thanks mike.

its good that things are looking up now

Well...not all the way up. It seems to have been only a temporary spike. To be honest, I still feel like shit.

sorry to hear. the night is always the darkest before morning.... which really leads to a moment of duh i guess. but not really. has anyone actually tested that out?

I'd watched a documentary about Stephen Fry (Monty Python among other things) called The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. its a tv documentary, but still cool enough for an outsider if you will.

and even before that, I'd read in Scientific American Mind about the fine line between creativity and insanity via schizophrenia. So many examples: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Daniel Johnston, Syd Barrett (although that could purely have been from the amount of acid he dropped, thus triggering his creativity). The idea was that this disorders actually cause the creativity. They see the world through a different lens and show us through their music, thus being deemed exceedingly creative.

Poetry seems to certainly work on a similar path i would imagine. I say that because of my intro english course I took back in 1999. many of the poets we read were clearly depressed, but this was deemed creative, even though they see the world this way, not the "normal" way. But to be able to express themselves in a way that's palatable and comprehendable is what is just as special as teh vision itself. My background of science would have this example if it were the case: Imagine Einstein, or Newton, or Bohr. They see these relationships, but can't express it in a pleasing mathematical equation for the future scientists to scrap over.

but i ramble, its 2:30am and i haven't slept in a couple days again.

Yeah...new nights and mornings come and go, though.

I typically avoid talking about b.d., since it often makes it seem like I am using it to excuse my actions or to claim artistic pretentiousness. I write because it's who I am; I am a prick because it's who I am.

The only true thing about b.d. is the pain, which is very real and very overbearing. Typically, no one understands what it means to be in this sort of pain.

Get some sleep. Being unable to off myself, sleep is certainly a welcome escape...but not yesterday, when I dreamt they found pornography in my desk drawer at work. Yeah, when I'm manic (which is not often enough these days), I stay up forever (my longest time is around 36 hours, I think; one supposedly becomes completely insane after 60-70 hours.

Fuck. I feel empty again.

My claim to fame, and my personal science experiment, is three full days of no sleep. I was also hallucinating and completely incoherent when i crashed in my room halfway through the fourth day. legs out, body in, face down. nasty.

Did you try to antisleep with the aid of caffeine, or did you do it all au naturel?

by the end i vaguely recollect coffee. only coffee...

Mhumm. I've got two interesting, recent coffee experiences:

At the end of last month, I got another one of those head-splitting migraines, but all I had left at the office, in terms of painkillers, was some Aleve (aka Naproxen: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naproxen) that I scored off a co-worker back in Gifu (she gave me some when I had an inexplicable and excruciating foot pain for a month).

Anyways, what I did not know about Aleve was that, apparently, it increases heart rate. The short of it is that I took one pill after a cup of coffee. Now, I am teaching a lesson. About ten minutes into it, my manager bursts into the classroom, saying something about wanting to observe me, and sits in the corner.

My brain starts to race: "What could have I possibly done wrong?", etc., but you, know, I still have to do the lesson, with all the singing and dancing. At one point, I thought my heart was going to explode - it was going that fast! Of course, as is too often the case with me, the deal with my manager turned out to be nothing, but I did learn a valuable lesson about using drugs I have not properly researched beforehand.

My second coffee-related story happened just the other day, when I came back home after work and, wanting to stay awake, drank a cup of coffee...and barely managed to get myself to bed before I fell asleep! My theory, at present, is that it's all about dosages: Needless to say, years of coffee-fuelled essay writing have conditioned in me unwanted diuretic impulses, but, in addition, I've also seem to have built up a resistance to caffeine, which shows only under or above a certain dosage - which I'm trying to figure out right now. Fascinating stuff! ;)

That's a great lesson actually. Something similar yet completely opposite happened to me a few weeks ago.

I'll be honest, i smoke my share of weed. and the stuff here is weak compared to BC so it wasn't doing a whole lot. Well, apparenlty with my painkillers, it takes on a whole new degree of tranquility. I no longer felt my body for a good 4 hours. I couldn't feel it at all, and it was amazing. Not only that, but I couldn't focus and keep up with a conversation that lasted longer than 3 seconds. 3 seconds is fascinating. why you may ask? well, that is approximately the true length of our short term memory. I'd ask my friend a question, and by the time he got to the answer I couldn't actually remember if I had asked the question or if he had. I also couldn't remember what the question was and why he was talking.

