Ashamed

Sometimes I'm ashamed about how much I whinge about my lot in life. Here I sit in a stunning 3 bedroomed house, 200 metres from one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, 2 cars, 3 computers, 2 TVs, a kitchen full of good food, and cupboards full of good clothes.

Above is a photo of Soweto. I'm using Soweto because its probably the best know township in South Africa. But there are 1000s of others. Shit, there's a township about 10 miles from my house.

Spare a thought for the BiPolar sufferers living in these shacks. Yes, there are people with Bipolar in shanty towns. All over the world. Millions. Unlike pretty much everything else - BiPolar does NOT discriminate.

What care do they get? They can't even afford enough food let alone meds. And therapy? Man, they would gawk in disbelief if they knew we spent the value of a week's staple foods to go and talk to someone for an hour.

So when us fortunate ones sitting here connecting in the blogosphere whinging about the hells we are going through - just remember that our hell could be another person's paradise. It's easy to forget this. And for me, living down here in Africa, it is even less forgiveable to forget. The majority of my country lives in these conditions.

Time Management 101

If you're bipolar you're gonna have to learn time management sooner or later. Like probably as soon as you hit your first hypo/mania. (You probably won't need it when you're depressed because the scarce resource in these phases is energy, not usually time. "so many chores, so little energy")

But on the Ups you got loadsa energy, and loadsa phenomenal ideas, all begging to be immediately implemented. "so much to do, so little....."

So I've been thinking a bit about time management lately, and it struck me that somewhere we are just going completely wrong. Ask anyone if they've got any special aims (resolutions/goals/wishes/dreams...blah, blah) and they pretty much always have.
"Yeah, I want to travel more... take up jogging...spend more time with my family..."

Step Two: "so why haven't you gotten around to doing them"
Answer (99 times out of a hundred): "I just don't have the time."

"But you're still going to get around to them someday huh?"
Answer (every time a coconut): "yeah, one day, when I get time".

WAKE UP BUSTER! You think you're suddenly going to have time thrown into your hands in the future by some Time Fairy?? NO!!!

But does this mean we just have to give up on our goddam goals? EQUAL NO!

So how do you do it, and why doesn't anyone do it?

Well I'll give you a clue. Time is finite right? (if not - you're taking some kinda schedule 5s that were NOT subscribed by your PDoc). But ask somebody this "What special plans have you got to cut back on other time-consuming activities?"
??
A spectacular silence.

So we're all running around saying "I'm gonna get around to this plan and that plan in the future", but I'm not hearing any body running around saying "I'm gonna be cutting back on this and that."

So either we're totally deluded about the finite nature of time, or else our math sucks. Because it's a zero sum game.

Blu Bottles .../continued

From here























This jump from 3 mg pix to 7 mg pix that my new camera has allowed has led to a lot of fun. Compared to 3mg, there is just so much digital landscape to play with. You can crop really small sections of a photo and after doing it for a while you see that, in fact, every photo you take has a myriad of other smaller (often better) photos within it. So there is this like multiplier effect. You only need a few interesting photos to start with (the raw materials) and you can create like 20 from there. These photos above, together with the ones I posted before all came from 4 original photos of the blu bottles above my bed. Sheesh, imagine what 12 mg pix could do...

I really like this new crop-a-lot form of photography. It's got a certain zen-like quality to it - bracketing out all the peripheral noise and focusing on small areas. Simplifying the noise. Clarity.

***
On my last blu bottle post Kodeureum , faithful follower of BPD, suggested that maybe all the blue was not a good thing for depression. Maybe so, but there's a problem there I'm afraid. The pic below will show you that to un-blue my room will be a HUGE mission.

Paranoid Schizophrenic coincidences

People who see coincidences where none exist suffer from a medical term called apophenia.

In other words: Apophenia is seeing links where there are none.

So here come a few links:

1. How is BPG related to apophenia? Because very often psychotic people (been there, fck that) suffer from Apophenia
   
   
2. In 31 years time planet earth could be obliterated. This is not bullshit, as we speak an asteroid is hurtling towards earth (see article from the leading British newspaper "The Guardian")
   
   
   • From the article: "Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it".
     
     
   • "Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima."
     
