1:34 am : Just took my first dose of Quetiapine and decided to keep some notes on whatever effect it has on me. You know, for science. Or obsessive self-analysis. Take your pick.

1:45 am : Well, no radical effects yet, but these things tend to take a while to kick in. I do feel slightly spaced out and groggy, but that could just be the background noise of my unstable consciousness. After all, paying such close attention to my mental state is bound to rev up the neurosis. That alone could account for feeling a bit weird.

2:00 am : OK, definitely feeling an effect now. I feel a growing sleepiness, as well as a sort of numb feeling in my head which is making me a little dizzy. Typing is becoming difficult, as I am both finding it harder to concentrate enough to form words and sentences, and becoming a little more clumsy. Also, my head has started to loll around very slightly. Annoying. So far, the effect is just like Zopiclone, but faster and stronger. Keen.

2:07 am : Yup. This stuff has me by the short hairs. This will likely be my last note as I am finding it pretty hard to take down notes right now. Next step is to go urinate (that should be fun, hope I can still manage it) then turn out the lights and crawl into bed and see where this all takes me.

2:12 am : OK, one more note. Urinated without too much complication. Feeling a sort of floating sensation, ss well as some tinglings in my fingers, and a very dry mouth (known side effect). Now I am going to go lay down. Wish I could take notes via voice. Oh well. Nighty night all!

Today was a therapy day, and there was some resolution on recent issues, so I figured I would record them here along with whatever the heck else is in my head today.

There may be links, there may not be. I am flying high and wide today.

So I confronted my therapist about how unhappy I was with his response when I needed more Zopiclone on Saturday. I told him how I thought it was flippant and dismissive and how it really bothered me, and brought up a lot of issues with me, like how I feel like people just dismiss my needs and ignore me because that is how my parents treated me, and so forth and so on.

He explained that he did not phone in the Zopiclone because it is a fairly serious drug, and he was not prepared to give me more without my chart in front of him to make sure it was safe. I am not entirely convinced on that point, but it was plausible enough that I will accept it for now.

He also apologized for not remembering my issues and being more sensitive to the sorts of things I have been through in the past. I accepted his apology. It is not reasonable, I suppose, to expect perfect sensitivity even from one’s therapist. He has a lot of patients, I called him on a day off when his mind was on his own life, etc.

And I know I have some pretty enormous trust issues. It is not the sort of thing that is obvious when you meet me, because it is not like I am some antisocial curmudgeon who oozes misanthropy and is prickly and hostile all the time.

But I fundamentally have a hard time trusting people, and I especially have a hard time relying on people. My life experiences have taught me that there is nobody I can rely on to be there when I need them, and it is hard to overcome that inherent deep down mistrust, even with people I should be able to trust.

So when I reached out to my therapist, who is supposed to be there for me and who told me I could call his cell any time I needed him, day or night, 7 days a week, and he seemed to casually dismiss me for no apparent reason other than it was easier, that brought a whole lot of the Bad Stuff to the surface for me. I felt angry and betrayed and depressed.

How dare he trivialize and dismiss my concerns, my needs, just like my parents used to do?

So I am glad it was not entirely what I thought it was, and that he will be more careful in the future. Even therapists make mistakes. They are only human, after all.

But emotionally speaking, it will probably be a while before I am entirely over it. That is the thing with these deep issues you develop over a lifetime. When something hits a raw nerve like that, all the rational understanding in the world will not block the pain. It can only fade over time.

In other news, the other takeaway from today’s therapy is that I have a new sleeping pill, a major mouthful called Quetiapine. It is supposed to be better than Zopiclone in that it does not bind to the receptors it activates, and therefore does not build up drug resistance.

The main drawback is that some people find they sleep too long on it, and when they wake up, they are sluggish and tired and kind of out of it. Fine by me, to be honest. I already get that fairly often from my unbalanced, feast or famine sleep cycle. I can live it with it, if in return I get to sleep more deeply and get more of that deep restorative REM sleep.

