A-E-I-O-U

This song has been stuck in my head for a week now. I discovered the video this morning; it was made in San Francisco.

Jim James, "State of the Art (a e i o u)" off this album, Regions of Light and Sound of God.

Riviera Nayarit: flora

 

Ti plant ("Muñeca") 

 

Plumeria by the beach

 

 Fan Palm

 

 

Two stages of palm fruit

The landscaping of the place we stayed used plants that were not all native, but they were beautiful.

Two weeks of amazing food in Mexico

While I was in Mexico, I avoided drinking most of the time, but on my last day, I indulged in a typical tourist drink, a "vacation-sized" margarita with Blue Curacao.

 

Our favorite part of the morning buffet (too much to do every day) was the freshly-made empanadas, prepared with fresh masa and fried in front of you.  I liked the ones with flor de calabaza (squash blossom) filling the best.

 Several kinds of bananas and plantains in the market in Puerto Vallarta.

 Lobster salad with grapefruit and mango, from our last dinner on the beach.

Oh my lord, medio kilo de camarones al ajillo "arriero."

"You had one job!"

This is the week of FAIL on the part of the usual suspects: insurance companies, medical providers, homeowners association. Stress bombs, baby.

I don't mind it when people who make mistakes apologize and fix them. I'll settle for just fixing things without an apology. But that is not the track record with these actors. Instead, it seems that I am supposed to clean up after their messes, while remaining calm and cheerful. This is difficult for me when these communications trigger my symptoms. I find it especially  hard to handle communication with people who don't respond to any of my phone or email messages, unless I call daily for a week.  When I feel my anxiety level rising, with the jolts of adrenaline fear causing intestinal distress and trouble breathing,  I do my best to try not to slide into a hypomanic episode, or a full-blown panic attack, or some combination of the two. The moment when I am trying to fall asleep is the worst time; I have trouble breathing and feel as if I am going to die because I can't breathe. It is terrifying. I have a few strategies to try to interrupt this physical panic response.   Humor helps, a little bit.   ("...You had ONE JOB" was a line from one of the Ocean's 11 movies that got turned into a meme.) 

I can't get tax return done because the property management company has provided incorrect documentation to my accountant.

The evil Insurance company that (mis)handles my employers long-term disability seems to have lost my file, all the material going back to last October. Or maybe not--I can't tell, since the *new* claim manager is not responding to my daily voice-mails asking for clarification. I am trying so hard not to freak out because this person told me on the phone that she couldn't find anything after October, then sent me  the usual vaguely threatening/shaming form letter saying it is MY responsibility to get them all the documents they are asking the doctors for, but without telling me what or when.

The hospital where I had been going for day treatment for the past four months and one of the many medical insurance companies that is involved in the billing are having some kind of spat over how to code their bills, which resulted in me getting over-billed for Day Treatment program to the tune of thousands of dollars. This issue had, supposedly, been corrected, but then it started happening again. I finally reached a billing person, after four days of leaving messages, waiting on hold, talking to people who couldn't help me, the usual. She assures me that the new error will being corrected, yay! but I have some trust issues with this particular hospital, so I am still anxious.

I'm doing my best. It's not always good enough.

Dancing in the Movies: A Supercut

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to watch all of the movies included in this supercut of dance scenes, by the fine folks of Supercut Videos; they provide a list of all the films they included:

"Dancing on the silver screen has been happening since film was invented. From the big time musicals to the small quirky dances that pop up now and then. There are so many examples of dancing we could only fit 246 films in this cut, so a part 2 might be on its way for the 100+ clips we had left over. We hope you enjoy it as much as we've had making it and the Bee Gee's 'You Should Be Dancing' never gets old."

Don't forget to like and subscribe.

Tweet us : www.twitter.com/SupercutVideos
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Email us : supercutonline@gmail.com

Film List:

