Argument With Myself

"It's time to trim my hair."

"But I love it long!"

"It's so long that it's impractical."

"I wonder how long it can get..."

"No."

"But..."

"NO."

"But it'll feel short. I'll be taking a whole eight inches off!"

"It'll still be long by any one else's standards."

"But it'll be short by mine."

"You keep trapping it under you when you get in bed."

"Yeah, but..."

"No. It'll be unmanageable soon if it keeps growing."

"But..."

"It's only a trim. It'll grow back if you really miss it."

...and this is the internal argument that occurs in my head when I trim my hair, oh, maybe every year. Or so. You know, whenever I get around to it.

Before vs. After

This wasn't my first idea of what to write about today. But I found the above photo while looking for photos for something else and decided that it might be more fun to write out an argument I have with myself on a regular (yearly?) basis.

I trimmed my hair recently and it now comes down to my waist, whereas before it was about three feet long. Seriously, I measured it after my mom made a comment about it being three feet. It took me a couple days to adjust to the new length, waist length did feel short at first.

Hopefully tomorrow's blog post will have more substance. At the moment I think I'm too tired to think up anything brilliant to write about.

Cats and the Dog

Having a new dog in the house has really changed some dynamics.

For one thing, the two cats are treating each other differently. Historically Kokopelle has bothered Saphira a lot, leading to squabbles. ("Bothered" as in, he doesn't know he's neutered.) When Josie came along they had a common...not enemy, but a common source of uncertainty to be cautious of. This united the two for a while, and even though Kokopelle is perfectly fine with Josie now he's still getting along with Saphira better than he had been before.

Kokopelle and Josie

What's really amazing to me is that Kokopelle and Josie actually get along great now, as you can see in the above photo where they're happily relaxing next to each other. They even play together! This is a major change from when Kokopelle was a kitten and clawed me up to escape when he glimpsed a friend's dog one evening. That was a somewhat unpleasant experience.

Kokopelle has also started changing some of his habits, in some delightful but also annoying ways that I'm sure are Josie's fault.

First of all, Josie has taken to sleeping under the blankets with my mom. (Except for when she decides to sleep on my bed...not sure how she decides who to sleep with.) Despite Kokopelle seeing Saphira sleep under the blankets with dad for years, he's apparently finally figured out that it might be fun to snuggle with a human friend (me) under the blankets from watching Josie. So, he was asking to get under the blankets with me for about a week. Which was sweet, except for when it wasn't.

Yeah, it's difficult to find it sweet when Kokopelle wakes me up to request that I allow him under my blankets. Can't he figure out how to get under them by himself? Or at least climb right in rather than gaze at them thoughtfully when I hold the blanket up for him?

When I got tired of waiting for a decision on his part and decided to go back to sleep one night, Kokopelle decided to bat at my head. And when I pulled the blanket over my head, would you care to guess what he did? If you guessed crawl up on top of my head and bathe himself, you guessed correctly. I still can't quite believe he did that.

Josie escaping

Not only is Josie settling in, but she also finds way to get into...trouble. As pictured, Josie managed to chew a large enough hole in the crate that mom bought for the car to stick her head out of it. She also keeps escaping from harnesses that mom buys her. When Josie isn't teaching my cat new tricks she spends her time trying to outwit my mom, and so far the dog seems to have a knack for winning those contests if mom isn't careful.

Head Stuff

Technically I missed a day of writing on this blog. Technically. I'm blaming it on my sleep schedule, and one could argue that due to my sleep schedule I haven't missed a day...just that my days are weird at this point in time.

Why is my sleep schedule messed up? Maybe it's to do with depression. Yeah, not only am I still working through the anxiety stuff, I've also got to deal with depression. At least the meds that work for one also work for the other. So that's one good thing.

I'm finally figuring some things out about my depression/anxiety. For example, I finally have a word to describe my fear of being out of the house by myself: agoraphobia. Strangely, most people suffering from agoraphobia have experienced a panic attack in public, which I haven't. So I'm odd there. I also finally figured out that I'm depressed, after a while of showing symptoms without actually feeling it. Yeah, did you know it's possible to be depressed without feeling particularly down all the time? I knew it, but this is the first time it's happened to me. I also finally learned the term intellectualization, which turns out to be my go to defense mechanism.

Yeah, I know that the above paragraph might be better broken down into several paragraphs because it looks messy as written. Jumping from one problem to another really quickly. But I think it sort of reads how my head feels right now.

...and this is turning out to be a difficult post to write, even though I do want to write a bit about what's going on with me head-wise right now.

The funny thing about intellectualization is that it's used as a way to keep anxiety and stress at bay, which might explain why I've been using it. A brief definition that I found at psychology.about.com was: "Intellectualization works to reduce anxiety by thinking about events in a cold, clinical way. This defense mechanism allows us to avoid thinking about the stressful, emotional aspect of the situation and instead focus only on the intellectual component." I thought it was a good way to handle things, and that I could think myself out of feeling anxiety, stress, anger, sadness...any emotion that I'm uncomfortable with. But no, turns out things don't work like that.

Perhaps proving that intellectualization is a problem for me, my knee jerk response to learning what it is and realizing it's what I do in my head all the time is to learn as much as I can about it and think about how to work around it. Yeah, think about how to not use thinking as a way to avoid certain emotions. I suspect that just accepting whatever emotions come my way, whatever they are, may be a better solution.

Waterfall Among Rocks, non sequitur yeah but I want something pretty here

 
On a different note, apparently blogger is eating comments on my blog again. If a comment of yours isn't showing up, that's why.