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| Afternoon sun through the blinds.... |
Nine is the number of completion in numerology--one of its properties is that you can add it to any other single digit and the sum of the digits is the original digit. It's as if 9 is transparent, or perhaps just moved into another dimension.
Speaking of completion: I came to end of my binge watch of STNG. I had recalled the final episode as being a bit of a letdown, but now that I experienced the entire series, I feel that it's perfect. The very last scene is Capt. Picard finally sitting down at the poker table with his trusted and able officers, who have now become his family, and saying, "I should have done this a long time ago." Fade to black.
Next up tonight is number 9 again -- Deep Space Nine! Woo-hoo! It was fun watching how DSN characters got woven into the STNG narrative, and DSN mentioned several times during the last season of STNG. So watching it next was a no-brainer.
Last night I got to bed a little earlier, and the sleep time was framed by high pain levels. Why certain nights are worse than others is a mystery to me--especially because physically, my life is pretty much the same in terms of events on the day-to-day, and my diet is pretty monotone. I eat the same thing, basically, almost every day, and if you take into account weekly--it is identical week by week. This is good, because it eliminates variables as my monkey mind tries to analyze "what's wrong" with me. If I had gone out for pizza, for example, well, then that would have been the reason why pain levels were high. Or, maybe had a beer, or ice cream, or, or, or.... ugh.
And yet, I am committed, so one way or the other, I'm going to get this done, and hopefully, this beaten and battered body will be able to dig down deep enough to find coherence with the totality of me.
Mercifully, when I do lie down I can usually get to sleep pretty quickly because I rarely have pain when I'm still. It only kicks in (big time) when I move my legs or arms. Of course, this means during waking hours, I'm pretty much experiencing pain all the time, there are certain physical positions I can be in where nothing hurts, but it requires stillness and focus.
I remember the days when I could just jump down the stairs and go walking for an hour, hardly in the body--thinking about stuff and not even paying attention to what I was doing--a kind of blissful unawareness that I actually miss sometimes. Nowadays, walking and especially attempting stairs requires my complete attention and focus so as not to exacerbate already achy muscles and joints, or inadvertently trigger a stabbing sensation in the knees or a tearing feeling in my upper arms. So this is the situation I am in. I've already been through the grieving process, and have gotten to occasional hopelessness or outright anger, but I keep pushing the envelope and seem to manage to provide food and shelter for myself, despite the pain and occasional agony of it.
I feel it first in my upper arms, which is usually around an 8.5 accompanied by my shoulder joints popping. Once I get up on my feet, the pain in my knees ratchets way up, sometimes to a 9 (there's 9 again), and I cry out. Lately, my left knee is so painful, I find myself shifting the weight more to the right knee. It'll cramp out for a moment, and then calm down. I then hobble to the bathroom to do my business. In the dark, I have to be especially vigilant because a lot of my balance depends on visual cues. I don't want to turn on the lights, because, a) it hurts my eyes, and b). it gets the serotonin firing, delaying getting back to sleep.
I then back up to the bed and literally fall in, since the knees are too painful to bend into a sitting position without support. I sit there for a minute, massaging the knees and arms, then maneuver the body under the blanket.
I'm grateful that once I get situated, I'm not hurting, and sleep comes pretty quickly. For the last 3-4 months, I've been sleeping deeply, with a lot of dreaming that sometimes continues even when I sit up and open my eyes to go pee, or during my wake up routine. It's as though the body wants to keep sleeping all hours. And yet, if I sleep more than about 2 hours in one position, the body will jab me with some pain to wake me up to change positions. I'm a side sleeper, so it's left side, right side, all night.
Enough of that shit! Today was store day. I also had two orders to mail, so I took an extra Ibuprofen, shlepped on my street clothes, and hobbled out to the truck. It was a beautiful Fall day here--around 60 degrees and partly cloudy. There was a nice breeze--very refreshing.
Pain levels were down as I walked around the grocery store gathering my rations for the week ahead. I bought a money order for the rent, and drove over to the landlady's house to drop it in her mailbox. Doing it this way--instead of just mailing it--gives me an excuse to be outside doing stuff, trying to keep the envelope of activity somewhat expanded, since I've only been leaving the house a couple times a week.
I managed to horf the groceries into the house without too much pain, and was pleased at myself for getting everything done I had intended to do for the day. I followed up on a couple of communications, got started on the newsletter--actually got it almost done except for my "This Quantum Life" article. I don't know what I'm going to be writing about yet. I thought I had it last week, but I'm going to have to let it marinate, and see if I can locate those synapses. The newsletter will go out tomorrow!
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