Waking Myself Up

On the stereo: Funk Essentials

It’s 6:30 AM (or ‘six AM in the morning’ as they say around here). I’ve been up since 5 but not quite awake.

Sometimes, in the mornings, I just have to turn the music up to 11. Today, it’s the Funk Essentials playlist from iTunes. The coffee hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m awake enough to get my mind typing. James Brown’s ‘The Payback’ is playing right now, and I suspect that the never-ending loop of ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ stuck in my husband’s head has been derailed. Let’s hear it for the downbeat!

In the cup: Zambian coffee

The coffee’s just about ready. The coffee du jour is the bottom of the Zambian beans we got at the local cafe. It’s an interesting coffee with notes of bitter chocolate and something berry.

On the docket: Trying to motivate

The problem with writing so close to the beginning of school is that I want to soak up every drop of leisure I have left — and I have less than a week of it. I’m not that enamored of what I’ve started right now, and I have Canva advertising to play with. Ideally, I should get two hours writing today. Or even an hour. And it’s not speaking to me.

Maybe I need motivation.

Or a vacation.

The Cataract Surgery

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday

I was prepping for my cataract surgery, which means no breakfast, no water, no coffee. NO COFFEE?! I was a total wreck.

What cataract surgery entails

I arrived at the surgery center, which was in the basement of the eye center. (When the patient liaison told me it was in the basement, I entertained all sorts of gruesome scenarios of dungeons, but the surgery center wasn’t that way at all. The lights were somewhat dimmer than usual, because eye surgery necessitates dilation of pupils.)

We sat in a small waiting room with other patients. Finally, the nurse called me back. Once called back, the nurse sat me on a gurney and took my blood pressure and oxygen, and my bp was high, as one might expect from someone who’s about to take a scalpel to the eye. I’m normally sanguine about surgeries, even wanting to watch them, but slicing eyes is beyond my comfort zone.

The nurse gave me a Xanax. I informed her that one xanax would not be enough to sedate me, so she gave me an IV full of Versed (a benzodiazepene). They gave me eye drops — dilation, numbing, betadine (ow!), water, more dilating, more betadine, more water, more numbing. I didn’t feel any different, really, but I shrugged and let the nurse wheel me into the operating theatre.

The surgery itself was no big deal. They pried one eye open and shone red and green lights in my eye, and somewhere over to the side, the doctor did something that stung a little bit. I felt the vacuum part, which felt like a tugging on my eye and hurt a little. At some time, the doctor told me that I needed to look at the lights; I must have been distracted.

The surgery didn’t take that long, beginning to end. My eye was disappointingly blurry for the rest of the day, so I couldn’t see how well the surgery worked. I spent the rest of the day wandering with Richard to lunch, to coffee, to the follow-up appointment, taking eye drops and Tylenol.

A day later

This morning I woke up — and oh my gosh I could see! I couldn’t just see — I could SEE! The eye gets gunky at times, and it feels a bit like there’s something in my eye (which drives me crazy) but I can see again!

I’ll have to have the surgery on the other eye in a year or three, so I’ll know what to expect. But A+A+A+A+A+A would do again!

Cataract Surgery Tomorrow

What I’m not worried about

I’m not worried about how well my surgery is going to go, because it’s a minor, 20-minute surgery. The surgeon cuts a slit at the side of the eye, breaks the lens up with lithotripsy (the same procedure used to break up kidney stones), and then sucks it out. Then they put in a (in my case fixed) intraocular lens. Voila, surgery complete.

Nurse covering eye of patient by medical plaster

I’m not worried about coming out of anesthesia, because the anesthesiologist doesn’t put the patient to sleep. They instead use medicines that make the patient zone out, or as they put it, ‘not care’.

In fact, I would find this all an intriguing experience (as I do any medically-related things, including my gallbladder surgery and getting hit by a car.)

What I am worried about

I’m afraid that dissociative anesthetic is not going to be enough. My brain says, “There’s a person. With a knife. At my eye.” I find this edginess strange, because I fall into meditative states while having teeth drilled and pulled. I watch the nurse take my blood. I study pictures of injuries to improve my moulage (casualty simulation) skills. I watched a video of a leg fracture reduction last night. But my eyes — I feel rather protective about my eyes.

I’m going to need to be really dissociated. Like ‘look at the scaly butterflies’ dissociated.

How I’m going to get through it

I figure the first thing is to let the doctor and anesthesiologist know about my misgivings right off: “I’m in a cold, dim basement room and you’re going to hold a scalpel to my eye; this sounds like a bad horror movie. My next move is to scream and grab the scalpel, then make my escape. Is there any way we can prevent this?”

I think this will get me the good drugs.

Bye for now

I won’t be online tomorrow, so wish me luck today!

The summer winds down …

I’m privileged

Being a professor means that I get a wide-open summer (well, if you subtract internship time and setting up classes for fall.) Most people don’t get that, but it’s part of the reason I became a professor. It’s a privilege I will accept gladly.

I needed the break

After a school year of drastic COVID mitigations, life not normal, lack of a social life, talking to nobody, the summer was welcome. Unfortunately, with the Delta variant, we may go back to that soon. But at least I had this summer to recover.

I admit I’m been a bit of a hermit, writing/editing and staying cool. But it’s been a good, relaxing summer, and I’m grateful I had it at the right time.

Two weeks left

I don’t know how summer went by so fast — I’m now two weeks out from the beginning of semester meetings. I’m contemplating taking these last days napping and watching British ambulance shows on YouTube. I probably won’t do much of that, because there are projects I want to do. (Really? I can’t think of any.)

Whatever I do, I plan to make the most of these few days, and be ready for the fall semester.

