Brief update (in which I rant)

See? This is what happens when you allow yourself to get addicted to the internet. You go off and sulk for a week, and you think it must be much longer because you haven't been gone this long since about 2002. OK then. Life is just peachy. I've been on incapacity benefit all of six weeks and the government is already trying to get me off it. Because, yeah, being able to stay awake for all of three hours at a time makes for a highly productive teacher. Officially, and according to that 'British law' thing they used to take seriously, all I'm supposed to be sending in for 28 weeks is doctors' notes. But because the government wants to 'crack down' on 'benefit fraud', after just six weeks I (being so special) get to go through the extreme stress and worry of being examined by a stranger who has probably never heard of M.E. or FMS and will think I'm lying for the fun of it. Yes, because living on less than £60 a quid a week and lying in bed doing nothing and seeing no one ever is so much more fun than when I used to have a good job that I loved and made quite a decent living from thankyouverymuch. Because I want to be sick and in pain and losing everything I ever worked for, for the fun. Because, of course, like all sick people, I'm just plain lazy. Because being too ill to go to your support group, or to lift the batteries into your wheelchair so you can charge it up so you can just get to the post box, is so much fun in itself that I'd like to starve too. Because I'm so grateful to the government for taking twice as much money off me in council tax than they give me in 'handouts' that I think they can just take that off me too. Because paying National Insurance contributions for ten years is really worth it when you get so much good value back for your hard-earned tax money. Because bipolar disorder, doctor phobia, chronic pain and severe fatigue make it so much fun to go through endless medical examinations from the Department of Work and Pensions, who bring new meaning to the terms 'arse' and 'elbow' and 'don't know' and 'from'. Because it's all just great fun. New Labour. What a triumph. I don't care much of a mess the other lot of idiots would make, it couldn't be as bad as the months of bureaucratic crap that has caused me so much stress that I can't quite believe how appalling their record with me currently looks, and NO ONE gets to call me naive for not remembering how bad the Tories were unless they've had six months of the same. Thank you. Oh - and because it's actually a bit upsetting that the longer I spend not getting better, the more likely it starts to look that this is going to be a really quite long-term thing. Nice. But that's a whole other thought process and I'm not letting myself go there just yet, or I might fall apart entirely, and I need not to do that right now. And, finally and most ironically, because the one thing that might help me start to get better enough to go back to work might be, oh, I don't know - LESS STRESS. Idiot government.

Edited To Add: And I've just heard that social services, who have been umm-ing and ahh-ing for about six weeks over what has been made clear to them is an urgent need for care hours, and have requested (and got) ALL the medical confirmation of ALL my symptoms and ALL the ways they affect me, are STILL asking for more fucking information. While I go without showers for days on end, have now fallen several times in the past week, am not eating properly and keep making myself sicker through doing too much. I feel like giving up, telling them all where to go, crawling into bed and just bloody well staying there. Fuckers.

In good news, I seem to be able to read a bit again. We have been watching House MD, which is truly fantastically addictive (although it either freaks The Girl out when the needles appear, or just turns her into a hypochondriac). I sold some crap on ebay. I bought an iPod that I can't afford. We went to see some family members (others are pretending I don't exist). I'm avoiding church. We're still trying to work on the Great London Trek site, but I'm mostly too sick and the other one's mostly too busy. We had people over for pizza, which made me a bit tired. Um. That's about it, really.