Wrong turn

Today, I was driving home from Alexandria to Baltimore; I decided to try taking I-295 north, rather than cutting through DC. I wound up taking I-95 south for 25 miles. I didn't feel bad. I felt a little sad over the loss of time, I could have been having more fun, but I didn't feel guilty.

That was new for me. One time, I got lost by a similar amount, and wrote a pages-long blog post analyzing each of my mistakes, I was obsessed. Today, I thought, "Huh, I went the wrong way. I'll turn around. No big deal." I started thinking about what that lost 50 minutes meant to me, this would come to mind several times as I drove home, but I wasn't self-accusatory today.

It was very rainy today. I left Alexandria at 3 and got home at 7; even with having made the wrong turn, the rainy traffic made it so my trip would have taken three times what it normally would have. Roughly.

I have a cold today, I have a headache, I feel drowsy, my throat is sore. I would have gotten home sooner if I hadn't stopped at Wendy's for a Frosty for my sore throat. I would have probably gotten home at 6:30 if not for the Wendy's trip, which was actually pretty long, because the line moved very slowly, and it took them 10 minutes to give me my fries, and I had to go to the bathroom. There were two cops from the DC metro police there and they had very cool uniforms, the shirts had a lot of pockets and they had neat walkie-talkies with earpieces, like the secret service officers. Most little kids, at one point or another, want to grow up to be police officers; I know that I did. When I was five, I stood at the side of the road with one hand up, indicating that the cars should stop. The drivers just waved and drove past. I don't think that that's something I totally grew out of.

Anyway, the cold helped me feel better about having made the wrong turn; I made the wrong turn because I was inattentive because I was sick. I didn't give up 50 of my best minutes, I gave up 50 pretty low quality minutes that would have probably been spent napping or reading Cracked.

The rain helped me feel better about my mistake. The rain and a bunch of other people in cars cost me twice as much time as my own mistake did today. I suppose it would have been nice if I had no traffic and would have gotten home by 5. I try to optimize my use of my time, and I think that I would deal with my time in a healthier way if I were to realize how much of it is taken up with things that are ordinary and uneventful. If I were to compare the amount of time I spend on mistakes with the amount of time I spend commuting and going to the bathroom and waiting for a latte to be made and going for a walk to clear my head and watching a movie for enjoyment and sleeping, all of these things that take up time but don't seem productive, I think I would feel better about my mistakes, I would regret them less. Life takes a lot of time, and I have trouble remembering that.

I haven't been blaming myself very much lately, and I'm glad for that. I used to blame myself a lot. This summer, I took Lexapro for anxiety and that was unpleasant. All of my feelings were thrown around, even my feelings about right and wrong, and I think that when I saw that my feelings about right and wrong didn't have to be one way, they could be another way, or any of a dozen different ways, that helped me see that my feelings about right and wrong are quite different from any sort of absolute morality. I trust my feelings about what is right and wrong much less now; I mostly call them feelings rather than rules.

It turns out that I had the bad reaction to Lexapro because I have bipolar disorder; antidepressants can do bad things to people with my condition. I often feel guilty, with no connection to things that I've actually done. When I got my diagnosis in September, I realized that my feelings of guilt were probably more due to my disorder than my actual failings. If you felt guilty most of the time, you migh become meticulous about noticing every wrong thing you do. I did.

On the day I got my diagnosis, I went to the library and checked out Bipolar Disorder for Dummies which has been a helpful manual in dealing with the disease, but the title should probably be something more like, Bipolar Disorder for People who have Troublesome Mood Swings, but it's not their Fault that they have the Disorder. I got a large iced mocha and sat by the pond and read the book for a while. I called my mom, and told her the news. She said something like, "Oh, no." or "I'm sorry." when I told her, and I told her that I thought that was a funny reaction.

I'm not happy to have bipolar disorder, I'd rather not have it, but I'd rather know that I have it than not. The diagnosis was symptomatic; I already knew that I was suffering. If I took a test and was told that I have cancer and am going to die soon, I would say "Oh, no!" When I was told that I have bipolar disorder, I was excited. The diagnosis wasn't news to me, it was a new word for the problems I had already been feeling. When I got the diagnosis, that meant that I could get better. I'll probably need medicine and psychotherapy for the rest of my life, but that's a lot better than ennui, anhedonia, and delusions. Before I got the diagnosis, before I even tried Lexapro, I dwelt a lot on the idea that I'm going to die. Mom and I talked a while, a bit about my problems and a bit about how my family is doing, and I was glad that the whole conversation wasn't about my disorder; it's good to talk to Mom.

I figured that a lot of stuff that I thought was my fault, feeling sad and guilty a lot, those feelings aren't my fault a lot of the time, those came from a real disorder, real genes tweaked real funny in the real nuclei of some of my real neurons. I spent that afternoon sitting in the sun, drinking a mocha, and reading Bipolar Disorder for Dummies, not so much for the information as to make myself feel like I was doing something to help myself get better. Even though I was glad to get a decisive diagnosis that day, it took me a while to accept it, to apply the diagnosis to myself. I sat on that bench for a couple of hours that afternoon, when I could have been in the lab getting work done. I think I used my time wisely.

The cold (disease, not temperature) and the rain made it easier for me to accept my wrong turn today. I would like it if I didn't need things like that, rationalizations, to help me not put blame and guild on myself when I make petty mistakes. I would like to become good enough at accepting mistakes that I could just move on as soon as I had gained the relevant insights, but I'm not that good at accepting mistakes yet. I think that it's okay that I'm not that good at accepting mistakes.

Overheard

In a thrift store, I saw an old man with light hair, cut short on the sides. He was wearing jeans which had colorful embroidery on the pockets. I think he thought he was a cowboy.

I also saw a man wearing one of those bandannas that seem to be worn in support of Palestine. He was carrying a cat toy.

Driving home, I saw a man wearing an orange jacket and a green hat, carrying a big black garbage bag. He looked like an urban pumpkin hobo.

I walked past some neighbors, a mom yelled at her son, 'Do you know what happens on four days?' I didn't hear the answer, but I wonder what happened then.

I walked past two other neighbors, on said to another, 'I've got a fifth of Ever...'

Sick day

I'm feeling ill today, I've had a cold for the past three or so days. I'm working from home, doing low-key things like reading articles and reviewing my projects.

When I was a little kid, I would get excited whenever Dad would take a sick day. Not that I wanted him to get sick, but I got extra Dad time. Even if Dad was lying on the couch, sipping ginger ale, holding a bucket close, just in case, I was glad to just be around him.

One time when Dad was sick, Mom and I were downstairs doing an experiment, we were learning about how water expands as it freezes. I asked Mom why, and she didn't know, so she sent me upstairs to Dad, who was lying ill in bed. I asked Dad why water expands as it freezes. Groggily, Dad told me to go get my Ramagon set.

Ramagon is a building toy that never took off; I have no idea where my set came from. It had a bunch of spokes that would connect to hubs. It was good for making truss structures. I made a bunch of little L's with the Ramagon, two spokes sticking off of a hub at right angles. Dad told me about how these L's are like water molecules, with the tips of the spokes representing hydrogen and the hub representing oxygen. Water, as a liquid, is a bunch of these L's sitting in a puddle, but, frozen, the water forms structures out of all of these L's stuck together, spoke to hub, hydrogen to oxygen, and that's why water expands when it freezes.

I let my rabbit out of her cage today, she's running around. I'm sitting on my futon, and she keeps jumping into my lab and nipping at the articles I'm reading.

Why the dislike button is a great idea

Facebook doesn't make much sense. The like button means three things:
I like this
I want to be notified when people comment on this
I want other people to see this
It stinks when something bad happens to a friend and they post about it, for sympathy, "I lost my job", "My dog died", etc, well, it stinks for my friend when those things happen. But it also stinks for me, because I want all of my friends to know, so they can show sympathy, and I want to be notified when other people say nice things to my poor, jobless, dogless friend. I just don't want to click the like link, because I don't want people to think that I like it that my friend is living under a bridge without a dog. This is why we should have a dislike* button, it would differ from the like button in name only.

*It could also be the "I express my sincere condolences" button.

At least I'm not that guy

I have been hurt a lot by the psych conditions I have, they've affected every area of my life. At least I don't have to deal with what this guy did.

Counseling might be difficult

I have no idea how counseling works. I went to my second regular appointment today, before that, I'd had two intake interviews.

I think that counseling might be difficult. The last time I went, I was sad for five hours, I counted, and I wasn't even thinking about the stuff we talked about. It's been four and a half hours since my appointment today, and I'm hoping the sadness lifts soon.

This sadness feels very physical. My mind isn't whirling or anything. I'm not obsessing over any thoughts. I feel soreness in my legs, my throat hurts, I feel tension in my head, a headache like I got before I started wearing glasses. I just took two ibuprofin.

