I feel like I have a head injury. I think it’s from lack of sleep. For the past ten days there’s been an intermittent soft throbbing on the right side of my thinking tool, and a general pressure everywhere else.

If I could think properly I’d blame it on Christmas.

The Christmas season always messes with my sleeping patterns. One or two events a week I can handle, but constantly having to be somewhere and then somewhere else six hours later drains my energy levels to the point where I start talking about energy levels.

It always seems like Christmas punches a three week hole into whatever routine I’ve built up to that point, which somehow carries on afterwards… even if I manage to almost catch up. I missed a couple of recycling days around Christmas, then basically got caught up and yet now I’ve got almost three weeks of recycling on my kitchen floor.

.

It’s like I’m using a bucket to empty the bathtub, and once I’ve emptied the equivalent of a bathtub full of water onto the floor the damn thing has filled up again because the tap’s still running.

Last week it felt like I was getting back to a routine, kind of like being on the cusp of being on the cusp of being where I was before Christmas… which was a lovely place, full of clean sleep and three meals a day.

But then I went a couple of days where I was up around the clock because some 70IQ Internet neophyte in Pennsylvania doesn’t understand humour, or the world and her part in it. So I spent a couple of days explaining her role to her.

And I haven’t had a decent nights sleep since. Mostly I blame communists.

I think I also blame my blood sugar, so there could be a conspiracy. Because my blood sugar was so high (20+) for so long (8 years) my body adapted to the symptoms. But now with my blood sugar in the 7-9 range my body is having a much harder time. So my vision is almost constantly blurred and I’m taking three or four five-hour naps a day.

While I’m on the topic, there has also been a lot of joint pain… and for the past couple of weeks my hands have started acting weird.

I’ve been having a hard time putting my hands where I want them, and holding onto the things I’d like to pick up. It’s kind of like they’re only moving 75% of where I want them. It’s really noticeable when I try to tie a knot, use scissors or try to turn the page in my notebook.

My back, sides and shoulders have been screaming for a week as well… which, I think, is from bad sleep more than anything else. I definitely haven’t been lifting anything other than my tired ass back and forth to the computer.

I’m not sure if these are all symptoms of having a case of communists or not. But it also hurts when I do this.

When my head hurts I find it very hard to concentrate long enough to write anything. Even when I have an idea it generally gets pushed out before I can write the next sentence. Which gets frustrating and just adds to the fog and soft-pain pain in my head.

I also get distracted by noise, and when my head is in a fog like it has been over the past two weeks I can generally hear people breathing in the next apartment. Which just adds to the fog in my head.

So I surfed around and ended up finding some links which could prove very useful to any self-respecting blogger. Some of them even have nothing whatsoever to do with porn.

Stolen Content: WordPress has finally opened a space where people whose work has been stolen by Sploggers and Blog Scrapers can leave their information. WordPress staff will then search out any information available on the net as to where and who the thieves are and list their information on their new site.

I tried something similar with Exposing Sploggers, but it helps to have staff and a focus… and the only link in the blogroll is to a site which endorsed my idea.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF has been around since the early 1990’s. Basically they’re an advocacy group doing their best to keep the Internet safe for defenceless bloggers.

The part of their site that’s most interesting is the Bloggers FAQ, basically it’s an explanation of all blogger rights and freedoms.

Google Blog Converter: the guy who owns LiveJournal is making it pretty clear he’s selling the blog service. It’ll probably get sold for gas money back to the people he bought it from… Six Apart, who run TypePad, Vox and Movable Type. So this is a tool anyone who is thinking about migrating their LJ blog to Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can use to make the process easier.

WordPress already makes it fairly easy to move blogs here from elsewhere, but going the other way and moving between other platforms can be freakishly and mind numbingly difficult.

Fuck You, Penguin: thank Christ there’s finally an antidote for that LOL Cheezburger crap.

DBS Trial: a personal blog kept by someone who just had a brain pacemaker implanted to treat his depression. Basically, when it’s fully operational, the device will send an electrical impulse into his brain…

According to Wiki: “Researchers reported in 2005 that electrical stimulation of a small area of the frontal cortex brought about a “striking and sustained remission” in four out of six patients suffering from major depression. Their symptoms had previously been resistant to medication, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy.”

I also found, and added to my blogroll, two smart and irreverent personal blogs written by people who are dealing with their depression — clinical and bipolar.

In no particular order:

i fall down a lot, and; Bipolar Reflections… funny, I thought there were more.

UPDATE: And I’m taking one of them back… I have to research his site more, or at least follow it for a bit longer, so I’m taking it out of my “recommended” pile and keeping it in my private blogroll for now.

.

.