As an aside, you may know that I don't run my AC 24/7. I can't; it's not just about the electric bill, but it's because running it for more than a few hours at a time when absolutely necessary is basically pointless -- it'll never get down below 85-90 on the top floor of my house, and if it runs too long when it's incredibly hot outside, the condenser on the AC unit will freeze up, the fan/unit itself will begin to squeak and whine, and it will stop blowing any cool air -- but it won't turn off. When this happens I have to turn it off for a few hours to let it "relax," I suppose, before it will work correctly again. It's an old, old central air unit.
I've not had to run my AC that much this summer, so my electric bill hasn't been a huge concern (this month's bill is a scant $47). For almost a month, the highs were in the 70s or low 80s and it was raining/storming every day, sometimes giving us several inches of rain at a time. That sort of weather is heavenly here in Kansas during the summer when for the past two or three years it's been over 100 every day from mid-May to early September. Well, the rainy, cool weather stopped shortly before classes started, and we've been in a slowly-climbing dry heat wave ever since. Temperatures the first week of class were in the low 90s every day. Last week they were in the mid-to-high 90s. Right now, on Saturday afternoon, it's 102 and feels like 106.5 outside. This does not help my pain levels (which, again, I'll get to) and every effort I make to stay properly hydrated does little more than give me more sweat to soak into every piece of clothing currently on my body. I took off my shirt hours ago because it was wet and soaked through, and now the sweat running down my torso (yes, running down my body in streams) is hitting my boxers and soaking them through as well.
Neither Daisy nor I tolerate heat well; her house in Omaha is constantly set at 70 degrees, and it stays there (as I mentioned before). Her parents have an excellent heating/cooling system, and my own system is outdated, works sporadically, and is installed in a house built by the Winnebago company (yes, the RV people) in the 1960s, which means that it's not exactly the best insulated house on the block. While I love my house, the temperatures in the summer cannot be sealed out of it like Daisy's house. Because of this, and because of our free time, we desperately wanted to get out of my hell-like hotbox of a home to go do something someplace that had air conditioning. A movie, of course, was our first choice.
Daisy and I go to the movies almost every time she comes to visit, as I've written here before. At this point it's not generally about the movie; it's about getting out of the house and doing something together, something fun. I so, so very rarely go see movies by myself; it has to be something really exciting for me to take my own time and money to go see a movie alone. In the weeks leading up to Daisy's visit, I knew of several movies which were coming out, movies that I was excited for, but also most of which she would absolutely not want to see, no way no how. I desperately want to see Kick-Ass 2, for example, but Daisy abhors violence in almost all forms, and she hasn't seen the first one. I wasn't going to subject her to that, throwing her into a comic book movie that she had no desire to see and no clue about the backstory. I even more desperately wanted to see The World's End, which was scheduled to start playing in Newton's theater last weekend, but at the last minute, they didn't end up getting it. This made me very, very sad. Daisy and I could've driven to Wichita in the heat and traffic to find a theater which was playing it, but it wasn't even really worth it. Again, it's not about the movie for us, but the experience. It's our own "date night" scenario. Something else that's wonderful -- and a tip for any other vegans out there -- the popcorn at about 90% of movie theaters is vegan. Yes, the buttery, sodium-filled popcorn. The butter flavoring on it is soy-based, and the oil it's popped in is coconut oil. As long as you don't get the "extra butter" squirts, your popcorn is vegan.
Yes, Daisy and I did research on this, because we had to. This is not true for every theater, of course, so do your own research for your local movie house.
So, because Daisy loves popcorn and has developed a newfound addiction to it since the theater popcorn here is vegan, we go to the movies all the time. This summer alone, as I told her, I've probably seen more movies in the theater than the past five or six years combined. This summer, she and I have seen Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, The Wolverine, and now Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. That's five movies. In one summer. I haven't seen that many movies in a theater in a long, long time, let alone over the span of three months. To put this into perspective, the last two movies I saw in a theater before this summer were Green Lantern and Inglourious Basterds.
