"Panic Cookies" Would Also Be A Good Name For A Band

Sometimes when I don’t get enough sleep – as was the case last night, when, for whatever reason, I got, at best, 3 and a half hours – my body has kind of a strange reaction the next day.
Rather than simply allowing me to feel tired, my body decides to start pumping adrenaline to keep me going.
A lot of adrenaline.
This would be okay if it just meant that I would spend the day not feeling tired, but there tends to be rather more to it than that.
All of the adrenaline coursing through my veins makes me feel really, really anxious.
If you’ve ever had an anxiety attack, I would say that you could liken the feeling to a mild anxiety attack.
One that lasts all day.
The reason I mention this, of course, is because that’s what’s been happening to me today.
I’ve spent the whole day feeling antsy, with my stomach churning, and a sense of impending doom hovering over me as I worry about…well, nothing.
That’s the really irritating part; this isn’t a reaction to any sort of external event. I don’t have anything to actually feel anxious about, yet I feel anxious as hell. If there were some external source of anxiety, I could try to do something to deal with it. But there isn’t, and so there’s no way to really deal with the feeling.
It was, of course, this weird fight or flight response going on that, more than the kids and the music, prevented me from taking a nap, which is ironic because the whole reason I wanted to take a nap was to try to get the fight or flight thing to go away.
(Typically when this happens I feel fine the next day, after having crashed and gotten a decent night’s sleep.)
In an effort to give me something to focus on – for the record, writing this is a huge effort; I manage to write maybe two or three sentences, then I have to get up to pace wildly – and to expend some of the energy, I decided to make oatmeal raisin cookies earlier this evening.
It was…an experience. To an observer, my baking efforts probably would have looked like something out of that “Go Meth!” commercial.
My efforts didn’t really do much to burn off the energy, and the cookies came out kind of retarded, though given that today’s yard work didn’t do it, I’m not sure why I thought baking would have any impact on the energy.
Somewhere in the racing thoughts in my brain I realized that the idea that baking would burn off energy was just one of many mistaken assumptions I’ve made recently in regards to oatmeal raisin cookies.
The first mistaken assumption, which is part of the reason I decided to bake oatmeal raisin cookies specifically, came a while ago at work on my lunch break.
While standing in line to pay for my lunch at the café I usually buy my lunch from, I decided to grab one of the packages of chocolate chip cookies on the counter for dessert.
When it came time to eat the cookies, though, I discovered, to my disappointment, that they were actually oatmeal raisin cookies, not chocolate chip.
I like oatmeal raisin cookies, but when you’re expecting chocolate chip, it’s kind of a letdown. Still, they were pretty good, and have actually become a standard part of my lunch.
(They’re actually better than the chocolate chip cookies that are sold at the café.)
Inspired by the café’s cookies, I decided that somewhere along the line I should make some of my own, an idea which, as mentioned, I seized upon tonight.
I was operating on the assumption that I had all of the ingredients, but in the process of gathering all of them I learned that this was yet another mistaken assumption, as it turns out I didn’t have any oats.
After doing some frantic digging around, though, I learned that this was also a mistaken assumption, as I did, in fact, have oats.
(I’m rambling, I know, but I can’t help it.)
I thought about going for a walk, but one of the elements of these all-day anxiety events is just a smattering of paranoia (for that tangy zip), so I didn’t want to venture out into the world and be seen by people.
This morning’s excursion provided quite enough of that.
In any case, I suppose I should move on to do something else in the pursuit of wearing off this energy, but I just thought I should share today’s Adventures in Anxious Mania with you all.
Hopefully it’ll be the usual well-adjusted……err, slightly more well-adjusted, and considerably less energetic, Jon who writes the next entry.