My therapist has suggested that I work on a few things, but one of them was trying to enumerate my day.

Here's the plan for my day. I'll update this after accomplishing things.

05:45 - Actual wakeup
06:30 - Stop trying to fall asleep, read webcomics
06:45 - Intended wakeup
06:55 - Shower
07:20 - Get dressed, empty Zoan's litterbox, feed cats.
07:30 - Fix UniFi Access Portal (turns out it didn't have an IP... for some reason)
07:40 - Add new wireless access point to my network, Read daily websites.
07:45 - Duolingo lessons for Norwegian. I finished my Basics lesson, which is nice. Major downside, these lessons are pretty sexist and heteronormative.
08:00 - Start writing this up.
08:05 - Medication
08:10 - Leave for work.
08:30 - First meeting at work.
10:00 - Second meeting at work.
12:00 - Third meeting at work.
13:00 - Lunch
13:42 - Pi Day Celebration (3/14 @ 1:42p)
15:00 - Fourth meeting at work, assuming you don't count pi day as a meeting.
16:30 - Leave for home.
17:00 - Medication
17:01 - Phone call to vacation house.
17:05 - Watch Youtube / stare at wall.
18:45 - Make myself a sandwich to eat and/or have leftover steak.
20:45 - finally stop staring at a wall, install Server 2016 on my new home server
22:00 - Go to bed.
23:00 - Actually fall asleep.
04:00 - Zoan wakes me up my starting to vomit on top of me. I get him off of the bed before he throws up, luckily.
04:45 - Actually fall back asleep.
06:45 - Alarm.


Bleh.

Anxiety, for me, consists of basically a complete inability to focus on anything ever, with building up feelings of dread. Depression and Anxiety, for me, go hand in hand, and one usually follows the other.

In this particular case, I'm sitting on my couch. My butt hurts from sitting too long, but my brain keeps bouncing between worry/stress over my house's litter box situation, how I need to swap my VM hosts, with cable management and all of that fun, how I need to do laundry, how my couch is a huge mess, how I need to get something to drink, how I need to relax so I don't have yet-another anxiety filled night again, how I need to contact Dell over my broken laptop, how I need to contact the US Embassy, how I want to make an awesome card for Kritter so they get something in the mail, and..


... yep. It feels like my brain is just randomly firing upon things left and right with me unable to do any of them. So I end up stuck, making things feel worse for myself for no apparent reason. Woo.

Well, hopefully now that I've written something down, I might have a chance of actually doing something.

Felt like posting this somewhere. I know few bother to read LJ anymore, but eh. Warning: Brain dump.

Last night I gave myself food poisoning. This was certainly not intentional, as I'm still experimenting with my pressure cooker. I'm pretty sure what happened was that the chicken (boneless skinless chicken thighs) that I put in was actually still a bit frozen in the center, thus didn't cook all the way. Due to the colors of chicken thighs, it isn't like I can simply cut into the beef to know. I've now ordered a instant probe for measuring the temperature of meat to make sure this doesn't happen again.

That's not what I'm talking about.

My depression, like many others, are based on feelings of helplessness and weakness; the more often I am ill and/or the more often I get injured, the more frequent I have bad days. My feelings of depression are amplified greatly when I am also by myself, feeling alone in the world (even when I have friends and such, it doesn't matter to StupidBrain). So the idea that I (nominally a decent cook) managed to infect myself with something out of carelessness... infected myself with something that constantly interrupted my attempts at sleep with extremely large amounts of nausea and very painful gas... well, not good for my mental well being, that's for damn sure.

After this, naturally I couldn't really go to work like that. I ended up taking a sick day today.
A couple of problems with this:

1) I'm out of sick leave. Technically, after today, I have -0.5 sick days. While a lot of the sick leave I take is due to medical appointments (hard to zip to a doc and back when you don't drive), a huge portion are due to me just plain being sick. See the depression source "weakness".
2) This puts me a day behind my projects at work, when we're already a bit rushed. Now I feel like I'm bringing my team of people down with me (for something that is entirely, 100% my fault). See the depression source "helplessness".
3) This means I'm by myself for the day at home, feeling like crap (physically due to recovering from food poisoning; mentally due to the above), with only my cats to talk to. While my cats do genuinely try to help, they can only do so much when I'm lonely. See amplification of depression.


So yeah, today has been a fairly bad day for me mentally. It took me hours to even just get out of my room, and hours more to actually get off of the couch so I could actually work on hydrating myself. Everything felt sort of ... worthless? My thoughts were more of a "why should I bother doing anything anyway" mentality.



