Center of the Universe Syndrome

Otherwise known as COTUS. Humans are symptomatic of this disorder at all times of the year, but it seems to be particularly prevalent during the winter solstice; specifically what is known as the Yuletide Season. 

If you've ever:

• Blocked the entire baking aisle of a crowded grocery store to have intense conversations with someone about your shopping list, how the buttons on your coat keep falling off - and then saying extended goodbyes, complete with kiss and hug - completely oblivious to the 10 people on each side of you who would like to slide by
• Talked loudly on your cell phone, looking around all the while to see whose attention you're getting
• Got waved on to merge into traffic, but couldn't be bothered to reciprocate the universal "thank you" wave
• Gone through a door without holding it open for the person walking in right behind you - triple-COTUS points if it is an elderly person, a busy mom toting a toddler, a baby, and shopping bags, or a person of any age with their arms full of stuff
• Left your car sitting in front of the pump after you've finished using it to make several trips into the convenience store

Or, as I had the pleasure of witnessing last night...

• Leaning on your shopping cart in the dairy aisle opening that is literally 1 carts' width, on your cell phone, with your datebook open, having a lengthy conversation about the upcoming weeks' plans; only to turn around after several minutes and see several frustrated shoppers lined up behind you. 

You'd apologize profusely, right?

No. 

You turn around, look contemptuously at the gaggle of strangers, toss your hair, and get on with your oh-so-important life. 

COTUS presents commonly in children, in fact 100% of children display COTUS up to their early elementary school years. Failure to develop empathy during those years puts a child in danger of becoming permanently afflicted with COTUS and becoming an asshole for the rest of their life. 

COTUS is less common in mature adults, but most adults will display symptoms at least once during a lifetime. Severe cases of COTUS can only be cured by a combination of life-changing events, new-onset empathy, and/or a beating administered by a fed-up mob of formerly nice people. 

If you see the signs of severe COTUS developing in an adult in the 20-30 year old age range, now is the time to act. Administer a severe beating and withdraw all financial support immediately; otherwise the condition will become permanently disabling. 

Often recognizing that there is a problem is the most difficult step. Know the symptoms! 

Focus is a funny thing.

Last holiday season (hell, from October to December 31), I gained about 20lbs. That might seem easy, but I worked at it like it was my job. Hitting drive-throughs almost nightly on my way home from work, many times after having had dinner while at work. Baking cookies "for everyone"; quality control mandates that one tests at least a dozen of each variety for consistency, taste and chip distribution, right? In general "treating myself" as often as the impulse hit. If you are an emotional overeater, the impulse hits about as often as your heart beats. I didn't limit myself on anything, really, but my overindulgence of holiday-specific sweets and fast food were most of my undoing last year. 

This year, for the most part, I've avoided those things like the plague. I have eaten from the drive-through on impulse exactly once this holiday season, and physically I felt like hammered shit the rest of the evening afterward. Thankfully we haven't been as inundated with holiday cookie trays and treats at our stations this year as we had in years past. I made the decision to mostly avoid cookie baking this year, with the exception of baking some Santa cookies with the little one before Christmas. So, what could I possibly be abusing?

Regular food. 

Stuff I bring to work to eat. Pizza ordered for game day. Bread. For some reason, when everything is gray and brown outside (when it should be white, snowy and sparkly), I crave all things bread like a junkie craves their fix. It has been months since I have craved salad. And I do crave salads and vegetables. I'm not one of *those* people who can't/won't prepare or consume them. All summer long my mouth waters at the mention of them. This time of year, though? You mention salad to me and I get about as excited as if you'd suggested eating cardboard. 

You see, I've been focusing so hard on the fact that I've been such a good girl regarding my prior favorite self-abusing foods... that I've lost focus on the fact that I am abusing just mundane, everyday stuff. And that is really something to keep an eye on. 

Need a Do-Over, Please.

You know your Friday OT shift is going to be fun when:

• Your remote won't even let you into your car to go to work, and you stand out in the pouring cold rain for 10 minutes trying to make the damn thing work.
• You arrive at work (2 minutes late when you were miraculously running 15 minutes early at one point) and realize you don't have your keys to the narcs
• You grab your partner and rig, run home to get your keys before the shit hits the fan
• The shit hits the fan
• (On the way other side of town)
• You get cancelled from the shit hitting the fan - so in theory, you could have had your damn keys in the first place if you were psychic.
• Finally arrive home to pick up your keys, find a steaming hot pile of doggie love on the bedroom carpet
• It is December in the NorthFreakinEast and it's going to precipitate an inch today. Rain. Not snow.

Thursday's thoughts, deep and otherwise.

Ahhh, Thursday. The day before Friday (not that that means anything in my world - weekend? What's that??) Thursday, sometimes the day before payday; sometimes not.  Just a perfectly ordinary day.  Why not lighten things up and throw out some random thoughts?

