Toy Stories and pretending; taking Peter to the store; why Tammy doesn't drive now

3:00 PM 11/30/10

I'm resting today. No caffeine pills this morning, but I am having a little bit of coffee now. I'm recovering from one of those stomach viruses where I figure out that I'm sick so I stop eating and stop drinking, and I never throw up, I just get really dehydrated for 12 hours or so. I couldn't even take more than a sip of water at a time.

I 'got the file out' a few more times today and yesterday. I have a backlog of garbage that I have mostly cleared out. The piles of trash in my bedroom are gone, but I have 'objects' on the floor now, mysterious unexplained things that need an official place to be. They're not garbage, and I mean to keep them. But they need a more permanent place besides sitting on the floor in my bedroom.

This is going slowly, but at least I am doing a little bit. I don't trust myself. Anytime I've tried self-improvement or time management, bad things have happened, or the enthusiasm wears off after a few weeks, or it's just a passing fad, or I have a disaster and I end up worrying about and dealing with the disaster, and when I go back to trying to do the time management again, I feel too hopeless to try. I really would like to practice time management for the rest of my life, till the day I die. I would like to be conscious of my time management. I don't mean that I need to be obsessed with it or anal-retentive about it. I don't mean that it has to be perfect, or that every second of every day has to be scheduled down to the smallest detail. I just want this to be something I am aware of, and trying to do, forever, so that I can achieve more of the goals that I set for myself, the ones without deadlines, the goals where nobody will come to my house and arrest me if I fail to do it, the no-pressure goals where nobody cares, except me, if I never achieve the goal.

Somebody at my apartment complex doesn't watch Toy Story! There were a few toys in the dumpster today, and a bunch of them fell out when the trash truck lifted it, because the dumpster was overflowing with stuff this time. (I usually don't notice. I haven't been going to the dumpster for a while!) There were some rubber dinosaur toys. I used to have a bunch of those. They are probably still in the attic at home. The dinosaur toys next to the dumpster were actually pretty cool. I would have wanted them if I was still collecting dinosaurs. There were some matchbox cars too (I don't know if that was their official brand name or not, but they were matchbox-like cars). It makes me sad because I feel like toys are alive and they have feelings, just like in the movie. I really, sincerely used to feel exactly like that.

I haven't been buying or collecting any toys for a long time, but I still sometimes feel that desire to collect them. And now that I'm an adult, I have so much more money. I could collect every single toy and I could make the collection absolutely perfectionistic, and I would have every single piece, and every single thing ever made in that toy collection. I used to try to do that with Hasbro's My Little Pony toys.

What did I used to 'play' when I played with toys? Sometimes I played alone. Sometimes I played with my brother, and sometimes with the neighbor kids. We had various 'plots' for the stories that we would play. Sometimes the plots were very creative. Other times they were dull, reassuring routines. My brother John and I both felt like we were 'losing our creativity' as we got older, and the plots for my toy stories weren't as interesting as they used to be.

I remember one big story my brother and I did. We had Fabuland Legos, and the animals went on an adventure and got stuck in The Glue of Time. It was like being in a time-travel rift or something. They were trapped in another dimension and some of the other animals had to go rescue them.

Also, when Bonnie Bunny got mad, she sort of sounded like Miss Piggy from the Muppets. She would say, 'mad, mad, mad, mad, mad... BIGGGGG BUNNNNYYYY!' and she'd transform herself, and then we would bring out my huge, pink, stuffed bunny which was hundreds of feet tall compared to the Fabuland toys. Then she would do whatever she needed to do.

I had one of the 'dull, reassuring routine' plots that I often played with the neighbor kid Jeremy in West Virginia. It was 'feed the dinosaurs.' The dinosaurs were made from hollowed out rubber, and some of them had a big hole in their mouths which went into the hollowed out body. So you could stuff things down in there, as long as you could get them out again. We used to make them eat grass and weeds and other growing plants. We just sat there feeding the dinosaurs. Then, when they got full, we would hold them by the tail and beat them so that the food would fly back out of their mouths and they would be empty again. That was all we did. Sounds boring, doesn't it? But it was comforting. I guess it was like wanting to grow up and become a shepherd and watch the sheep grazing, or something. It's also a lot like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, and watching the little people as they buy burgers and pizza from your little shops. It's satisfying somehow.