The methods that I "deal with" depression are basically consisting of CBT - Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or a problem-solving approach to things. Think "why do you feel this way and what steps can you take to either avoid those intrusive thoughts or just escape out of the situation?" I don't take medication because I deal with some really stupid side effects of, well, every medication known to humanity. I mean, seriously, some of the things meds due to me (brain meds or otherwise) are just plain stupid. So, as a result, I have to be cognizant of what my brain is doing at all times, realize what is going on, adjust what I'm doing to compensate, all while feeling like nothing at all matters and I'm just a worthless piece of trash in an ocean of privilege.

This works about as well as one thinks.

What I am good at, however, is doing a post-mortem on events. I'm excellent at looking back at a bad time and figuring out what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I can do to optimize things; basically, what I'm doing right now. One of the things I'm doing is being a bit more open about what I'm going through. I have a tendency to just shut up about things like this, which doesn't help my friends help me. I also tend to string unrelated events together; my last major depressive episode was due to injuring my shoulders while attaching my new shower head. Imagine hurting yourself by lifting up an object less than a kilogram above your head, then imagine hurting yourself again by screwing up some cooking. My brain correlates these things, even when there is no rhyme or reason to them. I didn't intentionally give myself food poisoning, and I didn't intentionally hurt myself putting up my shower head - these really are unrelated, but StupidBrain thinks that they're just additional signs that my body is freaking worthless (thus I'm worthless).

I don't really know where I'm going with this; I just wanted to write it down. I'm not suicidal or anything, I'm just depressed and having problems with the idea of having fun even. I'm taking steps to try and better myself as a result of recognizing this, but this episode may get worse before it gets better.

Especially if my cats keep stepping on my poor sore stomach. Ow.

I really disagree with the con/str stats. They should probably be swapped, but my family's high alcohol tolerance is likely to blame there; I had to guess.


I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (4th Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-9

Dexterity-15

Constitution-11

Intelligence-17

Wisdom-18

Charisma-17


Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Hi.
I haven't been doing so well this past year, so I haven't really been feeling like posting. My depression has taken a turn for the worse along with my physical health; I have problems lifting a cat above my head now.

I just.. avoid talking about things here, as even if there are very few people left on LJ, I don't want to bring them down with me. I want to be lifted up to see eye to eye with people instead.


Anyway, just saying hi.

I made a thing! Sort-of. Okay, it is out of Lego, but it is still a thing! That works! YEAH!

Hi all! Don't mind me, just a video on deciding between the final four games to play on a Let's Play.

The games:

Zeliard (DOS) - Metroidvania game, beaten once before. I'd end up talking and playing at the same time, treating it more as a source of conversation and a bit of a fun MST3k type of thing like I did for Beyond the Beyond.

Koudelka (PS1) - jRPG that I've never played before. Chances are, I won't be MST3king the game much and will be treating it more as a conventional Let's Play and talking to the audience like you're another person in my room while talking.

Sid Meier's Covert Action (DOS) - 'other' genre spy thriller. I'd be MST3king the crap out of this game, probably also with lots of alternate music. Unlike BtB, I've actually never beaten the game, but I've played through huge chunks of it.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire (Win9x) - Turn-based strategy / 4X game. I've played this for over 1000 hours and would likely do this as a tutorial / random bits of conversation topic. I'd be playing through one civ from start to end in ironmanish mode.

I shut off my brain while adding ingredients. This is what came out of it.

How to make WTFajitas:

1) Start with a Land o’ Lakes Saute Express (Garlic Herb) butter starter thingy in a medium sized non-stick fry pan.
2) Realize that you need to empty the dishwasher of clean dishes.
3) Somehow decide that’s more important than actually deciding on dinner.
4) Give the task of making dinner to the unconscious side of your brain.
5) Unload dishwasher.
6) Unconscious brain tells you that your FOOD! is ready and you see the linked image in the pan.
7) Reverse engineer what the hell you just made.
8) Figure out that this started with around half a pound of frozen “summer vegetable” mix (carrots, yellow squash, zucchini).
9) Notice that you added a pinch of ground white pepper and more than a pinch of both crushed sea salt and flash-frozen garlic.
10) Stare at the opened package of Wisconsin Pizza Cheese Curds (from the Dane County Farmer’s Market you went to two weeks ago) and realize you must have added around 60 grams (two ounces) worth. Basically fresh (when I bought them) cheese curds that squeak in your teeth with various italian seasonings (basil, oregano, garlic) and pepperoni.
11) Wonder why the hell your unconscious brain thought that was a good idea.
12) Spot the empty bag of frozen pepper stir-fry, indicating that your brain added 410g (14.4 oz) of sliced green/red/yellow bell peppers and white onions.
13) See the 142g can of chicken breast. Realize that it is empty and was full prior to tonight.
14) Try and figure out what this thing is and finally see the empty package of fajita seasoning mix.
15) Decide that this is close enough to fajitas and heat up two flour tortillas.
16) Eat two delicious WTFajitas.
17) Put away 2-3 WTFajitas worth of leftovers.
18) Type this up, realizing no one will believe you.