Monthly Archives: August 2005

Ode to Olanzapine

Night after night in the bleak grip of darkness
I reach for the Olanzapine
Round white pills of things mysterious to me
It is the drug companies biggest seller
You can’t say there are no after effects
The first year was a fog
Emotional flatline
They said I was making progress
Olanzapine zombie rarely speaks
Is compliant
60 pounds in six months
New wardrobe, new stretchmarks, new body
I take this drug so that I can keep up with capitalist demand
To be a productive person
To not think magic still exists
To live
I don’t mind the olanzapine
I just hate the idea of forever.

Life is strange

Yes it is. I’m having a sort of spiritual crisis at the moment, a result of deciding to walk away from a very long and intense friendship which was stagnant. I know it was a positive decision, but the negative fallout from walking away (including having my dead pet put on my apartment doorknob and which was stolen before I could reach him) has left me feeling shaken. I want to be able to have the ability to love and forgive, but hurtful actions are difficult to heal from.

Maybe I used to think that in order to truly forgive someone, you had to allow them in your life, even if they were severely limiting your ability to live in peace and love. Now I realize this isn’t the case, you can care deeply about someone and still put up big boundaries that mean they can never hurt you again. Sometimes people are just too negative to allow them to influence your life anymore. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them goodbye.

Aside from that, I have been reading a lot of stuff on Near Death Experiences. Quite fascinating. I must admit, it makes me quite homesick for a spiritual land far far away. But dammit, I’m supposed to be here, doing my thing.

I’m also considering moving. To either Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. Of course, I probably won’t, yet. Still, there is a creepy feeling pervading me that this isn’t where I should be calling home. I’m really unsure. Too many questions.

The Great Drug Debate

There are some people who go crazy and then manage to pull themselves back to normal through natural remedies. In fact, during my early adolescence, alternative medicine is what saved my life. I do not deny the efficacy of alternative means of dealing with mental health. I’m sure if I hadn’t gone to see that alternative doctor, I would be dead long long long ago.

So why do I take pharmaceuticals now? The short answer is that I had a psychotic break and what eventually stabilized me were pharmaceuticals.

Now I am just as aware as anyone of the unethical capitalist practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a corrupt system, filled with unfairly tilted studies of new drugs, sweeping side effects like death, suicide, and homicide under the carpet.

At the same time, I think it’s just as unethical to tell someone whose medication works for them that they shouldn’t be taking it. I’m tired of hearing people tell me “you’re not crazy, you don’t need those medications.”

I am crazy. Crazy isn’t a forever thing, it happens in cycles, at least my brand of crazy. And while I can function to a high degree, I definately notice if I forget my meds. If I get depressed, you usually won’t know it because I retreat into my apartment. If I get hypomanic, most people will just notice that I seem happier and yappier than normal and that maybe I’m doing better. I have only once gone so crazy as to believe I was the next messiah, and that scared the shit out of me.

So I take pharmaceuticals. Big deal. Five pills a day and I’m a-okay. This is how I’m dealing with my mental health right now. There is always the possibility that someday in the future I will go into full remission and not have to take my medication. Likewise, I may always take medication.

As a crazy community, it’s important that we support everyone’s personal decision as to how they want to address their mental health concerns, drugs or no drugs. To do this, we have to be given more choices, more options. Doctors should be willing to listen to the concerns of their patients about side effects. The psych ward system needs to have group home options for people who are going through spiritual crisis that will allow the course of a psychotic episode to be resolved naturally. In fact, in the States back in the seventies this was done with manic depressives and schizophrenics, and without the use of drugs or restraints, all the patients were able to resume fully functioning lives. Of course once in a while someone would run naked into the yard, but this wasn’t pathologized.

And finally, most importantly, crazy people who are stabilized need to be given more supports in our communities. It doesn’t help to go to a mental health team and find out you’re not crazy enough to be given services.

Mmm, kissin’

I went out last night, got wasted, and necked with two girls and a boy while their friends took pictures. Much fun. I haven’t kissed girls in ages, and it’s kind of nice to neck when there’s no pressure about going “all the way.” Plus I look freakin hot necking with girls. I’ve never had the chance to look at it from an outside perspective. Oh wait, I necked with one of my friends on Super 8, but I never used the footage. It was pretty funny.

I like kissing. I believe I must get more kisses in my life. I used to kiss so many people when I was in my early twenties. I could neck at the drop of a hat. Most of the time I didn’t even care to go further, and neither did they, it was just a fun thing to do when you’re at . . . certain events. Like fetish parties. There was this one friend I had who was so hot, and we totally necked here and there.

I remember this one time she was helping me get ready for my bartenders exam, and if I recited the recipes wrong she’d flick my nipple REALLY HARD! Ah, good times.

I must admit, if I look at the people who are my close friends now, I’ve necked with most of them at some point in the course of our friendships. Or else they were my lovers and then in true lesbian fashion went on to be friends after the break up. Sometimes . . . long after the break up. It’s hard to remain friends with someone you still desperately want to shag, but I find if there’s a nice chunk of time away from them where you get to work through all those bitter feelings, it can work. I mean, all of my girlfriends have been people I like as individuals for different reasons, so in some way I don’t see the point of completely cutting them out of my life based solely on the fact that the relationship wasn’t working out.

