Lunar new year: Green Horse

New moon in Aquarius! and it is also the beginning of the year of the Wood (or Green) Horse in the Chinese lunar calendar.

It would be a good day to visit the Chinese horses at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, like this bronze horse.

Improvements and challenges

Now that I am on a time-released version of the new med, I am doing much better! And I am also tracking my symptoms in a log because I'm still far from stable, physically, and I need to see when and why I experience symptoms that can quickly tip into becoming severe.

Improvement: the new med and the new dosage and in the time-released form now allow me to fall asleep around 10:30 and sleep for a straight 7-8 hours. This is an incredible improvement after years of only being able to sleep 5 hours a night. I am also having vivid dreams, and experience this as a luxury.

(Jim des Riviere's Luna moth poster)

Challenge: I can't even move my body much less get out of bed in the morning until almost 8:30, no matter how long I have actually been awake and even with the cat meowing constantly for over an hour. This groggy paralysis or "sleep inertia" is annoying but OK if I have nowhere to be in the morning, but will be a serious challenge when I have to get to the airport for an early morning flight or show up anywhere earlier than 9:00.

Improvement: I am no longer so severely depressed that I have to actively work to shove away suicidal ideation on a daily basis. I am cautiously beginning to feel hopeful enough that I can imagine any future activity without experiencing a severe anxiety attack. This is, clearly, an enormous improvement.

(Yellena Jamos print)

Challenge: I am still so inhibited in function when I am up and about during the day (inability to focus, distraction, foggy brain) that doing more than a few simple things results in systems breakdown of competence of one kind or another. If I remember the appointment, I might show up with my clothes inside out or without having time to eat. If I manage to bathe and dress myself, I might forget the appointment altogether in spite of setting alarms or writing reminders. This can be OK if I have almost no outside responsibilities, but is a serious challenge if I want to arrive on time to a volunteer commitment, go to the gym, or have various other kinds of appointments with other people. When things break down in these minor ways, I have been experiencing a great sense of failure, of loss of competence.


Improvement: I haven't had an anxiety attack since I last went to the hospital several weeks ago, although I have felt myself on the slope to one several times. I am feeling more grounded and patient and less afraid on a daily basis. This is a huge improvement.

(needlework art by Cécile Dachary  here)
Challenge: Almost every day, if I am not extremely careful, I experience a stressful drop in my blood sugar levels (in a way I did not with the lithium),  that seems to be part of the roller-coaster metabolic pattern with the new meds. At around 11 and at 4, I get hit with a blood sugar crash and if I don't eat something immediately (ideally protein), I get extremely shaky and have a mood plunge. Even with carrying around nuts and protein bars, I have not been able to eliminate this spike. In spite of efforts to control my eating, I have gained a lot of weight and this is seriously bumming me out: I can't fit in my clothes; I feel really uncomfortable' I'm worried it won't stop. The overall feeling I get is that there is this is jagged and insecure edge to the day that keeps me on a leash. I don't want to go out at night, or venture far from home without the means to return quickly. This is making me wonder how I can handle travel where I am not always in a position to go hide if I can't fend off the crash in time. The blood sugar crash shares enough with the wind-up symptoms of hypo mania that it is scary to feel myself sliding in that direction.

Improvement: I have been making a big effort to shop, cook, and eat in a healthy way, not just for overall calories but with all the healthy guidelines about nutrition that I already know. I think this will pay off over time, but it has proven hard to incorporate  the need to eat small meals five times a day with a more restricted calorie intake.  At least my weight gain seems to have plateaued for the time being.

Johanna Helena Graff
A Poppy in Three Stages of Flowering, with a Caterpillar, Pupa and Butterfly
Watercolor and gouache over traces of black chalk
late 17th–early 18th century

Source: The Métropolitan Muséum Of Art

Improvements in external circumstances that have been stressful:

• After a month of skirmishes, the hospital that was overbilling me by $2100 has retracted the mistaken bill. 
• I was issued refund checks by two different medical organizations that had overbilled me for copays. 
• The prescription plan has admitted that the price I was quoted on the phone ($1300!) for a mail-order Rx was wildly inaccurate and I may actually receive my Rx for the correct price and on time before I run out. 
• The new management company for the condo association also retracted the mistaken bill for $1500 as an employee error and has slowly been getting its act together, although they literally have asked me to do everything (give them documents, passwords, budget summaries, etc) twice because just giving it to them once does not seem to make things stick.
• My neighbor still wakes me up at least once a week when she arrives home so drunk that she runs and yells at 3AM. I hope that in the years ahead she stops drinking so hard. Meanwhile, earplugs are my friend.

