Saturday, September 29, 2012

Body Awareness

Every now and then I become suddenly viscerally aware of how big I am. This used to perturb me, and when I thought about this I began to be bothered by it. I'm not bothered by the sensation, I bothered by the lack. This feeling is really just the feeling of being fully aware of my body. The fact that I spent the majority of my time Not aware of my body is much more troubling than the oddity of sudden awareness.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Nocturnal

<p>I'm writing this on my phone, so the quality may be a bit lessened.</p>
<p>Tonight is my second shift of what may well be my job for the next 9 months.&nbsp; The client is asleep and the ongoing miracle of technology means that I have a computer more advanced than the space shuttle casually in my pocket.</p>
<p>If things go on like this my life is going to make a major change.&nbsp; My shift is 10 pm to 10 am.&nbsp; I'm trying to sleep from 11:30ish to 8ish, which is more or less what I used to do, except the am and pm are flipped.&nbsp; That flip might be my new normal.</p>
<p>I have a bit of dread over this, and a lot of that comes from remembering 2006-2007.&nbsp; Similar time period, screwy sleep, difficult job.&nbsp; That period in my life, project exodus I called it, sucked.&nbsp; Every memory from then is bleak and dark and weird.&nbsp; I learned a lot, I grew tremendously as a person and I had never been so unhealthy, mentally and physically, in my life.</p>
<p>You can see why I'm worried.</p>
<p>The thing is though, the reasons that period was so bad wasn't really because of the nocturnal life.&nbsp; My diet sucked, 0 exercise, no sunlight, no vitamin D, unhealthy internet obsessions, and a life lived much more on Azeroth than on Earth.&nbsp; I find myself wondering what this noctunal period will be like.</p>
<p>So lets pull out a longstanding tradition of this blog and name this part of my life.&nbsp; I'm calling it "The Long Night."&nbsp; A. Because it's about to be the grey season in the Northwest, and that means literal long nights.&nbsp; B. Because its going to be a time of tribulation and struggle, and C. Because this is, hopefully, the last time I'll have to be apart from my fiance for an extended period of time.

Making it through the long night is going to be difficult.  I'll need to double up on my anti-depression practices.  I really really need to find a way to blackout my bedroom during the day, and I might invest in a second sunlamp.  I've already upped my Vitamin D intake from 2000 ius per day to "a handful of capsules" a day.  5k should be enough, 10k if I can afford it.  Meditation and exercise will both become mandatory health practices instead of aspirational practices.  My diet is always being worked on.  I was in the midst of a paleo reboot when I started this, Ill probably keep that up.

Lastly I want to start blogging again.  Twitter and facebook are fun, but I don't think I get the genuine writing practice out of those that writing a full blog will give.  I would say that I'm committing to writing more, but every time I say that I end up being wrong, so we'll see.  I'll keep you posted as the transition continues.