Thank you everyone for your lovely comments on my last post. I'm still struggling a lot but a good part of that comes from physical issues so it's kind of hard to tell how depressed I really am. I alude to the fact that I suffer from depression quite a bit here I think but I'm not sure how much, if at all, I've ever really posted directly about it. For four years before I left Ireland I saw a psychologist on a regular basis and that therapy changed my life. One of the things I liked about my therapist was that he wasn't one thing or the other and was always able to adapt to suit whatever it was I needed at the time. He was very good at that. Sometimes I didn't want to talk about me so much as try to understand a bit more about some aspect of psychology and he got that that was important to me and would talk to me about what I was interested in, drag down a book if he felt there was something in it that would answer my questions and, on occasion, call me out on asking questions just to avoid talking about what was really bothering me. I always felt very lucky to have found a therapist who seemed to be so much on the same wavelength as I was and so good at being able to read me.
One of the things that I said I wanted help with in my first session was losing weight and how to keep going with it instead of giving up yet again. That came up time and again as a topic, we sometimes spoke of food addiction but it was only really shortly before I left Ireland that I accepted that I actually have an eating disorder. So, for a month or so before leaving Ireland I also started to attend OA meetings. That's where I first heard the expression compulsive overeater and it was such a help to me to hear it. I had always hated the term food addict and (possibly for reasons that might take more years of therapy to get behind and possibly for entirely prosaic reasons) never liked using the term to describe myself. But compulsive overeater describes it exactly. Because sometimes a stressful situation will just make me want to eat and eat and eat. It really is compulsive, a strong force deep inside pushing me to eat (and it goes beyond the normal comfort eating that many peopel indulge in occasionally). And of course it is most often chocolate and crips and so on that will get eaten during that kind of episode because you can eat vast quantities of those empty kinds of calories and with 'real' food, the limit comes much faster, which is no good to you if you want to keep eating. It's not about hunger or being greedy.
After moving here I went to one OA meeting but it was a very small group, just wasn't the same having to do it in German and on at a time when I also had the chance to go to a knitting group so I didn't go back. I think I will go back in the next week or so though, I need...something. I've thought about finding myself a therapist here as well but then it comes down to a question of money, trying to figure out if I'd want to try and find an English-speaking therapist (knowing if I found one it's most likely to be an American so the cultural differences might be just as great as talking to a German), whether to just pay privately or go to the doctor and see if I could get it paid for on my private insurance (which might impact on lots of things as it seems to me that there is quite a lot of stigma in Germany attached to admitting any connection to depression or mental issues). It's hard to know what the right thing to do is.
I think I have mentioned before that I don't want to start taking medication for a number of reasons and I still feel that way. But the last few days it has felt like I may not have any other choice. I am sinking into a hole where it is so difficult to do anything that getting up in the morning and making it to work is like a huge achievement every day. I hadn't hoovered for two weeks and spent at least five days looking at and being disgusted by how filthy the floor was looking (I have long, dark hair so apart from the dust there are always hairs visible somewhere although I do try to always brush my hair in the same place to try and contain the problem somewhat at least). I finally did actually do it yesterday as well as changing the bedclothes and dusting a bit and this morning I did the few bits of washing up that were there. So I feel lots better but the way I felt all last week really quite upset me. And it's very hard to figure out how much of it is currently related to physical issues and money worries and how much is really just depression.
I was at the dentist last Monday for the next stage of the implant, in which he actually put the implant in so it was an operation involving him drilling into my jawbone and screwing the implant in (as far as I understood it anyway, why the hell do dentists insist on explaining stuff just AFTER they've done stuff that is, to be honest, quite distracting!). That was still very swollen and painful the next day but he felt it was healing nicely and on Wednesday it was still swollen. But the pain was coming more from the lovely row of mouth ulcers that were developing all long the jawline on the side he had been working on. They still hurt and mouth ulcers are just plain bloody distracting, aren't they. I have been using quite a lot of Kamistad, a gel that soothes and numbs it all. I get the stitches out tomorrow so we'll see what the dentist has to say about all of that anyway.
I've realised that yet again I don't really have a point and more of these kinds of posts may follow over the next few weeks. I just have to get some of this stuff out of my head for a while. It helps a bit anyway and I'll take what I can get as long as I have the energy for it.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Writing style
I am going through some difficult stuff at the moment. The man who told me he loved me (and who I believed) fecked off for no reason and then just over three weeks later (last Wednesday) sent me a text asking me how the weather here was. Huh? I'm confused. Although I have to admit that after a few days of really not knowing what to do, on Friday evening I txted back: sunny with intermittent showers. Haven't a reply yet surprisingly. Someone sent me a link to a song by a German band which I have been listening too and finding quite amusing (literal translation of the title is "men are pigs" - I know that's not true of all men but it's a catchy tune!).
