Alone and Unobserved

I don’t know if I’m supposed to be feeling the therapeutic effects of my antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication only two weeks after starting it, but I think I am. I’m 100% certain I’m experiencing the side-effects, at least, and if the accompanying sustained good mood is just a placebo effect I’ll take it, by god.

Maybe in about ten years I’ll be stable enough to consider a relationship. I want one right now, or I kind of do (see this post if you’re wondering what “kind of” means). But I think I need to learn to be happy by myself before I’ll be able to be happy with someone else. Before I can be with someone else and not cynically undermine their happiness.

I’m not as fucked up as some people, and I should probably be grateful for that—but grateful to whom? to my parents, because they weren’t as destructive and dysfunctional as they could have been? to the Mormon church, for not quite succeeding in driving me to suicide? to my ancestors, for “only” bequeathing ADD, depression and anxiety to me, along with a history of any number of fatal illnesses? to a deity I don’t believe exists?

On the subject of god: Losing my religion six or seven years ago did leave a void in my life that I don’t think I’ve completely filled. I should be honest with myself about this. It removed an enormous source of anxiety, self-hatred and confusion—I hardly notice my OCD tendencies anymore, for instance—but it effectively alienated me from my family, my (then-) friends, my social network. Maybe just as importantly, with my religion I lost my purpose in life, and, while I’ve tried, I don’t think I’ve completely replaced that.

Do I want to be a librarian for the rest of my life? Probably not. And even if I did, is that compelling enough to be a “life purpose”? What does “life purpose” mean to me, anyway, and do I really need one? Have people in general been so hypnotized by the hollow promises of religion that they feel meaningless and hopeless unless they replace it with something equally life-consuming?

What say you all? Do you need a “purpose,” and if so, have you found it?

I’m sick. Just a cold; nothing major. But it’s made me realize something: I don’t get sick very often. Oh, I call into work occasionally with a sinus headache, but my meds always kick in by the next morning and I’m (relatively) good to go. Today is the first time I’ve called into work for the second day in a row in over a year. I… just don’t usually do that. And my god, it sucks. There’s only so much television and internet and warm baths and lounging around lethargically I can take—especially when I’m kind of achy and sore-throaty and I can’t get comfortable and nothing’s really engaging.

Here’s hoping I’m feeling better by tomorrow. Better yet, tonight. Or how about… now? No? Okay, what about… NOW? Argh.

No matter how long it takes me to actually get better, I can guarantee it’s going to feel like an eternity.

I’ve posted the impossibly delicious recipe for pasta with broccoli rabe that I made last night, and which gave me an apparently unending case of indigestion. But then I did eat half the entire batch in one sitting, so I deserves what I gets.

No one has asked for it, but the recipe for Irish cream floats is very simple: scoop vanilla ice cream into a glass or bowl. Smother in Irish cream. Consume. Repeat.

Pasta con le Cime di Rapa (Pasta with Broccoli Rabe)

My friend Craig and I celebrated being young and single and carefree last night by cooking and eating an enormous pot of fusilli with broccoli rabe, parmigiano reggiano and pecorino romano, drinking an entire bottle of sauvignon blanc and slurping up massive amounts of Irish cream with Snelgrove Canadian Vanilla ice cream floating in it*. We had a blast . . . so naturally I spent the entire day today dyspeptic and hung over. But it was worth it, if only for teaching me that I must never do anything of the kind ever again—at least not when I have to work the next morning. (And/or to prepare by stocking up on Alka-Seltzer beforehand.)

I’m trying to get into tea. Put a bit more clearly, I’m trying to cultivate a taste for what is essentially leaves boiled in water. The way I understand it, tea comes from an Asian tree. Green tea is raw and black tea is fermented. It’s all bitter and unpleasant, and the only way to make it palatable is to drown it in milk and spices (SEE: Chai latte). In a moment I’ll go read up on tea on Wikipedia, and then I will know all there is to know on the subject.

Why have I decided to start drinking tea if it’s so thoroughly nasty? Because, from what I hear, tea (esp. green tea, which tastes like boiled grass) is basically a magic elixir that will keep me young and beautiful forever, like a vampire, or Dorian Gray. I’m approaching thirty, which seems like a good time to start obsessing over my health and looks, and whether those are wrinkles forming at the corners of my eyes, and whether my hair is thinning, and whether I’m getting jowly.

