Midnight revisited...

Despite my good intentions I relented and closed the windows about an hour ago. I also turned on the heater. I wanted to not do that or worry about the temperature because, after all, it is springtime, even at night. But I got too chilled, even in my bathrobe, and I don't like suffering. It's toasty warm in here now and I think I can turn the heater off and have it be warm enough in the apartment for the rest of the night. It will have to suffice. 

Like I said, I'm sitting here in my bathrobe and I'm obviously not in bed where I should be, but I enjoyed being up late last night and slept well in the morning. I had no bad effects from it today and didn't need to take a nap like I had expected to. I was up on time for my personal helper and even had some time to spare.

I'm extremely mellow and slightly sleepy headed and that feels very pleasant. It's a pleasurable state of mind to be in. I think that's why I like being awake right now. 

It's the whole experience I appreciate. I'm always one to seek out the more pleasant moods that are stress free and in which I feel just a little punch drunk. I seek the altered states of mind that I seem to find at night. Feeling normal isn't good enough. It will do during the day, but at night I want a different experience. 

I went on the bathroom scale tonight and had lost 600 grams. Now I need to get on it in the morning and see what I really weigh, which will be less. I never weigh myself at night, but I was curious because I had not been on the scale in quite some time. I can't wait to see what the weight will be. I hope I will have lost a total of a kilo, but maybe that's too much to hope for. 800 Grams would be nice and I guess that's more realistic. 

Today was an utterly normal day. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, except that the weather was unpredictable. Sunshine one moment and huge gray clouds the next.  It was real April weather, although it was a little warmer than usual for the time of year. I guess even the weather wasn't that out of the ordinary. It was a completely forgettable day and you could have traded it in for any other ordinary day that had nothing to distinguish it. 

I suppose I shouldn't complain about that. I'm sure there are enough people in the world who would like to have a very ordinary day with nothing to distinguish it from any other. I'm not really complaining, just stating a fact. It went by quickly and I even watched television last night and watched a soppy show called 'Memories' in which people go in search of an old love from their past. 

Well, I did that and married him and divorced him 15 years later and I don't think the whole adventure was a good idea. It sounds very romantic on paper, but in reality it's not such a great idea. You can't revive a teenage romance. You can do it briefly, but not long term. It has to stay rooted in the past. Ships passing in the night and all that... You don't want to end up like the Titanic on an iceberg. 

I'm a sucker for soppy shows, though, providing they're tastefully done and don't abuse the sentiment. 

Well, I have to move on to the next thing, whatever that is going to be. I don't know if it's going to be bed yet, although I am yawning. I may get excited about something yet. The night is still young. 

Have a good one. 

Ciao,

Nora

Spare time not spent sleeping...

I'm having myself a cup of coffee to get rid of this sleepiness I feel and have been feeling pretty much all day long. I've succumbed to it and slept a lot, but I'm yawning again and don't want to dislocate my jaw like I did this morning. It's making a lot of noise when I open and close it, so I better be careful. 

I'm looking forward to going to bed, though, and I can't wait for it to be late enough to go. I do want to wait until a decent enough hour. I want to make sure that I don't wake up too early in the middle of the night as I'm bound to. I don't have any appointments tomorrow and I can actually sleep as late as I want. So if I do get up in the middle of the night, I can go back to bed later and finish sleeping. 

The Exfactor was here today to do the rest of the grocery shopping. It was quite a relief to see a friendly face. Someone who didn't make any demands on me. That was nice. I didn't experience the visit of the personal helper that way yesterday. I felt that I had to perform and do something special while I was not up to it. I couldn't adequately explain how I felt to her. 

I don't know if I explained it well to the Exfactor, but it seemed to matter less. We had coffee together and chatted and he did the groceries and afterward we chatted some more. We didn't talk about anything really important. It didn't seem that way to me anyway. My perception may have been off a bit, though, because I still felt a lot of anxiety. It hadn't left my system yet. 

I saw my SPN in the afternoon, and without going into the details of the long conversation that we had, I have to say that she helped me get to the core of the anxiety and the cause of it, and that since then I feel a lot better. The free floating anxiety is gone and I'm only left feeling very tired and wiped out, but with the feeling that I've really reached a destination that I had to get to. Something has been resolved. It will have to be talked about more, but the beginning is there. 

