Category Archives: Linguistics & Semantics

Of All The Weeks In My Life, This Has Been One Of Them

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And it has been very long.  Very, very long.  So long.  Long.

I think I am the opposite of most people who deal with manic-depression, but I’m not sure. I try to remember from the zillions of books I read on it, but that was so very long ago. . .

What happens with me is that when I am depressed, time rushes by, but when I am manic, it goes so very, very slowly.  Guess what this week turned out to be?

“I blink and half my life is over. . .” ~ Pete Winslow

I have never been a huge poetry-reader, I will confess that now.  Mostly I stuck to prose, especially in my younger years.  But beginning a poem in an anthology that one of my dearest and my oldest friend brought back to me when she visited the City Lights book store in San Francisco years ago. . .  (you know who you are now?  hi!).  That line began a poem and it jumped out and grabbed me and has stuck with me in a way so many and so few things have.

City Lights possibly might not mean a lot – anything – to some of you, but if you’re familiar with the Beats and specifically Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that’s his.  The progression is I spent pretty much all of my teens wildly enamored of Jack Kerouac.  I have made good acquaintance with Ginsberg and Cassidy and Burroughs and Holmes and so many more as well, but Kerouac will always be my true love there.  We are both “crazy mixed-up Catholic Buddhists,” though I only have a name for it because Jack gave name to it.

Thank you, Jack.

This week was, as I described to my psychiatrist Thursday when I saw him, florrid mania.  Psychotic, to boot. But then it had little tiny ultradian cycles woven inside the days and most especially the nights.  I would lay in my bed at night, knowing there would be no sleep, listening to music, Thinking, and hallucinating with four out of five senses.  Time stretches out for me in a very unreal way.  And I lay there and I Thought about so many things.  One of them was how I was having my parents drive me to my doctors’ appointments, because I didn’t feel like it was at all safe for me to be behind the wheel of a car.  A decade ago that would have been the first place I jumped in that state.

I have slowed down.  I have grown older.  I have grown wiser.  I have grown tired.

(For those of you keeping score, 72 hours awake, 4 of blissful sleep, 16 awake, between 30 minutes and 2 hours asleep – little hazy about what happened there – 14 mostly awake with a wee bit of dozy time, which is not real sleep but is closer to it than anything else I found, 4 of sleep, 6 more awake and that is now.  I know.  It’s confusing to me, too.)

By Wednesday afternoon I decided the best only course of action for me was to go silent, which I learned by hard lesson is what to do with myself in that state.  I stay completely off of the internet, and keep all other interaction very minimal, until I feel like I have most of my judgment returned.  If I ever disappear for a long period of time with no notice, that will most likely be why.

Thursday night the mania dissipated (though the insomnia didn’t) in a very nice and novel way.  Just a matter of minutes, it was like inside me some dials and slider switches were moved and I was restored to euthymia.  Euthymia.  Such a pretty word.

I think it was a combination of finding a bit of balance, and some clonazepam (Klonopin) that did it for me.  And yesterday morning my doctor wrote me for my favorite sleepies that didn’t kill me but should have (not a botched attempt there, a drug interaction that no one knew about nor figured out for months, despite me repeatedly blacking out – and I was the one who discovered it – but I’m off the other drug), which gave me my four hours of sleep last evening.  Which I needed, because while I haven’t come down this time into a full depression – yet – things got pretty desperate for me yesterday.

The wherefore of that is a little hard to explain, but it has to do with the lovely way I have of almost dissociating when I am so long with very little or no sleep and nicely manic, and no longer having that, being fully present in the reality of the moment.  And it has to do with how hard I work to insulate my mind, my mental state against anything that might further compromise it, even a little, and coming out of that cocoon-in-a-very-high-tower-with-no-door-and-briars-at-the-bottom.  That’s a good one.  It not only describes perfectly what I build around myself, but doesn’t it sound pretty much like hell to come out of?  It is.  I nailed that, and right off the cuff.  Love it.

Lastly, my desperate state had to do with one of the many moments of clarity I had while Thinking, actually this one deserves the designation of ‘epiphany’, that I found myself in during the whole episode.  I’m saving it for another time.  Maybe.