     
3. The link you're waiting for:
   
   Aphohenia <-> Apophis (the name of the asteroid)
   
   
   
4. Link 2:
   
   Earth <-> Apophis
   
   Seeing a direct link (hit?) between 2 unseemingly related things.

So I reckon there is a link between this asteroid and earth AND apophenia.

But is it just a case of apophenia??

***

Hey, if this post makes absolutely zero sense to you, don't worry, its just the rumblings of my latent Paranoid Schizophrenic mind. (my psychiatrist wouldn't like it either.)

Bipolarhood Disclosure

The comments to my previous post got me thinking. There doesn't seem to be any clear ideas about how far to go with your disclosure about your condition. Even from a legal technical point of view (in South Africa anyway) there is no law that says you have to disclose to the following people: a, b, c etc. Well I couldn't find anything in the Mental Health Act anyway. Maybe its tucked away in some kind of employment Act, but I think not. I think its just skirted around because its a messy issue.

But it definitely interests me and I have therefore created a new poll (see in my right hand side bar ->) so that I can collect peoples opinions as I go along. I know the questions are very generalistic because at the end of the day whether you disclose to any individual person depends on that person. But still - I wanna see what others think.

And whilst I'm on the subject, I did tell my programmer that I'm BiPolar. Besides coding he is a very active jazz musician and a really cool guy. What was holding me back was that I thought maybe he would no longer consider me a good long term client (with loadsa potential). But then I figured, fck it, I've been working successfully with him for 2 years now, if he hasn't worked out whether I'm viable or not then he's a monkey.

And he's not a monkey. He was actually really cool about it.

Wanna join?

Adventures in YoYo Land - that's where I've been this last week. Horribly down midweek last, as high as a kite at 3am Saturday, and now back in the trough.

And, as usual (every time a coconut), my business is the first casualty. G knows its taken a knock this last 10 days. I just cannot, for the life of me drag my sorry arse down to my outside office and do the stuff I'm meant to do. Boring-as-all-hell stuff for sure, but fckn important stuff too. 'Cause if it doesn't come right soon - BPGs gonna be a sunken sorry arse. Right know I'm in more debt than the average South African earns in 10 years. Yeah, Fuck!

But what really gets me is where this dang business could be. If I'd been giving it 8 hours a day for the past 2 years, who knows, I coulda retired already. More than one large corporate has come sniffing around to buy me out. Shit, the last one is listed on the London Stock Exchange! (ok, so it was only the local division that I spoke with, but nevertheless...)

There's blu sky potential fo sure, but it just ain't gonna fly on 3 hours work per day, which has been the story of the past 2 years. And it's not a nice steady 3 hours per day, it's like zero hours for one week, then 50 the next.

My programmer, who I am very friendly with (but does not know I'm a YoYo club member), is going thru all hell at the mo. 2 weeks ago he was getting exasperated 'cause I kept adding lists and lists of stuff to Basecamp whilst he was still working his way down the list. Now this past week, I've kinda vanished from the face of the earth (well, from email, G-Talk and my mobile anyways).

I'm kinda thinking right now that maybe I should spill the beans pills, and tell him about my sorry true state. Can't really make my mind up. There's pros and cons both ways. Any advice would be welcome (i know there's a of you couple computer programmers lurking out there in the great beyond).

A question to all bloggers

DO YOU EVER READ BACK ON YOUR OLD POSTS?

Can you see growth in your personal life? Regression?

Are there things you regret having said in previous posts?

Has your true voice changed?

AND SPECIFICALLY FOR BIPOLAR BLOGGERS:

Can you ever see the same-old, same-old patterns in your life?

Are you ever embarrassed about posts that you wrote when you were hypo?

Does looking back help you get a much-needed perspective on your life?

OR IS IT JUST BETTER TO MOVE ON - FOCUS ON THE PRESENT AND FUTURE RATHER THAN THE ANALYSING PAST?

BiPolar Discography Bonanza

Heres some music that speaks to me very directly about BiPolar Disorder



Cause it's a bittersweet symphony this life..

And I'm a million different people from one day to the next
I can't change my mold, no, no, no, no, no



BPG: self explanatory



Shutting my eyes I find
Opening up my mind
What is this sound I'm hearing

Voices in my head
Telling me beware
Voices in my head
Everywhere

BPG: try listening to this when you are hearing voices in your head.
That's what happened to me on my first trip into hospital



I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm tense and nervous and I
Can't relax
I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire





he lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'till I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

"I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvelous! Ha ha ha!"