I know I shouldn't drink right now. I want to. I know it would be bad. I'm not drinking, but mainly because I'm on Clonazepam, and I hear that just a little alcohol will get me very tipsy. I have to grade a lot of papers tonight. Pity those students!

I feel this bad sometimes, with no obvious cue. It's entirely possible that my sad mood right now is, you know, my regular depression.

I don't know if it's a coincidence, or if the counseling is digging up deep stuff. It's funny, because I pretty much just talk for my 45 minutes, and sometimes my counselor asks a question or suggests something, or frowns sympathetically. I have deep, honest conversations with friends frequently, I'm very candid, and some are insightful enough to dig very deep and find difficult things for me to deal with. Maybe it's that I see my counselor as an authority figure, or that I see counseling as a special time, or maybe my counselor has some sublimely deep insights that don't seem as deep as they are when I hear them, but bother me later into working out some subconscious issue.

I have no idea. Maybe it's just a coincidence that I feel exhausted right now. Maybe I'll be in a positively chipper mood after the next session. Or, maybe I'll feel miserable after the next session, but maybe that's what getting better feels like.

Deescalating

The hardest thing about a hypomanic episode is the time after it.

It's tough enough to have grandiose delusions, thinking things like, "I'm the best scientist in the world." Except, I can actually feel like that if I'm pulling all-nighters and writing crazy code and impressing my advisor. Sometimes, I do really great work when hypomanic, but enough of the stuff I make when hypomanic is either crap or so pathologically egotistical that it's useless; on the whole, I don't think that hypomanic episodes are worth it.

What's tougher is the time after the hypomanic episode. It's a huge let-down. When I'm hypomanic, I come up with all sorts of crazy plans, ideas for great books, how to do awesome science, how to get more Twitter followers.

I'm a meticulously organized person. I have two baskets of unfolded laundry in my room, sitting on top of a disgustingly sweat-stained pillow and dirty sheets that I never intend to use again. I normally have a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. However, when it comes to information and ideas, I track everything. Right now, I'm reviewing my 100+ projects that I have in my system. It's sad for me to see some of the projects that are really, "How can I pump up my ego?" It's satisfying and freeing, though, to delete them.

Clonazepam is amazing

Benzodiazepines rock. Or, at least, Clonazepam does. I've been feeling anxious all week. It was weird, it felt different from my regular sense of anxiety. I felt very taxed, very preoccupied, like I couldn't catch my breath, except I didn't actually have shortness of breath. When I was heading out to start my day on Wednesday, I just sat and listened to podcasts and played solitaire on my Palm Centro.

Ordinarily, when I feel anxious, I feel a sense of fear about all sorts of things in my life, "I'm inauthentic", "I'm afraid of paying bills", "What if I run out of money?", "I'm not a good grad student", "God doesn't like me". It's normally a pretty cerebral experience, but, hey, I'm a pretty cerebral kind of guy. Of course, there are physical effects, too, I tend to oversleep to cope, that's the big thing. I'm less attentive, I'm more likely to goof off at Photobomb than to actually do my job.

Exercise helps a lot. I love going for half an hour on an elliptical machine, then doing some weight training. However, this takes a lot of time, I need to get into gym clothes and pack soap and a towel, if I want to exercise in the middle of the day. I haven't been to the gym in a couple of months. I take a lot of walks, now; whenever I need to burn off steam, I can wander by the pond for fifteen minutes and get back to work. Half an hour of walking a day is way better than two hours at the gym once every two weeks.

The anxiety I've felt this week has been different. I grind my teeth. I can assess how anxious I've been over the past couple of days based on how large of a lesion I've worn in my right cheek. My cheek had been healthy for the last month or two. This week, the lesion was huger than it had been in maybe a year or two. I felt very physically tense, a lot of tightness in my belly and I was getting tension headaches. I was twitchy. I always carry Silly Putty for if I get fidgety, I was using it a lot this week. I would wake up an hour before I had set my alarm, and have trouble falling back asleep, I was tossing and turning. This is all very unusual for me; anxiety is normal for me, but this felt like a more basic, physical anxiety.

I've been taking Lamotrigene for two weeks now; it's a mood stabilizer, and it's the first thing I'm trying to manage my bipolar disorder. One of the potential side effects is anxiety. I was wondering if it could have been the cause of the anxiety this week. I had been on 25 mg for the first two weeks, which is, in the words of my psychiatrist, Dr Regan, "practically homeopathic". Dr Regan is gradually increasing my dose; the Lamotrigene won't do anything useful for another six weeks, or so. The dose is being increased very gradually because the medicine can cause all of my skin to "slough off" if I'm allergic to it, which would lead to "death".

I had an appointment with Dr Regan yesterday, Friday, but I was feeling so bad on Thursday that I tried to call him anyway, to see if I should back off on the Lamotrigene. I knew that it was unlikely that it was making me anxious, but the anxiety felt so different from my normal anxiety that I wanted to make sure. I couldn't get in contact with Dr Regan, so I called my primary care physician, Dr Murthy.

Let me digress. I would like to say that I'm wildly enthusiastic about all of my doctors that are helping me. Dr Murthy has been my doctor for about two years. She's not chit-chatty, but she's very compassionate. Also, she's a vegetarian, and so am I, so she can help me make sure my diet isn't troubling me. She works in Glen Burnie, but is so good that I think she's worth the drive. I can get you her contact info if you're looking for a doctor.

At any rate, Dr Murthy suggested that I skip the dose on Thursday night, just in case, and talk to the psychiatrist on Friday.

In our regular appointment, Dr Regan said that there was no way that the Lamotrigene was causing the anxiety. He proscribed clonazepam, which is an anti-convulsant. Most benzodiazepines are pretty addictive and can cultivate dependency, so they should only be used in emergencies. Clonazepam is great because it's long lasting, but with no euphoric high. It's safe to take long-term. I can't drink, now, though, because alcohol interferes with it very strongly. I enjoy wine, so, hopefully, when the Lamotrigene kicks in, I won't need the Clonazepam.

The Clonazepam is amazing. I was having trouble not being panicky yesterday, but, today, I feel calm and serene. I sleep ten hours last night, but I had been pretty tired, so I'm not sure if it's the meds or what.

For the past week or two, my anxiety and depression had been pretty tough for me. Curiously, I could concentrate very well doing my job. That concentration blocked out the pain. I reckon that I've worked 57 hours this week, which is a lot more than normal for me. Whenever I wasn't actively talking with people or writing code or grading papers, I felt terrible, not because I felt compelled to do these things, but because it was only when I was concentrating, flowing, that I could feel free from the anxiety and depression. This isn't healthy, long-term, I want to work because I love work, not because I hate doing anything else, but there are worse coping mechanisms than advancing human knowledge and helping train the next generation of engineers.

I'm still confused as to why anxiety felt so different for me this week.

Lexapro broke me of a lot of the negative thought patterns that I had. I normally have very cerebral experiences of anxiety, depression, and hypomania. This got so bad on Lexapro, I had to learn how to just feel terrible, instead of feeling terrible and thinking terrible, too. I've been listening to a lot of Zencast lately. I don't have a regular meditation practice, or anything, but I've been learning to cultivate mindfulness, learning to be more embodied. I used to have anxious thoughts. Now I ask myself, "What does it feel like to be anxious?" and I observe how I feel in my body, tightness in my belly, soreness in my limbs, whirling energy, and so on. I wouldn't put a lot of money on this, but I wonder if mindfulness practice has helped me change my experience of my psych problems, and maybe that's why anxiety felt so different this week.

I feel so not-stressed now, thanks to the clonazepam, that I feel like I'm on vacation. I'm sitting at an outdoor table at Panera with a cup of coffee and a bagel. I'm looking at a parking lot. When I feel okay, though, I can take a vacation to a parking lot.

Psych update

I've not written much about my psychiatric problems since about mid-August. I finished taking Lexapro, an SSRI that I was proscribed for anxiety, on July 31. If you've read most of the stuff I've written so far, skip down to New Stuff. Otherwise, here's a

Handy Review

The first few weeks on Lexapro, in late June, I had become very depressed, anxious, and sleepy. But, after the first few weeks, I started having delusions and feeling very up. I describe some of this in Bad Lexapro.

I was brought to the point of realizing that I have depression in addition to anxiety while I was on the Lexapro. In How psychologically healthy Lexapro made me, I describe how this realization happened: Lexapro made all of my regular problems, depression, anxiety, and a whole slew of negative and harmful thoughts, it made them huge, so I was forced to admit that they bothered me. I don't know if I was in denial about having depression, or if I just didn't know what it felt like, to have an undepressed mind, but my depression became so bad while on Lexapro it made the depression the rest of the time seem more obvious to me. I decided to get help for this problem, too.

In Anhedonia, I describe still feeling very affected by the Lexapro, a month later. In fact, I don't feel like I landed until about a week ago. I feel more normal now, but not totally normal; I feel very affected, mentally. Frankly, I feel scared.

