I had a better afternoon yesterday with anxiety, probably because I took a nap at lunch in an empty classroom. It helped a great deal.

But the bigger issue that is emerging is the one that has been my prime concern: my physical capacity to deal with the pain, nausea and fatigue and keep up with the demands of the grad program. I can’t write to take notes and spending all day in class on the keyboard and then going home and doing homework all evening is putting me in pain. The nausea is getting worse as I take more and more methotrexate and so is the fatigue, which will be compounded by the demands of the program.

Worst case: I’m thinking of trying to hold on for the summer term, after which I would have 11 grad credits, which could be transferred to a program that I could via distance learning over a longer period of time. It would allow me to pace myself.

In the meantime, I’m in pain and I’m sick and I’m tired of it. But all I can do is hang on.

Today’s posts are simply going to be whining sessions. Forgive me, but this is all the therapy I can get while I’m sitting in class and keep my cool.

My fatigue level is high suddenly. Nauseated. Fatigued. Anxiety-ridden. I’m a mess and I need to whine about it. Nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs to whine.

The main fear I had when considering whether to attempt to restart grad school was, ironically, not the anxiety; I expected that and it will go away. The big fear is physical … fatigue and arthritis and the side effects from the chemotherapy I’m taking for the arthritis, which induces more fatigue and nausea. Can I keep up with the pace? I have to pace myself and get plenty of rest. There will be times when I have to be less than perfect. And I’ll have to accept that and forgive myself.

And that will be hard; I’m pretty angry with myself right now.

I’m trying to relax. I’m trying to breathe. I’m trying not to lose it. But it’s hard. Nausea is increasing this morning.

The silly little games we do increase my problem. I understand the purpose, but here at the beginning, they are trying to break through my castle walls that have been erected in my heart to help stop the hurt. When these anxiety attacks happen, I want to shut down and shut out the outside world, which is the source of the hurt. While I’m adjusting, the walls are high and thick and I don’t like to be cooperative … that would mean collaborating with what is hurting me.

It’s self-protection while I adjust. I understand the process, but it is really agonizing to go through. The flight mechanism kicks in and I want to flee back home. It’s been the same way for over 36 years; I don’t like to be forced to do things away from home.

It would be nice to be normal …

Not as unpleasant, though, as that afternoon a week or so after I’d first moved here and got lost walking down Madison trying to find the main branch of the Ann Arbor District Library. Which tells me that either (a) that afternoon was unusually humid or (b) I’ve finally acclimated to the muggy summers. We’ll see — many more hot and muggy days to come to test out the hypothesis.

« Truly hilarious ».

‘Did you guys catch Tom Cruise on the Today Show this morning? I did. It was va-gynius. Watching Tom Cruise blabber on and on about the ills of medicine was mesmerizing. I’m a Matt Lauer fan, and I thought he handled himself smartly and gentlemanly. As far as Tom’s movie goes, it’s clearly gonna tank. Here’s the transcript of the segment … along with some visual annotations by yours truly.’

Brilliant.

The temps are supposed to be 14 degrees above normal here later today … yikes. The only possible relief may be a few scattered thunderstorms during the afternoon. It won’t get below 80, apparently, until next Friday.

I was eating breakfast in Frank’s Diner this morning and overheard one of the customers complaining about the weather to the waitress. She said, “It’s days like these when I ask myself, ‘When’s winter coming?’” I guess I’m not the only person in southern Michigan who misses milder temperatures.

Summer is here in a big way this week, despite the storm interlude on Tuesday. The past few days have been hot and almost cloudless, and the humidity is starting to creep upward. The weather has not been all that oppressive (although a friend of mine points out that that perception may be due to the fact that I’ve acclimated, not because of the weather itself), but that’s bound to change in the next several days when the temps start to rise into the 90s. There’s supposedly a cold front on the way but the National Weather Service seems to doubt that it will make it this far south. As the long-range forecast on the National Weather Service page says:

The theme for the long term weather pattern is consistency …. The consistency from run to run supports a good degree of confidence that the long wave pattern affecting our weather will change very little if hardly at all.

On my way home Tuesday night, a brief but intense deluge came down from the sky—a ripping thunderstorm on the first day of summer. I was unprepared, having forgotten to check the National Weather Service on the way out the door in the morning and consequently having also forgotten my umbrella. I was soaked through by the time I got home (a walk of seven minutes or so), but it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant—the temperature was still fairly high so the rain was, instead of cold and miserable, almost refreshing.

