Weirdness

When I had created my 'kiyotesong' journal, I had made all these tables of magical herbs & their correspondences. I swear, as I created them, I deleted my original documents from my computer...

I was looking to see what all I could clean out of my documents since the semester has ended, and all the magical herb stuff is still there on my hard drive.

I am seriously losing my mind.

I also played hooky from physical therapy this afternoon. Rob & I watched Full Metal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa tonight. It was okay. I think I would have preferred it to just be 4 or 5 more of the series episodes instead of crammed into a 2-hour movie.

(My back hurts... this should have been Wednesday's post but I whined to tribe instead:

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've got anxiety more than depression. Or maybe anxiety is compounding my depression?

It's all the physical therapist's fault, really. She has been doing deep-tissue massage on my right leg to help the muscles respond to treatment so that my leg will be strong & support my knee more than it was before the surgery. She hits these nerves & tendons that go up the back of my leg & I just want to leap off the bench and run screaming into the desert. It freaking hurts so bad! I always do the stretches & exercises before she works on me, so I should be 'warmed up' & 'loosened up'. I can feel the tendons easing a little when I do the hamstring stretches, but by the time I go to the bench for her to work on me, it's like high tension wires again. She threatened to work on my left leg today & I was like, "no, that won't be necessary..." I've never gone to a professional masseuse or had a spa treatment because I'm literally afraid for anyone to rub me. I know it's going to hurt all over. In fact, I'm in muscular pain 99% of the time anymore, even in muscles that I've always used and muscles that should be relaxed. I ache constantly, all over. Doesn't matter how active or inactive I am, I just hurt continually.

I know part of it is my knees & my lower back. When your support system is out of whack, it can throw your entire body out of whack, but my scoliosis isn't that bad yet, and my knees have been out of whack for a loooong time - the ol' flesh & bones should be used to it by now.

The p.t. asked me if I was afraid to relax, & no, that's not it. I just can't relax. I chant mantras, I stretch, I do yoga, I have a balance ball. I do those relaxation techniques where you start with your toes & work your way up, one body part at a time. By the time I reach my knees, my toes have tensed up again. No matter how drunk I get, there's always a string of vague worries floating around in my brain. I can't escape, I have no releases, it's just always there. So I decided to check out the symptoms of anxiety...

Excessive, ongoing worry and tension - well, isn't that what I just described?
An unrealistic view of problems - not sure if my view of my problems is all that unrealistic.
Restlessness or a feeling of being "edgy" - constantly.
Irritability - heh, ask my husband & coworkers about this one.
Muscle tension - ask my p.t.
Headaches - Not so much anymore. I used to get horrible migraines til I started taking beta-blockers for my high b.p. Now it's almost a relief to get a headache because I know it's just a headache, probably due to sinus pressure or eyestrain, not a migraine that's going to make me go blind, puke my toenails up & land me in a dark closet for three days. If I run out of my b.p. pills & can't get 'em refilled for a couple of days I'm in for a beating, though.
Sweating - Not so much. I usually panic if I sweat. If I sweat, it's because I'm exercising & that's cause for panic in my book.
Difficulty concentrating - oh, hey, look, a chicken! No, this isn't one of my problems usually, but sometimes I find I have hyper-concentration where I'll be so focused on one thing that I can't unfocus to multi-task anything else.
Nausea - not so much. I have an ulcer, though.
The need to go to the bathroom frequently - nah, got that one under control.
Tiredness - all the time. I'm horribly, horribly alert, but always tired.
Trouble falling or staying asleep - I take a pill for this. It hasn't been working lately. I haven't been dreaming much lately, either - so I know it's not working as well as it should be.
Trembling - sometimes
Being easily startled - oh yeah. I'd like to stop being easily startled, too. I'm jumpy as fuck.

So that's basically 9 out of 14. I wonder if there's an online quiz that could give me a definitive diagnosis, lol.)

Ya Learn Something Every Day

I was having a terrible time w/my frames for my webpage - couldn't get the 'frame' page to display correctly in Netscape Navigator. I've learned that I abhor Netscape Navigator. However, I did figure out why my frames weren't displaying and managed to fix it. Before, the page I designed w/the Netscape frame tags wouldn't display in Internet Explorer. I never looked at it again w/IE because, well, it just wasn't working. However, now that I've fixed the problem, IE displays my Netscape page just fine, which means I probably didn't need to use the 'iframe' tag for IE at all, I just needed to add the 'row' attribute to my IE 'frame' tags.

In a year or so, that probably won't make any sense to me whatsoever.

Dream of a Bee

Right before I was supposed to wake up, I dreamt a bee stung me. It was sitting on a pot lid in the kitchen and I tried to shoo it out the door, but it deliberately flew down and stung me on the hip. I tried to catch it in the folds of my dress but it had stung me and was dying before I could stop it. I stood in the kitchen & started crying - not that the sting hurt much, but because of the suicide, repeating over & over again, "Why did you sting me?"

Sorry, Ariadne, I spoke of snakes and poppies, of pomegranates and the Bull from the Sea. I forgot to mention your bees and the melissae. I won't forget again.

If we ever do move to Washington, I will have bees in the garden. Without bees there is no mead, or poppy cakes or the bliss in fields of flowers.

When I was very little, I was afraid of bees. It's probably because my mother was deathly allergic to them. One time, we were in the car waiting for my dad to finish checking his truck into the truck yard, & I was sitting on her lap so she could brush my hair. There was a bee on the armrest of the car that no one saw, but my mother put her arm down on it, and it stung her. She threw me out of the car, trying to get someone's attention before she passed out or stopped breathing, already clutching at her throat & turning red in the face. After that day, I would run screaming from bees, hornets, wasps, you name it. As far as I was concerned they were killers. But I got stung a few times, realized it didn't hurt that bad (except yellowjackets, but yellowjackets sting in groups, and they don't die when they sting you - they can keep that up for some time before they get bored or find a target with fewer holes), and I've never been allergic to them.

Bees are important and necessary. I love bumblebees, fat black furry bees. No one ever told them they weren't supposed to be able to fly.