Another edit

Staring at my keyboard

I have a lot of editing to do today. Apparently I have a lot of idiosyncratic punctuation, using em-dashes instead of ellipses. I blame Emily Dickinson for that.

I never saw a Moor--
I never saw the Sea--
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven--
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given--
 -- Emily Dickinson

I just always thought em-dashes are for shorter, faster, more dramatic pauses. Not true, I guess. Lots of editing in my future.

I’m weary of editing

I really am tired of editing. I know it’s necessary, but darn, this is getting tiring. I want to go forward, but I keep being pulled backward. I’m hoping a search/replace takes care of most of the problem.

Going forward

I’m contemplating writing something new in the Archetype series — this would involve the Archetype civil war and a young human woman who has lie detection as a talent. The woman, Leah, also seems to be present at certain important episodes of Archetype life to represent The Balance. She becomes part of the unfolding history.

But first, editing.

Death

I think about death sometimes

I don’t consider myself a morbid person, but I have come to realize my life will not go on forever. I think about my death — mostly my own death.

What is dying like? Will I be in pain? Will I know I’m dying? Will I die alone, or will there be people there with me? Will I die before my husband?

I don’t wonder so much about the afterlife

Religiously, I tend to be an agnostic universalist. If there’s a heaven, I imagine, all of us will find it eventually under our own gods. (Those who believe in reincarnation may take a while.) Sometimes I believe our souls become part of the universe in a great gestalt, and maybe someday we get reincarnated. I don’t believe in “my god’s better than your god” that passes for much of Christianity today. Why would ours be better?

But what I mostly believe is that once I’m dead, I’m dead. I believe there will be a white light and a life review as my brain cells die. But after that, permanent loss of consciousness. No new life, no reward for having been good or punishment for being bad. I, in other words, won’t know I’m dead because I won’t know anything.

But I will live on

I have come to find that our lives live on in stories told about us, in the legacy we have left to our workplaces, our families, our hobbies. Someone will have an idea for a class that I have seeded. My friends will tell my stories. My books might finally be read. It’s really comforting, and that’s what we look for when we think of death, comfort in the face of a gaping maw of the unknown.

Coffee

Impostor Syndrome (again?)

I didn’t write yesterday

I didn’t write yesterday because I didn’t have a lot to say and I had a lot to do. I broke my 80-day writing streak, but it turned out I didn’t feel that bad about it.

The real reason I didn’t write

I’m suffering from a serious case of impostor syndrome. I feel like I’m doing everything wrong in writing, editing, and promoting my books. Ironically, I think this is happening because of a group of other writers that I’m hanging out with on the Internet.

They seem so motivated. They write 10 books in a year, they post regularly on Tik Tok. They participate in anthologies. They know which genres they fit into easily. I can’t keep up with them; I’m still trying to figure things out despite having written seven books.

I don’t want to be like them — I want to be like me, but I wonder if that’s good enough.

Impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome is that feeling that, if someone knew who I really was, they would decide I was a fraud.

I hear that impostor syndrome is entirely too common. Ubiquitous, even. That everyone has the same dialogue in their head that says that they’re not good enough. That everyone who looks like they’ve got it all together feels the same way.

I don’t know the cure for impostor syndrome. I don’t know that anyone does, or else we wouldn’t be suffering it. I think even my fellow writers with all their enthusiasm feel it.

I may just have to live with it and do all the things anyhow.

Preparing for Cataract Surgery

My Cataracts

Yesterday was my pre-cataract evaluation at the eye doctor’s. I’m only 57, but the story of my eyes is that I have cataracts. This is probably because of mood stabilizers I have to take for my bipolar disorder; lithium and other stabilizers have been linked to early cataracts.

The doctor and nurses explained to me that my cataracts were not typical. They do not have the yellowish, thickened nature that age-related cataracts have; rather, they were more like looking through a frosted window. “You know that there are three different types of cataracts. You have all three,” a nurse informed me as we discussed the surgical procedure. The third type, I found out later, grew quickly and could overwhelm one’s vision center in months. This is what happened to me.

“You know that there are three different types of cataracts. You have all three.”
Nurse at eye clinic

How the procedure works

I went through many tests, most of them familiar to me as part of typical eye exams.Then I got the orientation on what my cataract surgery would be like. It will be very quick, sometime between 10 and 20 minutes. I will get some oral medication that will make me very dopey — “Like Thursday night at the college,” I’m told. I will look at pretty lights like a kaleidoscope while they do the surgery. (Now this sounds promising — tripping out with a light show. Count me in.) When I’m paying attention to the light show, they’re going to pulverize the lens with (I believe) ultrasound and suck it out a slit they make in the side of my eye, then slip a new lens in.

It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fuss, actually. I will go home with sunglasses, be careful about washing my hair, and wear an eyepatch at night. I won’t be able to do heavy lifting or lots of bending, but I can return to the computer immediately.

I’m feeling good about it.

I’m feeling reassured about the surgery — it doesn’t sound like a big deal, there doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of pain, and I’ll be back to good in no time. I can’t wait to get my eye taken care of.

Ennui

A lovely word for boredom

Photo by SHVETS production on Pexels.com

That’s not quite right. Ennui is boredom and so much more! It’s being bored and tired at once!

What more could I ask for?

As it turns out, I could ask for a whole lot more, because ennui results from a lack of excitement. And, it turns out, that’s where I am right now. I’m bored with editing. There’s nothing really happening in my life except an upcoming cataract surgery, and even my writing isn’t piquing my interest.

Whatever will I do?

There’s lots of things I can do. Change my scenery, whether local or out-of-town. Find novel experiences. Find something new to write. Find something gripping to read.

It’s just so hard getting up to do something.