As for the Percy Jackson movie, we didn't even know what we were going to see when we got to the theater, as the lineup here in Newton was awful. Here's what's playing up here right now:
It's awful, as you can see. I've never even heard of half of these movies, and the ones I had, I mostly had no interest whatsoever in. I won't see Elysium because it's made by the people who did District 9, and let me tell you, I fucking hated that movie (apparently, I was one of the only people on the planet who did) because it was exceedingly boring to me and was not at all how it had been advertised on posters or in the trailers. I wasn't about to fall for that trap twice. I had no desire to see Planes or We're The Millers, and I'd never heard of The Butler or The Mortal Instruments, probably because I don't watch TV and would never see ads for them. The One Direction movie wasn't playing when we went over there, but obviously it's not like I would've gone to see that tripe either, and I already wrote above about why I wasn't going to subject Daisy to Kick-Ass 2. So, really, the second Percy Jackson movie was the only one either of us were really interested in. Daisy had told me weeks before that she wanted to see it, and I'd bought the first one from one of the DVD bins in Walmart so that I could watch it and know what was going on. Daisy also didn't tell me until we were already sitting in the theater to watch it that she hadn't seen the first one, but wanted to see the second because it "looked pretty." I gave her the thirty-second rundown of the first movie and who the characters were...which was also about the first thirty seconds of the second movie once it started.
We went home after the movie -- after a stop for a while at the Rue 21 store next to the theater -- and it was even hotter than before; the temperature reached 98 on Wednesday. She'd slept for twelve hours, but I was running on less than five -- over the course of more than two days at this point. The heat and my fatigue was making all of my muscles and joints ache. We ate a small dinner later on, as we were both filled with popcorn until we could digest it properly, and eventually (to escape the heat up here) went downstairs to bed fairly early -- I think around 10 or so. I don't remember exactly because, again, deliriously tired and in overdrive. I seriously don't even remember going to bed. I'd been awake all day since 5AM, in the heat, had driven to and from campus, and had stayed awake and lucid to see a movie and go clothes shopping with Daisy -- I was completely and totally out of it.
I set the alarm for 5 and told Daisy I'd get up then, and get her up around 7 so that she could rest longer before we had to leave the house around 8. I begin teaching at 9:15, and I needed to fill her gas tank for her beforehand as she was running low, we were taking her car, she'd need gas to get back home, and it takes roughly half an hour or a little more to get from my house out to the countryside of West campus. I will almost always fill her gas tank for her when she's here; regardless of whether I'm visiting Omaha with her or not during any given excursion, I will fill her tank at least once. That's the kind of person I am. If she's coming all this way, the least I can do is replenish her gas.
So, to cut to the chase, that's what we did. I got up, woke her two hours later, she got ready, got her gas, and we were off -- Daisy would get to see me teach for the first time.
My 101 class on West campus had little to cover on Thursday; I was introducing their first paper assignment to them, which involved giving out a good spate of four or five handouts discussing that paper, formatting of all of the papers in the class, and how workshops would operate before we dismissed. I don't have a whole lot to go over on days like that -- the objective is to lay out the assignment before them and get them thinking about it -- so it was a good day for her to watch me teach. We also briefly discussed "The List of Forbidden Topics," which will become more prominent later in the semester as they get to branch out more on things they'd like to write, and I could see in Daisy's face shock and awe when I mentioned that they weren't allowed to write on topics like abortion, religious issues, racial issues, drug/alcohol issues, global warming/cooling, etc. The list contains many things, most of them hot-button issues that, in a state as backwards and redneck as Kansas is, would (and at times have) trigger(ed) screaming matches during workshop.
"Why can't they write on those topics?" she asked me in the car on the way home. "Shouldn't these kids be able to write on whatever they want? It's like a restriction on their freedom of speech."
