Escape Is My Armor

This whole dog-mauling incident has convinced me of something I've suspected for a long time now:  I'm really, really good at suppressing the fuck out of unpleasant feelings through the time-honored tactic of distracting myself. 

I've always been in love with the fantastic, and I've always preferred playing to working, so it's ridiculously easy to engage my imagination or otherwise immerse myself in something (a game, a book, a TV series) to keep from thinking about something unpleasant. In a lot of ways, I detach from myself and enter the world of the show, like the geekiest out of body experience ever. 

It's much more difficult to do with physical pain, of course. I can't enjoy doing much of anything with a headache -- the constant physical reminder of "Hey, this hurts" makes it hard for me to detach from myself -- but if the pain is emotional, I can block it out with escapism. I'm the one who hurts, you see, so if I stop being me, I stop hurting. 

In related news, I've been watching a lot of television. I thought Archer was pretty terrible for most of season 1, but by season 2 either the Stockholm Syndrome had fully kicked in or the writing had become a lot better, the jokes funnier and the characters less annoying. 

As for the rest of me, the swelling is starting to lessen down, especially on the less-injured part of my face. I can now open my mouth half an inch, rather than a quarter, which makes eating and drinking much less onerous. Mind you, chewing is still a lot of work, because I can only chew with one side of my mouth and even then can't move my teeth very far, but I can at least get larger morsels of food past my lips and fuck me running that is a quality of life improvement. Think about that for a moment: I'm just grateful I can eat my mush from a grown-up size spoon.