That was a mistake

On Wednesday I briefly thought I was having a heart attack.  Full body weird gross feeling, and unusual sharp tightness right in the middle of my chest.

It took about a minute for me to realise, when I put my hand to the sensation and realised the surface was twitching, that the chest tightness was the central edges of my pectoral muscles spasming against my sternum.  And soon after realised the full body grossness was Post-exertional malaise (PEM, if you are nasty), the chronic fatigue thing that last time a specialist talked to me about it they still seemed to think was only possibly a real thing and was possibly entirely in my head - and yet I had forgotten about it until it got me again and then the unpleasantness slowly dredged up the memory of what was going on.

I had had another physiotherapist led gym session the day before, and after the earlier ones had mostly gone fine I guess I pushed things too far this time.  And thus the flesh much punish me.

Days later, things are still pretty damn uncomfortable but recovering slowly.

 

Otherwise I have not been up to a lot.  Working through some old Ursula K Le Guin books.

Had a plumber come and fix something in my flat that I had been feeling embarrassed about failing to ever fix myself, to learn that it was built wrong and literally couldn't be fixed without replacement parts - which made me feel a bit better about my incompetence.  

Caught up with my cousin Pen briefly when she was in town so her daughter could go to a university tour - that made me feel old. 

Had a flat inspection that I failed to properly clean for and still got complimented by the tenancy manager for having one of the cleanest units in the complex.  Which does leave me worried about the levels of filth my neighbours are living in.  I had had intentions of cleaning but the spoons ran out when I tried.

One of these days I will cave and accept Dalton's offers to help.  I just have to work out the socially acceptable way to pay him for it afterwards. 

About time

I realised today I had never gone back and purged my phone of the old pictures of Shitlord.  Back in 2019 it was too fresh and painful, and by the time it had stopped being painful I had forgotten the pictures were still there. 

Today, I purged them.

No narcissistic Magyar cluttering up on phone.

In the process of hunting them to delete them seeing he was not as pretty as I had thought at the time. 

Why do I even try to use tinder

I mostly don't try to match people on Tinder but open the app occasionally and realise how few people seem remotely suitable.

But swiping on a couple of 40 somethings claiming to seek long term relationships that then actually matched over the last couple of months has matched me to a couple of people.

The first very quickly revealed himself to be a romance scammer of some sort when he said he was a research student in the university's research department.  Come on people, if you are going to make up a fake identity, do a little bit of homework for your legend.  (Look at me revealing I partake in spy thrillers, and don't really know anything about being a conman.)

The newer did a better job of passing for human, but if definitely using AI to make his answers seem something... maybe, smarter, which is making me assume he is probably also a catfish of some sort.  And they are fairly generic.  So will probably turn out to be a romance scammer, but has at least done a bit of homework of sounding convincingly in Dunedin.  If not convincingly an actual human.   Why do people bother?

 But more to the point, why have I bothered replying.

The internet produces nothing good. 

 

But hey, the US and Israel and war criming Iran and Lebanon, and maybe starting WWIII.  Nuclear armageddon could wipe out humanity before anything else has a chance of being a problem.  With any luck.

Arm of achiness because needle

Going to the 40th birthday on the correct day was actually very nice.  Though I hadn't seen the birthday girl in a very long time (maybe a decade) she was very excited to catch up and I ended up dominating her time far more than I my fair share considering the number of people there.

Otherwise have not been up to a lot.

Got a slightly overdue COVID booster yesterday so my arm is currently sore.

The guy I was borderline dating late last year messaged some more to (having not interacted with me in any way, and thus having no idea what was going on with me or my opinions) explain to me what I was thinking, but fortunately sign off by saying he would be deleting my number.  Until he went very weird, I had assumed we would end up friends, but his tendency to talk about me, about things he had decided about me with no actual information to back them up, had been slightly irksome right from when we had first met.  Realising that was only going to grow in scope as things went on makes me glad he decided to make up a version of me that was entirely not worthwhile after all.

Because I am a fucking idjit

Facebook reminder about an event I didn't really want to go to but felt I should.  Panicked, thought I had correctly read it.

Got myself dressed.

Went through my gift cupboard and found something that would work, wrapped it.

Sorted someone who could drive me to slightly awkward to get to pub. 

Got there.

Was the wrong day.

Can't read.

Am an idiot. 

Dresdens done for now

Twelve Months, the 18th  full novel in the Dresden Files, has now moved from my Currently Reading to my Read list.  After about a month of Dresden reimmersion, I am refresh and then up to date with the new one.

 And glad to have them done.

Doing them all together was not the best plan.  There is too much of them. 

But I did at least enjoy the last one. 

When did my taste become all silver foxes

I had my pain clinic appointment today.  I am not sure how actually useful it was.  I guess I will see, I have follow up with a physio for an exercise plan which they seem to think will be a good first step to helping manage the pain, I refrained from pointing out how much it didn't help last time I was doing regular exercise, because I fall into not being a whiner when in specialist appointments - thus stop being one at the single time when it is most useful and appropriate. 

I am such a fail human.

Between noticing the hotness of the main doctor, and then the eye-candy I notice in the O-week tent village and on the walk home I noticed a distinct pattern.  I was only checking out silver haired nerds.  I was just wondering when I had developed a new weird twist on my taste when it occurred to me it is just my old nerd fancying remaining age appropriate.  I have almost mostly checked out about my own age.  I am so failing to be a proper predatory man.  I am so boring.

