Frazzled Friday - Over-Thinking

I, my dear, dear blog monkeys, am physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. For the past, oh, two weeks or so, my usual amount of over-analyzation, recursive introspection, mental compositions*, and other paranoid and and neurotic tendencies have been amped up by a factor of 15 or so. Why is that? Heck if I know. All I can tell you is that my brain has been going practically non-stop, sometimes focusing on good stuff, sometimes focusing on bad; it hasn't all been doom and gloom, surprisingly**, but neither has it all been sunshine and lollipops. Been a little bit of a roller coaster ride, and I don't know if the ups and downs are more exhausting than just continual downs, but either way, I am ready for a break.

I do think part of what has gotten me in ultra-contemplative mode is the fact that there are some changes coming up in the next few months that I'm not looking forward to, the end result of which is that there's a good possibility that by October my four closest friends will be removed from my regular life due to moves and deployments and life-changing career choices. Over the last couple of years I've come to rely on these guys for a lot, and the thought of not being able to just call up Shack-Fu to see if he wants to come over, or spontaneously pick a fight with PigPen when I'm feeling froggy, or not being able to hang out with Cap'n Peanut while he waits at our place for PigPen to get ready for their weekly hijinks, or not being able to leave Li'l Random a voicemail and see if I actually get to see him face to face before he gets around to returning my call . . . yeah, it's got me a bit discombobulated. I know that's not the only factor, mind you, but I think it's a pretty big one.

One of the problem with having my brain running ninety to nothing nearly non-stop is that it keeps me from sleeping effectively at night, which makes me sluggish and loopy the next day, which just allows the runaway mental processes more leeway in their never-ending rampage behind my eyes. The compulsion to carry these thoughts through to completion and the barrage of other thoughts that have swarmed up to take the place of the complete thoughts has left me too distracted to do much of anything requiring an attention span, including reading or watching movies/TV. I have managed to get the storm in my head to quiet down on occasion; when my parents were visiting I was fine as long as I was with them, but as soon as they headed back to their hotel, wham! Mental overdrive again. Probably the best cure for this so far has been my judo class; kind of hard to have all of the worries of the world swarming in your mind when you're trying your best not to get thrown on your head.

Quick semi-digression: last night I had to randori while the whole class (around 20 people) was watching, and yet somehow I managed not to be horribly self-conscious. In fact, as I was sparring with another white belt, I could see him getting incredibly frustrated at not being able to take me down, and he finally let it distract him enough that I was able to get the take-down on him -- quite possibly the first time in my life that during some sort of athletic competition I kept my cool and did what I needed to while the other person melted down. Gotta say, it was a good feeling, wouldn't mind feeling it more often.

The reason the above was only a semi-digression is that I think me being able to shed my self-conscious about performing in front of the group, being able to be aggressive and finish off my opponent, and even being willing to volunteer when they asked if anybody wanted to go again*** gave me enough of a mental boost to escape the more negative tendencies of my hyper-driven mind, and I was actually able to use some of the relaxation techniques PigPen showed me many moons ago to clear my mind and go to sleep last night.****

With luck, I can now get my brain to drop back down into it's normal amount of paranoia, composition and neurotic over-analysis; much more of this and my brain will be well and truly fried.


*By that I mean composing emails and hypothetical future conversations and the like . . . there's a reason this is my 5th full blog post of the week
**Cap'n Peanut even commented that my rambling missive to him early last week was surprisingly lacking in the self-loathing department
*** Didn't do quite as well the second time, but I was going against the higher belt I usually train with, so he knows all my tricks . . . all two of them.
****Twas not the first night I'd tried the techniques this week, just the first time I got them to work.