Metablog

I’ve decided it might be neat to write a compiler, so I’m going to try writing a lisp compiler, from the ground up. I’m going to start from assembly language, and write my own assembler, and work my way up, building more abstractions and more safety into the assembler until eventually it becomes more of a compiler, and more features into the compiler until I get happy with it. It’ll be self-hosting all-the-while, and probably more-or-less impossible to port to another architecture. Not sure about the platform aspect, though. It won’t be Common Lisp, because that sucks, but it’ll be something along those lines. Most of the same features, none of the all-caps, silly-names weirdness. Probably a number of conventions taken from Java/C#/etc. since that’s what languages are doing nowadays. That is, if I get that far with it.

In the meanwhile, I’m terribly depressed. I was on Lamictal, which was helping quite a lot, but after about 5 weeks of treatment I got a tiny little rash, which apparently can be a first sign of a more serious, deadly rash. My doctor took me off it immediately, which I think was overly conservative. So for the past week I’ve been off my rocker. We’ll see tomorrow if he gets me on something else that will help.

In related news, I am still single.

Why is it that it’s so hard to flirt until you stop caring about it? Why is it that it’s so hard to make friends while you’re lonely? Why is it that it’s so hard to find a partner until you’re no longer desperate for one?

Welcome to part two of this three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.) This would be part of part 1 except that Wordpress decided it wanted to cut off my post after it was halfway through.

Solomon, of course, faces severe apathy at the worst of his depression. I think the extent of this is best illustrated by a quote from the book:

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This is part one of a three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.)

I’ve not been very active recently on this blog. I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve had the same problem with my other interests and chores, too. They’ve mostly been remaining undone.

I have had a low level of energy, true. I’ve had trouble focusing. But those are just symptoms, too. What is the cause? How can I make sense of this state? Is it ADHD? Is it depression?

For a long time, I thought it was ADHD. So many of the symptoms fit. But the remedies don’t seem to, and the accounts of people with ADHD didn’t really strike a chord with me at all. So after a while, I began to suspect that depression would more accurately describe my problem. (Especially after I was diagnosed with depression by a psychiatrist.)

So, a few days ago, I had a truly marvelous and unprecented idea. Why not read about depression? After all, I realized, I really didn’t know that much about it. Despite having lived with it since I was a teenager, I had somehow never actually read any book about it. So I strolled over to Barnes and Noble to take a look.

I picked up a book called The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. I read a couple dozen pages, and found it compelling enough to buy. (At $17 for ~550 pages, it’s not a bad value, either.) Solomon writes quite poetically, and though I found his anecdotes tended to draw on a bit excessively, they did a good job of illustrating what it feels like to go through depression. His factual writing is elegant and interesting, and taught me quite a bit about depression that I’m very glad to know.

(If you’re interested in the book, you might like to know that it covers, primarily, unipolar major depression, with many mentions and a few discussions of bipolar disorder. It doesn’t really cover atypical depression or dysthymia.)

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If you’ve just read my last post, you know I just got dumped. And if you’ve read this, you know that I’ve had a real problem with feeling apathetic. I now understand this problem as straightforward major depression, rather than ADHD. And, thanks to my most recent experience, I now understand this depression as being caused, in a major part, by social isolation, or loneliness. (Read on for the full story.) Continue reading »

OK, well, not really. It was just two dates. But the second one was at my apartment and involved cuddling. And she sounded so infatuated! Or at least, interested. What with the “cutie” and “sweetie” over IM.

What’s that you say? Someone that’s 22 years old shouldn’t be too upset about this? This is just a normal part of dating? Oh, I hear you. I know. It’s just that I haven’t ever experienced these things. I’m such a newbie. This is the first time I’ve been dumped. (Well, declined after having had dates.) And I’m wondering, how is it that I became attached after two dates for this to be a surprise?

I have two theories. One, I’m just too easily taken by people. I become attached more easily than others. Solution: more dating. More experience. More cynicism. (Intellectually, I’m pretty cynical, but emotionally no.)

Two, she was being misleading. Solution: slightly more cynicism. Be aware that some people can disply all the signs of wanting intimacy without the actual interest or desire in you particularly. That’s a new experience for me.

My best guess at this point is an even mixture of one and two.

What is it about neediness that’s so unattractive, even for people who are themselves moderately needy? Why is it that confidence is so very widely viewed as so desirable, even a requirement? People take this so far—to the point where even depressed and lonely people try to fake high confidence and energy in order to attract others.

I really don’t understand this well. For me, I’m attracted more to moderately needy people than to people who aren’t, because I like to feel needed. I like to feel important to others. I don’t want to be too independent. This relates to my own insecurities—because I perceive myself as not having a lot of charisma with others, of not being seen as attractive, I try to find someone who sees themself as having a similar lack of power, so that the relationship will be balanced, so I won’t be plagued with fear of abandonment.

Though it might not always be this way, I think that where I am now, I’m going to need to depend a lot, emotionally, on my girlfriend, (if and when I get one,) until I can get happier and more confident. And I don’t want to be taking a huge risk when I do that.

