"I Feel Fine!"

When you first begin taking medication for bipolar disorder, people will tell you a lot of things. They will tell you that you might start to feel like a guinea pig or a lab rat, constantly being experimented on with different dosages and different medications and combinations of medications. They will tell you that the side effects can be pretty severe, but that you can mitigate these with further treatments. They will tell you that at some point you will start to feel better, and will be tempted to go off the medication, but that you must never ever do so without first consulting your doctor.

What they don't say about this last bit is that it's not merely temptation. It's not as simple as feeling fine and thinking you probably don't need the meds anymore. Your brain may actively fight you on this. It knows all of the rationalizations. It reminds you of how much easier it was to deal with yourself when you knew the rabble-rabble rage and the deathy-deathy despair were right around the corner. And don't you miss the euphoria of a manic episode, when you're fifty feet tall and can repel bullets, and the world-- no, the universe-- exists solely for your pleasure?

You can't be creative unless you feel too much, your brain informs you. Until you are utterly stupefied with emotional overload, you cannot truly create brilliant work. You feel fine, but are you fine? Are you really? Those side effects aren't particularly mitigated, are they? Why, your panic attacks are even more frequent now you've gone on these pills. You only used to have one every few months. Now you have at least three per week, if not more. And you look fat. You're probably gaining weight again.

The meds are not really helping you. It's you doing the things, not the pills. All you have to do is go off them, and keep doing as you're doing, but doing it better because you are yourself. You're not yourself without the mood swings and the destructive behavior. You're not yourself without seventeen elaborate scenarios in your head about how this day will go wrong. You're definitely not yourself without a death fantasy for everything that does go wrong.

You don't need the pills anymore, says your brain. You never needed them in the first place.

These are the lies and half-truths you will tell yourself after a month on crazy pills, and no one ever said a word of warning to me about it. Don't listen to your jerkbrain. Stay on your meds. Adjust them if necessary. Talk to your people. Your people are there to help you, and they want you to be well. Your brain is fighting you because it's terrified. Keep fighting back. Show it that a pill or two isn't going to best you; it's going to better you.

I'm telling you this because I need to be told this. Maybe you do, too. Maybe when it gets to that dark place, we can tell each other.

Damseling Amy Acker

Am I the only person who thought "the Cellist" would end up some Level 11 S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, or CIA or something? When I heard Amy Acker was playing her I was sure of it. And they fucking damseled her. A better actor than all the actors on the show combined (and that includes you, Paxton. Please do chew scenery in every mediocre series on television, because you are a joy to behold, but we both know Acker is a rare and glorious specimen) and they damseled her.

This woman does Shakespeare! This woman can play anyone. And you, Jed Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen, fucking damseled her. Write more musicals and fuck off with this shit. I am disappointed in you.

Next week Adrian Pasdar will return with his ridiculous lip caterpillar. I hope there's a scene where he rips it off while cocking his brow and saying something hilarious. This will not happen because Whedon the Younger and Tancharoen fucking suck right now.

How could you waste Amy Acker like that? God damn it.

Blahg

I guess I took January off from blogging. Whatever. If anybody read this thing, maybe they would have reminded me to post every once in a while. That's right, Nonexistent Reader, it is YOUR fault.

Maybe one of these days I'll give a fuck again and post something of substance.

Gaslight!

No, you're not crazy. I did remove the previous post. I am going to work on it and re-post it in a few days. The blog format makes it tempting just to put things out there without thinking them through. The post needs tweaking, and I should not have published it as it was.

No Nanowrimo This Year

As you may have noticed, this blog started out several years ago as a Nanowrimo blog. However, I have managed to fail every attempt I have made at this event, and have determined that I am no good at it. So, no Nano this year. My self-esteem just can't take another failure.

Lady Popular's Biggest Crime...

...Is that it is frightfully boring. After reading John Walker's review of Lady Popular, I had to give it a try myself. The game is exactly as Walker described it, down to my sexy new boyfriend Car washer. He's kind of a hottie. Got that greasy blue-collar wage slave thing going for him. But he only gives me $50 per week, and that is not nearly enough money to pay for this cute little $4900 shirt I found at The Mall.

I love playing Avatar Dress-Up. If items of clothing have useful or magical properties in a game, I like to put together special outfits for specific missions. My XBox avatar changes clothes every few months. I dress my Rock Band avatar for every city my band Piss Bat plays. It's just fun, and I think a lot of that fun is having the freedom to make the avatar look any way one chooses. Because my head is lumpy, I probably shouldn't wear a Toxie-green Mohawk, but my Fallout character looks great in a 'hawk.

Lady Popular does not give the player that kind of freedom. The game dictates what kind of hairstyle the player should get in order to level up. So, even though the Hair Stylist has a huge selection of styles from which to choose, to get ahead the player has to conform to the game's idea of how one's avatar should look. Boring, boring, boring.

Now, a case could be made that the game teaches young girls about color and style, much like a more straightforward educational game might tell the player to pick a square or a triangle from a list of shapes. But the game dictates other things that should be the player's choice, like my boyfriend Car washer. Nothing against the guy; like I said, he's adorable, but wouldn't it be more fun to flirt with different people at The Club? (And if the game actually is for girls young enough to need to be taught color, why does the character have to go to a meat market to find a date for the party? I am pretty liberal most of the time, but five-year-old kids just should not be dating.)

Wouldn't it be more interesting to make seducing a date for the party part of the game? All I did was click a button, and BAM! Car washer and I were an item. That's no fun. I don't know anything about him, except for his occupation, and he knows nothing about me, except that I look totally smokin' in these new jeans I got at The Mall.

Which brings me to another reason this game is so boring. Lady Popular is supposed to be a social game--the Lady goes to school to train for a job, she dances and flirts at The Club, etc.--but nowhere is there a character sheet with XP to allocate. A Lady with high Endurance, for example, could dance longer at The Club, and a Lady with high Barter could get better deals on items at The Mall. Instead, every Lady is exactly the same as every other Lady. Dullsville for sure.

So, I played as far as Level 2 and then went back to Dead Island, where there are no wardrobe changes for Xian Mei, but where I can live out my zombie apocalypse fantasies in a safe environment.

Off to a fantastic start

Remember what I said about flaking right out as soon as I make a commitment to something? Yeah. It turns out that Mondays are terrible for doing anything except finishing up my schoolwork for the week. Wednesdays are a little bit better, except that initial discussion posts are due on Thursdays, so I have to make sure to do all my reading before then. Fridays are fine. Probably I should have been writing on Fridays up until now, but then I just felt embarrassed because I hadn't posted anything on Monday or Wednesday.

Anyway, that's the deal. I am going to come up with a better plan, and try to implement it next week.