Tuesday 24 February 2009

Sleep-Deprivation...

Last night was the second night in a row in which I slept terribly. Two nights ago I had even taken a sleeping pill, but to no avail. Both then and last night I woke up after about 3 hours of sleep, to then wake up and spent the rest of the night taking small naps to get some sleep.

Only beneficial effect of the consequent sleep-deprivation is that I'm too tired to worry or think much about anything at all. Yesterday I have done the most work I have done in ages. Today I hope to repeat the same, despite feeling like someone is keeping my head clamped inside a vice, and trying to ignore feeling nauseous and such. I guess that cold I have had for weeks now doesn't help much. I keep waking up with a sore throat each night and morning. Perhaps that's what's keeping me awake.

Anyway, despite feeling like a wrack I have to look presentable for a visitor who will drop by later today. In the comments for the previous post, 'Jan' offered his old phone and will personally drop it off today. I was pleasantly surprised when my plea for help got answered. It's also an interesting way to meet my blog's readers :)

My head is hurting like hell now... I think I'll go take a few more painkillers and try to focus on work. See ya all around.


Maya

Friday 20 February 2009

Bah...

A few things: first of all I got a phone call from the VUMC earlier for an appointment. March 9th, with a doctor Gijs. We'll see what comes out of it.

Secondly, when I turned on my work mobile phone earlier it told me the SIM card was rejected even after power cycling the phone a few times. While trying to open the phone to replace the SIM card I got so frustrated with this Nokia 3310's shell design that I threw it against the wall. The cover is off now, but the LCD screen is a goner. Yes, I suck for getting angry.

Sadly it's also the phone I use for contacting clients, so now they can't even reach me by phone. In other words I really need a replacement phone. Anyone have an old (Nokia) phone they don't use anymore? As long as I can call and be called with it and it handles text messages it's fine. SIM-lock free would be nice too ^_^

*grumbles*

I really don't feel like spending 50 Euro or so on a phone right now...


Maya

Nightmare?

Last night I took a sleeping pill, but unfortunately it didn't prevent me from waking up when Pieter returned home from D&D and the dogs went berserk as usual as they went out for their walk. Nor did it stop me from waking up 4-5 other times during the night. I remember a few dreams, waking up covered in sweat once, and to finish the night off I had something that could be called a nightmare.

I was sitting in a wheelchair, with a woman sitting in another wheelchair, around us were stairs. I was chasing after her or so, forcing her against a wall and such, I don't exactly remember. I somehow knew that the building I was in was an institution for the mentally ill. After having acted like a nut for a while a man came and drove me off. As we went downstairs, he told me: "And Ms just thought you were improving...". He then told me that I had been caught inside a fantasy world inside my head for a long time.

At that point the thought that what he said was true, that I was indeed crazy and that I did indeed belong in that institution, dawned on me. I must have rejected the thought fiercely the next moment, though, as the dream then shifted to me bringing down a small white gate as you'd see in front of a house, and flinging two dismembered arms with swords in their hands away from me, watching them vaporize and preparing to head home. I was walking on grass and thinking of running home.

During the dream I remember seeing or just hearing certain people I know, like my father and his new wife, plus random people, giggling and laughing at me. It felt as though they were mocking me. When I woke up from the dream I felt my heart beating in my chest, as the experience had seemingly affected me quite a bit. I went to see Pieter shortly after waking up so that I could be a crybaby again.

I think that the dream is largely based on my experiences at the VUMC, as both my mother and I have described the Gender Team there as 'lunatics treating the sane', combined with my further experiences, sense of loneliness in this whole issue with a big dash of paranoia.

But frankly, why should I trust anyone at this point to help me?


Maya

Thursday 19 February 2009

Nowhere Left To Run...

Today appointment with GP. She referred me to a physiotherapist who can teach me breathing exercises as alternative to sedatives. Further offered to listen me when I felt the need to do so. Asked who support me, could only name Pieter. Can't do anything else for me.

Pieter brought me by car to GP, walked home. Headache. Had breakfast, felt tired and distracted. Went to bed at around 1 PM, read for an hour, tried to sleep. Started crying and laughing like a crazy person again. I am crazy. It's all over. Too much pain. Fell asleep, woke up few times, covered in sweat. Feeling miserable.

Want to cancel all outstanding client projects, quit company, give up on everything. Nothing works. Can't focus. Too much pain.

