When Life Hinges on Chairs and Toner Cartridges

I didn't fall into a black hole, though it might seem that I must have done. I wasn't despairing about my current circumstances, or feeling depressed. The closest to that was exhaustion. You see, my life apparently hinges on a properly situated chair, and obtaining toner cartridges. Most of the delays I face at the moment are because I'm unable to print. Sound ridiculous? Let me explain. You see, Revenue Canada owes me a lot of money from back taxes. In order to file my returns I need to print the forms that need to be filled out. I can't do them and submit electronically because I'm too far behind on them and can't create a log-in, so they all have to be done in hard copy.

So, I ordered toner cartridges for a really good price from eBay, and idiotically forgot to change my address on there, so they got shipped to my old address in another city. It's a huge rigamarole for me to get there, but my ex went to pick up his mail and got the cartridges after they'd been sitting there for weeks. I finally was able to arranged for my daughter to pick them up from him, since she works very close to where my ex is living now. Well, he was late getting home and they missed one another, which means waiting even longer to get them.

You may wonder why the money is so necessary. Well, I need to get a car. I need one very badly. I have to be able to get to doctor's appointments all over the place, and I need to be able to run errands. My injuries are such that I'm not even supposed to be walking, yet it's a 30-minute walk for me to get to my family doctor - never mind the specialist I see in another city. Buses are a huge hassle, especially when you need to walk several blocks to make connections, or they don't travel where you need to go.

Another reason I need money, especially after yesterday where we had three blackouts, is because my computer is dying a slow and painful death. Well, painful for me anyway. It becomes agony for an impatient person to have to wait for a laptop to chug along and do something that should have been accomplished in a microsecond. My poor laptop has been subjected to a fair bit of stress. A lightning strike dinged my LAN cable input, so I have to use wireless now. The blackouts have messed up my sound through my speakers, and they killed one of the connections that involve my battery charging - so if my laptop is accidentally unplugged, or the power goes out, it just shuts off. I have no battery backup. Never mind the fact that it's about 6 years old now, and you might as well brand it an antique. Computers this old are laughable.

A new computer means being able to do my own online show, too. I've got big plans for it. Check out the Aberrant Rain page on my personal website if you're curious as to what it's all about. For that matter check out my website in general, and don't forget to bookmark it! You can find the home page at www.rainstickland.com. Welcome to my strange little corner of the world.

So, you see, I haven't been entirely unproductive. I just haven't been doing any writing really. I did write one piece for a new website I'm contributing to, called The Simple Keys. It's a piece I'm rather proud of actually, and something I've been meaning to write about for some time. It's called, "Don't Just Survive...Thrive! Rape and Abuse Don't Have to Destroy Your Life." It's subject matter that's pretty important to me on a very personal level, and I'm very open about what I've gone through simply because I want to give hope to someone else who may not have healed from their own experiences.

The biggest reason I haven't been writing is because I haven't had a proper chair set up with my desk to be able to sit up and write. My laptop has been on my night stand so that I could lie in bed to use it. It's not laziness that has me in bed, in case you're not familiar with my previous blog postings. It's injuries. I've got major damage to my hip joints that will require four separate surgeries within the next eight years. Good times.

I spend a fair bit of my time heavily medicated, which is another reason for my writing hiatus. I have to switch things around all the time because some drugs lose their effectiveness, while others cause damage to my liver. Thankfully the liver is an organ that heals itself if it stops getting pounded by something. I'm on a good drug now that's non-narcotic. It's a neuropathic pain reliever. It helps with the pain in my nervous system, dulling the pain signals that go to my brain. It doesn't get rid of it entirely, but it makes my life a hell of a lot more comfortable.

I can't guarantee that I'll be able to contribute to my blog all the time anymore, though I will certainly try to add to it far more regularly than I have been - which has been not at all for about three months now. Some people wondered if it was the presence of a new man in my life, but it wasn't that. He's very encouraging when it comes to my work. He's not possessive of my time, or threatened if I'm focusing on other things. Besides, he's well aware that I'm crazy about him, so insecurity will not have a foothold there.