BPG: Floyd has another song "Us & Them". Don't think it's intentionally about any mental conditions but I found the following piece of its lyrics pretty damn spot-on

Up and Down
And in the end it's only round and round and round



I get knocked down
But I get up again
Youre never going to
Keep me down

BPG: yeah, this one should be our national anthem

***

"Without music, life would be a mistake" - Nietzsche

***
Anybody know of any other songs that speak to BiPolar??

3h27 am

Can't sleep. I'm pumped.

Happy. happy. happy.
Things are gonna work out. Things are gonna be great.

So much to do.
So little time.
Anyone know where the DEFRAG button is? I need to aline the sectors.
Or maybe a whole bunch of Control-Z s will do it. Like about 9 000.

Was Listening to Ludwig the other night.
"Last night a DJ Ludwig saved my life."
Stirred it all up. Where before there was nothing to stir. Just sticky mud.

Got another mysterious email from my reader from Canada. Don't know much about her except that she is very wise. And at least 60. I've got this weirdest feeling that she could be an old Apache or something. Maybe i'm wrong.

Amanda asked "How was you childhood?"

START HERE


5h54am

FLYING. BEEN LISTENING TO TALKING HEADS "STOP MAKING SENSE". NON-STOP. NON-STOP NON-SENSE. AND LOADS OTHERS. WATCH OUT FOR MY "BIPOLAR DISCOGRAPHY BONANZA" POST COMING OUT SHORTLY.

THINK i'M GONNA GO FOR A RUN.
NAY, A SPRINT

YEEEEEHAAAAAA!!!!!

7:26 AM

Right now: firmly ensconced in:

YoYo Land

come back to this post from time 2 time. it's prolly gonna grow today...




7H46

Eric D said: Canadian Maple leaf
???
over my head

OK so I'm gonna do it. Gonna add the "manic(est) days" label to this post ALREADY
Usually only add it next day, like after the fact.

dont even ask about the formatting. Big G is doing his own thing this morning.

I'm thinking I'll just keep my blog editor open all day today
(never know what else might come to mind....)

8h47



Though I'm passed one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go,
tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground control to Major Tom:
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong.
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you ...

Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the moon
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do

Candour

So I was listening to this podcast the other night - an interview with a top US Woman executive (I forget the name, but that's not important) who integrates spirituality into her corporate life. And she's got this Triple-C philosophy that guides her through life:

Clarity, Candour & Compassion

And I thought to meself: "Ok, so Clarity and Compassion are pretty self-evident, but why Candour?". And the more I thought about it the more I realised that my personal grip on the concept candour is somewhat slippery. The only solution? To the dictionary:

"honesty and straight-forwardness of speech or behaviour"

- Collins Paperback English Dictionary
(yeah, I still use "offline" directories. There's somethin more stable about them)

And I started seeing how important this thing is from both a spiritual and everyday point of view. I also started seeing how my own demeanor has been so lacking in candour up to now.

Yeah, this has been one of my biggest problems in life, especially in inter-personal relationships. It's like I don't say how I feel, I bottle it all up, especially when somebody "wrongs" me. I take the shit, take the shit, take the shit and then one inauspicious, innocent day, that little line in the sand is crossed (aka the camel's back) and all hell breaks loose. And by then, of course, it is construed as totally blown-out-of-all-proportion, and the whole dang thing backfires. Something which upfront candour would prevent from ever happening.

So why this lack of candour? I'm still working on answers to this, but here are some of my tentative theories:

• Candourlessness, if you examine it closely, is a pretty bipolar trait. It slots into the ALL or NOTHING mould. The ALL depression, or NO depression syndrome. With lack of candour it comes thru as a TOTALLY accommodating, or ZERO accommodating personality dynamic. (Camel's Back syndrome). I'm not for a minute saying that all BiPolars lack candour. I know plenty that probably have an over-supply. But for me - that's how it works.
• BiPolar aside, I am a person that is always over-eager to please others. And paranoid about rejection. The result - been too polite, too accommodating, too willing to keep the peace. Until it explodes.
• Another reason I can think of is that Candour is in very low supply in post-Apartheid South Africa. Political Correctness is the new God, and everything else takes second place. I'm not saying PC doesn't have it's righteous place, but often these days we're ending up with Naked Emporer scenarios. A spade no longer gets called a spade, it gets called a "traditional, manual, gardening aide". And "fucking" is "non-oral, penetrative, sexual relations with another consenting adult."
  
