TV flickers at a rate guaranteed to put the higher cognitive functions to sleep. LINK It is literally, and specifically, hypnotic. Anyone surprised?
Some people like that, although I don’t. Some people need that, at least in some measure.
Every waking hour when you’re at home? There’s a problem there, even when you don’t share a house with someone with longstanding CRPS.
I learned to hear the words behind the words when I was an ER nurse. I had to be able to know the truth from the lies to the self, the lies to others, and the lies to the universe. I had to know when people didn’t care if they were lying or not.
Our brains can split the channels of verbal communication, so that the literal meaning of the words goes into our brains via one logical branch, the subtext and connotations of those words go into another, the emotional load the person is trying to convey goes into a branch that analyzes conscious manipulation, and the emotional load the speaker feels about what they’re saying — or if they’re even paying attention to it — goes in via a subtler branch. I learned to parse it quite specifically.
Some people thought I was reading their minds. I was just hearing their speech.
Now you know why, much as I loathe and despise the modern Democratic party, my outraged contempt for the modern GOP (and all its wacky little offshoots) is even greater. The sound of all those relentless, delusional lies is unbearable to me.
My mostly lovely partner, J, has TV again for the first time in a couple of years. Like the Scot that he isn’t, he wants to get the most out of his monthly investment — or that’s his excuse. In any case, he has perfected the most effortless way to get me out of the house: keep the TV on.
Every.
Waking.
Hour.
There are only so many times you can argue about the same thing before you realize you’re utterly screwed, and the most important person in your life is just going to torture you until something breaks.
No wonder I can’t get any work done. It’s too darn cold to be outside for long, so I have no choice but to have my brain beaten into a pulp day after day.
I can’t get the message through to him about what it does to me. He thinks I’m being dramatic or controlling, “because that’s how women are.” (Yeah. I know. Living with someone with CRPS is hard, and he uses the “woman” excuse to think about something besides the fact that this is such a hellacious disease. Moving right along…)
It’s not how *I* am. I’m a weird woman, I readily admit it, but I am not interested in interfering in someone else’s self-medication, as long as it does no harm to others.
That’s a major freaking caveat.
My ears have been ringing for days now. Early hearing loss runs in my father’s family, and the absolutely relentless natter of evasions, irresponsibility, bad acting and recreational conflict are doing significant damage to my hearing mechanisms, not to mention what’s left of my capacity for reason.
And J wonders why I’m getting more unhappy and short-tempered.
Dad protected his hearing and commented on his symptoms and how he treated them. He swore off music and TV for days when his ears started ringing. Moreover, as heads of the family, he and my mother limited TV time to two hours a day.
Lucky cuss.
When J and I leave this area, he thinks we’re going to live in a trailer or something as we wander around the country. While 90% of that is a fine idea (as long as I’m strong enough), we are definitely going to have to solve the TV problem. Personally, I’m preparing to “accidentally” drop something heavy on all the TVs in the vicinity, and apologetically give him a small laptop set that doesn’t even have speakers, just a headphone jack.
I think I could just about live with that.
P.S. It’s worth noting that, every time I write a post about J, I read it to him before posting. I don’t sneak around behind his back at all.
His comment halfway through: “Okay, I’m prepared to split this 50:50.”
His comment at the end: “Okay, I’m just off to go kill myself.”
I think it might have finally penetrated.