Tag: life

Atlas Shrugged (and so do I)

Have you ever read it, Atlas Shrugged?  I am listening to the audiobook while driving, and I am finding it oddly wonderful.  Occasionally, I want to jot down sentence after sentence from it, and then just give up the idea, realizing that I might as well just tell people to read the whole book, because there are only five million quotes worth sharing from it.  Obviously, that is exaggerated.  However, I gave up bothering to write down anything from it, because before I can even pause the book to write down what I’d just heard, I’ve already heard something else, something additional, that I now also want to write down.  And that goes on for quite a while, such that I would be pausing the book far too much to be able to stay in the book.  So, I don’t copy any of them down, and I don’t even bother working on remembering them either, there are so many of them.  I just listen and absorb and enjoy and wonder.  I have no idea what this book is about.  I had ideas related to something from the era of Fahrenheit 451 and the other Orwell future-is-a-terrible-place sorts of novels, but I don’t know where I got the idea – I genuinely knew nothing but the title of the book before I began reading it just last week.

But I like it so far.  It has me ever on my toes, and the reader is wonderful with making everything seem important and worth hearing.  I feel like I’m in a spy novel of some sort, but, instead of its being about a murder of some sort, it is about life as a whole, and we are spying on life as a concept, and examining each little piece and evaluating it as though it were unique and brand new to us.  All this with a love of a railroad company taking the driver’s seat, and being good at whatever work one does in the passenger seat.

Post-a-day 2018

A small, small slice of (my) OCD life

‘Will you open the compost bucket?  I need to put this in there, and I have it all over my hands already.’

Hesitation.  And inward tug of panic.  A sigh.  I walk over, and hold open the bucket, then close it after she has dispensed of the boiled vegetable (from dying eggs).

‘Can I wash my hands?’  She moves over a little, so that I can use the running water to wash my hands (with soap, of course).  The water is hot, but I’d rather get my hands washed than mess with anything else.

I only had to wash my one hand, so I air dry it easily enough, and wipe it on my clothes for good measure, as I walk away from the sink and kitchen.

‘Crap.  Will you just move the whole thing over here?  This is all just going to drip, if I try to move it over there.’

A shudder runs through my insides, and a brief sense of paralysis overcomes me.

‘Oh, come on.  I just cleaned it.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ I snap.  ‘I’m still going to wash my hands again.’  And so I walk back over, move the bucket to the sink, where I know she wants it set, but about which I purposely do not think, and I step away again quickly.  She blocks the sink, and asks for more paper towels on the plate.  I can barely breathe, but I carefully pull off two layers of paper towels, without touching anything else but those specific paper towels, and I drop them on the plate.  As I rush away, she fusses that they aren’t placed correctly.  I almost begin to cry, but manage to return and to lay them the way she wants them lain.  Finally, as I can feel the panic and the tears brimming, she moves to the side, and allows me to wash my hands.

I leave immediately afterward, because I don’t want her asking/demanding my help her do anything more.  I need to get somewhere where I can breathe.  Somewhere clean.

The kitchen is a dirty place, and I dislike being in it.  Even thinking of it is a source of anxiety for me, so I do my best to avoid letting it spend any time in my mind.  Now, as I share this, tears caress the edges of my eyelids, and I swallow with difficulty, unintentionally doing my best to breathe as little and as lightly as possible.

But then I remember that I am somewhere clean right now, so it is okay to breathe.  I do breathe, and it is comforting.  I will pause from this for a moment, so that my heart rate can relax some.

…………..

I think my mom just thinks I’m being dramatic, or that I’m making a big deal out of nothing.  I know that, for her, it actually is nothing.  For me, however, while it can be nothing at times, it usually is one of the most overpowering, overwhelming things I have ever experienced.

I saw a Facebook Memories post from last year just recently, of the time I was trapped in the bathroom at school (work).  Well, one of the times, anyway.  I’d said something to the effect of, “When you’re stuck in the bathroom, because your OCD saw her not wash her hands.”  I eventually washed the door handle, then washed my own hands again, and then used toilet paper from the stash on the countertop (there are no paper towels) to open the door.  It took me a while to get to that point, though, because I was mentally battling the situation.

