Doing laundry of course, but also ripping some of my CDs. Not all–that’s too overwhelming of a task, but some of them. So I no longer flip through the CDs going, “Oh! Stevie Ray Vaughan!”

So far today:
Cowboy Junkies
Marty Friedman
Soundgarden
Toadies
XTC
Kevin Ford
Michael Penn

We also brushed Kat. He likes to be brushed right up until he hates it and pitches a hissing snarling fit. Fun.

And I want to finish my book today. But I have a feeling I’m more likely to fall asleep than read. I’ve still pretty damned tired, which is why I’m unable to gauge my depression. Ah well.

ADDENDUM the First:
Now I’ve ripped:
Aine Minogue
Leahy
Taliesin Orchestra
The Mediaeval Baebes
Enya
Dead Can Dance
and finally, Stevie Ray Vaughan

Now I’m making pizza. Mmmm!

Realized I haven’t made a depression update in awhile.

Mostly because there hasn’t been much to update. I’m in a holding pattern, and trying to decide whether I need to increase the dosage of my medicine or not.

I’ve been extremely tired recently, but then I’ve also been extremely busy at work. The work busy is a good thing (and kinda fun I have to admit), but exhausting, so it’s hard to tell precisely where my head is right now. Unfortunately, work isn’t going to slow down much at all for awhile, so I’m going to have to take all this into consideration as I try and determine how I’m really feeling.

Doc gave me a prescription to up my dosage if I felt I needed it, but I’m going to have a hard time separating out exhaustion from depression. Though I did get a lot of sleep this weekend (naps even!) which was very nice. Not sure what that says though.

On the bright side, I haven’t had any really dark days. Of course, I’ve been so tired I’m not sure I would have noticed.

So that’s where I am right now. Holding pattern. No better, but no worse either, so I can live with that.

Thursday night was dark.

I don’t mean it was rainy or overcast, I mean that I was dark.

It was an extremely strange feeling–one I hadn’t felt since my dissolute and wild college days.

By the time we got home from the gym, Michael and I were both exhausted and neither of us wanted to make dinner, so we convinced Grandmom to go out to eat. We eventually ended up going to IHOP, and it was there that the darkness fell.

Mind you, the IHOP is relatively new and in good shape, so what I felt was not a reaction to my surroundings.

As I sat there, I felt a despair fall over me, as if a piece of the Snow Queen’s mirror had fallen into my eyes, and like Kay, wherever I looked I saw ugliness and hopelessness.

A grandmother walked by with her grandson, and all I could see was how wrinkled her clothes were–as if she was trying to look nice but had fallen short and instead looked simply worn and tired.

The girl in the booth across from us was heavy, and all I could notice was that her shirt had ridden up in the back, and a roll of pale fat was bubbling over the top of her jeans. Her companion was scrawny and his pants were falling off. His hair was greasy, his face unshaven, and he spent more on his ball cap–cocked at an asinine angle–than he did on any part of his wardrobe, including his ratty shoes.

A mother walked by with her kids, and all looked dirty–not filthy dirty from playing outside, but as if a dust had fallen upon them, turning everything slightly gray.

A group of teenage girls walked by to their table, and all I could see was over treated hair, too much makeup, and faces that would too soon lined with cares and worries for their futures at that moment were not bright and hopefully, but instead the struggle of living on the edge with too many kids too young and not enough education to pull them out of the hole.

The life and hope and joy were drained out of everything I could see, from the ripped number on our booth, to the dead leaves and branches on the trees outside.

It was all I could do to continue to sit at the table, to try and choke down my meal.

Thank the gods the despair lifted and today was a relatively good day.

But the darkness still lurks, just out of the corner of my eye, waiting for a moment of weakness to surge back and lead me to despair.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

I will fear no evil.
I will fear no evil.
I will fear no evil.

Just a small update on how things are going.

They’re going.

I don’t feel as bad as I felt for the past couple months, but I also don’t feel over this latest bout of depression.

It’s easier to laugh at things (primarily myself and my own mistakes) but I don’t really feel a lot of joy in the little things they way I used to.

I’m still tired, and still pretty damned anti-social, and still don’t feel up to dealing with stressful situations or difficult people, but I am managing both.

Mostly the depression is still manifesting in a lack of interest in doing anything, and a wish I could hide in the house and not have to talk to anyone for a week or two or more. Or do much of anything really. You’ll notice that it took a month but I finally made a new poll, and also changed the countdown. It’s the lack of interest in the little things that lets me know things still aren’t great. I even have a new design for my main page I want to roll out, but can’t get the gumption to finish it.

But depression is like that sometimes.

Just have to see where things go from here.

The title pretty much says it all.

I’m having ups and downs right now, which is good and bad. Nice to have ups, but it makes the crashes harder to deal with when they come. I’m still easily distracted, but I feel like I’m capable of writing coherent sentences if I put my mind to it.

The extra bad TMJ and headache seem to have been a temporary glitch–thank goodness. But I’m still tired, and having trouble with motivation. My OCD is still bad, and I’ve got an unpleasantly high level of paranoia going. And evenings, unless I’m completely distracted, have been rough.