I'm a freak. Stop telling me I'm not. You all tell me to be what I feel I am. I am a freak. I hate it all. No love. No friendship. Only pain. Suffering. Things I can't do or be because I'm a freak. I'm a freak, damnit. A stupid, freakishly deformed, undefinable accident. People hate me for what I am. I can only hate myself for being like this. Shut up. Shut up. You stupid people with your stupid normal lives and 'issues'. You only laugh at me when I'm not looking and make fun.

No help. No end to pain. No point in trying. Four years is too much. Want to surrender to the pain.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

New Website And Dreams~

Today during my noon-time nap I had a really interesting and mostly pleasant dream. It featured the female friend who last visited me, late last year. In short, the dream involved us two cuddling, lying down and generally feeling incredibly at ease. It still makes me feel sad that I haven't felt like that in a long time. It's one thing to shut out all emotions and attempt to focus on the truly important stuff like work, but I can't ignore the fact that I love physical contact (cuddling, hugging, a pat on the shoulder...), not to mention the sensation of having someone nearby in real life who understands you and not only appreciates your efforts, but easily joins in with your projects as well. I guess I'm merely human after all, even if wish I wasn't...

Today I did some more work on the new Nyanko.ws company website. I'm close to finishing the new Content Management System (CMS), which I have written from scratch in a combination of PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS and JS. You know, the usual stuff virtually every web developer uses :) with apologies to the handful of ASP.NET/JSP developers ;)

The reason why I chose to write the CMS from scratch was largely because I could only see existing CMSs as being so generic and so bloated that using a CMS like Joomla or Drupal would be about as elegant as balancing an elephant on the edge of a porcelain tea cup. Not to mention that these CMSs have so much overhead, are extremely difficult to write extensions for or to customize for a site, and have more bugs in them than the air on a midsummer's afternoon.

With some luck I will have the new Nyanko site up and running next week. It should be relatively easy to debug as it consists out of fewer than 1,000 lines of code, has been fully documented and commented, plus I have gone through the code with a fine-toothed comb a few times already. The design of the website shouldn't change much from the way it looks now, unless anyone has some great suggestions? :)

Right now I'm having some difficulty breathing. It's as though I simply can't get enough air into my lungs and it's giving me a headache. Supposedly this is merely due to stress, and it's the beginning of hyperventilating. The breathing exercises don't seem to help a lot, though. At any rate I have made an appointment with my GP on Thursday. I promised to keep her updated on the status with the VUMC, apparently I'll get to tell her that I have been placed on the waiting list for a few months, am still officially undiagnosed, yet I'm at a point where I collapse nearly daily from the emotional stress, suffer from concentration lapses and fatigue, not to mention the general sense of restlessness I seem to be affected by.

I guess dreams will just be dreams...


Maya

Thursday 12 February 2009

Numb.

Not much has happened in the past days. I have done a bit of work, nothing impressive. Most of the time I spent on doing nothing useful whatsoever. The most interesting thing to happen was a few days ago when I received a text message on my phone from my dad, who claimed to want to get back into touch again. After what he has done to my mother, brothers and me, I don't ever want to see or talk to him again.

I sent an updated version of my story to the national TV broadcaster AVRO. Previously they had shown some interest in my story, ergo I thought it only pertinent to let them know what had happened since then. I have no idea whether they'll respond, however.

My general state lately can best be described as 'passive' and 'uncaring', or just 'numb'. The emotional pain doesn't seem to get out at all any more, but just poisons me from the inside out. Outside some projects I work on I really don't care about anything any more, or when I still feel that I do, I quickly withdraw because to do so always means pain and confusion.

Much of the day I spend overcome by what I can only assume are the symptoms of stress, namely a feeling of being extremely tired, dizzy, nauseous and with a headache which slowly gets worse. Sleeping is no longer an escape from this, as shortly after waking up again I'm right back in the same state. Sleeping itself is an ordeal already. More and more often I lie awake for hours, assaulted by dark thoughts, whether it's before I go to sleep, or when I wake up during the night.

I guess that what I'm trying to do is adjusting to my situation, which means withdrawing into myself, much like how things were years ago. Anything beyond purely rational things seem more and more alien to me, though I often fail to see the point of performing rational things as well. I loathe the thought of dying, yet I loathe living just as much.

