Words’ End

Something Completely Different — SCD — is the name of my house. It’s a good house, with good caring quirky people who have been extremely indulgent of me these past couple of weeks.

Good thing, because I haven’t been well lately. Out of the last week and a half, I’ve spent about four full days in bed, watching Farscape and intermittently crying, hating the world, hating myself and resenting the fact that sometimes I have to talk to human beings.

I’ve written about SAD before, though not at any length. It’s not cool to write about depression, and I mostly don’t have the words to do it right. But here’s my experience of it anyway, in the name of context and better understanding.  Here are some things that happen regularly in the winter.

• It doesn’t seem to hit until it gets cold.  Then it hits with a vengeance.  A sane person would move somewhere warmer, but my people and my life are here, and I love it here except for the damn SAD.
• I cry a lot.
• Sleep is erratic: I stay up too late and get up too early or too late, and my sleep schedule gets all out of whack.  For example, it’s 1am now.
• Because of this, a 9-5ish work schedule is excruciatingly hard.  I operate at about a third of my usual capacity for weeks on end.
• Until I get angry enough that something flips and I’m a productive fiend.  There’s no telling how long that will last before I have to build up an anger reserve again. (Gosh, put that way, there must be a better way to flip that switch.)
• (There are better ways, but their effectiveness is no more predictable than anything else during the cold season.)
• Mood shifts are unpredictable.  My arsenal of coping strategies for this is impressive.
• I get even more down on myself than I usually am.
• Accomplishments feel hollow unless I work very hard to make my brain think (but not really believe) otherwise.
• Good, positive things that people say to me take about five times more effort than usual to sustain in my mind without perverting them somehow.  ”She didn’t really mean that.  He doesn’t really think that.”
• I feel helpless.
• I eat erratically, which in itself affects my mood.  That’s a nasty feedback loop.
• It’s even more effort than usual to drink enough water.
• Everything is more effort than usual.
• I get lonely but can stand to spend only limited time with large groups of people, even people I adore.  Cravings for one-on-one company are overwhelming, so I sequester myself in order to not become a barnacle to my closest people.
• Accepting genuine offers of help is nearly impossible, and the need to respond to them often reduces me to tears.  Of course, I also crave the offers of help.
• Everything takes more energy.  Everything.  Brushing my teeth, setting down the computer, reading a book, getting enthused about food, everything.

I could go on.

I’m still functional, still me, still capable of surviving — at least I don’t battle suicidal ideation these days.  But it’s a nasty, debilitating, unpredictable depression, and I’m tired of it.

Still, life goes on, right?  Right.  It’s been intercession for a week now, with a few days to go, and the days that I haven’t spent in bed have been full.  I’ve attended parties, gone through all my clothing and the stuff in storage boxes, reduced the amount of stuff I possess again, reviewed three conference paper proposals, put my dissertation back up online and tweaked it to update the logistical bits, backed up all my data, hosted locally *and* remotely, spent some quality time with friends and beloveds.

The only thing left on my to-do list is this grant proposal that I’m supposed to start writing before the end of break.  Maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow morning and actually have three and a half days of true vacation without any obligations beyond the familial.  Maybe I won’t get to it at all, and feel bad.  The part about feeling bad never goes away.

So I’m exhausted.

Depression is real.  Seasonal depression is particularly hard to deal with because, though it may be finite, it’s also completely unpredictable… like the weather, I suppose.

Life goes on, and we all go on, but some of us are craving sunlight and warmth a little more than others.  Probably more than is reasonable.  If you don’t, and you have the opportunity to be someone’s ray of sunshine, please do.  ’Tis the brutal season.

I have NO time to write this, so it’s short. Here’s part of an email from Obama’s PR people I got today:

Last week, Republican Senator Jim DeMint made it pretty clear why the opponents of health care reform are fighting so hard. As he told a special interest attack group, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Here’s how the President responded:

“Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time, not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake.”

With Congress only days away from finalizing their plans for reform, it’s time to stand up with the President and fight back against this disastrous brand of old-style politics. So we need as many people as possible to publicly support the President’s principles for health care reform and call on Congress to act.

Please watch a 1m22s video of Obama’s response here, and if you wish, declare your support by filling out the form that only asks for your name, email address and ZIP code (presumably so that they can pass this on to your congresspeople).

Do it. It’s a tiny thing, but Obama’s campaign was one of many significant recent events that prove the power of social media and grassroots activism. Do it, please. We need different healthcare, and even if what he’s proposing won’t work, it’ll be something new to try. What we have isn’t just “not working,” it’s appalling. Please spend the four minutes on this.

EDIT: OK, so it takes you to a donation form. I should’ve checked before writing this. You don’t have to donate; your support will still be registered.

This has been sitting in my blog as a draft for a couple of weeks. It’ll be old news by now, but healthcare is a long-range political issue, and Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi’s latest project Change Congress is still pursuing it, and I think it’s worth a read.

