New perspective

I had my first week of part-time work this week. Each day I would go into the office, teach one class and maybe one sort-of class, and then go home. If there was a long gap in between them, I would go lie down for a while and maybe even sleep.

Each day I would go home an pretty much crash for the duration. I took long naps and stayed on the couch for most of the remainder of the day. This demonstrated an interesting principle for me, the idea of zero-sum energy.

I think I've noted before that I've always felt confident in my energy reserves. I could always summon up 5 more minutes of stamina, be it running or cycling or lesson planning or teaching or whatever. It was comforting to know that I always had that little extra for the occasional times I needed it. Well, I can say without a doubt that this does not in any way describe my current physical condition.

I haven't been able to find any explanation of why shingles causes fatigue, but every description of symptoms says that it does. For whatever reason, I find that on any given day, I have a finite amount of energy. Some of that is contained in my body when I wake up, and the rest comes from food and drink. But it's finite- it runs out eventually. And when that happens I physically crash. I get dizzy and weak and have to lie down, drink something with sugar in it, and wait to replenish.

I know this sounds depressing and to some extent it is. But on a scientific basis, it's really very interesting. I never thought about my energy stores in this way. They used to say, "You are what you eat," and that's much more literally true for me right now than it's ever been. A bowl of cereal, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and evening snack give me a certain budget of energy. And even more interestingly, it's not just physical energy, it's mental energy as well.

I've noticed this because I've been helping both of my kids with their schoolwork- both with Calculus and one with an English paper as well. Thursday night through Saturday afternoon I spent a lot of time doing this, and then suddenly on Saturday evening I couldn't read anymore. I could look at a page, I suppose, but I was unable to take in any of the information. How weird is that? I've always been a sponge for information of any sort, and here it is, staring me in the face, something interesting and intellectually stimulating (an article on Hamlet that my daughter needs for a paper) and I just kept looking at the page and my reading muscles wouldn't engage.

This gives me a different perspective on how to budget my time in that I have to inventory my energy levels as well as my to do list. Today is the first day I've started with that perspective from the very start, so I'll let you know how it goes.

And now, because I'm lying around watching TV so much, and as much as I dislike that animal videos are a thing, here's a mysterious video of a pug somehow climbing a flight of stairs.

And here are two cats and a banana box