learn

Thanks to Flickr this morning, I now know how to greet people in Korean!

Note to self: do NOT leave work between 3:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. No matter how much you want to believe that today will be different, it won’t be. It takes fully FOUR TIMES as long to get home between these times because of traffic congestion around the hospitals.

Further note to self: your bicycle is bored and lonely and not doing much good in the shed.

I had what I can only describe as a complete melt down yesterday. In hindsight, I can see some warning signals – my thoughts were scattered, my breathing kind of fast and shallow for much of the afternoon, and I was both restless and tearful. But what should have probably tipped me off over everything else was that I couldn’t be at home. I just couldn’t get comfortable there. That is really unusual for me, and I probably should have recognized it as significant.

Leaving home was a mistake. I didn’t fare any better out in the world, and probably only added to my feelings of loneliness and despair.

I won’t bother with the whole story, because I feel somewhat better and a great deal stronger now, but I wanted to record these points in the hope that next time I start to unravel, maybe I’ll recognize it sooner and be able to deal with it more carefully than I did last night.

I’ve spent the last two hours reading all about neuropharmacology and Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, seizure disorders, schizophrenia. My own little brain is now saturated, but I still have depressive disorders and anxiety disorders to get through. Ugh… time for a little break.

Lesson #12,645,578,340,419:

There is no point to my scheduling productive time on Friday afternoons and evenings. After a long, busy week all I want to do is kick back and/or cut loose.

Yesterday Marty picked me up from work early, around 1:30, so I could treat him to lunch at the Ben Thanh (Viet-Thai restaurant). He had never been, and they make a killer vermicelli bowl filled to the rim with cool, fresh noodles, cucumbers and lettuce, topped with shredded spiced pork, a spring roll and four succulent tiger shrimp. Top it off with the sweet and tangy fish sauce and oh…. aargharraaarghgh … I drool more than ole Rover Pavlov.

Now why, HOW??? did I think that, after a glass of wine and a hearty lunch, I was going to head home and study?? HA!!! Fat chance! I lounged, luxuriated, lazed and languished.

And that is precisely what should be on the menu EVERY Friday.

My brain is fried. I had such a mentally busy day – week, actually. I’m at the bottom of a couple of steep learning curves at work (which is especially tough because I have no interest in either project), as well as in three courses, and then the everyday aha-moments of my life these days… and my head is SWIMMING!

It’s only four days into school and I’m already all stressed out … but I’ve been here before, and if I can squeeze one more lesson into my overfed brain, it’s the one about how when life overwhelms me like this, I must mindfully move slowly, breathe deeply, and trust.

I’m at my desk doing a little easy work, listening to Eric Clapton play guitar and marveling quietly to myself about how much we’ve gotten done around here, and even how much I was able to do over my holiday, and then suddenly I distinctly heard the words “Since I turned off the television”. Plain and simple, life is way more interesting without it.

That said, I’m still a TV junkie at heart, for a few shows in particular, anyway.

Now that I’m thinking about it though, I’m not so sure whether TV sucked the life out of me, or whether I was already lifeless lying there so I just turned on the TV to while the time… seems like a different person when I remember back now and I can’t remember much of where my head was at. I seemed to just be on auto-pilot.

The lesson? TV: mostly bad. Most other stuff: good

Fundamental life lesson that most of you learned in Kindergarten but which I have only just begun to understand: if you want something, or need something, from another person, the first step is to ASK FOR IT!!

After all my whining and snivelling and feeling hard done by, turns out that M is more than willing to help out around the house and with meal prep. Sure, the first two of my ‘requests’ were met with some (minimal) grumbling, and we still have more of this learning curve to maneovre, but this weekend we cut through so much stuff and he was the picture of perfect participation.

Who’dda thunk.

to record the lessons I’m learning. They seem to be coming fast and furious these days, in all shapes and sizes; I need a place to deposit the overflow.