Feeling Guilty

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him." - Mark Twain

I have one more year of law school left. I wonder what type of motivation I will take into the year. I wonder how hard my classes are going to feel, how much I'll just be hoping to finish up. I think I wouldn't of minded being done already, nor maybe even taking the bar this summer if I got a year head start. I need to figure out a way to use this year the most to my advantage. I need to focus my energy on finding a job and making sure I can use all these years of work to finally start making money that I can live on.

I finished listenting (audiobook) Annie Duke's book. I thought it was really good. It is nice to hear the life story of other people whom you would consider normal. She is anything, but normal, but just seeing that everyone shares a lot of the same goals, fears and troubles makes you feel a lot better. It didnt' improve my poker game much, but it did make me feel more motivated.

It wasn't too long ago I was talking to someone and I mentioned that I didn't understand how anxiety attacks worked. It didn't make sense to me that you could feel so anxious that it would literally cripple your being able to do anything. Life is full of anxiety, how could you ever let it win and could it really be something I couldn't control or fight back against, I mean its in your head right. I still won't venture to say I understand them, but I feel like I had a form of one yesterday. It was something I had had in my life before, but I never knew how to classify it so I just chalked it up to feeling weird. I was at work and all of a sudden my heart just started racing, and I felt trapped, like I wanted to get out, just get away. My chest started really hurting and I couldn't sit still. It wasn't anything where I didn't have control, but I also couldn't be productive at all. Everything just felt futile. I'm used to stress building up and coming out in negative ways like my eating habits or lack of activity, but never did it every have such a physical effect as it had this day. I self diagnosed of course, that is something us people without health insurance tend to do a lot, and I could only explain it as being anxiety. There are long term things that continually stress me, like school, work ethic, relationships and finances, but I tend to just take these on in stride (well my kind of stride). I think it had to do with recent stressful things I had been dealing with that I had left resolved/unresolved just the day before. Then there was just irrational thoughts and fear that pops in your mind making you feel worse. Like feeling that you are not productive enough, going to get fired, that you won't have a place to live at the end of the summer and on and on. Usually you just distract yourself from such things, but this day I just had a research project to work on and I just added that to the fustration. The day ended and I raced home. When I got there I had a beer, played a game of poker and then fell asleep at 9 or 10pm. This never happens.

Today I feel much better, but the thought that stresses in my mind could manifest themselves in physical ways scares me. It also makes me feel weak, like I am not strong minded enough to control this stupidity. I mean, relax, life is good, why let these things mess with you. So my little experience, which I'm blowing up here to look bigger than it really was. I mean I didn't faint, throw up or do curl up in a ball. But I did feel intense pressure on my chest, and the fight or flight responses in my system turned on without having anything to fight or run from. I figure I'm better off thinking about it now than if it got worse later.

In more upbeat news, they killed that terrorist guy. Nope, not the actual important one (Bin Laden), the Iraq important one. Maybe he was like their George Bush, once you get rid of him, you get rid of the problems. Oh maybe he was just the face of a bigger problem (in W's case, the conservative right) and they will find another lacky. Point is, we finally get some good news and when killing people is good news, you know something must be wrong.

convenient