Sunday of my Life

I’m currently at the comocile of my good friend Drewboy, about ot partake of a seafood dinner he feels he owes me for helping him study for our Networking exams. God this food smells good. He cooks with alot of garlic, and that’s just the way I like it. We’re having oven steamed/baked fish, prawns and scallops with rice and a creamy garlic sauce, and my mouth is watering already. Just thought I’d drop a line to let you all know I’m about to have a damn good meal, and boy am I happy about it.

Watch soon for another post about the Dragonhunt, and a comprehensive explanation of the background of my character, Rien.

So I went clothes shopping today.

Most people can’t seem to grasp the concept of just how much I hate this activity. Clothes shopping can be a trial for a lot of people, I’m sure. What to buy? What to buy? So many decisions, so much range. Eh, good luck to them. My problem is exactly the opposite. As I have vouchsafed in times past, I’m not a small guy, and I am working on this, but every time I have to go clothes shopping, it still depresses the hell outta me. There is so little range to be had for people my size. We have the choice of business trousers, old men trousers, t-shirts with non-descript stylings and polar-fleece jumpers. I mean, honestly, do they think bigger guys have no fashion sense? That we’re somehow content to wear such non-descript, baggy, raggy clothing that looks like it was regurgitated by a fashion-inept dinosaur.

Of course larger men can get some very fashionable clothes if we want to…we just have to find somewhere that sells them.

Oh yeah, and then we have to be made of money, because you’d better be prepared to pay upwards of $100 for a t-shirt, and an unimaginable amount for a pair of pants. But…that fact aside, the clothes are fashionable — if you’re 40. We’re mainly talking suits and shirts and ties…nothing that your average 20 year old would be caught dead wearing in a casual setting. It’s a cruel world of fashion for your larger, younger person. And yes, I know the solution of this problem is all up to me as, as I said, I am working on it. But these things take time.

Onto other matters though.

OK, I admit it, I am a bit of a slob sometimes. Cleaning is a chore that comes below everything else in terms of priority. This means that, when I’m working, cleaning is the furthest thing from my mind. And I have a busy work schedule, so naturally I don’t do cleaning that often. So, since it didn’t look like I was going to do it anytime soon, my father decided he’d clean up around my computer for me. *Sigh*…he has no sense of property unless it’s his. And as far as he’s concerned, everything in his house is his. Honestly, like it’s not my home too.

I came home from clothes shopping today to find the surfaces of my computer desk clean and neat. And completely cleared of the work I’d been doing. Various pieces of it had been scattered to different places in the house. On selves, in drawers and in cupboards. AARRGHHHH!!! Honestly, as if it hadn’t taken me long enough OTOH get myself comfortably set up there. It’s not like it was even messy, it was just a sketch pad, three pencils, an eraser and a ruler. Oh dear God no! They’ll mess everything up! Some things are out on a table! Ahh! The world’s going to end. Had a big argument with him about it, trying to get through his thick, stubborn head the fact that “it doesn’t belong to you, therefore it’s not up to you to decide where it goes and when it should go there.” He gave me his usual response, of course.

“This is my home, boy, and I can do what I like here.”

Gee…you’re home is it? And what am I? A transient guest with no blood relationship to you at all? Ergh…I hate it when he turns all pompous on me, acting as if I’m some errant child who has no concept of right and wrong and so needs to be taught a lesson. I’m 20-fucking-years-old, and something gives me the feeling that he’s not going to realise that until I get married or move out or have kids or something. It’s the most annoying of his many annoying mannerisms (other include making stupid noises when he burps or sneezes…kind of hard to describe, but believe me they’re deliberate) and it’s really starting to piss me off. Next item on my list of things to do: think of some way to convince him that I am, in fact, an adult, and not under his control anymore. Outright defiance on a continual basis might be ok. He can’t use any of his old threats like cutting me off from the computer or the internet because I now own both of them, so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on there. I pay for electricity, gas and water, and I mostly buy my own food, so those options are out for him now too.

I think that may actually work…either that or it’ll blow up in my face.

We’ll see.

(oh yeah…you may have noticed above, he occasionally seems to forget the name that *he* gave me. My name’s ‘Adrian’…not ‘boy’)

Well…ok, maybe I am in a couple of ways

it’s the end of the semester, I’ve finished my exams and all my work and I’m a free soul for the next 30 days. I’m going to take a week off then spend most of my time at work. I’ll be earning more money than ever before for three weeks of so, and that can’t help but be a good thing. I may finally get my networking tools (I’m buying my labeler this weekend) and things like that.

