No Post Day | Rescue Challenge

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Gabriel...


There’s a YouTube here of The Bellamy Brothers. If you can’t see it please
reload, then contact Google and tell them to stop being evil.

This No Post day is a little different… instead of me asking questions this is more of a request to help other bloggers who might not even know they need some.

I keep a fairly large number of blogs in my public and private blogrolls which have been abruptly abandoned (see blogroll: 999 M.I.A.), and I like to occasionally check on them just to see if there has been any recent updates or signs of life.

I found a blog in my private blogroll a few nights ago — Fluffy Pink Clouds — I hadn’t been to in quite a few months. When I did visit, the last entry was dated December 1, 2008, and was a not very subtle threat of suicide.

When I find a blog kept by someone trying to recover from a mental illness who is having difficulties, I try to leave a few links to blogs I believe could help them, along with a few words of support. FPC had difficulties with depression and self-harm, for example, so I left links to Patient Anonymous and Seaneen.

I’m still not sure how responsible we’re supposed to be for each other, or how far that responsibility should extend. I’ve written before about our collective responsibility to each other, but only after we’ve taken care of ourselves.

So what I’m requesting on this strangest of No Post Days is for whoever is interested in participating to go through their blogroll this weekend and see if anyone needs a little help.

I don’t think this should be restricted to people we have a previous relationship with… so if you’ve got a short blogroll, use someone else’s.

Drop a link to a cool or funny video, maybe to something like the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, or to a site which helped you, and maybe to a blog kept by someone who has dealt with similar problems. And a few words of support. If you want to do it anonymously, just log out of your WordPress account.

Just find someone who is having a hard time and let them know they’re not alone.

.

...thanks.

.

Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Health, No Post Day | 5 Comments

Symptoms Probably Symptomatic Of Nothing And Some Links You Need To Blog Safely

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Gabriel...

I feel like I have a head injury. I think it’s from lack of sleep. For the past ten days there’s been an intermittent soft throbbing on the right side of my thinking tool, and a general pressure everywhere else.

If I could think properly I’d blame it on Christmas.

The Christmas season always messes with my sleeping patterns. One or two events a week I can handle, but constantly having to be somewhere and then somewhere else six hours later drains my energy levels to the point where I start talking about energy levels.

It always seems like Christmas punches a three week hole into whatever routine I’ve built up to that point, which somehow carries on afterwards… even if I manage to almost catch up. I missed a couple of recycling days around Christmas, then basically got caught up and yet now I’ve got almost three weeks of recycling on my kitchen floor.

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Posted in Bipolar, Christmas, crazy people with no pants, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Privacy Issues | 13 Comments

Old Post Day | kicking at the darkness

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Gabriel...

This is something I’ve been planning for a few months. The basic problem with blogs is the more you write, the more gets left behind in the archives. So a few times a month I’m going to leave excerpts from my original posts which I think can really help people who are just starting out on their recovery, then link them to the original so maybe someone can also find something useful in the original discussions.

For this inaugural Old Post Day I’ve chosen one of the very first pieces I ever wrote about manic depression, it was originally posted on November 18, 2006. The title is a line from “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”, a song by Bruce Cockburn…

“kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight”

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Health, Manic Depression, Old Post Day | 8 Comments

Tweet Tweet I Want To Kill Your Children LOL

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Gabriel...

There’s almost a wilful blindness when it comes to the Internet and the technology surrounding it.

Of course most people don’t even understand that their name, address and phone number are stored and available for free online in an easily searchable format. If you’re in the phonebook, your numbers are on the web.
“Killing Time With Tech And The Things You Really Need To Know About Your Online Privacy”, Me; May 28, 2008.

I just had to prove that my fucking daughter was all right because some “person” who has never met me, barely exchanged any words with me, couldn’t stop for a minute and think, gee, perhaps she’s like many other mothers, annoyed at bedtime. She couldn’t stop and think, hmmm, an email might suffice.
“Watch what you twitter, big sister is watching.”; Thordora

“if I smother my 3 year old, who will NOT GO TO FUCKING SLEEP, is it REALLY a crime?”
The “tweet” in question. Notice the punctuation and question with an obvious answer, and the word “if”. At no time in this statement does Thordora threaten her children. It’s a type of humour called “absurdism” which makes an exaggerated claim to make a point about something else… Thordora is saying she is tired.