Moral of the story:  ”I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.  I am my own entourage.” ~ a delightfully misnomered quote, from the always lovable and neurotic John Cusak, in America’s Sweethearts

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Magic, Part Two (Well, A Little)

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I read a lot of blogs in my ventures through internet land.  I have been reading more and more of them lately, as I look for potential contributors for A Canvas Of The Minds, my other project.  By the way, I read them thoroughly and this takes time, so if you feel like I’ve overlooked you, your invitation just may not have been post-marked yet – so why don’t you make all of our lives easier by contacting me already?

I have very few things in my life that will fill me with the wrath of God.  Despite my venting here, generally I’m pretty mellow.  I came across something in my perusing that flipped that switch recently, though.  I read a post where a blogger said writing was such a great form of therapy because it didn’t require any talent!  Or words to that effect.  I’m not sure, I make a point of not quoting idiots.  But I took a deep breath and counted to one million and realized that this person was merely broadcasting their ignorance, nothing more.

They’re right, in a way.  Writing doesn’t require any talent.  Pretty much any moron can do it (and lots of them do).  It’s good writing which demands talent.  I mean, you don’t have to take my word.  You could poke the souls of Dickens or Austen or Kerouac or Wharton or Hardy or Virgil or Vonnegut or Twain and ask them their opinions.

Writing, in case you’ve missed it, is not just One Of The Things in my life.  It’s The Thing In My Life.  It is my life, in more ways than I could ever detail for you, in more ways than I could ever detail for the rest of my days – although I will undoubtedly never cease trying.  I write for lots of reasons, but the main one being Robert Heinlein’s, “. . .  Because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.”  The full quote, along with a few others that relate, can be found on my page Thoughts From People Wiser Than I.

Would I like to have my words published in my lifetime?  Of course.  Would I like to be able to support myself and live off of them?  Sure.  Will I keep writing if I am rejected by every publishing house ever to exist and not a soul ever reads my thoughts, not even my very best friends?  Absolutely.  I will die if I don’t.  My soul will wither and I will cease to be.  I want very much for people to relate to and enjoy what I say, but I write because I am a writer.  It is my vocation and my calling and my gift and my everything.  I have suspected this for all of my life, and I had it confirmed from within and without at a very young age.

I don’t profess myself to be a genius, but I do possess a gift, far more so than even the one I have for photography (detailed in my last post, Magic, Part One - how clever I am with these titles).  You may recognize it or not in this medium.  When I blog, I literally write whatever flies from my mind to my fingertips.  An idea may cook in my brain, but I don’t plan or outline or work at it.  An 800 word post is generated easily in under an hour, and probably it would take about 20 minutes if I weren’t a very slow, two-fingered typist.  And I don’t edit, at least not for style or content.  I read back for grammatical or spelling errors, but beyond that the most I ever do is clarify something slightly.  I have a policy of not changing content, the same as my policy regarding photography mentioned in the post prior to this one.  All of this is meant not as bragging, but to give a rough metric for comparison.  If you find something valuable in what you read here, you ought to read the things I actually think about and work at!

There is one thing, though, that I do work at (even here), because I cannot help it.  Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.”  Also on the page (page, not post) referenced above.  I don’t try to explain this one, generally, but today I will because it’s a piece of the magic in being a writer.

I call it “the click.”  There is the “almost right word” and the “right word,” and if you have writing as the main thing in your soul, there is “the click.”  You may not notice it as such, but it’s there.  ”The click” is when you’re trying to get That Word, The Right Word, and you’ve been going through your brain and your thesaurus and anything and everything you can think to go through, and all at once you hit upon it.  And something inside of you just clicks and you know you have your lightning.  It can be a big word or a little word, an integral piece or one that seems not to be too crucial to the reader or even yourself – sometimes your only clue is that you were so determined that you spent hours or days or months looking for the word.

I have a policy of not altering what I post here after I hit Publish, unless I spot a spelling or grammatical mistake that is glaringly obvious after the fact.  I may go back and re-read and think of something I wish I had written differently, but I don’t change it.  On very rare occasions I will find that something really does need altered, usually for accuracy, but when I have done that, I have always marked what I changed with an asterisk and added an explanation at the bottom of the post.  Again, integrity.

I don’t know that this post explains magic the way the previous one did, which is why it has a parenthetical in the title.  Writing is the thing I’m best at doing and worst at explaining.  Loving I am incredible at, but I can explain why, easily.  I think.  I guess I’ll have to try sometime.  But this last paragraph just gave me my moral.

