Do Inzombiacs Eat Brains? Because I Prefer Pizza...

I told myself a week or two ago that if I couldn't sleep, I wasn't allowed to spend any more nights reading and playing video games. There's too much stuff that needs to be done. If I can't sleep, I work.

I've managed a lot of cataloging, and quite a lot of paperwork. No writing, since I don't have the energy or the mental awareness. I've managed very little sleep, dammit.

I don't know if it's something to do with the weather, or what. Usually at this time of year, things are getting warmer, but here in Alby it's freezing (literally) and periodically snowing, even though it's nearly April and most recent years we've had bikini weather by April 1st. I'm in that generally unsettled frame of mind and body, where I'm not quite sick but not quite right either. I do keep getting stupid health problems, things that come right out of left field - since I got back from Somerset three weeks ago I've had four ear infections (yeah, I get a lot of ear infections, but four in three weeks is pushing it even for me) and a urinary tract infection and then today I broke a rib, stupidly. I don't even know how I did it - I was rushing to get in and out of the bath, and then get dressed and dry my hair, but there wasn't a particular moment when I suddenly felt the pain. No cracking sound or sensation, or sudden sharp pain. It just came on over a period of about ten minutes - a twinge at first, then a pain that I thought was a pulled muscle that I could walk off, and then half an hour later I couldn't move at all. I'm guessing it's a rib, anyway, unless I actually tore a muscle. I've had strains and sprains and pulled muscles before, and they don't hit me anywhere near as badly as this. That said, I've also had broken ribs, and they haven't been this bad, although the one that I broke in a car accident five or six years ago still gives me trouble if I sleep on it wrong. Ribs are funny like that.

So I'm stuck in bed. I literally cannot move most of the time, although I'm managing to make it to the bathroom and back every so often (although it takes about ten minutes to sit up and walk down the stairs, so I have to schedule bathroom breaks). I can't sit in a chair. I find it hard to stand. I find it uncomfortable to lie on my back. Lying on my stomach is the only position that's even vaguely comfortable (the injury is in my back) - everything else sends my entire left side trapezius and latissimus dorsi into spasms. I'm surprised at how much the darn thing hurts - I've had back injuries before, but never any that made it impossible to actually MOVE. There is, of course, the possibility that I'm just being a huge pussy, but you'd think that as used to pain as I am, I'd be able to cope with this better.

I'm generally irritable right now, because of the pain, and the tiredness that I've been feeling since Christmas - well, okay, since the strep in Oct 2011 really - and the extra weight I'm still lugging around on my body (with all the health problems I've had over the last year, I haven't managed to stick to an exercise regime for more than a couple weeks) and the constant, gnawing hunger that never quite goes away, even though I feel like I never stop eating. (In reality I'm probably not eating that much. I can't afford to eat more, though. Money is really tight, but that's for another blog post.)

I'm also irritable because I have so much freaking stuff that needs to be done, and I can't afford to be bedbound. I've been decorating - my walls are now entirely pink - and I've been painting the shelves and brackets white, since I can't afford to buy bookcases. Unfortunately, this is a VERY long process. Each shelf needs two coats of primer and at least two coats of paint (they're going from a very dark colour to white) and this results in me having to run to Wilko to buy more paint on a regular basis. I should really just buy several cans and be done with it. I can only paint one side at a time, unless I want to end up with paint smears everywhere. And I have to do the work outside because of the fumes - and it's been pissing it down with rain most of the time. I can't work in the rain. Or the snow.

I've been working on the damn shelves for at least a week now, and I'm not quite finished. I thought it would take me a couple days. But then I thought there'd be sunshine and warmer weather.

The walls are looking pretty good. They could have done with another coat of paint, but I ran out, and I certainly wasn't going to go out and spend twenty quid on another can. I can't believe how expensive paint has gotten.

The frill you see isn't part of the paint, it's just the shadow of the lampshade. I should have taken photos in daylight, but we aren't GETTING any real daylight right now. Shelves will go in this alcove - I actually put the brackets up yesterday, before I did the ribs.