In short: Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson opposes to Obama’s health care reform work. Obama is all, hey, we got a broken system. Maybe we should rethink children’s health insurance and also how completely unaffordable COBRA is and what we can do about it, and, you know. Health. It’s one of those most precious resources.

And Nelson is all, Obama is trying to hurt private health insurers by making health insurance public! Socialized medicine! What next, THE FROG PLAGUE?

…Huh. What do you know, Nelson has received quite a bit of fundraising money from private health insurance companies. The article I link to here has Nelson attacking back, but he doesn’t seem to refute the donations.

Healthcare is a tricky and complex issue, and I’ve got no rosy sunglasses on about socialized healthcare. But this isn’t about public health insurance, it’s about elections. Frankly, anyone dismissing an organization run by Lessig and Trippi as a “special interest group” running “a fundraising gimmick” is automatically suspect in my book. And the vehemence of Nelson’s language combined with his considerable extremely-special-interest funding makes me want to go march somewhere and put flowers in these people’s fountain pens. It wouldn’t help, though.

So, how about changing election rules? How about entirely publicly funded election campaigns? Can you imagine how things might go when advertising time is roughly equal and people have to really think before they hurl insults at each other? What if no special interests got to financially contribute to a campaign? Wouldn’t that be nice? I think that’d be nice.

(Edited Friday 12 June to add this update from Lessig on the Nelson thing.)

S.A.D. is kicking my ass this year, but this doesn’t come close to last year’s suck. Of course, I’m also not in crisis mode this winter, but there’s still a lot going on, and it’s good and bad and hard to keep up with, and I’m swimming more than sinking, and that feels good.

Last winter was easily the worst time I’ve yet spent on this planet, but it taught me a lot about my own strengths, and these days I’m remembering the lessons and putting them into practice in completely different contexts. That also feels good.

Today I was… moody; let’s say, it wasn’t full-blown SAD crashing down on me like a storm cloud, there were just things that kept throwing me off-balance. I made it mostly a good day, but couldn’t stop the wild swinging until I started cooking. Only a few minutes into it I felt this weight that I hadn’t even known was there fall away. Happy conclusion, or re-learning, or what have you: cooking is not something I indulge myself in and carve out time for here and there. It’s nothing short of medicine. Remarkable, really.

A bunch of scientists have written a commentary in Nature arguing that mentally competent adults should be able to use what have been referred to “brain doping” drugs (Adderall, Ritalin, etc) at will, for cognitive enhancement. The idea is responsible use, of course, and of course I’m for it in theory. (For me this falls into the same category as my firm pro-choice stand: anyone who can soundly judge what they’re doing should be able to do what they consider needful or desired with their own body. And face all consequences arising from their decisions.)

Three things worry me. First, where’s the line of mental competency? This isn’t a new question, and I don’t pretend to have an answer, but it’s relevant here. Second, even assuming competency, what about sound judgment? (Ah, but here’s where their responsibility begins, and nobody should stand in their way.) And connectedly, what about physical addiction to stimulants of various sorts? This ties into both competency and sound judgment. But also, successful navigation of the addiction bit heavily depends on education, and that’s what I see as lacking.

So, we need, must have education on this topic that goes along with the freedom to experiment with one’s own brain and body chemistry. And allowing people to do so at will involves implicit acceptance of some incidence of drug addiction. But just as alcoholism is no reason to reinstate Prohibition, addiction to drugs — prescription and otherwise — is no reason to restrict those drugs.

Of course, there are drugs whose addictiveness is so overwhelming that I wouldn’t particularly want those available without a prescription. But, having seen people around me take Adderall and the like for some years, some of them getting addicted, some — not, I think cognitive-enhancing drugs aren’t physically addictive enough to worry. We just need to make sure to get information to people, enough of it that they can make their own informed decisions.

(Edited to add: But I do wish people would stop calling them brain doping drugs. That puts a derisive spin on what isn’t an inherently bad practice.)

“We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.”

Once again I fall a little bit more in love with the 21st century.

After an almost three-week absence, I have not quite gotten my room back to an acceptable allergen level. This is a daily challenge even normally, no surprise considering I live with five cats and a dog. So the rest that my immune system had gotten and the full frontal assault upon my return from the desert to the humid state, and we’ve got fun times.

Today my Burner campmates and I, along with some hundreds of others, unloaded the two 53-foot containers whose rental our fearless container leader Cris Wagner organizes every year. They get loaded up with stuff people are taking to the playa two weeks before Burning Man, and unloaded two weeks after the event.

Everything comes back covered with the tenacious, alkaline playa dust, of course. I now have several bins of stuff to de-dust, launder and re-organize, plus a tent and an aerobed; I hope to deal with most of this tomorrow. Ah, the bliss of weekends when I can dedicate so many hours to a project.

