World's Only Rational Man

…getting fired will be the best thing that’s happened in years. 

For the first time in the last year, maybe two, energy is coming back to me.  I can hardly believe how worn down and run down and exhausted I was.  “Life” was nothing other than futile flailing at my fatigue and depression.

This has helped.  I can mostly sleep in this thing, as opposed to the CPAP pillows the Inquisitor’s Nozzles.  And how have I been spending this renewed energy?  By investing it.  Finally.    

I’ve found a great circuit around my neighborhood, 1.3 miles around, with excellent hills.  Today I did it five times, then mowed the lawn (which is pretty freakin’ big).  Combine that with sustained ketosis and only one meal a day (which is also, admittedly, pretty freakin’ big) and I’m now losing 2 pounds of fat a week, at least.

I don’t see this trend stopping, because if I don’t walk, I don’t get to keep reading the Sword of Truth series.  Since I’m currently on Soul of the Fire,  there’s probably about 4000 pages to go.

Sorry, again, for another egocentric post.  But I have to focus on kicking apnea’s ass.  It’s robbed me of my last two years and I want payback.

All the best to all of you. 

So, finally got hold of the highly regarded specialist attorney.  His recommendation was going through the EEOC for the ADA concerns, and the DoL about the FMLA.  I’m not even going to unpack those acronyms; hopefully, you’ll never need any of them.

Therefore, there is much research to be done.  Will try to be back later, if the work doesn’t give me acute acronym poisoning.

Via Insty, I see that Mark Hemingway calls it the Ideological Revenue Service.  As usual, I fixate on numbers.

Some 471 conservative groups seeking 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status were harassed by the IRS…

We’re not hearing any progressive complaints about the IRS, which means harassment of them is somewhere between non-existent and utterly negligible.  Leftists whine incessantly about whatever’s bothering them, whether it exists or not.  So, no IRS bother.  None.

The IRS claims to be completely non-partisan .  How likely is this?  It’s exactly as likely as tossing a coin and getting all heads or all tails…471 times in a row.

So, a 1 in 471 chance?  Er, not exactly.  To make this easier we’ll round off our calculations a little.  In the IRS’s favor, of course.

The odds of (by chance) flipping a coin the exact same way ten times in a row is one in a thousand.  For every ten additional exact flips, add three zeros to number.  The IRS managed to do 47 such sets of ten, plus one more flip.

So, the odds that the IRS and its apologists are being truthful?  They’re about 1 in…

2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

And people say you can’t trust the government!

Oh, and if I do get an Instalanche?  I just lost my job, because I couldn’t deal with my sleep apnea and work simultaneously.  So, for the first and hopefully last time, I’ll beg for donations.  There’s a small Paypal donation button beneath my blogroll.  It was originally meant to finance video blogging, but I suppose now it’s more of a Beanee Weanee Fund.

(NOTE–I’ll be trying to set up a new computer today, and you know how that can get.  If I’m not back in a few hours, send a search party.)

First, obviously, is that I’m worried about my personal situation.

But I also don’t want to jinx it.  By “it”, of course, I mean this blowback on Obama and Co.  The response is barely a millionth of what’s deserved, but at least it’s something.  Apparently the IRS rigged the 2012 election in Obama’s favor.  This is so bad that even some Democrats pretending outrage.  Heck, it’s so bad that some of them may actually be slighted perturbed.  But don’t worry, that feeling will pass with the next false witness against a non-progressive.

Most of all, what if I’m a sort of voodoo doll?  “ObamaGate” blew up exactly when my career did.  Should I regain control of my life if it lets the Progs control everyone else’s?

Hmm.  Decisions, decisions…

…the barn door gets locked.

In theory, I could have managed my apnea since beginning to wear the CPAP respirator back in…I think…February.  Instead, it mostly got worse.  The specialists said most people adjust to the discomfort in a month, as long as they wear it every night for about seven hours.  And of course all organisms react identically to the same stimuli.

No, for me it was torture.  Although chronically fatigued I still couldn’t find sleep with those “pillows” stuck up my nostrils.  In bed, my most common thought was probably, “we couldn’t do this to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.”

And that was before I finally managed to fall asleep…to quickly discover that whenever my mouth sagged open even slightly, my medical “aid” would respond by blasting air down the nose and into the throat.  When I woke to that sensation and realized what happened, I thought I was in the Circle of Hell so horrible that Dante had repressed his memories of it.

“Ah, you need a strap to keep your mouth closed in sleep,” the experts said.  “Strap” turned out to mean a tourniquet…for my head.

Apologies for going on about this, but I’m also trying to organize my sob story (but a true sob story!)  for future legal counsel.  My plea will be countered with, “he didn’t comply with the specialist’s instructions in the first month.”  And that’s true:  in my numbed and exhausted state I found it impossible to torture myself any more than I did.  The treatment made things a lot worse before it got better.  Which, prior to my termination, it didn’t really ever do.

So, guess what happened when I went back to the sleep clinic a few days ago?  The technician heard my complaints and mentioned a new respirator, the Wisp.

As you can see, it does turn the user a whiter shade of pale than Elric of Melnibone.  But you know what?  It’s a small price to pay.  So what if direct sunlight will now cause me to burst into flames?  I can actually sleep in this thing…most of the time…with relatively minor disruptions.

The Wisp came out only weeks after I got the ”nasal probe” model, and I’d still have my job if I’d only known.

*Ambiguous sigh*

There’s something weird in pending comments.  Some piled up there even though they went up on the blog as well.  ed hering’s and wydyfae’s did not, and I just now noticed.

I don’t think I’ve missed any other carbon-based messages among the silicon-based spam, so I’m about to delete the entire pending list.  So if I did miss other comments, next time they’ll be easier to spot.

Oh, and of course thank you all again for your concern.

…are you ready for me to go on welfare, food stamps, and Obamacare?

I admit to a morbid interest in the prospect, since it’s quite possible that I’ve “fallen through the cracks”.  Thanks to being fired I probably can’t draw unemployment, and Tennessee’s is terrible in the first place.  But it’s also unlikely that I can get SSD (Social Security Disability) for the apnea.  Here’s the criteria:

Cognitive Impairment

Chronic sleep disruptions caused by apnea can affect daytime alertness, intellectual ability, memory, and mood. But to qualify for disability benefits because of these problems, your symptoms must be severe. The SSA requires that your sleep apnea has caused cognitive or mood changes that limit your activities, your ability to function socially, or your ability to focus and keep up with work because of one of the following:

• personality changes

• memory problems

• mood disturbances

• cognitive disturbances (such as delusions or hallucinations)

• emotional instability or poor impulse control, or

• a loss of 15 I.Q. points or more.

Those bullet points which apply, I won’t be able to demonstrate to the bureaucrats.  And while a 15-point I.Q. loss would drag me down into triple digits, that’s not going to garner sympathy with the paper-pushers.

So…no employment due to being fired, but also no unemployment, and no disability.  What’s left?   Hoping that Marco Rubio can get me amnesty, I guess.

Yep.  It’s time to climb aboard the “entitlement” wagon.  So pull me, my productive friends!  Harder!  Support me in my indolence!  You work, I’ll stay home in anticipation of this…

…and this…