In other news, I’ve been sick almost continuously since February started. I haven’t decided what I’m going to blame it on this time—draughts? mixed lighting? changing seasons? lactose intolerance? my generally sickly constitution? all of the foregoing?—but I’m hoping the Ides of February and a diet of green tea will cure me.

or, All About Me (motto: “Every Paragraph Begins with ‘I’ ”)

I am sick. “Sick” in the sense of being physically ill in some ill-defined “general malaise and fatigue” sort of way, and also “sick” in the sense that I called in sick and am home doing nothing in front of my computer. But now I am not doing nothing! Now I am blogging. I feel productive.

I just discovered that I am not a registered Democrat, as I had previously imagined. I guess when I registered to vote in Salt Lake County—in 2005! how can I possibly remember that far back?—I decided to go with “unaffiliated,” perhaps because it made me feel loose and unencumbered. Like choosing boxers over briefs, say?

I think I will be voting for Obama tomorrow, largely because of this video.

Inspiring, isn’t it? I’m not one-hundred-percent sure which way I’ll cast my vote (honestly, I like and dislike both Clinton’s and Obama’s policies in about equal measure) but right now I’m leaning towards the guy with MoveOn’s and will.i.am‘s backing.

In other news, I went out and bought the first three Myst games, as well as the first two Age of Empires games with their respective expansions. Unfortunately, all of them have various levels of trouble functioning on my machine, ranging from Age of Empires I (has to think really hard when changing songs) to Myst III: Exile (waits until I haven’t saved in three hours and then freezes) to Myst: Masterpiece Edition (crashes and takes Windows down with it). Oy vey.

A little over a year ago, I started noticing a strange tingling sensation in my pinky and ring fingers, especially when I woke up in the morning or after a long day at work. Of course, I ignored the tingling for the next six months, hoping it would go away. It did not; instead, it progressed up my hands and forearms until I was continually semi-numb from the elbow down, which turned me into a complete butterfingers, especially with small, expensive objects (like my cell phone—the poor thing will never be the same).

At this point I was also having a bit of trouble typing, which was a bad thing, because I type a lot. In fact, at least half of my favorite activities (blogging; Facebooking; library-catalog–searching) require the use of a keyboard and/or a mouse. So I finally went to the doctor. He ruled out the obvious possibilities (which were apparently limited to heavy-metal poisoning from well water or me making my symptoms up), and referred me to a neurologist. She was a nice, intelligent-seeming woman with a bag full of torture devices like needles and mallets and tuning forks and oh, yes, an ELECTROSHOCK CART. After using the above on me for what seemed like eternity (Hell is an endless nerve conduction survey, bet you didn’t know that), she shrugged, said everything seemed normal, and prescribed me 900mg of Neurontin.

If any of you aren’t familiar with Neurontin (generic name: gabapentin; motto: You Are Very Sleepy), it’s a drug that is commonly prescribed for seizures and various kinds of nerve pain and trouble. Patients are usually eased up to the full dose a little at a time to avoid the worse side effects, which include extreme lethargy, dizziness and poor coordination. The idea is, if you increase the dosage by 100mg a day, by the time you’re up to the maintenance dose of 900mg/day you won’t spend all your time snoozing, bumping drunkenly into furniture or mis-dialing telephone numbers. It’s a nice theory, but in practice that is exactly how I’ve been spending the last week, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been posting in this blog very regularly. Also, I was in Vegas for five days, and let me say: Neurontin does not interact well with alcohol. Just a tip.

Aside from the dizziness and the drowsiness and the turning my life into a complete shambles, the drug does seem to be having an effect. So maybe it’s worth it. I’m in a constant drugged daze, but at least my fingers aren’t tingling.

I changed medications a week ago, and I have definitely noticed some changes. I have a lot more energy in general—instead of slumping at the reference desk all day at work, I fidget, or get up and wander, or dance a jig or a polka (I am NOT kidding about the dancing), or smile helpfully and hopefully at every patron who walks by. But I’ve noticed that I suddenly have a lot less interest in certain things. Like blogging, and writing in general. Has my muse vanished with my angst and lethargy? Must I choose between a life as a frustrated, stymied human being and a life as a frustrated, stymied artist?

I’ve been getting some quality reading time in, though. Right now I’m working my way through Patricia A. McKillip’s oeuvre (see here and here), though I also find time for the odd article on feminist fantasy and science fiction. My living room floor is covered in library books and printouts from EBSCOhost and Wilson Web, and somewhere under all the mess is my work proximity card, without which I can’t get into the staff areas at the library.

Last week I needed a boost, so I went to the dentist, where the hygienists cooed over my flawless, plaque- and tartar-free teeth. I have my parents to thank for this: my mother instilled in me an obsession with dental health, and my father passed on his genes for titanium-grade dental enamel. Bacteria and caries need not apply.