I am perfectly willing to sleep for longer, rather than sleeping in two to three hour naps, if the long term payoff is in better sleep.

And what the heck, if I find I do not like it, I can always tell my doc that it is no good for me and stop using it. I am the health care consumer, after all. And my therapist is a reasonable fellow.

Maybe a little forgetful, but I am hardly in the position to fault anyone on that score.

Looking at the Wiki entry for this stuff, I see that, as my therapist said, it is not primarily indicated for treating sleeping problems. It is, in fact, primarily an anti-psychotic! Eek. I might be crazy but I am not that crazy, thank goodness.

But one person’s side effect is another’s sure, and so its sleep-inducing side effect for psychotics is now a primary effect for us people with Sleep Issues.

It seems like pretty heavy duty stuff, all told, although the “sleep” dosage is lower than the “make the voices go away” dosage, so that is not so bad. Well, I asked for something stronger than the Zopiclone, something that would give me the sleep security that I seek.

And that is what he gave me. He said to start with one pill, and if that does not do the trick to give 2 pills a try. And I will do so, but I am really hoping one pill will do it. I do not want to mess with this stuff any more than I have to, given its nature.

Then again, I am always sort of terrified after reading the Wiki page for a drug I am taking. Heck, I was scared about the Zopiclone after reading about it on Wiki, and it turned out to be a kitten. So I probably should not put too much stock in how I feel right after reading the Wiki page for a drug.

I do sometimes wonder if I would be better off not reading the Wiki page for what I am on, but I could not live with myself if I decided not to do so when I am put on something new. Curiosity alone would drive me nuts, let alone a sense of my own intellectual integrity.

So I am sure I will be fine.

I just have to make it through the post-knowledge anxiety.

But hey, the drug is supposed to be good for anxiety too, so… there’s that!

More on this experiment later.

You know what is worse than spending a whole day asleep?

Spending a whole day trying to sleep.

I have seriously spend the vast majority of the day’s hours trying to get some damned sleep, but never quite making it there. I am getting both tired of it and tired in general. It is getting to be somewhat of an issue.

This is the problem the Zopiclone was supposed to cure, and now that I am out, it is back. As previously mentioned, I will be giving my therapist a significant portion of my mind about casually abandoning me to this hellish (well OK, heckish) fate.

It really sucks to be laying in bed for hours and hours trying to sleep but unable to get any deeper than the sort of shallow sleep where you are still aware of your surroundings and are really only slightly asleep. Does not really count at all.

And the most irritating part is that just when I would be getting somewhere near real sleep, my bladder would be full and I would have to get up and take a piss, which then set the clock back a couple hours. And yet, I could not ignore my bladder either, because of course I am not going to be able to get to sleep with a full bladder, am I?

So today has been very frustrating and tiring. I am hoping that after I am done writing, I will be able to finally get some sleep once it gets dark and hopefully quiet. And this time, I will not leave music playing. That is clearly not helping, and I need to change shit up a bit.

At first I thought I was not getting to sleep because my feet were cold. Sounds trivial, but I have had that problem before. I am all tired and sleepy and really need sleep, but I can’t get to sleep, and it turns out that it is because my feet are cold and I just cannot sleep when my feet are cold. My body just will not let me. Presumably it figures if my feet are cold, there is danger of some sort.

But no, today I made sure I had warm feet and yet I still could not get to sleep. Just hovered around sleep’s waiting room, listlessly pawing through the ancient magazines and staring at the clock.

And that cannot be healthy. I mean, I know I said I wanted to cut down on the napping, but that was within the context of a normal sleep pattern, not this god damned feast and famine bullshit.

I get the feeling that my life is chaotic because I have many overlapping biological cycles of varying periods and intensities creating complex harmonics via constructive and destructive interference.

And as I have mentioned many times before, I think one of my problems is that my mind is excessively linear and wants to find or impose order and predictability, rather than becoming more flexible and adaptable to whatever conditions come along.

Learning to surf that waves, rather than curse the tide. Learning to accept the circle as well as the sword. Not always trying to cut through everything.

