Valetudinarian

I'm not feeling too great these days. The stress is immense and stifling. Forewarning, the below rants are descriptions of my current life at the moment and are not the most adventurous reading -- nevertheless, I feel that it's important for me to write about these things, as they really are "adventures" to go in my adventure journal!

Food

My health is wavering. It was very, very poor last week. I hadn't been eating very well for the previous couple weeks because I was avoiding shopping at my old apartment until I moved into the new place (so that I'd have to carry fewer groceries over to the new place). This resulted in me eating out more often. When I eat out I typically only eat Taco Bell (replacing the meat with refried beans and chips), so there's not much bad stuff that I'm eating except a whole lot of sodium. However, eating that stuff does take the place of better foods that I could be eating (e.g., if I eat a white tortilla, I'm not going to have room to eat a whole wheat or whole grain tortilla). So although I wasn't eating really "bad" foods, I was lacking good foods. This probably led to some malnutrition over the past few weeks prior to the move.

Now, however, I have been doing much better. I feel like I saw color come back into my face yesterday (even though I've slept an average of 4 hours/night in the past few days and have experienced enough anxiety for a semester's worth of anxiety for a class full of undergraduates. I have been eating very well for about 4 days now and it's starting to show. I'm sure I've lost at least half a pound by now. I'm back to my healthful ways. Yesterday I had: Carrot juice, cranberry juice, coffee + almond milk, green tea, oatmeal + peaches/blackberries/raspberries/strawberries/blueberries, a few dark chocolate-covered cherries, a few dark chocolate-covered blueberries, banana + peanut butter, falafel wrap with tahini sauce, fruit bowl of blueberries/mango/plum/apple/raspberries, kale salad + whole wheat couscous/artichokes/asparagus/green bell pepper/red bell pepper/avocado/red grapes/tomato/red onion/cranberries/raisins/walnuts/flaxseed/cucumber/tofu/olive oil, carrots/broccoli + hummus, mango sorbet (first ingredient is mango). The falafel wrap was a treat, but it was still pretty simple. Pretty good. That's more like how I used to eat. I wish I had more time to cook. But, I did make my salad toppings bowl that I can scoop onto salad for the next few days, a fruit bowl for oatmeal in the morning, and have some decent dessert treats.

Sleep

However, I'm pissed off at my sleep hygiene. I was in bed for 13.5 hours last night but probably only slept 8. Possibly 9, but no more than that. I was awake from 3-6 AM thinking about all the bad stuff that's ever happened to me. Even when I tried to use mental escape techniques, I couldn't. I had a horrible migraine last night when I went to bed and it is the type of pain that interferes with your relaxation. At 3 when I woke up the pain had lessened, but it was still there and hard for me to feel relaxed. The problem with relaxation is that you can't do all that "imagine yourself on a beach" crap when you're sweating and have a migraine and have trouble breathing. It's not about being able to mentally escape at that point, it's about having to ignore the immense pain in your body. I'd like to hear some of those psychologists try to use the meditation practices to ignore that pain. How do you get past it? Oh man, it was a bad headache last night. I started keeping a journal of my symptoms, even though I know what causes it. Alcohol and immense stress. The only 2 times I've had a multi-day migraine in the past year that did not result from having used alcohol within the previous few days were (1) last November when I packed up my belongings overnight and drove across the country -- by myself and leaving a relationship behind, and (2) this week when I had my final draft of my dissertation due and had to work on it for about 16 hours/day over the last few days to get it to a good enough place.

Health

Not good. I'm having problems in almost every area of my body that I can think of. I feel like my health is just failing. Some of the concerns are very great, and others are just annoyances, but it's still causing a great deal of stress because it affects my ability to think, to work, to relax, and my concerns about the future. I only have time right now to set up a couple doctors appointments and try to eat better, but I need a serious vacation when this is over. I'm really hurting my body with this lifestyle. Unfortunately, I can't change the obvious (the lifestyle) because I only have 3 weeks left to prepare for my final meeting. I just have to try to sleep as much as I can and continue eating well. I can't handle my thoughts about the health situation right now -- I need to ignore them for a few more weeks.

Topic for later: I don't like the trend of progress in the internet world. I don't like how everyone is hooked on Facebook and I don't like the psychology of Facebook and the consequences of Facebook. For an example of what I'm referring to with the internet trends: see the Psych page on USA. The entire top half of the page is an ad and everything else is just images to click on. I hate the layout (and it's a common layout that organizations are using). Rather than menus, they've resorted to grouping objects under icons that you have to click on to get there. I guess I'm more "old school" because I like the menu format so that I can see how the page is organized. I've had this discussion with Mac users a long time ago too -- my argument was that Mac has always been a little more "icon-friendly" rather than "organization-friendly". Designers are now gravitating toward icons and humongous, never-ending pages to scroll down, rather than have to click off the page. I hate the idea of a never-ending page because you can never reference yourself on the page -- anytime you scroll past something and decide, "Hey, that thing I saw a couple seconds ago was cool -- where was that? Oh yeah, I have to scroll back up through everything to find it, rather than just click a simple back button!" Web designers have "decided" for all of us that never-ending pages and icons that you must click on without a description are what users want. And I don't like it. In fact, I dislike it enough that it ends up turning me off from whatever site that is and I become avoidant of that page. That layout has distanced me enough that many sites have lost me as a visitor.