New Stuff

At the end of August, I decided to get counseling help. At UMBC, there is free counseling offered by the University Counseling Services. I now have been to two intake sessions and one regular counseling session with Dr Wick. Dr Wick is a new counselor with UCS, but she has twenty years of experience, including three at Goucher. I feel like she has a good understanding of the context my life is in as a grad student; heck, she's been one herself!

I was initially reluctant to ask for counseling help. I could write a whole post on just the bad thought process in that, but I didn't want to admit that I have trouble just knowing how to manage my emotions, at a thought level. I'm a smart person, I'm working on a PhD, I get good grades, I read smart books, but that doesn't mean that I am as good as I'd like to be at telling when the things I'm thinking about myself and my feelings are reasonable or harmful.

Wednesday of last week, I went to Dr Regan with UCS; Dr Wick had referred me to him, he's a psychiatrist. Dr Regan is one of the coolest doctors I've ever been helped by, he reminds me of Tom Gammill, smart and pleasantly sardonic. He diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I didn't believe it at first, because I've never, say, raced my car along country roads at 4 in the morning, or spent a week rearranging furniture.

As I understand it now, I fit the bill perfectly for bipolar II. Bipolar I is the really tough bipolar disorder, with the wild mania and deep depression. Bipolar II never hits the DSM's definition of manic; my experience from mid-July to mid-September or so does count as hypomania. Bipolar II is tricky to diagnose, because a patient could complain of the doctor, never have had a hypomanic episode, be proscribed an anti-depressant, and then get shot high. Antidepressants like Lexapro are great for depression, but without a mood stabilizer, are terrible for people with bipolar disorder.

My terrible experience with Lexapro is the classic litmus test for bipolar II. I'm so glad to have a concrete diagnosis now. It'll be a while before I can look at getting medicated for anxiety specifically, but that might be treated along the road with mood stabilizers and antidepressants.

Dr Regan proscribed Lamotrigene, a mood stabilizer with few side effects, except for a deadly rash that could result in "the outer layer of my skin sloughing off". That doesn't sound too bad, compared to hypomania. I've been on it for a week now. I have to gradually increase the dose, so it'll be a while before I feel any effects.

Beautiful offices

One time, a couple of weeks ago, I had to visit some administrators at UMBC, I had botched some paperwork. Most of the time, I'm dealing with PhD's who have sparse offices, or maybe they decorate their office with a turbine or a wooden boat. I know one who has a stuffed Taco Bell chihuahua and a Hoberman sphere, and he's one of the healthier professors. The administrators I visited, they're not academics. They're outranked by the professors, and I get the impression that a lot of the professors disregard them or make their jobs harder than they need to be. Even so, they seemed to be very happy, well-adjusted people.

In the office of one, a Mardis Gras mask hung on the wall. The fluorescent lights were off; she had brought in incandescent lamps. The lighting was dim and relaxing, but bright enough to work with. There were neatly organized office supplies, a pleasant little widget that held different paper clips, and so on. On the phone, she'd call colleagues by nicknames, like "Bibs". Light radio was playing; I don't like light radio, but it seemed to make the place seem more relaxing. The desktop wallpaper had a tiled picture of a flower. Family pictures were taped to the wall.

The other administrator I visited, the one who filed the magic form that saved the day, had a quote-a-day calendar sitting on her desk. She also had brought in her own lamp, and turned off the fluorescent lights. Family pictures, framed, sat on the desk. A pendulum clock hung on the wall, facing the desk. There was a painting, or at least, a well-made print of a beautiful painting. Certificates and awards hung on the wall. There was a plant, it might have been fake. A wreath hung on the door.

I was having a very stressful day that day, but these people who helped me, by trying to make their workspaces acknowledge their humanity, helped me feel more human, too.

Naming depression

I had a depressive episode tonight. Before having taken the Lexapro, I didn't call myself depressed. I might say, "I'm feeling depressed right now." but I didn't identify with the condition. When I was on Lexapro, all of my normal problems got magnified, and I'm much more aware of them now.

I used to think that I used to be an upbeat person, and then I became dreary and angsty about four years ago. Now, I don't think that's true; I think I'm a genuinely happy, optimistic, eager person, but that that was obscured by my problems with anxiety and depression since I experienced onset of these disorders four years ago.

I don't know how to compare my problems with other peoples'. I can't measure their feelings against mine. I know that I'm functional without intervention; my problems haven't led to any addictions (except caffeine, but that's okay in our culture), acting out on my problems hasn't led me to say anything that I regret, I haven't harmed the people close to me. I have a job, and I think I'm doing pretty well at it, I have interesting hobbies and a rich internal life.

I used to say, "I'm functional, so I don't need help for my problems." Maybe functional is one way to measure psychological health, but it's not the best one. If you've got back pain but you can still do your job, you're not healthy, you're in pain. I've been functional and depressed and anxious for four years.

I used to think that treatment was for people who are really depressed, like people who sleep all the time and are mopey and can't have good relationships with people and who are driven to substance abuse. I've never had problems anywhere near that severe, so I just told myself that I needed to have more willpower and discipline, or that I needed to fake my emotions, or that I needed a better diet and to exercise more, if I just did enough things on a list, I'd be okay on my own.

Now, it doesn't matter to me what category my problems fit in, if I have major depressive disorder (I don't think I do) or disthymic disorder or something else, I don't have the feelings I want to have, and I can get help for this. I might as well.

Since I decided to name my depression while I was on Lexapro, my experience of it has changed completely. I didn't even realize that I was depressed because the way that manifested for me was negative thoughts. I blamed myself a lot for my imperfections and frailties, I blamed myself for not being religious enough or sufficiently socially conscious. I thought I felt bad because I wasn't good enough. Now I say, "I feel bad." and let that be what it is. At least, that's what I try to do and I think I'm getting better at it.

Before, when I would feel depressed, I would feel it, physically, in my head. Not just psychologically, I would feel tension in the muscles in my face and neck and chest. Now, when I'm depressed, I feel pain throughout my body, this is my new experience of depression, but I don't feel the tension in my head and I don't harm myself with hurtful thoughts as much. I feel like I can have a peace inside of the depression.

Anhedonia

I've been off of Lexapro since July 30. It still has a huge effect on me.

I'm less depressed, overall, than I was before I got on it. I have had a couple of depressive spells. I made this during one of them:


There's a huge difference, I'm learning, between being happy and feeling happy. I was happy while playing with wind-up monkeys—who couldn't be?—but it didn't feel happy to me. I went a couple of weeks without feeling happy after I went off the Lexapro. Now, I'm getting flickers of happiness, the feeling, that is, and I think they're becoming grander and more frequent.

At the same time, I have been much more prone to having grandiose and obsessive thoughts since getting off the Lexapro, than I was before I started taking it. I have much higher concentration. Those, combined, led me to pulling an all-nighter two weeks ago to overhaul my code. I'm starting to see fruit from these efforts. I've been very energetic. Some days, I've gone without caffeine altogether; before the experiment with the Lexapro, I had had caffeine every day for months straight.

I'm surprised that, almost a month later, the effects of Lexapro are dominating my emotional state. I feel like dealing with the difficult emotions while on the Lexapro helped me release a lot of unhealthy thoughts, so now I'm very serene. I'm learning to be content with that serenity, even if I can't feel happy about things that make me happy.

Fireman

I set my alarm to go off at 9 AM today. It did, but I didn't; I figured I hadn't slept in since last Saturday, so I'd go back to sleep. I drifted in and out of dreams for the next hour and a half. I dreamt that I was in an alternate-reality game based on The Office, run by an acquaintance I haven't seen for years. We were on the beach, it was sunset. It was pleasant.

I don't just dream in stories, my emotions dream, too, and I find that's when my problems with anxiety and depression might get to be their worst, but I'm asleep at the time, so I'm not sure. Small children get bad dreams and they can't get back to sleep so they crawl into their parents' bed; they do that while they wait for the bad vibes to shake off. I don't live with my parents, and, besides, I'm a grown-up, so I dilly-dallied over breakfast, while feeling absolutely terrible and knowing that that feeling had nothing to do with reality.

You might be surprised by how much singing helps. I am.

I love the song, Penny Lane by the Beatles. There's a character in it, a fireman, and I have a friend, and the first time I saw him, I was surprised because he looks like how I imagined the fireman on Penny Lane would look. I got to see this friend today, and he's a good sport.

How psychologically healthy Lexapro made me

TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, on nurturing creativity. Watch it now, it's better than the stuff I make.

Watching this, I didn't feel any anxiety. Elizabeth Gilbert talked a lot about how creative people are paralyzed by fear. I used to be afraid that I'd never make anything good. Worse, I was afraid that I'd make on one thing that's really awesome and that I would never be that awesome again.

Ever since coming off Lexapro, whenever I have a thought, maybe I'm not using my gift as well as I should, maybe I'm not going to become a top professor, maybe I can't cut it as a professor at all, I banish that thought as terribly unhealthy, because all of those things could be true, but the blame that they put on me is false. I keep saying, "And then what?"

