Scenes from my boring life

All y'all should be as bored as I am with my 'life.'   This is the shit I do or just think about when I'm too demotivated and/or too medicated to do much of anything.  Which is how I am most of the time.

With only a few days left I come up with a name for this decade: The Yikes!², which is probably more accessible than Y²Kes!, although the latter might be easier to understand.  I think "Yikes!" squared  pretty much sums up the Y2K years, which sandwiched terror attacks, war, paranoia, electoral turmoils, and a global natural disaster between the dual hangovers from overhyped panic & parties and the worst international economic downturn since the 1930s.

Wacky weather haiku:

Texas white Xmas

bare, brown Montana landscape

Climate change? Really?

I got new snow tires, so of course it's not going to snow again until 2012.  If then.

I had a music-related dream the other night, yet another one that made me sad I don't know shit about music.  I heard Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover, which for some strange reason sounded like Siouxie Sioux singing with Interpol instead of her singing with Bauhaus / Love & Rockets, which is what Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover would probably sound like.  Anyway it was an original song (like all the music I dream about) with the lyric "I look in her eyes and see I can never win."  The Google can't find anything close to that in the same sentence, but there are so many great bands whose lyrics have yet to be published on the Intertubes.

Tremble in the majesty of my Kvetchmas booty, bitches:  Seasons 1 & 2 of Wonder Showzen. Robot Chicken Star Wars Episodes I & II. Family Guy Blue Harvest & Something, Something, Something Dark Side.

The animation involving things like ships and asteroids in Something, Something, Something Dark Side is better than that in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That's saying something, I just don't know what. 

I used to be told, frequently, that I'm the reincarnation of someone from Japan.  A Meiji-era comic was the final consensus.  While hikikomori is a modern condition, it certainly describes me during adolescence:

Called hikikomori, or social withdrawal, the ill-defined but debilitating syndrome afflicts as many as 1.2 million young people--seven in 10 of them male. Symptoms include agoraphobia, paranoia, aversion to sunlight and severe anxiety; sufferers become antisocial [sic] in their teens or 20s and spend months or years holed up in their bedrooms. "They see themselves as ugly. They think they smell," says Tamaki Saito, who runs the outpatient program at Sasaki Hospital in Chiba. "They fear that they're being watched by neighbors, so they cover windows with curtains or black paper."

I didn't think I smelled bad, but everything else fits.  Although I was socially avoidant, which is what most post people usually mean when they use the term "antisocial."   I'm the kind of dick who points out that sort of shit.  I came across the article while researching Apathy Syndrome for a topic on the Crazy Meds forum.

Christmas Music

A bit late, given how this song is especially relevant this year.  But one of only two Kvetchmas songs you really need:

Culturcide's Santa Claus was my Lover

The other is Happy Flowers' All I Got were Clothes for Christmas.  From the Touch and Go compilation God's Favorite Dog.  I don't know if that has been re-issued on CD or not.

Lurn 2 spel

It's "straitjacket" you moron, not "straight jacket." Someone is tightly (strait) confined when wrapped / encased (jacketed) in one. It is not a linear article of clothing. The Cafe Press store name and reference on the Mental Mall page have been updated. 

 

It's been how many fucking years until I noticed that?

More Flavor, Less Lexico-Spatial Awareness

My Topamax dosage was raised by 50mg to 375mg a day, in addition to the lamotrigine (250mg), protriptyline (50mg) and methylphenidate (a whopping 5mg).  This has allowed me to take the methylphenidate daily, work on a crossword puzzle if I don't have anything better to do, and eat food seasoned with nutmeg and cloves without worrying about having an aura.  Taking the methylphenidate is especially important because taking it daily means my sense of smell and memory are better, and the tremors aren't as bad.

One downside is my appetite isn't worth shit.  More Topamax + daily methylphenidate = can't even force myself to eat that much.  I'm not dangerously skinny, gaining weight is just another thing I've given in to giving up on.  While nutmeg and cloves are kosher again, peanuts are now part of my permanent Lent.  No peanuts means no peanut butter.  No peanut butter means no peanut butter and banana milkshakes, which were a great means of caloric intake when I couldn't deal with cooking and/or eating.  Fortunately I don't have the "look at a peanut and die" allergy, just an "eat peanut butter and spench" allergy or sensitivity of some kind.  As peanuts are legumes it doesn't surprise me that they'd eventually not like me any more.  The cost is too prohibitive for other nut butters.

I've gone back to needing nine to ten hours of sleep.  That wouldn't bother me if I were able to go to sleep at nine PM.  I'm lucky to fall asleep at 10:30.  Waking up after eight in the morning just messes with me.

The oddest effect is a kind of jamais vu or other Topamax-related size issue.  When I'm doing a crossword puzzle it won't matter how many times I count the number of squares and the number of letters in the word or phrase I know is the answer, I can't make it fit.  It's too short, it's too long, I've yet to discern a pattern.

Updates on Crazy Meds

I did a minor update to the Abilify page and posted a new PI sheet for it, to reflect its recent approvals.

I also did a slightly less minor update to the Clozaril page and posted a PI sheet to replace the dead link, along with links to PI sheet equivalents and consumer information from Australia, New Zealand and the UK.  Clozaril is being discussed more and more these days.

New Board on Crazy Meds Talk for Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Conditions

I just created a new board on the forum for Crazy Meds.   Schizophrenia & Other Psychoses: Messages from the Zernox Galaxies

Throughout their lives, membership in the nine versions of the Crazy Meds fora has skewed towards affective mood disorders.  We never have had many people in the spectrum of psychotic conditions, but we've been one of very few sites run by the mentally interesting that caters to the psychotic.  I've yet to come across a site specifically about schizophrenia that isn't run by, and is primarily for family, friends and 'caregivers.'  It's the same patronizing attitude NAMI has these days and it disgusts me.

What finally got me off of my ass to create the board was a post, that, in part, reminded me the latest round of anti-crazy bigotry from NPR, Huffington Post and other bastions of liberal groupthink. In their effort to avoid even raising the questions of what parts religion or nationality may or may not have played in the Fort Hood event (My take: Exactly like those of Timothy McVeigh when he killed 168 people in Oklahoma City 19 April 1995, a perverted form of religion mixed with an extremist and racist nationalism.) they dug and dug for the slightest hint of crazy. Long before the rumor of an insanity defense plea.  Unable or afraid to wade into a complex debate regarding the motives of a fratricidal traitor they prefer to deflect the issue by raising the specter of crazy.  Because it's perfectly acceptable for everyone to hate and fear us.

In the hierarchy of the mentally interesting the schizophrenic and other psychotics are pretty low on the social totem pole.  I've read posts from plenty of people with affective mood disorders (depression, bipolar, etc.) who were glad they aren't schizophrenic, don't want to be lumped in with people that crazy and so forth.  Crazy Meds strives to be the big tent of brain cooties, it was about time I continued with that tradition.