i am an idiot

in general the aftermath of this tachycardia episode has been milder than the first time. apparently having my heart stopped twice is less of a stressor for my body than beating a mile a minute for several hours. which makes sense -- i wonder how the hell people deal with it who have tachycardia for 24 or 48 hours; *gah*. i've also achieved sleep instead of lying awake forever hoping i won't wake up with the same thing again; that was only an issue the first night.

anyhow, i've been doing pretty well, and for the most part managed to not constantly listen to my own heartbeat. but late yesterday i started feeling physiologically restless, and i began to feel my heart was thumping faster and louder than before. not irregular though. still, after a couple of hours of that i was starting to lose my powers of meditative calm. went to bed with some grapes from the vine and a gay pirate novel (raised by wolves by w.a. hoffman). that worked for a while, and i finally fell asleep after consuming about a third of the book.

this morning i woke up all fine, and, as i am often prone to doing upon waking, had a realization. yesterday, some time before the thumping started, i had suddenly felt a hankering for lady grey tea, and so i had a mug of that instead of my standard decaf coffee or rooibos tea (i go through long phases of drinking and eating the same things).

now, i gave up caffeine quite a while ago, and hadn't had any at all in about a year. lady grey tea has caffeine. so that was it. i recognize the symptoms really clearly as caffeine-induced from prior experience. i guess i didn't twig to it right away because i had been a massive caffeine consumer for decades, and when i gave it up, i could easily drink several cups of strong coffee or tea right before bed without it having any noticeable effect.

predictions for the future

from the ladies' home journal, december 1900.

that's actually very impressive. they completely didn't expect the computer and the airplane, and they didn't dare say anything about contraception, but a lot of their expectations did come about. much of it not quite in the way they anticipated, but still. i don't think that i could do as well today.

love the preoccupation with pneumatic tubes. pneumatic tubes! i wish for them! they make my steampunky heart happy.

(via james_nicoll and epi_lj.)