off my chest

Maybe I’m starting to get the urge to write at this hour of the morning because my brain is tired of stockpiling things to play with when I’m trying to sleep.  It occurred to me last night as I was recovering from at that little fit (and everything was fine, by the way) that thoughts come up and want to be dealt with, but I pummel them into submission.  I’ve trained myself to fall asleep almost immediately with multiplication tables or, now, switch-words (QUIET-SHUT works really well with EFT), but that means that those thoughts are not getting their proper attention, so they’re trying to work their way into my consciousness in other ways.

Well, we just can’t have that, now can we?

Normally at this hour during the week, I’m dealing with emails from the home office in China, writing out my schedule for the upcoming days, etc., but somewhere in the last couple of days, I decided that I needed to get to bed earlier.  I’ve been getting up at 10 and not getting to bed until 3, not sleeping until later sometimes, setting my alarm for 9… but the boys get up before that, so I should probably get in that habit, non?

Especially since that whole “staying up until 3” thing frequently involves doing work-related stuff, which means that if I were getting paid by billable hours instead of salary, I’d be making about 2.5 times as much, minimum.

I tried to carve out my week so that I’d stop working at 6.  That worked two out of five days.  One of the remaining three days, I worked until 6:30, but the other days, I worked much later, and then went back to work when I was done with dinner.  (Or rather, had dinner while I was working again.)

That’s too much.  This is not a reasonable return on my energy investment.  It should at least cover my expenses without stressing out over things like feeding my children or buying my youngest his medicine.  (Yeah, it’s that tight sometimes, especially when I have a business expense or two to cover.)  It doesn’t go that far.  Cost of living increases, and I’ve now lost my ability to do a second job (unless it’s the same job, which is another story).

Oh, and on that front, we have the EEG scheduled for the 5th of July at 8 in the morning (wish us luck, I guess?), and in the meantime we’ve worked out another part of the possible solution with the addition of complex digestive enzymes to his ketogenic diet.  Have I mentioned that dealing with epilepsy sucks?  I can see this amazingly intelligent being in there, but he just can’t get past the mechanical errors…

So, today, I started trying to teach him sign language.  (Thank the gods for Blue’s Clues!)  He already has “together” thanks to Steve Burns, but he also learned “mommy” and “daddy”, and he started to get “boy” and “girl” and “same”.  We’ll see if he remembers them tomorrow.  I’ll have to brush up on it myself.  The poor little guy just can’t communicate what he wants adequately, and he gets so frustrated, but maybe it’s a speech center problem and doing ASL will help him get past it.

I can relate to that feeling of frustration, although my failure to express is more a matter of not wanting to scare people, not wanting to rush things, not wanting to say something bad that makes them doubt me or fear me or just plain dislike me forever… and if it were “normal folk” who would come and go in my life anyway, it wouldn’t matter at all, but when it’s people you’re already invested in…

It’s kinda like when I had to agonize over the posts that I first wrote for Spicy Horse (more accurately, AM.Com, really.)  There’s a moment of autistic anxiety (I have now learned to identify this) wherein on one hand, I was told, “Love your style, do what you want, this is your baby,” and on the other hand, I was told, “ZOMGWTF, try to be more not like that?!!”  Conflict between stated desire (which I delivered) and actual result (not what was promised).

I get beat up for saying the wrong thing a lot, you know?

I never mean anything bad by it… it just happens that way.  Maybe it’s a crossed wire somewhere.  Maybe I should just communicate via ASL.  I’ll do a whole series of vblogs of nothing but signing (with bad grammar) how I feel, and maybe it’ll be general enough that it won’t get picked apart.

Believe it or not, this is not a self-pity trip.  I’m really trying to come up with solutions here.  And maybe part of that is getting all these crappy, random thoughts out of my head before I go to sleep so that they don’t bug me and my subconscious can work on important things.

(I don’t actually have enough readers to run a give-away or anything, do I?  I bet if I decided on a non-personal topic or at least a consistent topic and then offered to do a random drawing for a give-away off of comments once I reached 100 steady readers a day… it would be a long time until I had to do a give-away.  That also is not self-pity but merely another thought that flickered through my mind to get put down here and left for another day.  So there, nyah.)