  You should have seen the South African version of Survivor! Man, what a flop. There was none of the back-stabbing, snarky, sneaky, juicy stuff that makes Survivor so good. Everyone was tiptoeing around everyone else, like a bunch of whimpish fakes. Like a fckn group "feel-good" expedition.
  

It's all a big mistake

What's the point??

I haven't been telling you, but I am currently in the throws of a big slump. My work has come to a standstill, daily meditation is teetering, as is the daily beach walk, and horizontal spent time is rapidly increasing.

Nothing really new, but what's worrying this time is that it seems to be a deeper reaching down. As I've said before, downs come in all shapes and sizes and since Lamictal they've been a lot less intense. Not this one. At this moment there is this deep aching emptiness. A kind of "existential" down, the likes of which i haven't had since my post-modernism studies in 2003.

It kind of started over the weekend. I had been taking media-guzzling to new limits: 6 hours of podcasts a day, 3 hours devouring RSS feeds. I was pretty happy doing this until, for some stupid reason, I sat back and asked "What's the point?".

I mean really, what is the point of jamming my head full of facts and trends and observations and news? What for? Where's it all going?

Answerless, I then started thinking about what else I should rather be doing. A hike in the mountains? A movie in town? But those too elicited the "what's the point?" enquiry, and those too were without answer.

So I carried on with this whole line of thinking until all that I was eventually left with was:
"What's the point?" PERIOD.

WORK
CONSUME
BE SILENT
DIE

?

The blu bottles on the window above my bed

all photos taken by bpg sunday 11 feb 07

Eclecticism

Wild and far-ranging moods = wild and far-ranging tastes.

Here's my Amazon wishlist which has been going since April 2001. Over the weekend I did a major cull on it but what is left still veers into all sorts of incompatible territories.

In need of a new identity

I've been realising of late that I gotta get myself a new online identity. "BiPolar Guy" doesn't always work, and I'm finding more and more online places where I wanna go, but can't take him with. In my "Offline Life" I'm getting increasingly involved in SEO. And I'm wanting to participate in some of the forums and stuff, but marching in as BPG, isn't necessarily the best way to go about things.

This was illustrated all too palpably recently when I set up some Adsense on the commercial site which I run (which in terms of content and society segment is like 180 degrees to BiPolar Daily). And the adsense adverts sat there on my commercial site for all of a week, and then one day, I hovered over the links and saw the "Advertise on this site" invitation. So I clicked and the damn thing came up with "Advertise on BiPolar Guy's Adsense accounts". F$@@***Ck!!!!!!!

I immediately unchecked the "Advertise on this site" option, but how many of my distinguished customers snuck through my online firewall, I will never know.

It brought me to the harsh reality - I need to split into 2 here. A BPG for all the cool, creative, alternate, bi-polarish stuff, and a "SEOpro" (maybe?) for the professional stuff. It's a friggin schlepp though because it means a new Google account, a new delicious account, new email addresses, new adsense accounts etc. etc. etc. Which means even more passwords and logins. Yeauughhh

So once complete, that will bring my personal identities to 3.
BPG and SEOpro.
And me. The meaty one, typing this post.

Simple

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

-Mark Twain

The reason I asked

Yeah, I think you guys are right. I'll skip the gun idea.

The reason its been on my mind lately is that the crime down here is totally out of control. Every night somebody in my road (and it's a short road) is broken into. Actually this is pretty much happening in the whole of South Africa. And these dudes are violent man. Often they hack the houseowners up with bush knives. How we're gonna host the 2010 World Cup, I don't know.

So at night, every time the trees scrape on the roof, or the cat jumps off the table, you bolt upright in your bed, and the sleep that ensues is pretty patchy.

But you're right, I can't afford to have total trust in myself. I would never use it on myself - in that I have NO doubt. I've rationalised suicide before but would never actually do it. I know this, deep within.

It's the temper outbursts that I'd be worried about. Especially since I've been off the anti-psychotics, they've increased a bit. Pulling a gun on friends and family is something that would NEVER happen. But if somebody did break into my house, I might do something stupid. Like run into the lounge firing the thing like mad, and either getting shot in the process or killing about 5 people and landing up in court on manslaughter charges.