You can see that the window surrounding needs another coat or two of paint, so I bought some tester pots just to do that...and then found out that you're not supposed to paint with them, because they don't give a decent finish. Fuck.

My bed is about the only pretty thing in the room right now, aside from the walls. Oh, and my bedside table. If I had the money, I'd dump all the furniture - I've had it since I was eight. But I don't have the money to replace everything. Nor will it paint (it's cheap MDF, and I've tried, to no avail). So I'm stuck until I can at least buy a dressing table.

The thing that really drives me batty is that there is so much STUFF everywhere. Stuff that doesn't have a home. There's like, NO storage space in this house. This suits mom well, because she likes open-plan thing - shelves made out of planks of wood and brackets; everything sitting out on display. I hate open-plan. Unless you have a weekly housekeeper, it's horribly impractical. Everything gets dusty and grimy and you can't ever get it properly clean. I like cupboards and wardrobes and closets and everything stored neatly in its place except when you're actually using it.

The room looked so nice when I had just finished painting, and there was nothing in it. I seriously wanted to throw out everything I owned and have a room that was empty except for my bed. I like starkness. It makes me feel clean. Or at least less dirty.

I wanted to put coving up, and to smooth the horrible textured ceiling out, but I'm not sure that I'm going to have the time. Mom's talking about putting the house on the market in May. (Bad timing for me to paint, but I've been putting it off for four years because Mom keeps saying we're moving. You can't put off life indefinitely.)

For so long I've had this idea in my head of what I wanted my room to look like, and now that I finally have the walls painted, I can no longer see the plans. I'm just so tired, and the amount of work that needs to be done in this house before we can sell it is weighing heavily on me. There are 200-odd boxes from the attic to sort through. I have to go through the emotional battle of trying to separate mom from her hoards, and the emotional battle of getting rid of some of my own books and clothes. I am not at my mom's stage of hoarding, where I keep things like dried-up tubs of paint and boxes of bricks, but I do find it hard to get rid of clothing and books. Stuffed animals, too, although those are in bags in Ryan's wardrobe right now, and have been for several years (my cardiologist told me I had to put them away until my allergies improved).

I guess the long and short of it is that I'm not feeling good, and I suppose I'm kind of depressed. Not suicidally depressed or anything; not focused on the futility of life, but exhausted mentally and physically. I can't see a way forward right now, except to keep plodding on. My health seems to get a bit worse each season, no matter what I try to do to keep things working. I don't sleep anywhere near enough, and for a couple months I've been waking up every morning in truckloads of pain in my back and neck. I thought it was my sleeping position, and have been working to change it, but so far it doesn't seem to matter what position I sleep in, I still have the pain in the mornings. I'm constantly shattered, constantly starving, and can't seem to lose any weight, even when I don't allow myself to overeat. If there had been any men in my life, I would wonder if I were pregnant, but barring alien abduction, that's not a possibility. Nothing I do seems to matter at the moment. Nothing touches the work that's piled up. No amount of money I bring home in my paycheck makes any difference to mom's debts at the bank and with the Visa. No amount of housework makes the house any cleaner or tidier. No amount of organising or throwing stuff away seems to make a dent in the shit that came out of the attic. I was looking into the possibility of hiring a storage locker to hold some of the stuff I had for my home when I have one - mostly stuff I bought when I was planning on moving in with C - but in this town, the cheapest storage unit I can get is £30 a week. A WEEK. I'd been expecting it to be about that a month.

Damn, this note is depressing. I'm just so tired. I seem to have a lot of blog posts over the years that say this. The fibromyalgia is kicking my butt, to be honest, no matter how good a fight I put up. I just wish I had someone who could and would help me out sometimes.

