NonFicThing: Purgatory-bound

After another particularly rough morning surfacing the kind of things requisite to write the NonFicThing – those things being my Type One Diabetes – and a particularly rough few weeks in dealing with said T1D, I've decided that, for my mental state, I need to send to said project to my Project-Purgatory.

I've always considered – and still consider – writing to be my respite, my sanctuary: it is where I can push myself forward and be most myself. However, while I'm not one to shy away from tackling difficult subjects, when that difficult subject is one that is being particularly bastardy in its inexplicable machinations (literally) through my bloodstream consuming, at the moment, almost all of my waking hours – and sleeping ones, as the problems seem to arise there – my respite, my sanctuary of creation, is spent tackling my failure to move a project forward about the current failure of my day-to-day to control my T1D.

While I had plenty of nifty things planned for it, and still hope to maybe one day push it forward, I simply – for the sake of my mental well-being – cannot devote more time to thinking about my omnipresent condition than I already do just to stay alive.

/25oct2021

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Another morning of batshit crazy blood sugar: I feel like crap and all I can do is add more and wait and see; I loathe all three truths but they are the truths that I'm dealing with at present and all I can do is move along (this is what I'm telling myself). That nothing helps makes the situation feel all the more hopeless. You wanted to know the T1D day-to-day? You've got it: Hopelessness punctuated by occasional rage and/or jubliation amidst perpetual self-judgment that does nothing but harm of which you seem, even fully medicated and with 20 years of meditation on your belt, incapable of "letting go." Between that and Kirby's coned neediness and the constant feeling of walls closing in, I'm about to declare mental exhaustion on everything and everyone and go live in a cave with my Multi-Grain Cheerios and a bottle of wine.

The day fucking awaits; nine days of conelife – though it's better with the new clear blue cone, yay peripheral vision – remain.

Panarchy / Sustainable Scale Project

Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change. It is the study of how economic growth and human development depend on ecosystems and institutions, and how they interact.  It is an framework, bringing together ecological, economic and social models of change and stability, to account for the complex interactions among both these different areas, and different scale levels (see Scale Levels).  

Panarchy’s focus is on management of regional ecosystems, defined in terms of catchments, but it deals with the impact of lower, smaller, faster changing scale levels, as well as the larger, slower supra-regional and global levels. Its goal is to develop the simplest conceptual framework necessary to describe the twin dynamics of change and stability across both disciplines and scale levels.

Came across this on a Cool Tools podcast with futurist Leah Zaidi: my own elementary understanding of this is that it’s sort of a “Hero’s Journey” model of reality (which fully embraces reality’s inherent complexities). Fascinating concept; the whole article – and Zaidi’s website – is worth absorbing, as are the notes from the podcast.

/24oct2021

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Blood sugar grand at bed, shit at breakfast – an occurence explained by my not being able to run outside yesterday thanks to blood sugar being too low (has to be 180+/- – I was 113, figure which, the day before, with the same amount of insulin dropped me only 13 points instead of the 100+ it dropped me yesterday) when it came time to run, which then set off a chain reaction through the day, one that will, most likely continue throughout the weekend and at least into Wednesday when it will go crazy again because I'm getting my COVID booster – Pfizer mix-n-match to top off ye olde antibodies with some mRNA deliciousness on top of my J&J good-idea-at-the-time AND my flu shot (though I might postpone that given what will clearly, over the next couple of weeks, be an immune-system rodeo orgy of heightened everything) – which I will then have to explain to my endo the next Wednesday when I'm told that I didn't do that great with my A1C and time in target (target this, I say, with my middle finger raised) and I can say no shit Sherlock but here I am – in my immuno-heighted iteration-of-self with a hyperactive dog in a cone (10 days to go) so fuck you and fuck rye bread and fuck your admonition to stop eating my Multi-Grain Cheerios with almond milk at breakfast because it's the one source of joy I derive these days from food (save mushrooms on a bacon cheeseburger) – but today I'm running my six miles even if it's a cold rain and I get pneumonia so there and I say all of this with a mouthful of dark chocolate almonds because Sunday which means I have to engage in familial small talk all fucking afternoon which serves to remind me only how much I've failed in my goals – to never see this place again – but I'm pretty good thanks for asking.

(Oh, fiddling with a new app that I’m kind of falling in love with. Might publish a Worknotes post on it later today but FIIK.)