I hope user interaction specialists are doing the appropriate user testing for all this, because it would be a shame if the trend is developing just because people see it happening on other sites and think that therefore it is a trend. Just because Facebook developed the s***** strategy of taking up your whole view with a huge picture on the homepage doesn't mean the trend is "right" unless the majority of users like it. I feel like other site designers have mistakenly inferred, "Facebook is very successful and Facebook has a HUGE picture at the top with a never-ending scroll page; therefore, our site will be successful if we build in a HUGE picture at the top with a never-ending scroll page." I feel like they're seeing a confounding variable (the social network content of Facebook is what makes it successful, not the site layout -- which has changed about 200 times in the last decade, btw).

Personally, I am turned off by Facebook too, ever since they developed the new layout. I can probably go on and on about how much I disagree with the philosophy and strategy behind changes sites in this way, and the profound effect it has had on my psychology and my life. But then again, I don't work for an online organization and am not getting paid to write such recommendations or run such user tests :). Btw, I also believe the iPhone sucks because it has 2 volume controls linked to 1 volume button. It is inconsistent and hard to manage, and has scared the hell out of me more than a few times when I thought I had turned the volume down, but really I'd only turned the SOUND volume down. That's when I realized the RINGER volume was separate. Whoever designed that should be fired. I still don't understand why they haven't fixed that yet. Am I the only one who has noticed or had problems with that? Geez. I guess I must be. I had a moderately intelligent phone until October 2012, when I got an iPhone 5. People claimed that I would become addicted. Well, they were wrong and I knew that I wouldn't before I even got it. I liked the phone at first because of the word games, but honestly the only thing I use it for now that adds any value is Facetime (sometimes), reading the news app when I'm walking around the house, directions (which my Garmin can still do better than Google/Apple), and the built-in camera. None of those are really improving my life enough to make it worth it to me. It has a cooler camera case (a TARDIS), but my real camera and Garmin can still fulfill the other needs quite easily, and I really don't use the phone for anything else unless I'm waiting in a doctor's office. I get the most use out of the sleep app that I use all night when I'm asleep so that it can track my movement; so, I use the phone the most when I'm unconscious! Haha.

I'm not attached to it. I feel like it's just like any other psychological effect -- you have to detach yourself. Parents tell their kids to turn off the TV, to not look at screens before bed, etc. I feel the same is true for phones. You have to unplug. I feel like sometimes I'm just going to become like Neo in the Matrix and go off-grid. I am totally not "plugged in", in my opinion. I don't see myself getting any more involved in the online world unless it changes dramatically. Maybe I haven't found the right sites yet, such as ones that are more focused on improving your life. Maybe something more like a homepage with less user interaction? I don't know, maybe I'll do some research later. I'm just not a techie person. I love video games and my laptop, but the whole social networking thing just has so many negative psychological effects that I feel like I can't support them. I feel like the psychology of Facebook is something I'd like to write about later. Maybe it's a topic I could collaborate with someone on -- figure out the effects Facebook is having. It would be fun research, although totally not in my area of study. Anyway, my thoughts about social technology aside, I do like how the iPhone is sort of an all-in-one device. :)

Haha, okay enough of this. Now I must attempt to work through changes on my dissertation drafts. I have about 8 drafts of comments from other people to go through and fix, plus I need to read through it myself and make my own revisions probably 4-5 times. I also need to add information on my significant interactions and interpret their simple slopes, check that my missing data deletion procedure ran correctly (advisor noticed it might not have), run power analysis and effect size estimates, and strengthen my discussion section. After all that, it's going to be ready to go to the committee. The question is, how to go about getting it done. I've decided that today I'm going to work on combing through the 8 drafts of feedback and fixing anything I can, while adding comments I don't want to address (because they're more involved or more difficult) as comments on my new final "consolidated" draft. I finally have the final draft in one clean document. So now I'm going to work from that and just add comments that I need to come back and fix. I downloaded MS Office 365 so I can hopefully use their new comment feature to help me address comments better. It's similar to the comments setup that Google Drive has -- where you can respond to them or mark as complete. I'm hoping the new version helps me address and track the comments better. So then, tomorrow I will deal with the harder statistical questions left to fix. I don't feel able to deal with them today as I still have a minor leftover migraine that is causing my thinking to be fuzzy and me to be spacey (and apparently grumpy too, if the above rants are any indication!). I hope I can at least get through a large chunk of the comments by the end of today. My final draft is due to my committee by Wednesday. If I can, I'm going to send it earlier, but I've decided that I will send it on Wednesday if I think that 2 more days of changes can significantly improve the draft.