Finally I have managed to get my old chair set up in my bedroom in such a way that I can write properly again. I'm in as comfortable of a position as possible, though it may take some getting used to. The last few weeks have been a bit of a horror show for me when it comes to pain, and we had a cold snap that made it even worse. It was hardly encouraging to my writing. I was getting ideas for a number of pieces, but just wasn't able to bang them out on the keyboard. Well, hopefully I have resolved that issue and will be back in fighting form. At least for a while.

To be honest, I've been feeling somewhat discouraged about my current physical situation. You see, I finally got to see an orthopedic surgeon, but it turned out he no longer does surgery at all, and he never did hips. He didn't even know of any other specialists that do. Most of the orthopedic surgeons he knew worked on shoulder injuries. Well, he is in a wealthier city, and those wealthy people do need to be able to play their golf games. I, on the other hand, live in an economically depressed city, seeing as I'm somewhat economically depressed myself at the moment. Apparently there are some world-class surgeons here who work on hip injuries. Yippee...except that it may take a year for me to get in to see them, and then be put onto a waiting list just for my first surgery. We'll have to see what happens there.

When you're fighting to get proper care, you're in constant pain and living on drugs, and you can't get around to your appointments without a great deal of struggle, after a while you just get tired. I'll bust my butt for months to get somewhere, make a little headway, and just get worn out from it all. Then I just kind of give up for a while. I simply can't keep fighting. I don't think anyone can fight all the time. Especially when you get one piece of discouraging news after another. I got excited when I finally got in to see a specialist about my hips, and it was a huge let-down to find out he couldn't help me at all. Not only that, but after some research and finding out it was going to take many more months just to get in to see someone who could help me, I just had to take a break from it to some extent.

I think I'm back for another round of struggle, though. I'm not entirely certain, but it seems as though I'm starting to get a few things done again. I did manage to make my bedroom conducive to working and writing, which was a huge deal for me. It isn't easy to do housework of any kind when all you want to do is curl into a fetal position and moan, never mind moving furniture around. Still, it had to be done if I was ever going to get moving with my life. Maybe after this I'll be in a lot of pain again for a while. Who knows? At least I've got things set up for myself, though.

I used to write a blog posting every single day. I liked having that outlet, I guess. It wasn't just about personal stuff either. I wrote a lot of opinion pieces on various political and social issues. I don't want to be one of those people that are screaming about things all the time, though. I need to be more positive. Are there things that need changing in the world? Sure there are. Are there things that piss me off? Absolutely. The problem is, yelling about it just makes everyone mad. Yelling at someone for it doesn't change any minds. I decided a long time ago to approach things from a different angle, so when I write pieces now I'm going to try to write about what I think the solution is, or just outline possibilities. I have no problem with detailing the issues I'd like to see resolved, and spreading out the bits and pieces of them so that we can all look at an issue from various angles. I think that would be a much better approach than just getting upset and making everyone else either upset or defensive.

Nobody knows what the future holds, of course, so I can't say for certain where I'll go with my work, or even where I'm going with this blog, but I'll certainly be writing a lot more in the near future. One thing I should note, however, is that I intend to do a lot of fiction writing. That means I need to be in a slightly different frame of mind. My postings on here will likely reflect that. I'll be doing research on subjects that pertain to the new book series I've started, which means my curiosity will compel me to delve far deeper into a topic than I need to, as well as meandering onto other topics that pop into my head. I'll be sure to find out a whole bunch of weird and interesting facts that I just have to share with everyone.

My new fiction series is going to be about demons, but in a new and intriguing way. I don't know about all of you, but I'm starting to get a little bit tired of seeing the scads of books and movies in the vampire genre. Sure, I would love to stop aging and be immortal, but it's not bloody likely (pardon the pun), so I think we probably all want to move on to something else for a while. Anyone who reads fiction probably isn't looking for a lot of realism, but the same subject does get tiresome after a while.

Okay, now that I've updated everyone, and gotten back in touch with my writing identity, I think I need to rest up for a bit. I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and everything I've been doing to get ready for it has tuckered me out! Back to playing games for a while tonight, and then I'm going to sleep. I hope everyone is doing well, and that life has been treating you kindly so far in the new year.