It's not just "Felicity", though. It's everything that I watch. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" are major snores to me now, they canceled a couple other things I watched (although no great losses there), and I think it's about time "The X-Files" got put out to pasture, given the season opener the last two weeks, and previews of next week's (apparently) quasi-spoof episode (and that's from somebody who's watched since the pilot episode!). Other things are too sickly-sweet or tend to just point out all my apparent flaws.

I am starting to come to the conclusion that since I'll probably never wean myself off the boob tube, I would be better off just giving most of the commercial offerings a miss and spending more time watching videos and PBS. Get some good result out of that time investment, no?

I'm also reconsidering the (altogether too large) amount of time I spend online. Part of my problem is that I have become wedded to these machines; they are just a part of how I live my day-to-day existence, and pretty much have been since I can remember. I used to think that was a good thing when I was mastering everything about them at a prodigious rate. I had a network of geek friends that was tailored to that aim, almost, and the time and attention span to accomplish those aims.

Now I have been relegated to little more than a user. My skills have deteriorated, and I experience actual fear when I think about trying to rebuild them. I feel like I've toppled down the side of a mountain, and now I have this long vertical climb ahead of me, without the use of ropes, tackle and grapples. I'm already exhausted. I don't think I can make it, and most of the time I don't even really think I want to try. Easier to sit on the ledge and wait to be crushed in the next landslide.

But I am starting to think that maybe I should just go away, let everything drop to the floor and shatter. I can spend some time away and try to renew, and if I come back, just come back under a new anonymous identity and see what becomes of things that way. Just try again. Give up on the old.

My mind has been really fried lately. Overload has been the order of the day.

If you want to know exactly how fried, here is a weird glimpse into the weird things that run through my mind while semi-sleep deprived and stooped over staring into a mirror at about two inches distance about to jab myself with a sewing needle.

See, lately I've been stressed out or my body chemistry has been out of whack or something, and I seem to be getting actual acne again. Maybe it's the St. John's Wort. Whatever it is... it's coming on. And my body tends to gets blemishes and pains symmetrically. (Yeah, you read that right.)

Right now I have this incredible zit on the left side of my nose. It is going to get its own area code if it keeps this up. And it's bright red. Nobody's called me Rudolph yet, but it's not close enough to Christmas for that to happen, I guess.

I think I got it because lately I've been wearing my glasses pretty far down near the tip of my nose, because of some sort of shifting vision thing, or maybe I need bifocals, or just plain need new glasses. The tip of my nose, being unused to such pressure and weight, not to mention the added heat and oils that get trapped down there from doing this, react badly with the silicone nosepads, and thus I started growing this second head just above the bulb of my nose.

Anyway, I know that once I have something on one side, I tend to get it on the other side not too long afterwards. Yes, same spot, just on the symmetrical portion of my body. So I guess I am going to be doomed to getting a large, unsightly pimple on the right side of my nose next. Eventually, what I had on one side, and then the other, goes away, and I'm left with whatever remembrances or scars or lingering effects that come from having my special problem.

Wonderful to be different, 'eh?

Well, I started to think about this, and how it related to my intellectual development. I was definitely born right-brained. When I was a child I drew all the time, and when my parents wouldn't let me learn an instrument, I went to singing instead. I read constantly from age two, thus building in my weakness for books. I even did a fair bit of writing, although nothing long and generally mixed-form works like illustrated texts or narratives to visual media.

I even liked playing with mediums; one day Moogie caught me doing something akin to storyboarding a television show I was making up in my mind. I had a tape recorder, and loved to sit with mine and my parents' tape recorders and mix sounds and shuffle orders so much that either the sound became so distorted from hiss it or the tapes wore out. When I was in first grade I redrew my favorite story book on a long roll of paper, and slightly rescripted it, such that when rolled out in this box that was cut out to be like a TV, you got a progression of scenes and could tell the story without the book. (I thought it lent itself to the presentation of the story to a classroom group more than reading a page out of a book and then sweeping it around to the classroom so everybody could get a quick glimpse of the page before going on to the next one.)

