friday nite peace

Last week was Not So Good.  Let’s just say the Not-So-Good part started at Sudden Onset of Extreme Dizzinesss, went directly to Extreme Panic, made a bee-line for the ER with help from the serendipitous timing of a visit from my dearest long-long-time friend, and then ended with the realization that I am a Mo-ron.

This realization made me feel a lot better right away.  Although to arrive at it, I had to ride my spinning carousel of a living room while trying to focus my spinning eyeballs long enough to research my predicament on my spinning computer.

Now, after almost two weeks after fixing the Mo-ron part, which means going back on the SSRI I had inadvertently stopped taking cold-turkey, which was the cause of the dizziness, I am feeling like My Old Self,  Which is, as you know, mostly OK with some not OK parts.  Bottom line:  Drugs are good, at least for now.

So this week I have been spending a lot of time just being thankful for my life. For being able to watch summer evening sunsets from my front porch, work at a job that is enjoyable and pays me well enough to afford my front porch and drugs, have my lovely Mommy close by and willing to come babysit me anytime I need her, have a great big, sweet horse to ride, and have the comfort and support of my dear friend who I have just simply adored for about 42 years or so now, exactly when I needed her here, even though she lives 3000 miles away.

Tonight, Friday, the end of a busy and so-much-better week, I am reminded of something I wrote a few years ago while in a similar state of under the influence of gratitude.

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About 25 years ago, when I was more of a City Girl, I used to go with a friend to the Sacramento Symphony on Friday nights. We would get all gussied up in fancy dresses and jewelry (hers) and drive a red BMW convertible (hers) and act like Real Women of Culture And Sophistication. I loved the symphony.

At that time, I was also wearing suits and pumps to work, studying piano, taking college courses at night, buying my fingernails, living in a townhouse, and probably smelling better overall.

Fast forward to now. I still consider myself to be a Real Woman, but it occurs to me that the Culture and Sophistication parts have officially hightailed it out of here, as far from my present being as my feet are from their next pedicure.  The little black dress, good jewelry and convertible replaced by riding pants, boots, and my dirty beater SUV, I head out on a Friday night to different sort of symphony — dusty old Garth Brooks hits blaring from a loudspeaker.  I sit on a garage sale-quality dinette chair, eat a home-made pulled pork sandwich courtesy of Daisy’s Chuck Wagon, and watch local horse people do team penning.

• Team = Two or three riders and their horses
• Penning = separating a single young cow from a herd at one end of the arena and moving it down to the other end, into a pen.

The team sits waiting at one end of the arena.  When given the go-ahead by the announcer, they start walking, trotting, loping or galloping (depending on the horse and/or rider’s desire to actually get close to those cows) toward the herd of terrified or bored (depending on the cow) cows at the other end. The cows are wearing numbers, zero to nine. There are several of each number. The announcer calls the number of the cow to be penned when the riders have started down toward the herd.

The teams have to find one cow with the correct number, cut that cow out of the herd and then make it go by itself to the other end of the arena. Since the cows know by Herd Instinct that they are safer if they stick together (safer from what, one wonders, when the closest thing to a cow predator within miles is Daisy herself, and she’s busy with pork), the cut cow will try its hardest to get back to the herd, in which case the rider’s job is to yell “HAH HAH HAH YIP YIP YIP” and jerk their horse’s head around trying to get them to track the cow and scare it down the arena and into the pen.  The horse’s job is to either to be obedient to the rider’s jerking or jerk the rider around in a bucking frenzy. Which is way more fun to watch if you are the audience. Definitely more fun if you are the horse.

Or, the cut cow just won’t care anymore since it has been doing this team penning crap every Friday night for 6 weeks in a row and the outcome is inevitable — it gets driven down to the other end of arena, goes into the pen, waits for the applause, and then toodles on back to the herd. So the cow just plods along resignedly in a Just-Shoot-Me stupor, infuriating the rider who wanted to show off his riding skills and giving the horse a much-needed break from getting his head jerked around by those same riding skills.

And this goes on for hours, as long as there are teams that want to pen, and the cows are still awake. Long past sundown, and into the wee hours possibly. I don’t know, I didn’t stay until the end. But when I left, Garth was still singing and I thought this was just a way cooler Friday night than the symphony ever was.

Paxil 20 – Patience 0

So far, I have weaned myself down by half — from 40 mg to 20 mg.

I am definitely feeling it since the drop to 20 mg 5 days go.  But nothing really horrible, honest.