"When I started teaching in 2010, we were given a list of topics that, as GTAs, it would probably not be the best idea to let our students write about as they are emotionally-charged or heavily biased topics," I said. "Abortion, for example. These kids are freshmen, and most of them -- since they live in Kansas -- are probably highly religious and/or Republican. They're not going to be able to make a cohesive, balanced argument without logical fallacies, outright falsehoods being passed off as facts, or religion weaving its way into their viewpoints, and a paper written with that passed off as 'research' and 'argument' will fail because it can't stand on its own."
Daisy gave me yet another shocked look.
"What?" I asked. "The topics on the forbidden list were put on there for reasons like that, and for the additional reasons that a.) I don't want to read a heavily biased, bigoted or otherwise non-fact-based rhetoric on why gays can't marry or why abortion should be outlawed, and b.) because these papers are workshopped in class. There have been screaming matches in workshop of kids arguing back and forth not about the papers themselves, but about the opinions and controversial solutions proposed by the students writing said papers. The point of workshop is so that the class can help each other with their papers, not to fight over what they think."
"Okay," Daisy said, "but see, that's unacceptable; they're in a classroom environment and they need to control themselves, no matter whether their own opinions differ from those of their classmates or not. If they can't be civil, kick them out of class."
I've only ever had to kick students out of my class twice over the course of my entire teaching career -- and it was, both times, over starting arguments like those in workshop.
"But they don't think that way, honey," I told her. "I agree with you, but again, these are eighteen-year-olds for the most part. They're not like us. We have degrees, we've been through all of this before, and we have tact and discipline. These kids are a generation removed from us. They're like a completely different species. Left unrestrained, they'll use emotional appeal and bias and religion and who knows what else in their papers regardless of my telling them not to, because they've never learned how to argue academically before -- not with all of that 'no child left behind' bullshit all of them grew up with. Most of them weren't taught how to write in high school; that much is evident from the large amount of errors and other problems I see in their papers even after I've gone over the material in excruciating detail -- they were simply taught how to pass tests."
"Furthermore," I added, "to be able to learn how to write effectively and make balanced arguments, sometimes first year composition students must write about something boring, something they're detached from, something they have no vested interest in, because if they don't -- whether they realize it or not -- their own bias toward one side or the other will creep into their writing, and once that ball gets rolling, well, they won't focus on keeping the argument balanced, only on why their side is the 'right' side."
"But they do have the ability to go out and research some of these topics in an unbiased way, to get hard facts on them, to get statistics on a lot of them. Like for abortion. There have been studies done on when a fetus can feel pain, for example--"
"Again," I said, "they won't. They won't do that research. I know this, I've seen it. If I allowed them to write on the abortion debate, they'd go out to some crazy right-wing 'abortion is murder' site for their research, or they'd find some way to weave it back into religion, while evading the overall main points and disregarding hard medical facts in favor of falsehoods or rhetoric. None of them care enough to put a scientific or medical research level of work into their research and writing for a simple 101 class, no matter how much we tell them to, and no matter how much we physically show them how to get academic, literary sources for their articles."
"But they could," Daisy said. "That's all I'm trying to say. That information is out there, and they have access to it. You shouldn't shut down topics simply because you don't want to read papers on them or don't have enough faith in your students to do that sort of work."
"They're not taking the class because they want to, they're taking it because it's required," I said. "I adhere to the list mainly because I've seen students write papers on some of the topics on it in the past, and they can't do it correctly. They want to write on those things simply because they are controversial, not because they care highly about the class -- they want to puff out their proverbial chests and make it a show, and hope they get that 'A for effort' they always got in high school."
"Do you not have students who write well no matter what, whether it's a controversial topic or not?"
"I do," I said. "[Former student, now friend] wrote a magnificent argument paper in my class discussing and researching polyamorous relationships and if they can truly work, and that was fine -- but she was an English major and work of that caliber is extremely uncommon amongst average composition students. No amount of great teaching or high enthusiasm in the classroom is truly going to make most students care about a class they're forced to take, especially if they're not English majors. That's why they want to write papers on 'why lowering the drinking age to 18 would be awesome' or 'man, pot should totally be legalized'. That's what they're supposedly passionate about, but they won't do enough scholarly research to actually find, or give, legitimate reasons why they're taking that position. They won't think that far ahead, they'll list a lot of superficial or biased sources, and their argument will fall flat."