I want to be the best scientist ever, I have that as a wish, but which scientist doesn't? We all want to be the best scientist ever, we're defining ourselves in terms of how much funding we get or how many papers we write or which university hires us and how well ranked it is. Except, now, I have a deep awareness of my wish to be the best scientist ever, or even my wish to be a useful scientist, and I hold those loosely.

The existentialists were all mopey over whether there's any ultimate meaning in the universe, and were oppressed by the weight of holding up one's own meaning. I don't know what meaning is supposed to mean. This isn't a category in my thought process. It used to be, but it isn't now, and when I think back over all of my thoughts about meaning, I can't relate to them, they're incoherent in my current mindset. I was worried all the time about these deep, big, infinite, cosmic issues. Then I took Lexapro, and it made those problems worse. It made those worries so bad that I had to lose them.

This is very relieving.

Bad Lexapro

I didn't write a whole lot about my emotional state, the last week that I was on a full dose of Lexapro. It was the worst spot that I'd been in since starting it. I was so overwhelmed, I wasn't in a place to write about it. I was literally getting up from my desk to take walks three times a day, I couldn't sit still. I felt manic. I was laughing at things that I knew weren't funny, and it felt like hollow laughter.

One time, I had just parked my car in front of my house. It was about 10 PM. Baltimore City writes citations for people who don't use trash cans, but my neighbor had too much trash to fit in his trash can, so he went running across the street with a garbage bag, to put it in front of an abandoned house. I busted out laughing. It was pretty funny, but not that funny.

I was having grandiose thoughts, literally on the scale of 'I am the best scientist/theologian/philosopher/writer in the world.' And then, I'd look at what I was actually doing, and I felt absolutely terrible because I was driving or hanging out with a friend or reading a book, and there's no way that the best scientist in the world would be so weak and shallow as to spend his time on such trivial matters. I was in tension between these feelings of hugeness and feelings of inferiority.

I felt like I couldn't tell which way was up. I was confused. I felt disoriented, like when I first started doubting God's existence, but this was a much more overwhelming, primal, pervasive feeling; I was doubting everything. My emotions and values, the things I like doing, were meaningless to me. I felt like the laws of physics were incoherent.

I would play Rising Diamonds, a game in Gamebox Gems for my Palm Centro. I played it a lot. It's boring and repetitive, but I couldn't stop playing it.

I was so hyper I felt no craving for caffeine. I had none at all the last day I was on 20 mg of Lexapro; that was my first day without caffeine in—who knows?—months?

I like to drink a glass of wine a day. I love wine, it's delicious, and I drink it while reading books before bed, which makes me feel classy. I don't want to worry you, I don't think I'm about to become an alcoholic, but the alcohol in the wine did a lot to help me. It made my mind stop racing, so I could actually think. It suspended my worrying, and I could read and enjoy my books. I found a lot of solace in wine.

I didn't feel suicidal, but there were points at which I didn't feel like existing. A lot of people think that consistent nihilists should have all committed suicide by now; I doubt that. I think that a lot of people in our culture are very consistent nihilists, eating Lays and drinking Coke and watching King of Queens reruns. I would say "I don't want to exist right now." and I'd set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes and play Rising Diamonds and listen to the NPR Most Emailed Stories podcast. Then, I'd get back to existing.

I told a couple of close friends about my feelings about not wanting to exist. They weren't urgent feelings, I wasn't forming plans to commit suicide, but I figured it's safest for people around me to know; I'd be less inhibited about telling them if things got worse. I started telling one of them "It's not like I'm suicidal, but I don't feel like existing right now." "That you say that," she said, "tells me that you should get off the Lexapro as soon as you can." I'd been planning to try the Lexapro for another couple of days, mainly because I'm stubborn. I wasn't thinking straight. I listened to my friends.

I recommend radical honesty, at least with a few people you trust, if you're trying psych meds. I was so messed up by the Lexapro that I couldn't tell which way was up. I felt like I had all the parts of an alarm clock sitting in my lap, I'd taken it apart, and I had no idea how to put it back together. I got to the point where I couldn't think straight; I was having trouble being responsible enough with making choices about my medication. Honestly, I think I would have been okay on my own. However, having close friends supporting me has been invaluable.

I have been off Lexapro for two weeks now. In writing here, I don't mean to be writing a bad review of Lexapro as a product. It just didn't work for me; it seems to work well for a lot of people, including some I know personally. The human mind is finicky and fragile. Psych meds are very blunt objects; sometimes they help, sometimes they do more harm than good, and it's hard to know in advance what will help and what won't. I don't regret having tried Lexapro, and I'm going to try another psych med, starting in about a month. I feel like I'm on vacation now.

Library card and flow

I basically spent Wednesday evening through through breakfast time on Saturday (that's lunch time in your timezone) working on writing fancy simulation code for my research. I had avoided human contact for three days, and had spent all my time talking to perfectly logical robots.

I had such a great time, feeling very focused, so I wanted to get a copy of Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I went to the Enoch Pratt Free Library, downtown, and walk up to the desk to apply for a library card:
"Can I get a library card?" I ask.
The librarian: "Sure, can I see some ID?"
"Sure." I hand over my driver's license.
"Is this your current address?"
"Not exactly, it's my parents' address, I can get mail there and everything, so it's no big deal."
"I need some ID with your current address on it."
I look through my wallet. Nothing else has any address of mine on it.
"Do you have a bill or a bank statement sent to your current address?"
"Yes, but not right here, with me."
"I need something with your current address on it."
"So, if I had come in here, and lie, saying that this is my current address, I could have a library card?"
"Yes."
"But I can't unsay that."
"Right."

Q How do you drive an engineer insane?
A Tie him to a chair and fold up a roadmap the wrong way.

If your system incentivizes people to lie to you, and this matters to you, you've failed at making a sane library-card-granting-system.

This event with the librarian gave me a headache. It took, literally, hours for it to go away. I needed to drink decaf coffee to mellow out. I never drink decaf!

I was upset out of proportion to the actual "tragedy". I didn't care because so much about the book that it deserved a headache. I was grieved because the reason why I didn't have it was so incomprehensibly irrational. I use less secure identification when I vote. The librarian vetoed my government ID, and would have preferred official mail sent to my house, which would have been easy to forge.

Arrgh!

PS I went home and requested a copy of the book over interlibrary loan. It'll be delivered to my campus soon, and I don't have to hassle with parking downtown to get it.

Mercury poisoning

I'm against capital punishment, not as a matter of principle, it's just played out so terribly. However, the one crime that we, as a society, should threaten death for is inappropriate disposal of compact fluorescent light bulbs. These suckers are so much more energy efficient that it's better for the environment and your credit card—the one that you're about to default on—for you to throw away all your incandescent light bulbs right now and replace them with CFLs.

The only problem is that CFLs leak mercury into landfills if they're disposed in regular trash.

"But I don't know what else to do with my old CFL." you say. "Can I just throw it in the trash? One lightbulb doesn't matter that much."

Sure, one lightbulb doesn't, but millions do. All the salmon will die.

The thing is, this is a difficult rule to enforce. We have all sorts of rules against, say, deviant practices or drug use, that could only be enforced thoroughly if the police had cameras in everyone's bedroom. Throwing away a CFL is even more discrete, though, and actually hurts other people.

If you speed, does your going eleven miles per hour over the speed limit truly cost society $50? It's got to be way less than that. The police figure that they can't catch you all the time, so they have to make the consequences unfair. The harder it is to enforce a rule, the more disproportionate the consequences should be.

Thus, if anyone actually gets caught throwing a CFL in the trash, their punishment should be death. Or, perhaps, torture, then death. We could harm their families too. It's not fair, but it's only way to get the rest of us to dispose of our CFLs safely. It's either them or the salmon.

[To appropriately dispose of your CFL, check out this directory; these are the best spots for Southwest Baltimore. You can also visit Ikea or oodles of Home Depots.]

Puzzles and coffee

I was sitting in the coffee shop run by A New Faith Community. There were two little brain teaser toys sitting on the coffee table in front of me. I reached for one. The man on the couch next to mine reached for the other. I'm charmed by subliminal suggestion like that.

I was doing Sudoku puzzles. "Oh, are you doing Suhnookoo?" "Uh, yeah."

Meanwhile, other men were talking about people who consume a lot of sugar. Literally filling a glass half full with sugar, adding warm water, stirring, and drinking this sludge. Filling a coffee cup with sugar, then adding coffee to fill in the cracks. "It's like putting jumper cables to your head." "You can feel your pancreas shrivel." One of them got to talking about Sudafed, somehow.

"No, Suhnookoo," my companion corrected. I told him that it's Sudoku. We did matchstick puzzles and shared riddles. I can't remember the exact way he phrased his riddle, it seemed a little funny to me, but I found a sensible version here:
The man who built it doesn't want it
The man who bought doesn't need it
The man who needs it doesn't know it.
What is it?

