1. Hell and Back: This article, by a reporter in New Orleans who continues to report on the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, details his descent into a massive depression when he didn't even believe depression was a real thing. Incredible piece of writing, and so much of it is so similar to my own experience. Via dooce, who also writes great stuff on this topic.

2. My moods continue to fluctuate between Normal and Dark, and the afore-mentioned article gave me a much-needed jolt, so I've been starting to take this a bit more seriously. Before I was just frustrated. Now I'm a bit more motivated to fight this sucker. I've been doing inventories of what's stressing me out and what I can and can't do about those factors right now, and why I don't need to worry about them. For example: my student loans are coming due at the end of November, and I'm making so little income that the payments would be over one third of my income. But, I have applied for interest-free status and will likely be approved due to said low income. So, I shall wait and not worry. (Except that I am very good at worrying, and rather poor at waiting.)

3. My hands and wrists continue to ache, but the pain has certainly lessened in the last week. I have been avoiding typing in the evening, avoiding unnecessary typing at work, improving my desk set-up to be more ergonomic, doing stretches, and wearing wrist braces at night to avoid inadvertently putting my wrists in stressful positions while I sleep. I'm still on a quasi-break from the blog though, hoping to get rid of the pain altogether.

4. I went to a Leafs/Sens game (see?). I had no idea the Leafs sucked so much. It was entertaining in a self-deprecating sort of way.

5. I actually beat Chris at pool last night. Such flukes must be commemorated and celebrated annually. Perhaps I will make myself a medal and wear it constantly, just to remind him of that one time when he got beaten by a crippled girl who really sucks at pool. (He went on to beat me twice after that, but really—that's just a return to the natural state of things, given that he's been in a pool league all year and I have played less than 20 times in my life. What is remarkable about that?)

My hands and wrists have been hurting a lot lately, and I think I'm getting an RSI from a combination of typing too much and crocheting on top of it (same muscles/tendons). So, I'm going to try to limit my after-work computer usage for a while. No blogging, MSN, etc., until I get this thing under control. I just woke up and they still hurt, which is not a good sign. It hasn't progressed to a stage of waking me up with pain yet. I'd like to avoid that.

Books and conversation will be much kinder to me, I think.

I'm currently reading Brave New World Revisited, and in the chapter on over-population, Aldous Huxley writes that

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

Funny how he could sum up the problems with the War on Terror, Drugs, Whatever way back in the 50s. Funny how we haven't learned a thing since then and we're just skipping merrily along the path to dictatorship. It seems like our governments always tend towards dictatorship. Whether they start out as kingdoms or socialism or capitalist democracy, eventually someone seizes control of the money and the media, and we're stuck with King Bush for 8 years with dubious elections and people with indefinite imprisonment and no charges in Gitmo. People just disappear, the phone companies hand over all your "confidential" records to the CIA, anti-war demonstrations are limited by the government and accomplish NOTHING, and I wonder how long it will take for the masses to find this alarming. Sure, there are some people talking about it, but I don't have any sense that anyone knows how to fix this or where to go from here. Don't vote for Bush, sure, but it's not like you have any shining alternatives.

And I don't know how far down this path Canada has gone. I feel like we're not quite as bad, but then you see the government apologizing for the Maher Arar case, but not punishing anyone involved with sending him to be tortured, let alone firing anyone. People responsible for that have been promoted. And what can we do about it? I'm sure as elections approach we'll get lots of shiny promises, but that rarely translates into actual action.

I feel the responsibility to vote, but gosh would I ever like to feel like it meant something.

I took Christopher and Agnieska to a few sets of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word on Saturday ("Baby, it's poetry, yes, but it's poetry by lesbians") and.... he liked it. Sandra Alland, who I try to see whenever I hear that she's doing a reading, was there and was excellent. Besides the Queer set, there was an African-Canadian set and a Nerd Poetry set. The Nerd Poetry set was UNBELIEVABLE. It had us laughing until there was tears. Mike Bryant did a side-splitting hiphop piece about knitting that has had Chris and I looking at each other and muttering "Knitta, please" all week long. And then we went for sushi with Agnes and I teased Christopher mercilessly because HE LIKED THE POETRY AND HE COULD NOT DENY IT.



Oh, and we went to see Badly Drawn Boy with Matthew (of the Barton clan), Matthew who still owes me breakfast (since last spring!!). Concert photos here.

