belated post

everyday i lay in bed trying to go to sleep. and everyday the same thoughts invade and disrupt my struggle for inner peace and sleep. so i have finally done what my brain keeps telling me. write a blog post to my father.
so one day you told me that you have a constant ringing in one (or both, i forget) of your ears. well, i tend to hae ringing in my ears. and as far as i can remember at the moment, i think i have for a long time. i blame being the earbud generation, but c'est la vie. anyway, its always incredibly bad in a quiet room, like when i'm trying to sleep. well, i have taken to doing something about it that i often think i should tell you. life with buzzing is miserable and not something someone should have to deal with. so i've taken to a kind of mantra. though, mantra isn't the right word, it is a kind of right start. so this is when my advice gets silly, but effective. i have taken to training myself how to stop the buzzing. this has gone through several iterations, and the last few have been irritating in their limited useless. so i started first by assigning my brain the task of becoming an old-fashioned radio... it's really a personal choice. this buzzing in my head is simply noise coming from a radio that i can simply reach and turn off. now, this is the slow, horrible part. as you mental reach your mental hand out to that mental turn dial, your brain is literally cycling through all the sensory imput you are getting trying to find the correct frequency.. its like trying to tune to the right station. your brain knows your intent, it just doesn't know what's white noise and what's not. so you do this over and over and eventually your brain learns what this buzzing is and qualifies it. it literally becomes the on/off switch you imagine. so when you turn it off it knows which sounds to make you stop hearing. so, i do something like that every night to shut off the buzzing and then i lay in nice quiet until i fall asleep. though in all honesty, the radio idea is an old one. it has been replaced and this is my warning to you. don't do something too constrictive. from the radio i switched to a turn dial, but the irritating part is that i normally do this in the dark and in bed. so for a long time i couldn't quiet the noise if i tried sitting up in the afternoon for example. well, that made me mad. so i could do the simple thing and retrain myself, but i didn't. i think i forgot about this whole thing until recently, when i had to start listening to mind numbingly loud music to deal with my everyday life. something i am actually very upset about. so now i have had to revive this practice, but it didn't quite work because it had been too long a break and my brain had forgotten how to hit the mute button. anyway, when i remembered i was on my left side. and now i can ONLY do it on my left side, which is a pain. also i have mistaken trained myself so that it doesn't really work. i've been lazy and half the time when i take a prepatory deep inhale to turn the round volume knob that is now my mental image, the volume goes down but not off. and not when i actually turn the knob. good job i know... when that made me angry so i've started doing other things. i know this has gotten lengthy but its a weird process and i actually haven't ever told this story before and i like to tell stories, especially late at night and to my notepad. so now i can quiet buzzing, but not all of it at once. there are normally several different frequencies buzzing in my ear (from my loud music destroying my ears on a variety of levels at once) and i must work on each one at a time. so now i visual the inside of my head and assign a space in my 'headspace' for this sound. and strangely i picture the sounds as colored mesh link fences. i think linked fences because they are easier to grasp. anyway, then i take my mental hand and shove them down (though slowly, like pushing a stubborn garage door) and the noises fade away. and i do this with each successive layer until its quiet.
i'm kind of lazy about it but i normally fall asleep before i have too much to worry about it coming back. i know this was all wordy and strange, but it really does work. i started doing this when i had cluster migraines in college and it really does work. i watched some documentary about bioresponse and training your body to do things like this, it's used a lot in chronic pain treatment when pain killers don't actually work. you simply learn to turn off certain brain signals. so anyway, you should try and do this if you want because ringing in your ears is a pain in the ass.

this week is busy so i will be honest and say that every spare moment i have will be unwinding with my super nintendo games. you gotta do what you gotta do, right? but now that i have relearned the convenience of typing on my own laptop and simply using other PCs as a posting horse, i should be more regular with my post. i've also been following a 'if you don't have anything nice to say...' policy so you can see obviously that things are fantabulous. i kid, i kid. i joke, i joke. or not. nah. my new motto (i have a new one like everyday...) "c'est la vie"