Yes, I am a mature experienced woman.

My current favorite piece of software

I love software. I have always loved it. Editing, writing, photoshopping, web pages, power point, whatever. I have a love affair with each one.

My current favorite piece of software is Final Draft. It makes scriptwriting so freakin easy. Not only does it make formatting it properly a breeze, but it will also do really cool things for your script, like come up with various reports on how many characters there are, give you all your locations, and it can even be used to compare your first draft with your later drafts. How sexy is that?

Anyway, after the last pathetic blog, I decided I would write some stuff. Altogether with today and yesterdays work, I have seven and a half new pages. Woo hoo! Including the sex scene, which was a little hard to write because the last time I had sex with a girl was when Bush got into office. Pretty grim. So I felt just as rusty writing sex as I’m sure I’ll be having sex, should I ever have sex again.

I’ve also realized that in a certain way, what has blocked me from writing this story is that it’s a love story, and love has been rather elusive in my life. So I was uncomfortable actually writing characters who fall in love, although more terrible things are in store for them soon.

Soon I have to write the really uncomfortable scenes, the loss of sanity and subsequent hospitalization. It’s all very sad. Hmm. And I’ll be introducing some more characters.

That’s the hard part of writing, you create characters you really care about, and then you have to throw them in a horrible situation.

I tell you we must die

Trundling along with Unemployed Summer. It is Thursday. I applied for two jobs. One is as an Office Services Clerk in a law firm. That would be a nice job to have, considering I’ve already done it. After writing two cover letters and updating my c.v., I sat around and talked to my mother. Then I watched two episodes of Ab Fab and then Mirrorball. I laughed so hard at the scene where Jane Horrocks sings Alabama Song. That’s one of my all time favorite songs when I’m maudlin in a certain “the piano has been drinking” sort of way. Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar. I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.

I am a veritable powerhouse of creativity at the moment, and yet I can’t seem to motivate myself enough to pull my script up and pound away at it. The trouble with the writing process is it’s so solitary. That’s something I like about it as well, but when I’m on my own, making myself sit down and write is that hardest thing to do.

So I write in my blog.

Really though, sitting around watching well written british comedy series is probably part of my creative process. Brit comedies rule the fucking planet. If I was ever to do a comedy series, I would want to do it with the BBC.

But obviously, I must first learn to have good writing habits. I do write everyday, just not on my script. I must start everyday script writing. What troubles me at the moment is I have fifty-five pages and I’m only a third of the way through the plot, which means I’ve got more material than I can use. However, I also realize that I shouldn’t start chopping away at it until I’ve completed the whole first draft. Oh it’s tiring. Plus one of my characters really needs an overhaul, poor transdude. He’s been tokenized, and that’s obviously a problem because he’s woefully unfleshed out.

I am my own worst critic.

I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.

I’m off to buy two cigs now. I’ll be back later.

Diary Haiku

I apparently have but one thing on my mind according to the haiku engine for my diary site. Here’s what it came up with:

are all bacon and
eggs nibble nibble i like
fish as long as it

I am particular about fish. I didn’t realize I talked about food so much in my diary. I thought for sure it would pick up my potty mouth.

Life + Pills

Edina – “Remember when you could just wake up in the morning and feel fabulous?”
Patsy- “Yeah, without pills.”

I’m trying to think how long I’ve been taking pills for psychiatric reasons. I’ve been on Epival and two other meds for two and a half years now, but before that there were many years I was on anti-depressants alone. It does seem like a very long time. Probably the majority of my adult life.

Before pills, life was really hellish. I think back on my childhood and so much of it was just dark and intense. I really didn’t want to live. And I was a kid!

I wish there had been some way to treat me back then. Oh well.

But I do remember mornings when I could wake up and feel fabulous, and the smell of the morning dew as I walked to school was the most sensual spiritual feeling I ever had, and I liked life. That’s the weird thing, it didn’t all suck all the time.

So now I’m maintained on three different drugs that work together in different ways in my brain and make me able to function fairly normally. I’ve grown happily accustomed to my prescription, no horrible side effects, but I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to not have to depend on pills. I don’t want to go off them, because obviously they work wonders. But there are concerns, like say my plane crashed in the woods and I ran out of meds. Or the government broke down and there was no way for me to get a prescription filled in all the melee. What the hell kind of crazy would I go?

Still, the little pills are in no danger of being taken away from me yet. Unlike American’s whose health plans only pay for meds as long as you are actively crazy. Once you’re stabilized, they take it away.

It makes me cream my jeans

I just found the sexiest thing in the world on the net. I am rendered completely speechless. I think I am overcome with love and lust. If I had this baby by my side, life would be sooooo ultimately perfect. I have missed having my own camera since I lent mine out and it came back BROKEN! And besides, it also became really old technology.

Thirza sells out and goes High Definition. Mmmmm, sweet sexy sacriligious sell out.