Day 47 – Fisher Wallace CES Report.

The 26th (Monday) was another good day. I have a huge phobia of phone calls. Okay, I’m not sure if phobia is the right word, but when the phone rings I get a sick feeling in my stomach and feel anxious all over.

I spent three years working for an IT startup and was most of the time on-call 24/7/365. The experience was a good one – but I think it severely scarred me when it comes to telephones. This along with the fact that I have always had issues with hearing make phones a distasteful device for me.¹Since I was a small child I’ve had hearing tests. My hearing is fine, there seems to be a disconnect between what I hear and what my brain processes. I have an especially hard time when other noise is occurring simultaneously to speech – its like my brain processes both at equal priority or fails to filter out the “noise” for the conversation. I have a book (looks around at piles of books) here somewhere about this condition or something similar…I started reading it…

But Monday I felt some energy – so when the phone rang, I picked it up each time – seven times in all. That is pretty crazy for me. I can usually handle one or two phone calls a day, and usually space out the time when I return calls, and rarely pick up the phone when someone first calls.²The psychological reasons behind this are too complex to talk about here and I’m not sure I have entirely fathomed them myself. Hint, if you want to get a response from me more quickly – email or text message is a better bet…Even listening to voicemail messages makes me shiver with fear. Is that pathological? Probably, but it is the truth.

I did a bunch of “office work” – mainly communications of various kinds that needed to be read, processed, and responded to. I spent some more time reading Scripture and prepared a lesson for Nomads on the Lost Princess (we are on chapter 8).

Again, I was unable to nap for any significant amount of time. I worked on some personal projects (websites), did some chores around the house, and then went to the church early to check on the washing machine in the parsonage which John Sherk had reported was broken. Thankfully, it was working when I got there…I’m not much of a handyman. Then it was over to the church office, which was locked with the key inside – so I attempted to break in while chatting with John Broglin. Lets just say I am not a good lock picker (I watched a video on the internet to no avail!). We finally got the door open and I made sure I took an extra copy of the key and put it on my key chain for the future.

Then it was leader’s meeting with Kyle, Cayla, and Taylor followed by Imaginiff with Ryan and Kyra. It was a small youth group – and we didn’t want everyone else to miss the progression in the story, so we held off and played a game. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Home by 9:30 I read more Scriptures and Feedly (RSS feeds from numerous tech, science, religious, medical, etc. sites which send me the latest stories they post via Feedly). Watched some TV , used the CES, took clonazepam, and went to bed.

Overall, I’d say it was a “good” day. So, I’ve had a few good days, one decent day…hoping to continue to the pattern…but we’ll see…if the pattern breaks it is likely to do so within the next few days, as up to this point I’ve made it maybe 5 or 6 good days before crashing.