Monthly Archives: January 2015

The voice of insomnia

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This is going to be a weird blog entry written at a weird time coming from the weird state of mind of a very weird dude.

Some day, I should write a State of Mind address.

Anyhow, here I am at 8:47 am writing the day’s blog entry. I am doing it at this odd time because I want to be able to take my Quetiapine and get to sleep as soon as I can when I get back from the pharmacy.

Let me explain.

I got my ‘scrip for all my psych meds on Friday. And I could have gotten it filled then. But with all the stress from the UPS bullshit and so on, I forgot, and didn’t remember till I was home, and by that time I was way too out of sorts to go back out into the world.

Mental note : pick up more sorts.

But that was no big deal. I had one more day’s worth of meds. I could do it Saturday.

But then Saturday rolls around, and I look up my pharmacy on the website for the chain, and I find out they are only open from 10 am to 2 pm on Saturdays, and what with dithering and blathering and general dicking around, I didn’t get my shit together until it was too late.

Mental note : get more compact and efficient shit.

No problem, I thought. I have that one more day of meds. That will cover Saturday. I will just have to go Sunday.

And that seemed totally cool (lazy, but cool, like a cat) until I sat down to watch The Mindy Project and munch my midnight popcorn, and realized that the one med that I did not have that extra day of was my sleeping pill, Quetiapine.

Sounds like a peaceful alien planet filled with pacifist aliens with big brains, doesn’t it?

Aaaanyhow, so there I was, with a half liter of Diet Coke in my bloodstream and no Big Q, feeling pretty stupid. I tried going to bed, but while Quetiapine has no really nasty side effects, it does have one notable withdrawal symptom, and that is total insomnia on like, a chemical level.

I have not slept yet, and yet, I am not sleepy. I am barely tired. I can sort of feel a little tiredness around the edges as my eyes and my body get tired, but my mind is going strong. My brain is not sleepy in the slightest, despite binging on my Android games AND reading.

It’s a state of mind that at other times I would find highly pleasant and useful. There have been many, many times in my life where I would have loved to be this alert.

But when I say that I am not tired, that does not mean the lack of sleep is not affecting me. I am keenly aware of a sense of strain building in my mind, like my mind mind is a wire that is being drawn thinner and thinner, and if this keeps up, ventually it’s gonna snap.

And I am definitely feeling squirrely. You know, sort of agitated and twitchy. I feel like my eyes are glued open like in A Clockwork Orange and the little squirts of artificial tears aren’t coming quite fast enough.

So the plan is to wait until the pharmacy opens at 10 am and then mosey on over there to pick up my meds. Then I nimble on home, pop my two Big Q’s, and hope to God they let me sleep.

Dunno when I will eat lunch. Maybe I should eat before I sleep. Don’t want low blood sugar added to the mix.

I suppose I will sleep for most of the afternoon. That is bound to mess up my sleep schedule, but that is a problem for tomorrow. Today, I gotta get some sleep.

A younger, dumber me would just skip sleeping for this time period. Hey, skipping one sleep can’t be that big a deal, right? I will just sleep like normal at the usual time and everything will be groovy.

And a younger me might have been able to do it, honestly. But the current 41 year old me? Ha ha ha. Dumb idea.

I would rather sleep all afternoon than be eating at ABC tonight and fall asleep in my poutine. Or fall asleep when we are hanging out together after. Sunday is my favorite night of the week, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

So it’s a snoozing Sunday for me today, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise.

What else… oh right, The Mindy Project. I’ve watched 5 episodes so far, and it’s a good show. Kind of like ER meets Ally Macbeal. The main character is a 31 year old gynecologist named Mindy (duh) who watches too many romantic comedies and can’t ever quite seem to get her life together.

It’s pretty good. The characters are not super likable, but the show itself has a decent heart and is not mean or cold, so I can get over the lack of character appeal.

I mean, they’re not awful, they are perfectly fine, just not appealing. No character you just fall in love with.

My one big problem with it is that Mindy is so busy going around being adorkable and awkward and a mess that you really begin to wonder whether she is an even vaguely competent doctor. So far, I have not seen her actually practice medicine, and that gives me this terrible feeling that this is actually a terrible person who should not be practicing medicine.

I know that the lack of evidence of her competence is not actually evidence of her incompetence, but it would really help me relax and get into the show if they just threw in a line about how her patients love her or how she won this “best gyno” award or something like that. Or even just show her dealing with a patient competently.

Being neurotic sure does make life colorful!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yay! We’re back!

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Yay, my website works again. Writing stuff in OpenOffice then copy n’ pasting it into LJ and Tumblr wasn’t exactly a massive burden, but my website has been the center pillar of my life for so long now that it just feels good to have things back to normal at last.