Absurdism: An act or instance of the ridiculous. “True absurdism is not less but more real than reality” (John Simon). A philosophy based on the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe. Distinctively Absurdist language will range from meaningless clichés to Vaudeville-style word play to meaningless nonsense.
Taken from merriam-webster.com, Answers.com and Wikipedia.

Tara Gerner-Ziegmont

Because of a misunderstanding on a social networking site a friend of mine had to explain to police she hadn’t harmed or killed her kids.

My friend, Thordora, posted a comment to her Twitter account. She was tired, fed up with her kids bedtime rituals and joked about “smothering” them.

After a series of convoluted events a woman named Tara, who lives in Pennsylvania, used “tweets” on her Twitter account to contact a complete stranger in Los Angeles, who somehow managed to convince the police near Thordora’s home there was imminent danger to Thor’s kids.

This is what happens when two strangers who are naive about the technology they’re using collide. Thor, for a minute, believed everyone reading her “tweet” would understand her. Tara thought it was her responsibility to get her Twitter “community” hard at work finding Thor — ultimately slandering Thor’s name up and down the Twitter world.

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Posted in Bipolar, crazy people with no pants, Health, Privacy Issues, Technology | 32 Comments

Looking Back Glancing Sideways And Resolving To Keep Moving Forward

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Gabriel...

So this is what I know after another year in recovery… fighting the disease comes first. But then there’s the neglected clinical depressions and the neglected body. The clinical depressions can be talked into submission with a decent psychiatrist, but the neglected body needs more than better food and not drinking and/or smoking. It needs blood tests and visits to a General Practitioner every three months, and visits to a dentist.
“An Update On My Recovery Progress…”, Me; May 11, 2008.

A New Year’s Resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a project or the reforming of a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous. The name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day and remain until fulfilled or abandoned.
New Year’s Resolution; Wikipedia.

Resolution: a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner.
Definition: Resolution; WordReference.com.

“Life is full of obstacles – the street, dope, prostitution, etc. When you feel like you just can’t go on anymore, let someone else take you by the hand and point you in the right direction. Give yourself time and don’t give up hope.”
Text left on the wall of “Dans la rue”, a Montreal shelter for street kids.

The year of 2008 started off with teeth being pulled from my face and a diagnosis of type two diabetes, so anything short of being attacked by rage infested monkeys was going to be an improvement.

But it did improve, in very real and substantive ways. Over the course of the year I learned how to pay my bills on time, and haven’t missed any of them in seven… maybe eight months; I started to seriously confront the clinical depressions which have hurt me for so long; I started to go grey, which hasn’t sucked; I’m eating healthy, and; for the first time ever I had my parents over for dinner.

I also started riding a bike again; I got checked out at a sleep clinic; I only missed one appointment with my psychiatrist… maybe two; I only missed four… maybe five doses of my meds all year; I voted; my sleeping patterns are under control; I celebrated my birthday, as well as the second anniversary of my blogs, and; enough people voted for me that I came in fourth as Canada’s Best Health Blog.

Even with all of the emotions surfacing from my work on the clinical depressions, and the crap I had to deal with to get the diabetes under control, and the teeth being pulled from my face, this actually turned into one of my favourite years. I’m not sure if that would still have been the case if I had any investments… but I don’t, so… I guess that’s one more check on the “good news for me” side of the ledger. Score.

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Posted in Bipolar, BiPolar Christmas, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Clinical Depression, crazy people with no pants, Family, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Year In Review | 22 Comments

No Post Day | Getting Gave Got

Posted on December 25, 2008 by Gabriel...

“Despite a commonly held myth that the Christmas season has the highest suicide rate of all the seasons, studies have proven that across North America, suicide rates are actually lower at that time of year. Studies suggest that while the holidays can bring up some very difficult emotions, they also tend to evoke feelings of familial bonds and these feelings may act as a buffer against suicide.”
The Canadian Mental Health Association


There’s a YouTube here of Billy Idol. If you can’t see it please reload,
then contact Google and tell them to stop being evil.

We’ve had a lot of different Christmas traditions in my family. They actually seem to change every five years.

When we actually started to celebrate Christmas on the day itself we would travel into the mountains to my grandfather’s “hobby farm”. We’d go skiing, visit with the neighbours — one of whom was a girl I had a crush on from when I was about seven until… well, it technically hasn’t stopped yet.

We’d kill a tree, decorate it and when my brother and I woke up there’d be presents and bacon.

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Posted in Bipolar, BiPolar Christmas, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Christmas, crazy people with no pants, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Mental Health, No Post Day, Old men in red suits | 15 Comments