I saw Daisy's point. I did, truly. I don't like restricting what my students can write on, but this is the beginning of my fourth year of teaching English composition courses, and I've seen what these students do (or, really, don't do) when left unrestricted and without structure. You can't tell these kids to write whatever they want and give them free reign on it. They fail. Plain and simple, they fail. They begin writing papers on subjects they desperately want to argue for, such as pot legalization or why abortion should be outlawed, and they don't yet have the skills or experience to argue those subjects effectively or academically -- at least not in English 101, anyway. Against my advisement, they'll use logical fallacies or cite "facts" that are just plain wrong, they'll use biased sources, they'll misrepresent their sources, and they'll do anything they can (except what they're supposed to do) to make their argument sound high and mighty. At worst, they'll write a one-sided, unbalanced, biased argument that doesn't take any opposing viewpoints into account -- simply because they hold their own viewpoint, out of arrogance, as the only valid one. I've seen it all. And all of those papers have failed. Every single one.
"It's a state-run university," Daisy said, "where opposing viewpoints, even if controversial, should still be allowed to be discussed, not forbidden."
"I didn't come up with the list," I replied. "Some professors don't even use it, and they let their students write whatever they want. Then, some of those students fail and end up taking my class, where I am restrictive about topics, and they pass. No, I didn't come up with the list, but I have added topics to it and have created my own expanded list over the years."
"...you mean you've restricted it more?" Daisy asked, again awed at what I was saying.
"Yeah," I replied, "I have, after some clever students found loopholes and wrote about topics that I hadn't expressly forbidden, but wrote on them just as badly and just as biased. The 'lowering of the drinking age' topic isn't on the master list, but I added it to mine after my first semester of teaching, since nobody -- and I mean nobody -- could make a valid, facts-and-research-based argument as to why it should happen. They write feeling-based argumentative essays instead of research-based ones. That's the problem with letting them write on a lot of those controversial, incendiary topics -- they'll try to make a passionate argument and will have nothing, no facts, statistics, studies, or academic sources to back them up. They'll say things like 'studies have shown...' and never say which studies, because they're writing that for effect and haven't actually looked up any to cite. That doesn't work in a college-level comp class."
I've also added animal testing (all they cite is the heavily-biased PETA), anything involving current military or political policies or ongoing wars, climate change, and anything involving any sort of racial or cultural stereotyping (in any form) to the list as well. The original "forbidden topics" list included only the big three: abortion, religion, and hatespeech-related topics, the latter of which bans papers such as "why Hitler was right" or other topics along those lines. Those things must be forbidden in my eyes; there's no way these students can write about them either ethically or academically. I once had a student, in all seriousness, ask me if he could write a paper on why abolishing slavery was a bad idea. Yes, these things come up. This is white-bread, bible-belt Kansas, and most of these kids come from tiny farming communities that are 100% white and always have been. They don't see much diversity at all.
Daisy just shook her head.
"I do give them a list of topics that students have used in the past to great effect," I told her. "I show them that I'm not totally restrictive. They can write on anything they want, but not those few forbidden things. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with it when making them write on something else will therefore make them think, and therefore will greatly raise their likelihood of passing the class."
This is true; on the back of the sheet of forbidden topics, I have twice as many examples of really good ones, topics which were original and unorthodox, as well as the tried-and-true ones. For example, I allow my students to write on the second amendment/gun control issues, I let them write on the death penalty, I let them write on the euthanasia/assisted suicide/"right to die" topic. I've had students write on the future of the space program and what should/shouldn't happen with it, and I've had students write on justification for the use of (or abolishment of) nuclear weapons. These kids are creative, and many times they are quite intelligent and can write intelligent arguments -- but until they prove that to me, or to the department, I don't and can't trust them or their skills any further than I could throw them.