However, I’m not happy about a couple of things that I learned today. First and slightly less annoying on the list is the fact that it looks like I may have Fuckrag again next semester; not for one class, but for two. Goddamn…not him again…and for two bloody classes. Oh well, I’m doing my damnedest to transfer my enrolment for Multimedia and Web Design to flexibly delivered so I can just get all the work and do it and not have to see him for that subject, and I’ll see what I can do about Client Support. Second, and slightly more annoying on the list is the fact that one of the guys in my class that I tutored and took in my study group decided he needed to cheat his way through the exam. That kind of thing really pisses me off, especially when I know that this guy knows the subject. If you feel you can’t do it you should at least try your hardest to succeed, not resort to lowly methods of sneaking answers to yourself. Both myself and my teacher have worked damn hard this semester to make sure that everyone knows their stuff, and this kind of things is really galling. It makes me feel like I’ve wasted my effort, when this person cheats in order to succeed. I wonder if I should continue to bother. I mean, I know I was successful with most of them, but just this one person…*sigh*…ok…calm down. I was successful with all the rest of them, and am I going to let one person ruin that feeling of success?

No…no I’m not.

My good friend Dorothea has written an entry in Caveat Lector, her blog, that has touched me in a very special way. It reveals to me two things we have in common, we’re both blind as bats without our glasses and we both believe that there is a circle of hell reserved for the person or persons who came up with the idea of Microsoft PowerPoint.

Yes, I am a glasses wearing geek, as all my friends know, but I really don’t care. I am, in fact, quite proud of my geekhood, and wear the signs of it with chin held high in pride. I play Dungeons and Dragons. I work as a Network Administrator. I can tell you the distinct differences between an inline and block level element in CSS driven web-pages, or the differences between Div and Division in a program. I am a glasses-wearing, badge-adorned, card-carrying member of the Order of the Geek. And, damn I’m proud of it. I too have bad experiences with losing a lens to my glasses, although my frames allow me to just pop it back in, so that’s no real biggie. The day I lost my glasses though I was really lost. I almost cannot see without my glasses, my long vision is that poor. I have to hold things about a foot away from my face to read them. I was lost, couldn’t see, and basically couldn’t do anything, because I also had trouble finding my way around. Good thing I found them when I got home. There they were on the kitchen bench. Don’t know how I missed them, or how they got there in the first place for that matter. Oh well…crisis over.

PowerPoint though…ergh. My hate of PowerPoint dates back to high-school, where projects increasingly had a PowerPoint presentation as an assessment requirement, like it was somehow the greatest invention since fire and the wheel. I can think of some interesting things to be done with the makers of PowerPoint, involving both fire and wheels…but that’s something from the realms of pure fantasy. Imagine having to sit through class after class of badly-done presentations involving crappy transition animations and cheesy sounds, and knowing that yours was just as bad as everyone else’s because of the tools you were all relegated to using. It’s a nightmare, it truly is. It was, of course, made worse this year with the reign of terror that is Fuckrag, and his insistence of multimedia creativeness in a technical subject like Hardware. My hate of PowerPoint, since associatively it is now aligned with him, has increased exponentially, and I was most glad tonight I hear that Dorothea despises it as much as I do.

So I would like to say in conclusion: Glasses are good for those that need them, being a geek is nothing OTOH be ashamed of, and may Powerpoint die the grisly, horrible death it deserves.

Just how much of an impression you’ve made on people in a short time. To further on my efforts to bring my new life experience into the public eye, but also to help spare myself the embarrasment of having an attack in public (something apparently that every panicer fears most of all), I have told my one of my two remaining teachers about it. FunkyTeacher reacted..well…not exactly as I expected him to. Truth be told I expected some kind of ‘What the fuck?’ reaction out of him, but ’tis not what I received at all. He didn’t hand me sympathy on a platter, but rather some down-to-earth and userful advice on what to do to handle these attacks and prevent them from happening in the first place. Turns out he himself used to get them, which actually came as a surprise becuase he is one of the calmest people I know. Now I know how much of a struggle it can be for him to maintain his cool sometimes, I am even more in awe of the man.

One of the guys in my class turned out to be an even better friend than I had first imagined too. Seems he’s had panic attacks himself in the past, and his wife gets them too. He’s been most supporting, and doesn’t let me slip into a self-pitying thing about it, for which I am most grateful, because that’s a downward spiral I don’t want to even contemplate getting into.

Now I know I’m not sounding too coherent here, I’m just having trouble arranging my thoughts today, and really just wanted to get something down onto virtual paper about this, something safe, something so that I can know that I can beat this, becuase I’ve got friends who have done it too.

