Bejew­eled is cool and all, but it’s become com­pul­sive already. Just to con­tex­tu­alise this a bit, Aaron half-seriously asked if I were autis­tic a few weeks back after I asked if a TV displaying/playing noth­ing (black screen) could be turned off because of the noise the tube made. Also, I get pretty bad migraines some­times (there’s one com­ing now, but I want to blog this before I for­get and twenty min­utes will hardly make a difference).

When I’m in sig­nif­i­cant pain (be that mas­sive headaches/migraines w/ var­i­ous assoc. symp­toms, or gen­eral other ill­ness… vom­it­ing etc., or spe­cific phys­i­cal pain) my first motive to “alle­vi­ate” it is sim­ply dis­trac­tion. I’ll start by hop­ping between thoughts as rapidly as pos­si­ble because every thought I land on some­how I man­age to link back to the prob­lem at hand (i.e. pain), and I can only avoid com­ing back to that by ran­domly jump­ing between thoughts before fol­low­ing them to their “log­i­cal” (read: present cir­cum­stan­tial) con­clu­sion. This is, inevitably, pretty use­less… and when I finally give up on find­ing dis­con­nected thoughts I set­tle for pat­terns. If it’s not a headache (i.e. I don’t mind my eyes being open) I’ll trace lines on what­ever sur­faces I can see, or, if I can’t see (/don’t want to open eyes), I’ll invent patterns/logical prob­lems. Which I can never remem­ber after­wards but am aware occurred. And pro­ceed to solve com­pul­sively until the pain dis­ap­pears (gen­er­ally where replaced with sleep).

The thing is, these are usu­ally strate­gies I semi-consciously employ after recog­nis­ing pain. Today it was different.

I would close my eyes at work, try­ing to focus on an aspect of a rather gnarly CSS sit­u­a­tion (web-geek stuff, to demystify/ungeek this post) , and sud­denly the var­i­ous sym­bols in the game would be re-arranging them­selves (or, I would be con­trol­ling them but with­out even think­ing of the game) in my [per­ceived field-of-view? is there a word for imag­ined vision once you close your eyes? I take it that’s nor­mal… it’s not imag­i­na­tion and it’s not synes­the­sia, so… I think that it’s nor­mal]. Nor­mally I can feel headaches com­ing, but some­times I’ll just have a really dull one from star­ing at a screen for too long… it doesn’t par­tic­u­larly bug me and, if any­thing, I was pretty good with screen-time-focus today. Any­way, I leave work and go to bible study at Ant and Sarah’s flat, and am com­pletely fine (if remark­ably full of food fol­low­ing din­ner and Ant’s, err, “21st” cake) until we’re pray­ing… at which point I shut my eyes again and am com­pletely unable to con­cen­trate on what’s going on around me. I’m more aware of a headache when I open my eyes again, but it’s not significant.

Later, Gem is dri­ving back home (for which I’m so thank­ful, because, as will become clear, I really shouldn’t have been dri­ving) and I shut my eyes for a moment — you know that moment, as a pas­sen­ger at night where you can just lean your head back and enjoy dark­ness, momen­tary rest? Then, by the time I open them again (two sec­onds later, max), every­thing is that much worse. I really want to go back to puz­zles in my head to dis­tract from (now appar­ently oncom­ing) migraine.

This is all really strange. These things aren’t meant to hap­pen on their own, its some weird reflex that’s meant to hap­pen when you’re allowed to shut your eyes and clench your teeth to respond to headaches, not before… time to crash. Speak­ing of which, that’s what I’m going to do now. *rearranges puzzles/sleeps*