SizeUp

Allow me to recommend SizeUp. It's a Mac app that lets you manage your windows without using a mouse. It's super-cheap, you can name your price, as low as $3 for a license. There's a free demo. I use two monitors, and use SizeUp to bounce windows from one to another. This is very handy when I'm writing on my primary screen and have a reference or figures on the secondary screen. I love being able to put windows side-by-side, pixel-perfect, in just a couple of keystrokes.

I think the most pedantic use I have for SizeUp is that I don't want my maximized windows to go all the way to the dock, I want to leave a strip of exposed desktop so that I can bounce files around easily. I don't like thinking about where to save files when I save them, I save everything to the desktop, and then file everything a couple of times a week. This way, I don't hit speed-bumps with thinking about organization when I'm doing creative work.

Also, I keep my dock on the side of the screen. Rows of about eighty characters are optimum for readability, so I prefer tall, narrow windows. Most apps don't respect that, but SizeUp obeys me and beats unruly apps on my behalf.

SizeUp lets me resize and position windows automatically so that I don't have to fiddle a lot.

Goggles4u.com

Allow me to recommend Goggles4u.com. A week and a half ago, I went to my physician to follow-up on my Lexapro experiments. I mentioned that I'd had problems with headaches, she suggested that I see an optometrist. I went to the nearest Wal-Mart vision care center, put down $65 and got a check-up. I'd thought I'd had above-average vision, but it turns out that I have astigmatism in my right eye.



Ever since then, I've been winking my left eye to see if my vision gets blurrier. I was amazed that I'd not noticed before, I look out of these eyes every day, and I think it's crazy that I couldn't notice that the right one was fuzzy. I'd heard that I could get glasses for super-cheap on the Internet, so I asked the optometrist for a prescription and for my pupillary distance (PD). The cheapest pair of glasses from Wal-Mart would have cost $40.

I checked out Glassy Eyes for reviews and headed to Goggles4u. After some fashion advice from my image consulting group, I chose a pair, took a picture of my prescription with my Palm Centro. A week later, my glasses arrived in the mail. They only cost $29, and have anti-scratch, anti-UV, and anti-reflective coatings, included for free—Wal-Mart would have charged extra for those. All frames are $13. I opted for the cheapest lenses, $17 for your choice of plastic or glass, but fancier lens materials are available, too. Shipping is free.

I am absolutely delighted by these glasses and will likely never purchase glasses from a brick-and-mortar store.

Tips:

1. If you get headaches a lot for no obvious reason, go to the optometrist. It's worth a shot.
   
2. If your optometrist prescribes classes, ask for the prescription; your optometrist is required by law to give it to you.
3. Also, ask for your pupillary distance. You can measure it yourself, but optometrists have a special gadget for this that's easier and more accurate.
4. Use the "GlassyEyes" promo code when ordering from Goggles4u for a 5% discount.
5. If you wear glasses, measure your old pair to get a good fit on a new pair online. This is my first pair of glasses, so I measured my favorite sunglasses, and am delighted with the fit.
   

Don't buy potatos on August 15th

NO POTATOS...on August 15th 2009.

Don't potatos, or potato products, on August 15th. Join the Potato Famine!

"In April, 1997, there was a "potato out" conducted nationwide in protest of potato prices. Potato prices dropped 30 cents a pound overnight.

On August 15th, 2009 all internet users are asked to not go to a grocer and purchase potatos in protest of high potato prices. potatos are now over $3.00 a pound in most places!

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet network, and the average American spends about 30 to 50 dollars on potatos per month.

If all users would refuse potatos and potato products (potato chips, potato bread, potato rolls, latkes, hash browns, even French fries!) on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000,000.00 (that's almost 3 BILLION) out of the potato companies pockets for just one day. Lets try to put a dent in the mid-western potato industry for at least one day.

If you agree (and I can't see why you wouldn't) resend this to everyone on
your contact list with it saying 'Don't buy potatos on August 15th'."

Join the rebellion! By killing potato prices dead, we can stop polygamy (Frito-Lay), and lower potato prices for everyone! Think of all the hungry people who would like a potato now and then.

Together, we can show Big Spud whose boss!

Insomnia on Lexapro

[I wrote the following on Monday, July 20, and just now edited it I was still on Lexapro, and would be tapering off my dose for the next week and a half.]

I can't sleep. It's 2:30 in the morning. I'm not just not tired, I'm twitchy. I'm listening to This American Life; it just so happens that this week's episode is a rerun, Fear of Sleep.

I am blaming myself. I was up until 4 the last two nights, hanging out with a friend one night and writing a short story the next. Insomnia is a heavy theme in the story. I'm questioning the things I was up late for, were they worthwhile?

I blame myself for my problems with anxiety. I would rather be interesting than happy. I've always wanted to be a genius, like Einstein or Edison. Most geniuses are a little eccentric, so I cultivate eccentricities in hopes that I'll become a genius as a result. I carry around toys in my cargo shorts, I eat postmodern food, I try to cultivate an offbeat theology. I wonder if I'm an anxious insomniac because I'm obsessed with genius and interestingness.

I know it has to be the other way around, I have obsessions because I have nervous churning in my belly and I have to latch on to something. Healthy people, I suppose, have things happen to them and then they have feelings about those things. I have feelings, whirling around, and they'll attach themselves to whatever is happening. It took me a long time after the onset of my condition for me to learn say "I'm anxious because I have an anxiety disorder, not because of X." where X is people around me or my research or my creative work or 3 billion people living on $2 a day or whether or not God exists or my finances or whether I am a good person.

I know that I didn't give myself my problems, because if I were to pick a condition, I'd have synesthesia or schizophrenia. I want to be interesting. Schizophrenia is interesting. Anxiety is boring; when I'm anxious, I most want to oversleep or read Photobomb. I know that I'm not having trouble falling asleep now because of anything that's my fault; I'm not just not drowsy, I'm hyper and twitchy. I didn't cause that.

Parkour?

This evening, I was eating leftover Trader Joe's Take-Out Thali, which is delicious, along with the most ripe mango I've ever had, I was eating outside, under the Academic IV overhang at UMBC, where I previously met a squirrel. Two guys walked up, and one stood on the armrest of a bench, and hopped with both feet to the opposite armrest.

This first guy is asian. He is skinny and has very short hair and a black headband, and was wearing wife-beaters and black track pants. The other guy is white, and taller than the first guy. The second guy was just a little chubby. He has long red hair, parted in the center, and he was wearing a grey t-shirt and blue jean shorts.

The second guy stood around for a while, watching his friend. He got a little bored and paced. His friend jumped from the armrest of the bench to a bannister, and walked on it as if it were a balance beam.

The second guy then got a turn practicing, and stood, awkwardly, trying to balance on a different bannister.

Then the first guy practiced running up to a wall, jumping, then clambering up it. I think they were practicing Parkour.

Ostensibly Morroccan cous cous

So, the cous cous you prepare according to the directions on the box. The only trick I use here is to add vegetable stock instead of water; it makes a huge difference in terms of giving a savory flavor. Once the cous cous is done, add the chickpeas. First, make sure the chickpeas are good and soft; you may need to boil them, depending on how they were canned. (I'm assuming you're using canned chickpeas; dry is fine, it's just more trouble, because they would need to be soaked or boiled.)

The vegetables are more fun. Start by sautéing in olive oil a lot of amazing spices, cumin, ground red pepper (cayenne), cinnamon, whatever else tickles your fancy. Try coriander, if you like, and let me know how that works. Maybe some garlic would be good, too, fresh minced garlic is best. Add diced bell peppers, one red and one green should be pretty good. Or you can cut them into tiny strips, maybe 1/8" by 1/2" or some such. Sauté them in olive oil, with the spices, just for a couple of minutes. Dump that in with the chickpeas and cous cous, and add some raisins, golden raisins are best, and some grated carrot, it's pretty great. Top with almonds, sliced roasted almonds, if you have some on hand.

This stuff is great warm or cold.

Mocha happy

I feel happy. I'm sitting in the Panera off of Security Square Boulevard. There are two women right in front of me, I can't really follow their conversation, but it's clear that they're friends and I'm glad that people are friends with people.

There's a man sitting at a table, writing on a manuscript with a blue pen. I just submitted my first scientific article last night, and I edited it that way, too, except I used a green pen. He's wearing a polo shirt and cargo shorts, which is my uniform. I feel connected to him.

There were two men here who just left a few minutes ago. They got up from their table, and kept talking for a few minutes, because they had just one more thing to discuss. One of them was holding a Bible.

My doctor took me off Lexapro yesterday. I'm weaning myself off of it, I'm down to half the dose I'd been at for the last two weeks, and this time next week, I'm going to be down to just taking one pill every other day. I'm feeling a lot better already, probably more than reducing the dose of Lexapro can account for.

I slept in today. I've been sleeping nine or ten hours at night for the past few days. I think that my brain has just been so twisted up that it needs extra sleep to heal.