You see, it made no sense that I couldn’t open the door and walk out.  I regularly do so.  I know that most women in Japan tend not to use soap to wash their hands, and many do not even bother with the water at times.  So, whenever I grab the handle to walk out of the bathroom, I can easily assume that it is covered in whatever germs get on people’s hands in the bathroom.  It took me a long time to be able to push the thought enough out of my mind to be able to touch the handle ever, let alone often.  But, I typically succeed in not letting the thought arise, so long as the bathroom is reasonably clean-looking, and so long as I do not actually see someone not wash her hands and then grab the door to leave.

Once the thought has arisen, there is nothing I can do about it (most of the time, anyway).  If it doesn’t occur to me, I am completely fine grabbing that door handle and walking out.  I don’t even need a paper towel, the way plenty of women in the US tend to do.  So long as the thought doesn’t occur to me.  If, in any way, something draws my attention to the possibility of contamination of the door handle, I can not touch it.  Ideally, I stand and wait until someone else opens the door, and I sneak through then.  If, after a while, no one has come or gone, I’ll find a way using paper towel or toilet paper.  However, using toilet paper has its own issues, because the toilet paper comes from inside the bathroom stall, which is where I know hands are not clean, because that’s where they are exposed to the whole dirtiness of the bathroom in the first place.  And, if someone has touched the toilet paper already, well, then, those germs are on that paper.  not to mention if something else splashed onto the toilet paper or the dispenser, and made its way onto the toilet paper.  Plus, I’ll have to touch the stall door in order to get into the stall.  All of these are factors that require me to wash my hands again.

So, I have even gone into the stall I had just used (so the toilet seat is cleaned off still), carefully pulled off a full round of toilet paper, thrown it away or into the toilet, gone and washed my hands again, returned to the stall, pushed it open with my shoe sole, removed fresh toilet paper without interacting in any way with the dispenser itself (and not letting the toilet paper touch it either), backed up out of the stall, used the toilet paper to open the door (without touching any bit of the door, and not even through a single layer of the toilet paper), held the door with my shoe sole (ideally what had held open the stall door, so as to wipe it off), thrown away the toilet paper, and then rushed out the door.  I can’t take the paper with me that held open the door, because that’s too much time for the germs to have been able to travel on the paper that is still in my hands.  I must dispose of it at the bathroom door.

It doesn’t matter that the germs are either there or not, or that I sometimes grab the door handle and sometimes cannot.  No matter how I think it through, no matter how I reason with myself, if I think about it while in the bathroom, I quite likely will be unable to touch the door.  Period.  If I don’t think about it, I’ll grab the door fearlessly, and continue on happily in life.  (Unless, of course, I think about it as I am already opening the door, or have just walked out of the door.  In such a case, I usually’ll have to find a way to wash/sanitize my hand then, sometimes even by returning to the bathroom to do so, because I don’t much like hand sanitizer – it leaves the germs on you, even if they are now dead.)

And now I am going to stop sharing about this for now.  It is exhausting to consider, and it makes my chest tight.  As I mentioned, bringing it to mind is the trouble of it all.  When I don’t think about it, I’m fine and dandy, breathing freely.  So, I want to forget all of this before I next go to the bathroom, because I want to be able to use the bathroom with ease.  However, the fact that I am even considering how I want to forget this and why, that is possibly going to prove troublesome later, because I’ve already made the connection between the two in my head.  Now, when I go to the bathroom, I am likely to think of how I wanted to forget this before I next went there.  This is why I usually do not even allow myself to finish thoughts.  For example, this paragraph normally would have ended at that “And now I am going to stop”, because that would have been enough into the thought process of what I shared afterward.  I’ll share some more about other parts of the OCD stuff another time, though.  Just, I’m finished for now.  🙂

Post-a-day 2018

 

A brief step behind the ocd and normalcy

Occasionally, I being to wonder if I might actually be a little crazy, or if it is all just in my head… and then I wonder if the two options aren’t one in the same…

I first saw the film “Girl, Interrupted” when I was little.  And I loved it.  But I have no specific reasoning as to why I loved it.  I just did, and so did one of my best friends at the time, Jennifer.  I even gave her the movie for her birthday one year, and she was exceedingly delighted.  We just loved the film.  For whatever reason, it was on my mind this week, and so I watched it today – day seven-ish of my illness-induced infirmity.  Today, possible over a decade after the last time I saw the film, I saw something new in it.  I watched the extras section on the making of the film, and it had, as I suspected to have been the case, the woman on whose life the film was based.  She had written a book about her time in a mental institution in the 1960s, and this director had found the book, turned it into a screenplay (over about two years), and then made the film.

