Cleolinda everywhere

First of all! In order to lock in better fee rates, I've gone ahead and launched a low-key tip jar Patreon; I also have a Ko-fi page for one-time tips. Once I've counted my spoons and gotten back into the swing of things, I may add other/higher tiers. Right now, it's a single $1 tier, because I'd rather be able to use my Patreon as a de facto homepage/newsletter where you can see where and what I've posted. The first thing I'm looking at is adding voice posts (short; not excruciating podcast-length), and, in fact, I may record this entry as a voice post. I think it might help to hear the "ayyy, it is what it is" tone of my voice while I discuss health setbacks. Because, believe it or not, while I am dragging my achy carcass around the house, I still feel a lot better now than I have in a long while.

 
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Content notes: We're going to discuss a couple of media portrayals of suicide, as well as the suicidal ideation I'm seeing out there in fandom, and similar thoughts I have experienced in the course of my own bipolar depression. I'm not used to discussing anything this raw, so, here's hoping we do okay with this. Please take care of yourselves.

Oh, and spoilers for The Magicians.


I'm going to try to write this out of love as well as anger.

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@cleolinda: ICYMI: An overstuffed #Hannibal 2x05 "Mukozuke" recap (rewatch?)

@cleolinda: Stayed up until 2 am outlining the next recap. Caffeine is great, I can hear colors

@osheamobile: cleo no

@cleolinda: CLEO YES

So yeah, a year later, I finally Finished A Thing. Not to get unduly behind-the-scenes about the process, but I picked at it on and off for that entire actual year, finally vastly revising and rewriting it over the last week or two. I've always had this tautological kind of thing going where the longer it takes to finish something, the longer it takes. Like, there is this diminishing-returns quality of slowing down exponentially as time slips past me. So I'm trying to recap "Futamono" as--let's say, pro-actively as possible, rather than get sucked into that undertow again. At this point, I've got it outlined with initial thoughts, all the pictures laid out, and all the livetweeting worked in (there wasn't very much that week, apparently); now I get to hit the transcript and a few interviews.

I'm still retraining my brain to sentence the words real nice after a year of medication adjustments; that numbered list of Swimming Pool Symbology was originally a swamp of scattered paragraphs. (This right here is my third start-from-scratch attempt at a follow-up entry, in fact.) I personally think the recap turned out well, but that then means I have to go from something I fiddled with for a year to something I'd like to finish in less than a week. Thank God it's spring, at least.

As a side note, it's extra fun recapping the season two episodes and seeing where we got the eyeshadow concepts from. "Mukozuke" actually didn't have any, but we had some good ones for the first four episodes:

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It's funny, though, because I tried multiple times to catch up on my sleep today and couldn't. (And I woke up naturally at 6:30 am, after only four hours of sleep.) It doesn't quite feel like mania, but it's something. I'm aware that a burnout is very possible in the near future, but if I don't finish the season by June 4, that's fine, and I really have been looking forward to writing up "Futamono" and "Yakimono." So maybe I can make some hay while the proverbial sun shines.


OH--here's what I meant to say--I need to set aside an hour or two to go hang out in the recap comments, but I've been trying to keep moving forward instead of checking on them constantly. But I'll be checking in at some point.

Okay, I have nearly posted this entry like four different times, then held back for some reason, then needed to update it again, and it's finally turned into this mulch pile of an entry that I keep turning over every couple of days. IT NEEDS TO BE POSTED.

So. Doing somewhat better. Blood pressure is still a little high but nearly normal, after an initial week of self-imposed semi-bed-rest. (I gave up on trying to answer the comments on the previous entry, but thanks for your good thoughts, guys.) The day after that med check that I mentioned, when hypertension came up as a possible cause of my constant headaches, I stayed in bed and the headaches vanished. I've only them on the few rainy days since (which is normal for me). It took a while, and I'm still having to keep a pretty sharp eye on it, but I don't think I'm going to have to go on medication for it. Honestly, I spent the whole week until the GP visit being really anxious, but rationally anxious, like, how bad off am I, exactly? So, scared and a little sad, even.