I went to my friends' house to pick zucchini and bell peppers. They're about to go on vacation, and I talked with them about what they like to do on vacation, and biking long distances, and motorized flexible-wing aircraft. Some of the kids tried to trap me, to keep me from leaving. The littlest one was going in circles from the kitchen to the living room to the dining room and back through the kitchen, with a roller skate on her right foot. She kept falling down.

I don't feel euphoric, but I feel happy, happy in that life-is-good-but-we're-Presbyterians-so-let's-not-get-carried-away sort of way. I feel a little happy, and I've been feeling so convoluted lately that I'm happy to be happy.

I have an iced mocha. It cost $4, which is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a drink, but rather than feeling guilty about having spent $4 on a transient item, I'm incredibly thankful that I can have things that I like but don't need.

I'm reading an article, a delightfully well-written article on the immersed boundary method, the method I use for my research, and even though it's technically work for me to be reading it, it feels like I'm reading it for fun. I love my job, love it.

I got a cherry pastry, and I'm full from the tomato and mozzarella panini I had for lunch, so I don't know if I'll eat it before I leave or if I'll take it with me, and I am totally happy with having that undecided.

I feel like I just finished finals, except that I want to go to the lab and give a lot of work to my supercomputers.

I was feeling very hyper earlier this week. This morning, as I was making my iced coffee, I used slow, deliberate, careful motions. I sat with my Sunbox and read some of The End of Economic Man by Peter Drucker. Earlier this week, I was thinking a lot about how irrational human beings are, and how terrifying that is, and wondering if there was any ultimate meaning. Peter talked about those ideas in his book, and when I read about them, I was still scared about how once the Iranians or the North Koreans build a nuke, the world could end, but I felt much more calm than scared, I knew there was nothing I could do to fix the nuclear problem or world hunger or to stop slavery or redistribute wealth, so I took another sip of my iced coffee and kept reading.

A lot of the time, I read out of a sense of obligation, like I'm the sort of person who owes it to the cosmos to read a lot of books. This morning, I was reading because I wanted to be connected with Peter Drucker's ideas, that's what I genuinely like to do.

I'm now basically out of mocha proper and am now sucking whipped cream and residual chocolate sauce through a big, fat straw. Jazz is playing, and I'm normally ambivalent about the jazz that plays at Panera, it's a little smooth for my taste, generally, but I recognize the last few tracks that have been playing, I'm pretty sure they're by Dizzy Gillespie, and I like Dizzy, mainly because he has the perfect first name for a jazz musician.

Right now, I feel like the cheezy ending of every movie from the 80's, where there's a montage showing what all the characters are doing now that the Conflict is Resolved, and it ends with a freeze-frame of them all jumping in the air simultaneously.

A mom and her daughter just sat down in the corner. The daughter picked the seat. 'Why are you sitting me in the corner? Are you ashamed to be seen with me?' asked the mom. They each have an iced green tea, and they're sitting side-by-side, sharing a bag of the fancy Panera potato chip and they have a sandwich cut in half. The daughter is wearing purple glasses.

Marilyn and Mary

I just noticed that Marilyn vos Savant, holder of the highest IQ on record in the Guinness Book of Records, and Mary McDonnell, who played Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica, look kind of similar.

Marilyn vos Savant

Mary McDonnell

Songs that I listened to while driving today with the windows down and the volume all the way up

Code Monkey, Mr Fancy Pants, I'm Your Moon, Jonathan Coulton
All Together Now, The Beatles
Two Princes, The Spin Doctors
The System is Down, Strong Bad
Poor Little Rich Boy, Regina Spektor

Samples of Lexapro

When my doctor doubled my dose of Lexapro, she didn't give me a new prescription right away. I was due to run out of pills before my insurance would cover a refill because of this. My doctor was pretty cool about it, and gave me a weeks' supply in free samples.

I can understand why drug companies give free samples of certain drugs to their patients. I'm not sure why they give free samples of Lexapro to my doctor, though; Lexapro takes more than a week (one sample's worth) to take effect, and it's dangerous to stop taking it without a physician's advice. In this case, it was handy for me to have the spare pills, but I don't think that's what samples are intended for.

Of course, drug companies do much bigger things to sway physicians and patients.

Dullness and Lexapro

At the end of last week, I was feeling less depressed than I was previously, but I was very numb to any positive emotions. Lexapro, as with any SSRI, can do this. A lot of the strange, emotion-manipulating side effects of these medicines can be temporary or can last for as long as they are used, and the patient needs to wait and see to decide what to do with them. I'd been feeling this dullness intermittently since I started taking the maximum dose of Lexapro two weeks ago, but it was pretty consistent from Wednesday to Saturday.

This dullness was even worse than the depression. On a depressed day, I could try some things that might cheer me up. I at least had a strong negative emotion that I felt like I could respond to and fight against, I had something to be in tension with. When I feel dull, though, I just have trouble making myself care about anything. It's really sad for me, because I have a lot of things that are important to me, relationships, creative work, research, books, but to not be able to feel anything about these things made me afraid that I'd abandon them.

I love the opening scene of Garden State. An airplane is about to crash, and everyone on board is screaming in terror, except for the guy on lithium.

Sunday, yesterday, I woke up feeling a little depressed, and I was excited to be feeling something. I'm in a really good mood today. I'm actually feeling very hyper and fidgety. I'm afraid I might have trouble getting to sleep.

I refilled my prescription for Lexapro today. At first, that seemed like a tough decision; it' thrown me into one of the toughest spells, psychologically, that I've had in about two years. I'm feeling about average, now, though. It might turn out to be an amazing thing for me; I generally feel a little low, and have one or two days a month where I have really intense anxiety. If that disappears, that would be fantastic. A lot of psych meds take a long time to take effect; Lexapro takes anywhere from one to four weeks; I'll have been on it four weeks this Friday.

If you have problems with depression or anxiety, and you try taking medicine to treat that, you may find it worthwhile to endure a very difficult adjustment period to a new brain chemistry. I'm still wanting to see how I do over the next month or so.

What happens on the stoop

Walking around Baltimore, I saw
An old grumpy woman smoking a cigarette
A young man with squinty eyes, sitting in a wheelchair, eating rice out of a plastic bowl
The grandmas sitting in the white lawn chairs watching
The kids breaking curfew watching
Drug dealers watching
The police who watch us on the blue light cameras
I wonder why my neighborhood has the problems it has
I like to think it's because the people are lazy, always sitting on the stoop, smoking and talking
My neighbors sit around outside
But where people can afford air conditioning and can't afford strangers, they sit around inside and watch television
Either way, we are just people watching people

Take the F out of safe

I moved into Baltimore last August. I wanted to learn to be a good neighbor, I wanted to become a real Baltimorean. I went to the Safeway, planning on switching from shopping at Trader Joe's.

I asked the cashier how she was doing. 'I'm sick.'
'I hope you get to feeling better soon.
'In about nine months.'

As I entered the Safeway tonight, for cereal and duct tape, I saw her walking home with a big, red box of Huggies.

Things that made me happy today

• Cereal and berries
• Iced coffee
• Linen pants
• Iced tea
• An encouraging phone call
• Good job situation
• Smoking my pipe
• Playing with my computer
• Going to the gym, especially swimming
• Church people
• Meditation

Doubling the dose

The effects of the Lexapro have gotten worse. Last Tuesday, I was feeling dizzy, like vertigo. I had to sit and meditate so that I would feel safe to drive. I was feeling even more depressed than before. I wasn't drowsy, as I was previously, but I was the most depressed and anxious that I'd been in a long time. I had some periods in which I could concentrate well, but I was still generally feeling shaken.

I'm still clenching my teeth a lot. I've picked up sighing as a new tic.

I called the doctor, to ask what to do; should I quit it? Is it worth it to keep taking the Lexapro if it's making things worse now—does it get better? She wasn't in right then. I started to feel indignant.

Some of my neighbors, here in Baltimore, feel like they're automatically in opposition to authority figures. I remember one time I was watching a car wreck. The paramedics showed up, and my neighbors yelled threats at the paramedics for being a little late. The paramedics yelled back, as they put the shock victim on a stretcher.

I felt sort of like that about my doctor being unavailable. I was surprised; I never feel that way.

When I did get back in touch with the doctor, she told me to double the dose. I'm now at 20 mg of Lexapro daily, which is the maximum. That was Thursday. On Friday, I kept commenting out loud, 'I feel really good!' I did! I still felt a little down, but I felt some chemical happiness that helped me beat it.

That didn't last. I've been increasingly down since then, and the chemical happiness vanished.

Today, I generally felt pretty terrible. Right now, I'm feeling pretty okay, though. These things helped:

• Caught up with a friend on the phone
• Went to the grocery store
• Washed dishes
• Cooked couscous
• Meditation
• Hung out with church people
• Fixed my computer
• Ate a whole mango, it was very ripe and delicious
• Wrote

It's very strange to do the things that I enjoy, but still feel very depressed. I keep telling myself, 'This normally makes me happy, so I bet it would today.' It's very confusing. I keep trying to separate the depression from my true character as a person, I keep trying to externalize it, to say that the bad feelings aren't truly how I feel. I'm afraid, though, that that line between me and my psychological problems is wrinkled if it's real at all.

