Category: Life

I really want to believe there will come a time again where I don’t need to wear my ski jacket to catch the 6:34 train. It’s unreasonably cold every morning.

I just sent one of the more potentially life-altering texts of my life. Diana and I have an offer in on a house. The price is hard to beat for the city, but it had as many things that concerned us as things we liked about the place. Since it was a short sale, we’ve gone from early January to now without anyone bothering to look at or accept our offer, and nothing had come up on the market in the last few months to justify jumping ship on it. Nothing until Saturday, that is. We were supposed to be looking at two properties. One of them cancelled on us at the last minute, but another came on the market the day prior, and it was just a couple of blocks from our non-cancelled appointment.

By sheer serendipity we managed to get a time for a viewing within an hour, and let me tell you, it’s got a lot more right than it does wrong. The things I dislike are no different than the house we’ve been on the hook for (air conditioning and ductwork are alien concepts to a city at 7000 feet), but it gets a lot of our concerns about the other property right. It also represents about a 20% increase in price, but it looks like that premium might be needed to not have to sink an equivalent amount into repairs and maintenance right away. I told Diana that anything at this price range would have to be damn near perfect. This one is. So we’re retracting our offer and putting in one for this new … (More) “I See a Red Door and I Want to Leave it Red”

It’s no small concern of mine that nobody is asking me for a house-buying license during the process of trying to find a home in Santa Fe. At what point was I mentally capable of processing the reality of a 30-year mortgage? When was the class on repairing the myriad items and components that make up a domicile? I missed it. I missed a lot of classes, though. That’s not a big surprise.

That we collectively decided that agreeing to terms of payment on the next 30 years of life is odd. If you’re in a position where you need a mortgage, you’re also not in a position to guarantee that things will be just as good 30 years down the road, really. Hell, getting into state government is one of the safest possible choices in that regard, once you’re in and off your probationary period getting fired is a battle. Things could happen, though.

We’re looking at two more houses tomorrow, we’ve had an offer in on a different one for over two months now, but they weren’t lying when they said it was a “short sale opportunity for the patient buyer.” One is more “homey” and with a great location, a ten-minute bike ride to work if that. The other looks ridiculously nice, like in the realm of “What the hell? I get to live here?” kind of nice. So it appears in the pictures, anyway. Maybe it’s actually a small house photographed by a smaller human, or an iguana.

I was a little bit bothered a few days ago when someone mentioned that they were diagnosed bipolar and one of the markers was having days where they just stay inside and hide from the world, for lack of a better description. That was me not terribly long … (More) “Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16”

I feel like there should be a better barometer for being an adult than completing unwanted medical appointments. Somewhere towards the top of my list of fears is needles, and I’ve been staring down this appointment for weeks, knowing that it involved an IV whereby they supplement my blood with some bullshit that is most definitely not blood. I completed the appointment yesterday and the whole drive home I was doing these sighs of relief like I had just spent 20 minutes outrunning a hungry bear.

I bought a Fitbit Surge a couple of months ago, and it’s pretty entertaining watching my own heart rate skyrocket when anxiety kicks in. With good breathing exercises, I can get my heart rate down to about 60-62. Normally it’s around 97-100. Five minutes prior to the appointment it was 135.

What was going on was a CT scan to try and figure out what the problem is in my lower abdomen. My digestive health in general has been lousy for two or three years. I had a bit of a breakthrough a bit less than a year ago when Diana and I figured out that I’m lactose intolerant. So I’ve solved one mystery, but I’m still living with more-or-less constant pain and spasming of my lower left abdomen, a section of the colon that is particularly vulnerable to chronic problems like diverticulitis, divertculosis, and IBS. The smart money is on the latter.

We seem to do a pretty bad job of conveying the severity of an ailment with its name. Shingles are a construction thing, not a nerve-damaging rash that will affect you for the rest of your life. (The iodine injection yesterday very nearly triggered a flare-up right on the table.) Lactose intolerance sounds like you’re a milk-racist. Fuck your “ebony and … (More) “I’m afraid it’s Exploding Head Syndrome.”

This is a year where I’ve been looking forward to Daylight Saving Time very much. With the job requiring about a 90-minute commute each way to work, in winter that meant I was going to work before the sun came up, and didn’t get out until the sun was down. So today, I know there’ll be plenty of sunlight when I get home, nearly another hour. But I neglected to think of what it would do to the mornings, which is essentially reset it to how it looked in November when I started this job.

There’s that part of me that always likes to tease out a deeper meaning to the mundane, that this would feel like a reset of my time at this job. That part of me is kind of a silly pseudointellectual asshole. The fact is, even if it was a reset, the last four months have been great, and were I to start again with the familiarity with the people and the experience with the infrastructure that I’ve accumulated, I’d crush it.

I’m in my probationary period with the state until this coming November, right around Thanksgiving. Last year it was pretty slick, getting to start with a three-day week and having all those holidays, and the relaxed atmosphere of the place. If you ever get a chance to accept a life-changing job offer, I highly recommend doing it around Thanksgiving.

I had a bout of…something, on Saturday. It felt an awful lot like depression, with a side-order of spring allergies. I know there doesn’t have to be something immediately wrong to trigger depression, and it has taken a long time to not blame myself for it. I felt fine again yesterday. Diana writes through her problems in a private diary. I write through them on … (More) “Sunrise Deferred”

There have been a number of times in my life where I’ve felt totally at the mercy of my various neuroses. Growing up it was being antisocial, to the point where I would avoid answering a direct question, stoic in the awkward silence, because they would “win” if I talked. I don’t understand the logic behind it now, I’m just able to explain what I was thinking then. I’ve been able to deconstruct a good number of those things over time, and once understood, I could stop following those absurd orders from some particular lump of brain-meat that probably took one too many thumps.

There are a few that still bug me, still won’t go away. Some are relatively harmless…self, why the fuck haven’t you figured out good posture yet? You’re 5-foot-fuck-two. You need every bit of that standing up straight just to get on the rollercoaster. But I don’t, unless I’m thinking about it, which gives me about twenty seconds of good posture. Damn fine posture.

But there’s two big ones I don’t seem to have made any progress on; one is life-threatening and one is merely way-of-life-threatening. They’re so similar that they’re probably driven by the same thing. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not comfortable with medicating a mental illness, I feel like that field of science is still very rough around the edges. See the number of drugs that list suicidal thoughts as a side-effect. I do have good health insurance now, where I could just talk to someone qualified, but I have this great idea that if I consult with my fucked-up self on the matter, I’m going to fix things about my fucked-up self. That sounds more defeatist than I really feel, but it is a useful reduction for me.

The less obviously dangerous problem, … (More) “Vivisection: Deconstructing The Monster”