well, that explained a few things...

More than 2 years ago now, I was diagnosed as BiPolar ll. I am very fortunate that my partner made sure I could see an excellent, excellent doctor who’s worked with me to develop a treatment plan that’s made a profound difference in my life.

Note the word “treatment”.
Not “cure”.
This is not the flu, or a broken collarbone.
It’s just part of me and always will be.

C’est la vie - we play the hand we’re dealt …
…but this one doesn’t suck totally.

I’ve been able to look back at times in my life when I got a lot of grief because it just wasn’t possible for me to be the kind of “normal” some people expected me to be or when I could not get past being hurt for weeks or even months and so on… and stop beating myself up about it.

Sometimes… mostly…
I’ve also come to appreciate having my own “special and unique” perspective on the world, an occasional ability to connect dots others sometimes miss and the rush that comes a manic phase sometimes…

In the course of learning more about this condition, treatment options and such online, I came across this description of the manic and the depressive symptoms, translated from the Clinical into everyday language.
There’s also some of the diagnostic clues at the end. My favourite’s the one about joking while depressed.

I’m not a doctor or any kind of health practitioner so don’t take my word for any kind of gospel here…all I really know is what it’s like to live my life with my own personal mix of symptoms and habits.

I now have a name for it all, though, and it’s better than “you lazy useless f*cking goof!“, “too sensitive to live” or “stupid sack of sh*t” - which were my usual ways of describing myself to myself. They still are… but the medication and other elements of my treatment plan help me to keep moving at least a little when they do as opposed to taking me out of commission for a couple of days.
Most of the time.

Everyone tends to experience different combinations of symptoms. I’m glad I’ve never experienced a lot of the things listed here, including the scarier ones and I’m really, really glad I got diagnosed and I got help.

A Word to the Wise !
If these symptoms seem really way too familiar, get yourself checked out.
Take care of yourself… I’ve been told that left untreated, the dark times get longer and darker and the manic times get less frequent and less exciting as you get older … and

Here’s a more complete list of symptoms of depression

      * Reduced interest in activities (like writing FAQs)

          * Indecisiveness (maybe)      

      * Feeling sad, unhappy, or blue (pervasive attitude that life sucks)      

      * Irritability, dammit.      

      * Getting too much (hypersomnia) or too little (insomnia)sleep.      

      * Loss of, um, what were we talking about?  Oh yeah, concentration.      

      * Increased or decreased appetite  (my ex-mother-in-law’s cooking  notwithstanding)      

      * Loss of self-esteem, such as my understanding that I suck.      

      * Decreased sexual desire.      

      * Problems with, whaddya call it?  Oh yeah, memory.      

      * Despair and hopelessness      

      * Suicidal thoughts.      

      * Reduced pleasurable feelings.      

      * Guilt feelings, which are all my fault anyway.      

      * Crying uncontrollably and/or for no apparent reason.      

      * Feeling helpless, which I can’t do anything about.      

      * Restlessness, especially when I can’t hold still.      

      * Feeling disorganized (hell, look at my desk).      

      * Difficulty doing things (again, like finishing this FAQ)      

      * Lack of energy and feeling tired.      

      * Self-critical thoughts      

      * Moving and thinking slooooooowwwwwwwly.      

      * Feeling that one is in a stupor, or that one’s head is in

      a fog.      

      * Speeeeeeeakiiinnnnng slooooooowwwwwwwly.      

      * Emotional and/or physical pain.      

      * Hypochondriacal worries; fears or illnesses which prove to

      be psychosomatic.      

      * Feeling dead or detached.      

      * Delusions of guilt or of financial poverty.      

      * Hallucinating. 

Here’s a plain-English version of the symptoms of mania, with some extensions:

      * Decreased need for sleep.      

      * Restlessness.      

      * Feeling full of energy.      

      * Distractibility (what was that?)      

      * Increased talkativeness (or increased typeativeness)      

      * Creative thinking.      

      * Increase in activities.      

      * Feelings of elation.      

      * Laughing inappropriately      

      * Inappropriate humor.      

      * Speeded up thinking.      

      * Rapid, pressured speech, that you can teach, eating a peach, while on  a beach.      

      * Impaired judgment      

      * Increased religious thinking or beliefs.      

      * Feelings of exhilaration.      

      * Racing thoughts, which can’t be taught, and can’t be bought, although they ought, you might get caught.

      * Irritability (dammit, there it is again!)      

      * Excitability.      

      * Inappropriate behaviors.      

      * Impulsive behaviors.      

      * Increased sexuality (also known as “platoon-of-Marines-on-shore-leave syndrome”)

      * “clang associations” (the association of words based on their sound, a possible reason so many poets are bipolar, also why we have pun fun)

      *  decreased interest in sex, or any other interpersonal relationships, due to obsessive interest in some other subject or activity

      * Inflated self-esteem (so prove I’m NOT the world’s leading authority!)      

      * Financial extravagance.      

      * Grandiose thinking.      

      * Heightened perceptions.      

      * Bizarre hallucinations.      

      * Disorientation.      

      * Disjointed thinking.      

      * Incoherent speech.      

      * Paranoia, delusions of being persecuted.      

      * Violent behavior, hostility      

      * Severe insomnia      

      * Profound weight loss      

      * Exhaustion

The things that make me (the doctor being quoted, not your humble blogger)
suspect bipolarity in a patient diagnosed as unipolar are:      

      - oversleeping when depressed 

      - overeating when depressed 

      - a history of bipolarity in the family  

      - a patient who when depressed can still joke and laugh  

      - anyone with a history of frequent depressive episodes (rapidly cycling unipolar disorder)  

      - success as a salesperson, politician, or actor  (in school or real world)  

      - extreme rejection sensitivity  

meanwhile, on the hill

... where we live, the weather got
all Canadian, all of a sudden...

















a Big Snow that's stayed around for weeks,
through the solstice into the new year.