I'm also obviously dealing with my debt. And for the past week I've had a cold which finally settled on my chest yesterday evening which means that today I've had very little voice. Just what I needed just before starting a week of intensive rehearsals!
But the final straw may have just come when I saw a link to an analyse your writing style website. Because apparently
Oh dear. Infinite Jest is one of those books we read for book club but that I just never managed to finish. I've held on to it intending to go back to it one day but I'm very sorry, no matter how much of a literary genius he's supposed to be, I found Infinite Jest at any rate, well, pretty crap to be honest. It's a good thing I have always considered this blog to really just be my diary and that I don't have any aspirations to become a writer, that's all I can say! (Given my predilection for using brackets and exclamation marks I think it was already obvious that I'm not all that interested in 'serious' writing!!!) No, wait, that calls for a smiley face too :-)
I may need to obsessively start trying out that analysis with all previous blog entries, and not just the last one I had made. Surely one of them must come up with something better than DFW!
Edited to add: I've tried it with the rest of the blog posts which appear on this page at the moment, got two writers I've never heard of (Raymond Chandler and Vladimir Nabokov) followed by James Joyce (another one I've never managed to finish a book from) and then another DFW. Oh well, at least I'm laughing. If I weren't I suspect I'd be crying!
Edited again to add: okay, I've googled and Nabokov wrote Lolita, which I've not only heard of, I've read.
I'm also obviously dealing with my debt. And for the past week I've had a cold which finally settled on my chest yesterday evening which means that today I've had very little voice. Just what I needed just before starting a week of intensive rehearsals!
But the final straw may have just come when I saw a link to an analyse your writing style website. Because apparently
I write like
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Oh dear. Infinite Jest is one of those books we read for book club but that I just never managed to finish. I've held on to it intending to go back to it one day but I'm very sorry, no matter how much of a literary genius he's supposed to be, I found Infinite Jest at any rate, well, pretty crap to be honest. It's a good thing I have always considered this blog to really just be my diary and that I don't have any aspirations to become a writer, that's all I can say! (Given my predilection for using brackets and exclamation marks I think it was already obvious that I'm not all that interested in 'serious' writing!!!) No, wait, that calls for a smiley face too :-)
I may need to obsessively start trying out that analysis with all previous blog entries, and not just the last one I had made. Surely one of them must come up with something better than DFW!
Edited to add: I've tried it with the rest of the blog posts which appear on this page at the moment, got two writers I've never heard of (Raymond Chandler and Vladimir Nabokov) followed by James Joyce (another one I've never managed to finish a book from) and then another DFW. Oh well, at least I'm laughing. If I weren't I suspect I'd be crying!
Edited again to add: okay, I've googled and Nabokov wrote Lolita, which I've not only heard of, I've read.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Yet more bread and lots of singing
Just a quick one so that I am keeping track of how I'm making the bread so I can figure out which combination works best for me. The last one was pretty good but a little bit dry so I made today's a slighty damper/stickier dough.
This evening, after coming home from another all day rehearsal I was really hungry again. Out came some olives from the fridge as soon as I got home in the hopes of staving off my hunger while I cooked something. I had already decided to make pineapple rice as it will give me a couple of helpings that can be used as lunches this week and before I left this morning I had put the rice out on the counter along with a small tin of pineapple. I did this on Friday as well when I left out a tin of tomatoes, some passata and a tin of tuna but got home so late from work that I ended up just cooking some pasta and having that with cheese. But I made enough pasta to make the pasta bake even easier to put together yesterday. Chopped up a courgette, some onions, garlic and sauteed them then added the tin of tomatoes, the passata and the tuna not to mention lots and lots of herbs and black pepper. Cooked all of that then put it in an oven dish with the pasta, topped with the remaining breadcrumbs/grated cheese mix I had in the freezer and it all went in the oven for quarter of an hour or so. The kind of busy way my life is going at the moment, if I hadn't already left the stuff out on the counter there's a good chance I would have felt very stressed about getting something cooked for dinner.
So today, once I got home, it was easy enough to put the rice on to cook, add the onions, stock cube and tumeric and then let that all cook while I washed my bowl from this morning, made the bread and washed the mixing bowl. Then all I needed to do was throw in the currants and pineapple and wait for it to be all heated through before sitting down to eat just over half an hour after arriving home. It's all very easy really and yet if I had had money in my purse I know I would have stopped on the way home to get a pizza or eat out somewhere.
The bread today had just over half wholemeal (bio from rewe) flour, the rest mostly 1050 and made up to 450g with some 550. I used the rest of the gut + gunstig buttermilk still left from during the week *about 200ml) and then about half a carton of tengelman starmarke buttermilk (which was on special offer at 27c). Plus the usual heaped teaspoon of bicarb, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 of sugar.
