Iunno, man, maybe like six chickens worth?

REM sleep very active though. Last 24-hour period had hours of “Trapped In Labyrinthine Antarctic Ice-Caverns” transition fairly smoothly to more hours of “This Farm Is Very Badly Managed: Antarctica Edition” with only a little “Pursued On Horseback By Wizardy Bounty-Hunters (In Antarctica)” for padding in-between.

 

Contrast to last night, didn’t get to sleep til 5 AM. Incohate dreams with alien robots, civil unrest and neglected pet rodents. Vaguely frustrating. Woke at 1 PM, where “woke” means “eyes open, mostly aware of surroundings, not actively dreaming.”

 

And here it is, 4:40 AM again, and I don’t want to go to sleep.

I’m tired, sleepy even, but the idea of putting my phone away or even doing something with it besides reading is making me feel almost panicky.

Also, there’s a huge farty dog in my bed and a tiny affectionate cat that refuses to get off my boobs. I throw her off and she’s like “You seem to have mistaked, I fix.,” and climbs back on.

 

Day 2 of Activity Watch. Unlike last activity watch, this watch expects me to push a button when I go to sleep, but Only For The Night, and when I wake up, but Only For The Morning, like it expects me to goddamn know when that is.

I think I might have spent the day with it switched to Night-Time Mode, because I had a false alarm Wake Up and pushed the button at 11:00 AM, then went straight back to sleep until 2:00 PM and pushed the button again when I managed to stand up. Then I realized what I’d done, dithered for a while, and eventually decided to err on the side of Less Button Pushing, but I think I picked wrong.

Fortunately they also expect me to fill out another fucking sleep diary. I’m sure if I fuck that up too it means they get to keep withholding meds.

Wonder how many invalidated sleep studies have to happen before they stop paying for more. Nope, no more tests, patient is officially Too Fucked Up to Science Validly.

 

There should be a word for, like, lonely-hopeless. Like, seeing no prospect of ever finding anyone else who voluntarily wants to share their time with you, because you have nothing to offer and also you fucking hate interacting with other human beings.

Low-grade suicidal ideation’s hitting a relatively high mark lately, but that’s to be expected while off most of my meds.

I feel like a shitty piece of furniture no one actually wants, but the family keeps shutting between each other’s basements for sentimental reasons.

 

I fucked up.

Remembered my sleep-study appointment for today, forgot my covid-test appointment for last Saturday. End result: no sleep study for me!

The soonest they can re-schedule me for a sleep study is the 29th. Covid test two days earlier at 11:00 AM. Which I’ll have to wake up for. Still off all my meds. Fun.

 

Earlier I was looking up some of my old posts, because I forgot the word for “scrupulousity” and I knew I used it somewhere around here, and I was like. Wow. The person that I used to be used to talk a lot, huh. Like, obviously she thought she had something interesting to say. Wonder what that’s like.

 

Got my sleep study.

They couldn’t finish it.

I spent most of the night not sleeping, and then in the few hours I did sleep, they found I had undiagnosed sleep apnea. Insurance now won’t accept anything unless I’m on a cpap machine.

It was hard enough going to bed all wired up like last night. I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep at all with some shit up my nose forcing air down my throat.

New sleep study with cpap titration scheduled the 11th.

 

Oh, I forgot to tell you what I dreamed about.

My last thought drifting off was to my father, (deceased), and went, “Hi, it’s me, your most worthless daughter.” I dreamed I went back in time, to my 3 year old body, and yelled at my parents, “Why did you tell me I could do anything? How could you know it wasn’t a lie?”

Then it happened that my little sister came back in time too, and made the much more sensible decision to move to the bookshelves and start researching the causes of past-self bodily possession.

Around then was when the nurse woke me up, told me they couldn’t continue the study, and asked if I would come with her so they could get an update on my weight. The result of which was far more upsetting to me than I would like it to have been, but then pathological body-shame runs in my family, so fun times.

 

I can’t sleep.

I haven’t been able to sleep at night for the past week. I’ve been in bed since 11 PM and I’m so fucking tired, my eyes feel swollen, but I haven’t been able to fall asleep before sunrise since before the sleep study overnight.

This fucking sucks, btw.

 

So, I got my second sleep study last Wednesday. Spent the night wired up and strapped into a face mask that forced air down my throat.

They didn’t do the nap study because the insurance won’t pay for it if we can’t prove the symptoms won’t be resolved by a cpap machine.

I thought that was the whole point of wiring me up and forcing air down my throat in the first place but apparently fucking not.

I did sleep that night, apparently. After that, they unwired me and sent me home, whereupon I went back to bed and slept until 4 PM.