I had some snacks today that helped:

• Smores
• Gummi worms
• Trader Joe's itty bitty oatmeal cookies, the kind that are small so you can eat twelve of them and not feel bad
• Trader Joe's Jalapeño Cheese Crunchies

Also, I've been listening to a lot of The Beatles' Abbey Road album, Raffi, and Dog Traders, but I've been listening to They Might Be Giants the most. I love their songs Doctor Worm, New York City, Climbing the Walls, and The Cap'm. I normally listen to podcasts except for when I'm working. I've not reliably had the concentration for them to hold my attention, so it's strange for me to be listening to music as much as I have been.

Adjusting to Lexapro

It turns out that adjustment to psych meds isn't as easy as you'd think. Paradoxically, Lexapro (and all SSRI's) can actually aggravate depression and anxiety, at least while the body is getting used to them. The last three days, I've had this happen to me. Not only that, but I've been feeling unusually drowsy.

Wednesday was a weird day for me. I was falling-asleep-tired at 5 PM, even though I'd had plenty of sleep the night before, and a normal amount of caffeine (24 oz. iced coffee, about 300 mg of caffeine, by my estimate). So, in the 6 PM hour, I drank a can of Red Thunder (similar to Red Bull). I went from being anxious, depressed, drowsy, and inattentive to hyper, twitchy, fidgety, and alert by 8 PM. I had trouble not smiling too much and too awkwardly, it was a bad smile, not a good one. I felt insincere. Then, I fell asleep at eleven PM. This is very strange for me, I normally have trouble getting to bed on time at midnight.

I feel spaced out. I have ADD, but, now, with Lexapro, I'm having particularly bad problems with keeping my attention on my work. I have trouble putting words together, especially when writing, but even when talking.

My jaws are sore, I keep catching myself with my jaws clenched tight.

I keep getting songs or even just words stuck in my head, especially when I'm feeling the effects of the meds most intensely in other ways. This happened to me before during periods of very bad anxiety in the past. A couple of years ago, I got the phrase 'A passel of mail' stuck in my head, it was a quote from an email from my mom.

I'm on Lexapro

I've had problems with anxiety intermittently since 2005 around the time I started grad school. I think this is partly a coincidence, but stress can be a trigger for onset of anxiety conditions. Since then, I've learned to manage anxiety pretty well and I'm feel anxious far less often than I did before. Even so, there are a couple of days a month when I feel anxious about everything in my life, or anxious about nothing, or anxious about what God thinks about me or anxious global poverty. That my anxiety is so nonspecific makes me think that I don't need to make many major life changes at this point; I take plenty of time to rest, I love my job, I'm in a healthy community, I have good relationships with my family. So, on Friday, I started taking Lexapro (Escitalopram). I hope that helps. Anxiety can be great when I have something to be anxious about, but I don't want to feel anxiety for no good reason.

I am entertained by the list of possible side effects. I'll let you know which affect me. Here's an excerpt, the best side effects:

• Bizarre behavior
• Black or bloody stools
• Confusion
• Decreased concentration
• Decreased coordination
• Fainting
• Fast or irregular heartbeat (More stimulants!)
• Hallucinations
• Menstrual period changes
• New or worsening agitation, panic attacks, aggressiveness, impulsiveness, irritability, hostility, exaggerated feeling of well-being, restlessness, or inability to sit still
• Persistent, painful erection
• Tremor
• Unusual bruising or bleeding

Circulant matrices

Circulant matrices are freakin' awesome.

Numerical analysts like me like to use matrix multiplications to take derivatives. When we solve differential equations (especially partial differential equations) we have to invert these matrices. The thing that makes my job suck, as a numerical analyst, is that I often have to invert huge matrices; in my code, if I were to do this directly, I'd have to invert a 32768x32768 matrix for the most computationally inexpensive case. Some models require inverting matrices of tens of millions of elements. This would take forever to do!

The matrix that represents differentiation for uniform periodic domains is a circulant matrix. (Circulant matrices are evidently a type of Toeplitz matrix.) Multiplying a circulant matrix by a vector is like taking the convolution of the first row of the matrix with that vector. It just so happens that F(u*v)=F(u)F(v), where F is the discrete Fourier transform, u and v are vectors of equal length, and * is the convolution operator. The Fourier representation of a single row of my difference matrix is easy to find analytically.

This gives me solutions to Navier-Stokes equation in O(n log n) time instead of O(N^3) time (Gaussian elimination) or O(N^2) time (oodles of basic iterative solvers).

Furtle

Scientists have invented a new animal: the furtle.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Furtles are a cross-breed between mammals and turtles. They combine the pleasantness of a turtle with the furriness of a furry mammal (whales don't count). Furtles are furrier than chinchillas or Kevin Jonas. They are not gross like rats or little sisters. They can be taught tricks, like 'roll over', 'retract into shell' and 'sing aria'. They are very smart, so they are easy to take care of; they clean their cages themselves. They like to eat tomatoes. Furtles do not have lips. Furtles are the best type of pet.

Catonsville Engine and Transmission

Allow me to recommend Catonsville Engine and Transmission, at the intersection of Edmondson Avenue and Harlem Avenue in Catonsville, run by Rose and Matt, a wonderful married couple. They're a remarkably good mechanic, they understand that it's better to treat a customer well and have their happy business for years than to be shady to get a quick buck.

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One time, by mistake, I was triple-billed for an oil change. (I was there when the mistake took place; the person who normally works the register wasn't there, and the machine was clearly not working correctly.) Even so, a month later, when I brought the problem up as I was going in for a major repair, they took a hundred dollars off of my bill instead of just the forty-five dollars I was owed.

Another time, my gear shifter wasn't working quite properly. Matt told me I could either have the problem fixed perfectly for one price, or I could have a jury rig that was still perfectly safe, just less pretty, for one third the cost. I went for the proper repair, but I'm glad to know that I'm not going to wander into their shop only to have them invent three more problems to get a bigger bill.

Whenever I bring my car in with a problem, they take the time to show me what parts need replacing and to explain how they work.

They sometimes give discounts to students and regular customers. They're on the UMBC Shuttle Catonsville line, so they're very accessible for UMBC students.

I have friends, a married couple, who take their cars to Catonsville Engine and Trans as well. They've been given complimentary towing. They thought that Rose just managed the books, until she rebuilt the transmission on one of their cars.

When my roommate drove me to Catonsville Engine and Trans, I was telling him about how much I favor them. When we actually got there, he was surprised, because the place looks run down, the parking lot is crowded and poorly paved, the garage is an old warehouse. I'd forgotten how off-putting the appearance is, because the quality of service is so good.

I'm not generally in favor of keeping mom-and-pop businesses in business. Yes, Barnes and Noble has less character than a local bookstore, but I am more likely to find what I'm looking for there. Aside from restaurants and coffee shops, Catonsville Engine and Trans is the only local business that I would miss if they were put out of business by a chain.

You can call them at 410-744-4822.

I'm already post-post emergent

Evidently, there's some sort of post-emergent church movement happening. I don't know why, nor can I bring myself to care. Given that I can't explain what the emergent church is to a stranger over the course of an elevator ride, I'm not entirely sure it's a real thing. I'm not into eschewing labels, though, I have called myself emergent for ages and still do.

Tony Jones, whoever he is, did some manner of a post-emergent roundup on Beliefnet. I count ten references to God or a member of the Godhead, and twelve egregious typos, and that's not counting the failures to capitalize by those who possess a conviction that capitalization is imperialist.

Kevin Jonas' beard

Kevin Jonas has a beard now. It is a real beard, not one that someone drew on.

He's pretty fuzzy, like a chinchilla. In fact, you can't tell the difference between Kevin Jonas and a chinchilla, except Kevin Jonas' tail falls off if he gets scared.

Pictures that Eddie made

My brother, Eddie, made these pictures. He makes pictures for me, and they make my life better and more interesting. He wanted me to share these pictures with you.

I don't know if this one is oriented correctly.


This is a self-portrait. I'm sorry that the quality of this image isn't great, it was made on very large paper, so I couldn't use my scanner.

Roland Metal Art

At the SoWeBo Fest yesterday, I saw Roland Metal Art. These are high-quality affordable hand-made sculptures. When someone jokingly suggested that the sculptures are imported from China, the artist took offense and showed us his scarred hands.

These are sculptures that are designed to be gifts. If you know someone's profession, favorite musical instrument, or preferred sport, you can get them a great gift. I don't want to knock Roland, I think the actual work is excellent, but I think it's funny how people think in categories.


Someone might like fishing, but a sculpture of a person with a fish might not appeal to a fisherman. Looking at a sculpture of a nail-person with a fish is different from fishing, unless you wear waders all the time.