I am also blaming the wandering eye on having had a cute horny youngster hitting on me fairly hardcore, trying to get me to sext.  He has clearly got me worked up enough to be noticing people, even if he hasn't got me worked up enough to be taking the nudes he keeps asking for multiple times a day. I am too old to find it as flattering as it is clearly intended to be.

 

Also, there were no free pens at the tent village.  What is the point of O week? 

Why the nose?

On Tuesday night I dozed too much and thought I had taken my late evening meds when I hadn't.  First time I have stuffed up my meds in many months.

I have spent the two days since feeling very uncomfortable.

It is like my face in the wrong size.  Too small for what is behind it.

And the tip of my nose feels like it is somehow in the wrong place in a visceral and itchily disconcerting way.

At least it is less bad today than it was yesterday.

It was still enough to make today zoom-based trauma informed yoga class very uncomfortable to do.

 

Chronic illness life fails to be glamorous. 

 

In happier news I am up to the 14th of the Dresden Files in my reread of the novels.  I am not enjoying them this time.

I also caught up with an old friend back in town after years living in Melbourne in the weekend.  Mother of my eldest godchild.  Was good to see her and how much happier she is now as a later life lesbian than she was with the shitty men she had to deal with before.  No good comes from liking men.

Stupid tablets

For the second time in the years I have been working on it, I have accidentally wiped all local progress on my novel from a tablet due to an act of idiocy and my latest backup on cloud or another device was VERY out of date. 

 

I really should just use google docs. 

Further resolved

On Monday night, the guy I had been sort of but not really dating messaged again, asking to hang out, as if the conversation of a week and a half earlier had not happened.

My bringing up the earlier conversation (come Tuesday morning when I actually replied), thinking we should maybe resolve the issues behind it if we were going to attempt some sort of shadow of friendship after it lead to his sending a numbered list of my faults, quickly followed by a declaration of having actually liked me, and then almost immediately blocking me and soon after deleting the entire conversation chain away.

I really dislike how many modern chat apps allow users to delete chat logs at both ends.  Someone else being able to delete information off my phone just because they contributed to it offends me - I also wrote a bunch of that and I didn't agree to it being deleted off my phone.

But I guess it resolved my need to make my likeable to someone who I was finding more and more unlikeable the more I interacted with him and was regretting having met at all.  The joys of being a broken person. 

 

Just glad it is all done.

I do not have the spoons for dealing with dramatic people.

I don't have the spoons for dealing with my mother right now.

An evening of awkwardness

So the guy I was sort of dating late last year picked a bit of a fight with me on a dating app last night after mining things I said for insults that hadn't been there unless the reader really wanted to interpret them that way.  And then just kept at me with pretty adversarial messages that were also very clearly aimed at trying to argue that I was the problem.

So I think that is now over, and that he wanted to walk away with the moral high ground.

At least, if that wasn't what was going on, then I am very fucking confused by what was going on.

It was so focused, and so out of nowhere.

I'm me.  I assume everything is my fault.  So for a chunk of the conversation I was like "Oh, all these faults that aren't the ones I know about to add to my list of things wrong with me - sounds about right" but as it went on eventually logic kicked in with a "wait a minute..." 

 

I will admit I had been thinking it was probably a situation where we probably shouldn't progress things and should just be friends, and probably should have been clearer about that, but after last night I am not so convinced he is someone I would want to be friends with. 

I think the only actually arseholish thing I did was milk the dermatitis situation to avoid having to have the actual awkward "I think we shouldn't sleep together" conversation by hiding behind the "I am currently out of commission, medically" - which was me being chickenshit about confrontation.  Though there was some miscommunication along the way as well.

 

Otherwise my life in recent weeks has just been adjusting to my changing in meds dosage.  It is slowly settling down.  I can mostly stay awake through the day now, and generally form sentences when I need to. So things have improved.

Stupid facebook memories feature

I was just reminded of something that made me realise today was the ten year anniversary of being played.

I had been invited to a shitty movie by Shitlord, after a couple of month of no actual in person contact, and romantic relation built only on the texts required to keep some amount of control over me.  So the day had started around the plan of having the "this isn't working, we don't see each other, I'm not sure we like each other, we should probably break up" conversation. 

By the end of the conversation we sat down to have after the shitty movie he had somehow talked me into dropping the L-bomb, made awkward by the fact that the moment I said it I knew I didn't mean it but having said it still counted for something almost a year and a half into a relationship (it wouldn't become clear it was really more of a situationship until later).  He returned the L-bomb substantially later in the day.

And it wasn't until years later that I realised how much I had been manipulated.  The whole time really.

Every time I tried to get out, it turned into the rare occasions of him actually seeming like a good boyfriend for a bit. 

We shall see how this goes

I have just taken the first dose of the last stage of my dose increase.

After having spoken to the pharmacist about it and been warned that this will be the worst one side effects wise.  So after having only sort of recovered from having spent the last twenty days fairly out of it, I am going into what will probably be a worse case of the same.

Good thing it is that bit of summer when I have nothing happening and basically don't leave my house. 

Probably should have sorted groceries while I had a bit of brain space to do it... Oops.