The tiredness that I feel is purely emotional tiredness. It's from carrying heavy loads around. It wears me out. Whenever I have periods when I'm in need of a lot of sleep, you can be sure that it's because I'm bearing a big emotional burden.

I do want to say that I have a lot of grief about my first marriage and the break up of it. I have a lot of unresolved feelings about that whole marriage and about my relationship with my first husband, There is an untold amount of feelings that I have not dealt with ever. I'm going to have to deal with them and I'm planning on doing that. There is an awful lot of pain there and I can't keep walking around with it. It's like constantly being in deep mourning. 

I'm going to put on my pajamas now and at least get ready for bed. It's another matter if I will actually get there right away. I may get sidetracked by some blogs. The intention will be there anyway. 

Have a good evening.

Ciao,
Nora

One for the road.

Well, I managed to do it again. I fell asleep while watching the news and just woke up. I was gone from this world, as they say, and oblivious of everything. I may as well have been drugged and knocked out for all I know. Comatose is a word that comes close. I think a small horde of people could have entered the apartment and emptied it of nearly everything but the sofa and I wouldn't have known about it. They might even have been able to move the sofa with me on it.

My sister and I took the dogs for a brisk walk at noontime. It was near freezing, but the sun was shining and it was nice as long as you didn't walk in any shady areas. Still, I should have worn my gloves and alternately put one hand in a pocket. A walk is just long enough for my sister to tell me all that's going on in her life and I listen and make the odd remark and comment. I tell you, I'm a good listening post. In my next life I'm coming back as a therapist.

It's always been my job in this life to be a listener to people and to be patient and to absorb whatever is said to me without becoming overloaded. I seem to have that sort of attraction to people because I don't judge. I just listen and try to understand and not condemn them. It's always been that way and grew even more so when I gained psychological insight and started to understand the motivations of people, but I have always had this patience to listen and calm people down. Having had complex parents probably prepared me for that role.

It gives me the appearance of being very competent, when in fact I am not always. People have high expectations of me, because I seem to have a lot of knowledge. Nobody knows that I sometimes survive by the skin of my teeth and that understanding and logic applied to other people's lives, doesn't mean you can always apply it to your own life. On the contrary, I come up short often when it comes to dealing with my own problems, although I must say that there has been a vast improvement these past eight months since I've been single.

That's a funny thing. When there is nobody else in your life to muddy the waters and to muddle your thoughts, it is amazing how quickly you can put your finger on the sore spot and come up with the right solution. You get to the point where you want to be much faster. When left to your own devices, it turns out that you are more ingenious than you thought you were and far less helpless. When faced with an immediate problem, you have to figure it out on your own and reason it out in your own head without any outside help and you get it done quicker and better.

It makes you wonder how much of sharing the load is really true when you are in a partnership. I wonder how much help the other person really is in soothing your fears and worries. In helping meet them head on. I think in my case I've never found the person that really made things better and easier. It may have seemed so at the time, but looking back now, I am convinced that it wasn't. Looking back, I see that all the so called 'help' was only a prolongation of the problems and that there was never a solution or a teaming up together to eradicate the difficulties.

It's made me very weary of relationships, for me in particular and those of other people in general. All I see is the potential dysfunction of them. I think you have to be very healthy to have a good relationship. Or agree to the degree of your dysfunction and the seriousness of it. Now that I'm single, I feel that I've escaped from some terrible fate and I would never willingly go back and take that relationship up again.

At this point, I think I will stay single, because I like it too much to give it up and I do not feel the desire to share my life with anyone. I don't miss there being a person in my life that is always hovering in the background. Right now, I don't think I am generous enough to share myself with anyone else. I am too greedy of what is mine.

I have been married twice and both times it ended in a divorce, although the marriages were very different and so were the husbands. In between those two marriages, I had a serious relationship that was also very dysfunctional. I don't have a very good track record up to now. I think it is more important that I learn to live with myself than that I learn to live with somebody else. At this point, that's the most important thing and, oh yes, the fact that I get along well with the Überhund is very important too. Hee, hee.

Well, so much for philosophizing. It is late and I will go to bed and sleep for a while. I hope for a long while.

See you tomorrow morning.

Ciao...