The Comedy of Life

[davidn]

It occurred to me this morning just what incredible new depths of patheticness I am plumbing with my life at the moment. I am the only person in the world who has attempted to go on holiday, found that too stressful and gone back to work instead. Yesterday, I attended my most tragic birthday celebration ever, on the other end of a Skype call to my family-in-law who had gone to the trouble of organizing a cake for me with the Scottish flag on it, from a Mexican-run bakery called The Taste of Denmark.

But talking to them made me feel slightly better, and I feel that at least having a plan to fix this is a start. I am sort of adverse to medication, not in a Christian Scientist/Delphi kind of way, but... well, I remember when I was in third year of university the first years who moved up all sounded like so many chapters from a self-help book and were on medication for things that I would have thought were better just toughening up and getting over, but having gone through such an episode... I can understand it's because I never wanted to admit to it. Shame and disgrace over mental unrest, and... etcetera.

Anyway. Good things to occupy myself with during my unexpected week alone - guess who's in the latest of these Click community casts (at about 10:40 in this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EljYYzOrStE#t=10m37s

Apart from anything else, I am frankly amazed at how offensively appalling my graphics were six years ago. J Freude's graphics really help the game (and there are some from a couple of other artists in the community there as well), and it's thanks to their lead that the game looks so dramatically different now. Now to get it finished by the date promised in the video...

And tonight at 10pm on the History Channel for some reason, the Americans are going to try their hand at Top Gear. That's going to be good, isn't it.

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

The specific plane malfunction was that the landing flaps go stuck, so it couldn't slow down properly to land, and hits the runway at a much greater speed than usual, with higher risks of stuff going wrong. They had to circle round for a while to burn off fuel, and divert to an airport with a longer runway and fire engines on standby. But it was all fine - nobody even had cuts and bruises, although some of the passengers got a bit fed up about the three hour coach journey back to the country they'd booked a holiday in.

Phobias are by definition irrational, so it's probably not that unusual that your fear of flying comes and goes. I didn't realise you'd been having other issues though, so I just want to be clear that I'm not saying that you shouldn't consider medication, just that it's not the easy way out that it's sometimes presented as, so other options are worth considering. Having the right meds is good, but sometimes the process of finding what works for you can be less than pleasant.

[davidn]

I had thought that it may be something like that... similarly, I could have at least taken comfort in the fact that JetBlue is (I think) the only airliner to have successfully landed without the aid of undercarriage. And because they're also the airliner with the most television, as those passengers were circling around to burn off fuel they could watch themselves on television, presumably complete with the newsreaders going "What do you think of their chances, Biff?" "Oh, not so good, Hank."

I suppose these things never come up when I'm writing in a setting that's purely... on the Internet and unaffected by things in real life like this. For the most part I have it under control and just need to... plan ahead for my anxiety, but the plane brought it all out - I had been stressing about it for the entire week beforehand. Whatever might cure this, I have three weeks to find it.