Month: November 2024

Bad Brain

(Please note: this post has nothing to do with either the seminal 80’s punk/reggae band or the song by The Ramones from their 1978 album Road to Ruin. If that’s what you’re looking for you can stop here)

Anyone with an internal monologue1 will likely be familiar with this phenomenon. My brain will occasionally go into this mode where everything is broken and nothing can ever be fixed. It exists, in my case, solely to shit all over anything and everything I do. Progress is meaningless because you’re never going to finish, no matter how much you do it isn’t enough because you didn’t do everything, that sort of thing.

Bad brain has been rampant recently and I don’t have much explanation for why. If nothing else, November/December marks the beginning of the third year of me hiding inside playing video games, with no end in sight. That by itself may be enough but who knows? That’s the real frustration for me. There is no way to figure out what is going wrong or why with any certainty. I can construct a coherent narrative to explain my symptoms, but is it correct? no way to tell!

Brains are a waste of time.

  1. Something like 5-10 percent of the population have no internal monologue whatsoever, which blows my mind. How does that even work? ↩︎

Great Way to Spend a Friday

For reasons that aren’t relevant to the rest of the story1, we spent a good portion of Friday night/early Saturday morning in the ER at Highline or whatever teh fook CHI rebranded it to.

I’m not really sure what I want to say about this. It was horrible, of course. Being in health care environments still is quite difficult. Highline uses the same cardiac monitors and IV pumps as most of the other hospitals I’ve worked in recently so there were lots of very familiar sounding beeps and alarms. By the time Shannon was discharged I was about ready to crawl out of my skin.

Today is Wednesday and I still don’t feel like I’ve entirely put myself back together yet. This is yet more evidence that going back to work in health care is definitely not in the cards, at least for the foreseeable future.

As mentioned, my brain is full kind of scrambled. It’s difficult to string thoughts together. I may try this again in a couple of days.

Edited to add – Somehow I managed to turn on a function I didn’t even know WordPress had, subscriber only access. If anyone visited earlier and got a subscriber only notice let me offer my sincere apologies. I don’t know why anyone reads this in the first place and I certainly don’t want to make it any more difficult to access.

  1. Shannon was having issues with her chronic pain left over from cancer treatment. She’s back to baseline now. It’s not like any of this or secret or anything but I’m lazy and don’t feel like typing out all the background context. If you want details feel free to ask her and I’m sure she’ll fill you in. ↩︎