Some months ago I decided that cleaning was not worth it anymore (along with a lot of other things not being worth it anymore). So the house is a mess. I used the plates and cups and utensils until they were used up and piled on all the counters, then I bought paper plates and cups and plastic utensils and ate take-out and, eventually, goat cheese with bought GF bread. I let everything else rot in the fridge. I let boxes and boxes pile up in the living room everywhere that was flat. I let games and boxes and junk pile up on and around my bed. Games piled up in the living room until I had maybe a 2’x1′ playing area, in which I attempted to play Duel of Ages II and was minorly successful, but not comfortably so. More recently I stopped reading and writing, but I did keep playing board games.

The nightmares are coming back, too.

Really, I am a horrible person. So you should just leave me to rot because I never get better, I just go in these circles of destruction and that’s really tiring to people.

Anyways, if you stayed around…

Everything changed when I visited a friend’s place and decided, for reasons, to cook a bit of a Thai curry for her (in particular, paeneng chicken). She had always cooked dinners for me when I was over there, so it was only fair that I returned the favor. We went shopping for a few ingredients (I’m glad that the Thai meal I picked didn’t have that many components that she didn’t already have) and I cooked and I’d forgotten how good that felt. The dinner turned out wonderful.

The week after that, at work it was my new team’s turn to bring about Waffle Wednesday, a small weekly work function where each team in the department prepares breakfast for everybody else. It’s easy for people to buy fruit and muffins, and to use the provided waffle irons to make waffles, but it’s another thing to buy an electric skillet and make 72 eggs worth of scrambled eggs. I even taught some of my teammates how to scramble eggs properly. Everybody liked the scrambled eggs; they came out fluffy even though I didn’t put any milk in them. Probably just aerated them really well, and the very even cooking of the skillet was awesome.

So I’ve been thinking about those experiences, and yesterday I cleaned out my kitchen instead of eating. After four runs of the dishwashers and spending time cleaning out the rotten vegetables and fruit from the fridge, I even fixed my garbage disposal by myself (nothing tricky, just went out to buy a set of key wrenches and turned the little socket in the bottom of the disposal). Unfortunately not eating anything was a dumb mistake, because I then took my nightly Lamictal and ended up so sick that not even an emergency bowl of rice (which I could now actually prepare) made me better. I spent the entire night miserable, the early morning too, and nearly threw up for what seemed like several hours.

I called in sick to work, with the idea that by afternoon I would feel well enough to work from home and call into meetings and such. After that I was well enough that I prepared a bowl of rice porridge with some chicken thighs I had seen fit to freeze in individual portions in the freezer a long time ago, along with some reconstituted dried shiitake mushrooms stored up from a long time ago. No viable garlic or ginger any more, but I did have them in powder form, and they did make everything taste good, which is the point.

I went to sleep, and just woke up from a nightmare involving my parents.

So there’s that to deal with.

Which I am dealing with, I guess, by writing about my current life and putting that nightmare in context, which is as something of a footnote rather than anything that controls my life, or at least that it shouldn’t. I still need to work on that. Unfortunately I don’t see my bartender for several weeks because work changed my schedule such that all my scheduled appointments had to be canceled. It’s hitting me very hard and I don’t know what to do because the nightmares dissipate more after talking to him.

If only I could feel like not screaming. Probably a good idea to put myself on mute for any meetings I call into today.

Anyways, I need to shower. Then after work (or something) I need to pick up some fixings for dinner for the next few days at least, because I get home so late that I either can cook something or shop for things, but not both. Tonight I can do both though.

There are routes I walk to the office, when I am at the office, to avoid meeting my old manager again. It’s awkward when we do meet, given all the things he’s said and done.

So messages from my life will start flowing again. It just helps me to write it all down.

By the way, Duel of Ages rocks, but needs a lot more table space. I know what my next project is going to be.