And now, I think I've gone into a manic upswing, which means that I'm calm and rational, sure, but I can't focus. I'm having a really hard time maintaining a coherent train of thought; my thoughts actively wander, if that makes any sense. Like, to the point where it's difficult to read, the way it's difficult to get through a really dry text at 11 pm when you're supposed to have read it for class the next day, you know? It's like a mental dizziness, not a physical one. I had good ideas on Saturday, then was super productive on Sunday, and then it just all fell apart on Monday. (I had such a good idea for the book on Sunday, almost something of a game-changer, that I'm concerned it's just the mania talking and I'm going to do all this work on it and then sit here next Monday and wonder what the hell I was thinking.) I know, too, that I'm more liable to be cranky or lose my temper when I'm manic, and... that's not good for my blood pressure. Like, maybe I just need to not talk to people, any of them, at all, until this passes. But I digress. Mostly I'm managing it with, like, lavender and lemongrass-based BPAL blends, chamomile tea, and a glass of wine at night. The combination of my actual antidepressants was so difficult--painful, even--to get to a comfortable balance that, if adding on simple things like tea and aromatherapy are enough to settle me down for the week or two I need it--well, screwing with that is not something I would do lightly.

Here. Have a corgi being vacuumed.

Podcasts and TV shows I did (and, uh, did not) catch up on: ( Read more... )

1) Bella Swan: vampiring better than you since *checks watch* 2008. This is the same teaser that ran in front of The Hunger Games, so you may have already seen it (stop poaching Katniss's deer, BELLA). ( Read more... )

2) Meanwhile, shit got real: The Hunger Games' box office crushes the Twilight movies. All of them.

3) I seem to have hit a hypomanic upswing; mine, as I've explained before, are pretty mild. The only thing someone would really notice from the outside is that I'm a bit more upbeat, enthusiastic, and talkative--but when a movie I've really been looking forward to comes out, that doesn't seem out of place. (Honestly, I've started wondering--as I've said before--if you can trigger manic moods. If nothing else, I think it suddenly being SUMMER IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH gave me an overdose of natural light, and that may have caused it as well. As I recall, my most pronounced upswings are almost always in the spring and summer.) Otherwise, I'm outwardly calm, but as I've gotten older, I've been edging further and further into mild mania, and the happy creative bursts have been "evolving" into something less comfortable. The upside at the lower hypomanic end is that I feel happy and creative (verging on hypergraphic); at the high, verging-on-manic end, I feel overcaffeinated, impatient, and irritable, I have all these ideas but I can't concentrate or focus, I have a hard time sleeping, and I don't want to eat. I have a sample of BPAL's Safari blend, and a dab on the back of each hand (so I can smell it while I'm typing) seems to have centered me a bit. Once I was able to actually focus, I got 1600 words written in a couple of hours last night (there's your hypergraphia), but it took me all day to be able to concentrate that long.

On the other hand, you get wackadoo flights of fancy like the mandatory Panem TV schedule, and like this:

@cleolinda: WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING RT @NikkiFinke: Hugh Dancy To Star In NBC Series ‘Hannibal’

@cleolinda: Look, save some time. Modern-day Sherlock Holmes hunts Hannibal Lecter. In a dystopia. With a vampire. An alien vampire.

@cleolinda: The alien vampire is on the run from a beauty pageant to the death. Also, Sherlock is a werewolf. His brother is a steampunk faerie.

@writingfreak88: No alien ninja turtles?

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So I went in for my quarterly med check three months ago, and about a week later had some long-postponed-because-ehhhhhh bloodwork done. Yesterday I went in for another quarterly check and finally bothered to find out what the results were--my psych had mailed me a copy of the results, but I just... well. I was anxious about it, I was afraid to find out, and I figured that if I was dying, someone would probably tell me. No thyroid issues, my blood sugar was (surprisingly) okay, no diabetes, something something blood count something MCHC low, my good and bad cholesterols were a little out of whack but that's probably the American way--

"Wait, blood count? That means--anemia?"( Read more... )

I have been struggling with a severe downturn. I think what's happening is that we're getting into the seasonal depression... uh... season. And then there was the ice this week (we're still shoveling it off the deck; it's too thick to melt enough on its own). I mean, maybe it's natural to be sluggish when it's 18 degrees outside. Even though the days are getting longer from mid-December on out, the lack of sunlight catches up with you about now. And I usually get depressed just after Christmas and my birthday anyway. I tried to put together a linkspam post four days ago, and I just couldn't ever get it finished. I can get on Twitter to hit a simple "retweet" button and feel like that's the next best thing, for short bursts of sociability. It's hard to explain how you can bob to the surface, perfectly cheerful for a little while, or giddy about this or that little geek-interest thing, and then sink back under for hours of brooding. The thing about depression is that you can often keep up appearances in front of other people. Sometimes I think that depression is almost a separate, sentient organism, and it works hard to protect itself--it wants to make sure you don't believe in it, that you think you're miserable because you're a miserable person who deserves it, not because you have uncooperative brain chemistry. It wants to make sure you cover for it, you convince people that you're fine. It has its own priorities and best interests, a sense of self-preservation, and the self it wants to preserve is not you.

