Restlessness

Stuff has been interesting lately. New people, the liver-destruction diet (it totally works by the way). Other things...

Other than not getting jack done last week because I felt like crap, things are going pretty well. I'm feeling a lot better, I have been biking (indoors, ok, but whatever - I'm into it!), and climbing (also indoors...this is CA in Winter). Nevertheless, it's been kind of rad.

I find this blog a wonderful thing (for me), but at the same time I know that more and more people that I know are reading it...and it's making me self-edit. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, I don't want to reveal information that people don't want out in the open.

The point is that I'm a little confused about a new situation and want to write about it, but don't particularly want to face the consequences of discussing it in the public sphere.

So instead I'll dance around the subject, using little anecdotes that are not quite but sort of true. It's annoying.

You'd think that I've been through enough crap to know how to be around people who are going through shitty things. I don't. Everyone deals with crap differently, and there are ba-jillions of different kinds of crap to deal with. Some serious, some not-so-serious. Life experiences have a lot to do with how crap-tastic you might feel a crappy situation is, but more and more I'm thinking that people are born with particular ways of dealing with the turds that inevitably find their way on to one's road of life...so to speak. I mean if it wasn't one turd pile, would it just be another?

Lately I've been spending time with a lot of really positive people, and I think that this is why I've been feeling really good lately. The other part of this equation is letting go of people who aren't putting in the energy that I am willing to put in, and letting go of people who find it difficult to be happy, or if not happy, then at least genuinely appreciative, and largely content.

I don't want to judge people on how they cope with the good and the bad in life, but maybe there are better ways than others to take on new burdens. However, maybe we are hard-wired to move forward in our own ways, and assigning some sort of qualitative judgement to it is pointless. So what I am left with (and probably what really matters) is how I feel- something I tend to ignore when I sense that a person who is close to me is upset. All I know is that, for me, some people require a lot of my energy...I'm always worried about either pissing them off, or saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if they are happy, etc. As it turns out, I'm pretty sensitive. I'd rather write people off and head for the door than wait around for a "real" rejection. Personality failing. But hell, at least it's efficient right? I don't want to be that guy who's deluded.

So if anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about in this post...good for you!

On to more pedestrian things: Went to spin class and then the climbing gym Saturday. Climbing after spin class is really hard. Climbing after spin class after not eating for 4 days is damn near impossible. Oh well, I got to hang out with Rick and that was nice. Then I went home and collapsed into my oh-so-cosy bed for a few hours and watched The Wire. V-day night I had a "date" with a friend, where we ate tamales and talked about life. The tamales kind of sucked...I think they needed salt or something.

Sunday I putzed around in the morning, thinking about the things that I should be doing for work...and then not doing them. Chatted online with Alex for an hour or so (well, mostly I listened to him rant about Weidner). He's headed to El Salto, and I would be jealous except being there with them right now would mean being at the mercy of Chris's schedule. Blah. In the afternoon I met up with Drew at the Oakland gym and had a good session...after I was properly cooked, I went upstairs to the woody to see how the real rock climbers do it. In case you are wondering, they do it on a woody. And then they do it on the rings after that.

I skipped the woody sesh, but was intrigued by the rings (partly because you walk behind a curtain in the back of the gym and all of these rings are everywhere. It is vaguely bondage-ish, which is nice...). Anyway, it was cool and fun and I'd like to do it again, but I woke up this morning and could barely turn my head. Dammit. It kind of feels like I have whiplash! Whatever.

Good food for dinner, interesting company, and then back to Davis to attempt to work on a computer lab I'm teaching about Genepop on the Web and GDA software. Which sucks because I think that data analysis and interpretation is likely the biggest hole in my skill set right now.

And I'm editing a coauthor's draft of his portion of the Tuolumne River book and HOLY CATS IS HE VERBOSE! Editing basically consists of taking out gi-normous portions of text and getting rid of pointlessly big words. Whatever. I like cleaning stuff up and getting rid of excess.

So I get hangovers. Really really really bad hangovers - but only within the last year. The only reason I can think of for why I've been getting horrible hangovers is the interferon for MS. I did a google search and found some information about how alcohol can increase the side effects of interferon (which are usually flu-like symptoms), but I didn't find anything about interferon making you wish you were dead after having 4 glasses of wine. So who knows. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I guess I need to accept that I can't drink very much. Within the last few months I've had a hangover the day after Thanksgiving, one when I shared a bottle of champagne with a labmate, another when I had a beer and a half after the TBS comp, and one after having 4 glasses of wine last night. It's FUCKED. Not to mention embarrassing. It's about 8pm and I'm finally able to eat something. My housemate (who has a cold) went and bought me some chicken soup. This is not normal - it HAS to be the drugs. Apparently I need to accept some limitations. I'm not that psyched about it. But hopefully the desire not to SUFFER for 18 hours will prompt me to make more responsible decisions.