Now let me tell you about yesterday.

Yesterday was, of course, a therapy day. Therapy went off without a hitch, although because we had a long talk about my medications, the amount of psychotherapy involved was fairly low.

I told him that I had been really depressed lately, especially in the afternoons, and that I wanted to go back to 30 mg of Paxil for a while, as opposed to my current 25. I have been feeling so fragile and vulnerable lately that I figured some time with a higher level of emotional anesthetic might do me some good.

This is not a decision I made lightly. A lot of things got better for me when I went from 30 to 25. My emotions were so much more accessible and free-flowing. So I only committed to a month on the higher dose, as a kind of test.

If I find myself feeling stronger on the higher dose, then I will keep it. But if it just makes me more confused about what I am really feeling, then out if goes.

I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a “thing” I do in the afternoon, so my afternoons lack purpose. After supper, I blog, and between 11 pm and midnight, I bake, but in the afternoon…. nada.

So I am pondering adding a third “thing” to my day. The obvious choice would be to go back to doing videos, but for some reason, that does not appeal to me at all.

Whatever mental weather patterns caused me to want to do a daily talk to the camera type video a day have long since dissipated. It just seems stupid and pointless to me now.

This, despite the fact that when I see the videos I made last year now, I think they are pretty good. Not as good as the ones I made pre-tablet, but still, pretty decent. I have good screen presence. I present interesting thoughts.

But that all seems a million miles ago now, even though it’s only been since last Halloween. I stopped doing them for NaNoWriMo and never started back up again.

Part of this has to be my weird inability to go backwards. No reverse gear. When I stopped doing the videos, doing them become “done” in my mind, and once I decide something is “done”, I never want to go back to it like…. ever.

Getting back into video at this point would require some sort of fresh angle or gizmo to acts as my bridge back into it. A different approach, some neato labour-saving device, a cool new kind of video editing program… something to make the whole thing fresh for me again.

Otherwise, I am going to have to find an entirely different “thing” to do with my afternoons to keep myself from falling into the pit of oblivion every goddamned day.

And I have no idea what that “thing” would be. Music? Crochet? Underwater welding? The possibilities are endless.

All I know is that it has to be something with a specific limit and structure. All my successful “things” have had that in common. Blogging is 1000 words. Videos were a video a day. Baking is one baked thing a day.

If it was something loose and ill defined like “practice playing the keyboard for a while”, I could never keep it up. I need to know when things are going to end before I ever begin them. That old “won’t set foot on a path without knowing where it ends” issue of mine.

If there is a definite goal, then I can get into the thing and just drive for that goal. I am a goal oriented person in that way. I am much happier when I have a goal, an objective, or a mission.

That way, my ability to hyper-focus has something to hyper-focus on, and everything kind of falls into place sooner or later. It might take some cognitive CPU cycles to figure out the sequence of steps that will lead to the goal, but in the end, I am very good at doing things that require a single, focused, sustained effort.

Oh right… I was telling you about yesterday.

So after therapy, I wanted to make our usual post-therapy trip to Pricesmart (think Safeway), but there was literally no parking. That’s how packed it was. That made sense back during the Xmas season, but that’s over. WTF?

So we ended going to 7-11 instead.

That’s nothing compared to what UPS did to us though. I had a package to pick up, and in the past, that has been quite painless. Hand them the slip, Joe signs for it (he has photo ID, I don’t), I get my stuff.

The first problem was when, while already on the road, we looked at the delivery slip only to find that they no longer tell you on the strip which UPS store has the package. You have to either call the 1-800 number or scan the QT code on the slip.

None of had the capacity for QT scanning handy (that we knew of), so Joe called the 1-800 number. After wading through a massive number of “press X for” options and reciting a very long package identification number, the computer voice tells him “Your package is… at a retail outlet!”

WHAAAAAAAT? We already fucking KNEW that!

So we had no choice but to guess. We went to our usual UPS store at Garden City and Blundell, but of course, nope! It’s not there! It’s at one near Westminster and 3 Road instead!

So we trek back to said neighborhood, find the UPS store in question, and get in line to wait.

And wait… and wait… and wait. There was only two people ahead of us, but the first guy was just buying packing materials and THAT took fifteen minutes, then the next one was apparently re-shipping four big packages via Oslo or some shit, and that took half a fucking hour.

Needless to say, this did not improve our nerves at all. A carload of Tauruses does not take well to all this unexpected complication and unpredictability. We were all so stressed out that when, on the way out, some sad-eyed Sikh security guard tried to hassle us about using one of the business next door’s parking places to go to UPS, Joe flipped out and told him off.

Very out of character, but honestly, I felt the same. And the idea that there are parking spots for specific business at a strip mall is an absurd fantasy anyhow. Owners of strip mall businesses have this laughable idea that the two spots outside their businesses are “theirs” and therefore, if they see someone park their, it means they are about to get business.