Playing pretend, while cooperating with someone else, is an interesting process, and I'd like to read more books about it. I have a book somewhere in my 'google books' list online, but I forget what it's called and I'd have to look it up - oh, it's called 'The House of Make Believe,' that's it. Anyway, when we cooperatively played pretend, one person would suggest something: 'Let's pretend that he can't talk anymore.' (Yes, that was the result of me 'hearing voices' right now while I'm typing.) So one of the toys would be trying to give a message to someone or ask for help, and they weren't able to talk, because they were under an evil magic spell. And you almost always say 'yes' to whatever they suggest, and try to go along with it. Then you adapt the story that's developing to whatever they suggested. And you don't know what the outcome will be.

You can see social dominance in whoever gets to decide what the main plot will be. Sometimes one person does most of the suggesting, and the other person does most of the adapting. Sometimes you play with kids who are more violent and aggressive, and they want to fight battles with you constantly. I didn't usually like plots where you fought battles all the time and were always competing and trying to win. I liked peaceful scenarios and cooperative scenarios. I liked it when there were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys lose in the end, but neither I, nor my friend, are stuck in the role of 'bad guy,' but we both might help to operate the 'bad guy' toys, and then cooperatively fight against them.

Playing pretend with toys might be helpful for writing fiction stories as an adult. I could remember what types of things I liked to pretend, and try to remember why I felt that the plots were somehow boring or unsatisfying later on. For whatever reason, after a while, I felt like I wasn't getting what I needed from playing with toys. One reason was because my best friend Jeremy moved away. The other friends I had weren't the 'cooperative imaginary playing with toys' kind of friends. Many of them were the 'physical outdoor play with large objects' kind of friends. For instance, we might play volleyball, or do gymnastics, at my friend Christina's house. And my friend Sarah and I once built a sort of treehouse, but really, it was just a couple of big heavy branches and ropes strung between two trees, and the branches were big enough to walk on. Neither one of them liked imaginary toy scenarios. I liked playing with both of them, but I couldn't expect them to play toy stories with me.

I wrote fiction stories as a teenager, and many of the images came out of the dreams I had at night. This was before I was consciously aware of 'hearing voices,' and anytime I heard voices or talked to anybody in my head, I viewed it as a 'psychic' experience instead of an attack. So that was how I got a lot of ideas for my stories.

Later on, there was Rachael, my best friend in middle and high school, but she didn't play with toys either. With her, I had the most interesting intellectual conversations that I've ever had with anybody. And she enjoyed reading my fiction stories and cheering me on, and she would wait excitedly and impatiently for the next bit of the story to be written. (No, my stories weren't that great. She was just a very good friend and a very enthusiastic person.)

So I mostly liked cooperative, peaceful scenarios. I didn't like competition, and I felt that I wasn't very good at it. When I tried to compete, I felt like I usually lost. I didn't like submitting and being inferior. I didn't like playing with bossy kids who wanted to beat me down and brag about how great they were for winning against me.

But it's interesting to look at the pretend scenarios that I used to play. We play them because we want to, because they make us feel good. I'd like to know what kinds of stories make me and other people feel good, so that we want to play them, or read them, or watch them, whether it's a video game or a book or movie.

I didn't play in many sports, but I did run track. Running track was competitive, but I didn't get off on thinking about how great I was compared to all the people I had beaten. I was more into enjoying the excitement of traveling in a bus to go to some other school, and the fear and terror and excitement just before the start of a race, and then, running as fast as I could and enjoying that, but also, I had my limits, and I was a mediocre track runner, and I didn't win a lot there either. And I wasn't obsessive about trying to win.

I was a really fast runner if I was in a small group of people. In a small group, I could beat almost anyone. But if the group of people got larger, I became more mediocre in comparison. More and more people could run as fast as I could. So I didn't win much at the multi-school track meets. In fact, I still remember the two little girls who always beat me. It was the same people at every track meet. I think it was these twins, and I think they were black. Am I crazy? Am I remembering correctly? I seem to remember these two black girls who were twins and they were small and they could run the hundred-yard dash faster than I could, every time, and it was hopeless. Maybe it was only one girl, and it's not very likely that she was black, because we had almost zero black people in the area where I grew up. I think I'm remembering wrong. I just know that this one girl (or twins) could ALWAYS beat me at the dash, and there was no hope, ever. Their legs were just designed better than mine.

