The dead cat story.

OK, this is sort of a more serious post for me. I’ll be upfront, it’s a friend-of-a-friend story, so how much of it you want to believe, I’ll leave up to you.

So this is a story of two young women, who’ll we’ll call Abby and Betty.

Abby had a rough time growing up. Her parents devoiced when she was around four and her father left the state. Her mother got involved with someone who was a real arsehole to Abby and after a number of years, Abby decided she didn’t have to put up with it and left home while she was still in her teens. She then got herself into a fair bit of trouble, I think the phrase “falling in with a bad crowd” is one that is used in this situation. She ended up pulling herself out of it, making a real effort to get her life under control and she succeeded.

Betty on the other hand, came from a middle-class family that didn’t struggle financially, she had a supportive and loving family and really didn’t have any drama’s more that you would expect any person who grew up in such an environment to have.

Betty and Abby ended up working in the same place and despite their different backgrounds, they became close friends. Here the story skips ahead a bit. Abby had gotten back in contact with her biological father and they had bonded really well, but unfortunately, a little over a year he unexpectedly passed away and as you could imagine, Abby took it hard. Three months after this, Betty’s cat that she had since she was a child died and Betty was really, really upset.

So Abby and some other friends took Betty to the pub that night for some drink based comfort, but Betty was near hysterical over the loss of her cat. Some of their mutual friends were feeling a little uncomfortable about this as they knew Abby was still upset about the death of her father.

At one stage, when they had a moment alone, one of the mutual friends asked Abby if she was ok with what was happening and Abby asked him what he meant. He explained that he felt a little strange about trying to comfort Betty, knowing Abby had recently suffered a greater loss. Abby just explained it this way.

“What you have to understand is that this is the worse thing that has happened to Betty. She has never had any other pets dies, let alone a friend or family member die. She has had no chance to build up the defences that would help her deal with this. What she is going though now may be a small thing to some people but it is the worse thing she has ever had to deal with. Right now she is going through the most upsetting thing of her life to this point. And she is my friend and I want to be here for her.”

******

I hope I never forget this story. It can be easy to sometimes to dismiss an event without thinking of the emotional impact that it can have on an individual. I’ve told this story to a few times to friends, mainly when they have been upset about something but going through that stage of feeling the need to apologise for being upset. I guess I tell them this story because I don’t think their being upset over something small is silly, I am more concerned about the fact they are upset and that I want to be there for my friends when they are going through a hard time…

What to do?

To follow up from my earlier post.

I was really tired when I left for work this morning. That in itself is nothing new and usually I can struggle through the day. It was when I stopped a the café where I get my usual morning coffee from that I realised this was going to be a little more difficult and that after last nights apnoea attack I was actually probably too tired to function at a basic level.

I pretty much came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t be at work 2 hours after turning up. Fortunately, my team leader is an easy going guy and he had no problems with me taking off at midday after I explained what had happened.

Now my difficulty is this. I’m at home, far too tired to do anything productive. I’m worried if I go back too bed I’ll just end up sleep for 4 to 6 hours and will completely bugger up my chances of getting a good nights sleep tonight. I suspect that if I just try reading a book or watching a DVD I’ll end up falling asleep on the couch.

Basically, I need to find something engaging enough that it will keep me awake, but requires no thought or real effort. I’m doubting if anything really exists that can fall into that category.

Any suggestions?

Being attacked in my sleep.

Urk! So I have sleep apnoea.  These days most people knows what that means, but in case you don’t it basically when you stop breathing for short periods as you sleep.  I don’t suffer from it badly, usually I never know that it’s happen and I’ll just be a little more tired during the next day.  That and I know that I snore very loudly, which is a side effect.  In fact the biggest risk is if I’m ever in a relationship that last any length of time, that whoever I’m sharing a bed with will decide that my stopping breathing is a acceptable price to pay for a good nights sleep.  Truly, I have been warned about it in the past.

One of the worse attacks I had was while I was suffering from a cold.  I woke up from a dream that I was drowning and I was really desperately gasping for air.  Last night I beat that with my worse attack ever.

Again interestingly, it affected my dreams.  I dreamt I was in a duel, old fashion pistols, 10-paces-turn-and-fire type thing. In the dream I lost and was shot in the chest, I immediately woke up, struggling for breath and started a 20 minute coughing fit as I tried to get over it.

Needless to say, when you’re a little groggy, you can find this a little traumatising and I didn’t really have a good nights sleep for the rest of the night, very annoying since this happened only around an hour after drifting off.

So now I’m very tired and my throat is still sore from all the coughing I did.  However, I’m always intrigued when I can trace dreams directly back to real life events.  If I could wake up more I could possibly even think clearly about it…

I wonder if it happens often to other people? The real life/dream thing I mean, not the stop breathing thing…

I’ve an ouchie.

Actually, it doesn’t really hurt. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s around .0000000000000000025.  Which I think for me is taking being a wimp to a new all time high… or low.  It’s just on the end of my index finger so as I type it just gets really annoying.

