Beau Jackson

One of the blogs I read had an interesting post today, and I thought I’d share a couple of highlights.

The following is a quote from the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield:

Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance…Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up…It’s more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done.

The follow up quote to that (which is what really struck me on a personal level) is from the author of the blog I read (Conversion Diary):

I think the primary difference is that Resistance drama is ego-focused, whereas the healthy ups and downs of the spiritual life are God-focused. When I get mired in bad drama I withdraw into a tiny solar system with my blazing ego at the center, where I fixate on who said what that offended me, whether people will think what I’m doing is great or terrible, whether what I do is good or bad in comparison to other people’s work…and I give nothing back to the world. I’m a black hole. Paralyzed by Resistance. Whereas on the occasions that I’m swept up in positive drama, I’m more focused on God than myself, more concerned with helping people than comparing myself to them, and, most tellingly, I’m still creating. I’m still giving something back to the world.

I see a lot of “ego” based resistance drama in my life (sadly).  It’s something I need to work on, and I thought this was expressed eloquently enough that it was worth sharing.

I’ve had some crazy ideas in my life.  Some of them were crazy-stupid, some of them were crazy-adventurous, some were crazy-awesome, some were crazy-cool, and some of them were crazy-it’s-time-to-call-the-men-in-white-with-the-padded-van.  Some of them I’ve gone through with, some of them I’ve backed out of.

There was the time I jumped off a really tall rock spire at Lake Havasu into the lake.  The spire was probably 50-100 feet tall.  That was crazy-stupid at the time, but it’s crazy-awesome in my mind now.

Then there was the time I joined the army – more or less on a whim.  I followed that up with moving to Colorado with Allena and Nick, and getting settled in there in an apartment with eleven bucks between us for food, and no jobs.  Definitely crazy-adventurous.

One time, Allena and I gave a car to a girl that did a lot of babysitting for us.  It was a crappy car, but it ran, and she was 16 and was tickled to get it.  Crazy-cool.

The stuff where the men in white get called I don’t talk about too much…but Allena knows.  She’s saved me more than once.

A few days ago I started having another crazy idea.  I’ve been thinking about training to run a marathon.  Now I’m a big guy – 6′4″ or so and pushing 290lbs at the moment (thank you sooo much Depakote.  Not.), and I get shin splints, and I’m currently having some fun with plantar fasciitis, and on top of that I doubt I have the money to spare for good running shoes.  So, why would I do such a crazy thing?  I want to get in shape and lose weight…and I think this will help.  I’ve been struggling with depression (thank you again Depakote and Keppra too!) and I think it will help with that too.  But I think mostly because I want to say I accomplished something that not that many people have done (relative to the population of the world of course).

So what do you think?  Crazy?  Should I go for it, or not?

P.S. – Jerome – if you get around to reading this, you and your triathlon’s are a big inspiration!

I have slept with a CPAP machine for seven nights now, and I’ve made a few observations.  While I have felt more rested in the mornings,  I’m still awake a lot in the night.  There are a few sleep issues that CPAP can not resolve.  In no particular order:

• Staying up too late
• Not taking the medication to help you go to sleep (so you sit and breathe through the CPAP and stare at the ceiling for an hour or more)
• Seizures/episodes/whatever – I’m still not sure what these dumb things are
• Crying children that have decided to be awake at 3:00am
• Having to use the bathroom
• Dogs barking (and sounding like they’re in your yard, even when they’re not)

So, as far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on the CPAP machine.  I think if I ever get to sleep all the way through the night, it’ll be a big help.  :)

Friday was a pretty rough day.  I got one piece of upsetting news from the neurologist – during my sleep study EEG, there were “several events” that he wants to cross correlated with *another* EEG – this one a 24 hour EEG.  That produced a lot of intense frustration for me.  On the one hand “several events” is pretty darn vague.  Is several 5?  How about 10?  Maybe 20? And what the heck is an “event”?  Is it something that would make him think that my condition is better than he thought or worse than he thought?  Too many unanswered questions, and of course by the time I got back on the phone with his nurse, he had left for the weekend so I won’t hear anything until Monday.

Another bit of upsetting news from Friday – I had a biopsy done on a rather ugly mole, and it turns out it’s cancerous.  It’s a basal cell carcinoma (which I think is Latin for “big ugly mole”) and is technically malignant, although they almost never spread to other parts of the body.  Normally I would not have found it that upsetting, since my goal was to get it removed anyway and this just confirms that it was a good goal.  But put on top of the other news about more EEG tests…well it just kind of sunk me into a pit.

I’m feeling better today though.  The day started pretty early – our neighbor shot a doe and called to ask if we wanted it.  We all like venison, so the day started pretty early with skinning/gutting a dear, but it was a good time all the same.  We also had some folks over that are buying a couple of sheep from us, and they were really nice.

Tomorrow I get to do another sleep study.  It turns out I have sleep apnea after all, so tomorrow they will be putting me on a CPAP machine and getting it adjusted to me.  I’m really, REALLY looking forward to this.  I’m extremely hopeful that I will actually start SLEEPING through the night again – something that hasn’t happened since the seizures started.

Trying to stay positive!

I had a sleep study done last night – I’m actually blogging from bed at the sleep center this morning.  On the one hand, the good news is that I don’t have sleep apnea (well, just a little if I sleep on my back), at least not enough to warrant a CPAP machine.  On the other hand, the bad news is that I don’t have sleep apnea.

That may sound odd, but in a way I was hoping my sleep problems were due to apnea and they could put me on a CPAP machine and it would be this magic bullet that just fixed everything.  So I’m kind of back to square one, in not knowing why I don’t sleep well.

The technician who was monitoring me was kind enough to take a picture for me and mail it to me – I thought it would be good for laughs.  If you look closely, you can even see the red “L” on my forehead.  I’ll let you decide for yourselves what that stands for :)

All wired up