Question: Can anxiety and avoidance of a necessary task cause lethargy and loss of energy?

I'm talking more than just a sense of 'not being bothered to do something'. I'm talking about actual physical symptoms of tiredness.

I am tired.

I've done nothing physically or mentally demanding today, i've had as much sleep as I usually do, maybe even a little more from laying in this morning, but at 3pm this afternoon I felt too tired to do any writing. Instead I just lay on my bed for a couple of hours. I didn't sleep but I sorta just lay there with my eyes closed and I didn't want to get up or do anything.

Am I doing too many hours at work and haven't got used to it yet? I don't think so, because it's not like I haven't done those kind of hours before now. Plus while I'm at work I'm fine and I'm pretty active the whole day. Yesterday I did a 9 til 5 shift which meant I had to be up at 8 in the morning to get ready and go. Today I didn't get out of bed until 10:30 and by 3pm I was back in bed again, which isn't healthy.

It could be my diet. I turned vegetarian in April and with a few things that have happened recently I'm finding it difficult to maintain a consistent diet, it could very possibly be causing this state of lethargy I've been experiencing since the weekend. But on the otherhand my diet has never been stable or consistent, when I think back to uni, during the months where I was poor my diet was almost exclusively made up of pasta, pasta sauce, and cheese with very little meat intake. I'm pretty certain that my diet plays little part on my disposition as I've always just eaten when I felt like without any consideration over what I'm putting inside me.

I feel hopeless. I want someone or something to come and save me, give me drugs, a magical spell, a bloody army drill instructor, ANYTHING, just to get me going and past this ridiculous funk I've been in since Saturday.

I'm starting to feel like I'm going to achieve nothing of worth in my life, nothing I can be proud of. I'm afraid I'm going to be just part of the crowd like everyone else working a normal regular job devoid of meaning or value, another wage slave with nothing to show for the effort... and why? Because I'm scared and I'm lazy. They make the worse pairing for overcoming motivational problems. If you just had one of them it wouldn't be so bad, if I were just scared by motivated I could past my anxiety with drive and determination, if I were just lazy but not scared I would attempt things every so often and could maybe build up slow momentum to get over it. Unfortunately though, I think fear and laziness generally come hand in hand, or maybe one is a symptom of the other. Maybe my laziness is an excuse for my fear, or maybe fear is an excuse for my laziness.

I'm back in the same place I was earlier this year, it's like I've become a wimp and can't handle the pressure of anything anymore and I'm wallowing in it, but is it easier than the alternative? The fact that I repeat this pattern of behaviour it must be, but I want to stop and get off. I want to get off it now.

Dan & Eye: My little hobo - part one

Dan & Eye returns with a new tale: My little hobo. This is part one of a two part epic and hopefully part two will be up in a few days once we've conquered the most frustrating editing process I've ever witnessed.

To be a kid again

*note* - This is a repost from a blog I wrote for my tumblr (darkhorsedan.tumblr.com), about two days ago.

I heard a story on the local news today about a guy from Portsmouth who had kidnapped a 13 year old girl (yeah, he’s a paedophile), and taken her with him to Ireland where he was picked up by the police. The guy managed to gain the confidence of the girl and her family in a particularly unique way: he pretended he was a 13 year old boy, and not just with the girl and her family, somehow this guy had made a fake birth certificate and enrolled himself in a catholic school. How he did this without the help of a parent or guardian I don’t know, then again maybe he had assistance from other paedophiles pretending to be his parents (yeah, we all know how these guys like to hang around together in special little groups, setting up fronts for their special paedophile rings such as petit-bourgeois variants of Mothercare and Early Learning Centre). Or it’s even possible with the Catholic church’s seedy reputation for pedophilic priests that members of the faculty in this Catholic school were in on the scam as well. Personally I don’t know the details I’m just speculating and it’s not really interests me about the story anyway.

What the story did get me thinking about was a personal childish fantasy that myself and a few friends of mine have had (no! Not that kind of fantasy), where we wondered what it would be like to relive your school days with the minds we have now. I’m not gonna get into specifics whether we have just our intelligence and maturity of now, or if we keep the memories of this current life when we go back, all you need to know is that we would be children with adult minds.

I think many of us come to envy the lives that children have when we become adults and at some time or another wished for that life again. A life free from responsibility, a life of simple fun, and going back there with the mind I have now I could really appreciate it. And imagine all the things I could get done with all that extra time? School would be a breeze, and maybe I would become really popular with my much maturer attitude, and maybe the girls I liked back then would like me back.

But then I start thinking how shit it would actually be because the girls I liked back then would look different to me if I go back there with the mind I have now. They would just be kids, incapable of the kind of reasoned, adult conversations I have now (well, some of the time), and they will inevitably get on my nerves. The reality would be that I would be more interested in some of my female teachers who are close to the age that I really am now but they won’t want to be with me either, because No matter how intelligent and mature I come across I’ll fail to woo them due to the plain and simple fact that I’m in a child’s body. A child’s body with a child’s penis, which is no good to them, and has it so happens no good to me either. At least until I “grow up” again.

