I'm not well at the moment

Since vacation, which I may have mentioned didn't exactly go well for me, with about a day and a half of exception (thank you Lonespark for the day, thanks to my mother for the half.)  I've been off.

This week I'm going to have to go to see my psychiatrist and say, "I don't know if the medication has been working, I've been forgetting it more often than I remembered it."  Though maybe if I can stay on it between today and the day I see him I'll have some idea if it's working.  I haven't been having much of anything in the way of luck when it comes to getting enough sleep.  Hell, last night I had a dream with angels and demons and birds the size of cities and probably the most vivid part was when someone was, via magic, able to give me a good night's sleep.  It was such a wonderful thing waking up in the dream fully rested, and a disappointment waking up in real life to a feeling of, "One good night's sleep doesn't cancel out weeks of not getting enough."

I've not managed to stay hydrated well.

I'm not sure how well I've been keeping myself fed.  Last night I was sick.  (Sickness tends to make me more able to remember my dreams, for whatever that is worth.)  And I'm not sure whether I was sick because there was something wrong in an ordinary sickness sense, or if I was sick because yesterday I ate well for the the first time in however long and my body wasn't sure what to do with all the food.

First I thought I was going to vomit, then didn't.  Then laid on the bathroom floor as I heard-felt* bubbling in parts of my body that should never bubble.  I understand that the phrase, "It's just gas," is meant to be in comparison to "Something that could kill you," thus justifying the "just".  Even so, I seriously wonder if whoever coined the phrase had to deal with gas because it sure as hell hurts like you're dying.  At least I assume so, I've never been dying.  Difficult to imagine that dying could hurt more.  Hurt less, yes.  Hurt more, I have my doubts.

I've had broken bones, I've had grains of sand picked out of a deep gash in my foot with tweezers repeatedly.  (Couldn't get it all in one go, I think it took weeks to get it all out.)  How deep a gash? The only reason that I didn't have stitches was because that would have closed the sand inside of my foot.  They needed to leave it open to get the sand out.**  I've had a piece of  wood (too big to call a splinter  too small to call a stake) driven so deep into one of my toes that I was only able to remove it with pliers.  Fucking gas leaves all these things in the dust.

"Just gas," my ass.

No, no one said that to me.  But the phrase came to mind.

Later on I did indeed vomit.  This is something that happens to me extremely rarely.  "Feel like I might throw up," happens so much more often that I've reached the point where I don't even think of that as a reason to consider that I might actually throw up.  Instead I don't really consider the possibility until it's more like, "Feel like I'm in the first stage of throwing up."  At which point sprint to the nearest toilet.

And now here I am today.  Definitely feeling better than last night, but still tired, still somewhat nauseous.  First day back on my medications since I don't even know because I lost complete track of when I remembered and when I forgot.

Though, actually, it can be worked out that it can't have been more than two days without them, and I think it was two days.  The day I wrote my most recent post, I decided that I'd been missing my medication enough it was probably better to take it quite late than miss another day.  So I did.  Practical result: I didn't sleep at all.  Actually, I don't know if my meds are to blame for that because I never reached the point of trying.  I never even made it in the general direction of going to bed.  My hope that I could do something to counterbalance it by going to sleep extremely early the next day was dashed when it turned out a member of my family would be staying with me that night.

Anyway, been all out of sorts.  Missing my meds, missing sleep, missing hydration, possibly missing food, and possibly sick.

How long will this last, I know not.  Hopefully it ends today, but hopefully it ended before and yet it did not.

No idea what effect this will have upon the blog.  But it surely must have one.  The extreme drop in my output of late is what's been happening so far.  One might guess that that will continue unless I get out of this rut of everything going wrong.

Anyway, that's why this is tagged as meta.  What affects me affects the blog.  When I'm doing crappily so too does the blog.

And on a largely unrelated note, an ASL class just moved through here.

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* I'm not sure that everyone really understands the connection between feeling and hearing, I know I didn't always.  I think a break through moment for me was when someone talking about an old injury in their shoulder had me put my hand on it so I could "hear" the noise it made when the shoulder was moved.  The sensation was just like hearing, and processed as noise, but it wasn't coming through my ears.

That's part of why deaf people can enjoy music.  Hearing isn't limited to one's ears, it's just concentrated and specialized there.

My father once had a job adjusting music for something.  I think the biggest thing was monitoring the baseline because the sound of that is physical enough that without someone to adjust it the difference between a standing audience and a sitting audience will change the sound.  Or something like that.  (I tend not to get details from my father because if I start him talking there's no telling when he'll stop, so it's generally better not to ask for repetition, reminders, clarification, or elaboration.)

So when he was working at a birthday party for a deaf person, all of whose friends were deaf, he asked someone why the music had to be so damn loud.  It was explained to him that the music had to be loud so the deaf people could hear it.  The natural question of, "How can they hear it if they're deaf?" was responded to by pointing out that they don't hear it with their ears, the hear it here *gesture to chest*.

Those who are completely deaf, and were from birth, have a much more detailed sense of that kind of hearing than hearing people such as myself do because the part of their brain that would be used to interpret sensory input from their ears is taken over for the purposes of interpreting sounds picked up via the rest of the body.

It's all vibrations, and your eardrum isn't the only part of you that can feel vibrations.  Even amoung the hearing, if you pay attention (or there is a powerful enough baseline to make itself known in the absence of you paying attention) you can hear-feel music in parts of you other than your ears.

Hear-feel, heard-felt and variations on that are my own invention, I have no idea what the technical term for this non-ear-based sense of sound is.  If there even is one.

Vaguely related, I once saw and heard B.B. King live in concert.  (I recommend it if you have the chance and the money.)  I realized as I listened that different parts of the auditorium responded to different parts of the music.  My chair would vibrate with one sound, the floor with another, so on, so forth.  Resonant frequencies at work.

** What happened is this: a warped piece of wood on a dock had loosened a nail with the result that the head (that is the flat part, remember.  It doesn't cut; it rips) was exposed.  I ripped open my foot on it.  In my extreme pain I was less than rational.  I knew there was a med-kit in a building on shore and I ran across the beach to get to it, thus driving the sand into the gash.  If I'd been rational I would have called out for help, the help would have gotten the medkit, and I would have not gotten any sand in the wound.  Help wasn't far away, probably would have taken only a few seconds longer than me running for the medkit myself and it would have saved me lots of pain in the long run.