I've been trying to write. That actually went pretty well for a couple of days, except that people kept interrupting and pulling me away to do this or that just as I was getting somewhere. So instead, I went back to reading--non-fiction, which is why I haven't mentioned it; I might do a quick writeup on a few books at once. It's the kind of thing I take notes on while I read and come up with new characters or plot additions for Black Ribbon; a lot of it is to get details for high-society scenes or help me get a grip on the international political situation circa 1889. I think I'm going to be doing this mix of real names and fictionalized characters; I'm okay with dropping the name of a real person, but much more interaction than that, and I start to feel weird. Maybe you'll be able to tell who it's meant to be, maybe not. Because the thing is, Black Ribbon isn't a wildly alternate universe, though it looks like some historical elements are going to be accelerated a little bit. Major anarchist activity is going to start about four or five years early (uh. That is maybe giving something away), and we're going to have some technological developments happen 5-10 years early. In a weird way, I think I feel more anxious about getting away with this because the story world isn't wildly different. If I were just going to do outright fantastical steampunk with the airship pirates and whatnot, I don't think anyone would call me on discrepancies, because they'd know it would be pointless. But what I'm doing now is close enough that people are going to think I meant to be historically accurate, but internets, let them tell me, I am WRONG. I guess the solution is to put in a few Wildly Different elements to signal that. I was hoping that a mechanical peacock in the first chapter would suffice, but maybe not. I guess the only thing to do is write it and see. The only way out is forward.

I know I'm behind on Varney and Secret Life, but... just... nothing. I actually think about Secret Life a lot, but I can't get the new entry to turn out right. You know how there's usually more than one storyline going on at a time? Like, we visit with two or three different sets of characters? I've got one set of characters planned out, but the other storyline or two, they're kind of vague. I don't quite know how to get this entry to fill out properly. I mean, it's a process I go through every time; I'm just completely stalled on this one. And I don't want it to take nine months to work out again. But I think I am going to have to call a hopefully short hiatus until I work it out, rather than show up each weekend and go, "Yeah... still not done" and feel worse every time. I think the guilt actually torpedoes me worse than the block itself.

Meanwhile, the Golden Globes are tomorrow night. This is one of the awards shows I traditionally liveblog (one of the many services we provide at Cleolinda Industries). I keep trying to gear myself up for it, and... ehhhhhhhh. And we've got a really good slate of movies this year almost none of which I've been able to leave the house and see, so it's not lack of enthusiasm for the nominee pool. We've got one of those rare years where almost anyone could win and it would be deserved. I just... can't muster the energy. But I have to. I hate defaulting on things I like to do just because my dumb ass feels whiny. So I'm going to try to do that tomorrow night. At least with Lizzie now, it's easy to set up in front of the TV.

Also, I can't find my Lillie Langtry bio, which VEXES ME. On the upside, I've been given a couple of new YA books, so I might get to those soon.

You haven't heard from me much because I have been really, deeply, severely depressed for the last couple of weeks. I tried to write up a huge entry describing what it feels like, and then... I got too depressed to post it. Maybe I'll polish it up and post it later, because I think it might be valuable for 1) people who might recognize themselves in it and 2) people who don't have depression, but want to understand what it's like for a loved one who does.

( Data storage question, writing, Black Ribbon, aromatherapy, BPAL )

Anyway. That's what's going on over here.

Reminder: The Final Lostnesday is on Sunday, and it's going to be a huge Super Bowl/Oscars-esque thing with a pre-show and then a 2-1/2 hour episode and then a Jimmy Kimmel post-show with the actors (and alternate endings? I don't know if these are parodies or real). I would love to liveblog it, but honestly, I'd rather actually pay attention.

I have a couple of other things to discuss, but I think they'd get lost in the rambling here, so: we'll do that later.

More Formspring questions. Posted 3/9/10.


( Did you ever go through a goth phase? )