more often than not because I do things like "oh, I can't paint right now, I have clothes to put away" or "oh I can't crochet right this minute the cat needs a walk" or "hmm... I could write in my novel or I could go shopping a half mile down the road..."
See? Active.
Just... not today.
Today I just want to bury myself in soft blankets with hot coffee and thick socks and listen to a cute Australian lady find out what those ceramic molds she bought on Gumtree
contain.
And that's okay.
It's okay to be unmotivated and need some coziness once in a while.
It's when it lasts more than three days that you need to worry. Trust me on that. If you feel like your bed is too welcoming to do anything you really should be doing and you feel that way for 72 hours straight? That's either depression or diabetes. You want neither, but if they happen, you want them to go untreated even less. Brains and Pancreases don't exactly regenerate well without assistance (and pancreases even less than brains!) so if you're having a sudden "Nope" period for more than 3 days (and you're not having a period, because let's be real, sometimes the ol uterus is the one saying "nope"...) then you should probably see a doctor.
If you can't see a doctor, have someone sniff your breath and if it smells like apples when you haven't been eating any, get thee to an ER - that's diabetes. And it's bad.
Uh, to be clear that last bit hasn't happened to either me or anyone I know, but I've known some people who've known some people who've seen some stuff, so uh... that's a thing.
Anywho, it's Tuesday, and it's beautiful looking out there. There's soft, puffy clouds in the bright, robin's egg sky, we've only had one bird-murder in the last week (today - red-tailed hawk took out another one of our pigeons), we've seen the wood rat (she's very, very fat and apparently likes snacking on the neighbor's compost pile), and we've also got a red squirrel passing through. It's currently 66℉ (18.9℃) and about 64% humidity. The crows are cawing.
And I had a hell of a Saturday. Which, come to think of it, might be part of why I'm so resistant to movement.
My mother's mother is, as many grandparents are, quite eccentric. Like the majority of my relatives and myself included, she's also a musician. I play flute and piano, my mother plays trumpet and piano, my father plays trumpet and flugelhorn and bugle, my uncles & aunt play other instruments, and both of my grandmothers play piano...
But my mother's mother also happens to play the organ, and having moved multiple times, her own electric organ has become unplayable.
So she wanted a new one and found one!
A free electric organ!
A free electric organ two hours (one way) away from my house.
Which she lives two hours away from.
And she's recently had surgery.
So she obviously needed assistance retrieving this marvelous find, right? Well, she's only got 2 kids - my mom and my uncle. My uncle is not able to help with something like this for a multitude of reasons, nor would he be willing. My mother should not have helped with this, but she was too well-aware that my grandmother, the human definition of stubbornness, would have attempted to lift a whole damned organ by herself just to get it.
So my mother volunteered, despite having a back injury and a torn bicep that still has not fully recovered.
She also, regretfully, volunteered me.
I was... less than thrilled, but guess what? There's literally no one else to do this and I love my mother and my grandmother, so it had to happen whether anyone liked it or not. That's family, sometimes.
Now, this four hour trip would've been rough under the best of circumstances, but unfortunately, the circumstances got worse and worse.
- The day started after noon for us.
- We hit every rumble strip from here to there and then from there to here.
- My grandmother likes to drive one-handed
- She didn't have the directions to the organ's location written anywhere
- She kept calling for directions on the way
- None of us knew where we were or where we were going
- She brought her 85lb neurotic German Shepherd mix who kept trying to hang himself by his leash because he kept jumping over the backseat so he could be next to my grandmother
That last one? That's why I have bruises and a very sore spine. At one point, this animal decided that he was tired of sitting in the back and tried to sit next to me. There was no room next to me because we had moving equipment piled up. Also his leash was shortened so he was hanging himself. And his butthole was planted firmly on my shoulder. And he was struggling.
Eventually, I managed to yeet him back where he came from, but he kept trying to come back up! I spent probably 3 hours with my left arm around the headrests of the rest of my row just to try desperately to keep him in the back. It only worked about 70% of the time, so the other 30% of the time was me desperately trying to remind the pointy-skulled garganth that he would choke himself out if he kept forcing himself forward. All while knowing that at some point I'd be getting out to shift an electric organ.
Before heading out, before she'd told us the make/model of the organ, I tried looking up how much electric organs weighed, and one of the estimates was around 425lb (192.8kg). My max lift/carry is 100lb (45.4lb), and that's with a hernia belt and spotter. It's also my estimate from 15 years ago. I was, of course, terrified that I'd be trying to lift a behemoth with my mother while both of us have compromised arms - her from the bicep tear, me from an old injury + holding the dog back for hours.
I needn't have feared. The organ weighed all of 125lb (56.7kg) and the gentleman trying to get rid of it helped us. Also we brought a dolly so that helped a lot.
The organ was the easiest part of the trip.
Needless to say, the dog was no better behaved on the way home and ended up strangling himself a second time before he finally exhausted himself and laid down in the back.
For ten minutes.
Before starting right back up on his bullmalarky.
Needless to say, my shoulder is still sore and I have bruises that make it look like I got battered by a poorly controlled baby elephant. Both of my wrists have bruises (resting them on the laptop to type is annoying), my spine aches from being at a weird angle for so much of the journey, and also I'm just... I'm tired.
Sleeping has been hard, as I've noted many times.
Sunday was great! I spent time with my boyfriend, we watched silly stuff on YouTube, ate pot roast, talked about stories we're working on, and we ate a whole bag of popcorn between the two of us. It was a 10/10 visit and I had a blast.
Yesterday sucked, unfortunately, with nothing going the way anyone wanted it. Today has also sucked for similar reasons.
I mostly just want to eat chicken sausage and go to bed, but I also want to be productive in some way, shape, or form.
My hope is that after I post this and eat dinner, I can get a small sketch out. Maybe not a painting. Maybe not even something in color, but a sketch of some variety so I can get these creative juices back to where they were on Sunday.
How is the week treating all of y'all? Have you also had a "bent at an angle with a dog's butt on your shoulder and the seatbelt strangling you" kind of week? Has your week been mediocre? Has it been marvelous? Feel free to vent, bleh, or even brag in the comments!
Also, the plan for Thursday is to post something properly autumnal, so keep an eye out ;)
FC
