Metablog

It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: pretty much nothing. Reading webcomics, I guess. Sinfest is really good. Also, Minus is really good. I just found that one today. Read it! (And check out the artist’s other free comics.) And Gunnerkrigg Court is quite good. Also, XKCD is really good, but I’m sure you’re already reading that one. So I put it last. I need to put these in my sidebar.

I’ve been playing a lot of Dance Dance Revolution. I was playing on the main pad for a few weeks, (and I should start again, because it’s good exercise,) but then I got tired of that (partly literally) and started playing on the controller. I changed to double mode, where there are twice as many different keys to press, to make it more challenging. Of course, I could never do that on the pads. My god, I can’t imagine. Then I mastered all but a few songs on it. My improvement is plateauing, so I recently stopped, with nearly perfect scores (> 9.8 million out of 10) on nearly every song on the highest two difficulties.

I could try to improve more, but I think I’d rather try to program something like DDR, except for the piano. That way I would be developing a more satisfying (and less wrist-paining) skill during my gaming hours. I have a digital piano, and I’m a programmer, so it would be pretty easy to get a first pass done. I would probably get addicted to that pretty easily, and it’d be nice if I were actually using the program a lot, so I could have more of a motive to improve it. I tried to start the program a year ago, but I started on one of the harder parts of it, and didn’t get it to the point where it actually did anything useful. (To be kind to myself, I didn’t have the idea that made it possibly useful at the time, without much more work, so I couldn’t have.)

I moved from my apartment in the outskirts of Austin into a just-as-nice (and a bit more pricey, but really pretty close) apartment about 10 miles closer to Austin, and further away from where I work. That’s a bit less than 50% closer to downtown from where I moved from. My new apartment has a nice quarry lake with a walking path and a 20-ft sheer drop around lots of it. Very pretty. I should probably use it more. I went out last night to sit on one of the bordering cliffs and stare at the water, and that was going fine for a few minutes, but then a group of drunk kids walked up and started diving off the edge and making a huge drunken racket. We started to play tennis, but they weren’t very good, since I had a sober racket, so I got annoyed and just went back to my apartment and watched season 6 of The Simpsons on dvd.

I was hoping that moving closer into Austin would help me meet people more easily than I could out in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, the area directly around my apartment is still pretty suburban so I still have to drive a bit to get to the really dense places. But I still don’t get out much. That’s a bit of a problem. I did go to a Unitarian church, because having a church to meet people at might be nice. But as I walked in, I got a feeling in my stomach like it would be all old people. Sure enough, I peek in, and every person out of the dozen or two present was over 50, most over 60. I turned right around and left. Oh well.

What’s more of a problem has been the depression and ADHD and anxiety. My psychiatrist doesn’t think I’m bipolar. I started out on Cymbalta (an SSRI) and that relieved that anxiety, but not the depression or ADHD. Concerta (methylphenidate, like Ritalin) helps with my ADHD but exacerbates my anxiety muchly. My psychiatrist just put me on Wellbutrin (an SNRI, where the “N” is for norepinephrine) last week. That seemed to clear up my ADHD, but my depression was only helped a little, and it made my anxiety worse. And then last night, I was so anxious (for no apparent reason) that I couldn’t sleep all night. I went to bed at 7 AM (the previous night it was around midnight or 11 PM) and slept for 7 hours.

I’m going to try to go back to the psychiatrist next week and see if we can’t modify the treatment. Maybe try a different class of antidepressants.

I had a lemonade with my Quizno’s sandwich tonight. It was a very good lemonade. Tropicana. I want more sugar.

Oh, and this blog is going to become much more diaristic. I don’t have the energy to maintain the level of formality that I had been, if you want me to post more than twice a month on average. I’d like to average three substantial posts a week. What’s that, 150 a year? And I’d like to average 10 comments a post, eventually. Maybe I shouldn’t be so long-winded. But this is a catch-up post, so I’m indulging myself. I want to write about my “finding friends” problem, but that’s going to take a bunch of words, so I’ll make another post. Tomorrow? We’ll see. I’m going to stop using the “very personal thoughts” category, since I’m using my blog differently now.

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