Month: September 2005

OK, I’ve finally figured out what’s been going on for the last few months. Why I haven’t had the energy to do much (including emailing people and making weblog entries), why work has been such a drag, why even getting out of bed in the mornings takes a major effort. I’m depressed damnit!

Now, that may not seem like particularly good news – but actually it is. Up until a few days ago I felt like my entire life was in the toilet, which isn’t much fun. Today I still feel like my entire life is in the toilet, but I know that it’s because some neurotransmitters in my brain are malfunctioning as opposed to my entire life actually being in the toilet. And I know that those neurotransmitters can be fixed. So I have that most precious of luxuries, hope. Which at least makes it a little easier to crawl out of bed each day 🙂

So it’s Saint John’s Wort, healthier food and more exercise until I pull myself out of it.

I could go to the doctor’s and get some SSRIs (that’s Selective Seretonin Re-uptake Inhibitors in case you’re wondering – better known as Prozac) I suppose, but the last time I did that (back in 1999) it pretty much scuppered my brain. Oh, I felt a lot better, sure, but my IQ seemed to drop by about 40 points and I couldn’t write anything to save my soul (the main reason regular updates to the Tales of the Geek Underclass stopped so suddenly) or code. So I stopped taking it and’ve been fine even since. I’m hoping the Saint John’s Wort and other measures will have the same effect without turning me into a lobotomised drone, otherwise I may have to go back onto the pills for a while. Which would suck, but what price mental health?

So, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s my excuse 🙂

In other news England have won the Ashes for the first time in about a billion years. Well done to them. The mainstream press seems to be treating this as a disaster on the scale of New Orleans, but frankly we’ve had it coming for ages. Anyway, anything that annoys Shane bloody Warne is fine by me (I’ll await deportation for un-Australian activities shortly shall I? 🙂

Personally (in addition to mainlining herbal medicine) I’m rewatching Season One of Battlestar Galactica. I went into town on Friday night intending to buy a DVD of Firefly but couldn’t find one, so I bought Galactica instead. It’s just as good the second time around, which is to say utterly fantastic. I haven’t got all the way through yet, but I’m enjoying it immensely – probably way too much actually since I find myself with a strange desire to call people who annoy me ‘toasters’ to their faces and to mutter things under my breath about the Lords of COBOL (maybe you say they spell it with a ‘K’, maybe I say they spell it wrong 🙂

I also indulged myself in a DVD copy of Resurrection of the Daleks which is famous for being the most violent Dr Who story ever recorded, reputedly featuring more on screen deaths than The Terminator. Sadly I neglected to start counting until the last episode, but in that 23 minutes or so there were at least 16 on screen shootings and/or blowing-ups (only counting humans, you could boost the figures a fair bit by adding in exploding Daleks) which averages out at almost 0.7 violent deaths per minute (or in other words great entertainment value! *g*). If the same figure applies for the other three epsiodes (which to be honest it probably doesn’t but still) then we’re looking at a total body count of over 60 people! Mary Whitehouse must have had kittens.

Anyway, I’d better go and watch some more of the milkiest Battlestar of all! (linguistic joke, don’t be ashamed you didn’t get it – in fact you should be proud 🙂

Bah!