My normally very very long patience fuse is basically gone.  I am very easily annoyed, wired up, quickly reaching peak irritability at little things.  Not really my normal self.  But the part that is still normal is that I remain very easily amused.

The irritability manifests mostly while I’m working — remember, won’t you, that I LOVE my job.  Really.  It is a great job.  I am helping my company implement Health Care Reform.  Politics aside, actually non-existent on my planet, this is very good work for someone like me … Federal and State laws, intense deadlines, really complex business and systems problems to solve, really smart and hard working people to collaborate with, a few morons to keep things interesting (and ANNOYING), working at home most of the time because I have too much to do to spend commute time to drive into the office.

Aside:  My workdays have been so intense that I have dispensed with proactive feeding of horses at home, which requires about 15 minutes — go find the hay cart, drag it to the hay barn, fill the cart with hay, deal with the annoying hay twine, drag the hay cart down to the pasture where the horses are, toss hay over the fence, fill the water troughs, chat with Pootie the Cat.  To save this 15 minutes that I typically don’t have when meetings start at 8 am and go to noon,   I have invented Horse Fast Food, which takes about 3 minutes:  Go to the barn gates, open them up and call the horses.  Wait for the first one in line to come through the gate.  This is usually Rainy, the Pork Butt sorrel mare center front in the photo below.  Point the lead horse to the hay barn.  The others will follow.  Voila.  Horse Fast Food.  Hours later go check on the horses.  For no reason.  Because there is Food, there is no need to go anywhere.

So let’s talk a bit about the Morons, since this is how my patience fuse got blown a few times this week.    These are people that have jobs in my company.  Mostly they are merely voices, since we do most of our work via telecom and Webex.  Some of these Morons are actually very intelligent people.  They just don’t do anything except speak a lot of words to demonstrate their intelligence.  I go into meetings with a mission, agenda, things that need to be accomplished so I can get Something Done and then get onto the next conference call.  Morons go into meetings to talk.  Some of them are academics — they know a lot of stuff, and they need to tell everyone what they know, all of the time.

Some are really Sales or PR folks deep down, they talk as a performance.  They “raise issues” and poke holes at things and speak the Execu-speak that they think makes them sound like they are VP material and if they keep speaking that way, eventually someone will promote them.

Some are merely auditory communicators — they have words stacked up in their esophagi like big long freeway traffic jams and they MUST speak each and every word in the order in which they have stacked it, without variation of any kind.  If you interrupt them, or in my language “So-and-so, there were too many words in what you just said. Could you restate more concisely?” , they raise their voices and backtrack, rewind and start over where they were five minutes ago.  I could really go truly psycho.  If this happens on a conference call,  I Mute and Multi-Task  — do something else while playing the phone meeting voices on low volume, sort of like the Relaxing Sounds of the Ocean that my clock radio has to help me fall asleep to.  That I still don’t fall asleep to since [1]  I don’t sleep in the room that has that clock radio in it,  since that is my bedroom and since Insomnia Galore, I can’t fall asleep in my bed and [2] also because of Insomnia Galore, relaxing sounds of the ocean are really annoying sounds of the ocean.

To finish up with the Morons:  I try to punish them for talking so much by giving them ACTION ITEMS.  These are tasks that the Morons need to complete.  This only works to the extent that I get the malicious glee from causing them to panic.  Since they usually don’t have to do anything other than produce words, like the balloon words that come out of the characters in comic strips, they get a bit weird about getting Action Items.

Aside:  Sandie will remember that we had a long philosophical, first year of college-age discussion, possibly under the influence, about what would happen if all of the words we spoke could be seen coming out of our mouths and floating into the air, like in comic strips.

Many other symptoms … head (brain/jaw) zaps (feelings of electrical shock); high energy/wired feeling; loss of appetite.  The loss of appetite is really strange.  I really don’t have desire to eat — I do, of course, but only when my stomach is screaming for something.   Pacing.  Racing thoughts but not like those that come with anxiety episodes.

I am still taking the Relaquil for the natural anxiety relief aspect.  I am convinced it is making a major difference.  I am dealing with all of these symptoms pretty well, and even the anxiety hits have been short and pretty easily managed.  And not to forget my major source of therapy — Mo the Horse — continues to be a huge help.  We are back to jumping again (bad ankle steadily improving) and so, the utter terror of jumping helps keep me calm and sane.

Ok, now that did sound a little nuts.