Actually, I had some problems, over time - my knees started to hurt, and I had 'shin splints' (where the bones in your ankles are slightly cracked, a tiny bit, and it hurts) and I couldn't run very well anymore, and I didn't have any energy either. That must have been during my 'chronic fatigue' phase that was happening in my teenage years. I think I was having a reaction to pesticides at that time, but also, I wasn't eating well. We didn't always have a lot of good food at the house, and I ate tons of cereal and pop-tarts, constantly, because there was nothing else to eat. 'Being trapped in a house with nothing to eat' is one of those things that almost all teenagers experience. You're helpless, you can't drive a car, and you don't have a job, so you don't have much money except maybe a small allowance, and you might not be allowed to cook freely either. And that's right when you're growing and getting a lot bigger really quickly, so you need huge amounts of healthy food. (Steak for breakfast.)

I'm waiting for Peter to call. He wants to go to the grocery store this evening. His wife has a problem with her driver's license. This is one of those things that I can understand and relate to, but at the same time, it never happened to me, because whatever happened to me, it wasn't quite as bad as it was with her. Here's the story.

First, Peter isn't allowed to drive, because he hasn't been able to control his low blood sugar attacks, and the doctors took away his license. The one doctor said that he could have his license back, maybe, if he used a constant blood sugar monitor. He has the monitor now, but he's not using it, and it doesn't matter anyway, because they don't have a car right now.

They actually have two cars. One is a van, and the other is a white car, I forget what kind. The white car is sitting in the lot at the tow truck place. It's basically possessed by the tow truck people now, and they would have to pay a big fee to get it back. The van is sitting in front of their apartment. Both cars are either barely working, or not working, and need lots of repair and maintenance. Both of them have expired registrations. Both of them have expired auto insurance. Both of them are uninspected.

Tammy is trapped in an 'I can't do paperwork' rut. She had the money. She had a job. But for whatever reason, she couldn't bring herself to do the paperwork, fill out the forms, pay the fees, and keep the cars legal. I actually understand EXACTLY how that is, but somehow, I got myself out of it, and it's happened to me several times.

There's kind of a funny story to that, for me. This happened earlier this year, in 2010. I had an expired inspection sticker on my car. The cops pulled me over two or three times for OTHER things - once was because my registration was expired, and once was because I had a headlight out. Both times, they ignored my expired inspection sticker!

I wondered what was going on. I looked at the sticker. It said: 08 10. That actually meant that it had expired in October, 2008 (a long time ago!). When the police glanced quickly at the sticker, they were mistakenly thinking that the sticker meant it would expire in 08/10, or August 2010. It was almost a year and a half expired, since October 2008, but they were reading it backwards. Apparently, the position of the numbers was strange, or reversed, and there was no obvious indication of which number was the month, and which was the year.

I sat there in terror while the cop walked up, looked down at the inspection sticker on the front, and said, 'Inspection's okay,' and continued giving me his ticket for the expired registration. I was thinking to myself, 'What??? The inspection is OKAY? It's been expired for a year and a half now!' He was reading the numbers backwards.

Soon after that, I did, actually, get an inspection, and now it's up to date.

But Tammy has had something similar happen. It is that terrible feeling that you cannot bring yourself to do some piece of paperwork. It is a physical pain, a block, an anxiety attack. I usually got myself through these attacks by using an antidepressant, St. John's Wort, if things were getting badly behind. But for whatever reason, Tammy couldn't get through it. Her health problems are worse than mine. She's taking thyroid medication now because her thyroid is too low. Her face and body used to be all swollen, and it's been improved since she started taking the thyroid pills. But she never had any energy. I can understand how that pain and anxiety of not being able to do paperwork made her not do it, for so long.

She no longer has ANY up to date paperwork for driving. Her driver's license, insurance, registration, and inspection are all expired. The cars need repair. One of them, as I said, is waiting in the tow truck lot. Every piece of paper that can possibly be illegal, is now illegal.