My second story, is much closer to your own, but without the naproxen. One year, many years ago while i was in undergrad, I was swamped by a rather nasty courseload with an equally nasty midterm week. Well, to keep me going, I took an ephedrine pill. Fully knowing the risks and side effects, I decided that the benefit of staying awake and alert for longer was worth it. Well, lo and behold, that heart pounding out of your chest was very much like mine. My bed was actually shaking with each contraction. That was the first and last time I decided to get an extra boost other than with my good friend Caffeine. Oh I miss Timmy Ho's.

speakin' of drugs, last final is tomorrow in about 9 hours. And its in , you probably didn't guess it but still fitting to the topic, Pharmacology. 50 questions over 800 slides? I only need a 60 for a C. C is for Cookie afterall. and the class average is failing. Here's to hoping a magical curve appears and can be ridden

Hey, far be it from me to judge you for smoking dope. I never tried it (but I did invent one thousand excuses to avoid it, having an almost pathological fear of all drugs, except standard painkillers), but if it works for you - what the hell, right? Wow. So you were even worse than the guy from Memento, eh? It sounds fascinating.

Ephedrine...hell, I was shaking like an addict after one caffeine pill, this one time. You just never know what kind of shit they add to those things.

Pharmacology! I thought you were only doing eyes and such. How does that...slide-based testing work, exactly? They show you something and you have to discuss it? C is indeed for Cookie, but don't kill yourself, man, eh? I'll cross my fingers for your professor's speedy and painful demise. ;)

Its not like i'm some kind of pothead, nor am I saying you think i am. I didn't try it until my third year of university, when I was truly comfortable with my decision. I just enjoy smoking a small bowl's worth and just chilling and listening to music, but it is a rare thing. Frankly, and sorry that you get to hear this, but I am fully for decriminalization of the weed. It is far less dangerous that cigarettes and alcohol. However, there are stipulations to the decriminalization but I won't go in to that today. Your pathological fear of drugs is understandable, but we must keep an open mind to all, but not necessarily need to experience it yourself. After reading The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, I had to find LSD, but I'd also done a degree in science psychology which was heavily based in biology so i knew the nasty side effects of it, and that scared me stupid.

Yeah, i completely bombed that pharmacology test. I do study eyes, but lucky us we get to take all these courses that aren't even relevant in the first year, pharm being one of those. As for the slide based teaching, all of my lectures are now in powerpoint form. During the lecture hours, they put up slides and we have them on our own computers because we are required to have laptops, preferably tablets for taking notes. Frankly, powerpoint teaching is a great tool with very poor understanding. I've only met a couple profs that could actually do it properly. However, in lab, it is in much smaller class size so we do discuss cases and they'll show a slide of, for example a liver that is at different levels of cirrhosis and necrosis.

ps: Loved Memento. So good, and incredibly accurate in portraying amnesia.
pps: Your mission, should you choose to accept it if you like Star Wars, is to find yourself a copy of Star Wars Christmas Special (aka Star Wars Holiday Special). But be warned, this may actually be the second worst movie of all time, behind Hands of Manos. Manos = hands in spanish, go figure
ppps: Great new poem, but i like numbers.

Weed measured in bowls? Weird... Anyways, stop fucking apologising already, man. When you are invited to be a mig81.com regular (and you most certainly are), you should feel at home here.

Anyways, there's nothing wrong with decriminalising weed. It'd keep the cops a tiny bit less corrupt and would prevent shit like my brother's alleged suicide from going down. My only stipulation would be that if you smoke it, you're legal, but if you grow it, you go to jail. Of course, anyone selling weed to minors should have his or her dick cut off.

I don't know about LSD, man...they say it gives you flashbacks. Even weed is not safe in this regard, because you never know what it's laced with - sometimes (I hear) it even contains a little LSD itself.

Tablets! Wow. Your school is so twenty-first century. I had to write my notes manually, like a friggin' caveman... Cirrhosis and necrosis, eh? Let me throw some wild guesses around: too much drinking and too much...death, respectively?

Memento is so honest it's scary sometimes. The holiday special, eh? Is that where Boba Fett appears for the first time? Yeah, I saw Manos - The Hands of Fate, but only within the framework of "MST3K"...and even then it was fairly intolerable.

With regard to the new piece - thanks. I do have to say that I have nothing against numbers per se. Just the metaphor, m'am. ;)