But somewhere, something went "wrong." Around the age of six or seven my right-brained nature went into arrested development and I developed a definite left-brained bent. Somehow, my imagination morphed into an inquisitive, scientific outlook on the world, and my interests in drawing and patterns and organization turned into a bent for mathematics.

I wouldn't consider this so strange, except this was the point in my life where I started to hurt myself and noticing negative impacts on my moods. I have to wonder what changes would cause both of these. (Although also, this is the point the "educational" system refused to let me use my left hand to write anymore, and also the age range I started being left in day care, so coincidences abound.)

Now, "in the end," I tend to have a strange, hybrid outlook on life. I tend to think things through from a creative generalist's viewpoint, but analyze what goes on around me using Occam's razor. I studied physics, math and computer science, so most of my background tends to be technical, although I have a strange, mixed-bag of interests in media, communications and writing.

Thus, I'm confusing to everybody because I am basically unclassifiable. Once I told a math professor I had that I didn't learn by taking theorems and pulling the specifics out. I tended to work lots of problems and generalize the patterns out to understand the theorems. He said that was the stupidest thing he ever heard, and if I ever told somebody something like that in "the real world" (you're a mathematician in academia, you know what "the real world" is?) I'd probably be drummed out on my ass.

Oh, well. No biggie. It's the plight of the different to suffer at the hands of the normal, no?

At any rate, free association isn't always good for you, as I am sure you can no doubt tell now.

So why's my mind been fried lately?

Partly, it's too much family contact. My family has been having a garbage sale. (No, that's not really a euphemism for a garage sale, I really mean a garbage sale.) They claim it's their last, but I know it won't be. It never is.

Just like holidays, things like this tend to get everybody upset and angry with one another. This is why I asked to be disincluded last time they had one, but of course, that can't be done. I get to spend a whole day running errands and setting up, and then spending the next four days being stressed out by trying to fix food for these people and hearing all the stories of the backbiting and barbs they're flinging at one another, and even a few are hand delivered for me.

Nobody in my family is getting along very much anymore. In fact, the only thing anybody can seem to do anymore is fight, and I'm not immune from that. It varies from person to person, but I think it's a combination of stress, upset, various ailments and mood disorders, relationship problems, alcohol dependency... the only way I know to cope anymore is to stay out of the line of fire, but that doesn't suit them, because if I do that then it's one less target to attack.

Also, Crafty is gone to Comdex with her husband. I'm missing her, big time, because I realized that for a lot of things, she's often the only one I can talk to. She'll be back soon, though, so I can wait it out. From the email I've gotten from her, it sounds like she's having a good time. [smile]

Most of it has been that damned appointment with the county mental health authority, though.

I had an appointment set for Monday at 8:30 AM. Of course, it was Sunday night around 1:30 AM when I realized that I didn't have any clothes clean to wear in the morning, but I had already started some jeans in the washer earlier in the day.

So, like any reasonable person, I started gathering up some shirts, stumbled to the washer and dryer, put the jeans in the dryer and started a load of shirts, walked back to my bedroom and plopped down to get some things done on Gillian while I waited for the laundry to be done, so I could go to bed and get a little sleep before the morning.

I hadn't been sitting there for thirty seconds before Moogie appeared in the doorway of my bedroom yelling at me about waiting to do laundry, she was sick of never being able to get any sleep, and she was sick of me being a night owl (never mind the fact that I've always been one) and why was it so damned urgent that I do my laundry now, did I have somewhere to go that morning or something?

I told her yes, but I wasn't in the mood to tell her where I was going. I wasn't even in the spirits to argue or explain myself, because that would just invite more questions. I walked past her in silence, turned the machines off and went to bed. I wound up my alarm clock and set it for 6:00 AM and hoped I'd get up with enough time to spare to let the shirts finish washing and could throw one in with the jeans to get dry before I left, even if I got chafed from wet seams in the pants or something.

I woke up around 9:50 AM. (As I've no doubt mentioned, I'm a very heavy sleeper, so I slept right through the Big Ben alarm clock. I need a digital one; the infinite persistence of a digital clock is far more likely to wake me up than the sheer loudness of a clock with a clapper that only goes off for 45 seconds or so.)