(needlework art by Andrea Deszo)

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger lived to be 94. I have tears of gratitude for all I learned from him,  from his work and from his dreams. He never stopped.

Here he is, passing on the songs, with Johnny Cash:


And with the Weavers, singing "Goodnight, Irene"


"The Water is Wide" with a lovely choir:


"Buffalo Gal," his lighthearted side:


I listened to these songs with my whole heart: "Which Side Are You On, Boys?"


About war: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"


Dreaming the possible: "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"

cracking up

The New Yorker has a piece on comedians 'breaking" during sketch shows. One of the examples was Tim Conway on the Carol Burnett show in the Dentist routine. The part with the novocaine starts at 5:20 and Harvey Korman is just gone.

Handimania!

My mother just sent me a link to a video on the best way to separate egg yolks from egg whites: I love the name Handimania. There are lots of other fun tutorials on their site and their YouTube channel.

Accomplishments

Looking at pictures of myself from this past year is painful. I look beside myself, because I am. More recently, I'm getting through each day a little better now, but it's still very tentative. A tool that is helping me is the daily log, in which I record sleep, food/drink, mood, meds, etc. It allows me to remember things, now that my memory has been trashed. It helps me see what direction the changes are going in: manic, depressive, both, or none of the above. Lately, it's almost none of the above, but still a little bit depressed.  This is a great improvement over a month ago.

I'm sleeping OK! better than before, but still groggy in the AM. Not trusting myself to drive after dark while I'm still adjusting to this new med means turning down some invitations, sad. Being alone almost all the time: sad.

Core goals: getting to Day Treatment on time and not missing my volunteering stints twice a week.

 Other recent accomplishments of note include:

• not getting my car towed during either of the two Snow Emergencies, neither on the odd or on the even side of the street. This is a Major Accomplishment.

• shoveling the snow front and back for my building because my lazy-ass neighbors will never do it,
• completing the budget summary for last year, ditto,
• driving around the suburbs to banks and offices to deal with condo association business as we transition to a management company, because ditto.
• trying not to be so angry about this that it messes me up.

• doing the dishes every day.
• doing the laundry.
• taking out the trash.
• taking out the compost.
• and the recycling. 
• cleaning the cat box.
• keeping the cat alive with his diabetes meds and schedule.

• having healthy food in my fridge,
• eating breakfast,
• cooking food in my fridge before it goes bad,
• not eating all of it at once,
• only gaining ten pounds instead of twenty.

• reading whole books again, after months of not being able to read almost at all,
• returning them to the library before I owe money for them.

• picking up mail at the office on a day when I didn't have to run into anyone,
• shredding, without reading them, all of the course evaluations I'd saved since 1988,
• not reading them again,
• disposing of the shredded documents in such a way that they can never be read by anyone again, especially me.

• not freaking completely out over the weekly billing mistakes from a hospital, insurance company or management company,  claiming I owe them thousands of dollars when I don't,
• sorting out said bills without losing it completely.

• not being angry and sad all the time, just part of the time.
• letting myself be angry and sad without being so afraid that is will never stop. 
• saying stuff like this out loud because trying to hide it is getting me exactly nowhere.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, feelings!

Otra vez, Nina.

I am reading about the concept of amgibuous loss or disenfranchised grief. Lots to think about there, and it's a good time to reflect on complicated feelings because it is the full moon in Cancer, y'all! It's the first full moon of the year, in the sign of Cancer the Mother. We are told that this conjunction is all about FEELINGS.

Or, as Sesame Street would have it, "Felines!"




We are all "On the Island of Emotion,"  so lets swim with the feelings!

(animated by the wonderful Sally Cruikshank)

happy birthday, David Bowie

David Bowie's birthday was a few days ago, January 8. His web site also calls this the fiftieth year of his work as a recording artist; you can find his discography on Wikepedia, up to last year's album The Next Day, which I love.