What does matter any more? Contact with family? Friends? Rubbish. Meeting someone nice I could fall in love with? I can't even love myself, let alone tolerate. Build up a successful company and career? For what purpose? I don't even have an identity or personality, other than that of a freak of nature which is constantly in pain at the realization of its own existence.

I am a freak... as long as nobody can say what my body is, as long as I can not accept such an explanation and live with it, I am a freak. There is no point to this body until then. I hate it, can't stand it, want to hurt, maim and injure it. Emotionally I have snapped ages already, all my rational side is doing is keeping my suicidal tendencies and such in check. You have no idea how many times a day I feel tempted to plunge that sharp pair of scissors, or knife into my flesh.

There's nothing left for me to hope for. In this situation I can not get out on my own, yet nobody can or will help me. I truly wish I was just being depressed and such, but sometimes reality can be very harsh. It's got nothing to do with my looks, as I do look okay, or my intellectual side, as that one is fine too. I should have a great future ahead of me, yet inside I feel this huge turmoil, this chaos, slowly ripping me apart. It makes me wish I would just go insane already so that I won't have to consciously experience this degradation...

Bah... even writing this is pointless... whatever. Just keep watching and pointing as I perform my next trick. Leave me alone...


Maya

Sunday 8 February 2009

Innovations And Children~

Last night I got knocked out pretty quickly again thanks to another sleeping pill and woke up after a good night's sleep, feeling well-rested. With only 3 pills left at this point it's getting time for a refill, though. Pieter also insists on fetching it, so as to reduce the temptation on my side. Although he loves to tease me and make fun of me (constantly), it does show how much he cares about me, even if he has trouble showing his emotions like most men ;)

Today we went swimming together with a friend of Pieter as we have done now for a while. At first it felt like things weren't going right, with the sight of a few happy couples and such triggering a lot of negativity inside me, to the point that I nearly felt like crying. Just when I thought I was going to leave the pool, crying or not, I noticed two familiar faces.

A few weeks ago I had met a couple of children (two girls, one boy) and their father in the pool and ended up playing with these children. Today we ended up doing the same, though this time the boy mostly went playing with his father. The two girls, six and ten years old, played a game with me called 'push me off the raft into the water', which strangely enough seemed to often back-fire on them ;) though I was nice enough to drop into the water at times too.

It are times like that when it feels like I got a momentary reprieve of my tortured existence, being able to enjoy something which is just plain fun. In general I love children (though boys are often just annoying :P ), and time went by really quickly until it was time to leave. After talking a bit with the father of the children, who really seems to appreciate me taking a few of the children off his hands for a while, we said our goodbyes.

Lately I have been working on a nice project, which in short can be described as designing a new type of CPU, the central processor you find in any computer system. I'm employing a whole list of paradigms and ideas I have been thinking about for years now during my studies of computer systems, a favourite hobby of mine. As I grew up, I was surrounded by computers from quite a young age, starting with a Commodore 64 in the late 80s (loading games from tapes), then a 286 PC (DOS). Aside from playing outside a lot on the farm, I could be found in front of the computer a lot.

The architecture and design of computer systems has always interested me, as have the possibilities with them. Naturally, I always try to improve things, come up with new ways to do something, or to make something previously impossible possible. Which is what has lead me to this project :)

I can't say too much about the ideas I have for the CPU, as I don't feel comfortable spilling my ideas in public, where people can run off with them ;). I can however tell a few things. So far I have learned VHDL, the Hardware Description Language used to design chips (ICs, ASICs) with. I have programmed a few components of the design already, particularly the bits which actually perform the arithmetic, logic and bit-shift operations.

I have also come to realize how little I actually do know about the implementation of the most basic firmware which exists on a computer system, be it the BIOS, Open Firmware or EFI. As this is an essential part of any computer system (the start-up and other low-level routines), it is fairly important that I get this part right ;)

The name of the project is boringly called Nyanko CPU Project, with the name of the current prototype CPU I'm designing being 'KITTEN'. I intend to use KITTEN as a learning experience as I further develop this new processor architecture. After running simulations on each phase of the design, I intend to use an FPGA development board like the Terasic DE2-70 ( http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=39&No=226 ) which uses an Altera Cyclone II FPGA.