I've taken a second job transcribing interviews for a TV show. I am working at being speedy so that the pay isn't so bad. Note: it takes a god-awful long time to transcribe things, much longer than you anticipate. $30 per half hour transcribed sounds pretty good until you realise that that's TOPS $20/hour. That's if you're lucky (lots of stumbling sentences where you don't have to transcribe all the mistakes) and super speedy. We'll see how long I decide to keep this up. My first transcribed half hour of tape took me 2.5 hours. Boo-urns. But I am getting speedier, as I shed my linguistic transcription past and stop caring about accuracy and start transcribing what people MEANT to say, instead of what they really said.

i.e. Well, the thing that I- what I meant to say was, was that I really, well, I like you. = Well the thing I meant to say was that I really like you.

I'm sitting alone on a Friday night drinking foreign alcohol. There are two kitties here with me, kitties who greeted me this morning by batting around a cellphone, a cellphone which was loose on the floor only because they had CHOMPED the cord connecting it to the charger into THREE PIECES. They're lucky there isn't much of a charge on that cord. Them kitties don't know that electricity plays ROUGH.

I'm making friends with a coworker. We are bonding over agnosticism and our shared indigation with Dictator Bush (THE SELF-PROCLAIMED DECIDER). He who reunites church and state, he who talks about people using religion to start wars without any sense of irony, he who uses an awfully redneck accent for someone who grew up the son of an oil baron and went to Yale.

So, I still want to write a book. But the things is, I don't think that writing books is any way to make money. So I still have to think about what I want to do for a job. If I became a receptionist or something, I would have plenty of free time to think about book things. If I became an editor, it would be more challenging but wouldn't necessarily leave time for thinking about books.

I was talking to Cat today at lunch about how we're brilliant girls, so we should have Career Goals. But we don't. We just like school and ideas and reading interesting papers. And sometimes we shy away from PhDs because we find the idea of such isolation daunting. But we are smart! So we feel a responsibility to go forth and do something amazing, until we realise that we have no idea what the hell to do with our lives. Can't we stay in school where people tell us we're great all the time? No? Well, shit.

I wish I was still taking syntax. I still think about it a lot, still wonder why certain sentences work the way they do. Like, the other day, this jumped out at me:

I never go there.
*I not ever go there.
I do not ever go there.
*I do never go there.

(* means that the sentence doesn't work.)

Strange that do-support would interfere with the 'never'/'not ever' thing, and strange that 'never' and 'not ever' are not quite the same thing. Well, strange to me. The rest of you don't care. Me, I've been resisting the urge to draw sentence trees for all of those examples and figure out what exactly is going on. And I've been resisting emailing my old syntax prof about it, because she will just tell me to get my ass into grad school.

But I keep wondering about it, because syntax is like a HUGE sudoku puzzle that is all around you and sometimes you can figure out one little square, but the thing is massive and three-dimensional and it ain't never gonna be done. And to my brain, that spells FUN! That's strange to Christopher (He Who Never Wants To See Another Sentence Tree In His Life), especially when I get distracted in the middle of a conversation and start looking all thoughtful and he thinks I'm thinking about, you know, what we were talking about, but I'm really thinking about a sentence he just said and wondering how it works.

Not that I do that. Often.

So, I've been getting mood swings lately and it's been driving me nuts. I've been wondering if my depression is coming back. I've been irritable, I have days where I have no drive to do anything, and I have found inexplicable reasons to be grumpy about anything and everything. I also have weeks where I am inexplicably positive and happy and the whole world is beautiful, and I can feel my mood changing between Dark and Bright, and I have no control over it and I don't like that feeling. It's creepy. Plus, due to my birth control my periods are not on-schedule at all, so I can't track that cycle with any reliability, and thus never know why my brain is stubbornly happy or frustrated that particular week.

So last night, I'm sitting there in a funk and realising that I've been irritated at Chris for little things all week and I haven't said anything about it because I don't trust myself to be irritable for a rational reason. Because, you know how there are those stupid guys who assume that every time a woman is upset it's because she has PMS and she just needs to shut up and eat some chocolate/salt because women don't have legitimate concerns, they just have mood swings? Yeah, that guy is in my head. I can't tell if I'm upset because there are legitimate things to be irritated about or if I'm just Little Miss Hormonal. I can't tell if I'm going into depression again or if it's That Time of the Month.