I stared at the clock for at least a minute, as if time would roll back if I just disbelieved long enough. After that, I went into full-on panic mode. I waited fully five months for this, and now I go and screw it up.

I've done stupid things like this before. I've missed tests, job interviews, and even been late for work a couple times. This time, though, I had really let myself down. I stayed in bed and hid to keep from doing anything stupid.

While laying there, I thought about what everybody would say, the people who knew and I felt like I had let down.

Crafty already said, after what they'd told me, that she wouldn't blame me if I didn't go at all. She's like me, sometimes we have a defeatist outlook, so she seemed content to accept it was pointless, even though I'm sure she'd be happy if they would take me for treatment if I went.

Eleanor and Poet would probably be disappointed in me. In reality, Poet acted a little dismayed that I missed it, but pushed me to call them, at least, see what they would say. I told Eleanor and she ignored me.

The one I feared telling more than anything was Gurugrrl. I felt like she'd be really upset with me that I couldn't even get enough control of my life to get up and get out the door to an appointment as important as this. I imagined scenarios from her being upset with me to her refusing to speak to me anymore and doing all she could to make my life miserable, to going around blaming me, saying that I could have shown her that getting help was a good thing to do, but I let her down, so why should she bother?

Once I finally managed to get myself together and roll out of bed late in the afternoon, I made a conscious decision to avoid her. I just didn't want to tell her. I decided to go ahead, answer some email, and hop on to dump my mail queue to the respective SMTP servers.

This would have been great, except that when I did that, ICQ fired up automagically, and Gurugrrl was there. Trapped like a rat.

What was remarkable was that she understood. She told me how she does the same thing, and I need to quit expecting so much from myself. And she was right about one thing, for sure -- this is a symptom of people undergoing depressive episodes. If they don't understand that, and can't reschedule me, then something is wrong with the system.

I still fear calling, though. The woman I spoke to was so cold and unfeeling. She acted as though she didn't care, like I was less than human, and even less than a subhuman because I am not being productive in the narrow, definitely republican way that the county defines. She acted like they exist only to perpetuate their funding and keep jobs, not to help people, which can only be described as a seriously fucked-up attitude.

Gurugrrl said I should call back, and if she is still that way I should talk to her supervisor, whoever that is. I told her I can't do that, so she said she would call if they did that. Maybe she doesn't grok how emasculating that would be, but I couldn't do that, either.

Why can't they have a setup like the university? I went in, I got my intake session right then. I was seeing somebody in four days. I've been waiting more months than I waited days with the university.

I'm starting to think it's because the counseling center at the university gave a damn, whereas the county really doesn't.

I guess I'll call, though -- it can't hurt, can it? Nothing except my pride, anyway.

I was sitting here Monday evening being reassured by Gurugrrl that I'm not the most awful thing next to Hitler for missing my intake appointment when the phone rings. Moogie got it and yelled for me, and I asked her to hang on and wandered down the hall to get the cordless receiver. (I really need to hook up one of my phones to the extension in here.)

It's a guy I've known from when I was working in the language industry. He was calling to say hi and shoot the breeze, and we talked for a bit. I remembered something I meant to send him, so I emailed him.

Of course, I had a slight memory lapse. I meant to email him from [email protected], but instead I emailed him from [email protected], the account that has my journal URL in the .sig block.

Oops.

I didn't realize this at all until I checked my referral stats (as we paranoid-types are wont to do), and saw a lot of swbell.net hits. I checked the referring URLs, and they were from Netscape email. I had told him that I was having weird things happen to me in Netscape, because when I have Netscape open sometimes but not in active use it just sort-of seizes up, and he said he had the same problem. I put it together that, hey, this is probably him.

So I sent him an email asking him not to give the URL to anybody, which went unanswered. Not to be ignored, I faxed him not to give the URL to anybody.

I really don't want to have to shut down this journal over this. It's ridiculous. I really don't think he'll do that, but at the same time, I'll be watching the hits to see if anybody I know and write about and don't really think should be reading is accessing the journal.

Still, if you read a lot and don't talk to me on a regular basis, you might want to subscribe to the notify list, because if there is a sudden change of venue it'll certainly be announced there.

restlessmind