Status Report
December 13, 2004

Beginnings are always hard, but let's start with my pimp psychiatrist and the evil drug Effexor. I fired one and threw the other away.

I didn't last two weeks on Effexor. My blood pressure rose steadily higher, higher, and even higher on that crap. When I finally decided to get off it, my blood pressure was 160/100. Now mind you, I called my psychiatrist first. My thought was that he would tell me to taper off the stuff and to come back into the office to try something new. Instead, he called me from his car beginning the conversation with, “What's up?”

What kind of a doctor calls his patient and says that? And how are you to respond? “Yo doc! ‘sup to you too, bitch!”

Yet, I can deal with a casual doctor. What I can't deal with is one that calls you from inside their car, without your chart, without having looked at your chart before calling, and basically has no idea who you are. I had to tell him what I was on, why I was on it, and blah, blah, “Don't you have my chart?”

I probably would have forgiven even that save for the fact he wanted me to stay on the Effexor for a while longer. If my blood pressure maintained its level, I could go on some medicines to control it, he continued. And therefore, after unsuccessfully reiterating a final time that I would like off the stuff, I politely hung up the phone and proceeded to plan out how I would taper myself off.

In hind sight, I should have realized something was wrong from the very beginning. My councilor (not my psychiatrist) was the one that told me I needed to watch my blood pressure on this medicine, and mentioning that I would know if it was going to cause an elevation right away – which I did. The “doctor” didn't even take my blood pressure before prescribing the Effexor. To me, that seems a gross oversight.

There is something else I want to mention about Effexor: while searching the Internet for both technical information and patient experiences regarding high blood pressure, I came across a wealth of information about people having terrible problems getting off this medicine. Do a google search on “Effexor withdrawal” and spend about 15 minutes reading through some of those stories. At first I thought some people were just not tapering off the medicine, as is necessary with any drug which regulates serotonin levels. But then I read stories of people breaking open capsules and taking just fractions of the medicine inside to make the transition off easier, and still have trouble.

Drug companies play a funny game. Even though a drug may cause horrible, horrible withdraw effects, if it isn't habit forming, they don't seem to feel anything is wrong. I wonder why the FDA doesn't see a problem with that either?

The bottom line for me is that a high dosage of St. John's Wort was helping, after I'd been on it for a month, so I've gone back to that. My councilor mentioned that it is prescribed as much in England as other drugs are prescribed here – so it must be good for something.

***

In other news, a grandaunt of mine passed away. I'm saddened by it, of course. However, there are also some additional and complex emotions I'm suffering. Mom had forbidden me to speak with her after my “gender thing” so long ago, because she didn't think my aunt could keep a secret and because, at the time, she didn't want the whole family knowing.

Fast forward over ten years later, the whole family does know, and nobody seems to care. My aunt (grandaunt) found out about it about a year ago as well, but, after you haven't spoken to someone for so long, how do you become introduced again? I supposed I could have just called, but then she developed pancreatic cancer and, for some reason, I just felt like it was too late. I think I felt that she had enough to worry about without me popping back into her life with my own drama. “I know you're dying, but let's talk about me!”

We did end up talking on the phone, once. Things were mentioned at a high level, and I apologized for being out of touch for so long and, briefly, why. Yet, it was a fairly brief and causal call: she was calling for my Mom while I was house-sitting and that's essentially how the conversation went. Oh, nice to talk to you, tell your mom that I called. That was the last I ever spoke to here.

Part of me may always resent Mom for not letting me talk to her sooner.

Mom, though, has had her own problems with all of this. It turns out that Ruth was worth a little bit of money – not a lot, by any stretch of the imagination, but enough even still. Most of that money has gone to my Mom by virtue of that fact that Ruth put her on her accounts, gave Mom power of attorney as primary caregiver, and left no will. However, some other people, related only by marriage to Ruth's deceased blood relatives, and who Ruth didn't like, now feel that they have some claim to her personal belongings.

For fear of getting into a million details, of which nobody would want to read, I'll leave it at just that. Nothing more will come of the situation, because the law is clear. But Mom has been unduely stressed over it all, never mind having to deal wiht the passing of a loved one. I can't help but to notice how money can bring out the evil in people. I think Mom would give away the money just to be rid of such pettiness, but the person who thinks he is entitled to all of it is the same person that was trying to get Ruth locked away in a nursing home, against Ruth's wishes (by attempting to say she was incompetent), years ago. Ruth hated this guy and with good reason. Mom won't let him have any of it, purely on principle, and I don't blame her.

Meanwhile, I'll miss you Aunt Ruth. I hope you're doing okay in whatever place comes next.

***

Next. My laptop computer, the computer I was using as my main computer, crashed. The thing crashed so bad that I had to repartition, reformat, and reinstall the operating system. I mean the damn master boot record got corrupted. I could have tried to repair it, but didn't want to risk loosing any more data, which is to say all the data on my data partition.

This crash is just months after another computer (my main at the time) also crashed. I'm getting sick of reinstalling all this damn software and re-doing all of my settings. It sucks and I hate it. My life is tedious enough as it is.

