Apnea?

One disturbing moment during Marie's visit was when she said that she heard me stop breathing during my sleep. When we first got together I had noticed this about her, and mentioned it. Since that time she has lost weight and I've gained it; and so on this visit I never noticed any apnea from her but she noticed it from me.

Wikipedia lists 11 basic risk factors for sleep apnea, including:

• being male
• obesity
• age over 40
• allergies

Yup — all those apply to me. Apparently having a large neck is also a risk factor, but I don't remember where I left my tape measure so I guess we'll skip that one for now.

And alcohol can "promote" sleep apnea as well.

So … now that I know this happens, how do I keep it from happening when there is nobody else sleeping here with me to wake me up? I can't do anything about being male or over 40. I do try to keep my allergies under control. Therefore if I want to reduce the likelihood of apnea, it looks like I have to lose weight and drink less.

There have been times in the past, when I have drunk too much before going to bed, that I have awoken in the middle of the night unable to breathe. I don't mean classic sleep apnea, where I come awake in order to breathe. I mean that I get up out of bed, start to walk around, and still can't breathe. 

It's bloody terrifying. 

When that happens I finally force myself to cough and then the breathing finally starts again. And after that I cut way down on my drinking for a long time, out of fear of it happening again. But a few years later, it happens again.

Maybe I need to cut it all the way out, or at least make sure there is no alcohol in my blood when I finally go to sleep. Also somehow it feels like it should help if I go to bed earlier, before I am really tired.

All of these measures would probably be good for me in other ways too. So why is it that I resist doing things that are good for me? Maybe the fear of not breathing will be enough of a motivation. Or so I hope.

  

Marie's end-of-year visit

Marie visited me for a week over the end of the year. She took a COVID-19 test (which came out negative) and then isolated for a week before leaving. Then she took the train to get here (with a private sleeping compartment) rather than flying, much as I took the train for my business travel last fall. For my part, the only times I left my apartment were to go grocery shopping, or when I visited with Mother, Brother, and SIL on Christmas. Marie and I talked on the phone at great length to analyze the comparative risks of her driving to the train station (thus leaving her car half a mile away, so that she would have to walk back to it alone late at night on her return) or taking a taxi (thus sharing a closed space with some unknown other person): in the end she decided on the taxi, but we talked through all the possibilities. So on the whole we think we covered the risks pretty well.

Once she was here, we really couldn't do a lot. We couldn't go much of anywhere because so many things were closed. The only restaurants that were open were for take-out only. One day we did make the trip to visit my mom, whom Marie really likes. But mostly we stayed indoors, cooked, watched movies, read to each other. And fucked. We did a lot of fucking.

My sexual response continues to deteriorate, and it didn't help things that both of us are overweight and no longer very flexible. I could still get hard, but mostly I lost it just as fast and much of the time it was awkward to get inside her. I think I actually came only two or three times all week. But then I have said before that, in sex, I always consider the woman to be the Main Event anyway; and it that sense it all went gloriously. Marie is joyfully, effortlessly multi-orgasmic, over and over again. When she seems exhausted I let her lie still for a few minutes to catch her breath; and then with the tiniest motions of my fingers I can get her started all over again. It's wonderful. Also she has learned to keep her vocalizations quieter, which is a big improvement from her last visit a year ago. So all in all it was a very pleasant trip.

Her trip home, however, was straight out of "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles."

I got her to the train station in plenty of time. She got on the train, which left on time. Then an hour later I got a call from her: another train had derailed halfway to her destination, so this train was going to go only partway and then turn around. Amtrak made no commitment to get her home, offering only to refund part of her ticket. So she got off at the next stop and took a bus back to my town. Also she asked me to buy her a plane ticket home for the next day.

Got her a last-minute plane ticket. Got her to the airport crushingly early the next morning. Drove home to log into work, because by now my vacation was over. Even though I'd be working from home, I had to be working. Then I heard from her that the plane had mechanical trouble. Later she corrected that to say that the onboard computer had burned out and they were going to replace it. Finally she texted me that everyone had to de-board the plane. She was rebooked onto a later flight going somewhere else, and then transferred to a third plane that would finally take her home. 

So it's a good thing she hadn't left her car downtown near the train station, isn't it?

She finally got home, after way too much activity. At that, she was earlier than if she had taken the train all the way, but still it was way too interesting a trip. Now I guess we wait two weeks to make sure neither of us comes down with COVID-19 after all. But it was a good visit.     

"Optimistic but challenging start"

Someone at work just screwed up something we thought we had fixed. Now we have to figure out how they were able to do it, how our fix went wrong, and where to start over.

After taking infinite precautions against COVID-19, Marie came to visit me around New Year's. The precautions and the visit deserve a post of their own. The visit was great. But her return trip was straight out of "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles."

And then of course there's all the craziness a couple days ago at the Capitol building, because where would we be without a crowd seizing the halls of Congress, looting documents, and planting IED's?

I wished Kathleen at work a Happy New Year, and she said she thought 2021 was off to an "optimistic but challenging start." We'll see.   

Fillette

One of my friends from college died today, at 1:53 pm Eastern Time. She had been suffering from fourth-stage sarcoma and died in the arms of her husband and two grown daughters. I'll call her "Fillette," or "little girl." That's not far wrong to describe her the way I remember her, and it has echoes of her real-life name as well.

Until last August I had been out of touch with her since the summer I got married, way back in 1984. I had googled her a few times and found an email address, but never actually sent her a note. Or maybe I did but the address was no good. Anyway, last summer I found an address that worked, and sent her a quick note. That's when I found out she was sick. I sent her a longer email and she said she likely wouldn't have the energy to reply to it … but maybe some day …. 

