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.