So another short post. I’ll leave you with picture from my sketchbook. A glass of milk.

Chosen cause I’m wondering if I’m getting enough calcium.

Yeap, it's a glass of milk.

Things to do…

Bills to pay, people to meet, stuff to read, crap to avoid doing and beers to drink.

Busy night, so for today, I’ll leave you with one of my unfinished pieces.

It’s pastels with acrylic paint. It didn’t really work how I wanted. I was trying to do a leaf, with a pattern instead of veins. But after spending ages on the pastels, I started on the paint and discovered I really have should have left the leaf part much lighter. Maybe I’ll try again one day…

Ehhhhh... sort of getting there, but not really

Comics. Sometimes they aren’t what they use to be.

I was going to try and re-write my post from yesterday, but it was a long one and I’m tired and feeling like a bit of time away from the computer. So I’ll keep this quick and leave the three or so of you that read this blog with a question.

I love a lot of different comics and cartoons. When I was a kid, Wizard of Id was up there as one of them. Then as I got older, the comic seem to get worse and worse. They seem to be not as well drawn, written and they seem to lose all sense of humour. I now normally cringe when I see them in the paper.

Not so long ago, I found out both the creators (Brant Parker and Johnny Hart) died in 2007. Of course, I personally think the strip would have been hamstrung in it’s later years as Jonny Hart (also creator of BC) went a little of the rails, becoming more in more inclined to include his right wing political views and religious beliefs into the comics he worked on. In my opinion, neither are real comedy boosters.

I understand Parkers son, Jeff Parker, now keeps the strip running. Apparently he assisted with the strip with years before the deaths of the original creators. Unfortunately, I just don’t think he has the talent of his father and I feel a little sorry the strip wasn’t retired.

So I ask you. if you inherited, the rights to a profitable, creative enterprise, such as a comic strip, music or a book series, what would you do? Would you be tempted to try and keep it running?

No post, but this will totally make up for it.

OK, I was writing up today’s blog post, but managed to close the window three quarters through it without saving. That’s what I get for drinking BEER! not concentrating.

So instead I’m going to post a link to something that in my opinion is very, very cool! First, a word of warning though, I have no idea what the site says cause it’s in Russian and there are porn links at the bottom of the page, which makes what I’m about to say in the next paragraph a little disturbing if you think about it too long. The rest of the page is safe and you absolutely have to see it (the page I mean, I’ll leave it up to you if you want to see the porn or not).

Basically, children’s drawings are brought to life via photography. It’s absolutely terrific and I can believe I haven’t seen it more often. Especially without the porn links…

http://fishki.net/comment.php?id=32304

Hopefully, normal posting will return tomorrow.

Being Bored Beyond Belief…

OK, I won’t name the company I work for here, cause getting fired would completely suck I could get into a little trouble. I’ll just say it’s a large corporation.

The thing is, I’m kind of in a supporting role for my department. Meaning that 99.9% of the people that do the same work as I do, work in another department. This causes the problems you would imagine, that I miss important information and what not, cause I’m “in between” all the standard structures.

A good case of this happened the other week. We had to do some training. Now the 99.9% of the people with a similar role to me, had a training course that lasted only a couple of hours. I had to do the one for my department. That went all day. That had nothing to do with what I do in the company. That was absolutely soul destroying a little boring. Let’s look at 2 random little doodles I was working on in training… I’ve retyped the text in a hope it’s a little more readable than my handwriting.

Did you notice the times on them? Honestly after that I wanted to do more, but couldn’t bring myself to. I spent most of the afternoon drawing a brick wall. Partly, because a brick wall was much more interesting, partly because I really want a handy brick wall to bang my head against.

I’m sure the trainers we really impressed…

Old Friends…

OK. I said yesterday that I was in a cranky mood. That hadn’t changed today, but I forced myself out to go and see my old flatmates the Wonderful and Witty Mr & Mrs M.

I’ve been slack in keeping in contact with them since I moved out just before new years, but it was a good boost to the old want-for-social-interaction. Not a minute after I turned up we had BEERS! started a good old fashion catch up.

Mr M is one of my oldest friends and we’ve had times where we’ve been out of touch for a couple of years due to living and work arrangements. But somehow we’ve always managed to pick things up again.

This is probably not of any interest to anyone else, but I can’t help but thinking these are the things to dwell upon every now and then.

Not an amusing post I know, so I’ll end in presenting the literal video translation of “white wedding” (via rumproast)

UPDATE:

Freek! The embed isn’t working for some reason… try this

I’ll see if it works tomorrow…

Got to get stuff done…

OK, a few things to get done today.

I’ve just got to get started.  I’m sure it will happen soon… even if it didn’t the last 4 days I tried to get all this done.

Btw… If you haven’t watched any of  “Tales of Mere Existence” by Lev Yilmaz before, they are great.

Go visit www.ingredientx.com