même merde, jour différent

A week ago my anemia was so terrible that I thought I might suffocate. I don’t know how it happened. I was just out and about, and it hit me.

Fatigue to the extreme.

Heart beating out of my chest.

Crushing suffocation.

For about 12 hours, I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in, but I was sure that I was breathing normally. I went to sleep that night pretty sure that I’d just stop breathing in my sleep. I’m slowly dying I think, but you know fine.

I don’t really know how this has happened, but I keep having trouble sleeping because of the banjo. I dream about them --playing them, buying them, and just having one. It’s a problem. A serious one. I think my brain gets so overly stimulated by it that I just can’t stay asleep. I’ll just wake up and still be thinking about it.

The first night was a 4 hours struggle to fall asleep. The second, I didn’t get any sleep at all. Just this barely awake state of misery and banjo brain. I have no idea why it has started. I like banjos, sure; but I don’t love them. I love my uke. It’s something about the weird round body.

I’m going to start by saying I love my guitar. She’s beautiful. She’s a 50th Anniversary Fender Stratocaster with sunburst paint. This is a gorgeous, wonderful sounding guitar. It’s exactly the type of guitar I want to play.

But I can’t play it.

Understand that I’ve tried and I love holding it. I just love the weight and the way the strings feel on my fingertips. This is a wonderful guitar that is too good for me and far beyond my skill level. The whole thing markedly made worse by my equally lovely mini Marshall that goes with it. It even holds tune perfectly. It was barely out of tune last night when I tuned it for the first time since high school.

And that’s the problem. I tried so hard in high school to learn how to play this thing. In theory, I can play. In practice, my hands/fingers cannot reach. I thought maybe now with more time and better education resources that I might be able to just pick it up. I tried last night and it just felt so unnatural to me, so foreign. I started with guitar. I learned tab for the guitar, got picks, straps, etc for the guitar --and it felt off.

I love my little uke so much. When I compare the ease with which I learned the uke to the guitar, I’m just floored. I learned 4 new chords for the uke this week. I never even learned that many on the guitar. I always had to use chord charts or memorize finger positions for songs rather than chords. Honestly, I’m a little resentful of how easy the uke is for me comparatively. 

The uke playing has even got me thinking of taking up the banjo. I looked at one last week. It’s got me thinking about making a banjo and uke for myself. Maybe a makerlele or a cookie tin banjolele. I’m even working on a song. My own song. These are things I never would have considered doing for a guitar.

We went out for a little walk, which really ended up being a long meander/steep hike in the city. We had intended to go to the ice cream shop for a treat --a well-deserved one I’d say as I have been hitting my calorie goals for a few weeks now. 

Anyway, we’re on the way and we’re pokemon hunting. We ended up climbing down and up the park near where we live (50-55 degree incline). We crossed a river, we climbed the even steeper opposite side, a couple of jumped fences, and we’re out of the park at the edge of Hampden. It was a fun, sweaty adventure (in which I hurt my shoulder). We walked the last couple of blocks to our favorite ice cream shop and got that cold, delicious Tell Tale Chocolate (Edgar Allan Poe themed ice cream because Baltimore). It was beautiful. We wandered through some shops and eventually took ourselves to Cafe Hon for brunch.

In our wandering, we found some lovely shops and in one of those shops was both an enormous dog and banjo. I’d never held a banjo before, but it was magical. (More on this later.) I did not buy this banjo, but I did finally buy a new pasta book. 

Last stop of the day was the light rail station. It was about halfway there that I started to realize just how tired I was. Like tired and dehydrated. All in all, we walked about 5-5 1/2 miles, so I should have been fine --in DC we’d walked closer to 20. On the way back, while taking in a drink it occurred to me that we’d been out for a while --4 and a half hours a while --and I was started to get pink. I had a moderate sunburn from the looks, but I hadn’t worried about it because it was an overcast day.

I’m on a calorie restrictive diet. It’s kind of weird for me. Weird being overweight. Weird watching what I eat.

I have always cooked, but I haven’t always eaten. I was small for a long time. I didn’t feel small when I was small. It’s funny how that is. Like I was always “fat” even when that was not the case. Normal people don’t say a 30″ waist is fat. Bone to bone my hips are 34″. I feel like normal people probably don’t know that either.

Why do I know that? I had some pretty intense obsessive compulsions that manifest in various ways. In high school, they manifested by obsessively reorganizing my closet and bookshelves by size, color, subject, etc. And it would be fine for a while, but I always had to redo them to relax some part of my brain that just lit up when things felt wrong. I also would obsessively brush my teeth because I felt like they looked awful.

 And in college, it was more focused on my body because I was in ROTC. I was on that verge. I had a 28-29 BMI. They’d measure me like once a month. On a scale and then in a room with literal measuring tape. (A lot of people would do their fitness test in the morning, not eat all day, and then do a purge so they would look really good when they measured you after lunch.) I was the fat one in ROTC. So, in addition to my organizing compulsions, I started measuring myself. I felt like people were watching me eat --and I had to start actually eating because we had they hour/hour and a half work outs that just made me want to die 5 days a week. And I had remedial workouts, so I had additional running and more PT time set aside so I could catch up.