I am still struggling with the whole not hating my life bit, and progress is slow, but still happening. I have come to realize that the main problem is boredom and frustration. If I was better at finding constructive and interesting things to do with my time, I would not have so big of a problem.

But I am stuck in this rut where it is sit at this computer wasting my life on video games and chat, or read books till I fall asleep, and that is just plain not enough any more. I get so damned bored and frustrated with those options that I want to scream, and yet my depression still leaves me too paralyzed to be able to even think of what else to do, let alone get the willpower together to do it.

That is my journey right now, I suppose. Crossing that dead cold moonlit plain to find the courage and strength to throw off my burden and learn to do more with my life, and hence get more out of it.

That is what all this introspection is about, and that is what the therapy is all about. Getting to the pint where I can rid myself of this enormous heavy weight of depression that I carry with me and in some ways cling to like a security blanket, even though it is killing me.

As the old story meme goes, it will disappear when I no longer need it. And I will stop needing it, presumably, when I heal enough of the deep wounds inside me that I feel strong enough to face the world without its poisonous protection.

Because even though it is a burden and a killer, it is also my protector. It keeps me from having to deal with the world directly. It is the void between myself and others that I created when I withdrew into myself at an early age, and then further into myself as life got worse later on, and it is vast and cold as space, but it protects me even as is isolates me and freezes me inside.

So recovery, for me, kind of looks like orbiting closer to the Sun and getting closer to its warmth and light and maybe even some day finding a stable orbit at a distance conducive to life, instead of wandering the solar system like a comet.

Or maybe find a bigger planet to orbit as a small moon, content to be controlled by its gravity in return for not having to be at the mercy of the wider cosmos any longer.

Or what the hell, maybe it is just ever so slightly possible that I would find a hospitable planet, and land there, and learn to be a human being after all.

With that warm thought, I bid you adieu.

Today’s been kind of shite.

But first, we will back up a bit.

I forgot to ask my therapist for more Zopiclone on Thursday. To be fair, he should have asked. Anyhow. As I have certain social issues, it took me until Saturday to work up the nerve to call him to ask for more.

I got his voice-mail. Frankly, in social anxiety terms, that was actually preferably. I am not proud to admit that, but there it is. I left him a voice-mail explaining that I forgot to ask for another prescription for Zopiclone on Thursday, and that I was worried that it was not the sort of thing that one should go cold turkey on, so I needed more before I saw him next Thursday.

A few hours later, he called back. He told me to go ask the pharmacy for an emergency prescription to see me through to Thursday, because he did not do phone prescriptions. And not to worry about going cold turkey from Zopiclone, it was perfectly safe, I just “wouldn’t sleep”.

And being who and how I am, I did not realize how angry I was about his lack of assistance and his offloading the responsibility onto me and especially about his flippant attitude towards the prospect of me not sleeping for five fucking days.

So he is going to get an earful and a half when I see him on Thursday. I am seriously pissed off at him. How dare he make me have to go basically beg for pills in order to stay healthy and get some sleep? Especially since he knows I have serious issues with asking for things and assertiveness in general? How dare he suggest that lack of sleep is nothing to worry about, when he was the one who put me on Zopiclone in the first place specifically because I complained of not being able to sleep.

And said, at the time, “Oh, we better take care of that. If you can’t sleep, nothing else works. ” He seemed to think it was a serious problem then. But now that I called him on a Saturday, when he’s at home, suddenly it is no big deal to go sleepless for almost a week? Fuck THAT.

And I have been through the whole “emergency prescription” thing before, when I ran out of pills. The pharmacists are really, really, really reluctant to give you one, and look at you like you are a homeless junkie trying to pull a scam on them for some free methadone or some shit, and it is like pulling teeth to get them to do it.

And when you are socially awkward and anxious like I am, with a specific issue with asking people for things because of childhood experiences being punished for asking for things, to even call the doctor in the first place and ask for more Zopiclone was extremely hard. To then be casually dismissed (just like my parents used to do!), as if my needs were unimportant and what happened to me really did not mean two shits to the person I am asking, was really emotionally brutal to me.