The lead actress, Winona Ryder, spoke of how she wished she’d read the book while she was a teenager, because it had ideas that would have been extremely helpful for her at that time.  Having experienced genuine anxiety attacks, she’d had a glimpse of the sort of life the book described (but without the stay in the mental institution).  And that’s what really got me thinking today.

They mentioned how so much of what the main character suffered was normal for people, very common, even.  And I could relate to her.  For certain parts, not at all, but, for others… completely.  There are times when I look at myself as a sort of outsider, and I can say, ‘Oh, goodness.  Whatever.  Get over it.  It’s not actually anything real.  You’re fine.’  Today, I allowed myself to question myself after that statement.  Am I actually fine? Or are you just saying that? Is it because what feels to be wrong just doesn’t make sense?  Because I am better than this problem?  It kind of felt like a 50/50, really.

So, I forced myself into my 200-dollar vehicle.  After a few moments, I started it, and I drove to the store.  I drove the wrong way to get there, thinking it was the faster way.  And then I couldn’t figure out how I’d gone that way, because I’d known how to get to the store since before I could drive.  When I arrived, I drove at an elderly pace through the lot, and eventually halted in a spot.  It was the first spot, but I didn’t care and still don’t.  For minutes, I sat there, car off.  I looked around a little bit, and wondered what was wrong with me.  This wasn’t the first time I’d had such an experience.  Just recently, my mom had called me as I sat in the Target parking lot, and I was then wondering the same thing.  I couldn’t figure out why I was – was it afraid? – afraid to get out and go into the store.

I had driven to the store with two purposes in mind today (as is often the case when in similar situations): to get out of the house and to get food to eat.  But I couldn’t figure out what to buy, and I didn’t know how to get from where I was sitting to the successful completion of my errand.  And so I sat.  I wondered about getting out of my head, because I was clearly stuck in my head…, except that I didn’t have any specific thoughts going through my head at the time.  The only thought was about how I should probably get out of my head… but I couldn’t figure out what I’d been doing there, if I had been in my head, because there were no thoughts there.  I was just sitting, and I could feel how I was nervous about getting out of the car, but I had no thoughts or words to go with the feeling.  It was just a feeling.  When it finally hit the point of bordering on tears, I gave a big inhale-exhale and got out.

I went slowly into the store and got myself a basket.  I went to the Texas wines to distract myself.  (Not like I’d be buying any.  You see, the rodeo showcases wines, and I always like to check the Texas ones in the store afterward to compare the wine garden prices to grocery store prices.)  It worked.  I sent a photo of a 23-dollar bottle to a friend of mine, telling her how it had been $10 for a little cup of it in the wine garden.  I’d remembered the wine bottle.

And then I continued onward, found the smoothie thing I’d wanted, along with the noodle things I didn’t really want but felt I needed, because I wasn’t eating enough food otherwise (also part of the weirdness that made it difficult to go to the store in the first place).  I even gave myself two bananas and a special water (It’s a fancy, flower-infused water… oooh.).  (I worried about the bananas, but I got them anyway, because they are good for me.  Even now I worry that I might not eat them.)  By the time I passed the Easter candy and had sent various photos to some of my Japanese kids in Japan, I was doing rather well, feeling rather normal and not so shaky on the inside.  I played my audiobook on the way home, and it was splendid.  I felt very much normal by the time I was getting out of the car at home.

And it makes me wonder yet again if anything is actually wrong with me, or if it’s all in my head… or, of course, if it isn’t just both.

