Can't Even Buy Happiness

I've been cycling through various stages of depression, each day, for several weeks.  At least it's not the hell of tripolar ultradian cycling where I'll swing between manic, mixed and depressed several times an hour.  This is the gentle wash flavor.  Although a mood state can still last no more than 20 minutes, I'm rarely doing anything extreme like plummeting from sub-baseline to in bed, fetal position, shivering, crying and scaring the cats.  It takes at least half an hour to get from one extreme, if mildly depressed can be called extreme, to the other, and six hours or longer to get back.  I'm not hitting bottom, not even close, and I don't even reach my current low point on a daily basis, so this isn't a particularly bad episode.

I can't decide if I should try the 25 mg of Topamax every hour.  Not being able to decide is a key symptom of depression.  When I cycle through mania and mixed along with depressed I know I'm fucked up enough to make the cycling stop no matter where I land.  When I'm like this, I'm not sure.  I could stop cycling, but where?  With tripolar ultradian cycling the decision is easy, euphoric mania, dysphoric mania or depressed.as.fuck is better than going through those and mixed states - I guess that really makes it quadrapolar cycling - every five to ten minutes, and I figure I stand at least a 75% chance of landing on something better.  Since I figure all that extra Topamax is going to knock the mania dead as well, the odds of ending up mixed or either flavor of manic are pretty long, so it's going to be baseline or depressed, and depressed is vastly better than ultradian cycling.  But now?  I have no idea how I'd end up.

The extra 10mg of protriptyline is helping, but only in keeping things from getting worse.


The local Equinox is Monday.  Looks like six more weeks of feeling like this.  Unless I manage to decide tomorrow to try the Topamax cure for ultradian cycling.  And it works.

I need to get my tax shit together.  I have most of it.  I'm stuck.  Dealing with my life is painful.

I tried some retail therapy.  I found some atlases from 1930s Germany and the USSR in the 1940s, as well as late 19th and early 20th century America.  I have my eye on similar items.  I picked up, all via teh interwebs of course, a CD of stuff from The Birthday Party that I didn't have and other music.  I looked around for records I used to own and miss.  The downside of having a bunch of vinyl worth over $100 the each means replacing a few lost items costs hundreds of dollars.  More reasons to buy current music I guess.

The Missoulian had an article about the Montana Valley Bookstore - a local portal to L-space - trying to reduce its inventory so they are closer to the advertised 100,000 books.  The article mentioned how the owners donated boxes of encyclopedia sets to the Missoula Library book sale.  Had I known they were giving away reference books I would have been there with my own boxes in the bed of my truck.  I have two full sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with books of the year, and various other encyclopedia, dictionaries, atlases, and other reference books going back to the 1870s.  I have four bookcases, two custom-made, dedicated to non-medical reference works, and two more for medical texts.  When do they publish this stellar news?  Right before my birthday.

Timing is everything.

I'm slowly moving the blogrolls back from my short-lived, personal crap-only blog.  The Panoply of Stupidity, Humiliation, Pain and Absurdity is up, although some of the defunct entries need to be added to the defunct list, and new sites need to be found to replace them.  The medical blogrolls need editing as well.