It certainly did not put me in the right frame of mind to be able to go over to the pharmacy in person and ask for yet another thing from a person in authority, one I already know is going to greet the request with suspicion bordering on hostility.

That is just not in the cards for me right now. I just cannot do it. Not after getting the brush-off from my therapist, whom I am supposed to be able to trust completely so I can open up to them, and rely on them to be on my side in a crisis.

Well he wasn’t there for me when I needed him, and that, sadly, adds a substantial amount of weight to the the “misanthropy” side of the scale for me. I have been trying to fight this misanthropic mistrust of people as unreliable and weak for my whole life, and I really did not need an incident like this pushing me more towards bitter cynicism right now.

I already have trouble trusting people. But you know that already, Doc. I told you.

Anyhow, as it turns out, I can sleep without the Zopiclone, it is just a little harder to get to sleep.

As a result, today was a Very Sleepy Day. I slept more or less the whole day, from 8 am to 8 pm, with only a token waking period to eat a terrible lunch.

Had an interesting dream. As usual, took place in an informed-attribute version of my home town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island. I was trying to get home from someplace, and I was really eager to get home (a very common theme in my dreams), and so I started to take shortcuts through restaurants.

And these were very fancy restaurants. There was a very minimalist chic “tablecloths and candlelight” type of restaurant, and another super tony restaurant was done in the style of a Japanese rock garden. I actually hopped along the stones like they were stepping stones in that one.

In fact, the longer this went on, the more it stopped being like just taking a shortcut and the more it become like I was desperately eluding pursuit. I took more and more extreme measures to speed my travel, like barging through kitchens, going out fire exits, and weaving around people and waiters.

And even in the dream, I wondered “When did my little home town get all these fancy restaurants? And where the heck am I? I know my home town pretty well, and I have no idea where they would even put this kind of concentration of restaurants I have never seen before. ”

Eventually, I started getting really freaked out. Like, getting to the “animal fear” level of being freaked out, where you have practically no rational thought left, just anxiety.

So I just stopped and sat down at a random table at one of the restaurants, trying to catch my breath and get out of this weird ice cold fear, weirdly reptilian frame of mind. I think on some level I was also thinking “They will never expect this!”, whoever “they” were.

Things get a little fragmented after that. I remember seeing people I know come in, and slinking off to a dark corner so as not to be seen… yet. Because the really weird thing is, I wanted these people to find me, but just not yet. Like this whole thing had just been a childish stunt to punish them and make them worry about me because of something they had done to make me angry at them, and to see if they cared enough to come looking for me.

This is particularly interesting when I am having problems with trust, and feeling like nobody cares about me enough to put in any effort on my behalf.

after that, it became weird dreams about food, with a bunch of incidents of accidentally eating food meant for someone else, but not seemingly to really care either.

Then, of course, I woke up with low blood sugar and had to do the zombie walk to the kitcehn in order to get some food into me and regain my humanity before I die.

That is suall what eating dreams mean for me.

Meh. There is more, but I am bored with myself, so that is all for now.

There is something deeply illuminating about the relationship between being a nerd, and horseplay.

Or roughhousing, or play-fighting, or rough play, or whatever else you care to call it. We nerdy types do not do it, or rather, we do not do it physically. We take the seemingly sensible position that such rough play has the potential to cause pain, and resembles combat, which frightens and upsets us and seems like a bad thing, so why would we do that if we could avoid it?

And we think we are so smart and so sensible, too smart to do the “dumb” things the normal average kids do. But maybe we are simply too smart for our own good.

Because the thing is, this play-fighting behaviour is clearly instinctual, and lots of people seem driven to do it, both physically and via the verbal version known as “teasing”. And somehow, they do it without killing one another or wrecking their relationships forever. If anything, it seems to strengthen their bonds. not break them apart.