I’ve had this thing around going to the store for quite some time.  I don’t remember when it started, but today’s adventure was similar to the others.  Oftentimes, I don’t even go to the store if I’m doing it alone.  I scrounge for scraps of food, and make the unhealthiest of meals for myself in my desperate attempt to avoid going shopping on my own.  If, say, my mom is going, I’ll go along easily.  I even enjoy going along most of the time.  But going alone is a rarity.  I practically beg my mother to stop at the store on her way home some days, just so that I don’t have to go.  I do beg her to go with me regularly, and, when she declines, as she is apt to do, I usually end up not going.  This applies to restaurants, as well as the grocery store or almost any other store.

To me, this all just sounds like nonsense.  Like I’m just being dramatic, and Goodness, get over it.  That’s what my brain says to myself all the time.  Sometimes it works.  Yet this isn’t something that was around for just a little while, and has now disappeared.  It actually seems like a genuine problem at times.  I’ve actually not eaten multiple meals, because of it.  And I’m not talking about only a handful here…  doesn’t it just seem, well, crazy?

It certainly seems crazy to me.  But I’m not crazy.  I know that.  This is just exactly the kind of thing they were referencing about the struggles people have in life that, when viewed with a certain perspective, have us viewed as insane, or borderline.  If this were all someone knew about me, that person would have a completely different perspective than someone who has met me outside of this little pocket of craziness.  And, like the main character in the story, perhaps that first someone would want to put me in a mental facility ‘to rest’ for a while, and the second wouldn’t understand why I kind of agreed that it was okay for me to go.

Anyway… hope that didn’t freak anyone out too much…

Post-a-day 2018

Toilets self-proclaiming status

Tonight in the wine garden at the rodeo, we had a unique scene occur.  I was standing in line for the toilets – a very long line that doubled in size just in the time I waited in it.  I found myself wondering how the men’s toilets were.  They were part of the same trailers as the women’s toilets.  There was even a door on the inside that connected the men’s to the women’s toilets within a trailer.  Well, two guys come waltzing out of the men’s toilets in the trailer next to ours, and declare ‘Hey, we’re unisex here; you can use these, ladies.’ A small, but somewhat mad dash ensues by ladies that had been a ways back in our line.

“They say that…” I begin, but end there, for my conflicting thoughts couldn’t agree upon an end to the sentence.  It boiled down to the question of who would be liable for the issue of inappropriate bathroom use by the opposite gender – because I know that it is actually a thing – and the matter of 1) if anyone actually cared, and, if so, 2) who would be the one/s to correct/stop the behavior (aka enforce the gender rule of the toilets).

Sure enough, within moments after my statement, a grounds service person heads calmly up to the men’s bathroom and the line of ladies standing at it, and tells the ladies that they can’t use the men’s bathroom.  By the time I was going into the trailer, – by the way, these are fancy trailers with flushing toilets and hand washing and even paper towels – the man had almost persuaded the likely drunk final three ladies from the men’s toilets.  Though, I’m not sure he managed to get them out before they used the toilets.  We could see straight into the men’s bathroom while the door was being held open, and it cracked me up, because there were two women standing in the walkway-type area of the trailer, next to the stalls, the worked outside the trailer, failing to convince them that it wasn’t okay for them to be in there, and a man’s head and cowboy hat 100% clear above one of the stall doors, while he clearly was using the toilet within the stall, but still chatting with the people outside of his stall, who were standing in the bathroom (i.e. the ladies), plus the man outside the trailer.

The whole thing just cracked me up.

Also, there were only two or three stalls (I think two) in the men’s section, whereas the women’s section had five stalls.  I appreciated that fact.

Post-a-day 2018

Get a handle

I broke my new (to me) car today.  Okay, well, a part of it.  The car was parked on a street whose sides really sloped downward – and I mean a lot.  When I went to open the driver door, after unlocking it, the door opened just slightly, before my hand flew towards me, and the door slammed back shut.  The handle had broken.

And so, at least until I find a bonding agent – aka glue – that will hold well enough to stick the broken underside of the driver handle into place – hey, I wonder if that’s the issue with the other door – , I’ll have to do what I did this afternoon and tonight, and enter my vehicle from the passenger front door, because now both doors on the driver side won’t open from the outside (but the back seat door came that way when I received the car, so that wasn’t my doing).

