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, 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.