Functioning on Four Gigs of RAM
Sep. 6th, 2025 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
disappointed_lesbianI feel like my blood sugar is low (which is why I'm taking a break to compose this post), but, according to the sensor reader and the blood test I just completed, it is not low. Most times that the reader says that it is low, I feel ok.
I'm using an old and breaking-down laptop because my desktop computer monitor gives me migraines. The laptop has like 4, maybe 4.5G of RAM. That's fine for surfing the web, composing posts, and listening to music, but it's a nightmare for studying. I need a pdf reader, audio editor, web browser with about five different tabs, text editor, and my flashcard software open all at once to create flashcards. The laptop runs glacially slowly when I have all that open. I've wasted hours sitting here simply waiting for dialogs to open and web pages to load. Even downloading software and viewing manpages via the terminal is slow. I've tried switching to a couple lightweight browsers, but both of them give me issues with the Chinese script.
I haven't heard from my DOR counselor about the monitor and keyboard I requested. I hope she's doing the silently-send-what-client-needs thing she does. She won't respond to my requests but the stuff I ask for will show up in the mail.
My blood sugar still took a dive after last night's relatively protein-heavy dinner, so this evening I'm trying something the nutritionist suggested: splitting my dinner in two. Instead of having one large meal at eight pm, I had a couple hundred calories at six pm, and I'll have three or four hundred more at eight. I'm unhappy with this solution because I'm basically back to eating more than two meals per day, which I want to avoid because it's a hassle, creates more mess in the kitchen, and takes up more time. I'm hoping to do it for tonight only, because I feel so low-blood-sugary, then try something else going forward. The nutrionist said something about a huge load of carbs all at once potentially being the cause of this problem, so maybe I'll just eat less at the evening meal and make up the calories with my snack and/or afternoon meal.
My stomach is hurting now and I don't know why. Wait, yes I do. I've been undersleeping for days and it takes about four such days before I start having stomach cramps after eating certain foods. The cornstarch failed to work again last night, and again I got even less sleep than usual. I shouldn't have had chickpea pasta. That's actually the only thing I do have to eat in the apartment right now other than the fixings for another bowl of oatmeal, so I'll have to go out and buy something for my second dinner or have the oats tonight instead of tomorrow at noon, when I usually eat them. What a pain in the ass this is. The hypoglycemia management was supposed to improve my sleep, and so far the opposite is happening. I have plenty of oats but not much to sweeten them with. I could eat bland oats, go out for a bit of sugar, or use up what I have and buy something for tomorrow at noon.
Today has not been a productive day. Now I need to spend time distracting myself from pain instead of studying or working out. I hate that so much of my life has been wasted like this.
I had the oats.
Tomorrow is another day but my life is half over and I'm running out of days. I try to avoid thinking about this because it makes me feel a kind of terror that I find difficult to describe. It's not really death that I'm afraid of; it's an empty life, and the end of an empty life because there'll be no more chances to fill it with anything.
I'm using an old and breaking-down laptop because my desktop computer monitor gives me migraines. The laptop has like 4, maybe 4.5G of RAM. That's fine for surfing the web, composing posts, and listening to music, but it's a nightmare for studying. I need a pdf reader, audio editor, web browser with about five different tabs, text editor, and my flashcard software open all at once to create flashcards. The laptop runs glacially slowly when I have all that open. I've wasted hours sitting here simply waiting for dialogs to open and web pages to load. Even downloading software and viewing manpages via the terminal is slow. I've tried switching to a couple lightweight browsers, but both of them give me issues with the Chinese script.
I haven't heard from my DOR counselor about the monitor and keyboard I requested. I hope she's doing the silently-send-what-client-needs thing she does. She won't respond to my requests but the stuff I ask for will show up in the mail.
My blood sugar still took a dive after last night's relatively protein-heavy dinner, so this evening I'm trying something the nutritionist suggested: splitting my dinner in two. Instead of having one large meal at eight pm, I had a couple hundred calories at six pm, and I'll have three or four hundred more at eight. I'm unhappy with this solution because I'm basically back to eating more than two meals per day, which I want to avoid because it's a hassle, creates more mess in the kitchen, and takes up more time. I'm hoping to do it for tonight only, because I feel so low-blood-sugary, then try something else going forward. The nutrionist said something about a huge load of carbs all at once potentially being the cause of this problem, so maybe I'll just eat less at the evening meal and make up the calories with my snack and/or afternoon meal.
My stomach is hurting now and I don't know why. Wait, yes I do. I've been undersleeping for days and it takes about four such days before I start having stomach cramps after eating certain foods. The cornstarch failed to work again last night, and again I got even less sleep than usual. I shouldn't have had chickpea pasta. That's actually the only thing I do have to eat in the apartment right now other than the fixings for another bowl of oatmeal, so I'll have to go out and buy something for my second dinner or have the oats tonight instead of tomorrow at noon, when I usually eat them. What a pain in the ass this is. The hypoglycemia management was supposed to improve my sleep, and so far the opposite is happening. I have plenty of oats but not much to sweeten them with. I could eat bland oats, go out for a bit of sugar, or use up what I have and buy something for tomorrow at noon.
Today has not been a productive day. Now I need to spend time distracting myself from pain instead of studying or working out. I hate that so much of my life has been wasted like this.
I had the oats.
Tomorrow is another day but my life is half over and I'm running out of days. I try to avoid thinking about this because it makes me feel a kind of terror that I find difficult to describe. It's not really death that I'm afraid of; it's an empty life, and the end of an empty life because there'll be no more chances to fill it with anything.
