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.