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.