• One of these days it's going to stick. I'm going to get up early for work like I always do, but instead of drinking coffee and watching Morning Joe I'm going to: 1) pee 2) head directly back to my bedroom 3) put on my workout clothes that are draped on my treadmill (they're there for a reason, duh!) 4) work out before I do anything else. All it will take are 3 days in a row of this and I'll love it again. One of these days. 
• One of my online friends pointed out this post on Tom Venuto's blog. It's about putting yourself first so that you can take care of others; a concept with which I've been struggling. It's a very blunt reminder that that is actually selfish to NOT put our own health first. Very good post. I plan to print several copies and post them all over the place where I can see them all the time. 
• I love my iPod, but it's only 4G. Have you seen the prices on the 120G classic? *drool* That's more capacity than my external hard drive! This is going to be my after-Christmas gift to myself. Or my tax-time gift, depending on how finances end up. 
• I am going to have to invent some visual representation of mud = winter if this weather continues. Remember the snowflake? The snowman? Jack Frost? How about the mud-turd: A big hunk of mud that falls off of your shoes because it's too warm for the ground to freeze and no damn snow covering the mud. You don't know if it's mud or dog poop you stepped in until you get down on all fours and smell it. Instead of snowmen we can make mud huts. Environmentally friendly and gets rid of a lot of that mud that we keep tracking into the house. Build one for your mother in law! Jack Frost?  I got nothin'. 
• I lied. I am going to bake some cookies for Christmas. The little one wants to be sure Santa has cookies and if I don't intervene, her Dad will buy break n' bakes or those disgusting tubes of dough that have a picture imprinted on the middle of the tasteless cookie. If you're gonna have a cookie, have a real cookie dammit!

I'm off to get some shopping - Christmas and otherwise - done. 

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas...

... several years ago. I don't even remember exactly how long ago - I know I wasn't quite the burned-out veteran I am today. Probably 10 years ago, at least. We got a call for somebody "stuck in a bathroom". We took our time getting out the door and laughed at the mental pictures this dispatch information conjured in our minds. A drunk? A child? Some vasovagal syncope while on the crapper? 

As we pulled up to the house, the middle-aged children met us at the door and explained that they were pretty sure their parents were stuck in the bathroom and unable to get out. They arrived at this conclusion because their elderly mother required total care from their elderly father - due to a prior stroke - and dad's car was in the garage. They could hear a garbled voice coming from the bathroom, probably mom. 

This quickly went from a laughable possibility to a very urgent rescue situation. Dan and the Fire Department arrived and began taking the trim off the door, as we were unable to push the door open. When they finally got the door apart, what we saw was one of the most heart-rending scenes that will ever be burned into my memory. 

While lovingly bathing his disabled wife, the elderly husband had apparently died suddenly. The wife, who had lost the use of her speech and one side of her body, could only crawl out of the bathtub (which was now ice-cold) and lie upon the body of her now-deceased husband and wait for help. His body was ice-cold as well. They must have been there for hours. Though her speech was unintelligible to even her children, you didn't need to know her to understand what her garbled keening meant. He was gone. Her love. Her caretaker. The one who bathed her and dressed her and put her in her wheelchair every day. The one who fathered their children. Grandpa. She lay upon his cold and mottled body on the floor, screaming in horror, grief, and fear. I wished at that moment that I could wipe her memory clean of the hours she spent in that bathroom, take away the realization that life as she knew it would never be the same from this moment forward. We had to pry her fingers off of her husband to get her out of there. She didn't want to leave him. 

She was severely hypothermic from being in the cold water for so long, then lying naked on her husband's cold body. So cold that she had actually stopped shivering, her heart rate was slow and her skin ashen. The rectal temperature they obtained at the ER was 94F. We rewarmed her as aggressively as we could, but I wonder if she could talk, if she'd have asked us to just let her go. Let her go with him. Don't save her to be in this world without him. 

I drive by that house often on my way home from work, and I think about that old couple every year around this time. Calls like this make me reflect on my own fears and my relationship. One of my greatest fears is that now that I have fallen and fallen hard for someone, the only thing that is sure in life is that I will lose him someday - or he will lose me. You read about perfectly healthy people who die within a week of losing their spouse; I think that is the greatest testimony to love that there is. I can appreciate that some would find that statement possibly morbid or cynical, but the ones that do aren't in healthcare. 

I frequently wonder what ultimately happened to that poor lady. I hope that she found peace, whatever peace meant to her. We all have a different definition of peace. 

I guess I still have a little running mojo.

Just 20 minutes, but still. It's more than I've done running-wise at one time for months. It felt good to X that spot on the calendar.

Here's hoping it sticks.

Countdown to a less lazy me.

One of my therapist's suggestions in our last session was to hang a wall calendar, and mark each day exercised with a big ol' slash, or X, or smiley face, or whatever I prefer. The idea being, as I start to mark off consecutive days, this highly visible calendar will sort of prod me into exercising, because I wouldn't want to leave a day blank or unmarked. 

Well. Talk about serendipity. I got a free wall calendar in the mail today.

I would like to say I'm starting today, but I probably won't. I'm hanging that sucker up in a highly visible place though - with a Sharpie attached to it. All you other procrastinators out there know, if there's no Sharpie attached to it, that any procrastinator worth their weight (literally!) could waste half a day just looking for the right permanent marking device with which to mark the calendar. I'm thinking I'll hang it somewhere near the bathroom mirror, or on the fridge, so I can't ever miss it. Those are the 2 places in my house where I can reliably be found several times per day. 

One of my friends suggested training and then getting together for a Komen 5k for next spring. I think that is a fabulous idea, and just the thing I need to spark my interest in running again. All I really need is to get started and I will love it again, I know.