Ahh, the blackness
Jun. 6th, 2007 05:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksGiven how wonderful the weather is at the moment, I think that I can conclude with a certain degree of confidence that my depressions are not linked to the amount of sunlight. Since I have a penchant for working with curtains closed (a habit that may have to end soon, as it's becoming clear that age is catching up with my eyesight, and natural daylight may soon be needed for "ease of seeing"), I always had my doubts that this was a factor.
The odd thing now about the depressions is that I'm almost languid about them. I recognize the symptoms, I recognize the feeling, and I kind of "grit through it". I'm not sure if this is a plus or a minus. It's certainly weird.
So, insomnia is kind of back (waking up at 4.30am), as is lethargy, as is that all-encompassing feeling of hopelessness and "what is it all for?" And yet, notwithstanding that, I still function. I don't crawl back into bed and hide away from humanity for a week, even if that is what I feel like doing.
Part of this is necessity. If you have a job to do, throwing a girlie-one and hiding away just isn't an option. So, we struggle on.
As mentioned before, one of the therapeutics is cleaning, or variations thereof. Last night it was a two-hour session in sanding down the kitchen door, the last of the doors in the flat that needs to be restored to its pristine varnished wood faux-Victorian glory. That's the longest time that I've put into that door in over nine months, with progress being very slow.
When I feel like this it's important to avoid previous poker-related errors, and playing no-limit kind of makes this easier to do. It's far too easy to spunk away money when in this mood, because the overwhelming feeling is that "none of it matters, anyway". A bad result just confirms one's own feelings that everything is shit. At limit, it's easy to call off for a couple of big bets here, and a couple of big bets there. Next thing you know, you are down 50 big bets for the session. At No Limit, it's less tempting to stack yourself off for a buy-in just to confirm that life is crap. Hell, I can walk down Lewisham High Street and see that for nothing. Why should I pay fifty bucks to confirm it?
I've covered the ground too often about whether this thing is chemical or externally induced. It's clearly a combination of the two, and then becomes self-reinforcing. In this sense, I probably have better coping mechanisms than most, even though it doesn't feel that way at the time. And, to be frank, I'm probably quite productive these days when feeling like this, which is very atypical. I overcompensate and push myself harder, perpetually keeping myself occupied. When I was a student, in a single room in Darwin College, sometimes I would react to these moods by just curling up in my chair and smoking cigarettes endlessly (rather than smoking endless cigarettes, which is an interesting philosophical concept, but not, I regret to say, terminologically accurate). I could pass seven our eight hours like this. But it clearly did little for my output or for my health.
Part of the reason for the two hours' work on the door could have been because I couldn't make it to the gym earlier in the day, mainly because our E-mail system at work is still just this side of terminally fucked. So I spent 90 minutes waiting for the newsletter to move from my Outbox. Only to discover, when I finally cracked and phoned IT to tell them that something needed to be done beyond the normal explanations for the slowness, that the e-mails had gone out half an hour earlier, but that Outlook (despite assuring me in Task Manager that it was running) had failed to update the screen. A turn-off and a turn-back on, and there was the confirmation. Jeez.
So, that screwed up any chance of the gym. The office really pisses me off badly when I am this kind of mood, and I didn't want to head too far into GOM mode, so I came home early, tried (and failed) to take a nap, and then spent a couple of hours at the tables heading towards break-even.
There was an abysmal player on one of the tables who was getting lucky. Patience paid off after 45 minutes when my set of Kings doubled me through to $120. This seemed to put him on a bit of tilt, so it was nice to pick up QQ about seven hands later. I managed to get his last $40 in pre-flop, only for his 7-4 suited to hit the flush on the river. I simply typed "n1" and moved on. But one of the local rocks typed "lol" as well. I like these hands. The more players like that, the more I am confident of winning well long-term.