I can see why they wish this was true. But here in reality, if people want to patronize your business, they are going to park wherever is closest, whether it is one of “your” spots or not.

Would you rather they went elsewhere? No, you wouldn’t. Everyone benefits from communal parking, and it is the only enforceable system anyhow. There is a natural way to the way human system works, and trying to go directly against that is like trying to beat back the tide.

So yeah. Friday was unfun, and I am totally going to email UPS to complain about their cockamamie new system.

You let us down, Brown!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Loyalty versus morality

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I’ve been watching Star Trek : Into Darkness today (only half way through, so no spoilers) and it brings up certain issues that are a perennial problem for me, so I thought I would give that bone another gnawing today.

But first, an aside : The speech that Sulu gives to convince Benelux Cambersnitch to surrender on Kronos is so freaking hot. If you want to know what I am talking about, click here.

Holy Hannah, Sulu is putting his thing down. Whenever I hear him say “If you test me, you will fail. ” I get shivers. The iron in his voice leaves absolutely no room to doubt that he will do exactly as he says, without hesitation.

And that is just so goddamned boss (and sexy!) that I would not have been able to write this article if I didn’t include it.

Anyhow, back to the point. In the first half of the movie, there is bitter interpersonal tension between Kirk and Spock because, after breaking regulations galore to save Spock’s life, Spock then files an honest and accurate report of what happened. That lands Kirk in trouble, and he view this as a betrayal by Spock.

Thus, it is a letter perfect example of exactly the sort of interpersonal conflict I have found myself in, and for the same reasons, so it kind of got me thinking.

I have a highly developed sense of right and wrong. That sounds like bragging, but don’t judge me till I have explained everything. This highly developed sense of right and wrong is very good for moral guidance and can even be very good in stressful situations, as it provides a calm, reasoned, sensible course of action.

As we all do, I strive to always do what is right and refuse to do what is wrong.

In this scenario, that makes me Spock. Spock did what he thought was right. Vulcans do not lie (despite what they say, they can, but they don’t). He gave the exact same kind of thorough, truthful, and accurate report he always gives in these situations. The notion of lying about it to keep Kirk out of trouble probably never occurred to him. He did right by his own beliefs.

But to Kirk, Spock stabbed him in the back right after Kirk went out of his way to save Spock’s life, and it’s hard not to agree with him. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, he bit the hand that saved him from a horrible fiery volcano death. Even the slightest sense of loyalty would dictate that you return the favour and fudge the report to keep Kirk out of trouble.

And that’s where I get the title of this blog entry. The ethics that dictate Spock’s actions are logical, sensible, and quite frankly, hard to argue with. Taken in the abstract, his total honesty would seem to make him extremely noble.

But those ethics are very cold ethics. They are precise and logical and intellectually sound, but they allow for no such hot emotions as empathy, compassion, and loyalty. They are as precise and impersonal as mathematics, and operate entirely outside the need for emotion as we usually consider it.

That is how I operate. I suppose it is the ethics of a lonely but highly intelligent child. It’s the kind of ethics that grows well in the dark. If you do not interact with people very much, then such cool, calm precision in moral judgment can be very soothing. It is the ethics of the perfect outsider.

But if you do, actually, plan on interacting with your fellow humans, there are going to come times when someone asks you or expects you to do something you feel is wrong out of loyalty to them personally, or to some organization you both belong to.

And that’s where the terrible inner conflict comes in. If your ethics developed outside the world of direct interaction, then messy things like loyalty were just not included in it. You develop, by default, the idea that everyone should always do the right thing all the time.

Now I am not that unreasonable. I know there is a big difference between what people should do, in the abstract, and what one can reasonably expect of them. I would not fault a mother for saving her three children instead of a busload of strangers.

Heroism is not mandatory.

But still, this chilly reserve of mine has caused me a lot of problems in the past. The idea that you would go against your friends or family or whomever just because of your own inner sense of right and wrong is absolutely abhorrent to many if not most people. It’s inhuman. It makes you seem like some kind of robot to them, or worse, a kind of sociopathic opportunist.

And worst of all, it makes you unpredictable to others. They cannot trust you because, in their minds, you might turn on them any second. And if you can’t trust someone, you can’t relax around them, and you just plain don’t want them around.

That is the chilly pickle I have found myself in more than one time in my life. It is incredibly difficult for me to do something that I feel is wrong. The thought of it makes me nauseous. And that has lead me to keep a certain distance from others because I don’t want to be put in that position.

That would be fine, if I was a genuine loner. But I am not. I don’t actually want to be an outsider. I want the warmth and love that comes from connected with others. I want it so bad that it almost makes me cry just to think about it.