Rehearsals are going pretty well though, one more left before the final week and that's when it'll all change. I'm singing in the Symphony of a Thousand and for the two weekend rehearsals we've done, it has just been what the call the 'lay' choirs. Tomorrow those of us who registered as individual singers have been invited to rehearse with one of the professional choirs and then on Monday week we will have our first rehearsals all together. Just over 1,100 singers and something like 300 or 400 in the orchestras. It will be an experience!
This evening, after coming home from another all day rehearsal I was really hungry again. Out came some olives from the fridge as soon as I got home in the hopes of staving off my hunger while I cooked something. I had already decided to make pineapple rice as it will give me a couple of helpings that can be used as lunches this week and before I left this morning I had put the rice out on the counter along with a small tin of pineapple. I did this on Friday as well when I left out a tin of tomatoes, some passata and a tin of tuna but got home so late from work that I ended up just cooking some pasta and having that with cheese. But I made enough pasta to make the pasta bake even easier to put together yesterday. Chopped up a courgette, some onions, garlic and sauteed them then added the tin of tomatoes, the passata and the tuna not to mention lots and lots of herbs and black pepper. Cooked all of that then put it in an oven dish with the pasta, topped with the remaining breadcrumbs/grated cheese mix I had in the freezer and it all went in the oven for quarter of an hour or so. The kind of busy way my life is going at the moment, if I hadn't already left the stuff out on the counter there's a good chance I would have felt very stressed about getting something cooked for dinner.
So today, once I got home, it was easy enough to put the rice on to cook, add the onions, stock cube and tumeric and then let that all cook while I washed my bowl from this morning, made the bread and washed the mixing bowl. Then all I needed to do was throw in the currants and pineapple and wait for it to be all heated through before sitting down to eat just over half an hour after arriving home. It's all very easy really and yet if I had had money in my purse I know I would have stopped on the way home to get a pizza or eat out somewhere.
The bread today had just over half wholemeal (bio from rewe) flour, the rest mostly 1050 and made up to 450g with some 550. I used the rest of the gut + gunstig buttermilk still left from during the week *about 200ml) and then about half a carton of tengelman starmarke buttermilk (which was on special offer at 27c). Plus the usual heaped teaspoon of bicarb, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 of sugar.
Rehearsals are going pretty well though, one more left before the final week and that's when it'll all change. I'm singing in the Symphony of a Thousand and for the two weekend rehearsals we've done, it has just been what the call the 'lay' choirs. Tomorrow those of us who registered as individual singers have been invited to rehearse with one of the professional choirs and then on Monday week we will have our first rehearsals all together. Just over 1,100 singers and something like 300 or 400 in the orchestras. It will be an experience!
Friday, August 27, 2010
Good things about today
- I finally got the floors washed
- I have new bedclothes on the bed
- I've had a lovely shower and washed my hair (so will be doing those lovely clean bedclothes justice by not crawling into them full of the grime of the day)
- I've put away the clean dishes (leaving stuff on the draining board is one of my worst habits)
- I've made myself a cup of decaf tea and am going to sit and enjoy it with a few squares of chocolate before bed
Food Waste Friday 27 August 2010
Not too bad a week this week but a couple of silly mistakes led to some food waste.
First, I cooked some chickpeas so that I could have chickpea salad for lunch a couple of days. But I forgot I was only cooking half the amount I normally would and didn't check on them until I started to smell that something wasn't right. I have nothing against eating some things that are a little bit burnt and they didn't look too bad but it turns out that burnt chickpeas really aren't all that edible. First world problems I know but since I have the privilege of choice, out they went.
I also didn't finish my bread on time. I thought it would have been still okay to at least toast but it was rock solid and nothing could be done.
That was actually earlier in the week and then this morning, just when I thought I'd have nothing else to report for FWF this week, I picked up the last four small tomatoes I had to put them in my lunchbox and discovered two of them had started going bad on the bottom. Aaaaghh, I hate it when that happens. Looks perfect until you pick it up and turn it over. So the tops (or bottoms, depending on what way you were looking at it) got chopped off and dumped.
Food Waste Friday is, as always, hosted by The Frugal Girl
First, I cooked some chickpeas so that I could have chickpea salad for lunch a couple of days. But I forgot I was only cooking half the amount I normally would and didn't check on them until I started to smell that something wasn't right. I have nothing against eating some things that are a little bit burnt and they didn't look too bad but it turns out that burnt chickpeas really aren't all that edible. First world problems I know but since I have the privilege of choice, out they went.
I also didn't finish my bread on time. I thought it would have been still okay to at least toast but it was rock solid and nothing could be done.