So, Chris and I were talking last night about how I was feeling, and I was frustrated and absolutely not wanting to go out and be social, and he was getting concerned about me and saying that if this keeps up, he wants me to go to the doctor and make sure that everything is okay. But this morning, menstruation. So of course, everything is fine, because it's normal to feel like a trainwreck once a month.

Because being a girl can feel exactly like that, every stupid month. It can feel like you're going crazy, like you're off your meds, like you're sinking into a black cloud that you're not going to pull out of. And I can't help but suspect that if male biology worked like this, there would be a solution for it already, and it wouldn't be relegated to the somewhat sketchy "herbal" section of the health food stores.

I get to spend the next few months watching my stress level, considering switching birth control, and thinking about whether or not this is "just" hormones or actual depression. Fun, eh?

I'm a fan of the do-it-yourself movement and I'm cheap to boot, so here's a short list of tips on how to cut your hair yourself instead of going to some fancypants salon that will charge you double or triple just because you have girly bits instead of boy parts (as if the contents of your pants has anything to do with it!*):

1. Summon your courage! I'll be the first to admit that this is easier if you have curly/wavy hair which does not require straight cutting. Not only does crooked cutting not show when curly hair is dry, a straight cut is actually not a great choice for this hair type.

2. Want layers? Hair long enough for a ponytail? Easy. With your head upside down, make a ponytail on the very top of your head (or a bit lower if you want less drastic layers). I like to tie one elastic close to the head, and another closer to where I want to cut. Tied like this, it will look like you have layers already, because the hair from the top of your head will be much longer than the hair from the bottom of your head. These things happen when your head is upside down. Cut it evenly and the opposite will happen — when your hair is down, the higher hair will not fall as far as the lower hair. That's all there is to layers, really. Also, if you are of the curly-headed persuasion, layers are a very good idea if you want to avoid the triangle-head look.

3. Cutting curly hair: DO NOT CUT IT STRAIGHT ACROSS. Bad. Curly hair does not hang straight down, let's not pretend that it does. I know your hairdresser always does it that way, but it's incorrect and unhelpful. So here's how we're going to do things: Get your hair wet, grab a curl, and cut the end of it. Curls don't all need to be the same length (see point 2). Curls form naturally and have a habit of forming in the same places, so treat them as separate units. Straight hair is all one unit, curly hair is multiple units. They don't fall the same way, they shouldn't be cut the same way. If you can find a hairdresser who understands this, you have been blessed by the universe, as they are very rare.

4. Cut conservatively. You can always cut more, but it takes damn near forever to grow more. Conversely, see point 1.

5. Wait until you're relaxed, you've got a night off, and you've got some private time so you don't have to worry about some crazy roommate asking you incredulously what you think you're doing. Think about what you want to do. Maybe read some DIY forums about how to cut different styles. Be willing to try things!

6. Treat yourself to some ice cream with the money you saved. (This step is crucial for a truly good haircut.)

*Note: I know, boys tend to have shorter hair. However, I find it a million times easier to cut girl hair. But you argue, some girls have more difficult haircuts. Then again, some boys and girls have the same haircut. So why aren't we charged based on our haircut preference instead of our genitalia? Because hairdressers are thieves, that's why, and that's why I've cut my own damn hair for the past two years.

Chris took this photo the other day in Grange Park, one of my absolute favourite places in the city. My hair hasn't been this long since early early high school, it's a little odd. But every time I mention that I'm thinking about cutting it, my friends protest that they like it this way. I still think I'm going to cut it soon. Just not TOO much.

So, I haven't been updating this very often lately, and I'll tell you why that is. If you were to call me on the phone lately and ask me how things are going, I would talk to you about work. Now, I might be awfully open on this blog, but I'm not completely unaware of the consequences of that, so:

I don't blog about work.

A lot of my life right now revolves around my job and preparations to move in with Chris in January, and I don't feel like blogging about either of those things. I finished reading The Writing Life and I'm still mulling over a lot of passages in it. Now I'm reading Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (it gets emailed to me in chunks by DailyLit — awesome!) and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan.

Funny conversation of the week:
Chris (to one of his cats): What's the word on the street, Metro?
Me: Baby, why don't you ever ask Dune what the word on the street is?
Chris: Dune doesn't know, dear.

All in all, I've really been enjoying the fall weather the past few weeks. The air is crisp, the leaves are getting colourful and they smell great, there's lots of squash in the markets, and I'm starting to get out all my favourite sweaters that I haven't worn for months. I've been craving root vegetables and soup.