Moral or the story:  ”Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.  Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ~ Franz Kafka  

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

It Would Seem The Concept Of Modesty Eludes Me. . . Utterly

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So it would seem, to the ignorant observer.  Actually, I understand the concept completely.  I just don’t much care about it.  But then again I have pretty much always lived with a violent distaste for things considered socially acceptable.  I also never lived my life with a fear of offending.  The former is due to the fact that I think what is considered socially acceptable is absurd and verging on completely twisted – it’s okay to watch a show like Jersey Shore, as long as you profess to people that you do it with horror and disdain, but standing up against society in defense of your principles will more often than not get you “cast out,” as it were, and called all sorts of things, rarely positive.

As far as offending people, hey, their hang-ups are exactly that – theirs.  Also there’s the kid thing.  I always thought that women talked about losing any sense of modesty when they had children because of the constant checks, everyone and anyone poking around their nether regions, other lovely details about the actual birthing experience which I’ll spare you, breastfeeding in front of people, etc.  Maybe that’s what does it for most women, but it wasn’t for me.

I played a big part in raising up two beautiful baby girls.  One of them I would take in the shower with me (before you flip, hunt me down, and sick CPS on me, her mom knew and was cool with it), both of them frequently saw me in the bathroom.  I was around for potty-training, and you can’t potty-train a child while not ever letting them see how it’s done, aside from which when you’re in charge of a little one, the door stays partially open when you have to use the powder room.  You want to be able to monitor them, and of course this means they could pop in on you at any moment (and more often than not, they do).

I changed in front of them, they saw me in various forms of dress and undress throughout the course of an average day, and I never hesitated or thought twice about it.  Maybe I would have had their parents all (two families) not been such good friends, but we’ll never know that, will we?

In any case, I’m very glad that I was completely uninhibited around them, because I truly believed it contributed to them being comfortable with and loving their bodies.  Obviously we discussed things like not running around in the front yard stark naked, but that’s another topic altogether.

Now I won’t deny that I am naturally a fairly uninhibited creature.  But those girls definitely took what was left of any hang-ups and shattered them.  Thank you, meine Lieblinge, though I know you are decidedly not reading this (and pardon any grammatical mistakes there, many years and 16 rounds of ECT later).

I have been known to pop out of a dressing room, nothing on my top half but a bra, to ask for a different size.  I’ve also shocked pretty much every Victoria’s Secret employee I’ve ever encountered.  Oftentimes, when you’re looking for a specific style of bra, they’ll ask if you’re comfortable showing them the strap (in the middle of the store).  We have the most insanely repressed population of women ever, if they have to dance around the subject like that.  They ask me that, I pull down the front of my shirt and show them the bra.

Yesterday was really loads of fun though, because I was talking tattoos with two lovely ladies at the BE boutique.  Now my tattoos happen to be covered by clothing at all times (except when in a bikini), but all save one I can easily lift clothing to show without compromising the common, dearly held concept of “modesty.”  Yesterday I was wearing a denim mini, and some barely-there undergarments.  So what did I do?  Without even checking to see if there was anyone else present – as it happened, there wasn’t – I hiked my skirt way up to display my ink.  I say it was especially fun because these beautiful women weren’t shocked or offended or in any way upset by my less-than-commonly seen body parts.  They loved the ink for the ink, and didn’t act at all perturbed by my blatant display.

Morals of the story:  Modesty is a ridiculous concept, my baby girls are wonderful, and we need many more women like those I discussed in this world (three in one – I rock).

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially in the pressure cooker.  Tell you why in my next post.  ;)

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Written All Over My Face

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It seems that the PTSD has found a new, surprising, and extra-fun way to screw with my head: agoraphobia.

For those of you who don’t know (or those of you who think you know but are wrong), agoraphobia has its roots in both Greek and Latin (which nobody cares about save me).  It more or less translates literally to “fear of the marketplace.”  More exactly, in modern days, it means fear of open spaces.  However the popular, understood meaning has become fear of going out anywhere (particularly anywhere with people) throughout the years.