When I told Daisy this, she asked "You allow them to write papers on gun control and the death penalty, but not abortion or religion? Aren't both of those just as controversial as the others?"
"Controversial, yes," I said, "but easily researchable and arguable without biased sources, the intrusion of religious thought or doctrine, and with a great many statistics and studies published and available for them to draw from in their arguments. That's the difference."
"People are going to be just as passionate about those things as the 'forbidden' ones," Daisy countered.
"Yes, they will, but again, they won't have the crutch of faulty, biased arguments to fall back on. If they choose not to find or use the reputable sources, it's on them."
I also let her know that my students have a much, much wider berth in being able to choose their topics in 101 than they'll ever get in 102 -- in 102, they are given a list of topics (in the old book, it was 20 different topics on various current events issues; I don't know how many it is now that they've updated the book) that they must choose from to write their paper -- any extraneous topic suggested is usually shot down, as the book's options are sufficient. I think being able to write about basically whatever they want in 101, with a few exceptions, is much better than being restricted to a set list in English 102.
When later describing what it was like to watch me teach to one of her closest friends, she summed it up in two words: "Very Kansas." Meaning conservative and restrictive based on the discussion we'd had earlier. She enjoyed seeing me teach and now understood how I always have command of the classroom, but of course, she disagreed with me on the whole forbidden topics thing. Everything else, of course, she found interesting, and said she could tell that I was a good instructor.
Again, I don't have to do the forbidden topics thing, but implementing it makes my classes easier -- both when it comes to grading and when it comes to helping my students to succeed. I don't like to give failing grades, and I tend to grade brutally hard on the 101 papers (because if they can't do well in 101, they have no chance in 102). By implementing that list and teaching them what both I and the university are looking for in their writing, I raise the bar...and they rise to meet it again and again, every semester. I've never had a student whine about not being able to write on one of those forbidden topics -- they understand and accept why that list exists, and don't question it.
"I would be a student you'd hate," Daisy said, smiling. "I'd be the one asking why I couldn't write on those things and I'd be challenging you on them at every turn."
"...and you'd fail my class if you didn't follow directions," I said flatly. "Rules and policies are there for a reason."
I don't play favorites. You're a good writer, you say? Prove it to me in your work and with your effort. If you want to impress me, write well on a difficult topic.
We stopped talking about teaching after a while. We had to. I didn't want to fight with her. I do see Daisy's points clearly, as I mentioned before, and I deeply respect those points. But she's also not been teaching English classes for years on end like I have.
Anyway.
We came home and again kicked on the AC; it was nearly 100 degrees on Thursday afternoon, and there was no way we could deal with that without the AC. When it's 100 outside, it's easily 95 upstairs, if not hotter, unless the AC is running. Right now it's 11PM, and it's still 84...outside. It's 95.9 in my room as I'm typing this.
We made a lunch, and I put the last Harry Potter movie on, as neither of us had seen it yey (despite the fact that it's been out for over two years). I've owned it on DVD since Black Friday either last year or the year before, when Walmart put it on their DVD deep-sale list, but it sat on my shelf forever and I never got around to watching it. I do this a lot with movies; I have all three of the Lord of the Rings movies as well, and they're all still in their plastic wrap, unopened. I've had them for years.
My week was over, and I was beginning to wind down from overdrive mode. I'd been running hardcore for five or six days at that point, and my body was less than happy about it. Despite the fact that I was very interested in the movie, about halfway through it I slunk down onto the couch behind Daisy and passed out. And I needed it. Part of it was because I'd just eaten, but a larger part of it was because we didn't have any plans for the rest of the day/night and because my week was over. My body was starting to go into cooldown mode, like an engine that had been overheated and needs to cool off before it can perform again. I needed rest in the worst way. While I'd slept a decent amount the night before, having not slept and having kept up the pace I'd kept for the past week, all of those lost hours of sleep and relaxation/decompression time were seriously beginning to catch up with me. Even I can't stay in overdrive indefinitely. So, I passed out for about 90 minutes or so. I only awoke when Daisy had finished the movie and had turned off the TV, and the lack of sound is what woke me.