We must then observe that this kind of mock-fighting serves a very important social function, and indeed, we nerdy, intellectual types thing we are being smart and logical when we decline to be involved and completely fail to grasp the social education we are missing, but in reality our decision is very, very short-sighted and filled with the hubris of thinking you always know enough about a situation to make an intelligent decision, when you may in fact be extremely ignorant.

This seemingly logical pose, of “always trying to make the best decision based on what you know of the situation”, is actually extremely limiting and fools you into thinking you are being intelligent when you might instead just making yourself feel better about your own ignorance.

I also think this basic lack of connection to the richer social milieu that others pick up instinctively is the deciding factor in how “weird” or “alien” we seem to others, whether we are severe Asperger’s patients or just mildly nerdy bookish types. By focusing so strongly on the intellect, we also firmly close the door against instinct, preferring to trust our powerful minds over the dark and unverifiable worlds of intuition and instinct.

So we lock away all the rich intelligence and perception that the worlds of intuition and instinct could bring to us. If we do not understand an emotion, if it does not fit with our artificially derived explanations of ourselves or a preconceived idea of how things work, we treat it as noise and filter it out of our conscious perceptions.

Instead, we focus on abstract reasoning, and reap enormous benefits in terms of traditional intelligence, academic potential, and other modern intellectual virtues.

But socially…. we have a problem.

Let us examine what the typical of the species gets from this rough play. Two typical human children, by being able to play-fight and tease one another, create a safe outlet for the tensions and pent-up aggression and emotion that is the natural byproduct of human beings living together. We always get on one another’s nerves, and the urge to compete with one another is always there, lurking behind the relatively recently evolved screen of hunter-gatherer cooperation.

By providing this safe outlet, then, tension and anger are harmlessly dissipated via a stylized and watered down version of the very activities the aggression and anger tell us to do.

And what looks like open naked aggression to a socially ignorant observer is actually a highly refined form of aggression, with its own instinctual rules, the primary of which is “do no real harm”. In this rough play, the participants learn what is “too rough” with one another and over time learn exactly how much they need to restrain themselves with one another in order to stay within “play”.

Once they internalize this limit, they can then play-fight freely, and get the benefits of it.

And this special understanding of how far they can go with one another deepens the bond between them, and makes them feel closer to one another and in a way “safer” with one another because they know they can express their emotions (in whatever form) to one another and the other person will understand the sense in which it is meant.

This lets people let the guard down, and that is basically what social closeness is all about.

But we smarty pants types, we know better, right? We are too smart to engage in all that loud, rough, chaotic kind of play.

And so we absent ourselves from a major form of socialization and social development, and end up socially retarded possibly for our entire lives.

Surely there must be some way to intervene in the lives of young people who might be falling into this trap and gently push them in the right direction. Some way to clue them in that there is far more to this world than their narrow minds and insufficient knowledge can predict. Tell them that sometimes, you can only understand the reason for doing something by doing it.

And that you just might not know everything, and therefore should not be so quick to judge things that others enjoy as “stupid”, “pointless”, or “crazy”.

Those things might not only make a lot of sense, they may make a more profound kind of sense than you with your limited point of view can possibly comprehend unless you have been through it yourself.

We intellectuals tend to downplay experience in favour of knowledge. We pretend that makes us smart, that knowing everything about the road is better than traveling down it, somehow.

But in reality, we are just cowards, afraid of life, afraid of surrendering to the flow and seeing where it takes us.

We don’t want to set one foot on the road without knowing exactly where it will take us.

But life’s not that predictable.

You won’t get anywhere trying to learn everything before you do anything.

Not sure I spelled that one right. Never actually had to type it before. Nor have I ever seen it in print. And the Windows Dictionary sure as heck never heard of it.

Anyhow, heya folks, and a Happy Blue Moon to you all! Yes, when the moon rises tonight, it will be a Blue Moon, which alas does not refer to its color in any way (I know, boo, hiss) but which only means a second full moon in a calendar month.

It is, however, quite rare, as our calendar is vaguely lunar, so while the moon is the same old moon color as always tonight, at least now you have an excuse to do all those things that you say you do only “once in a blue moon”.

Tonight’s the night!