Nine and a Half Weeks
Risky Business
Mrs. Doubtfire
Anchors Away
Alpha Papa
Silver Linings Playbook
Along Came Polly
Beetlejuice
Clerks 2
Save the Last Dance
Tropic Thunder
Flashdance
White Nights
Footloose
Billy Elliott
A Day at the Races
A Clockwork Orange
Pulp Fiction
Adventures in Babysitting
Stir Crazy
Short Circuit
Slumdog Millionaire
Austin Powers
500 Days of Summer
An American in Paris
Dirty Dancing
Mr and Mrs Smith
Back to the Future III
Mr Fair Lady
My Best Friend's Wedding
Scent of a Woman
Michael
Coming to America
Gulliver's Travels
Star Wars : ROTJ
High School Musical
Addams Family Values
Back to the Future
A Knights Tale
Pride and Prejudice
Batman
Groundhog Day
Beauty and the Beast
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Labyrinth
Mannequin
Rock N Rolla
Fame
The Matrix Reloaded
Encino Man
Fanboys
Wayne's World
Grind
Bio Dome
Haunted Honeymoon
Hairspray
Something Borrowed
Bridesmaids
Robin Hood - Men in Tights
House Party
Home Alone
Uncle Buck
The Muppets
Revenge of the Nerds
Kickboxer
Bolero Raque
Cabaret
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Burlesque
Chicago
Make it Happen
Sin City
Grindhouse - Death Proof
Dogma
Striptease
From Dusk till Dawn
Showgirls
Magic Mike
Nine
P.S. I Love You
The Full Monty
True Lies
We're the Millers
Mamma Mia
Muriel's Wedding
Mean Girls
Coyote Ugly
American Beauty
Mystery Men
Romy and Michelle High School Reunion
Airplane
Go
Titanic
Dance Flick
American Pie 3
Saturday Night Fever
Boogie Nights
Beerfest
Charlie's Angels
Starsky and Hutch
Night at the Roxbury
Iron Man
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
The Mask
The Karate Kid Part II
Moonwalker
Friday Moon
Elf
Reservoir Dogs
Party Girl
Pretty in Pink
Memoirs of a Geisha
Damn Yankees
All that Jazz
O Brother Where Art Thou
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Little Miss Sunshine
Shrek
Step Up
Shaun of the Dead
Breakin'
Office Space
Do the Right Thing
Funny Face
Band of Outsiders
Sweet Charity
Center Stage
Pina
King of New York
Forest Gump
Jailhouse Rock
Swing Time
The Artist
Scooby Doo 2 Monsters Unleashed
Mary Poppins
Puss in Boots
The Jungle Book
Beau Travail
Black Swan
Billy Madison
Hellzapoppin
Hitch
It's a Wonderful Life
King Kong
Lord of the Rings - ROTK
Love Actually
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Royal Wedding
Zorba
Never on Sunday
The Last Boy-scout
The Blues Brothers
The Gold Rush
The Little Colonel
The Ringer
Top Hat
Rent
The Big Leboski
Napoleon Dynamite
Weekend at Bernie's 2
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Human Traffic
Kevin and Perry Go Large
Take Me Home Tonight
Ted
Spiderman 3
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
The Cable Guy
Despicable Me
Reality Bites
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Thriller
13 going on 30
Teen Wolf
Old School
Once Bitten
Flying Down to Rio
Almost Famous
Road Trip
The Breakfast Club
The Inbetweeners Movie
She's All That
The Worlds End
To Sir with Love
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
White Chicks
You Got Served
Stomp Honey
Step Up Revolution
Grease
Blast from the Past
Take the Lead
Romeo and Juliet
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Shakespeare in Love
Shall We Dance
Strictly Ballroom
The King and I
The Godfather
The Mask of Zorro
A League of Our Own
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Hitch
Zatoichi
Kung Fu Hustle
Glenn Ford
Urban Cowboy
Jackass Number 2
Three Amigos
Summer Holiday
Moonrise Kingdom
Singing in the Rain
Annie
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
The Music Man
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
The Wizard of Oz
West Side Story
The Wiz
The Sound of Music
The Producers
The Red Shoes
Oklahoma
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Enchantment
BASEketball
Broadway Rhythm
Knocked Up
The Jerk
Young Frankenstein
Zoolander
Stormy Weather
42nd Street
The Fisher King
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Swing Kids
Moulin Rouge

Colin Stetson, "To See More LIght"

I'm completely in love with all fifteen minutes of this performance by Colin Stetson, "To See More Light." I had never heard of him until I got this track as part of the Top Songs of 2013 from the music blog Said The Gramphone.
He is able to perform using circular breathing, overblowing, and other techniques that enable him to sound as if he is playing multiple tracks at once. Here, in an interview  for the show Studio Q, he talks about how he makes music.

"Montreal based saxophone wizard Colin Stetson has collaborated with the likes of Arcade Fire, Lou Reed and Bon Iver, and this year his solo album was short-listed for the Polaris Prize. Colin Stetson is in Studio Q to chat about the origin of his mighty bass sax and how he divides his time as a hired horn."

He  performs the piece "Judges" live, on the bass saxophone:

In this clip, he shows how he layers the parts and plays them together,  with mics that pick up the percussive sound of the keys themselves, and a throat mic to pick up a vocal part:


I still have not seen "Twelve Years a Slave," and apparently a piece of his music is part of the score. He will be at the Cedar Cultural Center April 17, so I'm going to make sure I go see him perform this amazing music.