But I’m getting through the days, and sometimes I don’t mind so much being in my own skin.

Tuesday I had my doctor’s appointment and started my new meds. I’m tapering down my current SSRI and tapering up my new SSRI. The doctor also suggested that I take a partial dose of an older anti-depressant as a sleeping pill, since she thought that might be exacerbating my depression.

Wednesday I spent most of the day foggy and tired–perhaps even worse off than I was before.

So Wednesday night I kept the same dosages of the SSRI but skipped the “sleeping pill.”
I woke up before the alarm feeling more alert than I have in months–but with a headache.

Two aspirin helped, and after some discussion and consideration decided that the headache came from my TMJ. Lucky me. SSRIs give me TMJ, so when I’m on them I have to wear a mouth guard while I sleep. And off and on today I caught myself gritting my teeth, which of course didn’t help any.

But aspirin helps, and hopefully once I finish the transition, the TMJ will get a little better.

But mostly, today, for the first time in a very long time, I felt clear headed and with some optimism for the future.

Went to the doc today, and got two new prescriptions.

One is for an SSRI I’ve been on before. The other is for an older anti-depressant that I am to take a small dose of before bed, to see if sleeping better also makes me feel better.

All I can say is this couldn’t come soon enough, because I am really damned tired of being irritable and depressed.

No, I’m not mad at you. Unless you’re GW Bush or Dick Cheney, in which case I’ve still got some residual hostility, so you should probably stay away.

I am, however, still feeling crappy and brain dead and the depression decided to add a good dose of paranoid to the mix, so I’m pretty much not commenting much right now, because everything I say sounds wrong or mean or just plain horrible. So I’m not dissing your site, I just don’t have anything coherent to say.

I’m extremely tired of this stupid crap my brain is pulling on me.

I hate the fact that guilt is the determining factor for my getting out of bed and eating lunch and doing just about anything right now. People depend upon me, so that gets me out of bed and to work and through the day.

But I know–I remember–that there can be more to life that acting simply to stave off guilt.

Anyway, what do you feel guilty about? Anyone care to out petty me?

I’m currently at the point where it feels like every day is a struggle.

Saturday night I didn’t even want to get off the sofa to shower and go to bed–and a hot shower is usually my favorite point of the day. I’ve got a week and a half till I go back to the doc and can hopefully get my meds changed.

Wish it was this week, because I am really sick and tired of being cranky and irritable and miserable and incoherent and just plain depressed.

To add insult to injury, Grandmom keeps thinking I’m mad at her, because I’m not talkative. It’s almost enough to make me want to take up residence in the basement, just so I’m not reminded of how badly I’m failing to deal with this damned bout of depression.

But it’s the start of another week, and I will keep plodding, knowing that at some point I get to switch from existing to truly living.

That day cannot come soon enough.

I’ll keep posting throughout the week, but don’t expect brilliance or anything. At the very least I’ll try to post pictures.

Or if you’re really unlucky, I’ll post code.

I’m here.

That’s about as good as it’s going to get today.

I was going to whine that I haven’t accomplished anything this evening.

Then I remembered I made brownies. So, yay me!

It was in some ways a painfully long weekend, and in other ways the weekend was entirely too short.

I’m still having issues with my depression. Destroying my cell phone on Saturday didn’t help matters, not did having to plunk down $400 to replace it. But. That’s why we have savings–so when things break (for whatever reason) they can be replaced. So it’s just no new computer for me anytime soon.

The depression was incredibly frustrating. Just one of those days where I can’t stand being inside my own skin, and nothing I did really allowed me to escape myself, although I did managed to distract myself.

I kept busy by doing a fair amount of web design over the weekend, rebuilding the WordPress template for my book blog and then recreating the same style for the book pages of my website. I’m overdue a rebuild of my main page, but I don’t have a clue what I want to do with it, and abandoning the color scheme means having to create a new set of images. Since I’ve got probably 30 or so images that randomly appear, that idea is rather unappealing right now.

Speaking of images, I test drove Adobe Elements over the weekend. I have Photoshop at work, but there is no way I am going to pay that much money for a software package, and I’m one of those weirdos that refuses to pirate software or music, to Elements seemed the logical choice.

Having played with it, it seems precisely what I need, so at some point I’m going to have to cough up the money for that. But it’ll be worth it, because it’ll be nice to do image work at home (and goodbye to Corel Photopaint 10).

The predicted storms never came, so Saturday afternoon was sunny, as was today, so I got to get out and enjoy the flowers, just a little bit. And posted the requisite Sunday Flower Pr0n.

I also finally finished my review for A Short History of Myth.

Here’s to hoping this week goes smoothly.

I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by my depression.

Stupid depression.

I’m going to try and stay offline today and see how that goes. Not sure if or when I’ll get back on Sunday, but I’ll probably make a couple Twitter updates over the weekend that you can catch in the left sidebar if you don’t Twitter.

Hope you have a good weekend.