"We can go downstairs and nap if you want, babe," she told me.
"No," I replied. "you can, if you want, but I can't. I won't get up."
One of the reasons I had purposely let myself fall asleep on the couch is because it's not comfortable at all, and because it's excruciatingly hot upstairs. That means I won't sleep deeply when I nap there because I cannot fully rest when I'm uncomfortable and hot. If I'd gone downstairs I would have passed out for many hours, and missed a lot of time that could have otherwise been spent with Daisy during one of the few visits we'll get to have together this semester. Napping on the couch is one of the very few ways I can force a nap to be a short "power nap" sort of scenario, because otherwise I sleep and sleep hard, always, when I go to sleep and desperately need it.
I had asked Daisy before what her departure plans were; as she goes back to work on Friday nights, it's not uncommon for her to come down on a Tuesday, stay until Thursday night, and then drive home in the later hours that night. Sometimes, as the case was this past week, she will stay until Friday morning or early afternoon, and then she'll get up, pack up, drive home and go to work a few hours after she gets back. Schedule-wise, they're both about the same to her, with the only difference being where she sleeps beforehand. If she leaves on Thursday night, she gets home in the middle of the night on Friday morning and sleeps her normal schedule at home before work. If she leaves on Friday, she does that sleeping here, and then drives up there before work. She's left on Thursdays before if she has plans with friends back home in Omaha or if I have a bunch of stuff to do over the weekend, for example. This time, she planned to leave on Friday morning, or barring that, sleep until noon on Friday and then head home, because she knew she wouldn't sleep before work anyway. This meant that our Thursday night was wide-open.
"There's football on tonight," I said. "We can cook the tacos and nachos and have a mini-football party with food and beer."
And that's what we did. We watched the Chiefs destroy the Packers -- destroy them so hard, especially in the second half, that the Packers released Vince Young from their roster afterwards, since they'd lost to arguably one of the worst teams in professional football. We went to bed almost immediately after the game was over, as it had since gotten so hot in the upstairs of the house that we couldn't stand it.
Here, finally, is where the story of my pain kicks in.
Somehow, in the course of the overnight while I was sleeping, I pulled a muscle on the left side of my chest. It was a muscle that somehow connected to a tendon or another muscle in my back and shoulder/shoulder blade area, and also extended not only into and around my lung/ribs, but into my tricep. I don't know what muscle this is, or why/how I pulled it in my sleep, but it just ached. Coughing/sneezing (because of my terrible allergies) was so painful. Moving my arm and torso in certain ways would trigger a spasm, which was also incredibly painful. Putting weight or pressure on it, such as to pull myself up or to lean against a wall or doorjamb, was excruciating.
And all of this happened while I was asleep. I didn't think I'd slept in any strange position, and I'd been fine when I went to bed. Tired, yes, but not in pain. The aching is what woke me up on Friday morning, at 6AM, and I came upstairs then because it was so uncomfortable. When I woke Daisy up around 11 or so (after she'd slept, again, for twelve hours) I told her about it, but didn't go into a lot of detail because I didn't want her to worry about me. I'm like a cat; I hide pain exceedingly well. Because it hurt when I coughed or breathed hard, I though that perhaps it was a lung infection that was causing all of my muscles around it to hurt/ache, and the word emphysema floated through my mind. I shook it off, I made her breakfast and helped her pack up all of her stuff, and kissed her goodbye when she left around 1PM or so.