News

I've been meaning to update you guys on here for a while, but I've had a heavy work schedule for the last week or so, and I haven't had either the time or energy. Well, I suppose I could have made the time, but the energy is a problem. Most of the time I got home too tired to even think straight, and then when I had today and yesterday off, I spent most of them reading the Simon R. Green books I got in the mail, and eating and sleeping.

So...news.

- Justyna, the new lodger, seems to be settling in well. I like her, a lot, and I don't usually like lodgers much. Oh, I don't dislike them, but it usually takes a while for me to warm up to them, even the nice ones. But Justyna seems pretty good. Friendly, but not overly so. Not too shy, and not someone who seems bothered about me wandering around the house in a T-shirt and panties in the evening, or a bikini in the daytime. (She doesn't wear a whole lot either, most of the time.) She cleans up when she makes a mess (and occasionally even cleans up *my* stuff - how cool is that? LOL ) and doesn't steal my cosmetics or food. She pays her rent on time. She doesn't lie around the house all day. She doesn't have wild parties at night or play music loud enough to wake the dead. (Or even me.)

And in addition to being an all-round OK lodger, she's a nice person. She's fun and interesting. The other day we sat out in the garden for an hour or more. I was cutting herbs, so she brought her dinner outside and we just chatted for ages. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed and wood touched and all the superstitious things, hoping that she'll continue to be nice, and stay for a while. Because we've had a LOT of really, really bad lodgers in the past couple of years.

Starting from when we moved back to the house in 2002, we had Richard. He stayed for a year, and was actually pretty neat, aside from the fact that he was always cooking fish-head stew, which was something I could look past. Unfortunately, or fortunately - depending on your point of view - he was also the first guy I fell in love with. At least the first as an adult. And we had a pretty tempestuous relationship, and a year after he moved in, he eventually moved out, because we were just doing each other too much harm.

Most of the time, if I think of him at all, I miss him and sort of wish things could have been different, or that we'd tried harder. But when we're having lodger problems, I sometimes find myself wishing we'd never got together at all, because he was a pretty decent lodger, and if we hadn't started sleeping together, he might have stayed.

The next couple, I can't remember the order they went in. There was Cliff, the alcoholic butcher, who actually drank himself to death not long after Mom kicked him out. Akinbo, a 6 foot 5 Nigerian guy who I made the mistake of having a one-episode fling with, and who thereafter decided I was going to be his woman, and was frequently picking me up and slinging me over his shoulder and trying to kiss me. He was a pretty good person, but a nightmare of a lodger, even without the constant come-ons. Hope, a pretty, exotic American girl who started out well, but went downhill quickly and possibly gets the award for "most annoying lodger EVER". She stole my makeup, had no respect for hygiene either in her own room or in the communal areas (god knows how she always managed to look put-together), was a compulsive liar, had both the manipulativeness and the vanity of Jen from BB9, was too lazy to even change the toilet roll when it was finished or put a new bin liner in when her stuff overflowed the last one, always had to be right, and worst of all IMO, had extreme contempt for interracial relationships. (Despite the fact that she was half white, half Indian.) She was studying to be a psychologist, and in her opinion the fact that at the time, I had a black boyfriend and a couple of African masks on my walls showed an immense amount of hatred for "[my] own people", as well as dangerously low self-esteem, and she told me on several occasions that as soon as she got her psychology degree, she'd make sure I got the help I needed to deal with my self-loathing.

Absolute crap. In the months she lived with us, I didn't bring a single friend from college home, because all but two of my college friends were Black or Asian or Middle Eastern (I went to college in Islington) and I knew she'd have something unpleasant to say about - and probably to - them.

After Hope was Graham, a friend of my mother's, and while I love the guy I hope I never have to live with him again. 60 years old, and messier than your average teenage boy. I don't know how anyone can get to that age like that. And then Paul, who had no sense of responsibility and thought that he shouldn't have to pay rent because it's harder for a Black man to find a good job (why that meant he shouldn't have to pay rent was never quite clear to me, but whatever), and Martin, who was generally a petulant child in a man's body, and ended up burgling three houses and getting sent to prison. Oh, and then Nutan, who lived here for less than a month, and moved out when Mom refused to let her friend move in and share the room with her.