I'd meant to take regular Ghost images as a system backup, but hadn't got around to it. Ooops. So a few days ago I went online to order and download a new version of Ghost (since the last version of Ghost didn't support USB) and somehow ended up with Partition Magic instead. This is why I advocate getting all excessively priced software through file sharing. (I'm so corrupt!)

Of course, I downloaded a bit torrent client (Azarius) from download.com and after installing it on my desktop I got hit with no less than twenty spyware and adware programs. So nasty was the infection, Spy Sweeper couldn't get them all off by itself, I had to manually remove some files from the drive and registry. (That is what I don't get from sticking to open source software.)

Computer hell. I hate computers. It's my livelihood and I couldn't keep myself away from them regardless, but damn it: I hate them so much. What I really need is some simplicity in my life, and computers aren't giving it to me.

***

Speaking of computers, I've found true love. I found it online. Yes, it's a game. Shut up. It's World of Warcraft.

What I'm about to describe wouldn't have happened if Shack hadn't betrayed me. You see, in November two games came out: EverQuest II and World of Warcraft. I have been waiting for EverQuest II for years . When it came out last month, I had decided not to buy or play it, but every day was hard. Really.

So one day, Shack calls me up saying, “You're going to hate me.” He had bought EverQuest.

Getting stabbed in the back fills one with a variety of thoughts such as “Ouch!” and “Holy shit, this didn't just happen. Can I recover from this? No, I don't think I can. I'm going to die. That's bad right?” and “Ouch -- the pain, again!” Basically it's: shock, pain, and crystal clean inevitability. Thanks Shack.

It turns out that EverQuest II sucks. The lighting is amazing mind you, but I can get lighting by just looking out my window. Shack and I were going to do a collaborative entry about how bad EverQuest II sucks, but there were too many points to cover and we just couldn't keep the entry together.

Now, this would have been good news, an unexpected proclamation of freedom, as it were. However, other friends were actively lobbying to get me to try World of Warcraft. EverQuest II sucked so bad, I just had to know if it was the game of if I was getting old. It was the game.

World of Warcraft has sucked me in so deep (and Shack for that matter) that I haven't been able to see straight since. I've played 14 hours straight, gone to bed, and woken up to play again until I shake with the need for sleep.

You did read that right, I have gotten shakes because I needed to sleep and I wouldn't let myself. I came close to giving myself a UTI because I hadn't gone to the bathroom. I ordered pizza from PapaJohn's online (twice) so that I wouldn't have to be bothered stopping or less than two minutes. I played naked once because all my clothes were dirty. I let some dishes get so bad that I had to buy rubber gloves (when I did finally go to the grocery store) so that I could clean them.

It's amazing: I have really bad attention deficit. I really do. But I can focus on a game like this, relentlessly, for shocking spans of time.

I've ignored family and friends. I've ignored professional obligations. I've given up my life for the one I have in World of Warcraft. (I'm a Night Elf hunter, by the way – and a damned good one too!)

I don't know why I do the things I do. And even though I do love computer games, there is something about Massively Multiplayer worlds that I can't resist.

Part of me thinks that I'm searching for an adventurous life that I had once and have now lost. Another part thinks that this is escapism from certain pains in my life that I can't seem to otherwise forget about. Maybe I'm simply drawn to a beautiful world that puts the ugly city I'm in to shame. Maybe it's the character development, which I really do love. My councilor says that is a system of never-ending instant gratification that has me compelled to play; something which contrasts sharply to my long-term goals such as “become a great pianist in 30 years,” which offers no immediate gratification.

If there is one thing having a journal has shown me, it's how much I haven't changed. So, I can't end this entry saying that I've learn some great life lesson. Some things change, like a sudden adoration for Mozart over this last year, but other important things stay the same, even though I've begun to realize my patterns.

Mind you, some realizations have prompted changes -- like a switch to decaffeinated coffee. After years I finally realized that coffee makes me tired. I'm love coffee too much to stop though, so decaff is a perfect alternative. But other realizations have yet to yield anything. If more willpower is needed, I surely don't have it.

And as for the specific topic of Massively Multiplayer games, a friend asked me years ago why I wanted to stop playing if I derived so much enjoyment from them. Surely it wasn't any worse than watching television, he suggested. Maybe he's right. But here I am thinking there is something missing from my life; I've written about it a thousand times, but I don't know what it is.

***

So that's the latest – the highlights anyway. I didn't mention that my front crown still isn't replaced. (Insert drama.) And my temporary came out this weekend and I can't get it back on; so I'm writing without it, even now. “Please, please, I hope tomorrow that finally gets completed.” Maybe I'll write up that story later.

I'm feeling like I'm ready to find some moderation with the online game and get back to my life again. I'm finally getting the laptop back up and running so that I can return email and work. And I even chose writing tonight instead of playing, and that's saying a lot.

But as for all my challenges, drama, and worries, as a whole they remain. I'll keep trying to find some new ones, though. And when I do, I'll report on them faithfully.

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