Think I'll give it a skip. Thanks for the input.

BiPolar survey:

Knowing that you're likely to get into moods that are not fully rational, would you trust yourself to have your own gun in the house?

We're in trouble...

A couple of things I ran across this weekend convinced me that humanity is in trouble:

First, Swedish Embassy opens in Second Life

Next, from "Google Blogoscoped" a top 100 blog that focuses entirely on the Big G. In a post titled "The evolution of search engines"

"...There may come the day when the search engine will not be programmed by humans anymore. It has become a self-sufficient, self-learning, all-encompassing entity. It may even be able to tell the future; not through magic, but by careful scientific analysis. Neither will it be understood anymore by its own developers. It may be merely superficially controlled, and physically monitored to ensure a healthy machinery.

More and more, we may get the feeling that we are working for the AI, as opposed to the AI working for us. It may query humans to gather more data..."

And when I went into my loo yesterday morning, and saw this, I knew the end was nigh:

They're here!!!!

They've invaded my home!!
HELP!!

All photos and squiggles by BPG. Today

From my kitchen window

Took these yesterday morning, straight after yesterday's blog post.

Disembodied

My post on Second Life (the virtual reality world) a few days ago, definitely touched some kind of collective nerve. People felt overwhelmingly antagonistic about this virtual lifestyle.

It is very understandable – spare time these days is even more endangered than global cooling. So its not surprising people get their backs up at the hint of something MORE that’s gonna demand their time.

But besides the time thing I think there’s another underlying issue. We’re all spending more and more time peering into our little cmptr screens. We are sensing that slowly, slowly the real world – the one with green fields and trees, remember – is disappearing, and our minds and souls are being sucked into this digital nothingness of wires and radio waves.

Soon our bodies are gonna be useless. They’ve already got technologies where you can move a cursor through brain waves alone. What then?

Need an anti-dote?
Try meditating. Meditation works in the opposite direction to virtuality. It tries to shut down the flitting mind, and experience the fullness of your other 5 senses. Where the Neb is about disembodiment, meditation is about getting inside of your own skin. Not the skin of some slick avatar on Second Life.

This might come as a surprise to some. The popular conception of meditation is that it involves a very focused mind, and has very little to do with the body. Well that’s just crap – especially with the particular meditation (there are a zillion varieties) that I personally practice. The one I do every day involves letting go of all things cerebral and instead feeling your body. Your breath, your skin, your bum on the cushion, the twinge in your neck. Just feel. Just be there. Present in your own body.

Some people focus on the sense of sound, some even on smell, but for me the sense of touch works best. It took me about a year of meditation to work this out. Touch is the last frontier. Sight and sound have already practically been assimilated by our electronic brethren. Next will be taste and smell. Touch? I don’t think they’ll ever get that right. It’s our last bastion of humanityhood.

So maybe, the more we get sucked into virtuality, the more reason there is to start meditation. Just do it.

(No, I’m not getting paid through PayperPost by some global meditation corporation. I just believe in it)

BiPolar Mood Charting Sucks

For me anyway. I've tried them all now: 1 to 10 ratings graphed daily in excel; smileys or frownies after every blog post; and now moodjam.org - choosing a colour for your mood.

My original motivation for embarking on moodcharting was that by plotting things on a graph I thought I could identify external stimuli that correlated with my ups and downs. Like maybe eating cheese made me down? Or going to the mall triggered an up the next day?

Bull-Poo! The ups and downs are because I'm BiPolar stooopid!!

Mood Charting sucks because it makes you too damn self-obsessed (as if us bloggers aren't self-obsessed enough as it is). You're so busy thinking "OK what mood am I in right now?". Your days become stilted, not fluid like they're meant to be. Analysis Paralysis. Like the dance teacher says: concentrate too much on the steps and you'll never dance.

And then there's the whole "label" thing. Start off your day by declaring that you're in a pretty-shitty mood and the likelihood is that you will spend the rest of the day in pretty-shitty territory.

Don't get me wrong, I think moodjam.org is a great initiative. Mood charting that associates colours with moods is novel and fun. But I think it's better suited for non-bipolars.

And people who have got spare time on their hands to fiddle around with these kind of diversions.