Cubicle-induced craziness

The effects of aging begin to manifest in various aspects of our lives. I am quite bummed by the fact that I don't bounce back from my sports' injuries as quickly as I once did. Or the fact that I actually HAVE sports' injuries. I'm beginning to notice another area of my life that is waning in stamina and that is my ability to sit in front of a computer. Even before this point, I frequently got up and walked around my office when I'd been sitting for too long. I started to think this recent problem was because I'm ready to change jobs so my motivation has diminished. But I'm beginning to think that I am actually losing the ability to sit in front of the computer for hours at a time like I used to. Right now, after sitting for a couple of hours of hard computer work (drafting, writing, researching, etc) I get up feeling like something has been repeatedly punching me in the face. I'm a little dizzy. My eyes and contacts feel like I've been staring at the sun for 5 hours. My back hurts. My brain gets foggy. My head feels like it's slowly being taken over by an invisible electronic force field. I believe that my monitor is taking years off of my life. Does anyone else feel like they have this problem? Does your computer suck the life out of you like mine does?

I have a plant behind my monitor. It's the only plant I've ever owned and not killed. It sees no sunlight. I water it regularly every 2 months. It is a mystery to me why this plant continues to live. For one, it's almost 2 years old which makes its duration in my office longer than half of the employees here. I was fully expecting its death to be self-inflicted by this point. But it keeps on truckin. I am now thinking that my monitor has been absorbing my life-force and transferring it back to the plant.

In a conversation with Tim, we realized that we have both done the same thing on a number of occassions. I thought I was the only one and I'm actually surprised I haven't been caught doing this yet. Some days, when I leave work, especially on the days when I've been smothered by the attention my computer gives me, I get in my car to drive out of the parking deck, and yell my way back to near-sanity. This tends to help me break out of my computer-induced coma. Though sometimes I'm not yelling to break the coma. Sometimes I'm yelling just to yell.

Am I nuts? Does anyone else have this issue? I swear I didn't used to have this problem. That being said, I'm sick of looking at this computer screen... I'm going to talk to real people now.