I really don’t understand what the reason behind being so attracted to confidence is, unless you yourself are that confident (in which case the reason seems obvious). Do any readers have any idea what it is?

I just bought a MacBook. OS X is a pretty neat operating system, but compared to the hype I’ve been hearing about, I’m underwhelmed. Still, I’m happy with my purchase—I’m dual-booting with windows, and I’m going to use it as a work laptop. (I have to work in Windows, since I develop Windows applications using Windows-specific libraries and development tools.)

But I’ve found myself booting into OS X a lot more than I would have thought, because of one application I found that came with the system: Omni Outliner. Oh, man, I love this thing! For a long time, I’ve tried various ways to use outlines to help me organize my thoughts, using various sorts of outlining tools, including notepad, wordpad, Word, Emacs, and Keynote. All of them sucked. But this, this. This is what I need; it’s what I’ve always wanted! It’s what I would have written for myself at some unspecified point in the future.

I want a windows version. I need a windows version. I might be able to use OS X at home, (it would involve switching a program I’m working on to the other platform, and finding a good development environment for the mac and learning it,) but I simply can’t at work, and I want to use it at work. And, wouldn’t you know, there’s nothing like it for Windows. Well, there’s Keynote, and there’s the defunct, but now freeware, Ecco outliner. It’s too bad I have no idea how to do good text rendering and editing with C#, or I’d totally write my own.

So far I’ve used it to do a todo list, based on the whole 43 Folders, Getting Things Done type system. And so far I’ve had the same problem I’ve had with every other organization system I’ve ever tried—while it helps me get organized, it doesn’t help me fix my actual problem, which is not having the energy and motivation to actually do the things I need to do. I can sit there staring at the list of a fairly complete list all the tasks I think I have on my mind, and look at the next thing that I’d need to do on each, and still not find it in me to work on them. Well, at least having it all organized helps me feel a little less anxious about not doing it.

This post is extremely boring. You were warned.

This is the second night in two weeks that I didn’t sleep at all because of restlessness. I didn’t take my sleeping pills either time, but I’m still concerned. The first time, I was staying up programming, and felt progressively worse the closer it got to 7 AM. I decided I had to sleep, and skipped work. Last night, I was once again programming (though I spent a lot of that time reading the documentation on OpenGL and not actually writing code), but this time I didn’t feel quite as tired by the time 7 AM came rolling around. I think it’s because I had been getting consistently good sleep for several days, which wasn’t the case the first time. I took my meds around 6:30 AM so that my stimulant bupropion wouldn’t wear off and leave me ready to fall asleep standing up, and I’ve had plenty of caffeine today. I feel quite sleepy, and not extremely sharp, but otherwise fine.

I worry that the meds are making me sleep longer than I need, like 9 hours instead of 7.5, and so I’m actually getting ahead on sleep and so not able to fall asleep in any reasonable time-frame. After tonight (in which I plan to sleep 10 hours) I think I’ll try limiting myself to 7.5 for a while. And getting to bed at a more consistent time, of course. I’ve been pretty bad about that, but then it’s been a long time since I’ve had this much energy to control. I hope the anxiety wears off. Maybe it will with consistent sleep for a couple weeks. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had consistent sleep for two solid weeks.

Online dating has been frustrating for me. I’ve been on OKCupid since last August, ten months ago, and I’ve only gotten two dates out of it. I’ve sent out dozens of messages, and I’ve only gotten responses to maybe 20%. Some of the people with the most promising profiles turned out not to be interested. And I have received only four messages from people I didn’t contact first. So it hasn’t been completely bare, but don’t people typically have more activity than that? Even when I haven’t been doing anything on the site, I regularly log in so that they can see that I’m still active. I have some good, objective reasons to believe that my profile doesn’t have anything seriously wrong with it, though of course there’s always room for improvement.

I wonder if part of my problem is that people just tend to be really picky. I think that the people I’d be interested in would be especially picky. Maybe I’m underestimating how picky most other people are, and so my expectations for success are too high. (Short-term success, for me, would be ongoing conversations with other interesting users leading to around a date per month on average.) Do I need to be less picky to get there? Would I have a much better chance of finding a long-term partner if I were less picky about first dates?

And I’m pretty sure that part of my problem is that I find it hard to get a good idea about someone, to the point where I can actually feel attracted to them, online. On the two dates I’ve actually had, it just ended up feeling weird and flat. I imagine this is unavoidable. You just have to spend time with someone before those feelings can start, and e-mail conversation, especially through a dating site, is a slow, slow process. And then, how long do you need to try to make conversation before you ask someone on a date? Would I have better luck if I sent out first e-mails suggesting a date (along with the usual greeting and conversation starter), instead of e-mails just trying to get a conversation going?

It takes so much energy, and it’s discouraging when you feel like the women don’t have to put as much energy in. I’ve heard a lot of success stories, or at least “success-getting-dates” stories. I’m not one of them.