I had heard all his earlier music while living in France 1976-7 because I had a roommate who was a huge Bowie fan, including painting her face, but the  album that meant the most to me was the one I got when I returned home, to my parents' divorce and my shattered family, 1977's Low. Recorded as he was trying to leave behind his cocaine habit, in collaboration with Tony Visconti and with contributions by Brian Eno, this album was what I played along with Talking Heads and Brian Eno to give some shape to my feelings.

The blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame is covering Bowie's body of music song by song.  Here is the section on Low. I especially appreciate learning about the crucial role of Bowie's R and B band to the sound of Low:

"Interviewed a quarter-century after he made Low, David Bowie griped about its alleged influences. Not just Low being called Bowie’s reaction to punk (which it predated—it was mastered before the Sex Pistols released “Anarchy in the U.K.”) but also what he said was critics’ over-emphasis of the likes of Kraftwerk at the expense of the American musicians—Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar and George Murray—who were the backbone of the record."

Lately I've been re-listening to favorite songs and records by paying attention to the bass playing, and I hear how much my involvement with this record's sound has to do with George Murray's bass parts. Here's a live performance from 1978, with musicians  Adrian Belew (lead guitar), Brian Eno (keyboards/synths), Dennis Davis (drums), George Murray (bass), Carlos Alomar (rhythm guitar).
Playing music from the next project: Sense of Doubt, The Beauty & the Beast, Heroes, Stay.

David Bowie live in Musikladen 1978 Part 1 from Golfhunter on Vimeo.

David Bowie live in Musikladen 1978 ( Part.2) from Golfhunter on Vimeo. Jean Genie, an awesome version of My TVC 15, Moon of Alabama (Kurt Weil).

And here he is on SNL in 1978 performing TVC 15 and Boys Keep Swinging.



Want to give all his albums a listen? Check out this playlist.

Como Conservatory

So, I've noticed a thing. For the second month in a row, I did very very well for the first few weeks with a new dosage of a new med: calm, happy, not much physical pain from the fibromyalgia. Then, unexpectedly and for no apparent reason (at the time) I almost lost my mind again for 2-3 days: panic attack, paranoia, weeping, frightened, enraged, the emotional cycles of a toddler with added grown-up fears.

 Annnnnd.... now I'm (relatively) fine again. What the hell gives? Is this like a bipolar menstrual cycle? I don't know if the symptoms are solely in response to external circumstances or if there is some physiological cycle that is triggering this. But I did not deal well with the changes in my prescription plan which will now force me to only purchase my meds in person during a 3-4 day window of time, and which promise a prohibitive charge if I dare try to buy them for delivery in the mail, as I had previously done for years and years. The phone rep said they would charge me $1300 for a ninety-day supply. Not a mistake, I asked her to repeat it: thirteen hundred dollars for 90 pills. The alternative is $75 for 30 if I buy them in person each month, but ONLY if Inever have to be out of town ever again for the brief period when the Rx can be filled and before I run out. My efforts thus far to change this situation have been fruitless. I felt enraged, frightened, ashamed, bla bla bla, at how poorly I handled this news. Not with other people: with myself. I spent three days beating myself up without letting anyone know because I am too ashamed at what they might think of me. A little too much of the "bipolar: you're doing it wrong" type of feedback.

Now I am doing better, mysteriously, and I don't know why. It's fucking exhausting and I'm pathetically grateful and somewhat anxious about how long the relative calm might last. I hate scaring my family, but if I don't lean on them for some emotional help, I do very poorly.

Yesterday, we went to the Como Conservatory for a much-needed dose of color, warm humid air, scents, sounds of running water, fish. The animal enclosures in the zoo are much too small and I am always devastated when I go there, so we avoided it, except for an attempt to see the sloth. Sloth spotted, but too curled up to see its face. We did see horsetails, bonsai camellia, baby pink bananas, and koi

Another fucking potato

"Helpful Advice" from Robot Hugs:





























A Tumblr comment exchange I reblogged (although I can't seem to reproduce the formatting here):


"---depression is like trying to peel a potato with another potato its not fun it doesnt work and you just wanna cry

---why is this such a good metaphor what the fuck

       -----#and then people are like #God! Why don’t you just get a peeler!? #and then they HAND YOU ANOTHER FUCKING POTATO

----------i reblogged it before but then it got better