the insomniac ramble

It's almost one-thirty am. I went to bed at midnight. Cannot sleep. I had a lot of trouble with insomnia and sleep disturbances right after I got sober (nearly 26 years ago), but I've basically had it licked via (safe) prescribed meds. One of them, an antidepressant with the side effect of sleepiness, is the one that permits me to stay asleep through the night once I've fallen asleep. That's the lifesaver. If my mind is so busy that I will have trouble falling asleep, I add a (safe) prescribed anti-anxiety med. Nothing worked tonight,and I am following one of the anti-insomnia rules of getting out of bed.

I did have a busy mind, but the med did not put a dent in it. I sort of mentally narrate to myself some events of my life that I feel the need to revisit. I'm not sure if these narrations are writing (though some of the topics will subsequently turn up in this blog or something else I write) or imaginary therapy sessions (would that I could go more than once a week!).

Oh, hello, some of my newer friends...did I mention that I'm in therapy and suffer from depression and occasional anxiety? I wonder if the boom in treating mood disorders in the US isn't somehow related to the increasing complexity of life here. It's kind of what it's like when I spend a weekend in Pennsylvania and then come back to New York - it's a lot of effort to live here, pretty hard work. You always have that near-unconscious routine of noting suspicious or oddly acting people, handling cash discreetly when you're in public, and so on. It eats up quite a lot of energy, negotiating a crowded sidewalk. It's actually pretty calm where I live, but when I get off that train and them am launched into Penn Station (which is built under Madison Square Garden making things even more hectic), then a block of midtown street, then the subway. And a lot of people outside NYC have cars and their own houses, which also brings oodles of stress and bad financial surprises.

Our parents kick us out of the nest as soon as possible, so we don't have the support of mother, siblings, grandmothers on a daily basis. I admire the way Indian families live. (The Chinese also keep the generations close.) My remaining parents (father and stepmother) are very remote, not welcoming and generous. My mother was the exact opposite, but she died when I was 22; and my stepfather had no intention of complying with her wishes, so there was no more emotional support, no "home" to go back to, and not even the security of a few extra dollars.

My father has been so adverse to spending an extra dime on my brother and me that he actually makes excuses when he and my stepmother do things like go to Bermuda for a week. I guess the idea is that if we know he has enough money for a vacation, HE SHOULD GIVE US SOME. So he'll say things like, "You know, we booked this three months ago and got a very good deal, and we haven't gotten away in a year, and some friends of ours are going to be there..." C'mon, just say "We're going on vacation." I promise not to ask you to buy me something or take me along.

Actually, I did sort of do it recently. They were going on a Caribbean cruise, and I asked them if they could pick me up some larimar stud earrings set in silver, if they were not insanely expensive. Larimar, which is a little whiter than turquoise and has chatoyance (cat's-eye quality), is only found in the Dominican Republic, and is hard to find and pricey over here. I really did stress that the cost might be too high and they should only get something very reasonable. (I was thinking about something dead simple, like studs in a 3 or 4mm round cab, or similarly small in an oval, in a plain silver bezel, period.) What they came back with were BIG heart-shaped studs, really substantial pieces of larimar, and a story. They found the earrings in the very last store on the very last island on the very last day; they had a hard time finding any anywhere. But this store didn't take credit, so they had to scrape every last cent out of their pockets to buy them. This was a rare act of real generosity, and I think Mary really drove it.

My relationship with Mary has improved immeasurably, believe it or not, because of the internet. She speaks in a kind of acerbic, non-warm ways; so when she makes a joke about something I've mentioned, it always seems as if she's making fun of me in a mean way. She just has that affect. But when she and I started emailing, she was extremely nice, and I started to see her as truly affectionate and sweet. I think I finally became 100 percent sure that she didn't dislike or resent me in some way, after 30-plus years.