My Aunt Daisy and I have started to compile a blog in memoriam of my grandfather Glen “B” Dial, who died when my mother was fifteen and Daisy was six, but who is fondly remembered by all who knew him. You can see the beginnings of the blog at glenbdial.blogspot.com.

And lastly, over the past week, I’ve listened to Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”—a song about young love, loss, and faith—approximately 1,001 times. It has lodged itself deep inside me for some reason, even though I am an atheist who has never lost the girl he loved to bone cancer, and when I am not listening to its simple, calm lyrics I am singing them to myself in the shower. Badly.

I’ll try to be better about updating my blog. As you can see, it’s not that I don’t have anything the write about—or rather, it’s not that I have less to write about than I ever had. Anyone who is really, really hurting to hear about my life now has an abundance of nutritious RSS-based fodder to choose from. As you can see, I’ve added several feeds to the sidebar, including several different flavors of mashups that I concocted in Yahoo! Pipes, for your feeding pleasure.

I’ve been taking antidepressants for the past several months, but to be honest, I haven’t noticed a huge difference. After I started taking them I wasn’t depressed, but I hadn’t been horribly depressed before, either—I was anxious, which is why I went to the shrink in the first place. And the meds didn’t seem to help with the anxiety at all.

Well, now I think I’m depressed again, despite any medication I may or may not be taking. To be more precise, I think I have been depressed for some time and just didn’t realize it. The symptoms? Lethargy; listlessness; lack of interest in doing anything, even things that I used to enjoy; feeling like simple tasks, such as cleaning my house, are just too monumental to tackle; decreased appetite; etc.

Of course, there is only so much concerted “not cleaning” that can go on before The Mess begins to push back. My house, it was a disaster. Out of consideration for my readers’ stomachs, I won’t try to describe the horrific nadir of shocking squalor I descended to, or to qualify the length of time that had elapsed since I cleaned the last time, although I will note that I use the words “horrific,” “nadir,” “shocking” and “squalor” advisedly, and that “It’s been a good, long while since I last cleaned” would be something of an understatement in this context.

Anyway, on Monday I looked around at the sty I was wallowing in, and lo, it was not good. The living room wasn’t good and the bedroom wasn’t good and the bathroom wasn’t good, and let’s not even talk about the kitchen, which really wasn’t good. The hallway was passable, at least in the literal sense, but the rest was a disgrace. This time, though, instead of collapsing limply on the couch in defeat, as I had been doing for the past, er, “good, long while” every time The Mess confronted me, I grabbed a sponge and started cleaning.

Last night, after two days of sweeping, spraying, scrubbing and sweating, I had made a respectable dent in the Herculean task I had created for myself (where are the Alpheus and Peneus when you need them?). Aching and twitching, I fell into bed. Sadly, instead of falling asleep, I lay there for what in this new context could again be called “a good, long while” (despite encompassing a much shorter amount of time in the absolute sense) and panted feebly for air.

At about four in the morning, it finally dawned on me that it was hot in my room. After a bit of online reconnaissance, I have discovered that it was probably in the mid-forties outside; whence, then, the oppressive blanket of heat that smothered my bedroom with a heavy hand last night? That’s right: my landlord has once again turned on the boiler, given control of the thermostat over to the lady in the freezing basement apartment, and left us all to bake.

Lying in bed and broiling got boring after a while, so this morning at six I got up and started cleaning the bathroom. At eight I had an unhurried breakfast, drank a gallon of coffee, and went to work at nine. And even though I was exhausted and in pain all day, there was one thing I didn’t feel: depressed.

One of the lies that I am fond of telling myself is that I am a noticing kind of person. This may be true when it comes to changes in my coworker’s hairstyles, or mysterious noises in the night, or the variable flavor of the café mochas served by my downtown coffee bar. But apparently feeling like complete crap in every part of my body doesn’t register, at least not until it has stuck around for eight hours straight.

I didn’t sleep very well last night (I know—shocker!) and this morning at work I was in such a daze that I could hardly walk in a straight line or form a half-coherent sentence. I guess I thought I was just tired, so I pushed through it, and stumbled through the whole day in a kind of bewildered, wretched daze. I was dissatisfied and out of sorts with everything. At work, every question anyone asked me was the wrong question; every task I set my mind to was the wrong task; every position I sat in, stood in or slouched in was the wrong position.

I didn’t realize until it was time to go home that the reason I was in such a sour, cranky mood, and the reason I couldn’t get comfortable, was that I ached all over. My head ached and my jaw ached and my neck ached and my shoulders ached and my arms ached and my stomach ached and my butt ached and my legs ached . . . besides which I felt hot and feverish and dizzy and disoriented. In short, I had been sick all day and I hadn’t even realized it.

I blame the weather.