Now, on with the science!

The Enemy Of My Enemy

An intriguing story out of France suggests that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be used to create new drugs to fight cancer.

The idea is to exploit HIV’s ability to create slightly different versions of its protein coat with each generation to trick it into producing slightly different versions of proteins we find useful, and thus turn the HIV virus into a little protein laboratory for our use as a species.

It will just keep churning out protein variations every generation, and we can collect them, test them, and see which ones are better. The French study produced a version of a protein used in activating anti-cancer drugs that is 300 times more potent than the usual version, meaning one three-hundredth of the dose will be needed to treat the patient, meaning one three-hundredth of the side-effects.

I particularly like this concept, and not just because of the delicious irony of turning one of our deadliest and most implacable enemies into something that will actually save lives.

I love it because this could easily result in better drugs for all kinds of diseases, not just cancer. These tiny variants on important proteins are a real problem for modern medicine, and a way to mass-produce and test variants could speed up drug development by the speed of life at the microscopic level.

And that is a mighty fast speed.

And who knows, maybe we could even trick the AIDS virus into creating a cure for AIDS.

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge on that goddamned fucking disease?

How Ants Network

Surprisingly, they mostly use LinkedIn.

Just kidding. But the story is that ants and computers share information in sort of the same way.

They used to think that ants could somehow transmit complex information to one another via things like chemical trails and antennae wagging.

And Deborah Gordon’s study of harvester ants does not disprove any of those other theories, but it suggest there may be a far simpler control mechanism.

Basically, in order to gather food efficiently, the ants simply base the number of ants being sent out to forage on the basis of how many are coming back with food. The more returning with food, the more they send out. The fewer, the fewer. Brilliantly simple, isn’t it?

And it turns out, that is exactly how TCP, the protocol that only runs, like, the ENTIRE INTERNET, works as well. The more packets coming in (ack packets, short for ‘acknowledgement packets’), the more packets it knows it can send out.

Ant colonies and internet nodes even start off the same way. The ant colony sends out a whole whack of scout ants at the start of the day, and then waits to see how many come back before deciding how many to send back out again. And every TCP node of the Internet does the same thing : starts a connection by sending out a whole whack of packets then sees how many make it back with an ‘ack’. That way it knows how good the connection is, and can adjust bandwidth accordingly.

No point in sending out more packets than will make it back, right?

Which just goes to show something that I have known since I was a kid watching an anthill in my front yard : ants are cool! Such complex behaviour from such simple creatures. I knew they must have some extremely efficient programming for that to be possible.

Rise Of The Cyborg

Finally, as you know, I always save the hottest, most interesting, and/or creepiest story for last, and this week’s story of the first successful interfacing of living tissue and machine on the cellular level pretty much maxes out all three of those criteria.

As you might expect, it involves nanotech. Some Harvard mad scientists managed to get some nano-wires to interface with some engineered human tissue, and voila, we have cyborg tissue.

Pretty funkin’ groovy, I don’t mind saying. And in case you think this “cyborg” label is a little premature, scope this quote from one of the authors of the study, Charles M. Lieber :

With this technology, for the first time, we can work at the same scale as the unit of biological system without interrupting it. Ultimately, this is about merging tissue with electronics in a way that it becomes difficult to determine where the tissue ends and the electronics begin.

Can I get a hell yeah? Paging Doctor Frankenstein! The immediate goal of such awesome tinkering is to aid in the creation of implantable medical devices which can interface directly with the control systems of the host body and use those, instead of needing to have their own (ultimately redundant) sensing and control systems built into them.

After all, your heart does not have its own brain. It runs on the same autonomic systems as the rest of the body. Why shouldn’t our implantable medical devices tap into those same systems?

But we video game nerds know where we want this to ultimate lead : controlling computers with your mind! And none of this having to learn to control your brain waves to play pong shit.

We want to control our characters on the screen as easily and fluidly as we control our limbs!

Actually, given how clumsy we tend to be, maybe even more than that.

Well that’s it for this week, folks! Seeya next time!