Brief Update: Bad News (for me)/Good News (for people who like my blog)
Proper update later, but here’s a very rare personal post. Some of you may have noticed the lack of posting recently. It’s been because I’ve been working very hard for months, putting in a substantial amount of overtime, and I’ve also been feeling unwell for quite some time.
On Tuesday I went to the doctor and was told I have high blood pressure. Not “you’re going to have a heart attack tomorrow” blood pressure, but “you need to work *at most* three days a week for the next month and not do anything stressful, and that way you won’t wake up screaming at 2AM thinking your head will explode” high blood pressure. While normally I’m a workaholic, I’m also a workaholic who wants to live to see forty, so I’m following the doctor’s advice.
Since I find writing about the most relaxing thing there is to do, and since I’ve got an enforced break from work, you can expect a *lot* of blog posts over the next few weeks – once I feel better enough that I can look at a screen for long periods of time, anyway…
you have my sympathy. i rather fear i’m heading towards something similar i’m afraid… ugh
I do hope not. Make sure you get to a doctor and have it checked out.
I was diagnosed with high blood pressure back in June. I’ve been trying to join the Navy Reserves (it’s my last year of eligibility, age-wise), and I found out I have high blood pressure when I took a physical for the Navy.
There are 2 paths you can take: The natural way (lose weight, cut back on sodium, exercise), or the medication route. Or a combination of both, in the event the natural way doesn’t work. I have to do both, as losing weight, exercising and cutting back on salt didn’t work for me. In my case, I have high blood pressure on both sides of my family, so it’s probably a genetic thing. Reducing stress isn’t really a realistic option for anyone……stress is a part of life.
The Navy is considering me……they have to give me a waiver because of my blood pressure, though. It’s a slow, bureaucratic process.
Hope the medication helps, though from what I’ve read it’s not nice. My uncle (a medical biophysicist) told me that many people with high blood pressure have magnesium deficiencies, so I’m taking 300mg a day of magnesium citrate, which he says might help. You might want to try that…
I’ve been taking a generic blood pressure medication that starts with an “E,” by I forget the full name of it. “Encephilin,” or something like that, I think.
It’s always best to try to do things the natural (hard) way, if possible though.
I was diagnosed with high blood pressure so threw myself into exercise, cycling ten miles a day. When this failed to turn me into a perfect physical specimen after two whole weeks, my GP, barely able to contain her excitement, prescribed me some shit which, after another two weeks got me into a lovely pattern of not sleeping at all and feeling suicidal. Eventually, having been awake for three days running, I thought ‘fuck this shit,’ and packed it in. I now cycle fifteen miles a day. I don’t smoke. I never drank much anyway. I eat what I want to eat and I don’t feel like killing myself. I have no idea what my blood pressure is and I no longer give a shit, quite frankly. No-one lives forever.
Sounds like you’re taking the right attitude to it. And yes, from what I know, pretty much all blood pressure medication is nasty shit.
In my case, I’m taking the enforced leave of absence from work, have stopped drinking coffee for a while to see if that helps, and am taking magnesium supplements which should help lower my blood pressure. But I’m only really concerned about getting it down to the level that I can climb some stairs without having a splitting headache.
Hope you do manage to beat the blood pressure, Andrew!
But I was mostly posting to comment on you finding writing “relaxing”. I think for me it’s more like an addiction I can’t shake! I was about to say I find it challenging, but I think it mostly depends where in the process I am. In the early stages it’s more like ideas appearing before me I try to scribble down. But by the end of putting it in a coherent, ordered and readable fashion it’s pretty much become hard graft. (And the distinction gets extended the longer the thing I’m writing.) Do you find the whole thing relaxing?
It depends on the type of writing. If I’m writing a structured non-fiction thing like my Beatles, Beach Boys or Monkees things, there are parts which I can write almost automatically, without really thinking, and that’s almost like a self-hypnosis thing. Sometimes, though, those can become hard work.
For my other writing (short stories, An Incomprehensible Condition, political ranting, songwriting) it’s pretty much all like you describe the early stages. It’s a huge release of pressure for me, getting the ideas out that have been building up inside me.
And part of the fun of that is getting it structured and readable on the fly. What I enjoy most, actually, is having part of my brain think about, and solve, the structural problems *while* another part of my brain is just getting the ideas out. It’s the same kind of thinking as when improvising in music (when recording with my first band, the sound engineer would sometimes get surprised when I did a different take of a solo and it was totally different, because he’d assumed it had been worked out in advance).
I do very, very little in the way of redrafting, because I find that the way my brain works I get all the structure I want on the first pass, while my prose style is never any good no matter how hard I work on it, and it loses what little spontaneity it has in a welter of sub-clauses if I revise much.
“What I enjoy most, actually, is having part of my brain think about, and solve, the structural problems *while* another part of my brain is just getting the ideas out. It’s the same kind of thinking as when improvising in music”
I’d have to take your word over music, but the first part I pretty much relate to. In fact that’s precisely why I called my blog ‘lucid frenzy’, in that its about uniting seemingly opposing parts of the brain – creative and structuring. To my mind its best summed up by the Diego Riviera print ’The Communication Vessels’, the “interaction between the life of dreams and waking life in terms of the ebb and flow of fluid between two containers.”
”I do very, very little in the way of redrafting, because I find that the way my brain works I get all the structure I want on the first pass, while my prose style is never any good no matter how hard I work on it,”
Ah, but here we differ! It I didn’t redraft anything I wrote, it would have all the form and coherence of one of my rants down the pub! I also find structuring pieces expands and enhances the argument, shows up weak spots, apparent contradictions and points where more ‘linkage’ is needed. I do work on the prose style, but I’m not sure anyone would notice!
Yeah, that picture works very well…
I honestly tend to find that my structuring gets *worse* the more I work on it, once I’ve finished a draft. I get a tendency to overexplain obvious connections when I redraft, which turns “I never thought of it like that” into “Yes yes I get it you can shut up now YOU TEDIOUS LITTLE TIT!” very quickly.
Instant structure? Maybe that’s why I’m not a software engineer…
I wonder if we could have some sort of exchange scheme. I have very low blood pressure…
I *did* have very low blood pressure up to a couple of years ago. It turns out that the cure for this is to take a job that requires you to sit in one spot for up to eleven hours a day while thinking very hard and drinking copious amounts of caffeine to aid concentration.
Also, going to Gregg’s for your breakfast every single morning and never doing any exercise.
(The other parts of the cure, like financial insecurity, taking on massive obligations to other people that you feel guilty about every second of the day when you haven’t done them, and being a member of the Lib Dems, you’re already doing).
I actually got only half way through describing my symptoms to the doctor before she said “you’re a software engineer, aren’t you?” Apparently high blood pressure is roughly the software engineering equivalent of black lung for miners.
I’m very pleased you’ve gotten some useful medical information, Andrew! Enforced LoAs are the best kind, because they’re the most guilt-free. Don’t you agree?
Absolutely. I’m still working part-time, but won’t be in til Tuesday. Spent most of yesterday asleep, and plan to do the same today, before writing in the evening…
Get well soon, Andrew. Hopefully this blogging regimen will do the trick.
Thanks. That’s the plan, anyway.
Work on some music, if you can.
That sounds nasty. I hope you recover soon. I was surprised that anyone could find writing relaxing, but then I find data entry relaxing as long as I don’t have to do it too fast!
(I’m an anonymous guest today because WordPress login seems to be broken)