Add that to the duct tape, and I am an image in blue 2002.

I mean, talk about ghetto – I’m getting there faster than ever anticipated (which was never!).  Haha.

Post-a-day 2018

True to your heart

Guy: ‘C—, you know, there are people over here you could be serving, instead of just hanging out here,’ he says teasingly.

Hannah: ‘Uh, she is absolutely doing her job.  She is giving us, the guests, exactly what we want, and, right now, that is her attention.’

Guy: ‘Well, is there anything I can do for you?’

Hannah: ‘That depends.  What are you offering?’

Guy: ‘I’m offering whatever you’re thinking.  What would you like for me to offer?’

Hannah: ‘…We could discuss it.’

[laughter from both]

………………………………………………….

How’s that for silly flirtatious conversation in the wine garden?  It’s amazing how wonderful life seems to go when I just let things be and rest calmly within myself.  That was a brief glimpse into the many wonderful conversations that occurred the other day/evening/night in my life, when I was comfortable and at ease with and within myself.  I love being me/myself.  🙂

Post-a-day 2018

What to do… slash I am a nutcase sometimes

I am having breakdown after breakdown with these graduate school essays.  Is it that I really just don’t want to apply?  I think not.  Is it that I am scared of applying?  Likely.

I am scared for various reasons.

I do not want to be rejected.  I am good enough for this program.  But I might not be a good match for it.  So, if the school decides that I am not a good match, and rejects my application, what then?  If the school accepts me, and I later find out that I am not a good match, and I end up hating the program, what then?  What if I am a good match for the program/school, but I end up just not liking the studies?  And am I applying because it just feels like something safe to pursue?  So many of my co-agers seem to have resorted to graduate school whenever something else for work has not panned out as hoped.  Do I resist applying, because I am worried that it will look like a sort of ‘I messed up and had no back-up plan, so I have to go to graduate school,’ kind of thing?

I like being prestigious.  I enjoy being snobby.  (Not like crazy, but to a certain degree, I mean.)  I love the schools I have already attended, and I love being able to tell people that I attended them.  They are special, well-known, highly acclaimed, and amazing quality schools.  I feel like this one is nowhere near the same caliber, and holds very little respect in its name.  The only way I would be comfortable attending it, would be if I had something amazing afterward, be it a spectacular PhD program or seemingly unreal work success.  It is the kind of place where I would want to work, not attend school.  Just like my teaching last semester, I want to be able to share about the school as someone who supports it as an outsider.  Attending the school would feel in adequate for my own abilities, skills, and knowledge.  I want a graduate degree, but I think I don’t want it from here.

However, is this fear coming forth, creating excuses for me?  I suppose the best plan of action would be to apply to the program, and then see what happens.  If they accept me, great.  Now I get to choose to attend or not.  If they reject me, great.  Now I get to choose what else to do with my talents and my time.  (I think I want to do the latter already.)

 

Okay.  So, let’s finish this application, and let’s rock it!

 

P.S.  And I know that I want the degree so that I can further my career in teaching, expanding it to English, as well as creating the possibility of teaching at the college level.  However, I think that is precisely what has been holding gem back from seeing what is really there for me.  That just makes so much sense.  It is difficult to set aside things that make beautiful sense.  If I take the step of this graduate program now, then I can begin teaching English quite soon.  However, I love teaching high school.  And I love doing other things, too.  I am substitute teaching today.  I love subbing regularly in a school, where I get to know the students just enough, but am not stuck to one subject area alone. Long-term subbing is kind of the best.  Yes, it pays way less than regular teaching.  But I love it.  I want to teach part-time.  Period.  Even when I consider my life post-Master-degree, I still see myself teaching only part-time.  I think what I fear the most is what I will do in order to sustain a part-time teaching lifestyle financially.  Or, rather, how to figure out what to do.  If I don’t manage that now, I will spend the next two and a half years freaking out about just that – if only in the background of my mind.  I think I want to figure that out now.  Now.  🙂

Post-a-day 2018