The Week in Review

Posted on December 7, 2002 in Depression Psychotropics Routine

Lynn’s upstairs, rewriting her resume. I’m on the network computer with a cat in my lap, looking back over the week.

I’m feeling glad that I have effexor because of the big knock we took from the lay off. Is it my imagination or do people wait for things to improve again before they deign to talk to you again, if at all? Well, I’ve had lonely Christmases before. Two nights before the New Year, I get to celebrate the season by having another piece of my writing critiqued. The obnoxious lawyer “doesn’t know” if he’s going to be back: nobody laughed at his cracks about my writing the last time. There’s a new fellow, a former advertising executive, who heard someone read a brief except and described it as “masturbation”. You just got to love a crowd like that. If it weren’t for the sincere, struggling authors who know how to tell you that a sentence needs to be reworked without insisting that you give up part of your mind because “people are dumb” and “you won’t sell your book writing like that”, I’d forget about showing up.

Yes, I’ve noticed that the effexor has had a marked effect on my mood. A good anti-depressant doesn’t cure your problems: it sets down a floor so that you can stand on stable ground to face them. I have to laugh when people say that I’m just looking for “personality in a pill”: I have no illusions that the sad guy with the big mouth is going to dissolve when I down my twice daily dose. Some people believe that they can put you on the pill and, instantly, you will be able to take all kinds of personal attacks. What I really gain is the calm I need to review things thoughtfully. I know now when to turn a cold shoulder to a complete ass.

A neighbor wants me to help him fix his website. I’ve never done a commercial site, except for my half-hearted attempts to garner some revenue through the sales of books at Amazon.com and the sale of t-shirts that no one wants to buy. I think it’s charity, really: a few dollars thrown my way to serve as a webmaster while Lynn struggles to find a new niche in the software field. I don’t know that I am up to the task, either spiritually or technically. I could show him dozens of folks who could do it better. But we’ll see.

Mood: melancholy, but not entirely despondent. Tomorrow I am going to write up a short article for City of the Silent and worry about whether I’ve managed to offend every last friend that I have by agencies unknown to me. Half a xanax will get me through the night and again and again until Tuesday when Lynn presents her resume to the owner of a consulting firm in Irvine. I’ll appease my whiney elderly cat by holding her in my lap and maybe get out to take a few pictures. The atmosphere has a wonderful steel tinge to it and an up-close clarity which tempts me sorely to photograph things in the slanting light of late afternoons, when the brown leaves of the sycamores turn umber and tortoiseshell.

The lawyer called me “Mr. Dictionary. God, why aren’t there other things to occupy my mind when I idle?