Just Your Basic Entry

Sometimes I hate having a partner in the morning when I’m awake but still dreaming and she wants to talk.  In this state, I want to sit in the silence, let it soak through me, consider the present, consider the day, consider the wonder of it at all, and she wants to talk about her massively overweight friend Konstantina and her new No Pizza, Just Chicken Wings diet, which sounds like pure idiocy, the sort of thing I would have seen on the cover of Women’s World magazine in the 90s in the checkout aisle.  This kind of stuff interrupts my headspace.  A difference between me and Jennie:  she can never have enough of the idiocy of others in her life, whereas my meter for this kind of stimulus fills quickly.  I love being married to her but there exists the following problem:  I have not yet figured out how to be alone when I need to be.

I’ve been taking Lexapro since late November.  Not much in terms of side effects.  Maybe slightly reduced libido but nothing dick-breaking thankfully, and a tendency to sleep worse.  It takes about two months to really be sure it’s having an effect so it’s fair at this point to evaluate what it’s doing, exactly.

I don’t notice anything dramatic.  The floor of my moods might be a little higher, and I’m a little less quick to blame myself when things go wrong —  I don’t feel the world hates me as often — these are probably signs that my levels of anxiety are somewhat lower.  It’s a little harder to work out heavily — I don’t seem to have quite the same oomph that I used to be able to give to some of the weight routines, but it’s hard to separate cause and effect when analyzing this sort of thing — this might be related to the fact that it’s winter and I’m not getting much sunlight, or any number of other variables.

The one thing I can say for sure is that something about being on this drug has made my music preferences different.  When I’m anxious I want to listen to a lot of heavy metal — fast paced, angry, obnoxious music — because the chaos and pace of the music seems to match what’s going on in my head.  For the past month though I’ve been drawn to slower, more atmospheric rock — I’m back into Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson’s solo stuff, the brooding Opeth albums like Damnation, returning to Radiohead, Perfect Circle, The Cure.  I can’t seem to get enough of it.  For now at least I’ve shelved the hardest stuff — municipal waste and cradle of filth are out, The Flaming Lips and Katatonia are in.

Some boring planning / logistics for today.  I have to figure out what to do for exercise and I’m not sure yet.  It’ll probably wind up being what I call “potpourri” which is a light combination of shit for the whole body — twenty minutes on the elliptical, low weight high rep curls, shoulder, and back, just a few sets each to wake the muscles up — some of my knee exercises, the killer leg-raise/ab moves.  I did the new vascular constriction exercises yesterday with my physical therapy guy, Conner.  He placed a band around my upper leg, attached it to a pump, and blew it up.  It felt similar to having an inflated blood pressure cuff around your arm, except slightly tighter.  The skin around my quad turned purple as I ran through exercises:  Squats on a machine, standing band pullbacks, oblique leg raises.  It never quite hurt but the muscles on that leg became tired faster than usual, which was exactly the goal — to tire the muscles out without putting the strain of additional weight on them — to make the muscles work harder without adversely affecting the joint itself.  During PT Conner talks about football and hockey.  His pick for the Superbowl:  KC.  My Dad would love this guy.

I have to do some paperwork for my job, then I will do the potpourri mix of exercises at the gym, then 11:30 group meeting, then talk therapy, then fence guy supposedly showing up — this is the third try trying to get the guy to show, if he doesn’t come today, I’m moving on to someone else.  The excuse he gave for not coming yesterday was “Oh, I had another appointment with another guy named Joe, I thought that was you!”  Sure, I absolutely buy that.  Fucking fence guys…

I have no idea what to talk about at therapy today.   Probably Jennie and Science Baby stuff.  She’s covid free and starting her new cycle.

I’ll probably also bring up my Dad, who lives in Michigan — he is doing the father equivalent of Love Bombing this week, he’s sent not one but two sepearate get-well cards to Jennie this week, one came on Monday and the second came yesterday and I have no idea why he’d do this — he also sent an email on Wednesday asking if I would ever move to Michigan to be closer to him?  No!  I live in Massachusetts, I just got married and bought a house here, my job and my friends are here, my mom and my brother live half an hour away plus I live in a pleasantly blue state where nobody tried to kidnap the governor.  I still have to respond to this email and thank him for the cards.  But I don’t want to — actually in December of last year he asked the same question — JOE you should move to MICHIGAN the HOUSES are CHEAPER here — I sent an email response to him basically stating all of the facts I just wrote above — and here we are in Feb, a mere two months later, and he’s asking again if I’ll move to Michigan.

Maybe I’ll forward him my email response from December — and add some text:

Dad you asked me two months ago if I would move.  Please see again the response, nothing has changed.

Don’t you remember asking?  Two months isn’t that long ago.  Are you ok mentally?  I’m getting worried about your cognitive function, you should probably see a doctor, get a brain fitness test to make sure nothing is wrong.

That would shut him the hell up about moving.

I have other options.  I could ignore that part of his email — which is probably exactly what I will do — or I could also playfully ask him to move here instead — which would be impossible, given that he is settled there with his wife B, and B’s family lives close by and she would never consider leaving them.