Every day, I'm shovelin', shovelin'

Ten different ways to embrace your obstacle

[your viral cool animal video of the day]

Color story

I'm halfway through having my place painted, for the first time in over 20 years. Everything will be topsy-turvy until they are done, by the end of the week, but it is worth camping out to see how my home is emerging with fresh new colors. I'm very happy with the crew I hired, on the recommendation of a friend. Communication has been easy and they have been very scrupulous and careful.  It's a huge job, and I'm glad I am able to have a pro crew do all the tedious prep work of patching, sanding, and moving stuff around. The living room has been an orangey/mango/peach yellow ("Villa Peach"), but I wanted a cleaner and fresher yellow. The new color, Benjamin Moore's Dalila, is making me very happy. In this photo, you can see the old color in the alcove. It's amazing how different colors look in photos, on the computer screen, or at different times of day!

 All the paint we are using is Benjamin Moore. My love affair with Farrow and Ball paints went aground on the price and also the difficulty of getting samples since no retailer carries it locally. But someone had matched F & B with Benjamin Moore, so I used these matches to  help me narrow things down.

The ceiling and trim throughout will be in Seashell, described as a soft ivory. To cover the icky acoustic tile ceiling in the living room, they put up sheet-rock. We also are taking out all the old crown moldings, most of which had been installed in a shoddy manner. The result is a much cleaner look.

The wall you see when you open the front door, in the tiny entry space, will be done in a "suede" finish, from the Ralph Lauren line, in the Santa Rosa pink. It goes well with the living room color that gets lots of natural light and transitions well with the color I've chosen for the shadowy hallway.



The two hallways get almost no natural light but their walls are what you see in front of your face when you are exiting the bedroom and bathroom, so I want them to be good backgrounds for displaying art under artificial light. They had been a dingy light gray, but now they will be painted Ben Moore Gray Mountain, (a color matched to Farrow and Ball's Brassica, one  of my inspiration colors, and described as "a grayed-down purple"). It looks almost bronzey-brown in some lights. I was going to get all fancy with color for the hallway ceilings, but Miss R is of the opinion that Seashell is best, and I agree. Too many colors will be too busy. In this photo here you can see how many patches we tried out; the trim looks yellow, but that is just an effect of the light.

The dining room has off-white wainscoting up to about six feet, also to be painted in Seashell. The ceiling was hand-painted by the previous owners with colors reminiscent of a twilight sky, and with some clouds and stars overhead; we are keeping the clouds, but matching the blue, and painting down to the top of the wainscoting to cover a row of motifs hat did not quite work at suggesting the top of a fence.

The bathroom is still green, but not the mistaken mint green of the last paint job (that irritated the hell out of me,  but I did not object and have it repainted). The color is called Lilly Pad, and the double l in Lilly is a tip of the hat to Lilly Pulitzer, whose happy color palette included many soft, fresh greens. This one is neither too yellow nor too blue,

Here is a test patch on one of the kitchen walls.

My bedroom will go dramatic with an deep indigo blue named Indigo-go, or "the party paint"  as we are calling it. I almost went with Kensington Blue, but I like the more purpley tinge. Because it is a small room that also gets almost no natural light, lighting will be important. I already have objects and bedding in hot pink or fuschia that provide a pop of color, and some new sheets and bedding from Ikea in a palette of red-violet purples and blues.

Mr. Leo is helping me test the colors.

The kitchen has some pesky matching issues with the existing laminate countertop color, which has a reddish tinge, and linoleum floor colors colors, which are a mix of greens. Maybe some day I'll replace each, but I've decided not to this time around. Lilly Pad is going to be used on the walls that meet the floor and the backsplash area and wall the meets the counter will be something else, still to be determined. Maybe the Seashell? I want to get tile for the backsplash.

 Lilly Pad and Mountain Gray go well together in the transitions from room to room as one looks down the long hallway in either direction. The back kitchen wall in Lilly Pad green gets lots of natural light and when you look down the long shadowy hallway, the patch you see seems to glow.

It's figure skating time again!

 Today I learned that Spain has an international champion figure skater, Javier Fernández, aka "Super Javi." LOL, this program.


Japan's new skating sensation is Yuzuru Hanyu:



The charming and adorable Jason Brown of the U.S.

Arcade Fire Reflektor tour

I'm finally getting a chance to listen to the whole double album Reflektor, by Arcade Fire. We were lucky enough to see them live (with free tickets I got from calling The Current) a couple of years ago.  They put on such a great live show, I decided to pop for two pricey Target Center tickets (seated on the main floor) for their upcoming tour. (I will not spend any money on coffee or eating out for a while). I normally wouldn't want to see a show at the Target Center, but they did such a good job overcoming the sound limitations of the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St Paul that I am sure they will have a great arena show.
(Billboard's track by track review here)

"Reflektor"


"Here Comes the Night Time"  and "Normal Person"

Video directed by Roman Coppola with Michael Cera as the unbeliever.

"Joan of Arc/Jeanne d'Arc " (fanvid with footage from the film The Passion of Joan of Arc with Antonin Artaud)


"Afterlife" (live on SNL)


"It's Never Over (oh Orpheus)"

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