The Not Happy Thread

Hang in there

 

@CoyoteKing
I agree with what others have said - it's very unlikely that somebody is pretending to be your friend. That would require a huge amount of effort, and would bring minimal rewards for that person. That time and effort could be better spent with somebody they actually did like. I used to think the same thing about people, and then at a certain point I just stopped caring. I enjoy the time I spend with certain people, and I take that at face value. It's so unlikely that somebody would pretend to like me that I don't give it a second thought.

 

Dude, you have a major battle raging in your body right now. Thousands of horses of calvary has ridden in to slay all those nasty cancer cells. Those warriors on horseback are giving it to them with everything they have. It's a spectacular battle.

Tired is good. Tired is telling your body to rest.

Rest is what turns on the switch to heal your body.

You got this.

 

You'll get there. It's tough, but you'll get there. If you haven't already, give yourself permission to feel like crap. It's part of what happens, isn't it? With chemo. But it will improve, and cure you as well.

 

Work is a bit different though, at work it does matter what other's think of you, to some extend. But in your free time social interactions, it would have no negative consequences if you didn't pretend to like someone. Like that dork who occupies precious spacetime in your bureau, annoying you with their very existence? You smile at them when you say good morning but you wouldn't play DnD with them, right?

 

True. People do do that. It greases the wheels of social interaction, I suppose. Though it's hard to imagine the motive for doing this in a purely social situation, where the interaction itself is the reward. And it's not very rewarding if you're only pretending to like the person you're doing it with.

 

Carrots and sticks.

 

So not going to make a Pony Girl Slave pic post joke, but I am heavily implying it.
(Just imagine that I did and we'll call it good.)

 

Dale Carnegie's book How to win friends and influence people taught me that valuable lesson in my early twenties. Because of it, most people think I'm the happiest, friendliest guy they know. Think is the keyword there...

 

Yeah, I think what you guys are talking about is being polite to people for the sake of social harmony and personal advancement, which is quite a different animal from the social-anxiety delusion of friends pretending to like someone.

It did occur to me that kids sometimes do that in elementary and middle school, which is probably how a lot of us ended up with that particular fear. But generally, adults have better things to do.

 

I was bench pressing in the gym this afternoon, and on a particularly forceful exhale, I felt something come out of my mouth, saw it fly up in the air and felt it land near my eye. I didn't think much of it as I often spit on myself when training, and it's the least disgusting bodily fluid I've got on myself during a workout. A few seconds later, I could see a blurry line across my eye and feel a tickle, like a hair was over my eye. I sat up and saw something fall off my face. It was some kind of bug, with a big, fat greyish-brown body. I don't know what the fuck it was, and I don't know if it was on me or in me. It's dead now, but I just hope to fuck there aren't more of them, wherever it came from.

 

Oh... my... *severe virtual hug*

 

Gotta go to the dentist. I recently broke a piece of a molar on the bottom left side of my mouth. That was strange to me as I hadn't been chewing on anything hard enough to do that. Nor was there any infection, so I was left pondering. Well, I took a short nap and figured out the problem - Bruxism. I woke up to the sound of a moving a dresser across the floor, only, it wasn't a dresser, it was my teeth. The screeching sound of teeth on teeth was quite something honestly.

When I sat up I spat out some blood and with the blood, another piece of the same molar. My dentist is going to love this.

 

When I was working on my thesis, I developed Bruxism as a stress symptom. Lost a piece of tooth while eating pistachios. My dentist tried to fix it three times but because it's the corner of a lateral incisor, the filling cracked out after less than 12 hours each time. By now, I've settled for the fact that I'll be either worrying that corner smooth or continue to snag my tongue on it until the tooth eventually falls out.

 

Snagging would annoy me, but honestly, since this piece of molar breaking off doesn't hurt...maybe I should just...not go to the dentist. Not like I want to pay for my dentists Mercedes.

 

@Moon I do that in my sleep too. As a result, my back teeth are pretty flat and short. I also suffer with acid reflux, and it caused my dentist to ask me some awkward questions. I think he assumed I had an eating disorder.

 

Mr. Turtle and I were planning to go camping today. But this morning I started to feel really sick, and it got worse, and basically I wound up stuck on the couch all day and we had to stay home. Not sure when we'll have another chance, given our work schedules.

I'm just so bummed. It's a little thing, but I haven't been getting out of the house enough lately and I was really looking forward to it. Now I'm just lying around reading reddit and feeling sorry for myself.

 

I have a family member who suffers from this. A cheap mouthguard worn at night works for them.

 

I hope you feel better.

 

Dinner with my dad and stepmom went... poorly.

Nope, not that.

She's got a host of medical issues that I'm not going to go into, but when some food went down the wrong pipe, it stayed there, we couldn't dislodge it, the ambulance was called, she was tubed and transported and is spending the night in ICU while they hope for her to become responsive again.

A lot of medical issues, and now this, it could be nearing the end of her participation in the simulation, and I don't know if she'd welcome that or not.

First day of vacation back in Chicago is over, let's see what tomorrow brings.

 

Hope she's okay, Iain.

 

It's very early, and while it's not definitively bad, it is definitively not good. We'll see.

 

I had a family member-in-law with motor neurone's disease, only diagnosed months before death. Before then the GP said, "There's nothing wrong with you, so go out and smell the roses." Needless to say, after diagnosis, no longer the GP.

Anyhow, I digress, the way we got through this trying time before diagnosis was by being very particular about the order of operations and simplifying things, so when eating in a family group, no operations took place at the same time: eating, talking and drinking were separate operations. It was basically like one of those early soundless movies where the action was done in unison. Everyone takes a mouthful in silence, chew, swallow, conversation recommences, then in unison repeat. It makes for a stilted conversation, but it did help with sphincter control and at least they felt like part of the group and conversation and this minimised gagging and ER visits for the same reasons as your stepmom.

We do what we have to to include our loved ones in our world, simulated or otherwise.