And back to jewelry...I have two other pieces of larimar. One is a big old pendant, roughly pear-shaped, that was given to me by an old boyfriend who had family in the DR. The second is a silver wire bracelet with a small oval cab near the clasp (it's a design called the "Cruixian Hook," with a hook clasp worn on top). I bought that in St. Croix in 1995. I also have about 40 larimar beads (faceted rondells, 4mm I think), which I've been hoarding for years. (There are some beads I sit on for years, waiting until I think of a design that does them justice. Some beads just demand it.)

I actually started working on a pretty elaborate pair of earrings today, the first piece for the crafts fair in November, but I ran out of thin enough headpins. I had more headpins, but they were a thicker gauge and wouldn't go through the stones I was using. I almost never let this happen, and it's really frustrating.I'm going to have to go back to them and get myself to that same level of concentration and careful work. I'm capable of working fast, but these pieces will have pretty healthy price tags, and they've got to be just right and not sloppy in any way. The price of silver has become murderous, so I always dread running out of headpins, wire, clasps, earring hooks, and so on. (I've actually broken up some old pieces to reuse the clasp.)

One of these days, I will come up with some way to photograph my jewelry properly. Or have someone else do it.

I think I'm gonna try bed again. Good night, and thanks for keeping me company.

bad mental health week...or two

So it wasn't just one of those little stressy recurrences of depression. Not only was it bad, but I had my first experience of delusions, albeit minor. A few times this weekend, waking up or falling asleep, I found myself worrying about mind control of children, accompanied by an image of upside-down red and purple tulips falling like a rainstorm - I suppose this was the delivery system for the mind control agent. Those thoughts showed up about three or four times.

That shit is fairly scary, and told me that it was high time to get my meds managed. I haven't seen a doctor in the year-plus I've been on this health plan because it's a $30 co-pay to see the primary doctor, and then a $50 co-pay to see a specialist. Plus my long-time primary doctor is not in the network. But I picked a new primary doctor today, made an appointment for Monday, and called my old doctor to arrange to get my records.

I need a psych consult, a consult for what seem to be two trigger fingers, and a new set of labs, since my body chemistry is no doubt a mess.

Luckily, work gets slightly easier after tonight. Classes are over until September, so no more late Monday nights. There'll be a lot of work through the end of June, three kinds of end-of-term evals to collect and some fundraising stuff, but July and half of August should be dead. I have ten vacation days coming to me and I'd like to take a full week in July and maybe a few other days. I do need some serious stress relief.

Part of the bad stuff was triggered by another horrible money squeeze last week. Barry was under the impression he would be paid in the middle of last week (when actually it's this Friday), and Verizon suddenly decided that no one can carry any back bill at all, did not notify us, and cut off our TV and internet (and would not reinstate it without full payment). We had zero money and no TV or internet, and really no resources to raise what we needed. So we ended up borrowing from my uncle and aunt, which I loathe doing, although they are very kind and generous and non-judgmental. We asked for $300 (Verizon needed $165), and they sent $500.

This kind of thing kicks up more shit than I can even start to get into. My issues with parental generosity/lack thereof are deep and broad and are making me cry right now.

Needless to say, I found I had no interest in reading riddles by an insecure wealthy actor.  SO not into Big B.

I also found some of my weird self-comforting behavior kicking up, the easiest one to mention being excessive playing of computer games (the really dinky puzzle ones). Another one is sleeping most of the weekend. One other I'm too flat-out embarrassed to mention, but I'll simply say it's been a few years since it kicked up.

Oh, and I pretty much ran out of lorazepam in the middle of this, which is what I take as-needed for anxiety, up to two 2-mg pills per day (this is the generic name of Atavan). Since I'm not seeing a psychiatrist now, it's a bit of a hassle to get it, though I don't do it illegally.

It sucks, it sucks, it sucks. But we had back-to-back functions at work today, and I am off to eat some leftover cheese.

Bad news and good news: Jannah's dog Sasha died last week, one of her two little Yorkies. I don't generally like small dogs, but hers are very sweet. Were. Max still is. The upside is that I'm going to visit over Memorial Day weekend.