There's been a couple of power outs
and even a week (gasp) without
the highspeed web connection!














but it seems the further one gets
from a large urban area,
the more people are equipped
to roll with it
and the less they are inclined
to whine about it.






























I really like that.














When I first moved up here,
I was worried that after taking photographs
in such an urban environment
that I would run out of things
to photograph around here.





























so far, at least....




























not a problem...


















-30-

Connect the Dots

In 21 states, Wallmart is the single largest employer.

There are 1,008 McDonald's franchises in France.

More people are killed by donkeys annually

than are killed in plane crashes.

Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of "Lorne Greene's Animal Kingdom".

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike each year than all the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

Marilyn Monroe had 6 toes on one foot.

The RIAA sued an 83 year old woman for downloading music illegally, even though a copy of her death certificate was sent to the RIAA a week before it filed the suit.

Two 1903 paintings recently sold at auction for $590,000 - the paintings were in the famous "Dogs Playing Poker" series.

If you hook Jell-O up to an EEG, it registers movements almost identical to a human adult's brain waves.

When Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen turn 18 in mid-2004, they will take official control of a company worth more than the gross national product of Mongolia. Their earnings in 2003 topped $1 billion.

35 Billion e-mails are sent each day throughout the world.


-30-

The Demotivation Continues

The last few days, I've been remembering back to the time before the The Great Economic Calamity. How simple those times seem even now, only a couple of months later....


























































































We now return you to the world of investor panic and the New American Socialism, already in progress...


-30-

Graffiti is Forever

... from what little evidence we have on early humans,
it seems graffiti has been a civic issue
since just about forever.



long before there were enough Greeks
with enough time on their hands
to talk about things like civics with each other,


humans were leaving hand prints,
drawings, stories...
making their mark, saying "i'm here".
when i look at images of the paintings
that have been found on walls,
the petroglyphs carved into huge stone.

the shapes and lines don't seem all that remote...



it's like they are "humanly familiar",
even if it is impossible for me
to decode the stories in them...


although sometimes i think i get it.












i mean hey... maybe these are interstellar tags.
space punks.

you never know...



i've lived in a city for much of my life,
and i don't drive a car....










between walking the dogs three times a day,
going to the store,









and sometimes even going for a walk
just me, for the pleasure of a walk,
because the sky is so blue,
or the air's that special fresh kind
of clean and sweet
after a couple of days of rain










it adds up to a lot of looking around the neighbourhood
in a week
or a month
-- a particularly useful thing to do
when you live in here, as it's very likely
there's been changes even on the streets
you think you know,









if you haven't been back to a street for 6months,
things will be gone, and something new in their place.
probably a coffee bar
or one of those places that does nails.

so i see a lot of tags and graff,
and i really like it.









these are every bit as humanly familiar
as their predecessors in the caves,
and some of these i actually can decode









so they're talking to me.
sometimes witty, sometimes not,
sometimes pictures, sometimes words,
sometimes just shapes and colours
i love the zooming in the lines of a good tag.
and i always have to read the whole story
if it's there...





















and the fact that it's been something humans do
for so long, and that it's such an individualized expression
of a person, makes it seem to me
that this urge to make one's mark is very primal,
part of the essence of being human.

i get the same feeling planting herbs and flowers
in the garden... this sense of connection to
the people back through the years who have
planted these same seeds on another spring day.
with the same hopes...



stay tuned for more on this....

Death, Where is Thy Sting?

There's a lot of nasty ways to shuffle off this mortal coil.

There's also some that are just kind of ridiculous. If nothing else, perhaps these brief tales can be a good reminder not to take oneself too seriously, and make it clearer that it's how we live that counts...
















because you never know...when the Grim Reaper turns up beside you, he just might look a lot like Bozo.

Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunken donkey attempt to eat figs.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone.

The Greek mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered by a mob by having her skin ripped off with sharp sea-shells and what remained of her was burned.

Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace was stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse. He was hanged, drawn and quartered—strangled by hanging but released while still alive, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then cut into four parts.

William Henry Harrison the 9th President of the United States, died of pneumonia one month after delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in cold weather without an overcoat.

French president Felix Faure died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office.

Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee bourbon distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination code.

Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and a broken neck when her scarf caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

In March 1981, Carl McCunn, a nature photographer, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."

2005: 28-year-old South Korean Lee Seung Seop, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing Starcraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.

you can learn more
about Jose Guadalupe Posada,
who by the way never heard of
the the Grateful Dead,
inasmuch as he had been dead
for decades before any of them
were even born, @
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Guadalupe_Posada


and here's an interesting series of covers for a serial on the history of Mexico.... worth going through for both the colour (!) images and the translation of the titles, like
La Matanza de Chulula o Sangre y Fuego, Fuego y Sangre
The Massacre at Chulula or Blood and Fire, Fire and Blood http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/charlotcoll/posada/posadabiblio1.html


more deathly images informed by the Plague
and the Apocalypse from the fabulous Holbein family...







































-30-

Nature's Way

Living away from the big city inevitably brings one closer to nature. Now, when I'm up at night writing, or walking around with the camera, I can hear the sound of coyotes and owls.



















It's a welcome change from sirens, construction machines, traffic and police helicopters at low altitudes.




















I think this new sonic nightscape is also related to the abundance of bunnies in this area. Seems people have set many pet ones free, and in the early evenings one can see them everywhere... which if I was a Mama coyote or an owl would suit me tickety-boo too.






















-30-