Sleep crapnea
I have snored for decades, as my family will tell you. I have also had a ferocious coffee habit for decades. These things may be related.
Probably around this time last year it really started to hit me more often. Working from home, I would get up and do some work in the morning, and by midday I was ready for a nap. Sometimes I didn’t really recover from that nap and wrote off half the workday.
Things got better for a while but I’d eventually revert to feeling tired all the time. After some days this winter of going to bed at 7PM and waking at 7AM I finally scheduled a sleep study. The first step was a home test. The idea of that made me nervous because I didn’t really want sleep techs coming to my house, but it turns out that instead you go to their office, they show you how a little machine works, and then you sleep at home while hooked up to the machine.
That test was enough to basically confirm what I’d guessed for some time, that I have sleep apnea. To me it feels like I sleep the night through, but in reality I wake frequently and never really get deep sleep.
So I have an appointment in mid-July for a sleepover at the sleep doctor’s office. I think/hope they will set me up with a CPAP machine and I’ll be able to start sleeping better by the end of the summer.
Depression mentor
I got a text some time ago from a friend, someone I haven’t kept in great touch with so I was happy but surprised to hear from him. Turns out he’d seen some things I had posted about struggling with depression. He’d also had what sounds like a serious depressive episode some time ago. He said medications had made things better, but that he felt like he’d plateaued or maybe regressed a bit to the point that he wasn’t nearly as bad off as before, but he was having trouble feeling motivated, energized, maybe trouble feeling much of anything at all.
I gave him about the only advice I really have to offer: keep trying different meds. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but this is what has helped me. I used to think of my pills as placebos. They did something, but not much. After going off medication entirely for a few years I finally tried again two years ago or so, and it’s made a world of difference.
My friend texted me again a few days ago to say that he followed my advice and he’s seen significant improvement. Seeking help when you are depressed is very difficult. I think of it like, “why would I work hard to help the person I hate most in this world?” And sometimes people try everything without very clear-cut success. But in this case there’s a small success and I’ll take it.
Watching
Inside by Bo Burnham on Netflix (2021). Shanon watched this on her own first and then we watched it together. And when it was over, I was kind of like, “Hm.” So I think she thought I didn’t like it. But I kept thinking about it for the next 24 hours+, so I’m really glad I watched it.
I guess I had trouble with some of the suspension of disbelief or something? Like the slippage between “Bo Burnham” the guy who is stuck in this room for a year making a video and Bo Burnham the guy who actually has a family and friends and everything kind of got to me. And some of the recursive self-deprecating narcissism (what I think of as the David Foster Wallace move) bugged me because I know I do it too.
But then I listen to (or better, watch) the songs and I think I’m just being churlish and nitpicking some compelling apocalypse art.
Listening
I said it on Facebook, but I have been listening to the same few Mannequin Pussy songs over and over again lately. “Drunk II” is the clear one to obsess over, but they’ve got a lot of good ones. Like this banger:
Reading
One lousy complication of the sleep apnea is that I’m finding it harder and harder to maintain attention to read. Maybe I’ll have some more updates soon.