I also had lunch last week with a friend from Penguin who doesn't want her name in this blog. Can't blame her. I'll just call her Liz, and say I haven't seen her in nearly a year. We ate Thai food at Qi, and I gave her some raspberry sours in a Hello Kitty tin that I bought at Dylan's Candy Bar.  That Dylan's sure is one dangerous spot if you don't want to be eating candy.

since I've already written the damn thing...

The "BigB" blog sometimes doesn't feel like posting what one has written. It has one of those stupid "recaptcha" things where you have to retype a series of displayed letters, but sometimes lately, it simply isn't there. So this is what I wrote tonight and could not post. I saved it, so I figured what the hell.

It was written as a comment on Big B's blog rather than as my own blog post, but it does explain what the past eight days have been like. And it probably should have been a blog post here anyway.


I feel like I'm just coming out of a terrible week - actually a few days more than a week.
Three people connected with the small school at which I work died this past week: a long-time teacher, a student my age, and the father-in-law of a board member. Our school is very small - 50 students, maybe 50 faculty rotating into 32 slots per year, 75 alumni, a dozen board members. Whatever happens to one of us, we all bleed. And as the administrator, I am literally connected to each and every person.

I suffer from terrible tree pollen allergies and we're having a particularly bad tree pollen season this year. Maybe that's good for the trees, but not for my eyes. They hurt and itched and watered as if they were infected - and this was *with* medication!

Problem with the internet at work - on the phone for two hours with various representatives of "customer mis-service" at AT&T.

Oh - and I was unable to post here for three days because there was no recaptcha. The first time I had written a post that I was eager to share, for once forgot to keep a copy - there was no recaptcha so I simply pressed Submit Comment, and the comment vanished.

And I had a bit of a financial set-back, which can be very painful when money is tight.

I was so tired I fell into bed as soon as I got home each night, and had very little appetite.

So I was very depressed for about eight days. It was pointed out to me a few months ago that I hadn't had a depressed spell since I started watching Indian movies (last October) - this was the first one (used to happen every 2-3 months).

I know that I could use some sort of discipline or practice to help me keep my moods a little more calm and even. I was lucky enough to spend some time with the film director David Lynch, who has practiced transcendental meditation for many years and promotes it very strongly. I met a lot of TM people who work with him, and they were all extremely nice. I was very interested, and talked to quite a few of them about the training and practice. What particularly attracted me was that it seemed the technique they taught was quite simple and worked immediately. As I have tried to practice meditation on my own for years, always unsuccessfully, I found this very appealing. Unfortunately, the cost for the four or five sessions of training was prohibitive, and it simply looked less good to me that it was unaffordable to a middle-class person (this was before the economy fell apart and I dropped out of the middle class). Should something that seemed so healing and freeing be only available to rich people?

(Really, this is me feeling cheerful again.)

masala therapy

Barry pointed out to me the other day that I haven't had any of those bad mood dips or uncontrollable weeping since I started my -- some would say obsessive -- romance with Bollywood.  Additionally, I find myself doing a lot of related research so I can have a better understanding of the movies: Indian culture, religion, politics.  I probably know about 20 words in Hindi, at this point, but can also remember and say a lot of Hindi movie and song titles.  (I have English subtitles to thank for most of this.)

So on the one hand, it's a crazy obsession which includes a hard crush on you-know-you...but it's also become something of an interesting hobby and a path of self-education.  Plus, thanks to the internet, it's mostly free, with the exception of a few movies I've had to buy because I can't find them subtitled online.

I find I'm not too interested in anything else, but that's par for the course when I adopt a new enthusiasm.  There were times when I was interested in nothing but jewelry and semi-precious stones; times where I was interested in nothing but (God help me) the music of the Holy Modal Rounders; and times where my mind was totally consumed by (ditto) bottlecaps.  (Don't get me started about the connection between the latter two.)

OK, I'll pretend to be well-rounded, and post some bottlecap pictures, for old times' sake:

I've also gone back to Twitter, where I can be found as @northofconey.  It seems less difficult than it once was to come up with brief bites, though I only have a handful of followers.  If you use it, come see me.

better? worse?

