Balancing Act, 20

I received some rather shocking news yesterday. My blood pressure is high. Dangerously high. Except for when I was quite overweight for a while, my blood pressure has always been on the low normal range. Something needs to change. The nurse practitioner who saw me yesterday was very helpful and diplomatic about it. Knowing that my diet and exercise habits are very good, except perhaps for my proclivity for cheese, we agreed that there might be other temporary stresses upping the ante: for example that we were new to each other, the clinic was in a new location, and the ambience was very bright and sterile, etcetera. I think she could be right. But there have been other multiple factors I have been having to consider. One is salt. I have been using it more copiously lately in my cooking and in my general diet. So, it`s got to go. No more salt in my cocoa, or iced chocolate, and really it isn`t necessary to bring out the flavour. And I am severely cutting back on this brand of whole grain crackers I have come to enjoy because, they have a lot of salt in them. Cheese is another luxury I am going to have to curtail somewhat, but not completely. I have also decided to block out of my apartment all sounds that I find disagreeable and upsetting. earplugs for construction noise, frequent sirens, garbage and delivery trucks, and the mouth-breather in the building next door with the loud stereo, but there is even more I can do. So, I have decided to quit listening to the CBC. I used to enjoy their broadcasts, their news and current events and social interest programs, and some of them, sometimes are still good. But IO have these things against them: crappy music that is foisted on the hapless listeners, shallow Brahman-caste white folk on the programs who don't have a clue what it's like to be poor or to do without, and their ignorant comments about their first world problems and clear lack of empathy really grates on my nerves: and it isn't just the white, white people on the CBC, but also the white Chinese, the white Pakistanis, the white Aboriginals, the white Africans. I don't care what their skin colour might be, but it seems that the CBC style of diversity is to hire as many people who are every bit as white as they are but for the colour of their skin. And some of them are even whiter. But I especially object to the way they now use their programs for channeling the odious voice of the Douchebag-In-Chief, President Dump, the Great Deplorable squatting in the Oval Office in Washington DC. Day, after day we re subjected to his horrible lying voice, and this triggers me (and I suspect that many others as well are getting triggered by that mouth-breather), and the rage has likely been causing my blood pressure to spike. I think I am also chronically stressed just from the urgent and anxious voices and musings of these type-A journalists who often sound like they themselves are but one newscast away from a nervous breakdown. And I don't need to be hearing the same bad and awful noise and news over and over again on the same day. So, I am opting for silence, for a while anyway. And so far, it is wonderful., Yesterday afternoon when I came home the radio stayed off and I listened to classical music or enjoyed silence or watched nature documentaries in Spanish instead. This morning I treated myself to a long early walk and an extra nap. Of course, on top of everything else, I do have friends (no family, fortunately) about whom I care enough to get upset with, and this certainly hasn't been helping, and I am going to do more in my power to monitor my moods and my emotional reactions to some of them. But I am not going to stop caring. I will be safeguarding my home airspace in the future and doing my due diligence to keep myself calm and safely insulated from destructive and powerful persons and forces over which I have no or little control except insofar as how much their verbal and spiritual sewage is going to impact me. Stay tuned, Gentle Reader.