So with all that, you can see why I hope Justyna works out.

Of course, if it were up to me we wouldn't have lodgers at all, if we could afford not to. But then if it were up to me, I'd have a yacht and a swimming pool and a house on the beach, so...

- The thing with my kid got...well, not completely resolved, but thereabouts. The guy he hit finally woke up from his coma, but he didn't really remember what happened, so the police couldn't charge him with anything really serious. All they had on him was something to do with the Public Order Act, and he ended up with community support and mandatory anger management classes, which is what I'd pretty much figured as the best-case scenario. He gets to do his community support as part of the community outreach program I work in, and I get to be the sort of mentor. It's more responsibility than I'd usually take on, but I guess I have to grow up at some point. His parents don't want him in the house anymore though, so he's having to find somewhere to live, which isn't easy what with the state of the economy.

Honestly, I feel pretty sorry for the poor kid. Sure, he shouldn't have hit the guy, but what happened was an accident. I know he didn't mean to hurt him - at least not badly. Boys fight, especially boys from poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods. I'm not saying it's right, but it happens, and you just don't expect someone you get into a fist-fight with to end up in a coma. With any luck this experience will keep him on the straight-and-narrow, and he'll end up doing something good with his life. He's a smart kid, and there's no reason he shouldn't go to uni and become someone great.

- Aside from those two things, there isn't much new in my life, except for one person. I joined this site one night basically because I was horny, and Oli was trying to turn me on over the phone, and I knew I couldn't let him when he still had a girlfriend, and I just got sick of all the indecision and decided this would be a good way to move forward with my life. It didn't work out exactly the way I was hoping; although I got a lot of emails, I didn't find anyone who I really clicked with around here. There were a couple of people from elsewhere that I liked, but nobody nearby who I formed that instant bond with (although there were a handful of possibilities). And then the thing I was least expecting happened: I found someone who could possibly be a close friend, someone who I bonded with on a mental and emotional level, as well as a physical.

It surprised me, because I didn't expect to find a good friend here of all places. Especially not one whose brain turns me on as much as his physicals.  But there it is, and I can't say I'm at all unhappy. On the contrary, I'm very happy. Even if the whole thing is slightly surreal. OK, a lot surreal. It's strange to meet someone and within an hour or two feel like you've known them for a long time. But then I always fall fast. In love, or in like, either way. And although I'm not here to fall in love, and to do so would be utterly inconvenient, I can definitely say I've fallen very much in like.

And in the long run, if this site brings me even one person that I become close to, it's worth it.

(Of course, there are a couple others that I talk to who may in time become good friends - don't think that I'm ignoring you guys, please. You too are much appreciated.)

And on that note, I'm off to bed. Or at least to read for a little while, and then fall asleep. (I love wireless broadband - being able to write all this (as well as work) from the comfort of my bed makes all the difference.) Someone kept me up all night last night, and I didn't get any of my chores done today, so I really have to make an effort to get up. My alarm's set for 12 noon, and it's now 4.15 am, so hopefully I can sleep soon.

[The following paragraph no longer holds true - I have long since given up the habit of using initials or fake names, since my poor damaged brain can't keep them straight.]


* Some of you have noticed that I don't use many names in here. It's for the sake of anonymity, and not getting sued. People who are a big part of my life, and I write about often, get made-up names (although usually ones that are something close to their real name) and people who I'm just mentioning now and then get initials. It's just easier that way. I usually mention these people by their real names in the rest of my journals, but considering where we are it's probably not such a good idea. Chris Kennedy is the only one with his real name in here, and he encouraged me.

Addition: Man, I had to edit this post like 10 times, I kept finding places where I'd just left out a word, as well as typos. You can tell I'm tired. Anything else that I missed, you'll just have to forgive. *kisses*