A big issue at this point is to procure one of these boards. As they run at around US$599 a piece, it's out of my reach for now, but I hope to obtain one either through sponsorship, unexpected rush of income, donations or simply by borrowing one. The ideal thing about this development board is that it has the interfaces and on-board chips for audio, VGA, USB and more. As my goal is to develop a CPU which can be used in low-end systems all the way to high-end servers, it is important that it can support a wide variety of interfaces.

For components beyond the CPU I will use regular DDR2/3 memory, a PCIe bus and forego x86/PPC legacy (although the PS/2 interface is an option). I'm toying with the idea of an upgraded COM (serial) port as well, as a serial link can be extremely fast, just look at SATA, USB, Ethernet and so on.

Moving on to more common tech, a friend offered to ship me his Nintendo DS, as he wasn't using it any more, but unfortunately his brother still wanted to have it around. I would have loved to feed my Harvest Moon addiction :) I guess I'll just have to be happy with the SNES and N64 versions for now.

So yeah, I guess that most of those who started reading this small novel have quit somewhere half-way through, for which I offer my apologies. It was my intention to show that I have a life beyond whining about stuff I can't change and threating with physical violence. I also wanted to show off some of my interests and my current projects involving these. Hopefully it worked.


Maya

Saturday 7 February 2009

And Thus It Ends...

Allow me to be frank: especially after that last letter from the VUMC. It confirmed for me at least on an emotional level that I'm a complete freak, who is surrounded by absolute morons, who are so incompetent that they can not provide a diagnosis. Worse, they're not even interested in trying to provide one.

I loathe this body I have. I hate all of you with regular bodies and with regular lives. The knowledge that all of that is completely out of reach for me tortures me every second that I am awake. At this point I can only maintain my sanity by forcefully suppressing my emotions, something I can do for about a day, after which I'll crash again, like I did yesterday night. Thursday I felt great, did a lot of work, felt like I could handle things with ease. Then Friday I began to feel worse and worse during the day, suffering from an overdose of stress as I have felt regularly the past months, which makes me feel tired, dizzy and nauseous. Sometimes I can break through it, meaning that I will crash later that day again, and sometimes sleep will help. Lately only letting out all the pain and frustration seems to have any effect, however.

I feel intensily bitter at this point. About me having felt less than everyone around me who did perform well at school, about me not being able to make money, have a job, run a company... all because I just had to be cursed both with being gifted and by having this body.

Is this how my life will end? The issues surrounding my body never resolved, me never being able to find peace with it, my giftedness ruining any chance on doing mundane tasks which will actually make me money, the frustration and anger getting worse and worse until at some point I can't take it any longer?

The time that I can spend here at Pieter's place is drawing to an end, as he isn't allowed to rent rooms out to people, and the tax office won't like it either. Within a few months I will have to move, yet for me to stay alone, or to burden others with my issues, as I will keep crashing, will cry for hours on end and possibly do stupid things to myself and others... or worse, move back to my mother's place... none of them are solutions, all of them will worsen my situation. There is no way out of this.

Unless something big changes for me, my life will be over in a few months time. I have been analyzing this issue and tracking its progress for long enough now to predict how it's going to end up. It may be less painful to others if I were to say my goodbyes soon, before my situation degrades even further, and I will hurt even more people.

Tell me I'm giving up, that I'm giving in to those moronic assholes who made my life into a living hell, but please do understand my situation and the pain I'm in. I just want to escape this pain...


Maya

Thursday 5 February 2009

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Still Undefined...

After a few calls by Pieter to the VUMC to ask for some urgency in my case, I received a letter today from the VUMC. The contents in short:

They're willing to look at my case again and will place me on the waiting list.

They have looked at my files and have concluded that this is not a case of intersexuality, and they'll have me talk to a psychologist for further diagnostics.

The latter point is especially interesting, as only a short while ago the sexuologist from the AMC concluded that I'm most definitely not transsexual. If I'm neither transsexual nor intersexual, what does remain? What upsets me is that things appear to keep moving along very slowly, that I will have to keep fighting to get people to listen to me and that the possibility of actual treatment is still as remote as ever. In other words, this year is shaping up to become just like the past four years. The only difference is that this year I'm decidedly on the edge emotionally, suffering from PTSD, multiple traumas and suicidal moods. Being put into this situation again is the last thing I was hoping for.

At this moment I'm holding my emotions back, and haven't shed a single tear yet. I can feel the turmoil inside, however. Pieter is going to make a few phone calls today. Hopefully some things will be cleared up...


Maya