Of course that day never came. She got sicker and weaker, and then died. I got back in touch with her just in time to lose touch permanently.

So I never really knew her as an adult. My memories of her are all as a college student: warm, friendly, open, childlike … naïve and with a tendency to suck her thumb just a little when she was abstracted or thinking about something else. Cute. If I hadn't been so neurotically afraid of romantic relationships, I would have liked to gotten close to her. As it was we were just good friends. The year after I graduated I came back to town for a month to visit old friends and I stayed at the house she shared with four others. It was a lot of fun. Of course, sex would have been fun too, but I didn't know how to get there from here.

I'm trying to think what I feel about this, to describe it for you. I'm sad, of course. I'm a little shocked that someone I used to know as a peer is dead, although I'm close to 60 at this point so that's going to happen more and more often. Six years ago when I found out that Lisa had died, it was disorienting. But I really have no right to think of it that way.

And I'm sorry I waited so long to send her a note. In my mind I can't rule out the fantasy that she and I might have rekindled some kind of conversation. I don't know what that would have looked like, though. She was married and lived many miles from here, so there was no chance of anything romantic. And my conversations with, for example, Inga, have dropped off to a bare trickle just because there is nothing to sustain them in real life. One reason you can't go back to old friendships on the same terms as before is that both you and the other person have moved on, nearly always in different directions. You strengthen ties by repeating the contact, over and over; when they have lain dormant for decades, don't expect them to come back to life. My experience rekindling friendships with Marie and Debbie are very much the exception, and both cases involved sex. So the fantasy I had of rekindling a conversation would probably have proven false even if I had written her a couple years earlier.

Still, I'm sorry.

On the other hand she's out of pain, and that's good.

   

"Vice and indulgence"?

I keep reading people on Twitter who point out that the Roaring Twenties followed on the 1918 flu, because partying till you drop and wanton dissolution are the natural responses to the social isolation of a global pandemic. See for example a couple of recent articles linked here that warn of a "post-COVID sex fest" and "an era of vice and indulgence."

From the New York Post

From the Daily Mail

My worry is that I don't think I ever learned how to live a life of wanton dissolution. Is there somewhere I can take remedial classes, to be prepared when the time comes?

     

Christmas planning

So today we finalized the plans for Christmas. I mean, we had basically known them for at least a month, but we clarified all the details.

As with Thanksgiving, as with the Fourth of July, Brother and SIL and I will meet at my mother's house. We will take care to spend the whole time masked and socially distanced, while also enjoying each other's company and celebrating a very quiet version of Christmas.

Son 1, as you recall, has his own apartment. Son 2 still lives in the town where he went to University (in another state) — he graduated in May — but he drove back "home" for Christmas. He spent one week with me to make sure he wasn't infected, and then moved to Son 1's apartment, where he plans to spend the rest of Christmas Break. Son 1 and Son 2 were both invited to join the rest of us at my mom's house, but turned it down on the grounds of COVID-19. Best to stay away from other people, to reduce the overall risk of infection. And after all, my mom is 80 years old.

That's all logical. Then I discovered today that they will spend part of Christmas Day visiting Wife. Again, I can understand the decision:

• If there's any chance they might not see her on Christmas, she gets self-pitying and emotionally manipulative.
• By contrast my mother, Brother and SIL, and I try hard to be grown-ups about the whole thing. We treat Sons 1 and 2 as adults, and let them make their own decisions.
• It's not practical for them to visit both houses on Christmas, because Wife lives 90 minutes from Son 1 in one direction, and my mother lives 90 minutes from Son 1 in the exact opposite direction.

I get all this. It's all very logical.

But sometimes it can be a burden being so damned intelligent and mature all the time, you know? I was disappointed when I heard I wasn't going to see them over Christmas. Now I feel jealous: you'll spend time with her even though she's obviously a horrible person, but not with us? Whimper, whimper, whimper …. It's stupid. I know it's stupid. That doesn't stop me from feeling it.

It's also not their job to manage my feelings, is it? That's my job. I know that. It still hurts, though.

            

Sloth

Yesterday I wrote about distraction. But along with the distraction I am seeing just enormous levels of sloth.

I have gotten into a pattern where I get up in the morning, fix and east breakfast, and then go back to bed for 30-60 minutes more sleep. Today I had a nap in the afternoon, as well. That's two naps during the day, and I'm getting ready to go to bed early tonight.

I am accomplishing almost nothing -- maybe one task a day. There's a lot of holiday cooking that I normally do every year around Christmastime. Haven't done it this year. (Wait, I made one batch of cookies. Which I then ate all myself.) Today I finally went to the store to get all the ingredients that I need. Or pretty much -- at any rate enough to get started and well under way. Came home, put them all away, had lunch, had my second nap. Then got up and played Solitaire. Oh … it turns out that one of the ingredients I got was wrong: I needed this variety and I got that variety instead. That's easy: just go to the store to return and exchange it. Right? Haven't done it yet.

So let's look at that list again:

• excessive sleep
• lack of motivation (rarely leaving the apartment unless I really have to)
• overeating
• overdrinking (though I've had none today, huzzah!)
• for the hell of it, let's toss in "social withdrawal" which is pretty much a defining feature of 2020 

A quick Google search will confirm that these are all well-known symptoms of depression. I take medications for that already. I hope this doesn't mean I need more. Probably it means what I need is a kick in the pants: if I were more active, I'd feel like being more active, in a "virtuous circle." That's logical, at any rate.

Or I could just go back to bed. What the hell, right?