That was actually earlier in the week and then this morning, just when I thought I'd have nothing else to report for FWF this week, I picked up the last four small tomatoes I had to put them in my lunchbox and discovered two of them had started going bad on the bottom. Aaaaghh, I hate it when that happens. Looks perfect until you pick it up and turn it over. So the tops (or bottoms, depending on what way you were looking at it) got chopped off and dumped.
Food Waste Friday is, as always, hosted by The Frugal Girl
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
More brown bread
Have another loaf of bread in the oven. This time: 250g wholemeal flower, 200g white 1050 flour, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 heaped teaspoon bicarb and a bit more than half a 500g carton of gut+gunstig cheapie buttermilk.
Am boiling potatoes for dinner to have with some sauteed courgette, onion and garlic with two small eggs scrambled into the mix for the last few minutes. I worked late unexpectedly and am very hungry and really, really, really wanted to stop and get chips on the way home but didn't. Came straight home, got the bread in the oven, did the washing up (helped myself to a few olives along the way to try and make my sugar/food-deprivation headache go away - it has worked more or less) and then scrubbed some of the cilena potatoes I brought home last time from the garden and put them on and chopped the courgette, onion and garlic and put them on too. Five more minutes and I can eat.
It's only five more days to payday. We officially get paid the last day of the month but the money is often in my account on the second-last day of the month already. If the last day happens to be on a weekend or Monday, I'll have the money on Friday. This month the last day is Tuesday so I'll probably have the money on Monday but there's a tiny chance I might get it by Friday or not. That would be a relief but to be honest I hope I don't get it till Monday or Tuesday as my budget actually runs from Monday to Sunday and if I get paid on Friday I know I would end up spending some over the weekend. And the budget is going to be tight enough for the next few months anyway as I need to finally get the tooth implant finished and the estimate from the dentist is for just over €1,200.
I wanted to have the last of the last loaf of bread for breakfast this morning but it was rock solid - so hard I could put it in a sock and keep it for warding off intruders. But I won't. It's in a bag and I'll bring it to the park tomorrow and put it in the old bread bin for them to use to feed the ducks and swans. Since I couldn't eat it, I bought a Käsebrötchen so that was an 80c spend today. I went for lunch with the secretary crowd to the canteen as usual on a Wednesday but brought my pasta salad with me so didn't spend anything there either.
Should be doing a bit of cleaning and ironing and general housework now but I am tired, have waited too long to eat and haven't the energy. I will have dinner, watch one episode of something online and then I am heading to bed.
Am boiling potatoes for dinner to have with some sauteed courgette, onion and garlic with two small eggs scrambled into the mix for the last few minutes. I worked late unexpectedly and am very hungry and really, really, really wanted to stop and get chips on the way home but didn't. Came straight home, got the bread in the oven, did the washing up (helped myself to a few olives along the way to try and make my sugar/food-deprivation headache go away - it has worked more or less) and then scrubbed some of the cilena potatoes I brought home last time from the garden and put them on and chopped the courgette, onion and garlic and put them on too. Five more minutes and I can eat.
It's only five more days to payday. We officially get paid the last day of the month but the money is often in my account on the second-last day of the month already. If the last day happens to be on a weekend or Monday, I'll have the money on Friday. This month the last day is Tuesday so I'll probably have the money on Monday but there's a tiny chance I might get it by Friday or not. That would be a relief but to be honest I hope I don't get it till Monday or Tuesday as my budget actually runs from Monday to Sunday and if I get paid on Friday I know I would end up spending some over the weekend. And the budget is going to be tight enough for the next few months anyway as I need to finally get the tooth implant finished and the estimate from the dentist is for just over €1,200.
I wanted to have the last of the last loaf of bread for breakfast this morning but it was rock solid - so hard I could put it in a sock and keep it for warding off intruders. But I won't. It's in a bag and I'll bring it to the park tomorrow and put it in the old bread bin for them to use to feed the ducks and swans. Since I couldn't eat it, I bought a Käsebrötchen so that was an 80c spend today. I went for lunch with the secretary crowd to the canteen as usual on a Wednesday but brought my pasta salad with me so didn't spend anything there either.
Should be doing a bit of cleaning and ironing and general housework now but I am tired, have waited too long to eat and haven't the energy. I will have dinner, watch one episode of something online and then I am heading to bed.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Made it
Total spend today = €10
Chose one of the meals from the menu which you can have as a starter or 'for a small hunger' - 3 Reibekuchen with stewed apple (5.90). I drank one glass of apfelschorle (2.50). Total 8.40 plus a decent tip rounding up to 10. Very pleased with myself.
Chose one of the meals from the menu which you can have as a starter or 'for a small hunger' - 3 Reibekuchen with stewed apple (5.90). I drank one glass of apfelschorle (2.50). Total 8.40 plus a decent tip rounding up to 10. Very pleased with myself.
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