Peter tried to do some of the insurance paperwork for her. But he says that the insurance people told him they need HER signature on something, and they needed to talk to HER about it, because Peter wasn't a legal driver in the house. For whatever reason, he wasn't allowed to finish it. I have a feeling that this is actually not as bad as he's making it sound, but for whatever reason, whenever he tries to get Tammy to do it, she freezes up and can't do anything. She often starts crying when they fight and when Peter tries to make her do it.

Now Peter tells me that she actually didn't even get a driver's license at all when she was a teenager. She got one much later, as an adult, in her twenties, I forget how old. She was used to just not driving, and didn't really care about not leaving the house and not going anywhere. It doesn't bother her that much not being able to drive.

That's the reason why I sometimes drive Peter to the store. But lately I have been losing patience with this, because Peter always takes a REALLLLLY long time at the store. I am impatient because we have been doing this on my days off, and I never have enough time on my days off to rest, and to deal with my OWN disasters, like the garbage pileup. I have trouble sleeping, because of the drug residues and because of the attackers waking me up every few hours all night long, and it's hard for me to even get out of bed before noon. Then I spend the whole afternoon with him on his errands. In some ways, I enjoy being with him and I enjoy spending time with him, but when I am worried about my own disasters, it frustrates me to take so long on something else when I could be at home, when I'm finally awake, when it's the afternoon and I'm finally out of bed.

He will go to Wal-Mart, and he will take three hours to shop. I had complained a bit about how long these trips took, and Peter blamed it on the fact that he is riding a slow-moving motor powered shopping cart because he has foot blisters, but that's not why it takes so long.

Peter does everything slowly. I had forgotten about that. When Peter used to work overnight at McDonald's, people always complained that he was too slow. He would take hours and hours to do something. He shops like that too. I get impatient, and I want to run through the store and just grab something off the shelf and keep moving. But Peter has to pick it up and look at it, compare the prices to all the other prices on the shelf, pick up another item, compare the prices, gripe and complain about how the prices have gone up $0.20 because of inflation, talk about how much it costs at another store someplace else, and so on. Sometimes, he just seems to stand there, picking up one thing and then another thing, and not talking, and I don't even really know what he's doing or why he's doing it, which tends to happen more when his blood sugar is crashing. ('They' told me Peter is an SJ. His awareness of prices is something that I like about him, actually, but it can be annoying.) And he will do this with every single item he picks up. I wouldn't care how long he takes, but I'm the one driving him, and I'm the one escorting him around the store, watching (and smelling) to make sure his blood sugar doesn't crash, and it almost always DOES crash, and he's not using the constant blood sugar monitor either. The longer we stay in the store, the more likely his sugar will crash!

Peter started taking Wellbutrin to help him stop smoking. He still smokes, just not as much. But the Wellbutrin is an antidepressant, and ever since he started taking it, I've noticed that he's more mellow when his sugar crashes. He will obey a suggestion if you tell him that you think he needs to check his blood sugar. In the past, when he wasn't on Wellbutrin, he was - I can't remember the word for it, but it's a word that they always use to describe diabetics having an insulin reaction - it's a word that means something like 'feisty, noncompliant, fighting, defensive,' something like that. I think the word was 'combative.' They say 'no' over and over again and won't do anything at all. They won't eat or drink anything either. He would deny that anything was wrong, and he didn't know his sugar was crashing. He doesn't do that as much now that he's on Wellbutrin. No, I am not an advocate for antidepressant use - I always say that I would like to solve the root cause of the problem or find a better way to do it (for instance, the Feingold Diet to help hyperactive kids and adults). I see antidepressants as a temporary thing that you might use out of desperation, but not use them forever. But still, I have observed that some things are easier to deal with when he is on Wellbutrin.

I'm going to post this now. I've just been sitting and writing most of the afternoon. But I got rid of some of the trash, and I made another trash can out of a cardboard box, and I have some plans for what I am going to do to prevent these problems from happening (as badly) again, even if I get another severe chronic fatigue attack. If the system is hard to use, nobody will use it. So I'm asking 'why does this happen?'