The weekends mostly depress me since I often don't know what to do with myself.  Last weekend, I took four days off -- took two for Rosh Hashonah because I felt I needed the break -- and we went to the Atlantic Antic on Sunday.  That's a huge long street fair down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which is held on the first Sunday in October.  I try to set aside a little money because there are generally a lot of nice handmade crafts.  I got a beautiful bronze hairclip shaped like a sand dollar ($5) and a tie-dyed swing top ($20).  Barry decided to come with me this year, but he does what I try not not to:  buy food.  To me, an $8 gyro is outrageous, plus, I'm not a fan of eating while on my feet.  Thought I confess (please don't kill me, oh sugar- starch and gluten-free friends) that we split half a dozen deep-fried Oreos, as neither of us had ever had one.  Worth the splurge.

This past weekend was dreadful because it was The Weekend Before Pay -- that is, broke, broke, broke.  This is the kind of weekend where I am trying frantically not to think, because it will plunge me into even deeper depression.  I slept a lot, watched TV, watched things on the computer. 

A week or so ago, I was really feeling the absence of scent (cologne, perfume).  My big bottle of Bellodgia has a clogged sprayer and although it's about 2/3 full, I can't get any out.  This happened about two months after I got it; at some point, just from pumping and pumping, I got it to work for a few days, then it quit again.  There's no way to open it.  I even wrote to Caron, and never heard from them.  I had bought some Gucci rush about a year ago, but the sprayer dropped off, so it will only stream; plus, it's not holding well on me at all.  My Sublime and Escape were down to dregs.  It's the season where I like to wear something a bit heavier, like Coco, but what was really on my mind was Shalimar.  Mind you, I've never worn Shalimar.  But one of my grandmothers did, or else she simply had a bottle on her vanity, and I remembered the smellvividly.  It was wonderful and almost overwhelming.  I recognize it on women who walk by.  So I got myself a fairly small portion (1/4 oz. EDT) on eBay, and it's unbelievably wonderful.  I can't believe how happy it makes me.  I'm also waiting for a bottle of Mitsouko and one of Samsara, both also made by Guerlain.  It seems like time to wear classics.

I may have mentioned The Perfumed Court, a website where you can buy smaller sizes of almost any kind of scent you can imagine -- plus it really has a lot of information about the history and composition of pretty much every scent on the site.  It's tons of information, but it does help you to find other scents of the type you enjoy -- plus you can get small samples (not free) to check them out.  It's not cheap, but fragrance samples are not as easy to come by as they used to be.

My brother is having more and more and more problems.  Not much to be done for him.  He's having more and more flashbacks about some bad things that were done to him as a kid, and although he sees a therapist, this stuff has totally paralyzed him.  Neither he nor my sister-in-law has worked for a very long time, and I'm not sure how they get along, except that I guess public assistance goes a longer way in Providence, RI than it does in New York.

I do have a new insurance plan through my job, which is about as good as it can be.  Unlike Medicaid, there are co-pays, but there are none for generic meds and none for lab tests, which is a life-saver.

Work is basically good.  The beginning of the term was pretty hectic, but now things seem to be rolling nicely.  I hired a nice new intern who seems to be working out well; I've had good luck so far with interns.

Barry is now without insurance (we lost Medicaid September 30), which is terrible, but there's not much we can do.  I don't have a spare cent to add him to my coverage (which would totally about $6,000 per year).  I'm really pushing him hard about looking for work...rather, I am strongly encouraging him.  But we are just not making ends meet. We've already sold CDs and books and Barry's drum kit.  Something has to change.

The Big Picture

Things with Barry pretty much righted themselves after about a week, although I'm still keeping him on a very tight leash with money.

The Big Picture is this:  one, my depression and anxiety are not being properly controlled.  I need to see a new psychiatrist ASAP.  I am still taking the lamotrigine (generic Lamictal), but a low dose, 125 mg a day.  (The bad psychiatrist had had me on 400, up from 200.)  I lowered my own dose because after my meltdown and after reading up on the drug a little more thoroughly, I decided that it's a nasty thing to have in my body and I only wanted to take a minimal amount until my med could be switched.  But Barry, who does my doctor research because he has the time, has had trouble finding a network psychiatrist who's taking new patients and who has hours outside of 9-5.  At this point, I told him any hour will work for me -- I just need to see someone.