But I can’t imagine how I would integrate loyalty into my moral framework at this point. Luckily, both the hot and the cold route lead to a lot of the same conclusions. I am ferociously protective of the people I love. I take great pains to deal with others with sensitivity and understanding. I am a dedicated humanitarian who truly wants the best for everyone.

But all of these aspects of my moral being have a large logical-cold component in between intention and execution. And that means that my morality as expressed in the world may well deviate from expectations at any moment.

It’s no wonder that I keep finding myself considering the ethical traitors of the world.

I am terrified of becoming the other kind.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The Year In Review

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Never done this before. This should be interesting.

I should preface this by saying I don’t have a particularly good biographical memory, so anything I put in here is going to be rather broad, to put it mildly.

I could go back through all my blog entries and find out what was happening with me. I seriously considered it. But that would take a hella long time and I probably wouldn’t be done before it becomes 2015.

So let’s see. What happened in my life this year?

Well, I moved. That was a bitch and a half, as it always is. And the thing is, you don’t have to be much of a pack rat in order for it to get harder each time.

You just have to accumulate stuff at a normal rate. You just have to buy new things without throwing the old things out. Little by little, the hoard accumulates, and you don’t even notice until it’s time to move again and suddenly you are thinking “Where the hell did I get all this crap?”

So moving was a grueling experience that lasted for most of August, all told. Part of the problem, of course, is that we are pack rats. Like I said at the time, we “rescue” things all the time. That is all well and good. I loathe waste and so the idea of some perfectly good item going to the dump simply because someone doesn’t need it any more drives me crazy. Someone else could be using and enjoying it!

The problem is that we rescue them and then it stops. We don’t send them further down the line to find a new home. Or rather, we didn’t… I am pretty sure we learned our lesson when we moved and quite honestly, this place doesn’t have the room for us to start accumulating again.

I feel really guilty about where we ended up, though. Not that this place sucks, but…. it was my desire to live in a place with a gym that prompted us to choose this particular location, despite its small size, and the kicker is that the “gym” in this place consists of two shitty late night infomercial grade exercise bikes.

Add that to how bad I feel about ending up with the master bedroom, and I have been carrying around guilt for a while. Feels good to get it off my chest, actually.

The other Big Life Thing I recall from this year is my failed attempt to go to VFS. It’s still painful to think about. I went to so much trouble and really pushed myself forward like I never do and tried so damned hard, and everything was green lights all the way, and then some petty schmuck decides that recent school attendance is more important than my obvious megawatt talent and total commitment to being educated, and it all comes crashing down.

I know damned well that I would have rocked that Writing for TV course. It’s the part I was born to play, baby. I’ve wanted to write for television ever since I realized television shows had writers. That has always seemed like the coolest job in the universe to me. To actually write things that magically become television…. what could be better?

But no, some putz decides to wag is tiny dick around and I am brought down in a great crash of flames and the sound of metal screaming as it’s rent asunder.

And the kicker there is that the whole reason I have no recent school experience is that I have been depressed for the last 20 fucking years. It is like getting turned down for an auto loan because of no recent driving history.

Hard to drive when you have no fucking car!

I could have tried again this last two months. The next session starts in January and so I could have gotten all my ducks in a row and given it another try. But I am just not ready to put my head (and heart) where life can kick it again. Not yet.

I might re-apply in the spring. After all, that prick might not even work there any more by then. And if he does, the people who supported my application the first time might be ready to rally against him.

I sure as hell would be ready for the fight. I knew everything I could do to fight back way back at the time of the first rejection, but I could only sit there as my motivation shattered into a million pieces and fell apart.

And let me tell you, it is a dark dark feeling to be helpless before that kind of dissolution. To feel your psyche just falling apart and wanted so badly to stop it, but you just don’t have it in you.

What else happened this year… well I got a bus pass for the first time. Did not use it a lot, and my overactive superego really, really, really wants to beat me up over that. It’s like it’s just waiting offstage, softly slapping its fist with the business end of a baseball bat, waiting for its cue.

So far, I have kept myself in the middle. I can say “it doesn’t matter how much I used it, the point was to have the option”, but I can’t make myself really believe it. So the best I can do is not accept either side of it.

I get the feeling that a lot of my life works pretty much like that. Hovering between.

Now it’s time to re-up for the whole bus pass thing, and I just don’t have the $ to spare right now. I got $70 a week to last me till the next cheque on January the 21st, and I am already $20 into this week, so I have to be careful.

So I probably will not get the thing until said next cheque. Oh well, it’s not like that will cripple my social life or anything.

I guess that’s all I can think of for now. I am sure there are many other important life events that marked the previous year that I would kick myself for forgetting if I saw the list, but whatever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.