But let’s just say that all that stuff doesn’t bother me. That I enjoy the whole experience, become the popular kid, and leave school with amazing grades. What about the life I have lost? As a cultshasha pointed out to me, you go back and live your life in a new way and chances are you won’t have the life you have now. I wouldn’t have made the friends I have now and I could end up a completely different person. Better or worse it doesn’t matter I don’t wanna change what I have now for some other life.

BUT, the greatest revelation I’ve had while writing this, is that in some ways I’ve lived out that fantasy and relived my school experience with an adults mind. Having done poorly in my GCSE’s I finished school at 16 and worked for several years before coming back a “mature student” when I was 21. I got to go to school again with the maturity and mind I have now and I have to say I’ve benefited from that. Putting this year aside (and it’s not out of laziness that I fucked it up - well no more laziness than usual) I’ve worked hard and got the good grades and I’ve made plenty of great friends too, so what have I got to complain about? Nothing. I didn’t think I was really complaining anyway, just examining a silly daydream.

Don't read this one it is about a nosebleed I had today. Nothing special.

*note* a few days old repost from my tumblr (darkhorsedan.tumblr.com)

I went to see Dark Knight this afternoon but I’m not gonna talk about that (it’s not because I thought it was bad, I just don’t feel like giving it a review, I’ll let it speak for itself), instead I’m going to talk about the nosebleed I had in the shower this morning:

I had a nosebleed in the shower this morning.

What? Is that it?

No, I’ve got more to say.

Get on with it then!

I was just about to until you interrup- wait a sec… Who the hell are you?

You but you’re writing in italics to make it seem like someone else is in this conversation. I think you’re trying to be funny because you haven’t got much else to say but it’s probably not working, specially now that I’m tellin—

—Alright, enough of that. It’s pointless. Back to the nosebleed—

—You still going with that whole nosebleed thing? Or are you going to carry on being gratuitous with these constant interruptions from a fake person?

So I had a nosebleed in the shower this morning and it’s the first time I’ve had a nosebleed since I was about 15, when for some weird reason that particular summer, I kept getting nosebleeds. Never had them any other time in my life, just that one year and now this morning. I was never one of those “nosebleed kids” that you seemed to find in every year group at school but my brother was. It was rare to have a day go by where he didn’t have a nosebleed. He’s had his nose cauterized so many times when he was growing up but they just kept coming back, I’ve no idea what was wrong with him but it got to the point where we wondered if there was something more permanent that could be done like maybe like filling his nostrils up with poly-filler.

The other thing that got me about my brother and other nosebleeders is it doesn’t seem to matter how many times in their life that they’ve had a nosebleed before now, everytime they get one they act like they’ve never had one before and have no idea what is going on or what they should do. They just sit there bleeding over their desk getting blood on their exercise books and pencil cases. All they seem capable of is anouncing to the teacher or anyone who’s listening “I’ve got a nosebleed”. They won’t move or do anything until they receive instructions on what to do:

“Don’t just sit there Gary put your hand under your nose! Get some tissue! Put pressure on your nose with your hand! No your other hand its dripping everywhere again, tilt your head back! Go to the medical room quickly!”

I think the school medical lady should be grateful for the nosebleed kids. It’s because of the nose-bleeders and the sickly children - which are often one and the same - that the expense of having an on site nurse is even justified. The rest of us “normal” kids hardly ever had to go to the medical room except for the occasional accident.

Well, not me actually, I was another breed entirely. A marvel to modern medical science I was the school hypochondriac, baffling the minds of even the most moderately qualified school physician with unusual combinations of symptoms and no definable course or reason outside the fact that I just didn’t want to be in school. I think there were even a few occasions where I actually made myself sick so that I could be sent home.

You’ve ran out of things to say now haven’t you?

For now. Would you like to round everything up and bring this to a nice conclusion?

Okay.

The End.

Phantom friends

*note* yet another repost - this ones a week old. Alternatively navigate my tumblr (darkhorsedan.tumblr.com)

Sophie left the house yesterday. We’ve only got another week or so before the tenancy is up and I’ll be going back home to London as well but I don’t particularly want to. That’s kind of a horrible thing to say isn’t it? My family is back home in London as are many of my friends, whom I have known for years, but I would rather stay here with the friends I’ve made in the 3 years that I’ve stayed in Bournemouth. I have formed some very close ties during this final year and now that we’ll be seeing considerably less of each other it’s going to be a difficult adjustment.

When Sophie left yesterday it got me thinking about how you can become emotionally attached to someone. It seems that the closer you get to a person the more they seem to become part of who you are. Like an appendage - an emotional one mind - that if you were suddenly to find yourself without it you feel as if you’re missing something. And in a similar way to an amputee, when they experience the sensation of their missing limb still being there, what medical professionals generally refer to as a phantom limb, you still feel like that person is/should be around. I felt it accutelly when I woke up this morning. You know when you’re head is still fuzzy and you’ve just come out of a dream? Things felt exactly like it was months ago but then as the fog cleared I remebered, Sophie’s gone home and soon so will the rest of us.