I broke away. A sudden, immediate break. I lost about 15lbs I had been holding on to as stress weight because among other things I hadn’t had a decent night of sleep in 2 years. So, I went into a profession that would put my organizing compulsions to good use. I became a librarian. I got happier, I relaxed, and I gained some weight. I really only knit to deal with the upsetting compulsions these days. The repetition of the needles is incredibly soothing and it’s just so delightfully tedious.

The final catalyst to realize that I needed to work on myself and deal with my body image issues was being around a person with body dysmorphia (BDD) who was critical of me as a manifestation of their problem. I saw this person over-exercising, under eating, and hating their body. It was so jarring and unsettling. Not what they said. It was my response: I just absorbed it and started working on myself like I was the problem.

Me playing “Stay Awake” by Richard and Robert Sherman in my apartment on my soprano. (Pardon the soft singing.)

For like 10 minutes between acts.

It was nice. Nothing quite destroys your fear of playing in public quite like putting on  your library face. It was pretty great. I’m learning more songs now from this neat Disney book (Disney Songs The Book (Easy Guitar)) I borrowed from one of the other branches. It does not have the theme from Ducktales in it, but I can live with that. I’ve started doing my own annotations from videos to match the style of the book. It’s an ongoing process. I’m working on playing “Stay Awake” and “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins right now.

I have to admit that one of my least favorite parts of work is story time. I'm OK at it, but the exercise itself is just emotionally draining. Today, I'd planned my usual animals in eggs learning story time for a school visit. I'd brought my uke just in case I wanted to use it.

So, it's 10:30 and they're coming at 12:30. And I get cold feet about the crocodiles and eggs and songs. I've got the uke, but I'm not sure about doing a Marley story time because I've only got one Marley book. (Important footnote: I really only know a couple of songs and they're mostly Marley.) Then, I remember that one of the classes (I think, but honestly I visit a lot of schools, sooo...) was obsessed with Pete the Cat. I looked up the chords for "I Love My White Shoes." There are really only like 3 chords for the simple uke version. So, at 10:30 I sat down and learned it.

I learned to do my 12X12 times tables in the 2nd grade. In 3rd grade, I had a teacher who gave us timed quiz multiple drills (10X10). I was really good at times tables.

I say that to say this. As I got older, I started to scribble the chart in margins. It started when I was bored. It grew as I got nervous or frustrated. I would draw this chart. It was like a little brain cope.

I’m working on cleaning up my life and reducing my carbon footprint. I’ve gone through my clothes and I’m discarding some. I know that there is just this huge influx of t-shirts that never get recycled, so I’ll be using mine to make yarn rather than dumping them to die in a thrift shop. I saw this very interesting rug you can make with a toothbrush needle (I didn’t see any available near me, so I made some and put them on thingiverse) and t-shirt yarn.

Hopefully, I can get some needlework done when I get my mouth surgery done tomorrow. 

Oh, I’m having oral surgery tomorrow to finally remove my (impacted) wisdom tooth tomorrow. I have to wake up super early, but soon my mouth won’t hurt anymore (yay!).

My small, blue uke is only the beginning.

1. It’s small enough to fit in my hands.

2. I like the way the music sounds.

3. Some of my favorite musicians were into and inspired by ukulele music (Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, and Kate Micucci).

4. It’s way more portable than my guitar.

Mercifully no one came to storytime today because my voice is out of commission. I’m sickly. I do still have one tomorrow, but I can talk a lot through that rather than sing. It hurts to swallow and sneeze and be alive for the moment, but I’m making it. My fingers are ok, so I should be about to muster up my custer and take on a new uke song tonight.

In other news, I finished organizing the supply closet at work and it looks like a robotics wonderland. I’m so jazzed about it. I just need to get my supply order in today before my brain gives into the sickness and I start to forget things.

Libraries Rock came to my apartment a little early this year. I bought a ukulele this month. I’ve already learned three chords. I definitely love it way more than the guitar I don’t really play.

I’m not quite sure why I hesitated to get the ukulele for so long, but I love it. (I mean, Kate Micucci is one of my favorite people.) Ideally, I’d like to get to the point where I can play Garfunkel and Oates songs and maybe “Riptide.”

We are all Wonder Women.

I was looking at some other Earth Day posts today and, unsurprisingly, none of them mentioned the number one way to reduce carbon emissions. It's not going vegan. It's not leaving the world to become a homesteader. And it's not starting a small nonprofit to collect and reuse trash.

It's just deciding not to create any more carbon producers. Or, you know, kids. . .

One less (or maybe two or three less) people eating meat, using plastic, and helping push our planet to an unsustainable global population. Here's hoping more people are into that next year.

I don’t know if many people know this about me, but Earth Day is like my Christmas. Instead of the mess and jumble of wrapping paper and buying and eating into gluttony, it’s this beautiful light day for recycling and caring about our Earth.

Oh, yeah. I bought a wok. It’s amazing.

I used it to make some excellent fried rice. It was great. I think this is going to up my frying game: stir fry, sauteed butterflied shrimp (the way they were intended to be eaten), egg fried rice, chicken teriyaki, bourbon chicken/shrimp. . . My body is ready.