I never thought until later that afternoon/evening that it was probably due to my muscles and body being exceedingly tired and fatigued from being in overdrive for a solid week. And, as the day went on, it got worse. I wouldn't even do anything; I'd be sitting still, and it would spasm. Hard. And it almost had me doubling over in shooting pain. By the time Daisy got home that afternoon and went to work that night, my entire upper body was on fire. I could barely stand up straight -- the muscles had felt like they'd locked up and the pain had spread to encompass most of my back, both shoulder blades, and both sides of my chest. This wasn't a simple pulled muscle or aching tendon at this point -- this was the upper half of my body trying to systematically shut down on me, muscles locking up and refusing to move without pain. Everything was going stiff. Every time I walked around the house or moved too quickly, everything would spasm, and I'd be in so much pain that I was shaking. I'd eaten, I'd kept myself hydrated, but I knew the heat (over 100 on Friday) was probably contributing to it as well. I sent Daisy a message telling her that I was still in a lot of muscle aches/pain and that I was going to bed early. This was around 8:30 on Friday night.
As my allergies were killing me and because I was in pain, I took a pair of sinus congestion and pain pills, the ones that have Tylenol in them in addition to the decongestants, because this time I truly needed both drugs. When I went to bed, I was trembling because of the process it took for me to actually lay down flat on the mattress and get into a comfortable position to sleep. Even laying down and not moving, every few minutes the muscles would contract and spasm hard, making me involuntarily tense up and hurt more. If you've ever had a knot in your calf muscles, that involuntary cramp in the night that wakes you from a dead sleep in horrible pain and won't go away until you straighten out those muscles by pointing your toes up toward your knee, imagine that -- but imagine it throughout your entire chest and shoulder blades, and imagine it happening every five minutes or so. That's what it was like.
I don't know what happened in the night, but when my body told me to go to bed because of the pain, I did, and in the overnight hours, while I slept, my body and mindset finally turned off overdrive mode. I had a long weekend ahead of me with only a little work to take care of, and Daisy was gone; finally, my unconscious/subconscious mind could turn off, and inwardly I knew I could rest and recuperate. I slept. I slept hard. Pete threw up on the bed six inches from my head, and I didn't even wake up for it. That's how out I was. What I do know is that when I awakened yesterday morning, 95% of the pain was gone -- and by yesterday afternoon, it was completely gone without a trace.
Honestly, I think it was my body telling me that it was time to end overdrive, that I could not go on any longer at the pace I was going with as little sleep as I was getting and as little food as I'd been eating. Yes, I'd had that big meal on Thursday night, but as I mentioned in my previous post, that was really the only true meal I'd had all week that wasn't just a quick sandwich or snack. Daisy and I both attempted to eat regularly during her visit, but I didn't eat a lot otherwise. My sleep cycles were seriously thrown off, and I had been out-and-about a lot more than normal, and since she was here I was smoking a lot less and drinking a lot less coffee, my fuels for overdrive. It was like running out of gas; the car just stops after a while of driving on nothing but fumes.
Regardless, I am out of that mode now, and am feeling back to normal. I've spent the majority of my long weekend trying to decompress and recover, sleep normal hours and take care of tasks at my own pace. It's also good that I will start my week softly, with my easy day, and I have a little more recuperation time because of the Labor Day holiday tomorrow. This morning, I got up at 10 and have done absolutely nothing of consequence all day long -- I played a video game and made coffee. Between now and Tuesday I have to highlight a few sections to teach in my 101 textbook and go to Walmart to get cigarettes and coolant for the car, but I really have nothing else major to do. Daisy is working a weird schedule tonight because of the holiday, and I'll probably be going to bed again rather early to maximize the amount of sleep I can get. It's not as hot today -- it's barely 80 right now and it's cloudy/gray for the first time in two weeks. It may rain/storm this afternoon, which would be incredibly welcome after the scorching, burning heat we've had.
I won't have to be in overdrive again for a while; my students don't turn in their first papers until the last week of this month, and I won't start teaching my 210 class until October 10. I've even made up all my handouts and other lessons I need to cover this week, and my outfits for teaching have already been laid out and readied for the week as well. Today and tomorrow will be total, sit-around-in-my-underwear relaxation days.
And I need those days. I so, so need them.
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