Title: Valentine 2012
Series: TOS
Rating: PG-13
Preview:


( Valentine's 2012 )

Everyone deals with exhaustion and fatigue differently. For example, right now it's seven a.m., Sunday morning, and it's dark and gray outside. I've been awake since midnight, having gone to bed and into a deep sleep by nine. So, I'm sleepless, and the fatigue that I'm experiencing right now is immense, almost crippling.

I've also taken a sedative. And it's as if my body, or my brain, is resisting the medication, fighting it with an awesome and almost frightening intensity. Why don't I WANT to go to sleep? Sleeping is wonderful, it's almost divine, especially once we make it into REM and start to dream.

Dreaming is the BEST. I love dreams. So, why don't I sign off RIGHT NOW and shuffle down the hall and enter my boudoir and climb into my gorgeous double bed, and fluff my four big, fat, cuddly pillows (several of which are trimmed in lace) and just have at it? Dormez bien! :D

So, time moves at an incredibly rapid yet simultaneously languid pace...here we all are, rushing toward what often seems like a personal Armageddon of the soul, while at the same time we fidget like mad and endlessly create technologiies to enable us to cope with the tedium of time's passage: the iPOD, the iPAD, the netbook, the e-reader...

Anything to help us to cope with the nature of silence, and to keep our own inner thoughts at bay!

There's nothing wrong with interior silence...it can be quite nourishing...the place where lucid dreams are born, and enjoyed...that place where universes collide, and the ecstasy of intellect marries that of will and ideation.

But I digress...

So, here I am, waiting for a nor'easter...all of which is kind of cool, I can listen to some music on my M3...just in case the power goes out, and of course I've got a mad stash of batteries, so everything is copasetic, as they used to say. Right now I've got so much reading piled up I"m beginning to get a bit anxious..but only a bit, I'm working on finding alternative methods of managing my general anxiety...music helps a lot, although there are those times when even listening to music is too overwhelming. The nly relief is silence.

And of course reading. Reading is always my essential pleasure...literacy is such a blessing, it's like a gift that never fails to deliver.

Moammar Ghadafi is dead...

The entire phenonomenon of Arab Spring has been simply breathtaking...humankind at its most dynamic.

Such sweeping change.

Now, what does the future hold?

Or perhaps I should say "contentment". It just dawned on me the other day just how OLD I really am...I guess I'm supposed to be upset about the ways my looks are changing, the way I'm aging...time and I aren't exactly enemies, per se, but we're definitely NOT friends, either...

Yes. I'm aging. It's all true! Wow. Seems so strange. You know you're beginning to age when all of those "kid stars" who were so much younger than you were back in the day are now becoming in-laws for their own kids! :(

Life is strange. Love is strange. Things fall apart, things fall into place. The circle never ends.

It's wonderful!

I love the Atlantic seaboard...even during times like this, between the earthquake of 2011 and now Madame Irene, there's always something happening around here...

Have family in NC...so far they're okay, and more than likely will be throughout the storm.

People have learned from the past, and nowadays they LISTEN UP, and listen good.

with so-called friends, is that as long as you're playing by the rules they've already established, you're "in", you are from now on accepable, cuddly-fuzzy, non-threatening...but deviate from the Path, express how you REALLY feel, exercise your right to be an individual with viewpoints and opinions of your own, be your eclectic and natural self, and you're OUT.

Unacceptable, undesirable, contrary and very possible a true danger!

Danger, danger Will Robinson, a unique opinion has been formed and even worse, VOICED!! Danger, danger, danger Will Robinson, the enemy must be destroyed!

Or ostracized, whichever will serve at the time.

Meh. I'm a born contrarian, an outworlder tried and true.

And damned proud of it.

People don't ordinarily love one another. Instead it's more like they USE. We each make a move to fill our own seperate agendas, we use other people for our own purposes, use and are used in return, and then we each lie and call it "love', or worse yet, "friendship."

Yet so few of us know the real meaning of the term, or how to truly fashion it.

the more we learn. One of the most important truths I've ever discovered is the reward of solitude.

I'm 551/2, which is to say I'm fifty-five and a half years old. I'll be fifty-six sometime around Thanksgiving and really looking forward to it! I ADORE being in my 50's, made the "change" with zero fuss or bother, and embrace each and every single day with enormous gratitude and verve.

With the exception of one baffling and very disturbing problem: chronic fatigue. So many people, both male and female, but most especially females, of any and all ages, find themselves compelled to deal with this peculiar issue.

For me, it snuck up, first manifesting apropos of nothing back in my early forties...at that time I'd been fairly hale, very energetic, always putting in a 20-hour day, couldn't sit still, worked two jobs, raised two kids, and a rabbit, walked everywhere, and followed a seemingly endless stream of interests. It first showed up as a draggy feeling upon arising in the morning, and I chalked it up to a need for more sleep. I began taking powerful vitamin supplements, and eventually my physician put me on a regimen of Vitamin B-12, one quarter of a 500 mcg tablet four times a day.

It helped, I'm on Vitamin B-12 again, along with a supervitamin and I'm following a macrobiotic eating regimen. The fatigue abated for several years, then re-surfaced in my late forties, so much so that I "dropped out" of my career, and decided to opt for an early pension, all at my doc's advice. His strong advice.

So, here we are after a nice, long "remission", and the fatigue is back, and it's bloody-blue-murder to try and cope with it. I'm lucky at this stage if I can manage to get a good six hours of great vitality, followed by a low ebb of tiredness, and then felled by complete and utter exhaustion which may last for days.

It's so confounding!! After dozens of tests, it appears my hormonal levels are fine, my thryroid is functioning, my blood pressure is under very good control, and my iron count is borderline but not entirely out of whack (which has happened in the past, anemia has ventured in and out of my life since the age of 18, and was a huge problem during my last pregnancy, 28 years ago)...

Fatigue compromises my life in so many really aggravating ways, but most especially around my two favorite pastimes, mainly creative writing and artwork, both manual and digital. The digital variety is a little bit easier on me, but the traditional formats of drawing and water-color painting are my real, true loves, and I'm just too tired to hold a pencil for very long or a water-color brush.

As for writing, for now, this digital journal is my sole outlet in that regard. :(

Really aggravating. There have been days, such as this past week, when I'm too tired to hold a book, or a magazine. Reading is my first love, and with the exhaustion being so profound and inescapable, that love has had to be shunted aside for the moment.

Which sucks, utterly.