I woke up a little while ago to my alarm (anyone remember when you didn’t wake to an ‘alarm,’ but an ‘alarm clock?’) because I have a doctor’s appointment today.  It was scheduled as a follow-up after the ER thing, but I thought, okay, I need to kick his ass into gear about the referral to the seizure clinic for my pseudoseizures.

When I became conscious a bit ago, and thought about getting out of bed and going out, I was absolutely stricken.  Frozen, could not move, no way I could go anywhere, utterly horrified at the thought.

This is a completely new sensation for me.  I’ve avoided going out before, but because I was depressed or tired or didn’t want to deal with people, and yes, there may have been an anxiety component, but not like this.  Not a completely rigid, paralyzing panic at the idea of going just to see my doctor, my doctor of half my life in an office I’ve been to a million and one times.

So I lay in my bed thinking (with this almost dissociative feeling), Oh, lovely.  So now my post-traumatic stress disorder has decided to manifest itself with agoraphobia.  And I thought and thought and thought, debating whether I should call and cancel the appointment, whether I should just hide under the covers from the world and not do anything, whether I should take this one head on and not only go to the doctor’s, but run as many other errands in as many public places as I could.  There is no middle ground in my life.

So I got out of bed and went downstairs to get something to drink, which in itself was difficult.  I leaned outside the back door where my father was to ask him a question.  I was in the process of closing the door and he called out to me.

“Ruby?”

“Yes,” I answered him.

“Do you want me to drive you?”

I was a little confused by this, but I figured I knew why, so I answered with my own question, “Because of the pseudoseizures?”

He responded with something very out of character, especially for my father.  ”Because of that,” he paused, “or anything.”  I thought this was kind of odd, but told him thanks, I could do it, and went back upstairs.

And then it occurred to me.  I must have been standing there looking like I was frightened out of my mind.  It must have been really apparent.  Not to disparage my dad (you all know I do that openly and don’t hold back if I’m going to), but he doesn’t pick up on subtleties.  Or even the obvious things, often times.  So for him to have noticed that there was something very, very, wrong about my affect. . .  Well it must have been vivid in everything about me.  Posture, face, tone of voice, etc., everything.  And I won’t omit the fact that I am grateful that he would do that for me.

So, we shall see.  I’m getting ready to go get ready, and I’ll take it from there.  My very beautiful friend has offered to help me through, via telephone (I couldn’t describe to you what she means to me).  I’m going to try to conquer the world, let’s see if I make it past the car.

Moral of the story:  I don’t know what it is yet, but I do know that I’m beyond grateful for people who love and support me.

Addendum:  I wrote this in its entirety before I left the house, but I didn’t have time to do all the behind the scenes editing, tagging, etc. crap.  When I was out conquering the world, two random people said things to me about driving carefully (although not in such a grammatically correct way).  I asked someone else with whom I was talking if I had some weird frightening look about me that screamed, “Unfocused, dangerous driver,” or something, and she said no.  WTF?

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Serendipity

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So if you have paid any attention at all to my mini bio, you know that I don’t believe in coincidence.  I do however believe in something else which is frequently believed to have a near meaning.  People commonly misconstrue words with subtle but crucial distinctions as having near meanings, and words with having near meanings as having primarily the same meaning.  This is a brilliant illustration of the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug (it’s also why being a dedicated student of semantics assists with distinguishing the right word from the almost right word).

Coincidence is “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time and by accident but seem to have some connection.”  Serendipity is “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for” (source Dictionary and Thesaurus – Merriam-Webster Online).

I little while ago I went downstairs to make a veggie dog and watch iCarly.  I heard this sound, not unfamiliar, but abnormal in that part of the house at this hour.  It was water running.  After I finished the program, I went hunting around to try to find the source of the noise.  It was decidedly out back, which didn’t reassure me much, as we had a sprinkler pipe burst and flood the backyard quite recently.

So I opened up all of the locks, went through the door, and followed my ears in the dark.  As it happened, my parents had purchased a fountain that was the source of the noise.  I stood out there for a moment, in the wonderful air, looking at the stars.  I caught sight of the moon, and I thought about how I used to lay out on the grass for hours every summer, watching for shooting stars.  And that very second, the moment the thought passed through my head, right beside the moon I saw a big, bright, beautiful shooting star in the early morning sky.

Moral of the story:  ”The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightening and the lightening bug.” ~ Mark Twain

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.