The type of game at these tables seems to vary remarkably from day to day, with little rhyme or reason. I had thought that the good weather would get rid of all the casual players in Europe and would make the games tougher. Then yesterday the IPoker network games seemed very soft, belying this theory. But suddenly, it's rock city and all you see is a sea of 18% of players seeing the flop. Weird. Clearly it's necessary to trawl as many sites as possible, and to be willing to quite tables quickly if they are no good.
The odd thing now about the depressions is that I'm almost languid about them. I recognize the symptoms, I recognize the feeling, and I kind of "grit through it". I'm not sure if this is a plus or a minus. It's certainly weird.
So, insomnia is kind of back (waking up at 4.30am), as is lethargy, as is that all-encompassing feeling of hopelessness and "what is it all for?" And yet, notwithstanding that, I still function. I don't crawl back into bed and hide away from humanity for a week, even if that is what I feel like doing.
Part of this is necessity. If you have a job to do, throwing a girlie-one and hiding away just isn't an option. So, we struggle on.
As mentioned before, one of the therapeutics is cleaning, or variations thereof. Last night it was a two-hour session in sanding down the kitchen door, the last of the doors in the flat that needs to be restored to its pristine varnished wood faux-Victorian glory. That's the longest time that I've put into that door in over nine months, with progress being very slow.
When I feel like this it's important to avoid previous poker-related errors, and playing no-limit kind of makes this easier to do. It's far too easy to spunk away money when in this mood, because the overwhelming feeling is that "none of it matters, anyway". A bad result just confirms one's own feelings that everything is shit. At limit, it's easy to call off for a couple of big bets here, and a couple of big bets there. Next thing you know, you are down 50 big bets for the session. At No Limit, it's less tempting to stack yourself off for a buy-in just to confirm that life is crap. Hell, I can walk down Lewisham High Street and see that for nothing. Why should I pay fifty bucks to confirm it?
I've covered the ground too often about whether this thing is chemical or externally induced. It's clearly a combination of the two, and then becomes self-reinforcing. In this sense, I probably have better coping mechanisms than most, even though it doesn't feel that way at the time. And, to be frank, I'm probably quite productive these days when feeling like this, which is very atypical. I overcompensate and push myself harder, perpetually keeping myself occupied. When I was a student, in a single room in Darwin College, sometimes I would react to these moods by just curling up in my chair and smoking cigarettes endlessly (rather than smoking endless cigarettes, which is an interesting philosophical concept, but not, I regret to say, terminologically accurate). I could pass seven our eight hours like this. But it clearly did little for my output or for my health.
Part of the reason for the two hours' work on the door could have been because I couldn't make it to the gym earlier in the day, mainly because our E-mail system at work is still just this side of terminally fucked. So I spent 90 minutes waiting for the newsletter to move from my Outbox. Only to discover, when I finally cracked and phoned IT to tell them that something needed to be done beyond the normal explanations for the slowness, that the e-mails had gone out half an hour earlier, but that Outlook (despite assuring me in Task Manager that it was running) had failed to update the screen. A turn-off and a turn-back on, and there was the confirmation. Jeez.
So, that screwed up any chance of the gym. The office really pisses me off badly when I am this kind of mood, and I didn't want to head too far into GOM mode, so I came home early, tried (and failed) to take a nap, and then spent a couple of hours at the tables heading towards break-even.
There was an abysmal player on one of the tables who was getting lucky. Patience paid off after 45 minutes when my set of Kings doubled me through to $120. This seemed to put him on a bit of tilt, so it was nice to pick up QQ about seven hands later. I managed to get his last $40 in pre-flop, only for his 7-4 suited to hit the flush on the river. I simply typed "n1" and moved on. But one of the local rocks typed "lol" as well. I like these hands. The more players like that, the more I am confident of winning well long-term.
The type of game at these tables seems to vary remarkably from day to day, with little rhyme or reason. I had thought that the good weather would get rid of all the casual players in Europe and would make the games tougher. Then yesterday the IPoker network games seemed very soft, belying this theory. But suddenly, it's rock city and all you see is a sea of 18% of players seeing the flop. Weird. Clearly it's necessary to trawl as many sites as possible, and to be willing to quite tables quickly if they are no good.