The second point of The Big Picture is that I worry about money every waking hour.  I used to tell one of my therapists that I was bad with money, and he always said the same thing:  "No, you just don't earn enough."  It took me a long time to understand this.  The point was not to be perfect with money -- the point was to have enough that if you weren't perfect, it wouldn't be a disaster.  I'm not earning close to enough.  Even during a month without a financial catastrophe like having to replace a computer, we don't have enough money.  It doesn't help that our monthly nut just went up $200 -- $100 for my therapy, and $100 for my carfare (the Back-to-Work job retention program paid my carfare for 90 days).  There is absolutely nothing coming in except my salary, and even though I now consider myself good with money (WAY better than I used to be), there just plain isn't enough.

I find I have to poke at Barry all the time to look for work, take classes or see a counselor at FEGS, try to sell our unused CDs to someone on Craigslist, etc.  I think he feels that his doing all of the shopping, cooking, doctor appointments, etc is enough.  I don't know how many times I have to freak out and yell that we need more money coming in, that he has to get something, anything, part-time, minimum wage, I don't care.  That generally buys me one day of him saying, "I looked at Craigslist this morning."  A few times over this past week, I took some time at work to look at Craigslist myself, and forwarded him a dozen ads each time.  That shouldn't have to be my job.  (Of course, there have been plenty of times in the past when I've said "That shouldn't have to be my job" concerning something that Barry wasn't doing, and I've always realized that if I don't make it my job, it won't get done.)

So the upshot of The Big Picture is that I cry almost all the time.  If I'm not crying, I'm close to it.  I usually don't cry in front of other people except Barry and my therapist, but I cry walking down the street, in the subway, alone at work.  I went through this once before, toward the end of my time at Penguin -- also an impending-doom scenario.  It's mostly just silent weeping, tears pouring out of my eyes without much sobbing or fuss.  If I feel particularly agitated, I take a lorazepam (generic Atavan), which is my anxiety-rescue med (as needed, no more than twice a day).  Some days I don't take it at all, some days I take one or two, or even three or four.  (Each pill is 2 mg.)  But I don't want to have to do that.

I don't know how to make more income happen.  I've even looked around for a part-time job that I could do evenings or weekends, but haven't found one.

In addition, our Medicaid runs out at the end of September.  My employers promised (in writing) to provide insurance when my Medicaid runs out, and for Barry as well if he is not yet working, "estimated at $3,600."  I think that was my low-ball estimate because I didn't want to seem too grabby.  $3,600 is nothing.  Even if they pay more and get me a decent plan, I'll have co-pays, which I don't have now.  Or I may have to pay in to the cost of insurance, which I can't possibly do.  This in and of itself is enough to cause constant weeping.

I am supposed to visit Jannah this weekend if I can manage to hang on to $30 for train fare.  That would certainly be a much-needed break, and I think I could actually stop worrying about finances for a couple of days.

My Amazon Associates widget is again not working, but I am reading The Help -- the movie based on it just opened very successfully.  The book is a little on the liberal-southern-chick-lit side, but not bad.  I'd really rather have seen it told exclusively from the points of view of the African-American maids, since the white protagonist kind of makes me grind my teeth in embarrassment.

besides the fact that the home computer died a week ago...

This has not been the best few weeks.  First off, soon (I think) after my last entry, I think a couple of Tuesday ago, I had a terrible reaction to the meds my new psychiatrist had troubled, and became disoriented and basically really fucked up, and Barry had to come to work and haul me off to the ER.  No fun and really embarrassing.  I've gone back down to the old dose and am looking for my fourth psychiatrist.

Also going to intake for a new therapist on Wednesday.  "New" is not a replacement -- I haven't seen one for around 22 years, although I went on and off from the time I was 9 until I was around 30.