I thought it was funny how there was one sculpture for computer. My grandma thinks that 'computers' is a job; she can't tell the difference between my job and that of a graphic designer, accountant, writer, or tech support worker. I don't think I want a sculpture of a person working on a computer on my desk, as I'm working on my computer. I have monkeys and toys and chocolate and my tea brewing kit on my desk.

I think these are fun sculptures, especially the ones for the OB/G, preacher, proctologist, and bagpipe player. The ones with the dogs getting into antics are super.

Be sure to check out Merlin Mann's podcast episode, The Richard Scarry Book of the Future.

Folding aluminum foil

One time, when I was a kid, my brother, Spencer, and I went over to our neighbor, Matt's house. He was called Matty then. Or Mr Matty-Mo. Matty got out a roll of aluminum foil, and tore off strips an inch wide for each of us. We folded the aluminum foil in half, then in half again, and so on, and we tried to see who could compact their aluminum foil into the smallest ball. Eventually, we were chomping down on the foil with our teeth. When we realized that it was physically impossible to further compact the aluminum foil, we shrugged and went on to the next thing, making paper airplanes or pretending that the floor is lava.

www.toothpastefordinner.com

Crossword puzzle tips

General tips:

• If it ends in a question mark, it's a terrible joke
• If part of the clue is abbreviated, the answer is an abbreviation
• Look for tense and case in the clue; plurals end in 's', past tense ends in 'ed'

Answers to common clues:
First name in jazz: ELLA (FITZGERALD is never an answer)
Dancing Astaire: ADELE, not FRED
Pirate in Peter Pan: SMEE, not Hook
Scotch partner: SODA
La Douce: IRMA
Western treaty grp.: OAS
Full house sign: SRO
Flying Brits: RAF
Anything about a plant or balm: ALOE
Pequod skipper: AHAB

Common crossword puzzle words:

• URDU
• ULNA
• AMEN
• ARC
• APE
• DNA
• ERA
• EEL
• OLEO
• OLIO
• OGRE
• OGLE
• LEER
• GAZE

Auntie

We drove up the dirt road to the farmhouse. It was after midnight. We were greeted by a Saint Bernard, Rufus, who ran up to me, and almost knocked me down. When we got in, Auntie gave me sugar cookies and hot chocolate. I got into my pajamas, the ones with the feet, and went to the bed she'd gotten ready for me. The next morning, I woke up, very late. Auntie had already gone out and gotten eggs and fresh oranges. She made me an omelet with cheese and mushrooms. I thought mushrooms were gross, but I ate the omelet to be polite. I decided that I like mushrooms, after all.

Enjoy the snow

On my way home from classes, I stopped in at Burger King for a veggie burger. I'd had too much iced coffee and had the shakes and was feeling queasy and needed something proteiney.


www.toothpastefordinner.com

The worker at the counter was a woman in her fifties; she was balding and had a slight mustache.

'Can I have a veggie burger?'

She looked up, gazing at a spot hovering in the air two feet above my head. The spot evidently then moved to the left, then the right. She had a big smile that revealed crooked teeth.

'I suppose' she said in a scratchy voice that made it sound like her tongue was stuck to roof of mouth, as if she'd just had a glass of whole milk. 'Cheese?'
'Yes', I said; I saw that the register registered $2.64.

'That'll be $264.' she said. I handed over three dollars. She counted the bills, passing them one at a time from one hand to the other, acting like she was giving me a $261 discount, but it's cool, this happens all the time, and is quite reasonable given my meager means.

'I can pay Canadian, too.' I said.



One time, back when I ate frozen pizza for lunch every day, I was trying to scoot through a trip to Giant on my way to campus. This was before Giant introduced self check-out lanes. My cashier was a man in his forties. He had a mustache. As he handed me my bags and receipt, he said, 'Enjoy the snow!' It was September. I looked at him, baffled. 'The weatherman says that they're expecting less than ten inches of snow today.' he said with complete gravity, as if going out and playing in this snow today was required of me by Hashem.

I went back to that Burger King the next Monday, partly because that cashier was so pleasant and funky. In the future, robots will prepare veggie burgers for us. This is a good thing, this frees people up to do other things. I'm just not sure how I'd cross paths with that Burger King cashier otherwise.

The ouzo effect

In my writing from my trip to Turkey, I marvel at rakı and its mysterious properies (see here and here):

Rakı is Turkey's national liquor, made from distilled fermented grapes and flavored with anise. (Greeks call it ouzo, and Iranians call it arak.) Rakı is drunk diluted. It is clear, but, because of magic, turns cloudy when water is added. Once, I was served rakı in a bar, and I added water, but it was already diluted, so the Turks I was with were able to tell that I'm sort of a poseur sometimes. Turks are very good sports when foreigners mess up their customs.

My friend, Zach, just called to tell me of the ouzo effect. In short, there is an oil in anise (which is used to flavor rakı) that is strongly hydrophobic and causes formation of microdrops. It is soluble in ethanol, and so raki is strong enough to keep the oil in solution, but if the ethanol concentration is lowered (by diluting with water) the drops form and make the rakı become milky.

Mike the Jehovah's Witness

Mike was probably my best friend at my high school. We had a lot of classes together, but we got most bored in government class.

Mike had a little watch that didn't have a band; instead, it Velcroed to the inside of his binder. We'd start class each day by Mike placing the Mafia watch in the pencil tray, as we sang, 'Mafia Mafia Mafia'.

We drew pictures. We drew pictures of Mr Miller, our health teacher, patronizing Lazy Joe's Used Food Store. One time, Sra Stevens, our Spanish teacher, was gone and we had a sub. The sub passed around an attendance sheet. We signed our names, but added names for some people who were technically not in our class, like Amanda Hugginkiss and Mike Rotch and Lazy Joe. Sra Stevens teased us about this when she got back. 'Who is Lazy Joe?' Mike and I mumbled something about Lazy Joe's Used Food Store. Sra Stevens was disgusted. Brian said, 'Yeah, you know Lazy Joe's Used Food Store, it's in Aberdeen, out on Paradise Avenue.'

One time, Mr Miller had a substitute, and Mike was taking his class at that point. The substitute was lax and let the students go through Mr Millers cabinets. The sub had a very fine beard. Some of the students found vaseline and rubber gloves. After that, I would say, 'Hey, Mike, I hear that Mr Miller's breaking out his vaseline and rubber gloves.' 'I bet he's going to grease down the floor. Wheeeeee!'

Mike and I rode the bus together. That was scary. Our bus driver, Miss Doris, would stretch her fingers when the bus was stopped, in such a way that we presumed that her hands had arthritis. We were sure that eventually her hands would fall apart and the steering wheel would slip and the bus would careen into a ravine.

Richard rode the bus, too. One time, he sprayed me with Victoria's new perfume. Sometimes he threatened me with violence.

Mike tells me that, the year after I quit high school, they were riding the bus to school, and Richard was throwing trash out the window for no reason. Trash! Like a disposable water bottle and paper towels. Miss Doris' bus was stopped next to another bus at a stoplight, and the driver of the other bus rolled down his window, and told Miss Doris that someone on her bus was throwing trash out the window. Miss Doris yelled, 'RRRRRICHARD!'.

Mike and I went to the tech high school; this school was populated primarily by losers, so when I say that we ate at the loser table in the cafeteria, this means that we were the losers that lost out on even being losers. I would buy the school lunch once a week. One time, I got macaroni and cheese. I scooped a hole in the macaroni, poured in ketchup at the condiment station, then covered the hole over with more macaroni. When I returned to the loser table, I stabbed the macaroni and my friends were amused to see it bleed.

Mike the youth leader

Mike was a funny youth leader. Most youth leaders fit into at least one of three categories.

1. Seminary graduates who haven't gotten jobs as pastors, and are trying to use the job as a stepping stone


2. Parents who want their kids to be able to hang out with other kids, but not unchaperoned. I've been to youth group meetings where there were more parents than kids.


3. Burned out druggies who became Christians. These are the best youth leaders, because they tell stories about drugs and promiscuity and living under a bridge; these stories always end with, 'But that was before I was a Christian.'.

Mike didn't have a crazy troubled past that I can recall; he had been married, but divorced, he no kids. He just cared about teenagers. He was middle aged, and didn't have a beard. He kept talking about how he'd been at a Newsboys concert before they made it big.

He was our youth leader when the hip contemporary church was still young, so there were about five kids in youth group. Four of us were well-behaved kids of well-behaved church people, but the fifth kid, on any given week, was some kid from a tough home life who Mike had befriended, because this kid needed a grown-up friend who was stable.

We ate a lot of Doritos and ice cream, and we drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Somehow, I'd always get to sleep on time. I don't know why I'm so much more sensitive to caffeine now than I was when I was 14.

After a couple of years at the hip contemporary church, Mike moved to a house in the middle of the woods in Virginia. He was able to hunt on his new property.