Bundled in with that sense of loss there’s also anxieties and fears (where would I be without my anxieties and fears? Somewhere a lot healthier and happier most probably) that this is it for our friendship. My track record for keeping in contact with people over long distances isn’t particularly reassuring as I’ve a tendency to heavily emotionally invest myself in whomsoever is in close proximity to me, hence the closeness of the ties I’ve made this year, and the scarceness of my visits back home to London. But maybe being so worried about this will encourage me to make that extra effort and keep in contact. Plus it will be tragically stupid of me to let a friendship like this to drift apart, could I be that much of a dick?

My comic collection

*note* Another 2 week old repost from my tumblr blog (darkhorsedan.tumblr.com)

So I’ve been back home in London for a few days and have managed to keep myself from going insane by keeping myself unusually busy with a number of things. On Saturday I actually finished one of the comic scripts I was working on and in general I’ve been doing a bit of writing here and there. Then yesterday, for some unknown reason, I decided I was going to catalogue my entire comic collection… It took me the best part of yesterday and about an hour and a half today to do it.

Actually, I think the reason I started doing it is because when I leave Bournemouth in about two weeks time I’m going to be moving in with my dad and I know issues are gonna arise over the storage of my comics. Even now my bedroom upstairs has very little space, I’ve got two full draws of comics, a bookshelf overflowing with graphic novels, and about 5 other boxes full up with comics so I took some time on the internet yesterday looking for alternatives for storage. I found various sites that sell boxes made for comic storage, the largest of these being able to store up to 400 comics (apparently). These sounded ideal, so in order to find out how many I needed I decided I better count them.

Figuring out to actually catalog them came as a bit of a problem to begin with, I figured I would use excel spreadsheets to do it but I’ve never really used excel before and I wasn’t sure of what categories to put them into, all I knew was that I wanted to keep it simple.

Then I stumbled across a site on the internet called StashMyComics, which will actually do most of the work for you. You just find the comics you have, create your own categories e.g. Superman, Marvel, DC, etc and it will organize your collection. It gives you the totals of how many you’ve got that you can export onto your own computer in an excel spread sheet and it even values your collection (only in dollars though) tallying up approx how much you’ve spent against how much they’re now worth.

Ok, firstly bear in mind that most of these comics were bought between the period of 2002 - 2005 (when I came to uni I pretty much stopped buying comics aside from a few select titles), and this is just my comic collection, it doesn’t include the trade paperbacks (these are comics collected together into one book also known as graphic novels - though annoyingly, “graphic novel” is a term that people who don’t like to admit they collect comics use to refer to comics in general).

Altogether I own 819 comics and I paid (approx in dollars) $2193.42 and their totalled approx worth is $2786.10.

If any of you reading this (Geoff & Sophie) feel like having a look at my collection (can’t really think why you would to be honest but I’m just trying to show off the novelty of this site) it can be viewed here:

Pulling a tooth could lead to tailor-made sperm

*note* This was written and published on my tumbl blog a few weeks ago.

Researchers in Brazil have found a unique doner for sperm - the human tooth:

Could sacrificing a tooth enable some infertile men to father children? That’s the goal of researchers in Brazil, who suggest that stem cells from human teeth can be coaxed into becoming sperm by injecting them into the testes of mice.

I told this to thesophie, and she suggested that should this be possible, she could take her own tooth, inject it into a mouses testes to produce sperm and then impregnate herself with sperm made from her own tooth, effectively being both mother and father to her own child (the mouse being nothing more than a surrogate).

Isn’t that a bit like incest but with yourself though?

Reading further along the article raised more questions however:

Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute, São Paulo, and her colleagues injected stem cells from the dental pulp of human teeth into the testes of live mice.

The cells seemed to migrate to the tubules where sperm usually mature and differentiate into cells resembling human sperm.

The way this was written makes me wonder if the scientists were just dicking about. Like injecting random cells and body parts into mice testes is something they do when they’re bored or just passing the time, or maybe a way to justify the funding they get: “So how are you guys getting along with all that really expensive equiptment and mice we gave you?”

“We uh, we’ve been conducting a lot of useful experiments involving stem cells - all the rage these days”

“oh really? Like what exactly? I’m just making sure that we’re not overspending or anything”

“Y’know, just stem cell stuff, it’s very important.”

This excited me even more:

However, the process was inefficient and some of the human cells fused with mouse cells – a problem that would have to be solved before the technique could be used therapeutically.

So you’re saying that can create human/mouse hybrids? Will this process work with all animals? Say I wanted to create a werewolf, could I inject my stem cells from one of my teeth into a wolfs nuts and it would give birth to a man/wolf hybrid?