« This » is how the Empire supports the troops these days apparently:

‘John Tod of Mesa had been prepared to face Father’s Day worrying about his son’s pending date with the war in Iraq. Then Uncle Sam stepped in with more disappointing developments. Marine Pfc. Jeremy Tod called home with news that his superiors were urging him and fellow Marines to buy special military equipment, including flak jackets with armor plating, to enhance the prospects of their survival. The message was that such purchases were to be made by Marines with their own money. “He said they strongly suggested he get this equipment because when they get to Iraq they will wish they had,” Tod said. Total estimated cost: $600.’

Hopefully, John Tod won’t have to « feel the same pain as Celeste Zappala »:

’”This war was based on lies and deception,” said Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, whose soldier son was killed while providing security for investigators searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Zappala said, “The only way we can understand how we’ve come to this disastrous position is to find out what the truth is.” Zappala’s unsettling words appeared even more striking considering the newspaper in which they appeared: Her quoted remarks were included in a news story in Stars & Stripes, a Department of Defense-authorized newspaper distributed at U.S. military facilities. Knocking some of the shine off the tabloid’s usual cheerleading tone about U.S. foreign policy and the military, its obligatory news article about parents who have demanded that Bush come clean about his actions in the run-up to the war seemed uncharacteristically somber. The newspaper also quoted Dianne Davis, a mother from Pennsylvania whose son was killed last August. “I envy the parents who support this war, because if I did I’d sleep better,” Davis said. She added, “But I don’t sleep well. My son died for a lie.”’

Which is as good a summation of things as I’ve seen yet.

Well, my words about the hammer of summer weren’t quite on target. The past week has seen a few days of temps in the high 70s, but mostly it’s been overcast, even drizzly and thunderstormy some days, with highs in the upper 60s and low 70s. Some of it has been remnants of Tropical Storm Arlene, which hit the Gulf of Mexico late last week, and some of it has just been persistent low pressure systems. The trend is for some higher temps this weekend, but the National Weather Service is predicting more low pressure systems for early next week, so it looks as if summer is just sort of going to continue limping along.

Gosh, it’s been hot.

So how’s everybody been? We’re still here, just a bit overwhelmed. I start grad school in two weeks and the allergy assault on Frank continues unabated.

The beagle is on a new diet and we have a houseguest for an extended stay.

The last day of school for Ann Arbor PS is tomorrow; I plan to go spend an hour or so in the morning with my favorite class of autistic students at a northeast AA elementary school. It’s been quite a year taking care of them; I’ve learned so much and had such a great time.

And there’s a new Mac under my fingertips; for grad school notetaking and so on, it was necessary. It’s a new 15-inch Powerbook G4 and it’s totally fabulous. It came with OS 10.4 Tiger, which is pretty indescribably awesome. It continues to prove that WinDuhze is truly primitive. The difference between Tiger and WinDuhze is like the difference between flying London-New York first class on Concorde and rowing a leaky bathtub.

Enough product placement for now. Back to pre-reading for grad school.

Oh, that « Gore Vidal », rehashing old, long-forgotten battles:

‘Asked to predict who would win in ‘04, I said that, again, Bush would lose, but I was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004 creative propaganda and the fixing of election officials might very well be so perfected as to insure an official victory for Mr. Bush. As Representative Conyers’s report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio (www.house.gov/conyers), shows in great detail, the swing state of Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even though Kerry appears to have been the popular winner as well as the valedictorian-that-never-was of the Electoral College.

‘I urge would-be reformers of our politics as well as of such anachronisms as the Electoral College to read Conyers’s valuable guide on how to steal an election once you have in place the supervisor of the state’s electoral process: In this case, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who orchestrated a famous victory for those who hate democracy (a permanent but passionate minority). The Conyers Report states categorically, “With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.” In other words, the Florida 2000 scenario redux, when the chair for Bush/Cheney was also the Secretary of State. Lesson? Always plan ahead for at least four more years.’

Wonder who the 2008 Heir Apparent will be? And which state will the fix be in this time?

Today, somehow, seemed appropriately the start of summer (though summer doesn’t officially start for another week and a half). Yesterday, the heat was hot, but it didn’t feel oppressive and exhausting. Today, it felt that way — I left the house at 9.30 and the heat and humidity were already stifling, and there wasn’t the slightest breeze. It’s not quite as humid yet as I remember my first summer days in Ann Arbor in 2003 being, but maybe that’s just a function of having accliimated to the weather of southeast Michigan.

Someone told me today that we’ve had more days in the high 80s and low 90s in the past two weeks than we had the entire summer of 2004. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does feel as though the weather now is somehow (over)compensating for the unusually long winter. Still, it would have been nice to have had a few weeks of spring before slamming into the heaviness of Michigan summer.

It’s great how «this list» equates John Dewey, Betty Friedan, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Maynard Keynes, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler. Such heartwarming catholicity is a rare find these days.

Why isn’t Catcher in the Rye on the list? Are the book burners asleep on the job?

[Link courtesy «Bifurcated Rivets».]