But I've been really crazy lately.  Lots of weeping, the kind of daily weeping I experienced when I worked at Penguin (except that I had a seriously horrible boss there -- hi Shanta Small! -- and I have seriously wonderful bosses here).  My job here gets busy and complicated, but that's not it.  I cry at home, too.  I worry lots and lots about money.  Supporting two people on one salary is really difficult, especially when it's the lowest salary I've earned since around 1995 (with the exception of Dweck).

So then our home computer breaks.  Not just needs-the-disc-wiped-and-Windows-reinstalled kind of break, the motherboard-is-fried-so-bury-it-at-sea break.  This was a week ago.  And so we had to wait until payday (today) to get a new one, which is irritating and embarrassing and just plain made me sad.  Everything makes me feel poor and less-than. 

I really suffer at times like this -- I feel like almost everything shows me how poor and dead-ended I am.  I got a very perky message on Facebook from a nice woman who is the older sister of someone who was a close friend.  My friend, the younger brother, used to feel like shit in comparison to his sister, who was tall (he wasn't), got into Yale (he didn't), and became a doctor (guess).  Anyway, I got this lovely note from her, asking about my career and my kids and so on.  Oops!  forgot to have a normal life!

Also on Facebook, I heard from M., who had been my lover some years back, when he was married and I wasn't.  (That was back in the days when I wasn't perfect -- oh, wait, I'm still not.)  M. was very full of himself and a lot of people didn't like him, but I couldn't get enough of the way he was fixated on me.  Plus the sex was great.  M. is now divorced and remarried, but I'm itching to talk over old times with him.  He really was a pal, at a very lonely time.

All times feel lonely now.  Barry has been an absolute rock, don't get me wrong, but I don't seem to have much except for him and work.

Can't seem to settle down with a book, either.  Can't seem to settle down much at all. 

We're supposed to go see Felix play tonight, but I may back out.  I love Felix to pieces but can't seem to go more than a few hours without crying.  It would be nice to get my chemicals in balance and my mind right.

Do you ever feel too poor to have friends?  Can't afford to get to where they live, or to go out to dinner, or to maintain a nice enough home so that people can visit?  I tried to get Robin and Ernie to come out to Felix' gig tonight, and she said, "I can hardly get Ernie to leave Brooklyn any more."  Leslie can't get Darin to leave New Jersey.  I don't suppose I need a lot of face time with people for them to be my friends, but it does leave me home alone a lot.

So, at least I got paid, and we can go out to Compustar and have them build us a new machine tomorrow.  I love Compustar -- they've been our repair guys for years, and built our first computer around 1999.  Of course, this means we'll be even more desperately poor coming into August 15, but what can I do?  At least we don't have to buy a monitor, keyboard, speakers or mouse.  And a dear new friend is going to provide me with a b**tleg of MSOff*ce.

It just makes me feel kind of sad that getting paid is such a huge event, and that the week before getting paid makes me feel like I'm living in the Great Depression.  Last Monday, I gave Barry around $25, and said, "Buy two pounds of ground meat and two packages of tofu, and a dozen eggs, I have a big bag of frozen broccoli, and buy a small bag of brown rice, a small bag of white rice, oatmeal, and onions."  Once or twice during the week we pick up half a pound of muenster cheese.  This is how we eat the last week before pay.  Barry has to do without soda, chips, ice cream.  He eats oatmeal for breakfast and I barely eat breakfast or lunch.  Maybe a cup of Greek yogurt in the morning and an apple at lunch.  It's seriously pathetic.  And this is without dropping $300-400 on a new computer.

I want to strangle every 18- or 19-year-old who talks about going to Berlin, Paris and Israel.  I want to strangle everyone who can afford a new skirt or a hat or even a manicure.  I can't figure out how they do it -- rather, I can't figure out how to live decently on what I earn.  (Forget about figuring out how to get Barry working.  I've thrown out every idea I can muster, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it, or maybe he's still frozen in fear after two years.)

I am so, so, so not a happy camper.  I'm happy about having a good job and good bosses, and also about having bought a nice summer wardrobe last year.