 

... is this a low dopamine thing, I wonder?

I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. But I can’t make myself put my phone away. I get panicky thinking about turning off input long enough to go to sleep. But neither can I focus on anything long enough to get anything rewarding out of it.

Ofc, I haven’t done anything physically challenging for the last month or so, which surely doesn’t help... but doing that would require going outside, which is cold and also full of people, so fuck that.

In other news, my little sister got a little black cat from the humane society. Her name was listed as “Boop,” but they’re changing it. Don’t know what to yet.

 

Apnea machine got here. I haven’t set it up yet. Too tired.

Sister couldn’t keep Boop. Once she got acclimated to the house, she started getting really aggressive with the baby. They didn’t want to take her back to the humane society, but it wasn’t really a choice.

Fortunately it looks like she’s already been adopted by someone else, so hopefully that works out for her.

 

Got vaccinated yesterday! My sister’s workplace was providing them for employees’ household members.

It was the Jaansen, single shot. Should take full effect within 2 weeks. Not like I’m going to stop wearing masks/distancing even then, though.

... Has anyone else actually felt more comfortable with social distancing & mask rules in effect? I think maybe my proximity alarms were miscalibrated at birth, and also it’s always been easier for me to deal with people when I don’t have to drag my big stupid face along, and wearing a mask is kinda the next best thing.

In other news, I just stayed awake all night reading instead of sleeping because fuck not being reading at all times ever, amirite?

(No. No, I am not rite. Bleh.)

 

Augh! Have run out of things to read again! There’s nothing left to drown out the existential nausea and I am distressed!

Just read all of Murderbot Diaries and Ancillary Justice, though. So those were good.

(Not a whole lot of fic on Ao3 for the first one, already ate through most of it; don’t really feel up to looking up fic for the Ancillary series at the moment, cause the high-context social maneuvering stresses me out.)

 

Oh, I watched the first season of Lower Decks last month, too. That was enjoyable, except for how I got the cheap “limited commercials” version of the one-month trial for Paramount Plus because I was worried I’d forget to cancel it after the month was up. The amount of commercials that comes with that sure doesn’t seem limited. Maybe they meant “limited to the times when we’re playing all these commercials.”

 

Right now, I am feeling Very Anxious, which my brain seems to be attributing to something I saw or read in the past few hours, but it won’t say specifically what, and now the anxiety has detached from the original cause and gone flapping about to glom on to any other source of stress or self-recrimination that my brain has touched on in the past few weeks. So that’s fun.

Oh, but in other news, Cassie and Colin got two foster kitties from the rescue, and they’re much more toddler-tolerant than Boop turned out to be. Will they stay? I don’t know! But they’re cute.

Here’s them:



their names are Neon and Mozart, and they’re very sweet boys.

 

The other night, I dreamed that my entire immediate family was mad at me. My mother, both my sisters, and even my dad, who is dead. I woke up convinced that this was still the case. I had to keep reminding myself that it was just a dream.

Why were they mad at me, you ask?

Why, it was because I had eaten too much pumpkin pie. Obviously, an unforgivable offense.

(Not all the pumpkin pie. Just maybe like one and a half pumpkin pies. Which meant there wasn’t enough left for... what? Something. It required quite a lot of pumpkin pie, I know that.) (Didn’t seem to figure into it that I had made most of the pumpkin pie myself, either.)

Priorities. My REM-brain has them.

 

Sylvie has discovered the art of the pratfall.

While her auntie Mandi was pushing her on the hammock-swing, she flopped forward and fell out onto the ground. All aunties and her mom immediately exclaimed in alarm, and Mandi rushed to pick her up, only to find her giggling uproariously. Her mom caught it on camera, too.

She spent the rest of the afternoon throwing herself to the ground and cackling like a tiny maniac. Even tried to fling herself off the swing after asking for another ride, after which we decided that the swing was All Done.

Each time she flopped over, I’d go up and say, “Oh, no! Are you OK?” (Because that is what we say to people who fall down.) After the first few times, she started answering, “No!” upon which she would get up again and scramble off in a cloud of flaily giggles to repeat the performance.

Just over a year and a half old, and picking up new words every day. Super smart kiddo.

 

AAAAUGH I’M SO TIRED

Mom came over for a Cleaning Day (TM) which is stressful because reasons that I won’t go into Because Tired

but anyways then we went to the dog park that’s a big hike over steep hills to the Mississippi River, which tires the dogs out (good) but also tires me out (hurty) and then we came home and Mom made dinner and was passive aggressive at me for being tired.

Also I read Discourse that I shouldn’t have so now I’m anxious too, wheee.