Doing Nothing

I'm kind of trapped in my room today. There's people over and I don't want to have to interact with anyone. Interacting with other people, especially people who know me to any personal level, makes me feel nervous to the point that I sometimes have panic attacks. There are a select few number of people that I'm okay with, such as my parents.

The end result is that I'm robbed of my daily ritual of bringing in the mail, something that I really enjoy doing. It's a small, trivial thing, but I like being the first one to see everything. The anxiety of getting bad news in the mail (any kind of form that I'm going to have to fill out and send back in, for example) is outweighed enough by the hope of finding something fun that I optimistically forget about it and grab the mail hoping to find something good. I love getting catalogs but I feel that I would be cheating to just order a catalog. It has to magically show up, to be a surprise. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, some marketing campaign will send you a free sample of something, and at that point getting the mail first turns into a treasure hunt that you win by being the first one to go get it. I once got an empty plastic bottle of Coke in the mail with a coupon good for a free Coke. I think it was to advertise a new bottle shape or something, but I was so happy to have gotten this one-man's-trash-is-another-man's-treasure in the mail that I kept that empty bottle for years and never used to coupon. For a while I kept ordering things in the mail, like from Amazon, so keep a semi steady stream of real goods coming to me in the mail, but that got expensive and the train has stopped.

The other bad thing about having other people over and hiding in my room is that at some point in the early morning the dog was let out of my room and my bedroom door was closed. This was done in an attempt to protect me, since my parents know about my social anxiety, but it's lonely to wake up alone when I've gotten used to waking up with the dog next to me, doing the Man's Best Friend thing. The dog's back and napping on the bed while I type this up, and hopefully nothing worse will happen today.