I have entered what some would call a new phase in my life, and under advice from my good friend Dorothea I’m going to write aobut it, to see if I can make some sense out of it, and maybe lessen its effects on me.

All through my life I’ve suffered mild anxiety, and considered it nothing. So I worry about things every once in a while, who doesn’t? Last night though I suffered a full-blown panic attack. First real one I’ve ever had in my life, and it’s not an experience I relish repeating.

For those who’ve never had a panic attack, or never seen someone have one, imagine it going like this:

• In the middle of whatever you’re doing, could be anything really, your perspective on the world changes, and things no longer seem as real as they were, or you feel like you’re floating outside yourself, unconnected from everything.
• Your arms and legs start to tingle as blood flow ot them increases, your heart beasts faster and you find yourself breathing harder.
• You suddenly find yourself afraid. Not of anything in particular, just…afraid. Of everything and of nothing.
• A wave of terror sweeps over you and start to sweat, and possibly burst into tears (not possibly with me…usually do, although I haven’t go much of a statistical comparison set yet).
• You feel nauseus, and you feel quite uncomfortable in the digestive region.
• You tremble uncontrollably, and find it hard to do just aobut anything except sit there

At least…that’s how it is for me.

Dorothea has done far more for me than I can ask of her. She talked (well, typed) me through it, and kept me going until my family came home and I was no longer alone. There are other things of this type happening with me, including nightmares and night terrors (which are two different things, look it up) and the fact I’ve broken an 18 year no-throwing-up streak.

Now, I promised Dorothea that when I wrote this I wouldn’t spend the whole thing being self pitying, so that’s enough of that then.

This is a problem, that’s very true, but problems are things to be solved, not things to wallow in. There is a solution here, and I will find it. There are alot of published works on dealing with panic attacks, and, while alot of them may indeed be well thought-out, reasonable bodies of work, in my current state they tend to look like alot of tripe. Dorothea tells me that this is becuase I’m so damn stubborn about accepting help, and she’s probably right, so that’s part fo the reason I’m writing this. I’m not looking for sympathy, and I’m not looking to be told to ‘buck up’. I’m writing this so that, at some point soon, I can print it and give it to my sister, for whom I hold much respect, and I can ask for her help. It’s possibly something I sohuld have done long ago, but I, and I know exactly why, was unable to do it. The reason why is not important, though; the important thing is that it was all me in my own head blocking me from doing it. Well now my problem is starting to get worse, so now I have to do something about it.

But I still need help, and that’s the whole purpose here. Erin…will you help me?

I came home from work today with a major headache and feeling sick to my stomach Now, for most people this is a nice, normal sign of a nice mormal stress filled day, but not so for me. I don’t get stressed in my new job, so why did I come home looking like one of the thousands of stressed out office workers and acting like one of the thousands of mellowed out stoners? Simple. Varnish and Oil-Based Paints.

At work today there was the finish touches being put to the new construction work downstairs. We just had a new office fitted where the undercover parking used to be (the new company call center/tech support area), new facures put onto the stairs leading to the upper level (thank god, no more catching my feet going up the stairs and making a fool out of myself), and two more offices downstairs had just been refurbished (my office and my supervisor’s office), so, of course, they had to be painted and the stairs had to be varnished.

Of course! So simple! No problem! Let’s do it in the middle of a busy work day!

Wrong…so wrong.

I first noticed it about half way through my morning. Stopped in the middle of the network layout diagram I was making to question myself; “What the hell is that smell?” Soon afterwards I learned that the stairs up to my office level were being varnished. “Funnnn,” thought I, “this kind of thing can’t be doing the server or my brain much good.” Around 15 minutes later the headache started. Ergh…just what I neeed. Soon afterwards I was finding it hard to focus and and forgetting what I was doing in the middle of doing it. the new call centre downstairs, already occupied by our call centre staff, was my main port of call that day for trouble-shooting and overall tasks as I hooked each of them into the network and remade their network shares nad re-mapped their network drives and got them back onto the net. It was also the main port of call of the fumes, since all four walls and the ceiling were freshly painted. it was a 30 minute job on each of the 4 computers, and I had to do it at 5-minute burts with a 5 minute break in between each one. It was that or throw up onto the computers. So the headache and the nausea followed me all day at work. Wherever I went, there they were, even out in the cavernous warehouse that is our dispatch section. by the end of the day I was delerious and kind of glad to be going home where there weren’t such fumes. Even now as I write this, every time my heart beats the world spins. Not a fun feeling people, I can tell you now.

On the plus side: I got alot of stuff done at work today…really accomplished alot.

On the negative: I can’t remember what any of it is.