On Monday 25 August, I drove the last westbound leg of my road trip, and entered Black Rock City, NV (just northeast of here, in the big white Black Rock desert). I drove in in a dust storm several hours long. It took me an hour or so to get from the ticket-check gates to the greeters’ station, and a good couple of hours more to get to my camp – visibility was that bad, and even though there was an endless caravan of arriving Burners all going 5mph or less, at some point everyone just stopped, got out of their vehicles and hung out for a while. Note to self: do not pack goggles on the Burning Truck. Seriously, bring them with.

I got to camp caked in dust, with my eyes burning and happy as happy could be. Hello, playa, I’d missed you.

The rest of the week proceeded to be gorgeous – only reasonably hot desert days and holy-gods-warm nights when I don’t think it got below 60 – right up until Saturday, when there was another half-a-day-long dust storm. By then I was exhausted and not a little strung out; emotions of all sorts are heightened at Burning Man, and this can be tiring. So I hid from the world for a while with great company of several people in succession. Lucky me – when I returned to Boston, I also returned to most of those people living within a five-mile radius of my house.

I got hooked on tobacco several years ago. Been quitting it ever since.

It’s easier not to smoke when it’s warm outside. Particularly when it’s warm and humid. And in the past six months I’ve had maybe a dozen cigarettes, if you don’t count the Quebec trip where I slipped and had, like, five. But sometimes it’s really damn hard. I didn’t know the meaning of addiction before tobacco. It’s been particularly difficult to stay away lately, and I don’t even know why.

Tonight I spent half an hour looking at anti-smoking ads on YouTube. Suddenly it’s a lot easier to resist.

On a brighter note: those new glasses I got have literally changed the way I look at the world. This happens every time I get new glasses, but it is no less amazing for its frequency. My eyes used to be rather far apart in their sharpness; my right eye had almost perfect vision at one point, while my left eye had deteriorated a lot. Now my right eye has mostly caught up with the left, which – the optometrist said – is actually better for my brain, even though my overall vision is worse. The glasses have restored some fundamental balance, [it feels like] somewhere around my brain stem. All I want to do is look at the world.

I want to be in the world. Perhaps, next time I get a cigarette craving, I’ll go look at more YouTube’d ads.

OK, an hour ago I still had the excuse of long-overdue catching up with a friend. Now it’s just the sneezing and the achy throat keeping me up.

Significant bright sides, both from tonight and from the past weekend: conversation over ginger lemon tea and a hummus plate at Diesel right up until they closed. Coming back home and preserving lemons brought to me by erstwhile Croatian visitors. Tasting the resulting lemon-juice-and-much-salt concoction, which won’t actually be ready for 5-6 weeks, but hey, I was curious; and experiencing a unique taste sensation that is oddly compelling. Listening to Ottmar Liebert, one of my favorite guitarists, whose album “In the Arms of Love” I’ve come to associate with the calm of late evenings.

Last Friday, seeing Mischief in the Machine, incredibly satisfying not least because the musicians have been practicing in my living room for the past several months, and some of the other performers are friends and acquaintances, and oh, also because it was an excellent show.

Food shopping with two friends and a kid, and helping the two-year-old through a comparative critique of two fairly complex cheeses.

Dinner (involving sushi), dessert (involving cherries and really actually unfortunate bacon chocolate) and conversation (involving three of my favorite peeps) underneath the Templet.

Helping a friend move – not under the best of circumstances for him, but satisfying both in a physical sense and in that I was able to participate. I’ve been on a bit of a streak reacting to what I see as empty pronouncements of love and sunshiny feelings towards the world – the only meaningful way I’ve found to counteract that is to invest of myself in my world, in practical ways that benefit it (them) and therefore myself. Hey, it’s not the best of motivations, but whatever gets me up and running, no?

Speaking of up and running, weightlifting is still having a profound effect on my life. Have I mentioned that? Yeah, like, every other post. Well, it’s true. Soon, if Molly and I succeed at mutually motivating, I’ll go check out BU’s gym facilities.

Going from strenuous move to the best picnic “brunch” yet this season. Quotation marks because it lasted most of the day. Molly and Rosa really know how to make a girl happy with food.

And then quiet and important conversation with Mark, one of the aforementioned favorite people; feeding my haptic interface; and an opportunity to start organizing my life – and snail-mail – and other paperwork – that seems to have been just the push I needed to start digging myself out of the piles-of-paper-everywhere hole I seem to get into at least a couple of times a year.

On balance, things aren’t bad. Except, of course, for the things that are. But, as I’ve written for the past several months, that’s largely out of my control.

Aki is sitting guard by my side. Time to go cuddle the cat – if he deigns to assent. Here’s hoping that the echinacea and goldenseal capsules counterbalance the lack of sleep, where my immune system is concerned.

Achy throat, achy body, chills, inability to stay awake at 8pm, interrupty sleep… aw, man. Highly inconvenient. Well, at least I’ve got the Moon keeping me company in the skylight.