Well I was looking at JM's Blog and I determined that I really should update my blog more often. I was also thinking about something that had happened to me this week and thought that perhaps if I had been writing down my thoughts, they might not have boiled to the point they did this week.
It all started Last Friday, not Friday yesterday, but the Friday before. I was already stressed out because of a number of factors in my life that I will not go into detail again here because I've said the big ones before. I'll just list the factors starting Friday that led me to my nervous breakdown on Tuesday.
As almost all of the few people who are likely to read this blog entry know, one of the biggest escapes from the stress of life I have is ACTD, a text (IRC) based Star Trek RPG. I play on 2 ships, one on Friday nights at 7, the other on Saturday nights at 7. On Friday night I was playing my Betazoid character, Lieutenant Victor Scott Regnum, on the U.S.S. Artemis NCC-83093. Well in the game we encountered strange aliens that traveled through space in ships made of coral propelled by black holes for engines. This alien had not attacked us or done anything aggressive with the exception of coming toward us. Personally I don't consider this aggressive, but instead of doing everything we could to meet these aliens, the CO (Captain) of the Artemis commanded us to run away from them. My character spoke up and said that it doesn't make sense that we are running instead of trying to “seek out new life and new civilizations.” Well the Captain didn't like my frankness and kicked me off the bridge, relieving me of duty. So even in my gaming things were not going well for me.
Saturday was supposed to be the most romantic day of the year (Valentines Day). And for the first time in my entire life I've had someone to call my Valentine on Valentines day, but because of my financial situation not only could I not visit her for Valentines Day, but I couldn't even afford to send her flowers. I spent the day alone and sad. I did call her that night and talked to her for quite a while. And later that evening I did some financial transfers to transfer enough money into one account to buy her an inexpensive necklace which I purchased for her, but I was still depressed that I couldn't be with her.
Sunday I was at the church running powerpoint and lighting for the youth group. Once a month instead of our normal worship we have the College & Career worship band lead worship for us. Well the leaders of this group, as well as several of the members, have been bugging me for months to get me to join their group. Every time they have a function they bug me to come to it. I don't really want to, I'm not good in groups, I'm not a social person. Heck at church I lock myself in a box (the sound booth) and only ever talk to 1 or 2 people at a time, I just don't like groups. Well they just kept bugging and bugging me to join them after the youth group to eat ice cream, so I went, and what did I do there? Well after eating my ice cream of course, I ended up sitting in a corner by myself.
Monday was a very long and hard day. I worked hard through the day on various projects and then I stayed at the office all night working. I got home at 7:30 Tuesday morning and made something quick to eat (having not eaten since lunch the day before). I got to my bed shortly before 8 and was about to lie down and get some much needed rest when mom came into my room with the phone cause Harold had called. There he was rattling off a list of things I simply HAD to get done today and I listened and paid attention and then when he finally let me go I hung up and went to sleep.
Less then 2 hours later I was woken up by the phone ringing. If I had been more awake I would have ignored it, but like a fool I answered it thinking it would be Harold again. It wasn't. It was the collection agency calling threatening me about the Bank Of America account I had never authorized again. This was the meanest person I've talked to concerning this matter. I mean she was a real b****. Any meaner and she would have been saying “If you don't pay us in 24 hours we will curse you and your entire family to eternal damnation” They did say 24 hours, but they just said “horrible things” They didn't say eternal damnation.
So I was already pretty fried from no sleep and that, well 45 seconds after I hung up with the queen B, the guy Harold had called to climb up on the billboards called my cell phone. He said I needed to be at the billboard on Cooper street immediately. So I threw on some clothes and zipped over to Cooper Street. Not only was I already stressed but I hadn't had my shower, Showers relax me and I take a shower every day before leaving the house.
At the billboard, we spent the next few hours trying to get a signal from our other billboard on I20. It was supposed to be an EASY wireless shot.
For those of you who don't understand this. The brown line is the terrain, the black lines going from the brown line up to the dark blue line on either side indicate the height of the billboards on each side, the dark blue line indicates the actual wireless shot, and the red and green curves indicate the Fresnel zone. This shot is only 5.8 miles so distance isn't a problem, and the red line and dark blue line never cross through the brown line so terrain isn't a problem. Yet try as I might I simply could not get a signal out of it. And I'm not talking, the signal was weak, I'm talking there was NO signal whatsoever.
This threw me over the edge. First, my left hand started to twitch, then shake uncontrollably. It wouldn't stop, I kept grabbing my left hand with my right hand just to stop it from shaking. Then I started stuttering, no matter what I was saying I was stuttering. Then what I was saying stopped making sense. I started analyzing everything that was going wrong, and then as I was audibly talking about them they started mixing up, I started mixing up the wireless problems with the financial problems with the love problems with the ACTD problems, just mixing everything up.
Then I started seeing things, more specifically I saw numbers, everywhere I saw numbers floating around. I rode this nervous breakdown for several hours before I finally calmed down, it was frightening.
So this breakdown is the main reason I've decided perhaps I should update this blog more. I feel that if I organize my problems and the good things that happen to me in blog entries perhaps it will help keep me from getting to that point again. This is the second nervous breakdown I've had in my life, I really don't want to have anymore.
Later that night when I called D I found out she got the pendant I sent her and she thanked me saying she really liked it, so that really brought up my mood.
Wednesday I didn't go to work at all, feeling I needed the day to recover from my breakdown. Thursday I had a job to do for a company in Fort Worth, networking their computers together. And Friday I worked from the house on various projects.
Last night I was up till about 3:30 in the morning working on various projects and talking to my Imzadi online and I forgot to set my alarm before going to sleep, so I was woken up at 5:30 in the afternoon by my mom calling me. I'll write about the events of today in a separate entry.