Weekend Ritual

Friday 19th February 2010 7:03 pm

I appear to have developed a sort of symbolic ritual that signals the beginning of the weekend.

During the week I have two sets of clothes at any time, I wear smart trousers and a shirt to work and t-shirt and jeans in the evening. This is some kind of throwback to when I was at school where it was considered the done thing by my mother to extract my uniform from me almost the moment I was through the door to wash it. “Go and change!”, she harangued, as I slouched about eating cereal and watching CBBC.

So, every evening I change my clothes. I prefer it too, it helps me switch between work and relaxing.

But on a Friday it is different. At lunch time I remove expired things from the fridge, throw them away, empty the bins. When I get home in the evening I start a bath running. I take all of my clothes of the week from the laundry basket and also what I am wearing and load them into the washing machine as the bath runs. I take the sheets off my bed and get a fresh set out ready to go on.

When the bath has been ran I start the washing machine off and get in to the bath. I either listen to a podcast or read, sometimes I play music. As I lie in the bath I am at my happiest of the whole week. Usually I have a rubber duck and shark floating around with me.

By the time I emerge from the bath, looking like a big pink prune the washing machine is done. Me, my clothes and my bed are perfectly clean – the entire week has been washed away. I don’t even have one dirty sock.

It is the weekend, work is over and the cleansing ritual is complete, dirt and stress all sluiced down into the sewers of Nottingham.

Then I can relax, until Monday morning when the whole hideous thing starts again. Late on a Sunday evening a sort of creeping disappointment approaches and looms over me as I go to bed.

Obviously I have other baths and showers and change shirts and t-shirts during the week too, but the Friday evening ritual cleaning is the most important. If I did all of this on any other day, as I’ve tried before, it does not work.

Only on a Friday evening. The ritual’s prescribed time must be adhered to or it fails.

And now, I shall go and run a bath. :)

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Temptation

Tuesday 9th February 2010 10:27 pm

This is opposite my desk at work.

Temptation

Many times a day I am very tempted by this suggestion. Especially as the fire escape goes through the kitchens of one of my favourite restaurants.

(Snapped with my iPhone on my way out of work today.)

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Waste

Sunday 7th February 2010 11:55 pm

Having one of those days/weeks/months/years/decades where I feel like I have no right to be alive, like I am wasting everything and should just go and hang myself in the woods so as not to be a pointless waste of resources.

Obviously, I’m not going to do this but it is not a nice feeling. I’m thirty-one, I’m not teenaged enough to have the balls to actually die by choice. Mortality terrifies me.

I’m just taking up space, food, water and oxygen and contributing nothing of worth or value. I am that vile capitalist construct, the ‘consumer’. The rat in the grain silo of existence. The locust decimating the harvest of the universe.

I’d happily slaughter a billion like me if I had the opportunity.

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Metabolism

Saturday 6th February 2010 3:11 am

It is really weird the way that I feel at the moment.

I have a relatively small ration of energy each day but when it runs out I don’t feel tired and need to go to bed, I just sort of inhabit this strange world where every thought, idea and experience happens from behind a sort of fog made out of apathy.

I was supposed to be in Leeds at a party this weekend, but it would take more units of effort/energy to even get there than I have to spare. I’ve only made it into work consistently because I just have to walk for four minutes to get there. Buses or longer distances would have been too much to cope with. I could get to the party, but by the time I’m there I’d be sat in a corner having to concentrate to focus and be mostly unable to even follow a conversation properly, let alone join in with one.

I hope my metabolism starts working properly soon. This is at least ten kinds of mad, terrible rubbish.

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Gutter litter

Tuesday 2nd February 2010 9:44 pm

At the moment I feel like crap. Permanently. I just have almost no energy, I wake up feeling no better than the night before, yawning, aching and stumbling, bleary-eyed, through the day. It takes a stupid amount of mental effort just to get out of bed in the morning.

By the time I leave work there is no juice left in my brain. I cannot concentrate hard enough or think enough to do any studying and things like housework, ironing clothes and making dinner are just far too much effort. I’ve had to force myself to iron some clothes tonight, just so I have things to wear tomorrow. Usually I am not this far behind.

I had been pinning my hopes of returning to the land of the living awake people on some blood tests. I have to take synthetic thyroxine because I was born with a knackered thyroid gland, a condition which used to be called ‘cretinism’. I am not making this up, if I was born much earlier than I was I’d have ended up a drooling midget spackoid, which I believe is the current politically correct term.

Anyway, if I do not have enough of this thyroxine stuff I get symptoms like fatigue, depression, my memory goes worse, I find it difficult to concentrate and so on…

I’ve been getting all of this over the last couple of months so I went for a blood test to check my levels of thyroxine. When the results were in I received a letter asking me to make an appointment to discuss my dose of medication. I though this would prove me right, but no. It has not.

My dose of thyroxine has been reduced and my doctor says I should have had the opposite symptoms to what I am having. I should have been hyperactive, had heart palpitations, felt on edge and anxious, etc.

This concerns me. I feel like a squashed McDonalds hamburger carton in a gutter, with a dirty big footprint on it. Next to some dog poo. In Swansea.

Unless my body has just been reacting in weird ways and I improve with the new dose, which begins tomorrow, I really have no idea what to do now and I worry that I am going to feel even worse because I’ll be on 7/8ths of the thyroxine I was taking, which is what keeps my metabolism ticking over at a normal-ish level.

Despair.

Edit: And, I almost forgot this, worst of all instead of taking two small fiddly 100mcg tablets I now need to take one 100mcg and three of the microscopic bastard 25mcg ones that I can never get out of the stupid blister packs. Bleeeuuughhh!

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